00:00SPEAKER(upbeat music)
00:20SPEAKER- Hey everybody, I'm Will.
00:21SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
00:22SPEAKER- We are making a podcast.
00:24SPEAKER- Yeah.
00:25SPEAKERWait, yeah, I guess that is what's going on here.
00:28SPEAKERThere's microphones, there's a--
00:29SPEAKER- There's a thing.
00:30SPEAKER- There's cables all over this table.
00:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I--
00:32SPEAKER- This must be a podcast.
00:33SPEAKER- I jokingly said we should, we're making a tech podcast.
00:36SPEAKERIt's not a games podcast, it's not a VR podcast, tech podcast.
00:39SPEAKER- Just tech ass tech.
00:41SPEAKER- Tech, we love tech.
00:42SPEAKER- Yeah, technology.
00:43SPEAKER- And we like talking to each other.
00:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
00:45SPEAKER- Which is a perfectly good reason to make a podcast.
00:46SPEAKER- It turns out a lot of the time that we spend
00:48SPEAKERtalking to each other is about technology.
00:49SPEAKER- It is, over the years we've had many conversations
00:52SPEAKERin Slack and in Discord and in text
00:54SPEAKERand in all the other things about all of the business.
00:58SPEAKER- Every time we get together to do other stuff.
01:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:01SPEAKER- It just ends up derailing into,
01:02SPEAKERhey, what do you know about DirectX 12?
01:05SPEAKER- Hey, what's the deal with--
01:06SPEAKER- Or what's up with--
01:07SPEAKER- I got an Android Echo for the car,
01:10SPEAKERAmazon Echo for the car the other day.
01:12SPEAKER- Ooh.
01:13SPEAKER- It's bad.
01:14SPEAKER- Ooh, I don't even want one of those in the home.
01:16SPEAKER- So my car--
01:17SPEAKER- Much less following me around.
01:18SPEAKER- Are you one of those guys?
01:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm that guy.
01:20SPEAKER- I didn't know that about you.
01:21SPEAKER- They, how many stories do you need
01:24SPEAKERabout corporations listening to people's recordings?
01:26SPEAKER- I just assume they're always listening all the time.
01:28SPEAKERI've given up.
01:31SPEAKERYou know, honestly though, with the kid,
01:33SPEAKERwhen she couldn't do computing stuff,
01:35SPEAKERwhen she couldn't use like a phone or anything,
01:37SPEAKERit was nice 'cause she could turn on the lights
01:38SPEAKERin the house with that, she talks to Alexa.
01:41SPEAKER- So yeah, that could be good and bad.
01:43SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like I'm probably doing a disservice to her
01:45SPEAKERbut also it's very convenient, so yeah.
01:49SPEAKERSo, okay, so we wanted to do a tech podcast
01:51SPEAKERwhere instead of sitting around talking about
01:52SPEAKERwhatever the week's tech news was
01:54SPEAKERor talking about the stuff we've tested
01:56SPEAKERor reviewed or whatever,
01:58SPEAKERwe wanted to just talk about one thing.
02:00SPEAKER- Yes.
02:01SPEAKER- Each week.
02:01SPEAKER- Which again, like is all we would do
02:03SPEAKERwhen we hung out anyway.
02:05SPEAKER- Yeah.
02:05SPEAKER- So it was just kind of like,
02:06SPEAKERwhy not do this with a microphone?
02:08SPEAKER- Massive multi-day conversations in Discord
02:10SPEAKERand other different places we've talked over the years.
02:13SPEAKERI guess I-AIM probably is where we started.
02:16SPEAKER- Maybe, yeah.
02:17SPEAKER- Would have been.
02:18SPEAKER- I still signed into AIM.
02:20SPEAKER- It's gone.
02:21SPEAKER- Well, you can't say--
02:22SPEAKER- Oh, you're right, I'm sorry.
02:23SPEAKERWell, I have a multi-service client
02:25SPEAKERthat I still sign into. - Oh, you're trillion.
02:27SPEAKER- I use Pigeon on OS X.
02:31SPEAKER- I'm learning all sorts of horrible things about you, Brad.
02:32SPEAKER- You know, at this point,
02:33SPEAKERI think it only signs into Google Chat,
02:35SPEAKERso I don't know why I still have it.
02:37SPEAKERI think I've disabled or deprecated every other service
02:42SPEAKERin that client.
02:43SPEAKER- The only things that I get Google Chats from now
02:46SPEAKERare Pornbots and Joey.
02:48SPEAKER- Really?
02:49SPEAKER- Yeah. - Huh.
02:50SPEAKER- Joey still uses Google Chat.
02:51SPEAKER- Fair enough, I know most,
02:52SPEAKERmost of the people I know still use it, I think.
02:54SPEAKER- Everybody's moved to Discord for me.
02:56SPEAKER- Yeah. - For like--
02:57SPEAKER- Okay, sure, yes.
02:58SPEAKER- For goofs. - Yeah.
03:00SPEAKER- So, okay, so we wanted to talk about one topic every week,
03:02SPEAKERand I thought, this is the episode zero.
03:03SPEAKERThis is the one we're gonna put up to start the feed
03:05SPEAKERso that iTunes knows we have a podcast
03:07SPEAKERand that we're real before we do the actual first episode.
03:09SPEAKER- It sounds terrifying when you put it like that.
03:11SPEAKER- No, it's fine.
03:12SPEAKERDon't think about it too much.
03:13SPEAKERYou're gonna be fine.
03:14SPEAKER- It's like a feeling of vertigo setting.
03:17SPEAKER- Well, but we were talking the other day
03:19SPEAKERabout how much USB sucks,
03:21SPEAKER'cause I've had problems over the last year
03:23SPEAKERgetting USB 3 stuff working with VR hardware,
03:26SPEAKERwhich shouldn't be hard, - Sure, sure.
03:27SPEAKER- but it's always a pain in the ass.
03:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
03:30SPEAKER- And you were saying you had some problems
03:31SPEAKERearlier this weekend with USB. - Yes, yes.
03:34SPEAKER- But compared to the way it used to be,
03:38SPEAKERUSB is very good. - Oh my God.
03:39SPEAKER- Plug and play, it turns out.
03:41SPEAKER- Like, this came up during a conversation recently
03:43SPEAKERthat it occurred to me that everything I appreciate
03:47SPEAKERin a positive way about tech now
03:49SPEAKERis filtered through the lens of how bad it all used to be.
03:52SPEAKER- I mean- - And for all of its faults,
03:53SPEAKERlike the janky plug and play future that we live in now
03:57SPEAKERis still so much better than the way things were
03:59SPEAKER20 years ago.
04:01SPEAKER- I'm not sure about that, Brad.
04:03SPEAKERI like, in some ways, yes.
04:05SPEAKER- Let's say you can do a lot more.
04:06SPEAKER- When it works, it's definitely better.
04:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:09SPEAKER- But- - When it doesn't work,
04:10SPEAKERit is, let's say you're maybe less empowered to fix it.
04:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it used to be that we had the tools,
04:17SPEAKERlike we were talking about modem strings a while ago.
04:19SPEAKERSo like you got your first modem,
04:21SPEAKERwhat was that experience like?
04:22SPEAKER- We got a 14-4, I think it was a Zoom.
04:24SPEAKER- That's a good modem.
04:25SPEAKER- We have, we're using a Zoom recorder
04:28SPEAKERhere in front of us. - It's different Zoom.
04:28SPEAKER- But this was, I think this was Zoom with an X.
04:30SPEAKER- It's X-O-O-M, yeah, they got bought by-
04:33SPEAKER- US Robotics. - US Robotics.
04:34SPEAKER- And then US Robotics got bought by 3Com, I think.
04:37SPEAKER- I used to want a US Robotics modem so bad.
04:39SPEAKER- Oh yeah, those were hardware modems.
04:40SPEAKER- They seemed like, yeah, they were like the gold standard.
04:42SPEAKER- Look, you didn't want a modem
04:43SPEAKERthat ran the software on CPU.
04:45SPEAKERYou wanted the modem that ran the, that had a chip
04:47SPEAKERthat did the modeming.
04:48SPEAKER- I doubt this Zoom modem was such a modem.
04:50SPEAKER- No, they were all soft atoms.
04:51SPEAKER- I, dude, I remember distinctly,
04:53SPEAKERI'm pretty sure it was a Friday.
04:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:55SPEAKER- That we went and got a 14-4 Zoom modem at Walmart.
04:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:58SPEAKER- And I can't tell you how many days it was
05:01SPEAKERbefore I actually successfully dialed a BBS with it.
05:04SPEAKER- So-
05:05SPEAKER- But it was definitely not the day we bought it.
05:06SPEAKER- I-
05:07SPEAKER- Because I didn't know how to write an init string.
05:09SPEAKER- And you had, well, and like,
05:11SPEAKERif you didn't have an init string in the manual
05:13SPEAKERthat came with the modem and you didn't know someone.
05:16SPEAKER- Right.
05:17SPEAKER- And you couldn't call the BBC op and be like,
05:18SPEAKERhey man, how do I work this modem?
05:19SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not like you could go on the internet
05:21SPEAKERand look up how to do this.
05:22SPEAKER- There was no internet.
05:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:23SPEAKER- Yeah, like, how did you figure it out?
05:25SPEAKER- I don't remember.
05:26SPEAKERI might've talked to a friend who already had a modem,
05:29SPEAKERI think.
05:30SPEAKER- Okay.
05:30SPEAKER- The old 10K method.
05:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
05:32SPEAKER- Calling around town.
05:33SPEAKER- Hey man.
05:34SPEAKERWell, so there was a screwdriver shop in my town
05:36SPEAKERthat I didn't find out about until, okay,
05:38SPEAKERif you don't know what a screwdriver shop was,
05:39SPEAKERin the old days, a screwdriver shop was a place
05:42SPEAKERwhere the electronics nerds hung out and sold computers.
