I’ve told this story before but I’ll tell it again - Jurassic Park got me into programming!
I was 7 when it came out, and when I saw that one scene with the 3D fly over of the clouds in the approaching storm, I was hooked. Hooked like “I MUST build this”
I started learning C, I downloaded NOAA weather satellite images from school and took them home on floppy disk. I started learning OpenGL (this was a few years later) over the course of many years I learned how to read a JPEG in C, how to denoise it, how to convert it to a height map, and how to animate a fly-over of it.
I think I saw “segmentation fault (core dumped)” about 50,000 times over the 8ish years it took me to build from ages 8-15 or so. It was funny because I had to learn the basics of trigonometry before they taught it to me in school, when it got to that I was like “ohhhhhhh i wish you had shown me this sooner this is really useful!!!” While the other kids were still complaining “when will we ever use this?!”
There’s a quote from the game civilisation that I love “instruct the children not to dream of toys or sweets, instruct them to dream of infrastructure” - I wish we had more scifi like Jurassic park that inspires our young <3
The scene where the girl goes "It's a UNIX system, I know this" was one of the most realistic computer scenes in movies during a time when computer output on screen was mostly fake mockups.
I was a kid back then but I'd seen otherworldly expensive SiliconGraphics workstations at PC fairs (my dad could only afford an XT clone), and seeing one in a movie was so cool.
I was 7 when it came out, and when I saw that one scene with the 3D fly over of the clouds in the approaching storm, I was hooked. Hooked like “I MUST build this”
I started learning C, I downloaded NOAA weather satellite images from school and took them home on floppy disk. I started learning OpenGL (this was a few years later) over the course of many years I learned how to read a JPEG in C, how to denoise it, how to convert it to a height map, and how to animate a fly-over of it.
I think I saw “segmentation fault (core dumped)” about 50,000 times over the 8ish years it took me to build from ages 8-15 or so. It was funny because I had to learn the basics of trigonometry before they taught it to me in school, when it got to that I was like “ohhhhhhh i wish you had shown me this sooner this is really useful!!!” While the other kids were still complaining “when will we ever use this?!”
There’s a quote from the game civilisation that I love “instruct the children not to dream of toys or sweets, instruct them to dream of infrastructure” - I wish we had more scifi like Jurassic park that inspires our young <3