[PrimeMcFly]

Not exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people, older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.

[aa-jv]

They wanted to say "this is an SGI system!" but had to go with "this is a Unix system" ..

[pelagicAustral]

Well, the fix was probably around the lines of:

    sudo systemctl restart gates

But, whatever, I mean, there are literal dinosaurs going around, I guess that's the more plausible plotline.

[Enginerrrd]

Ah but this was pre-systemd so you would have been screwing around trying to find whatever script was being used to lock the doors after close of business.

[sgt]

Well it's IRIX, so you'd just create a little bourne shell script in /etc/init.d, with symlinks from e.g. /etc/rc2.d to start/kill it on the respective run levels.

This was a pretty critical system though so why not just place this particular program inside /etc/inittab ?

[Izkata]

Before systemd:

  sudo service gates restart

...and after too, it still exists and maps to systemctl on ones that use systemd.

[PrimeMcFly]

What is the 'that' you are referring to as far as being the more plausible plotline?

I don't think it's weird for a kid with some computing knowledge to use a filebrowser to look for where a program might be.

[pelagicAustral]

Well, we are talking about managing critical infrastructure on a theme park riddled with dinosaurs. Potentially the definition of working under pressure.

I wouldn't think even teenage Kevin Mitnick on Mountain Dew can himself bypass the terminal security (if any), prompt his way to the safety mechanisms, and override their behavior. All while being assailed by a velociraptor.

[PrimeMcFly]

You didn't answer my question; I just don't get what you are saying is more plausible. Is it that the girl knew Unix at all or something else?

[test098]

pretty simple explanation: the girl in the movie is more talented than teenage kevin mitnick. if that's a bridge too far for you, i'd recommend not watching the rest of the movie because it's about people cloning dinosaurs using frog DNA.

[eesmith]

Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box, and while it was real software, it was dog-slow on low-end SGI without a graphics card, so she had to be using some pretty expensive hardware.

As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.

We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.

[dale_glass]

> Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box

She's related to Hammond, who owns an island. I'm sure he could get her an old box and some manuals to play with, if not outright a state of the art system.

> As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.

But isn't that exactly the sort of thing a clever kid with access to fancy stuff would mess around with?

> We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.

Which would perfectly explain why it popped up on the production systems. To make it look fancier for Hammond/any investors/the people visiting in the movie.

[eesmith]

"would mess around with", certainly. And quickly find it wasn't useful for actual file system navigation.

The 2D file browser for IRIX was pretty nice, with vector icons. https://sgi.neocities.org/1.png shows an example from https://sgi.neocities.org/ .

I made a mistake when I said we used it for demos. We did not use fsv for that. I was thinking of buttonfly - see example to the left of http://www.sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/images/irix-4.0.1... .

I did try out fsv, but again, it was slow on the desktop machine I had, and not useful.

[anthk]

Using the 3D browser would be akin to saying "That's Linux" upong seeing a Compiz cube a few years ago. I mean, yes, it would be technically correct, but not a defining term for deeply knowing Linux and its intrinsics.

[dale_glass]

Yeah, so? She's a bright 12 year old, not a burnt out and jaded Unix sysadmin with 20 years of experience.

[PrimeMcFly]

It's not weird or wrong in any way though. Plenty of people were running compiz for a while, and a kid into Linux would recognize it.

[eternityforest]

I don't remember her ever saying she actually has experience with the browser, just that she knows it. She could have just used UNIX in general and only read a lot about the file browser, or perhaps briefly tried then incredibly slow version.

It's not even too much of a stretch to imagine she has never seen the file browser, but is able to figure it out on like one can with modern GUI apps.

[eesmith]

"I know how to use it" is a bit stronger than "I know it."

fsv (the 3d file browser) was not shipped with IRIX, the 2d file browser was.

It's a pretty big stretch.

[111111101101]

When I was a kid I had access to all sorts of exotic operating systems. SunOS, VMS, all sorts of Unixes. I was a very naughty boy.

[eesmith]

SunOS and VMS were two of the most common workstation/minicomputer-class OSes out there, and rather less exotic than IRIX.