05:45SPEAKER- I was envisioning literally a hardware store
05:47SPEAKERwith nothing but screwdrivers.
05:49SPEAKER- So it was, I think they were called,
05:51SPEAKERthey were called screwdriver shops, I think,
05:52SPEAKERbecause people built PCs there.
05:54SPEAKER- Okay.
05:55SPEAKER- It was like, you'd take a screwdriver and you'd buy,
05:57SPEAKERyou'd have cases and CPUs and motherboards
05:59SPEAKERand all that stuff, you could build a generic PC.
06:02SPEAKERAnd the place that I had was,
06:03SPEAKERI think called Shields Electronics.
06:05SPEAKERIt was on Main Street in Bristol, Tennessee,
06:07SPEAKERState Street, sorry, we didn't have a Main Street.
06:09SPEAKERAnd it was a bunch of old radio guys,
06:12SPEAKERlike ham ops, I'm sure.
06:14SPEAKER- Greybeards.
06:14SPEAKER- Great, a lot of greybeards.
06:15SPEAKER- My favorite.
06:16SPEAKER- Like real fucking Richard Stallman looking motherfuckers.
06:19SPEAKER- Oh, that's great.
06:20SPEAKER- And are we cursing on this podcast?
06:22SPEAKER- Sure, sure.
06:24SPEAKERI'm gonna, it's gonna be so hard not to digress constantly
06:27SPEAKERduring this thing.
06:28SPEAKERI used to cut the grass for a neighbor
06:31SPEAKERwho was a ham radio enthusiast
06:33SPEAKERand also like a communications guy
06:35SPEAKERon a battleship in the Pacific.
06:36SPEAKER- Of course.
06:37SPEAKER- During the war.
06:38SPEAKER- Of course he was.
06:39SPEAKER- That's the best.
06:40SPEAKER- But yeah, so they were in that place
06:43SPEAKERand when you had weird computer questions,
06:45SPEAKERusually you could ask them
06:46SPEAKERand if they didn't know someone,
06:47SPEAKERthen they would log into the BBS
06:49SPEAKERand ask someone who did know the answer.
06:50SPEAKER- Oh, that's great.
06:51SPEAKERAnd one of the four people who could be signed in at a time
06:53SPEAKERmight have the answer or you could just wait for a couple days.
06:58SPEAKER- So the funny thing about that whole process
07:00SPEAKERwas I didn't know about any of that stuff
07:01SPEAKERuntil maybe I was a sophomore in college probably.
07:06SPEAKERLike I didn't find out about that stuff
07:07SPEAKERuntil much, much later.
07:09SPEAKERIt's like the screwdriver shop.
07:12SPEAKERI like you, my first computer,
07:14SPEAKERI went to Walmart the day after Christmas
07:16SPEAKERwith my dad and my mom and my sister
07:19SPEAKERand they had Wang 386s on sale.
07:22SPEAKER- Wait, Wang made x86 machines?
07:24SPEAKER- Wang made x86.
07:25SPEAKERYeah, so.
07:26SPEAKER- I thought Wang was its own thing.
07:27SPEAKER- So Wang, so when I was an intern on Capitol Hill
07:30SPEAKERthat same summer.
07:31SPEAKER- Whoa.
07:33SPEAKER- And the politics podcast too.
07:34SPEAKER- Working in my Congress critters office,
07:38SPEAKERhe had a Wang mini computer,
07:40SPEAKERwhich was a like timeshare terminal machine.
07:42SPEAKERIt was like a VAX or it didn't have like,
07:44SPEAKERit had dumb terminals,
07:45SPEAKERbut it was basically a giant word processing spreadsheet
07:48SPEAKERmachine that had like four monitors
07:49SPEAKERand keyboards attached to it.
07:51SPEAKERSo four people could kind of work on it at the same time.
07:53SPEAKERIt was, we used it to do mail merges
07:55SPEAKERto send form letters back to constituents
07:57SPEAKERwho had cared enough about some issue to write in.
07:59SPEAKERIt was not a good computer.
08:00SPEAKERBut anyway.
08:01SPEAKER- Back when Congress people interfaced with constituents.
08:03SPEAKER- Oh, they interface.
08:05SPEAKERAnyway, so we bought a Wang.
08:08SPEAKERWe looked at the two PCs there.
08:09SPEAKERThere was a 486 DX with no CD-ROM drive.
08:14SPEAKER- I figured you were ahead of me by a number of years,
08:16SPEAKERbut our first computer,
08:18SPEAKERfamily computer was also a 486.
08:20SPEAKERSo we're in the kind of the same ballpark.
08:22SPEAKER- I think we had like a, like an 8088 XT, whatever,
08:27SPEAKERan IBM XT.
08:28SPEAKER- The original PC, IBM PC.
08:30SPEAKER- We had gotten to hand me down one of those
08:32SPEAKERthat I got when I was probably a junior in high school,
08:35SPEAKERthat I played like M1 Tank Platoon and Wolfpack and game.
08:38SPEAKERI mostly played games on it.
08:39SPEAKERLike we didn't have a printer
08:40SPEAKERso I couldn't write papers on it.
08:44SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, that Wang was the first
08:46SPEAKERlike real Windows computer that I had.
08:49SPEAKERAnd we ended up getting the 386 SX, no math coprocessor
08:53SPEAKERbecause it had a CD-ROM drive.
08:54SPEAKERSo it was MPC one compatible, but no sound card.
08:58SPEAKER- MPC was like a consortium kind of label, right?
09:02SPEAKER- It was a Microsoft thing, but I'm not sure.
09:04SPEAKER- But it was basically a kind of a minimum spec
09:07SPEAKERsort of thing, right?
09:07SPEAKEROf like, "Hey, this machine meets this criteria."
09:09SPEAKER- You can use a criteria on this
09:11SPEAKERor it probably wasn't even a card at that point.
09:13SPEAKERIt was probably the other one,
09:15SPEAKERthe other encyclopedia on a disc.
09:17SPEAKERBut yeah, so we got the one with the encyclopedia
09:19SPEAKERon the disc thinking that was going to be much better
09:21SPEAKERand not getting the 486 really, really pained me
09:24SPEAKERwhen Doom came out.
09:25SPEAKERYeah, it was bad.
09:28SPEAKER- So yeah, that's like, that was for me,
09:30SPEAKERI took that computer to college.
09:32SPEAKER- Okay.
09:32SPEAKER- And this was what, '93, summer of '93.
09:36SPEAKERI was part of the eternal summer.
09:39SPEAKERI was the first class that was, I like, it's funny.
09:42SPEAKERThis is why we're in a weird place.
09:43SPEAKERLike you and I both grew up, I bet in similar houses.
09:45SPEAKERLike we had, until the NES came into the house,
09:49SPEAKERlike the most technologically impressive thing
09:51SPEAKERin the house was a microwave oven.
09:53SPEAKER- Okay, that's probably about right.
09:56SPEAKERWe had a 2600.
09:57SPEAKER- We had a T9994A actually that got used mostly
10:01SPEAKERas a game console and occasionally as a place
10:03SPEAKERto type basic programs in.
10:04SPEAKER- What was that?
10:05SPEAKERThat's not a handheld, is it?
10:06SPEAKER- No, no, no, T9994A was a, it was like the same era
10:10SPEAKERas a 2600 or a, it's like a shitty Commodore.
10:14SPEAKER- Okay, so it was like a computer that hooks up to a TV.
10:16SPEAKER- It was a computer that had a cartridge slot
10:19SPEAKERand a keyboard.
10:20SPEAKER- Okay.
10:21SPEAKER- And you could also get software on tape.
10:24SPEAKERSo you like on cassette tapes and you plug in a tape layer
10:27SPEAKERinto an audio line in and it would make the modem noises
10:33SPEAKERacross the tape.
10:34SPEAKERIt was really cool.
10:34SPEAKER- We had an early camcorder that hooked up to a VCR
10:37SPEAKERthat was two separate units.
10:39SPEAKER- Oh yeah, we had a two unit VCR for a while.
10:41SPEAKER- So one unit had the actual tape deck
10:42SPEAKERthat you put the VHS tape into.
10:44SPEAKERAnd I can't remember what the, like the other unit
10:45SPEAKERmust've had all, like that's where the clock was
10:47SPEAKERand that must've been where also.
10:48SPEAKER- I bet they did that to keep noise from the motors
10:51SPEAKERaway from the video signal.
10:52SPEAKER- Maybe.
10:53SPEAKER- I don't know.
10:54SPEAKER- They were literally distinct units
10:56SPEAKERthat hooked up to each other.
10:57SPEAKER- It wasn't like they were any smaller or anything.
10:59SPEAKER- No, they were both the size of what later
11:01SPEAKERbecame a single VHS.
11:02SPEAKERAnd also the camcorder, basically the half of the VCR
11:07SPEAKERthat had the tape deck in it, had a shoulder strap
11:10SPEAKERbecause that's what recorded the signal.
11:11SPEAKER- What, you carried that with you?
11:13SPEAKER- Yeah, so like my dad literally had a full-size VCR
11:18SPEAKERon a shoulder strap hanging from his shoulder
11:19SPEAKERhooked up to the camcorder.
11:22SPEAKER- Kids these days.
11:22SPEAKER- And capturing the video, but it was worth it.
11:26SPEAKERLike they, my parents got all those VHS tapes digitized
11:29SPEAKERand transferred to DVD.
11:31SPEAKER- Oh, that's awesome.
11:32SPEAKERDo you have them?
11:33SPEAKERCan we watch old Brad home movies?
11:33SPEAKER- I've got it all archived here.
11:35SPEAKER- Oh, this sounds amazing.
11:36SPEAKER- I'm intending to, because of course they recorded
11:39SPEAKERlike, you know, my sister's dance recital from spring '83.
11:44SPEAKERAnd then here's like Christmas '86 right after,
11:46SPEAKERyou know what I mean?
11:47SPEAKERLike just a mishmash of whatever on every tape.
