There are spoilers about Jurassic park in this post, so beware. Having said that, remember that scene in Jurassic Park where stereotypical computer guy Dennis Nedry tried to make off with some dino eggs while locking his system down to prevent anyone finding out what he had done? And remember how Samuel L. Jackson tried to get in but couldn’t, because he didn’t say the magic word?

If you ever wanted to see what makes fighting for your life against dinosaurs by using technology so much fun, you can do so over at JurassicSystems. They give you a fast video to remind you of how it all went down in the movie, then present you with an authentic replication of the IRIX OS used in the movie.

SGI IRIX Simulation

And that’s one of the things I like about this site; it’s based on a real system. IRIX was a UNIX-based system developed by Silicon Graphics, a workstation company that made – you guessed it – workstations, which were essentially super-powerful and expensive PCs. As PC power increased, however, there was less and less demand for workstations and SGI became something different. Interestingly enough, the old SGI building  in Mountain View, California, now houses the Computer History Museum.

Anyway, the site recognizes some actual IRIX commands that you can use in the simulation. You can even find some things that someone like Nedry might have on his hard drive, although it’s nothing too risque.

And speaking of Jurassic Park Hacking, you might also remember the infamous “This is a UNIX system! I know this!” scene, embedded below. Many people will tell you that’s a farcical representation of navigating a file system, but in fact it was based off of a real yet experimental interface known as File System Navigator that had been built by SGI for the IRIX OS mentioned earlier. In fact, for years it was available to download off the SGI website free of charge.  So if anyone ever tells you it’s an example of Hollywood making idiotic hacking scenes (which does happen), politely have your raptors attack.