In which you will find the answer to this riddle, and much more besides:
It is unclear how Jurassic Park crew got their hands on a Motorola Envoy. The movie was shot from August to November 1992. Motorola only finished the PDA in mid-1994 but delayed releasing it to February 1995
Also covers some of the software visible on-screen, and some of the trickery to get the displays to show what they show.
I worked for Thinking Machines while Jurassic Park was being filmed. My company had recently announced their new CM-5 supercomputer. For cinematic purposes, it had a big advantage over the CM-1 and CM-2. See, everyone loved the blinking lights of our first cubical computers, but they were not just for show, they provided a bona fide “window” into the computation: each of the 4,096 one-bit processors—if you could afford that many—had an LED (the accumulator or something implicit). But the “staggered monoliths” shaped CM-5 was different: the blinking lights on each end panel were controlled by a microprocessor that reflected nothing about the actual computation. This pissed off our president as disingenuous. But for the moviemakers it was an opportunity: they were able to buy a “zero node” CM-5 (i.e. no SPARC or vector processors inside) sporting the complete, authentic smoked acrylic skin crafted by the sculptor who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in D.C. and (of course) all the the blinking LEDs you saw on screen.
One of those panels, with some authentication documents, was on sale at the last VCF East consignment sale. Not sure if it sold.