11:50SPEAKERSo I've been meaning to go through and cut all that stuff up
11:52SPEAKERand put it on a Plex server or something.
11:53SPEAKER- Yeah, check it out on a private YouTube account.
11:56SPEAKER- Yeah, my family can stream that stuff whenever they want.
11:58SPEAKERAnyway.
11:59SPEAKER- So, so yeah, like that first computer though,
12:02SPEAKERI took it to college.
12:03SPEAKERI got a VAX account right when I signed in,
12:05SPEAKERlike it came with my student orientation stuff.
12:08SPEAKER- VAX.
12:09SPEAKER- VAX was DCs, I think.
12:11SPEAKERIt was basically--
12:12SPEAKER- Is it V-A-C-S?
12:13SPEAKER- V-A-X.
12:14SPEAKER- V-A-X.
12:15SPEAKER- So you could either, it was basically a shell account
12:16SPEAKERto a mainframe-y kind of like big,
12:19SPEAKERbig centrally shared time slice computer.
12:21SPEAKER- Okay.
12:22SPEAKERIs that literal Unix or some kind of--
12:24SPEAKER- No, it's definitely not.
12:25SPEAKER- Completely distinct.
12:27SPEAKER- Yeah, if you wanted a Unix account,
12:28SPEAKERyou had to sign up for CS classes.
12:30SPEAKER- Okay.
12:30SPEAKER- So I signed up for CS 100 the next semester
12:32SPEAKERand got a Unix account,
12:33SPEAKERwhich I could then slip and PPP into,
12:36SPEAKERwhich meant I could get like Mosaic on the web
12:40SPEAKERin 90, middle, middle, I guess Christmas of '93,
12:44SPEAKERspring of '94.
12:45SPEAKER- You could run an IRC client.
12:47SPEAKER- Well, so you could run the IRC,
12:48SPEAKERlike VAX had IRC and Usenet and Archie
12:51SPEAKERand all that stuff.
12:52SPEAKERBut at that-- - Gopher.
12:53SPEAKER- Gopher, yeah.
12:55SPEAKER- I love old defunct protocols.
12:57SPEAKER- Oh man, and they all had acronyms too.
12:59SPEAKERProbably Gopher, anyway.
13:01SPEAKERAnd also they dragged each other with their acronyms.
13:03SPEAKERGopher's acronym was probably like Gopher's Nart Archie
13:05SPEAKERor something like that.
13:08SPEAKERThe thing about that time though was like,
13:11SPEAKERI lived in a dorm with a bunch of other people
13:14SPEAKERthat were kind of computer nerds for lack of a better term.
13:18SPEAKERAnd software piracy was rampant.
13:22SPEAKERWe were copying those floppies left and right.
13:25SPEAKERI think one person would go buy a game
13:27SPEAKERand then everybody on the floor would have the game
13:28SPEAKERwithin like 15 minutes.
13:30SPEAKERAnd there were these, we had exchange students
13:33SPEAKERliving in the lounge at the end of the hall.
13:35SPEAKERLike they'd made that into like a bigger bunk dormitory.
13:39SPEAKERThere were a bunch of guys from Malaysia
13:40SPEAKERthat just lived in the room at the end of the hall.
13:43SPEAKERAnd they introduced us to IRC and Usenet
13:45SPEAKER'cause IRC was how they were talking to their family
13:47SPEAKERat home because it would have cost a fortune to use the phone
13:51SPEAKERand they could just catch up with the fam on IRC.
13:54SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Hey, what the hell is that thing?
13:55SPEAKERThe typing is going really fast there."
13:57SPEAKERThat's back when long distance calls
13:58SPEAKERwere charged by a minute for people
14:00SPEAKERwho maybe don't remember that.
14:02SPEAKEROh God, yeah.
14:03SPEAKERSo anyway, that whole thing opened the door to compete.
14:06SPEAKERLike trying to figure out how to get TIE Fighter
14:09SPEAKERand Doom to run on a 386 kind of started me on this path.
14:13SPEAKERThat's rough.
14:14SPEAKERSo that's rough.
14:16SPEAKERLook, if you had four megabytes of memory,
14:19SPEAKERwhich was expensive 'cause the Taiwanese memory fire thing,
14:22SPEAKERreal problem there.
14:25SPEAKERBut if you had four megs of memory,
14:26SPEAKERyou could run Windows 3.1
14:29SPEAKERand turn on the 386 enhanced mode emulator.
14:31SPEAKERThat's right.
14:32SPEAKERAnd you could play Doom in a post jam-sized window
14:35SPEAKERon your Windows desktop.
14:37SPEAKERIt was not a great experience.
14:38SPEAKERSo our first computer for the family
14:42SPEAKERwas like probably middle of '94.
14:44SPEAKEROkay.
14:45SPEAKERIt was a 486.
14:48SPEAKERThis is hard to describe.
14:49SPEAKERIt was, do you remember Cyrix?
14:52SPEAKERSo Intel created the 8486 line.
14:56SPEAKERYeah.
14:56SPEAKERLike that's the 486 SX and DX that everybody knew.
14:59SPEAKERAnd it wasn't, like there were major portions of that
15:02SPEAKERthat weren't patented.
15:03SPEAKEROkay, is that how the clones came about?
15:06SPEAKERI think it was the big part of the instruction set
15:08SPEAKERwasn't patented and the socket wasn't closed.
15:11SPEAKERSo the socket design, anybody could build a socket set.
15:14SPEAKEROkay, so that must be how all the clones came about
15:16SPEAKERbecause, so if you remember Cyrix made the--
15:18SPEAKERFor socket six back then, yeah.
15:19SPEAKERSo Cyrix made the 486 DLC,
15:22SPEAKERwhich was basically a knockoff version of the Intel 486.
15:25SPEAKERCame with horse armor, right?
15:26SPEAKERYes, probably.
15:29SPEAKERWe had a Texas Instruments manufactured knockoff
15:32SPEAKERof the Cyrix 486 DLC.
15:34SPEAKEROh my God, that's terrible.
15:35SPEAKERWhich I can't even remember the actual acronym of.
15:39SPEAKERFrom Googling it this morning,
15:41SPEAKERit looks like in terms of speed,
15:42SPEAKERit was about equivalent to a fast 386.
15:44SPEAKEROkay.
15:45SPEAKERBut it had a separate external math coprocessor
15:49SPEAKERon the motherboard.
15:50SPEAKERLike if you pull that thing open--
15:51SPEAKERWell, that was standard for 486s.
15:54SPEAKERSo I believe the DX had it integrated into the package
15:58SPEAKERor maybe it was external, I forget.
16:00SPEAKERYou could add a 4, you could add an X87 coprocessor
16:04SPEAKERto a 386 or 486 that gave it the DX indicator, yeah.
16:08SPEAKERSo we had something very similar to that.
16:10SPEAKERBecause like the 486s couldn't do floating point math, right?
16:14SPEAKEROr couldn't do it very fast.
16:16SPEAKERIt was much faster in hardware if you accelerated it.
16:19SPEAKERAnd it turned out you needed floating point math
16:20SPEAKERto do Doom and all the good games.
16:24SPEAKERIn effect, the CPU in our first computer was two chips
16:26SPEAKERbecause there was the main CPU
16:28SPEAKERand then there was this floating point coprocessor
16:30SPEAKERoff to the side.
16:31SPEAKERAlso no active cooling on any of that stuff.
16:33SPEAKERNo.
16:34SPEAKERThere were no fans on the CPU back then.
16:36SPEAKEROh, I didn't even have a cooler on either of my first.
16:40SPEAKERSo my next computer, when I went to the second year,
16:44SPEAKERmy sister needed a computer for school.
16:46SPEAKERSo she got the 386 and we went to Sam's Club
16:50SPEAKERand bought an AST Pentium 60 with the bug.
16:54SPEAKERI got the bug, it didn't matter.
16:56SPEAKERBut that thing didn't even have a passive heat sink on it.
16:59SPEAKERNo?
17:00SPEAKERNo.
17:01SPEAKERI think at some point with the Pentiums,
17:02SPEAKERthey started doing that little ceramic package on there
17:03SPEAKERthat was kind of a heat sink.
17:04SPEAKERWell, so anything, the next machine I got
17:07SPEAKERwas probably a K7, an AMD 166 or 200 or something like that.
17:13SPEAKERThat one had an active cooling.
17:15SPEAKERIt was the first one with a fan.
17:16SPEAKERIt's hard to believe.
17:18SPEAKERI think about how much time I spent dinking around
17:21SPEAKERwith cooling in my current PC.
17:23SPEAKERAnd the idea that I once had a machine
17:25SPEAKERthat had no fans in it is amazing.
17:28SPEAKERThe second PC we got was a Pentium 75.
17:30SPEAKERThat was a good computer.
17:32SPEAKERIt was not bad.
17:32SPEAKERYeah.
17:33SPEAKERWhich the guy at the computer store,
17:35SPEAKERwhich was just a little local mom and pop store,
17:38SPEAKERshowed me how to overclock.
17:40SPEAKERNice.
17:41SPEAKERYou just moved that jumper?
17:41SPEAKERIt was jumpers.
17:42SPEAKERHe was just like, "Hey, check this out."
17:43SPEAKERBefore we left the store with the computer,
17:45SPEAKERhe was like, "Hey, let me show you something."
17:47SPEAKERHe pulled the side off and showed me
17:48SPEAKERwhich jumpers to fiddle with
17:49SPEAKERand where in the manual the settings were.
17:52SPEAKEROverclocked that machine from 75 to 90 for about a year.
17:55SPEAKERYeah.
17:56SPEAKERThen that machine got real unstable.
17:58SPEAKERWeird coincidence.
17:59SPEAKERReally unstable.
18:01SPEAKERAnd it never recovered.
18:02SPEAKERBut anyway, I don't mean to get ahead of--
18:04SPEAKERNo, no, no, was that before?
