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Jurassic Park source code

Jurassic Park is on AMC right now (one of Chrissy’s all-time favorite movies). Dennis (aka Newman) is hacking away at a computer, just before he explains that some systems may go down, and runs out to drop off the dino eggs. I decided to pause and take a look at the code. It was blurry when paused, but I could pick out a few strings keywords, some comments, and regexes. A little bit of googling, and I found the exact file:

ftp://128.208.240.87/pub/fromRoger_G3/OPTICALS/Backup-3_optical/Backup-3B/MPW/Examples/Examples/CheckOutActive.txt

Surprisingly, I didn’t find any trivia sites or references to this fact. So, here’s my first, tiny, and probably last contribution to the pile of movie trivia available on the internet. Click the thumbnail below to see the code up close.

Jurassic Park source code

Now that I’ve posted an image which contains both a copyrighted movie and copyrighted source code, I feel I can take the SOPA & PIPA thing more personally. (Not that I didn’t take it seriously before, I just need to experience things myself in order to take them to heart.)


# CheckOutActive - Check the active window out for modification
#
# Usage: Called by a user­defined menu item
#
# CheckOutActive uses the ProjectInfo command to determine the
# parent project for the file open as the Active window. Once this
# project has been determined, the file open as the Active window
# can be properly checked out.
#
# © Apple Computer, Inc. 1988
# All rights reserved.

End

# Request a comment before we check the file out. It is still possible
# that the checkout will fail because the lastest revision on the trunk
# is already checked out for modification by someone else.

(Set comment "`Request -d "{Task}" "What changes will you make?" || Set error {Status}`")
If {error} == 0
Evaluate "{®3}" =~ /(,([0-9.]+[a-z]*)*)®4[0-9.]+/ # {®4} contains the branch
If "{comment}" ‚ ""
Checkout -t "{comment}" -c -m -project "{®2}" "{Active}{®4}"
Else
Checkout -c -m -project "{®2}" "{Active}{®4}"
End
If {Status} ‚ 0

Update Aug 2016 — Got this message from Lawrence D’Oliveiro at http://www.geek-central.gen.nz :

Came across your blog item about the source code extracted from the Jurassic Park screen shot.

I can tell you what language that is: it’s MPW Shell script. This was Apple’s integrated development environment that ran native on the old (non-protected, non-Unixy, not-quite-multitasking) MacOS. I used it for many years from the 1980s into the 1990s, to write code in Pascal, then Modula-2, then C. Those “Checkout” commands are for the integrated version control system, called “Projector”, which I never quite figured out how to use.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 9:54 pm and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Jurassic Park source code”

  1. » Source code on Nedry's workstation: real programming language/s? Says:
    August 31st, 2015 at 10:34 am

    […] in an early version of AppleScript as it doesn’t quite look like a UNIX sh-style syntax. http://www.joecullin.com/site/2012/01/jurassic-park-source-code/ claims to have found the full file (with a description and Apple copyright notice) based on […]

  2. Joe Cullin Says:
    December 20th, 2019 at 9:20 am

    This post gets consistent traffic, even though it’s surely not what most of the visitors are looking for.

    To reward you random googlers with something slightly more interesting, I offer this short but great take on the movie theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkNLAUwSFGw

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