Posted: . At: 4:26 PM. This was 2 weeks ago. Post ID: 19476
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The UNIX system program from Jurassic Park is very interesting.


The File System Navigator utility for SGI IRIX is excellent indeed. The example below is a huge aircraft carrier flanked by battleships. Each file is represented by blocks sitting on the deck. This is the program shown in the Jurassic Park film to access a control system, this was running on an SGI IRIX system. Specifically; an SGI Crimson. With up to 256 megabytes of RAM, this is not bad for a workstation. Especially in 1993. When a premium PC was a 486 with 8 Megabytes of RAM. And the biggest HDD was 1.2 Gigabytes. It supports up to 72 Gigabytes of HDD space. This is a lot of storage space in 1993. It also supports the addition of video digitizing hardware to work as a video editing workstation. So, it would have been very expensive in 1993, but worth it. The only issue is that it weighed in at 82 kilograms. So it is nearly as heavy as a huge CRT screen would have been back then. The awesome Panasonic TX-8DW71W Intergraph InterView 28hd96 monitor would have been great to use, this is a widescreen monitor and can do 1920x1080p. Amazing.

FSN running on SGI IRIX. This is a file manager for UNIX.

More information and downloads here: https://preterhuman.net/software/file-system-navigator-fsn-silicon-graphics/.

A version of FSN is available for Linux as well, this will compile and run just fine. But if you have an SGI IRIX machine, you would be able to run FSN and see what it was like. The source code for File System Navigator is not available, but at least we have the binaries.

Full specs and information on the SGI Crimson machine: http://www.sgistuff.net/hardware/systems/crimson.html.


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