What do the images of the system in the Jurassic Park book actually mean?

Question

In Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park, a system was created by Dennis Nedry to operate the park almost autonomously with minimum staff. Images of its interface are provided in the book.

Do the abbreviations in the menus actually mean something and if yes what?

Additionally, I would like to know if the structure of the menus has a reason or is just random?

1. For example, here is the screen after John Arnold restarts the park (page 288):

   

2. Then here is Tim trying to understand how the screen works and touches the RESET/REVERT (page 383):

   

3. Here Lex presses the VIEW (page 384):

   

4. Here we have the COMMON INTERFACE (page 386):

   

5. Here Tim touches some of the options in the COMMON INTERFACE (page 387):

   

6. Here is the SETGRIDS DNL (page 388):

   

7. Here is the main page after something happens which I am not sure what exactly (page 402):

   

8. And finally here is the ELECTRICAL MAIN (page 403):

   

Answer 1

I would call this an attempt to bring an old-fashioned graphical user interface onto printed paper.

Notably, page 387 looks like modal boxes stacked on top of each other. A modal box is a box that must be confirmed or canceled, or just confirmed, before the user can go on to any other function. Think of the "save as" box in a word processor -- you must tell it where to save the file, or abort, before you can edit the text some more.

Way back in the last century, many computer monitors were not graphics-capable or not very graphics-capable. They would display black and green, black and amber, or black and white, and the most efficient way to "build" boxes was to use a few lines and edges in the character set. Here is a list of one such character set (from MS-DOS, while Jurassic Park was probably supposed to use unix).

On page 388, the character decides to reset the default parameters on the power grid of the island. Those are the settings that the programmers defined in case the operator did not enter anything different.

On page 402, some "buttons" are "pressed" or some "lights" are "on" -- one cannot tell from the picture if getting black means that something has been started, or is being started, or is dysfunctional.

As to what it means, most is just technobabble.