[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.

[eesmith]

And you are being hard on me, and it's kind of ridiculous.

Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program which only exists on one version of Unix, and which was not distributed with the OS, and which was less helpful at file system exploration than both the 2d file manager [1] and 1970s-based Unix shell tools [2].

You specifically called out "older people even working in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.

[1] Here's what the IRIX 2D file browser looked like in 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IRB2MkMxgy0

[2] On a related note, The Great CHI ’97 Browse-Off was a non-rigorous head-to-head contest between different hierarchical browsers. The Hyperbolic Browser was the clear winner, with Windows Explorer coming in second, and the DOS command-line doing pretty well until it came to comparison questions like "Which planet is also the name of a car brand?" where both categories in the ontology needed to be compared.

[PrimeMcFly]

> And you are being hard on me, and it's kind of ridiculous.

No, lol, I'm not. I'm just disagreeing with you, and pointing out that IMO your point doesn't have much merit. I don't think that's a ridiculous response to what you're claiming at all.

> Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program which only exists on one version of Unix

She didn't say she knew a program which exists on one version of Unix, she just said she recognized the type of system. That's it. That's the claim she was making.

It's pretty similar to the hypothetical situation of a kid finding a mac and saying "This is a Macintosh, I know this" and using the finder to browse and look for a program to run. Same thing, with the only difference being Unix refers to a variety of operating systems not just one particular OS.

And you're making a big deal about how she probably wouldn't have known IRIX and all this, but that doesn't really make sense and it's extremely nitpicky. Others have explained why.

> You specifically called out "older people even working in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.

As I said though, most people who jeer at the scene do so on the mistaken assumption that the software scene on screen didn't exist.

I've not actually ever come across someone like yourself who doesn't refute that, but is just basically being very nitpicky and IMO unrealistic.