18:05SPEAKERDid you have a 3D accelerator in that card?
18:07SPEAKER'Cause you could have maybe had a Voodoo card at that point,
18:09SPEAKERbut probably not.
18:10SPEAKEROh, I think I did get a Voodoo One
18:14SPEAKERbefore that machine went out of service completely.
18:17SPEAKERSo it was funny 'cause my freshman year in the dorm,
18:22SPEAKERpeople were copying flobbies left and right.
18:23SPEAKERAnd because there's nothing required 3D accelerators,
18:26SPEAKERpretty much if you had a computer
18:27SPEAKERthat would run like Microsoft Word or Windows 3.1,
18:30SPEAKERyou could play all the games
18:32SPEAKERup until the time Doom came out.
18:33SPEAKERAnd then you needed a math coprocessor.
18:36SPEAKERSo it was like everybody was playing games.
18:38SPEAKERPeople were playing XCOM and people were playing,
18:41SPEAKERI think it was before Command and Conquer,
18:43SPEAKERbut Dune II was really popular.
18:45SPEAKERWe were playing Westwood RTSs.
18:48SPEAKERAnd that shaped a lot of the stuff that I still,
18:50SPEAKERlike that's why I was a Sierra adventure game guy
18:52SPEAKERfor a long time instead of a LucasArts adventure game.
18:54SPEAKER'Cause nobody on the floor was into
18:56SPEAKERLucasArts adventure games.
18:57SPEAKEROr maybe they had better copy protection.
18:58SPEAKERI wonder if, could that have been a regional thing?
19:01SPEAKER'Cause I was also into Sierra adventure games
19:03SPEAKERand also never played any of the LucasArts games.
19:05SPEAKERAnd then when I moved to California,
19:06SPEAKEReverybody I knew was in the LucasArts fashion.
19:09SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause all the Petaluma crowd is LucasArts.
19:13SPEAKER- It seems like,
19:14SPEAKERwell, that stuff was being developed around here,
19:15SPEAKERso I'm sure that had something to do with it.
19:17SPEAKER- For me.
19:18SPEAKER- Like it seems like this weird either or situation
19:19SPEAKERof you were either into Sierra or LucasArts,
19:22SPEAKERbut maybe not both.
19:22SPEAKER- Well, for me, the LucasArts ones were so obtuse.
19:26SPEAKERLike the Sierra ones had some internal logic,
19:28SPEAKERbut that may have just been because I grew up playing Sierra.
19:30SPEAKERThis is a different conversation for different podcasts.
19:32SPEAKER- Yes, definitely.
19:33SPEAKER- Also we said no games.
19:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:36SPEAKER- Except where creating boot disks
19:39SPEAKERto free up conventional memory for games is concerned.
19:42SPEAKER- That is, that was the innovation
19:43SPEAKERI brought to my floor of the dorm as a freshman.
19:46SPEAKERWas I went out and bought a big box of floppy disks
19:49SPEAKERfrom the school bookstore and I bought a Sharpie
19:53SPEAKERand I would make a custom bat file
19:56SPEAKERand config sys for each game.
19:59SPEAKER- Were you selling these boot disks?
20:00SPEAKER- No, it didn't have the game on it.
20:02SPEAKER- Okay, no, no, no, I'm saying just purely a service
20:07SPEAKERto make boot disks that would get your games running
20:09SPEAKERwhen they wouldn't run, could have been pretty lucrative.
20:12SPEAKER- So I turned the PC into essentially a console, right?
20:14SPEAKERLike I put the last line in the autoexec.bat.
20:17SPEAKERSo in the old days you had two files,
20:18SPEAKERconfig.sys and autoexec.bat.
20:20SPEAKERConfig.sys loaded a bunch of drivers
20:22SPEAKERand autoexec.bat loaded TSRs.
20:25SPEAKER- A bunch of environment variables.
20:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and memory resident programs like emm386
20:30SPEAKERand stuff like that.
20:31SPEAKERSo at the last line, I would just launch the game.
20:33SPEAKERSo I wrote TIE fighter on the TIE fighter disk,
20:35SPEAKERjammed it into the thing, rebooted the computer
20:37SPEAKERand it jumped right into TIE fighter.
20:41SPEAKER- This is, I don't know how much context we should give.
20:43SPEAKERI don't know who's listening to the podcast,
20:44SPEAKERbut this is basically regarding the apocryphal Bill Gates,
20:49SPEAKER640K should be enough memory for anybody.
20:52SPEAKER- Yeah, that's all you'll ever need.
20:53SPEAKERWell, yeah, 'cause that was the challenge.
20:54SPEAKERIt was like that scene in Apollo 13
20:56SPEAKERwhere they had to get the rockets to fire
20:59SPEAKERwith like six volts of electricity or something
21:00SPEAKERand they're figuring out all the...
21:02SPEAKERYou had to figure out, you're like,
21:04SPEAKERokay, I need to have the mouse,
21:06SPEAKERbut I don't need to have joystick drivers for this game.
21:10SPEAKER- Basically, even if you had a whopping four megabytes
21:13SPEAKERof memory, DOS was not smart enough to use all that properly
21:15SPEAKERor games were still designed
21:16SPEAKERwith this legacy memory structure in mind.
21:19SPEAKER- That was it.
21:20SPEAKER- Where anything crucial to running the game
21:22SPEAKERhad to fit into that 640K
21:24SPEAKERor you just were not playing the game.
21:26SPEAKER- And this comes back to the thing
21:27SPEAKERthat I was talking about before,
21:30SPEAKERin that it may not have worked
21:32SPEAKERand it wasn't easy always to get it to work,
21:34SPEAKERbut you could actually see
21:35SPEAKERwhat was going on under the hood enough to figure out.
21:38SPEAKER- If you spend enough time banging on it,
21:40SPEAKERyou kind of get a sense of that stuff.
21:41SPEAKERIt was like if you needed to use a mouse in DOS,
21:44SPEAKERyou'd have to manually load a mouse driver to make it work.
21:47SPEAKERSo the day that I figured out you could load the...
21:49SPEAKERHigh memory was like, I forget however much,
21:53SPEAKERseveral hundred more kilobytes above the 640, I believe.
21:55SPEAKER- Yeah, it was like 200 or something.
21:57SPEAKER- It was another space to move crucial stuff
21:59SPEAKERinto like the day that I figured out
22:01SPEAKERyou could move the mouse driver into high memory.
22:03SPEAKERSo it didn't take up conventional memory anymore.
22:05SPEAKER- High mem.sys was like a, it's changed my life.
22:09SPEAKER- Well, but in figuring,
22:11SPEAKERthis is the thing that was interesting,
22:13SPEAKERlike because I was into games
22:14SPEAKERand because games were hard to run,
22:16SPEAKERI ended up having to learn a ton about how computers work.
22:18SPEAKERWhich is how I ended up getting my first job
22:20SPEAKERand all that stuff down the road.
22:24SPEAKERIt's worth mentioning that my first computer
22:25SPEAKERdidn't have a sound card.
22:26SPEAKER- Wow. - Yeah.
22:27SPEAKER- No kidding. - No.
22:28SPEAKER- Wow, ours had a Sound Blaster 16.
22:30SPEAKERSo we were like, I didn't know how good I had it.
22:32SPEAKER- Yeah. - Until I went back
22:33SPEAKERand started figuring out like what an ad lib was
22:36SPEAKERand like what it was like before you had a DAC
22:38SPEAKERon a sound card and could do digital audio.
22:40SPEAKER- See, I went and bought- - We got lucky.
22:41SPEAKER- I went and bought a SB 16.
22:43SPEAKERIt was like $200 for a sound card.
22:45SPEAKER- Yeah. - Which was a ton of money.
22:48SPEAKERBut it turns out it was nice to have
22:49SPEAKERmore than just beeps and bloops.
22:51SPEAKER'Cause it did have the little speaker
22:52SPEAKERand would go beep, beep, boop, boop.
22:54SPEAKERWasn't that fun playing games. - No, no.
22:58SPEAKER- So, okay.
23:00SPEAKERSo Windows 95 came out. - Yeah.
23:03SPEAKER- Midway through the time that I had that Pentium 16,
23:05SPEAKERwhich I assume about the same time for you.
23:07SPEAKERDid you wait in line for it?
23:08SPEAKERDo you remember what a big deal it was?
23:10SPEAKER- Oh, dude, yes. - Yeah.
23:11SPEAKER- Like it was, it dominated the media
23:13SPEAKERfor like the whole entire week that it came out.
23:15SPEAKER- August of 1995.
23:16SPEAKER- They bought that Rolling Stones song.
23:18SPEAKER- Yeah, they paid Brian, you know,
23:20SPEAKERmore money than anybody's ever gotten paid
23:22SPEAKERto make a jingle before. - To make a start-up sound.
23:25SPEAKERWe mail ordered a copy.
23:26SPEAKERSo it was there on release day.
23:27SPEAKER- Nice. - And I,
23:29SPEAKERthis is what a gigantic nerd I was.
23:30SPEAKERI remember getting off the bus and like,
23:32SPEAKERbasically running home.
23:33SPEAKERI was so excited about having a real desktop and like--
23:36SPEAKER- It was the first time I waited for the UPS guy.
23:38SPEAKER- Yeah. - I was sitting there,
23:39SPEAKERI was like, and I was dumb.
23:41SPEAKER- 'Cause I was buying like,
23:43SPEAKERGod, I don't even remember what the magazines were
23:44SPEAKERat the time, like different Windows magazines,
23:47SPEAKERreading about like--
23:47SPEAKER- Probably PC World and PC Computing
23:50SPEAKERand stuff like that. - Preview builds of Chicago.
23:51SPEAKER- Oh, yeah. - And stuff like--
23:52SPEAKER- Chicago. - Fawning over
23:53SPEAKERthe screenshots.
23:55SPEAKER- Look, it has a button in the lower left-hand corner.
