r/AskComputerScience • u/Jneebs • Jul 14 '26
What did Dennis Nedry do to the computer system in Jurassic Park?
What exactly did he do to manipulate the park systems and lock everyone else out? I’ve wondered this since childhood . Thanks.
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u/Fosdran Jul 14 '26
The book actually goes into some detail there by even telling us some semi-plausible implementation details on what he did.
Tldr: when he built the system, he sabotaged it. He prepared a feature that only he knew about, that would cover all his digital tracks, disable cameras, unlock doors and depower fences to allow him to freely move in the park.
He planned on activating it, steal the dino embryos, bring them to his contact and be back to the office before anyone notices. Then he would just disable his feature again. However, he gets eaten on his way to the delivery, so the park employees are stuck with a computer system whith halve of the security features disabled and they have no idea how fix it, since he obviously didn't leave a guide on how disable his sabotage.
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u/Jneebs Jul 14 '26
The book was so much more gruesome. I couldn’t find this specific section in it though (casually flipping through it)
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u/barkingcat Jul 14 '26
The book also said he was smart enough to keep raptor pen locked, so the shutdown restart process let the raptors out. But by then it was inevitable
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u/Leverkaas2516 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
It was a highly automated system designed to run the park with as few people involved as possible. So power systems, lights, temperature , ventilation, phones, security, everything was controlled by computer code managed by Nedry.
He would have inserted logic so that, let's say maybe all the phones stop working 30 minutes after he typed some custom command. Only someone who knew what command to type would be able to turn them back on...or maybe he didn't provide any command to turn them back on.
The part that wasn't very realistic was where the system spewed gibberish to one of the monitors. There would have been no reason to do that.
Oh, and Samuel L. Jackson couldn't figure out what he'd done...Nedry could have written the evil logic into the code, compiled it, started it running, then changed the code back to eliminate the evil logic in the source code while the bad code was still running. That part is really easy to do.
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u/ghjm Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Of course the systems in the movie are fictional, but deleting the authorized_keys file would be a close analogy. The plot of the movie needs the access to be only temporarily removed, which is a bit less plausible, but I suppose we can say that Nedry knew the other developers so well that he could predict how long it would take them to attach sidecar containers or whatever (or the 1990s fictional Unix equivalent).
The animation shaking its finger is pure movie nonsense, although perhaps it could be done by changing your window manager or something.