Tech History: Floppy Disks Saved The 1st Jurassic Park Movie

When we think of Jurassic Park, we picture roaring dinosaurs, groundbreaking CGI, and Steven Spielberg redefining cinema in 1993. But what most people don’t know is that the movie almost lost its dinosaurs — thanks to a computer crash.

Back in the early ’90s, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was pushing the limits of technology. CGI was still new, and they were using powerful Silicon Graphics computers to bring lifelike dinosaurs to the screen. These machines crunched massive amounts of data to animate every ripple of a T-Rex’s skin and every blink of a Velociraptor’s eye.

One day, disaster struck: the system went down. Hard drives crashed, files became corrupted, and it looked like months of painstaking animation work might be lost.

The heroes of the story? Floppy disks.

Animators had the foresight to back up critical work onto stacks of 3.5-inch floppies — each holding just 1.44 MB of data. That’s less than a single smartphone photo today. But those tiny plastic squares preserved the irreplaceable dinosaur animations.

So next time you watch Jurassic Park and marvel at the dinosaurs that still look amazing decades later, remember: a handful of floppy disks kept them from going extinct (again).