[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.