Is the Unix operating system featured in Jurassic Park real?

Question

When the film Jurassic Park came out, and I saw that scene where Ariana Richards is sitting in front of the computer and says;

This is a Unix system. I know this. It's the files for the whole park. It's like a phone book - -it tells you everything.

I've always wondered. Is that silly 3D interface they show on the monitor actually real? Was there a 3D file navigator for Unix back in 1993.

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IMHO, the best Unix file browser in 1993 was on NeXTSSTEP and is what is on today's MacOS, but I guess for the general public the one in the picture looks better. — Peter Grill, Jan 30 '13 at 18:54
I always thought it was a great example of sounding technical while not being very technical. UNIX wasn't (and still isn't) well known outside of computer operators, and the field was pretty small back in '93. People knew Windows, but UNIX was way outside the mainstream. It made Lexi seem really hip and knowledgeable. — Johnny Bones, Oct 28 '14 at 19:53
Did chief engineer (Samuel Jackson) use sudo on accessing mainframe? — huseyin tugrul buyukisik, Aug 22 '19 at 20:40
While the machines 30 years later are hundreds of times more powerful, screens today have only what ... at most 16 times the pixel count and perhaps 3 times the linear size? I mean, I could still work with that monitor. — Peter - Reinstate Monica, Apr 06 '23 at 12:25

iandotkelly · Accepted Answer · 2022-10-06T11:32:59.283

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Yes, it is absolutely a real Unix system, it was a Silicon Graphics workstation (using IRIX, the SGI System V based Unix) running the three dimensional file system browser fsn ("File System Navigator", pronounced "fusion").

Silicon Graphics were early developers of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics, so they had the capability to create a 3D file system viewer in 1992, a year before Jurassic Park released.

The fact that the SGI logo is visible on the monitor, makes me wonder whether this was an example of product placement.

References: Wikipedia:Silicon Graphics, Wikipedia:fsn, SGI-Stuff

edited Oct 06 '22 at 11:32

answered Jan 29 '13 at 22:19

iandotkelly

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This was definitely helped by the picture in the question, I could just about make out the SGI logo on the monitor. – iandotkelly Jan 29 '13 at 22:28
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Wow, I can't believe this crazy thing was real! Who on earth builds a 3D file system viewer in 1993? Well, I guess I shouldn't underestimate questions which I think the answer to be trivially obvious. Next you will tell me they really rotated a plain security cam video in Enemy of the State. ;) – Napoleon Wilson Jan 29 '13 at 23:18
@ChristianRau lol, I know what you mean. I thought for sure this thing was fake, but it's bugged me all these years not knowing for sure. – Reactgular Jan 29 '13 at 23:33
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@ChristianRau I did some work at some of those workstations a couple of years later. The 3D file browser was a good party trick, but nobody actually used it for work. The command line was simply faster. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 30 '13 at 01:55
Looks like a deskside SGI crimson, perfectly capable of running fsn in the year they were filming. There's quite a bit of good info about the systems used at http://www.sgistuff.net/funstuff/hollywood/jpark.html – Alex North-Keys Aug 17 '15 at 19:14
@dmckee - sounds like you were at some interesting parties! – blankip Nov 05 '15 at 17:25
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@dmckee The command line is still faster today ;) – atripes Nov 11 '16 at 13:37
SGI also developed the GPU for the Nintendo64 released in 1995. – shortstheory Feb 14 '18 at 13:22
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Command line is always better ! – Nishank Magoo Dec 03 '18 at 15:10
@iandotkelly Is it possible to somehow download the aforementioned OS with that 3D files navigator and test it on the virtual machine? Or is it so outdated that it's gone for good? Are there any 3D file system browsers on modern OS'? – JConstantine Jul 22 '21 at 14:55
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@JConstantine ... yes you can download, build and run fsn from source code on a unix like system, such as Linux. https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv – iandotkelly Jul 22 '21 at 23:54
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Getting the OS working might be harder. I seem to recall IRIX runs on MIPS processors which are relatively obscure nowadays. But if you want fsn to run then I think you're in luck. – iandotkelly Jul 23 '21 at 02:57
@iandotkelly I also wonder if there's a Windows port of fsn. In general I think it's such a great idea to have 3D file system navigators and I wonder why it has not got popular and nobody uses this technology anymore even though we have all the resources now. I seem to recall IRIX runs on MIPS processors which are relatively obscure nowadays. - Perhaps it would be possible to create some kind of an emulator, no? – JConstantine Jul 23 '21 at 08:11
Not product placement, but it is clearly a self-referential nod to the fact that those were the same workstations used by all the folks at ILM doing the CGI for the movie. – Marcel Besixdouze Oct 06 '22 at 03:37

score 82 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 05 '17 at 18:01

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The application is fsn (pronounced Fusion). There's more information available on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

and there's an open-source clone available called FSV:

http://fsv.sourceforge.net/

edited Apr 05 '17 at 18:01

gerrit

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answered Jan 30 '13 at 16:32

Andrew Lewis

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+1 great find. As @dmckee says in another comment - its kind of a fun app, but doesn't look that useful in reality. – iandotkelly Jan 30 '13 at 16:47
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Hmm. Very nice find, but it doesn't really provide much more insight than iandotkelly's existing answer. A comment would have sufficed for this. – Napoleon Wilson Jan 30 '13 at 16:54
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Yes it does. He gives the exact system – Travis Jul 23 '13 at 16:00
@iandotkelly It wouldn't be. No one in their right mind would use a 3D browser to navigate a filesystem. Especially not a unix one -- there's a lovely little command called find. – Shadur-don't-feed-the-AI Dec 15 '16 at 11:25
@Shadur Are you suggesting find is a "little" command? ;-) – Cort Ammon Dec 15 '16 at 20:18
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Nobody not plugged into a VR system and navigating with there hands anyway... – Matthew Wilcoxson Feb 14 '17 at 15:31
Awesome Knowledge ! – Nishank Magoo Dec 03 '18 at 15:10
I never use find to navigate my filesystem, I use it for ... you know ... finding files (usually collections of files). cd, dirs, popd and pushd are nice, though. – Marcel Besixdouze Oct 06 '22 at 03:21

score 10 · Answer 3 · edited Nov 09 '18 at 15:54

As noted it was fsn, and it was actually an interesting example of a class of applications where we were using 3D navigation to visualize non-physical data, like file systems, sales data or stock market behavior. You could see large amounts of data, then quickly navigate to area that looked interesting and drill down. I occasionally used it, although find(1) had been worked on by an old boss of mine (Dick Haight) at Bell Labs when I was there. They serve different purposes.
This was in the movie (not the book) because the ILM folks used SGI workstations, pretty much exclusively, had the fsn program and thought an SGI workstation would be cool to have in the movie. I don't think it was a product placement.

(I was at SGI 1992-2001 and used to talk to ILM, Pixar, Sony, Disney, Digital Domain, Weta Digital, etc. and I still have the SGI "building a better dinosaur" T-shirt with Jurassic Park logo, which wasn't easy to get.)

Is the Unix operating system featured in Jurassic Park real?

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