23:57SPEAKER- Right, right.
23:58SPEAKERYou can actually drag files around.
23:59SPEAKER- Yeah, there was no,
24:00SPEAKERit used to be that the desktop was just a place
24:02SPEAKERthat the things that were running in the background lived.
24:04SPEAKER- Yeah, like Windows 3.1 was such a God awful interface.
24:06SPEAKER- It wasn't great.
24:09SPEAKERSo we did that.
24:10SPEAKERWe, I got Windows and I bought a box
24:12SPEAKERthat had Netscape Navigator in it at the same time,
24:14SPEAKER'cause I didn't realize that I could just go download
24:17SPEAKERNetscape Navigator. - Sure, yeah.
24:18SPEAKER- It was like, that was, I think that,
24:20SPEAKERI think the box that had like windsock and all the shit
24:23SPEAKERthat you didn't need anymore for Windows 95,
24:26SPEAKERprobably cost more than Windows 95 actually did.
24:28SPEAKER- I believe it. - Seems right.
24:30SPEAKERIt was a real, real gross opportunity taken
24:33SPEAKERby whichever company sold me that.
24:37SPEAKER- But yeah, that's like the companies
24:38SPEAKERthat used to package up user-made Doom levels
24:40SPEAKERand sell them in Walmart.
24:42SPEAKER- And those were good, yeah.
24:43SPEAKERI liked this, the Sam's company, you could get a box,
24:46SPEAKERyou get a book that told you how to make Doom levels,
24:48SPEAKERkind of, and also had like 600 Doom levels on it,
24:52SPEAKERincluding sometimes like the 20th Century Fox Aliens mod.
24:56SPEAKER- Oh yeah, you know, Aliens DC.
24:58SPEAKER- Yeah, all that stuff.
25:00SPEAKERIt wasn't actually made by 20th Century Fox,
25:02SPEAKERit was made by some people that then got Foxed.
25:05SPEAKER- Yes, I believe that is the origin of the term Foxed.
25:07SPEAKER- Yeah.
25:09SPEAKERI don't know what the next thread is.
25:12SPEAKEROh, first PC you built.
25:14SPEAKER- So that would have been, that was a Pentium 200.
25:17SPEAKERSo yeah, the 3Dfx happened during, or graphics cards,
25:22SPEAKERI mean.
25:23SPEAKER- 3D, real 3D, I mean there were--
25:24SPEAKER- 3D accelerators is technically
25:26SPEAKERwhat they were called back then.
25:27SPEAKER- There were things that claimed to be 3D accelerators
25:29SPEAKERbefore the Voodoo 1 card.
25:31SPEAKER- Yes.
25:31SPEAKER- And there were some that actually were like,
25:32SPEAKERthe Rendition Verite and some of those came out
25:34SPEAKERa little bit before, but like didn't have any,
25:37SPEAKERlike they were missing some key features or whatever.
25:39SPEAKER- I mean, the reason that you emphasize 3D accelerator
25:41SPEAKERis because you already had a 2D only graphics card
25:44SPEAKERin your computer and the 3D accelerator
25:46SPEAKERwas a separate card that you put in
25:47SPEAKERand you basically, you know, hooked them together
25:50SPEAKERwith an analog video cable.
25:52SPEAKER- Well, in a lot of cases, like the Rendition cards
25:55SPEAKERwere great, okay 3D accelerators,
25:57SPEAKERbut the 2D side was kind of slow.
25:59SPEAKERSo if you had like a really fast Matrox Millennium card
26:01SPEAKERor something like that for 2D,
26:03SPEAKERwhich I, it's funny to think about the idea
26:05SPEAKERof a 2D card being fast.
26:09SPEAKER- I think that's what I put in that Pentium 200.
26:12SPEAKERI think it was a Matrox Millennium and a,
26:15SPEAKERand I used the same Voodoo 1 that I already had.
26:17SPEAKER- Yeah, the thing that Millennium was nice for
26:18SPEAKERwas like Photoshop and stuff.
26:19SPEAKERYou could move the windows around and see the images
26:21SPEAKERinside the window when you were moving them.
26:23SPEAKER- Yes.
26:24SPEAKERBut then you had to, so basically you,
26:28SPEAKERyou ran a cable from the back of the 2D card
26:30SPEAKERinto the 3D card.
26:32SPEAKER- A big fat VGA cable.
26:33SPEAKER- And then the VGA cable out from the 3D card
26:35SPEAKERto the monitor, but the 3D card introduced
26:37SPEAKERa bunch of interference or noise.
26:38SPEAKER- A little bit.
26:39SPEAKER- Like at least on mine, the one I had,
26:40SPEAKERbut it degraded the nice clean image
26:42SPEAKERthat the Millennium was putting out,
26:44SPEAKERmade it look like crap.
26:46SPEAKER- See, I think I was on a shitty S3 card,
26:48SPEAKERso I probably didn't notice.
26:49SPEAKER- You didn't notice, sure.
26:50SPEAKER- The thing that was weird, so I put,
26:53SPEAKERthe first machine I put the graphic scaler in
26:57SPEAKERwas that Pentium 60.
26:58SPEAKER- Okay.
26:59SPEAKER- And it, I was able to play, you know,
27:02SPEAKERMechWarrior and Quake when that came,
27:07SPEAKERwhen GLQuake came out, stuff like that.
27:09SPEAKERBut it became clear that it was like really struggling
27:11SPEAKERto do, what was it, 640 by 480, I guess,
27:14SPEAKERat that time was the resolution.
27:16SPEAKER- Yes.
27:18SPEAKER- And it was a weird, it was a weird,
27:23SPEAKERlike that whole process was weird,
27:25SPEAKER'cause like you couldn't do windowed 3D apps.
27:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
27:28SPEAKER- You had to be full screen only
27:29SPEAKERfor the Voodoo card to work.
27:30SPEAKER- Yes, and I read, I think you would hear
27:31SPEAKERa little click when the signal changed.
27:33SPEAKER- It kind of chunked over.
27:34SPEAKERI think that was the monitor maybe.
27:35SPEAKER- Maybe.
27:36SPEAKER- 'Cause it might've been the monitor
27:37SPEAKERchanging resolutions.
27:38SPEAKER- Maybe, maybe you're right.
27:39SPEAKER- But yeah, it was a weird time.
27:41SPEAKERAnd then that started, from there I was like,
27:44SPEAKERI need a faster computer, but I don't wanna pay
27:46SPEAKERGateway or Dell or somebody to send me one.
27:49SPEAKERSo that's when I discovered the screwdriver shop.
27:51SPEAKER- Yes.
27:52SPEAKER- And I went to the one in Knoxville,
27:53SPEAKERwhich I can't remember what it was called,
27:55SPEAKERbut when I was in school.
27:57SPEAKERAnd I discovered Boot Magazine there.
27:59SPEAKERLike all of that stuff came out of going
28:01SPEAKERto those screwdriver shops, looking for,
28:06SPEAKERwell, there were two things.
28:06SPEAKEROne was that we started to see the first
28:09SPEAKERof the kind of online retailers for PC hardware.
28:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:13SPEAKER- So a lot of screwdriver shops in places like Kansas
28:15SPEAKERand whatever would list the stuff that they'd bought
28:17SPEAKERwhite box from Asia and they'd sell it in the US
28:21SPEAKERfor a lot cheaper than you could get it at Circuit City
28:24SPEAKERor CompUSA or whatever the other micro center,
28:28SPEAKERwhatever your computer retailer was.
28:30SPEAKERSo you could buy like memory straight from Taiwan
28:32SPEAKERand hard drive straight from Southeast Asia.
28:35SPEAKER- Yeah, that's pretty much how I was getting the parts too
28:38SPEAKERfor that first machine.
28:39SPEAKER- Well, and 'cause like if I was buying a hard drive,
28:41SPEAKERI didn't need, I didn't need the brackets and stuff
28:44SPEAKERto put in a five and a quarter inch slot
28:45SPEAKER'cause I was just like, I knew where it was going.
28:47SPEAKER- It's OEM hardware basically.
28:48SPEAKERI think that's how it was described back then.
28:49SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:50SPEAKER- Like if you bought the OEM thing,
28:51SPEAKERit was just a featureless brown cardboard box.
28:52SPEAKER- No cables.
28:53SPEAKER- No, like I guess you got a manual.
28:56SPEAKER- Usually not.
28:57SPEAKER- In some cases maybe a manual.
28:57SPEAKER- Maybe a piece of paper.
28:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
28:59SPEAKER- Screws, sometimes you'd get screws.
29:00SPEAKER- Literally just the parts they sent to builders.
29:02SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:03SPEAKER- Who built machines and sold them.
29:04SPEAKER- Well, that's what these screwdriver shops were.
29:05SPEAKERThese were the, these were people like,
29:07SPEAKERif you had a small business and you wanted five computers
29:08SPEAKERand you didn't want to call Dell.
29:10SPEAKER- Right.
29:15SPEAKERSo I would get the small stuff through the mail
29:16SPEAKER'cause it was cheaper and then the local place,
29:18SPEAKERI would go and get cases and monitors
29:21SPEAKER'cause they were bigger.
29:22SPEAKERAnd I ended up paying for a lot of college
29:24SPEAKERby building computers for people.
29:25SPEAKER- Wow.
29:26SPEAKER- Like I was, I did that first one,
29:28SPEAKERwhich was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.
29:31SPEAKERRight, like I spent $1,000 from some sketchy places.
29:35SPEAKERIt was the first time I ever put a credit card in
29:37SPEAKERon the internet probably.
29:38SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.
29:40SPEAKER- And that was terrifying
29:41SPEAKER'cause it was probably not even encrypted back then
29:42SPEAKERbut I have to think about it.
29:44SPEAKERAnd then two weeks later, there was a UPS strike.
29:48SPEAKERSo nine of the 10 components arrived via mail
29:52SPEAKERand the 10th was in a truck someplace
29:55SPEAKERwhile UPS was striking.
