Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
Jul 13, 2026
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.
EDIT: Just when I was putting the final touches on this article, I read the sad news that Sam Neill, who played paleontologist Alan Grant in JP, has passed away today. R.I.P Sam.
Surprisingly, the first computer visible is not on the island Isla Nublar but in Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler's mobile trailer. It is an Apple Powerbook 100, visible in the image below on the left side.
It had a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz, 2–8 megabytes (MB) of RAM, a 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome backlit liquid-crystal display (LCD) with 640 × 400 pixel resolution, and the System 7.0.1 operating system. Wikipedia
This machine specs reminds me of how awful '90s laptop screens, based on a passive matrix, were. Definitely something I don't miss from that era.
All computers and software are located in the Control Room on the desks of two engineers, Dennis Nedry and Ray Arnold.
Dennis Nedry's desk is an indescribable mess with three machines (two macs, one SGI), three monitors, one PDA, and storage devices.
Ray Arnold's desk is much tidier. It features a CCTV screen, storage devices, two computers (a Mac and a SGI), and two monitors.
In the back of the Control Room, we can make out a giant screen and a supercomputer with tall panels and blinking red lights.
The book The Making Of Jurassic Park has interesting details about how they designed the Control Room.
Everything in the set was real. We couldn't fake any of it, because audiences are so sophisticated now in their knowledge of computers. All told, $875,000 worth of computer hardware loaned by Silicon Graphics, $350,000 worth from Apple and some $500,000 in additional hardware and software went into equipping both the set and off-stage control room. Cory Faucher (Special Effects Coordinator)
This means, adjusted for inflation, Apple and SGI loaned roughly $4,000,000 of 2026 dollars for the production of Jurassic Park.
Ray Arnold's workstation is a SGI R4000 Indigo. It is barely visible in two shots. Blink and you will miss it at 54:48.
We get a somewhat better view of it towards the end of the movie thanks to a Velociraptor that never skips leg-day.
For the needs of the movie, that SGIs came in handy to run real-time 3D animation of the Hurricane. Or did they?
A dynamic and interactive method was employed to create the graphics, both on the big screen and on the computer monitors at each individual station. A makeshift room was built adjacent to the set, then equipped with a battery of Silicon Graphics and Apple Macintosh computer systems. Stored on computer disks were animations generated over a period of six months by a four-man computer graphics team headed by Michael Backes.
Responding to cues received via radio from the set, Backes and his team were able to feed their graphics directly to the appropriate monitors on stage, making it seem as though the actors involved were actually calling up the imagery.
The Making Of Jurassic Park
Dennis Nedry's powerhouse workstation is an SGI IRIS Crimson. It is such a beast that it won't fit on his desk. It is on the floor on the right of his desk (red box).
Most of the time it is used to display a 3D chess game (monitor the right end of Dennis desk).
The SGI Crimson is rarely visible on screen. It is briefly visible after Dennis's "white rabbit" lockdown brings Samuel Jackson into a depression.
The SGI Crimson was a very powerful workstation released in 1992. Its main appeal was its panel of real-time 3D graphics cards. The CPU was also very powerful with hardware Floating-Point Unit, a luxury for 3D graphics.
- One MIPS 100 MHz R4000 or 150 MHz R4400 processor
- Choice of seven high-performance 3D graphics subsystems (Entry, XS, XS24, Elan, Extreme, Reality Engine, VGXT)
- Up to 256 MB memory and internal disk capacity of up to 7.2 GB, expandable to more than 72 GB using additional enclosures
- I/O subsystem includes four VMEbus expansion slots, Ethernet and two SCSI channels with disk striping support
Wikipedia
Both Dennis and Ray use PLI Mini Arrays for their backup. Dennis has an impressive stack of five on the left-end of his desk.
There is a continuity error in the movie. See how the stack of PLI is facing left in this early shot.
Later in the movie, after Ray takes over Dennis's desk, we can see the PLIs have magically rotated to face the developer.
On Ray's desk we also find a smaller stack of two PLIs.
There is a close-up shot when John Hammond follows the jeeps' progress on the CCTV.
Despite the attention to detail, it seems the PLIs were not connected since the LEDs are all blank. In Macs Place of Spring 1993 we can find an ad on page 38 giving more details about the capacity.
Since John Hammond "spared no expense", it is fair to say he picked 1GiB version at $3,598 a piece. That would give them 7 GiB of storage for a 2026 equivalent of $33,223.70. In 2026, 7 GiB of HDD would cost $0.49.
Seven GiB was a MASSIVE amount in 1993 when a high-end PC would come with 120 MiB HDD.
The Motorola Envoy is a personal digital assistant used by Dennis. It is visible next to his right elbow in the image below.
It is an extremely impressive device for the early '90s. It is a foldable that features an antenna when deployed (video).
The hardware of the Motorola Envoy included a Motorola Dragon I/68349 microprocessor, 4 MB of read only memory (ROM), 1 MB of random access memory (RAM), and an LCD. Of particular interest were the wireless communications capabilities of the Envoy. Its built-in communication components included a radio modem capable of 4,800 bits per second communication, a fax and data modem, and an infrared transceiver capable of 38.4 kbit/s of data transfer.
