the IT failures of Jurassic Park

I’m pleased to be producing and co-hosting a new podcast series on the TAKE ONE Presents… podcast feed called The Dinopod where Jim Ross and I watch and critically analyse the Jurassic Park franchise films in release order. The first episode is out this week so please do listen, subscribe, and tell people about the show: we have no advertising and spread entirely by word-of-mouth.

It struck me as I was watching the original Jurassic Park (1993) that there’s a lot of lessons about IT infrastructure in both Michael Crichton's novel and Steven Spielberg's film adaptation so this is a brief post about how Jurassic Park failed to invest properly in IT and would have benefited from using open source software.

Jurassic Park, Inc. (a subsidiary of International Genetic Technologies, Inc. (trading as InGen)) used a lot of consultants and contractors to build the titular park. Computer services and IT infrastructure were provided solely by Integrated Computer Systems, Inc., an IT company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Crichton 1991, p. 53 ^[1]). The Integrated Computer Systems team was Project Supervisor Dennis Nedry (played by Wayne Knight in the film), Chief Programmer Mike Backes, and a larger team of unnamed programmers (Crichton 1991, p. 104).

The first infrastructure issue here is that for a project of this scale, Jurassic Park, Inc. should have hired in-house staff rather than putting out a tender and contracting the company implied to be the lowest bidder. If the park had continued to progress towards opening, further issues were likely to arise not covered by the original contract and in-house system administrators and developers could have written new software to resolve issues without the contentious contract negotiations that Jurassic Park, Inc. resorted to:

“Nedry was annoyed with the Jurassic Park project; late in the schedule, InGen had demanded extensive modifications to the system but hadn’t been willing to pay for them, arguing they should be included under the original contract. Lawsuits were threatened; letters were written to Nedry’s other clients, implying that Nedry was unreliable.” (Crichton 1991, p. 174)

This is gross corporate practice and clearly damaged the morale of someone that the park systems heavily relied on. Which brings us to a second infrastructure issue…

Dennis Nedry was made into a classic single-point-of-failure. In both the novel and the film, he is the sole programmer working on-site at the time of the incident and so when something catastrophically bad happens to him, the entire system stops working. With dedicated in-house staff and a team of approx. 4-5 system administrators with at least two on-site at any one time, the park’s systems could have been brought back online a lot quicker after Nedry’s demise. As it is, John Arnold (called Ray Arnold and played by Samuel L. Jackson in the film) struggles to decipher Nedry’s code which presumably was not well-documented. Jurassic Park, Inc. could have mitigated this somewhat by specifying in their contract that extensive documentation was to be produced and made available alongside the software code being developed.

Open source licensing alone would not have saved Jurassic Park: as the novel makes clear, there had been cascading failures of control even before the weekend of the incident precipitated by Nedry shutting down park systems. But it would have helped. As is normal for this kind of IT contract, all of Integrated Computer Systems’ code was copyright of the contractee and the novel specifically mentions that the Jurassic Park Common User Interface software was “© Jurassic Park, Inc., All Rights Reserved” (Crichton 1991, p. 346).

In the film, Lex (Ariana Richards) recognises the park's computer system as a Unix system. Unix systems can be open source like FreeBSD or they can be proprietary like macOS and Solaris ^[2] and the specific system that Lex uses in the film is a discontinued proprietary operating system called IRIX. Incredibly, the weird and seemingly quite clunky 3D interface that Lex navigates is also real proprietary software: it's fsn (File Systems Navigator), a 3D file manager. There's an open source clone called fsv that you can download and run on Unix/Linux operating systems.

Jurassic Park, Inc.'s lack of openness goes further than requiring proprietary software: the company failed to clearly communicate their requirements to their IT contractors. Nedry mentions that he's working under an NDA but also that Jurassic Park, Inc.:

"wouldn't ever tell him what the subsystems were for. The instructions were simply "Design a module for record keeping" or "Design a module for visual display." They gave him design parameters but not details about use. He had been working in the dark. And now that the system was up and running, he wasn't surprised to learn there were bugs. What did they expect?" (Crichton 1991, p. 104).

Nedry intuits that their database specification for records with 3 x 10⁹ fields must be for DNA molecule records but he is not told this by his client. Jurassic Park, Inc.'s failure to clearly articulate their requirements means they ended up with a proprietary system that didn't even meet their needs.

If Jurassic Park’s tender had been more open in the spirit of scientific knowledge sharing ^[3] and specified that their software code must be made available open source, Jurassic Park, Inc. could have got reviewers on the code much more easily whether of a volunteer community ^[4] or of other computer services companies (probably under the same kind of NDAs as Integrated Computer Systems, Inc.). This might have helped to discover the flaw with the animal tracking system (Crichton 1991, p. 164) and, as I mentioned in my post discussing the security advantages of open source, would have helped discover the system’s (deliberate) security flaws.

“The problems with the security system were high on Jurassic Park’s bug list. Nedry wondered if anybody ever imagined that it wasn’t a bug—that Nedry had programmed it that way. He had built in a classic trap door. Few programmers of large computer systems could resist the temptation to leave themselves a secret entrance.” (Crichton 1991, p. 174)

It’s harder to build a trap door in a software system that’s more transparent and with multiple people reviewing the open code. Open code with open documentation would have been easier for Arnold to review following Nedry’s single-point-of-failure failing.

Jurassic Park is a classic story of hubris in the attempt to control nature but it’s also a cautionary tale about underinvestment in IT infrastructure. As I’ve written before, we see the same underinvestment, corporate outsourcing, and institutional devaluing of IT infrastructure in the British Library which left them vulnerable to their recent cyber attack though fortunately books are not capable of escaping and eating the library’s visitors. The lesson for UK Higher Education institutions is that if you want to rely on technology and automation in your infrastructure, then you need to invest resources in it. Spare no expense.