29:56SPEAKERI was like, oh, I'm dying.
29:58SPEAKER- Sure.
29:59SPEAKER- It finally came.
30:00SPEAKERI set up on the dining room table.
30:01SPEAKERIt was summer break.
30:02SPEAKERI was at my parents' house
30:04SPEAKERand I'm putting together the first computer I ever built
30:07SPEAKERusing a guide.
30:08SPEAKERThere was a guide in a early boot magazine
30:10SPEAKERthat I'd bought at the screwdriver shop.
30:12SPEAKERAnd there was a thing on Tom's Hardware.
30:13SPEAKERAnd those were the two places,
30:15SPEAKERlike that was how I learned how to build a computer
30:17SPEAKERwas by reading just text descriptions
30:20SPEAKERof how to put this shit together
30:22SPEAKERand looking at pictures in boot magazine.
30:23SPEAKER- Do you remember what year that was?
30:25SPEAKER- It would have been summer of '94 probably.
30:28SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
30:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
30:29SPEAKER- That's way earlier than me.
30:30SPEAKER- Oh, really?
30:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I think '97 is when I built that Pentium 200.
30:34SPEAKER- Oh no, you would have built,
30:35SPEAKERit would have been way earlier than that.
30:36SPEAKER- Are you sure?
30:36SPEAKER- The Pentium 200 would have been '94, '95.
30:38SPEAKERUnless it was--
30:39SPEAKER- Of course when we got that 486.
30:43SPEAKER- Oh, you know what, you're right.
30:44SPEAKER'94, it would have been summer of '95 or '96.
30:47SPEAKER- Okay.
30:48SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause summer of '94 is when I got the Pentium 60.
30:52SPEAKER- Right.
30:53SPEAKER- And then that lasted until the next year
30:57SPEAKERI lived off campus and I replaced that computer
31:00SPEAKERmidway through that year.
31:01SPEAKER- Okay, it sounds like I was about a year,
31:03SPEAKERyear and a half behind the curve of what you were on.
31:06SPEAKER- But I mean--
31:07SPEAKER- In terms of CPUs and stuff.
31:08SPEAKERSo I built that PC during summer break
31:10SPEAKERand then I started selling,
31:13SPEAKERI started, you know those pieces of paper
31:15SPEAKERthat you stick on phone poles with the,
31:17SPEAKERneed a computer?
31:18SPEAKERCall blah, blah, blah.
31:19SPEAKER- Yeah.
31:19SPEAKER- And I put those on phone poles all around Knoxville.
31:20SPEAKER- Oh, I should have done that, man.
31:22SPEAKERI was not entrepreneurial enough.
31:23SPEAKER- Well, I didn't--
31:24SPEAKER- I was mostly doing manual labor for money back then.
31:26SPEAKER- So it wasn't that I was entrepreneurial,
31:28SPEAKERI just wanted to get new video cards
31:29SPEAKERas fast as they were coming out.
31:30SPEAKER- Oh yeah, sure, sure.
31:31SPEAKER- So like I would dump the old one into the PC
31:32SPEAKERI sold somebody and--
31:33SPEAKER- But I bought mine in '64 by helping my neighbor,
31:36SPEAKERthe same, the ham radio operator,
31:38SPEAKERI helped him blacktop his driveway over three days.
31:41SPEAKER- Oh my God, that's--
31:42SPEAKER- Yeah, like I was an idiot.
31:43SPEAKER- That is incredibly hard work, holy cow.
31:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I ruined a pair of sneakers doing it.
31:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
31:48SPEAKER- I was mowing yards and doing stuff like that for cash.
31:50SPEAKERI should have been using my burgeoning computer skills,
31:55SPEAKERbut oh well.
31:56SPEAKER- Well, so I ended up running networks at night.
31:58SPEAKER- Really?
31:59SPEAKER- All through college.
32:00SPEAKER- Wow.
32:01SPEAKER- Okay, so you're in a networking environment
32:02SPEAKERwhen you're at college already,
32:04SPEAKERso you're kind of absorbing stuff like this.
32:06SPEAKER- Well, no, we were all modems.
32:07SPEAKERWe were all dial-ins at college.
32:07SPEAKER- Really?
32:08SPEAKER- Yeah, they didn't have network.
32:09SPEAKER- My context for that is like when Doom first came out
32:13SPEAKERand the best I could do
32:15SPEAKERonce I got that stupid Zoom modem working
32:17SPEAKERwas play one-on-one against my friend across town.
32:20SPEAKERSo we wasn't, I wasn't after making a long distance call.
32:22SPEAKER- Yeah.
32:23SPEAKER- But I remember reading, you remember--
32:26SPEAKER- "Dwango."
32:26SPEAKER- Yeah, well, not just that,
32:27SPEAKERbut you remember the stories about like,
32:28SPEAKERoh, like half the networks, the IPX networks
32:32SPEAKERat the banks across the country crashed
32:34SPEAKERthe day after the Doom shareware came out.
32:36SPEAKER- My--
32:37SPEAKER- Everybody was playing Doom on their corporate
32:38SPEAKERor university networks.
32:39SPEAKER- My roommate, when I was a freshman in college,
32:42SPEAKERworked in the computer lab in the basement of our dorm.
32:44SPEAKERThat was his work study.
32:46SPEAKERAnd we went down the day the Doom shareware came out
32:49SPEAKERand loaded it up after the lab closed at midnight.
32:51SPEAKERAnd like he got in huge fucking trouble
32:55SPEAKERbecause we flooded the entire IPX network
32:57SPEAKERat the university playing Doom.
32:59SPEAKER- So I bring that up just to say that I've,
33:01SPEAKERI always viewed networking, local networking,
33:03SPEAKERstuff like that from afar,
33:04SPEAKERlike through the winds of computer magazines
33:07SPEAKERand like the little bit I could read about
33:08SPEAKERon like BBSs and stuff.
33:10SPEAKERBut like, if you were just at home with a computer,
33:13SPEAKERyou had no access to like real networking.
33:15SPEAKER- Well, and like network cards were expensive.
33:17SPEAKER- Yeah, and incredibly baffling.
33:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so we--
33:20SPEAKER- Like people don't understand
33:20SPEAKERlike what the pre-DHCP era was like,
33:23SPEAKEReven once you could get on the internet
33:24SPEAKERfor setting up network stuff.
33:26SPEAKER- So I learned about that stuff because my parent,
33:29SPEAKERmy dad went from being a complete Luddite,
33:31SPEAKERlike I don't need a computer,
33:32SPEAKERlike he was a sales guy for his own business, right?
33:35SPEAKERAnd he was against computers.
33:38SPEAKERAnd then I showed him a copy of Act
33:40SPEAKERthat somebody had pirated from a BBS probably.
33:43SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Hey, you should check this out.
33:44SPEAKERThis seems like it'd be useful."
33:45SPEAKERAnd he started using it in DOS with no mouse.
33:49SPEAKERHe was like, "This is amazing."
33:50SPEAKERLike it tells me when to call people to ping them to say,
33:53SPEAKER"Hey, I wanna check back up with you
33:54SPEAKERand see if you wanna buy some more stuff."
33:56SPEAKERAnd it was a huge benefit for his business.
33:59SPEAKERThen he hired a couple more salespeople
34:00SPEAKERand they were all working on their own separate Act instances
34:02SPEAKERand one of them quit.
34:03SPEAKERAnd he was like, "Well, shit, I want his contacts now
34:06SPEAKER'cause it's my business."
34:08SPEAKERAnd he was like, "Can we just do a network?"
34:10SPEAKERSo I set up a Windows 3.1 network using 10Base-T,
34:15SPEAKERthe coax cable and barrel connectors through the office.
34:19SPEAKERAnd that's how I learned it.
34:19SPEAKERSo I learned how to do that.
34:20SPEAKER- That was old school.
34:21SPEAKER- Probably the summer,
34:23SPEAKERthat would have probably been the summer of '95.
34:26SPEAKER- So that's straight up pre-TCPIP, right?
34:30SPEAKERLike was that some kind of...
34:31SPEAKERWhat protocols are we talking about?
34:33SPEAKER- So we used NetWare and IPX for that
34:35SPEAKER'cause we had a little NetWare server.
34:37SPEAKERNetWare was kind of like the free-ness of the day.
34:41SPEAKERIt was basically just a bucket you could dump files in.
34:45SPEAKERI mean, you could run stuff on it, but we didn't.
34:48SPEAKERYes, we saved the Act database on there
34:50SPEAKER'cause if you save the Act database on there,
34:51SPEAKERmultiple people could work on it at the same time,
34:53SPEAKERwhich was nice.
34:54SPEAKERSo we merged everybody together, put it all connected.
34:56SPEAKERAnd then I went back to school
34:58SPEAKERbetween my sophomore and junior years and put up,
35:01SPEAKERstarted calling local businesses and being like,
35:03SPEAKER"Hey, would you like a network?"
35:04SPEAKERAnd they all wanted networks.
35:04SPEAKERThey had no idea why they wanted networks.
35:07SPEAKERBut I would set up a local network.
35:09SPEAKERI would share their dial-up connection
35:10SPEAKERacross all the computers.
35:11SPEAKERSo it was incredibly, even slower.
35:14SPEAKERAnd they all had internet access.
35:16SPEAKER- It was really good.
35:17SPEAKER- Sounds lucrative.
35:20SPEAKER- Yeah, I made a bunch of money doing that.
35:22SPEAKERIt was good.
35:23SPEAKERBut I also, my grades went into the toilet.
35:24SPEAKERLike I was getting good grades before.
35:27SPEAKERAnd then I was suddenly like staying up
35:29SPEAKERuntil three o'clock in the morning,
35:29SPEAKERinstalling networking cables everywhere.
35:32SPEAKERAnd turns out that's bad for your,
35:34SPEAKERI didn't go to class very much.