Wikipedia
Dennis must have used it since we see it moved and partially unfolded later in the movie.
It is unclear how Jurassic Park crew got their hands on a Motorola Envoy. The movie was shot from August to November 1992. Motorola only finished the PDA in mid-1994 but delayed releasing it to February 1995[1].
The supercomputer of the control room looks a lot like five Thinking Machines CM-5 with there characteristic front panel with thousands of red blinking LEDs. With a pricetag of "only" $46,000 per machine, it is very possible these were authentic.
The CM-5 was released in 1991[2]. In 1993 it was still considered the most powerful computer in the world[3]. Each machine was called a "node", featuring a Sparc CPU, four vector units, and 32 MiB RAM. As many nodes as needed could be connected together to form a mesh. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) build a 32-node supercomputer with CM-5[4].
Does the red LED pattern in the front panel mean anything? Absolutely not, they were randomly generated[5].
One of the very best monitors money could buy in 1993 was the SuperMatch 20-T. The twenty means 20" and T meant Trinitron. The SuperMatch was featured on the cover of MacUser in Feb 92. In MacUser of Oct 94, page 180 (out of 252!!), we can see it cost $2,589 ($6,000 in 2026).
20" monitors were considered absolutely massive in 1993 and only seen in professional workspaces. A typical PC would come with a 15" CRT. 21" is almost the maximum CRTs reached, their depth and weight made them very hard to move. They were replaced by LCD around 2005.
The monitor features a particular "chin". The absolutely gorgeous SGI Hardware Developer Handbook, on page 4-59, reveals this is a 19" Mitsubishi HL7965 Monitor which SGI rebranded. It likely cost as much as the SuperMatch 20-T.
On Ray Arnold's desk, we can notice a weird keyboard with a connector on the side. This is a SGI Granite Keyboard (Indigo Style)[6]. It is a pretty cool keyboard with two ADB connectors on each side. The keyboard can be connected to the workstation from either side and the mouse is to be daisy-chained into the other port.
Ray is seen using the same keyboard later. If you look closely at the screen, it looks like status network was aliased to ping CLI.
ping to look coolDennis Nedry uses two Macintosh Quadra 700. Apple must have been very happy with the product placement. Although they usually require their computers not to be used for nefarious activity which is not the case here.
Released in 1991, The Quadra 700 ran on Motorola 68040 @ 25 MHz with 4 MB RAM, expandable to 68 MB. HDD sizes available were 80 and 160 MB. Ray also uses a Macintosh Quadra 700 but he has only one on his desk.
Dennis negotiates with his co-conspirator located in the harbor to give him time to make it there. It happens via a VC on the Mac. Why not on a SGI? Because the whole thing was faked via Quicktime Video player running on System 7.
The cursor on the progress bar is clearly visible. This is 1-minute clip. Even the mouse cursor is still on the "play" button of the Quicktime window.
Notice the video folder, named VIDnet.
Quicktime is used earlier in the movie. When Dennis is revealed to be working at Jurassic Park, he had Jaws played on his left screen[7].
IRIX System Usage utility, named gr_osview can be seen a few times. It looks like a powerful tool, able to report not only user time, sys time, but also interrupt overhead and even gfx overhead according to IRIX - Desktop User’s Guide on p182.
Despite reports that monitors screens were faked via remote operators, gr_osview seems to react appropriately to keystrokes in the sequence above. Maybe this one was actually live.
When Ray accidentally locks down the whole system, Nedry's face superimposed onto an Elvis Presley jumpsuit shows up on his Macintosh. That is the UI of the "White Rabbit", which Ray Arnold mentions when he explains the lockdown to Ellie Sattler. The filename whte_rbt.obj is not mentioned in the movie, only in the novel. Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park was actually a highly capable programmer.
The legendary "It's a Unix system. I know this" sequence was done using an experimental SGI file explorer application named fsn. Lex Murphy takes over Dennis's SGI Crimson and opens the /usr directory.
SGI was super happy to see this since they mentioned "YOU SAW IT IN JURASSIC PARK!" on their website[8].
IRIX supported spaces in file and directory names. I assume they put a dot between Visitors and Center for style.
Nedryland is the system modestly named by Dennis Nedry to control Jurassic Park. We can catch a few glimpses of the name on screen when the system successfully reboots.
There is very little online about how these screens were created except that they were created by Michael Backes and his team.
Fans have recreated Nedryland. Checkout JPOS NEDRYLAND YouTube channel to see it in action.
Some code associated with Nedryland is visible on screen. It looks like actual source code[9] with Classic Mac OS API functions calls.
Later during the faked video-conference, we can see more files belonging to a Nedryland directory.
One last detail for the road. The book on the top of Dennis's shelf (upper-right) is System 7 Revealed by Anthony Meadow. Wow they really did pay attention to every detail!
References