Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box, and while it was real software, it was dog-slow on low-end SGI without a graphics card, so she had to be using some pretty expensive hardware.
As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.
We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.
> Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box
She's related to Hammond, who owns an island. I'm sure he could get her an old box and some manuals to play with, if not outright a state of the art system.
> As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.
But isn't that exactly the sort of thing a clever kid with access to fancy stuff would mess around with?
> We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.
Which would perfectly explain why it popped up on the production systems. To make it look fancier for Hammond/any investors/the people visiting in the movie.
Using the 3D browser would be akin to saying "That's Linux" upong seeing a Compiz cube a few years ago. I mean, yes, it would be technically correct, but not a defining term for deeply knowing Linux and its intrinsics.
I don't remember her ever saying she actually has experience with the browser, just that she knows it. She could have just used UNIX in general and only read a lot about the file browser, or perhaps briefly tried then incredibly slow version.
It's not even too much of a stretch to imagine she has never seen the file browser, but is able to figure it out on like one can with modern GUI apps.
She didn't need to know IRIX if she knew some other flavor of Unix, she was probably savvy enough to use man and access documentation if needed.
The point is though most mock the scene as though the software they show was entirely fictional and made up, when it was in fact real and was in fact still UNIX.
I don't know why others mock it, but as an older person working in IT, I can explain why I mock it even when knowing it was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
I hadn't realized that was your reason for mocking the scene, I had thought it was just being kind of pedantic and making an observation about the scene.
Yeah that's pretty bad. I don't know what I'd say the worst movie scene was, most of my bad examples come from TV. That CSI visual basic example is pretty infamous.
She was the granddaughter of a billionaire so it's not unreasonable to imagine she may indeed have had access to high end hardware. "No expense spared".
I'm explaining why someone in the early 1990s, knowledgeable about Unix, IRIX, and fsn, would mock the adults who created that scene about a fictional 12 year old.
If the makers of The Matrix gets credit for its realistic looking use of nmap and a fictional "sshnuke", then Jurassic Park should get jeers.
We don't credit Trinity for that scene, we credit the creators of that scene.
And you are being hard on me, and it's kind of ridiculous.
Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program which only exists on one version of Unix, and which was not distributed with the OS, and which was less helpful at file system exploration than both the 2d file manager [1] and 1970s-based Unix shell tools [2].
You specifically called out "older people even working in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.
[2] On a related note, The Great CHI ’97 Browse-Off was a non-rigorous head-to-head contest between different hierarchical browsers. The Hyperbolic Browser was the clear winner, with Windows Explorer coming in second, and the DOS command-line doing pretty well until it came to comparison questions like "Which planet is also the name of a car brand?" where both categories in the ontology needed to be compared.
> And you are being hard on me, and it's kind of ridiculous.
No, lol, I'm not. I'm just disagreeing with you, and pointing out that IMO your point doesn't have much merit. I don't think that's a ridiculous response to what you're claiming at all.
> Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program which only exists on one version of Unix
She didn't say she knew a program which exists on one version of Unix, she just said she recognized the type of system. That's it. That's the claim she was making.
It's pretty similar to the hypothetical situation of a kid finding a mac and saying "This is a Macintosh, I know this" and using the finder to browse and look for a program to run. Same thing, with the only difference being Unix refers to a variety of operating systems not just one particular OS.
And you're making a big deal about how she probably wouldn't have known IRIX and all this, but that doesn't really make sense and it's extremely nitpicky. Others have explained why.
> You specifically called out "older people even working in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.
As I said though, most people who jeer at the scene do so on the mistaken assumption that the software scene on screen didn't exist.
I've not actually ever come across someone like yourself who doesn't refute that, but is just basically being very nitpicky and IMO unrealistic.
- the storm evacuates most people, essential staff only
- Nedry deliberately creates the IT emergency situation to lock out the other IT people still on the island
- The book has more details about how the IT system was over budget/rushed/flawed as another example of the hubris of the whole endeavor.
The book has a detail I especially liked: theres an automatic dinosaur counting system but it was written such that it stops counting once it finds all of the expected dinos (because the spec said they couldn't reproduce), which delayed them realizing that the dinosaurs were actually mating and in a bunch of places they weren't supposed to be. Classic example of a bug caused by software working correctly exactly to the spec.
What if she were originally baffled by the 3D display, and then saw recognizable paths like /bin and /usr and realized the system was actually familiar?
i grew up in university computer labs (parents were grad students then professors). all the machines in the labs were SGI Indys/Indigos running IRIX 4.x/5.x. as a 12yo, i used the 3D graphical file browser because it was fun and cool. it was installed on all the machines by default because it came bundled in a demo CD with every machine.
As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.
We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.