Jurassic Park was released 33 years ago. If you were there or know anything the movie, you know that computers played a large role in making it. The most famous example of that was the CGI rendering of T-Rex. I remember reading that the animator started with a skeleton for the dinosaur to get the movements right and added the flesh and skin at the end. Spielberg was apparently blown away by the result. The story of how computers were used in the movie’s production is fairly well known and interesting for us nerds. There was even a book written about the making of the movie.
Fabien Sanglard examines the movie’s use of computers in a different way. He researched every computer and piece of software from the movie that he could identify. The result is a long and interesting post. The computers were mostly from Apple and SGI although the “supercomputer” was a cluster of Thinking Machine CM-5s.
The producers managed to get the loan of computers worth roughly $4,000,000 in 2026 dollars from Silicon Graphics and Apple. The post has some other tidbits like the loan of a Motorola Envoy. The envoy wasn’t released until 1995—a couple of years after the movie was released—so what you see in the movie was actually Motorola’s original mockup. The other interesting thing is the computer monitors in the movie and how much they cost. There were many different types and Sanglard notes them all. The most interesting aspect of the monitors is that they had to adjust their refresh rate to sync with the movie frame rate to avoid flickering. See the post for a bit more on this.