I'm old enough that my college-freshman "intro to computers" and Fortran classes were taught on a CDC Cyber running NOS.

[PrimeMcFly]

She didn't need to know IRIX if she knew some other flavor of Unix, she was probably savvy enough to use man and access documentation if needed.

The point is though most mock the scene as though the software they show was entirely fictional and made up, when it was in fact real and was in fact still UNIX.

[eesmith]

I don't know why others mock it, but as an older person working in IT, I can explain why I mock it even when knowing it was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.

(Minor correction: it was not shipped with IRIX but a free demo you could ftp. After 30 years I had forgotten that until looking at https://web.archive.org/web/20070409024417/http://www.sgi.co... and similar sites just now.)

[PrimeMcFly]

> I can explain why I mock it even when knowing it was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.

OK, please do.

[eesmith]

Literally my top-level comment in this thread.

[PrimeMcFly]

I hadn't realized that was your reason for mocking the scene, I had thought it was just being kind of pedantic and making an observation about the scene.

[sumtechguy]

The one that really yanked me out of the movie was the first tom cruise mission impossible and he does a web search for 'job'.

[PrimeMcFly]

Yeah that's pretty bad. I don't know what I'd say the worst movie scene was, most of my bad examples come from TV. That CSI visual basic example is pretty infamous.

[buzziebee]

She was the granddaughter of a billionaire so it's not unreasonable to imagine she may indeed have had access to high end hardware. "No expense spared".

[eesmith]

The I would expect "It's an SGI, I know how to use it."

Familiarity with 4dwm doesn't really transfer to NeXTStep or SunView, which were two other Unix window managers of the time.

The people she interacted with would surely distinguish between different Unix vendors - Apollo, Ridge, SGI, Sun, etc. - we certainly did.

[PrimeMcFly]

You're being unreasonably hard on a fictional 12 year old lol. IRIX is UNIX. She said she knows UNIX. It's fine.

[eesmith]

I'm not hard on a fictional 12 year old.

I'm explaining why someone in the early 1990s, knowledgeable about Unix, IRIX, and fsn, would mock the adults who created that scene about a fictional 12 year old.

If the makers of The Matrix gets credit for its realistic looking use of nmap and a fictional "sshnuke", then Jurassic Park should get jeers.

We don't credit Trinity for that scene, we credit the creators of that scene.

[PrimeMcFly]

No, you are being hard on the character, and it's kind of ridiculous. IRIX is Unix, she recognized it as Unix, it's not more complicated than that.

It's the people mocking the scene as unrealistic, most of which do so because they didn't know the software seen on screen was real, deserve jeers.

[luismedel]

> No expense spared

but he only has one single IT guy in oncall during the emergency :-)

[esrauch]

I think that part is actually explained:

- the storm evacuates most people, essential staff only

- Nedry deliberately creates the IT emergency situation to lock out the other IT people still on the island

- The book has more details about how the IT system was over budget/rushed/flawed as another example of the hubris of the whole endeavor.

The book has a detail I especially liked: theres an automatic dinosaur counting system but it was written such that it stops counting once it finds all of the expected dinos (because the spec said they couldn't reproduce), which delayed them realizing that the dinosaurs were actually mating and in a bunch of places they weren't supposed to be. Classic example of a bug caused by software working correctly exactly to the spec.

[bitwize]

What if she were originally baffled by the 3D display, and then saw recognizable paths like /bin and /usr and realized the system was actually familiar?

[test098]

i grew up in university computer labs (parents were grad students then professors). all the machines in the labs were SGI Indys/Indigos running IRIX 4.x/5.x. as a 12yo, i used the 3D graphical file browser because it was fun and cool. it was installed on all the machines by default because it came bundled in a demo CD with every machine.

[UncleSlacky]

There's a modern clone of it now: https://fsv.sourceforge.net/

[butlike]

They spared no expense at Jurassic Park, you know.

[gjvc]

most people in IT don't do any research beyond six inches in front of their face and task at hand.