35:35SPEAKERAlso Quake World, GL Quake World came out,
35:38SPEAKERwhich was not a great thing for my productivity at school.
35:41SPEAKER- Sure, I can identify.
35:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and that's pretty much it.
35:46SPEAKERLike that, I did that stuff all through college
35:50SPEAKERand then wrote a nasty letter to the guy
35:53SPEAKERwho started Ars Technica about his BOS coverage.
35:56SPEAKER- P-O-S?
35:57SPEAKER- Do you know him, P-O-S?
35:58SPEAKEROh, B-O-S was, you know next.
35:59SPEAKER- Oh, B, like B-E-S, I thought you meant acronym B-O-S.
36:03SPEAKEROh yeah, no, I totally remember.
36:04SPEAKERI was, I don't know where this podcast is going,
36:07SPEAKERbut I was reading an article on,
36:09SPEAKERoh no, I think it was on Ars actually,
36:11SPEAKERabout, we're basically right around the 50th anniversary
36:14SPEAKERof the founding of Unix or the original development
36:17SPEAKERat Bell Labs.
36:18SPEAKER- The guy, I read the story about,
36:19SPEAKERI read that the other day.
36:20SPEAKERHe sent his wife and his kid off on a two-week vacation.
36:24SPEAKER- Yes, he literally wrote
36:25SPEAKERthe Unix kernel. - The Unix kernel.
36:27SPEAKERI think the file system and like one other thing,
36:30SPEAKEReach in one week increments.
36:32SPEAKERHe gave himself a week to write the kernel,
36:33SPEAKERlike a week to write the file manager and he did it.
36:36SPEAKERI think that was Ken Thompson.
36:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
36:38SPEAKER- And like Dennis Ritchie was there,
36:39SPEAKERlike defining the C language at the same time.
36:43SPEAKER- Bananas.
36:44SPEAKER- Anyway, I got deep into the comments
36:46SPEAKERand first of all, the comments on Ars are like,
36:49SPEAKERpretty deep well of experience there.
36:51SPEAKER- I would say the last good comments on the internet.
36:52SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a lot of gray beards there.
36:54SPEAKERPeople talking about working on, I don't know,
36:57SPEAKERlike deck tens and stuff like that, but.
36:59SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds right.
37:01SPEAKER- Anyway, I bring that up 'cause people,
37:02SPEAKERthere were people in there talking about,
37:03SPEAKER'cause like the premise of the article was like,
37:05SPEAKERhey, here are the beginning days of the operating system
37:08SPEAKERthat in a lot of meaningful ways underpins
37:11SPEAKERlike every smartphone on the planet
37:12SPEAKERand every Mac book out there.
37:14SPEAKER- And that like Steve, like Bill Gates was mimicking
37:19SPEAKERwhen he was writing DOS, right?
37:21SPEAKER- But so like the gist of some of these comments was like,
37:23SPEAKERand this is how I learned about what Google Fuchsia is,
37:26SPEAKERwhich I hadn't heard of before.
37:28SPEAKERFuchsia is basically a brand new OS
37:29SPEAKERlike that they're architecting from the ground up.
37:31SPEAKER- Oh, is this to replace the Linux core in Android?
37:33SPEAKER- To replace, that's thought to be the replacement
37:37SPEAKERfor Android, but it seems so skunk works right now
37:39SPEAKERthat nobody seems to know exactly what it is.
37:41SPEAKER- Presumably it solves all the problems
37:42SPEAKERthat we realized are problems over the last 30 years.
37:44SPEAKER- Maybe, but like kind of the gist of a lot of the comments
37:45SPEAKERwas like, hey, are we ever gonna move to anything
37:47SPEAKERthat is not sort of at its core based on Unix?
37:51SPEAKERAnd people were talking about like, like BOS was a flop
37:54SPEAKER'cause that's, that was an attempt at that.
37:56SPEAKERLike Symbian didn't catch on
37:57SPEAKERand that was another attempt at that.
37:59SPEAKERAnd like Fuchsia is like point being, you know,
38:02SPEAKERthis common Unix kind of foundation has been with us
38:06SPEAKERfor decades and people have tried to replace it
38:09SPEAKERwith stuff like B and they've never quite done it.
38:12SPEAKER- I mean, just to be clear,
38:14SPEAKERif Steve Jobs hadn't gone back to Apple
38:18SPEAKERand took Next with him,
38:20SPEAKERprobably Apple would have bought B
38:22SPEAKERand we guess they would have ended up being
38:24SPEAKERthe new Steve Jobs.
38:25SPEAKER- And then there would be no Apple anymore.
38:27SPEAKER- And Apple would have gone away
38:28SPEAKERalmost certainly as a result.
38:30SPEAKERBut I mean, B in the-
38:33SPEAKER- I used to be fascinated by B box.
38:34SPEAKERLike I used to, like I used to like, I for a while,
38:37SPEAKERI had a weird fetish for non-Windows operating systems
38:40SPEAKERback in that time.
38:41SPEAKER- Everybody does when they're in their mid twenties.
38:42SPEAKERWe're all, we're all, yeah.
38:44SPEAKER- So like I was, I downloaded Slackware over a modem
38:46SPEAKERand installed that on that Pentium 75 at one point.
38:50SPEAKERI don't think I ever got my-
38:51SPEAKER- Did you do OS/2?
38:52SPEAKER- No, I was about to say,
38:53SPEAKERI don't think I ever got my hands on a copy of OS/2,
38:55SPEAKERbut I had certainly tried or thought about it.
38:57SPEAKER- One of the guys across the hall for me
38:58SPEAKERwhen I was a freshman had an OS/2 computer
39:01SPEAKERand I got to play with that enough to be like,
39:02SPEAKER"Oh no, I don't want anything to do with this.
39:04SPEAKERThis is a disaster."
39:05SPEAKER- Glad I'd saved my time.
39:07SPEAKERAnd B, I think-
39:09SPEAKER- BOS/4.
39:10SPEAKER- Didn't it originally,
39:10SPEAKERit only ran on their power PC machines,
39:12SPEAKERbut then didn't they ultimately port it to x86?
39:15SPEAKER- So yeah, with BOS/4, they ported it to x86.
39:17SPEAKER- So I thought for a long time
39:18SPEAKERabout trying to get BOS/4 installed on a PC.
39:22SPEAKER- So during my sophomore year,
39:24SPEAKERI had a dual boot of BOS and Windows
39:26SPEAKERand used BOS for my like word processing and stuff.
39:30SPEAKERAnd it was really neat.
39:32SPEAKERIt was really hard to get stuff off of it.
39:35SPEAKER'Cause like there were no USB thumb drives at that point.
39:37SPEAKERAnd there wasn't,
39:37SPEAKERlike we didn't have file shares or anything like that.
39:40SPEAKERSo yeah, the thing that was neat about it was,
39:43SPEAKERit was preempted multitasking
39:45SPEAKERbefore anybody but Windows NT was doing that.
39:48SPEAKERAnd as a result,
39:49SPEAKERand also it was really good at slicing resources.
39:51SPEAKERSo you could like run 15 video windows
39:55SPEAKERon that computer at the same time.
39:56SPEAKERLike that was the demo they always gave.
39:58SPEAKERBut it was neat.
39:59SPEAKERIt felt faster than anything did
40:02SPEAKERfor another five or six years probably.
40:04SPEAKER- So yeah, NT is where I ended up actually.
40:06SPEAKER- NT was the right place to land.
40:08SPEAKER- I ended up with a Pentium 200.
40:09SPEAKERI ended up putting NT4 on there
40:12SPEAKERbecause it had the 95 interface,
40:14SPEAKERbut it had an actual like proper 32 bit kernel underneath.
40:17SPEAKERAnd like DirectX support was bad.
40:20SPEAKERSo there were a lot of games you couldn't play super well.
40:22SPEAKERBut OpenGL was fine.
40:23SPEAKERSo you could play all the games.
40:24SPEAKER- All the quick world was all you wanted.
40:26SPEAKER- All I cared about.
40:27SPEAKER- Hexen kind of worked.
40:30SPEAKERYeah, so it's funny.
40:32SPEAKERThat was the same exact thing.
40:33SPEAKERI ended up doing the same exact path.
40:35SPEAKERAnd then Windows 2000 came out
40:36SPEAKERand everything worked really well.
40:38SPEAKERAnd it was amazing.
40:38SPEAKER- Windows 2000 was like to my mind,
40:41SPEAKERprobably the first actual good Windows.
40:44SPEAKER- I think Windows 98 was good.
40:45SPEAKER- It was okay.
40:46SPEAKER- Windows 98 was the first one where USB actually worked.
40:48SPEAKER- Well, that's the thing.
40:49SPEAKERI mean, there were still a bunch of piecemeal
40:51SPEAKERkind of add-ons that you needed for different stuff.
40:54SPEAKER- Oh, it wasn't good, but it worked.
40:56SPEAKER- I guess what I mean is like out of the box,
40:58SPEAKERI feel like 2000 did most everything you needed.
41:00SPEAKER- I think that's fair.
41:01SPEAKER- And then XP kind of refined that,
41:03SPEAKERbecame like the actual real first mainstream Windows
41:06SPEAKERthat everybody didn't totally hate.
41:07SPEAKER- Wasn't there probably big hard drives back then too,
41:10SPEAKERwhere you used pre-fat 32,
41:12SPEAKERyou would probably have a lot of Slack space or something?
41:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you can't, you still can't create a file
41:17SPEAKERcalled the COM1.
41:18SPEAKER- Really?
41:19SPEAKER- In Windows 10 is my understanding
41:21SPEAKERbecause of legacy file system stuff.
41:24SPEAKERI've read that and I think that was
41:25SPEAKERin the R's comments for that story.
41:27SPEAKER- That seems right.
41:28SPEAKER- Legacy Cruft is around everywhere, but it's.
41:32SPEAKER- Yeah, Legacy Cruft is around everywhere.
41:35SPEAKERI think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up.
