Engineer identifies and explains every '90s computer seen in Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, while beloved as a film, has been the subject of snarky memes for the infamous line in which one of the characters declares, “This is a Unix system, I know this!” while using a computer with an unusual 3D file manager interface.

Despite the memes, the film’s production team was meticulous in accurately sourcing the right PCs (and adjacent details) for the sets—not too much of a surprise, given writer Michael Crichton’s background with computing and his obsessive attention to detail in the book the film is based on.

This was made clear by a little hobbyist investigation from Google software engineer Fabien Sanglard. He scanned the film and picked out every specifically identifiable piece of hardware he could see, listed what they were, and shared context from other sources on their specs, costs, and how they ended up in the production.

Truthfully, none of this is new information; people have been discussing the technology in Jurassic Park for years. But it hadn’t been put all in one place in a highly readable analysis in a long time, and it gained some traction this week on Reddit and Hacker News. Plus, Jurassic Park has been on our minds given the recent passing of beloved actor Sam Neill.

Identified hardware includes (among other things) five Thinking Machines CM-5 systems, a Motorola Envoy PDA, and multiple then-cutting-edge SGI workstations, including an IRIS Crimson and an R4000 Indigo. For additional background, Sanglard shared this quote from Jurassic Park special effects coordinator Cory Faucher, as seen in the book The Making of Jurassic Park: