[rakel_rakel]

What a great post! I would love to read more of these for other films.

> Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. > ... > - Cory Faucher (Special Effects Coordinator)

This sentiment seems to run throughout the movie, and I believe it's why it's held up so well in terms of visuals, I don't think it would have aged nearly as well as it has if more CGI (or other ways of "faking" things) had been been used.

As for the question (in <references[9]>):

> Some code associated with Nedryland is visible on screen. It looks like actual source code[9] with Classic Mac OS API functions calls.

That looks like old Pascal, and since the window has MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) in the title, that's probably it?

[solarkraft]

What a respectful view of the audience. Too bad this approach was replicated what feels like approximately 0 times after it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kl6rsi7BEtk

[mike_hearn]

A lot of it came from Creighton. He always researched the technical details of his books to a deep level, and in fact he was also a successful computer programmer, winning an Academy Award for some scheduling software he worked on (and author, and medic and screenwriter!).

What's great is he self-identified as a hacker.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n2/26_Michael_Cri...

> Although he does not consider himself an expert programmer or serious hacker, Crichton is in favor of hacking and the people who do it. He explains: "It's perfectly OK for a movie director to eat and sleep movies and to have no other interest in life--that's Stephen Spielberg. He's applauded for it; he's lionized. It's fine for a symphony conductor to have no other interest than music, or for a painter to live to paint. So why isn't it OK for a person who loves computers to be totally wrapped up in computers?

"I think the answer is that it is OK. I like hacking. I think the most boring thing in the world is to sit down with a bunch of flowcharts and think everything out before you start programming."

[ColinWright]

> ... "Creighton" ...

Do you mean Michael Crichton, the author of the original book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)

[ahartmetz]

Surely. The name is pronounced like Creighton.

[nemesisj]

The name rhymes with "frighten".

Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/crich...

Also a Source: Name is Scottish origin, I live in Scotland.

[marssaxman]

Also a source: back in the '90s, I once resolved a disagreement with a friend over the pronunciation of the man's name by emailing him to ask, and "Crichton rhymes with 'frighten'" was his exact answer.

[ahartmetz]

I mixed up German and English pronunciation of "ei". The German one sounds like English "i", so it would be Crighton.

[mike_hearn]

Yes, my mistake!

[jpeeler]

To connect this comment to another, in the video mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48916460 Tim mentions he prefers to be called a "hacker".

https://youtu.be/34r8Ypxzkk4 (28:42-28:54)

[Atotalnoob]

An academy award for software?

[mattpharr]

Not just for software, but more generally for technology that influences the movie industry: https://www.oscars.org/sci-tech

[glenstein]

Thanks for the link, and boy is that a whopper. Do my eyes deceive me or is there literally a shot of the computer looking at them from its computery perspective, through its screen, with some layer of visual digital artifacts over it at the 14 second mark?

[stevenwoo]

Mr. Robot and Person of Interest(iirc) got a lot of details right.

[bigcityslider]

What about Jurassic Park 2? Never saw it

[OwlsParlay]

"audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers"

It's funny they say this back in 1993. It feels like we've gone from computers being a niche but beloved piece of tech to a ubiquitous and reviled piece of tech.

[einsteinx2]

> Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers.

It’s funny he said that because when I first saw Jurassic park as a computer nerd kid, I was calling out the “this is UNIX, I know this” scene where she then flies around the file system in a 3d rendered file browser as typical movie computer BS.

Turns out it was a real application running on a real SGI machine, and ironically I was calling it out specifically because of my knowledge of computers (not having any idea about SGI machines at the time but having a ton of experience with DOS and Windows 3.1). My family who didn’t have much computer knowledge didn’t think anything of it.