41:37SPEAKER- I guess so, yeah.
41:38SPEAKER- What was your first computer?
41:39SPEAKERYou built the Pentium 200?
41:40SPEAKER- I built the Pentium 200.
41:41SPEAKER- How'd it go?
41:43SPEAKER- Fine, it booted.
41:44SPEAKER- For the first time?
41:45SPEAKER- Unlike you, I don't remember how I learned how to do it.
41:47SPEAKER- Oh really?
41:48SPEAKER- I also don't remember how I found the parts.
41:50SPEAKERLike I know, I'm pretty sure I bought them through the mail.
41:52SPEAKER- I went to.
41:53SPEAKER- There was a lot of OEM stuff, like you said.
41:54SPEAKER- Oh God, there was a website.
41:55SPEAKERWhat was the website called?
41:57SPEAKERIt was before NeoSeeker.
42:00SPEAKERIt was a price watch.
42:02SPEAKER- Okay.
42:02SPEAKER- Price watch was where I built the second one.
42:05SPEAKERThe first one I went to a site called Paragon
42:07SPEAKERthat was at work, it operated out of Kansas someplace,
42:09SPEAKERParagon Tech, and they sold,
42:11SPEAKERit was like a screwdriver shop that sold stuff real cheap.
42:14SPEAKERAnd I bought memory, I bought a K7, or K6, K6-200.
42:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so I don't know if this is a separate episode,
42:22SPEAKERbut this is around the time,
42:23SPEAKERright after that Pentium 200 was around the time
42:25SPEAKERthat I fell real hard into overclocking.
42:28SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it was a good time for it.
42:29SPEAKER- Yeah, totally.
42:30SPEAKERLike I didn't have a ton of money for computer stuff,
42:32SPEAKERbut I wanted them to be fast, so like,
42:34SPEAKERbuying the cheap thing that would overclock like my mother.
42:37SPEAKER- Were you on Shaq News at this point already?
42:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
42:39SPEAKERIt was, I started on, I mean, it was the,
42:42SPEAKERit was the Quake Holio when I started in like '97-ish.
42:45SPEAKER- That was where?
42:46SPEAKER- It was like, it was the Quake Holio,
42:46SPEAKERwhich became the Sugar Shack, and like Blues News,
42:48SPEAKERand Stomped, and all those.
42:50SPEAKER- Redwood Stomped, yeah.
42:51SPEAKER- All those websites.
42:52SPEAKER- Where's Redwood now?
42:53SPEAKERNo one knows.
42:54SPEAKER- I Googled that about a month ago, actually.
42:56SPEAKER- Oh, really?
42:57SPEAKER- Anyway, this is probably too much to cram it
42:59SPEAKERto the end of this episode, but like,
43:01SPEAKERthe whole progression of like the Celeron 300A
43:05SPEAKERto the, what was it?
43:06SPEAKERI think the Duron 600.
43:08SPEAKERLike, at any given time, there was like,
43:10SPEAKERif you're a broke college student,
43:11SPEAKERhere is the chip to buy that you can overclock like 50%.
43:14SPEAKER- So that was exactly it.
43:15SPEAKERThere was a time, and we should talk about overclocking.
43:20SPEAKERWe'll do an episode about overclocking
43:21SPEAKERat some point in the future.
43:22SPEAKERBut there was a time,
43:24SPEAKERand this was all stuff that I found from message boards.
43:26SPEAKERSo from Quake Holio, and from,
43:30SPEAKERGod, what was the other one?
43:32SPEAKERIt was before NAND.
43:33SPEAKERMay have been on Tom's site.
43:35SPEAKERBut like the SL2W8 was a Pentium 300
43:39SPEAKERthat was a straight multiply.
43:40SPEAKERSo Intel kept changing slot and socket designs.
43:43SPEAKEREveryone's like, oh, this is the end of overclocking.
43:45SPEAKERYou don't have to do this anymore.
43:46SPEAKERYada, yada, yada.
43:47SPEAKER- Remember when your CPU was a cartridge
43:48SPEAKERfor about two years?
43:49SPEAKER- That was a good time.
43:50SPEAKERThat was weird.
43:51SPEAKERThose things were real bad.
43:52SPEAKER- All the 300A was a cartridge design.
43:55SPEAKER- Oh, really?
43:56SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause I bought 300 days later
43:57SPEAKERfor a dual-core, dual Celeron machine.
43:59SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
44:00SPEAKERThat's intense.
44:01SPEAKER- An Abit BX2, I think is what that was called.
44:03SPEAKER- Oh, man, I miss Abit so much.
44:04SPEAKERThat was such a janky, wonderful machine.
44:08SPEAKERLike two cores in like 1999, maybe '98.
44:12SPEAKER- Two physical CPUs.
44:13SPEAKER- Two CPUs.
44:14SPEAKER- That's wild.
44:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a good time.
44:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
44:18SPEAKER- Yeah, so we're not gonna be Old Man Yells at Cloud
44:20SPEAKERevery week.
44:21SPEAKERThat's not the intent here.
44:22SPEAKER- No, no.
44:23SPEAKER- But I figured-
44:24SPEAKER- I mean, I would.
44:25SPEAKER- I mean, look, if that's what people want-
44:26SPEAKER- What do you say?
44:27SPEAKER- Sex sells, Brad, what can you say?
44:29SPEAKER- Yeah.
44:30SPEAKER- But if, we'll talk about more current stuff in the future.
44:34SPEAKERWe figured this was a good place to start.
44:35SPEAKER- Yes.
44:36SPEAKER- Let you guys know where we came from.
44:37SPEAKER- We didn't even grasp about USB.
44:40SPEAKER- Look, USB 3, why would they reduce the number of endpoints
44:46SPEAKERyou can have on a USB chain?
44:47SPEAKERThat's all I'm gonna say.
44:48SPEAKER- Wait, why do you even know about that?
44:49SPEAKER- Yeah, you can only have 128 endpoints on a USB 3 chain.
44:51SPEAKER- Only?
44:52SPEAKER- Well, you say that, but like a Vive is like nine endpoints.
44:55SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
44:56SPEAKER- So, and a Rift is more 'cause it has all those cameras.
44:59SPEAKERAnd if you add that and like you have RGB lights
45:02SPEAKERon everything, so the lights are one endpoint,
45:04SPEAKERthe keyboard's another endpoint and it just adds up.
45:07SPEAKER- I spent half the weekend trying to copy a bunch of data
45:09SPEAKERoff to a USB hard drive and not understanding
45:11SPEAKERwhy the copy kept failing.
45:13SPEAKER- Oh no.
45:14SPEAKERWhat happened?
45:15SPEAKER- Through the, I was using one of the case ports
45:17SPEAKERattached to a header on the motherboard.
45:19SPEAKER- That was a what?
45:19SPEAKERUSB 2 port?
45:20SPEAKER- No, it was USB 3.
45:21SPEAKER- Oh, really?
45:22SPEAKER- But then all I did was switch to using one of the USB 3
45:24SPEAKERports directly on the motherboard and it went totally fine.
45:26SPEAKER- So I had-
45:27SPEAKER- So like, then it was just a bunch of time of like,
45:29SPEAKERis this port jacked or?
45:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
45:32SPEAKER- Because the consensus just seems to be that motherboard
45:34SPEAKERheader supplied USB ports on cases are bad.
45:37SPEAKERSo for reasons nobody knows,
45:39SPEAKERare they not supplying enough voltage?
45:40SPEAKERIs there too much interference on the cheap cables
45:43SPEAKERthey used to hook up to the case?
45:46SPEAKER- I had a very similar problem a couple of weeks ago
45:48SPEAKERwhere I would plug my 128 gig USB thumb drive
45:50SPEAKERinto the front port on my computer and it would just
45:52SPEAKERconnect and disconnect and connect and disconnect.
45:55SPEAKER- That's exactly what this hard drive is doing.
45:56SPEAKER- It was an Asus X99 Premium 2 board.
46:02SPEAKERAnd I had two machines with that.
46:03SPEAKEROne was fine, one other one not so much.
46:05SPEAKERYeah, it's bad.
46:06SPEAKER- You can't trust electrons.
46:07SPEAKER- No.
46:08SPEAKERWell, and so to go back to the thing that we hinted
46:11SPEAKERat the very beginning,
46:13SPEAKERthe thing that they do now where like in Windows 95,
46:15SPEAKERyou could see how much bandwidth each device on the USB
46:18SPEAKERchain was using,
46:19SPEAKERhow much power each device on the USB chain was using.
46:21SPEAKERYeah, it was all buried in the device manager stuff.
46:23SPEAKER- I didn't know that.
46:24SPEAKER- That's all gone.
46:25SPEAKER- And all of that stuff is obscured now.
46:27SPEAKER- Yeah, you have to download some third party utility
46:28SPEAKERfrom a sketchy site that's probably not signed.
46:31SPEAKERIt makes you think, oh man,
46:32SPEAKERI'm probably gonna get a bunch of weird viruses doing this,
46:34SPEAKERbut what the hell?
46:36SPEAKER- Yeah, that is the biggest downside is everything has
46:38SPEAKERgotten smaller and more integrated and miniaturized
46:41SPEAKERis that so much exists in a black box now.
46:45SPEAKER- Look, if you can't take it apart,
46:46SPEAKERyou don't own it, Bratz, right?
46:48SPEAKERThat's the only thing you remember.
46:50SPEAKERSweatpants Tech Podcast.
46:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess that's where.
46:54SPEAKERBarefoot, barefoot tech.
46:56SPEAKER- Yeah, barefoot tech.
46:58SPEAKERWe'll see you next week.
46:59SPEAKER- All right, thanks for listening to us.
47:01SPEAKERYeah, ramble about how old we are.
47:03SPEAKER- Yeah, see you then.
47:04SPEAKER- Bye everybody.
47:05SPEAKER(upbeat music)
47:31SPEAKER(upbeat music)