The actual quote is “This is a Unix system; I know this!” A lot of self-purported geeks mocked the dialogue because it was a animated 3D graphical interface to the file system instead of the command line interface most Unix users were familiar with but in fact it was an Silicon Graphics (SGI) machine running their flavor of System V Unix (IRIX) which had a (mostly useless) graphical filesystem utility, which I recognized because I was working on an SGI system at the time. I don’t know how a 10(?) year old girl would be familiar with Unix but then this is a film about genetically reconstructed dinosaurs to populate the island zoo of a billionaire, so best not to think too hard about that.
I actually used to work for SGI in the kernel group. The SGI systems ran on something called IRIX, which was a fairly direct port of System V from AT&T.
Ha! Ninja’d by Stranger. But I have personal experience of those days…
…Why wouldn’t she? I mean, obviously, most 10-year-olds won’t be, but then, most adults aren’t familiar with Unix, either. But it’s always been accessible to basically anyone who wants to learn about it.
Hm, checking online, Jurassic Park, the book, was published in 1990. Linux was released in 1991. So not long before the days of open source, but yeah, still before it.
Still not too implausible that she might have gotten her hands on a Unix system somehow, but not as easy as I thought.
Pre-Linux, most people outside of academia or engineering had no access to machines that ran any kind of Unix or Unix-like operating system. There were technically MINIX and a couple of other efforts to make a Unix-type OS that would run on an 8086 processor but they were really niche products and didn’t have any kind of X Window system for graphical display, and were generally pretty useless for any practical use.
An SGI machine of that era running IRIX would have run starting in the US$30k range and up. The SGI Octane machine that I first use Pro/ENGINGEER and ABAQUS a couple years after that film listed out at over US$60k in its configured state, and was by no means the most expensive workstation configuration. So, it isn’t something anyone would have for a home computer notwithstanding that it wouldn’t support applications people would typically use for desktop applications like word processing or spreadsheets. (I actually wrote a simple ‘spreadsheet’-like program for manipulating and displaying data using Perl and vi because it didn’t have any other way of putting data into and displaying a tabular format before the admin installed WINE and a bootleg copy of Windows Office.)
Unless the girl character had access to such a machine through an academic institution or she spent a lot of time at an animation shop or engineering company, it seems pretty unlikely that she would be exposed to IRIX, and if she had she’d have known that the ‘flying GUI’ file system interface was painfully slow and it was much easier to just navigate via the command line. But it makes for a much better visual than typing text, and I’m sure it looked really futuristic to most moviegoers circa 1993. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that they used it because Spielberg and one of the production designers saw an SGI being used to render and display animations for the film and thought it would be a cool addition on the film set. A similar thing happened on John Frankenheimer’s Ronin where Stellan Skarsgård’s character is using a workstation to track the movements of their target during the heist scene, where they actually used a real AVID video editing station to display the animated maps.
The Linux kernel was released in 1991 but the first concerted effort to put together a comprehensive package of utilities and installable distribution (Debian) didn’t start until 1994, and it didn’t really get a lot of traction or a working X Windows port until ~1995 (guessing; I didn’t start using it until mid-1996 when I no longer had access to Unix systems at school). [ETA: It looks like XFree86 did have a 2.0 release as far back as 1994, but Version 3.3, which was the first really functional X Windows distributed with Linux was released in June 1997.] Before that, it was basically a hobby OS for comp geeks to fuck around with.
Once upon a time tape drives were the main storage medium and accessing records meant fast-forwarding the tapes to the desired record, which typically meant overshooting by so many centimeters of tape and then backing up to the record start.
Area 52 had the scout alien ship since the 50s, the eye rolling conspiracy theory is actually about the one that implies that the microchip and OS was copied from that and it gave us the technologies that we have today.
Easy then to make the virus in a short time, by the “logic” of the movie.
I know “zoom in and enhance” is a movie and TV cliche but there are actual methods for sharpening limited resolution images, and with ML methods it is possible infer and fill in information that is more detailed than the pixelized image would seem to allow for. So, while zooming in on a low rez JPEG or ‘enhancing’ fuzzy satellite image repeatedly until a license plate is readable is ridiculous, it is actually kind of surprising how much detail can be inferred from image and video data.
I still haven’t gotten a computer to be able to rotate an image and show something behind an obstruction as Harrison Ford did in Blade Runner but I’m waiting for some optics genius to explain how that can be done by anti-aliasing and reverse ray-tracing on a static image. That would solve so many more crimes if you could image the person taking the picture!
But why didn’t this advanced civilization have any kind of authentication scheme, or recognize that the scout ship that just docked had been lost forty years prior? Then again, these are guys who need to use Earth’s telcom sats to synchronize their attack for some reason, so they don’t seem like the brightest bulbs on the tree. Maybe they were just looking for things to make them go.
Indeed, as we discussed in a recent thread about telescopes, you can interpolate enhanced resolution from comparing multiple near-identical images, which is more common now that digital cameras can easily take 60 frames per second. But no, not from a single JPEG.
I wasn’t really trying to critique your comment; pretty much nothing about Independence Day makes any sense whatsoever. But at least it gave Brent Spiner an opportunity to show off his comedic chops and do some scenery chewing without attributing it to an ‘emotion chip’.
The “enhance” trick was central to the plot of “No Way Out” when Kevin Costner’s face was slowly revealed with each enhancement.
Another is the “Angelatron” on Bones, which has a database of every possible murder weapon and can then generate a hologram showing exactly how it caused the fatal injury, based on the respective heights and weights of the victim and alleged murderer.
I saw Jurassic Park on opening night with a friend who’s a great programmer. When the computer came up on screen, he leaned over to me and said “that’s UNIX”, just a few seconds before the girl said the same thing. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
In the years since, I’ve heard so many people complain about that scene being unrealistic, but I can personally attest that someone did recognize it. I asked him about it once, and it wasn’t the graphics that gave it away as UNIX, it was the directory names like /bin and /etc. Maybe people can’t read those when they see it on a small screen, and that’s why they think the scene is wrong.
Of course if the system had that flaw, WOPR would have gotten the code almost instantly.
(I wasn’t bothered by the vocoder issue - WOPR thought that David was his creator, Falken - and is capable of the simple reasoning, “Falken used a vocoder when talking to me - therefore I’ll use a vocoder henceforth - that’s clearly what he prefers”)
