135: This Machine Is a Server!!

00:00SPEAKER- Well, it finally happened.

00:01SPEAKERI lost an episode project.

00:03SPEAKER- Oh no.

00:04SPEAKER- Episode 134, last week's episode.

00:08SPEAKER- What'd you do?

00:09SPEAKER- Lost to history.

00:10SPEAKER- Oh no.

00:12SPEAKER- Lost to time.

00:13SPEAKER- What, how'd you lose it?

00:15SPEAKER- There's an E-134 shaped hole in my heart now.

00:18SPEAKERNothing will ever fill it.

00:19SPEAKER- Brad, what, like this is a,

00:22SPEAKERare we gonna have to rerecord the episode?

00:24SPEAKER- I had my 133 episode long streak

00:28SPEAKERof backing up every project for this podcast

00:30SPEAKERhas been broken.

00:31SPEAKER- Do you have a shadow volume copy?

00:33SPEAKER- I don't.

00:33SPEAKERSo it was on my system drive, it was on my C drive.

00:36SPEAKERFirst of all, let me back up a little bit.

00:38SPEAKER- Did you lose a C drive?

00:39SPEAKER- No, no, no, no, no.

00:41SPEAKERI feel like saying that I lost the project maybe is unfair

00:43SPEAKERbecause that implies that it happened to me.

00:46SPEAKER- Do you not save?

00:48SPEAKER- As opposed to the reality that I actually just forgot

00:51SPEAKERto archive it before I deleted it.

00:53SPEAKER- Was it not in your recycle bin?

00:55SPEAKER- No, I...

00:56SPEAKER- Do you not use your recycle bin, Brad?

00:58SPEAKER- Not very much.

00:59SPEAKERSo is this a common thing?

01:00SPEAKERI have developed the muscle memory

01:02SPEAKERof just shift deleting everything in windows.

01:04SPEAKER- Well, that'll do it.

01:06SPEAKER- Which is kind of bad.

01:08SPEAKER- The whole point, look, there's a whole system.

01:10SPEAKERThere's layers of, there's...

01:11SPEAKER- I know.

01:12SPEAKER- Okay, if you, A, you have a NAS.

01:15SPEAKER- Well, that's where the backups go.

01:17SPEAKERI mean, I seven zip the project every week

01:19SPEAKERand put it on my NAS, but I forgot to do that.

01:20SPEAKER- But you can also turn on shadow volume copies

01:22SPEAKERon your C drive and then it'll just save the,

01:25SPEAKERit won't overwrite the stuff until you need the space.

01:28SPEAKEREven when you hard delete stuff.

01:29SPEAKER- I thought that's how it worked by default.

01:32SPEAKER- Yeah, it's probably still there.

01:33SPEAKER- Okay, maybe this is what I wanted to talk about.

01:35SPEAKERI have tried, so the discord recommended something called

01:38SPEAKERrecover, R-E-C-U-V-A.

01:41SPEAKERI tried that.

01:41SPEAKER- That's a terrible name.

01:42SPEAKER- It's not great.

01:44SPEAKERBut apparently it's like endorsed by people who know.

01:47SPEAKERThere's also something called Windows file recovery now

01:49SPEAKERthat Microsoft makes, check this out.

01:52SPEAKERIt's a command line utility that as far as I can tell,

01:54SPEAKERthey only distribute on the Windows store.

01:56SPEAKER- There's a lot of that.

01:56SPEAKER- But it is only a command line utility.

01:58SPEAKERReally, is that not uncommon?

02:01SPEAKER- I've gotten, I want to say I downloaded some POSIX stuff

02:04SPEAKERfrom the Windows store the other day.

02:05SPEAKER- Interesting.

02:06SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:07SPEAKER- So like the command is winfr, that's the executable.

02:09SPEAKER- Yep.

02:10SPEAKER- But again, it's command line only,

02:11SPEAKERlike you download it from the Windows store

02:12SPEAKERand then you know how, after you download something,

02:13SPEAKERit changes from download to open

02:15SPEAKERand you click the open button after downloads

02:17SPEAKERand it just pops a terminal window

02:18SPEAKERand runs it with no arguments.

02:20SPEAKERIt's ridiculous.

02:21SPEAKERIt's a ridiculous way to distribute software.

02:23SPEAKER- That's pretty stupid.

02:24SPEAKERYeah, you could've used WinGet to get it too probably.

02:27SPEAKER- You've talked so much yang about WinGet

02:29SPEAKERthat I just tend to avoid it.

02:30SPEAKER- It seems like it's improving.

02:32SPEAKER- Is it getting better?

02:34SPEAKER- Like I typed in something that was super common

02:36SPEAKERand I didn't get a bunch of spam the other day,

02:37SPEAKERso that was pretty exciting.

02:38SPEAKER- Let me just search right now

02:39SPEAKERand see if winfr is on there.

02:42SPEAKERIt is not.

02:43SPEAKERWhen I search winget, search winfr,

02:45SPEAKERthe only thing I came up with

02:46SPEAKERis something called the Oprah Winfrey network.

02:48SPEAKER- I mean, that sounds good too.

02:50SPEAKERYou get a car and you get a car and you get a car.

02:53SPEAKERYou get a recovered file.

02:54SPEAKERYou get a recovered file.

02:56SPEAKERAnyway, I ran winfr, it has like three different modes,

02:59SPEAKERthree different methods of searching

03:00SPEAKERfor lost or deleted files and nothing came back.

03:03SPEAKERI think that project is just gone.

03:05SPEAKER♪ I will remember you ♪

03:08SPEAKERI don't know what to say about this.

03:10SPEAKERI am shocked.

03:10SPEAKERLike you had, like, okay, I was gonna say you have one job,

03:13SPEAKERbut actually you have, like many of us, you have many jobs,

03:16SPEAKERbut like, this is shocking to me, Brad.

03:18SPEAKERI thought you had a bulletproof system.

03:21SPEAKERMy bulletproof system was just to make sure

03:23SPEAKERI backed that thing up before I deleted it.

03:25SPEAKER- One errant press of the shift key.

03:28SPEAKERAnd I was gonna say, I'm gonna tell you something scary

03:31SPEAKERthat you're not gonna like at all.

03:33SPEAKERI don't ever delete the projects from my C drive.

03:37SPEAKERI have all of them on there still.

03:39SPEAKER- Projects for what?

03:40SPEAKER- The Audacity projects or the Audition projects

03:42SPEAKERand the Audacity projects, frankly.

03:44SPEAKER- Well.

03:45SPEAKER- I got it all.

03:46SPEAKER- Those are pre-edits, so those are of limited utility.

03:49SPEAKER- How big is your C drive?

03:51SPEAKER- Two terabytes, maybe, I don't know.

03:53SPEAKER- Mine is 512 gigabytes.

03:54SPEAKERSpace is a bit more of a premium for me.

03:57SPEAKER- Well, I mean, you gotta, look, get another reason.

04:01SPEAKERIt's time.

04:02SPEAKERYou should turn on file history.

04:03SPEAKERGiven the space you have on your NAS

04:06SPEAKERfor storing a lot of stuff long-term,

04:08SPEAKERit's like one of the reasons I got the big C drive

04:12SPEAKERwas so I could turn on file history

04:13SPEAKERand have the shadow volume copies

04:15SPEAKERof all my old stuff, basically.

04:17SPEAKER- Does that work in Windows 10?

04:18SPEAKER- Works in Windows 10 as well.

04:20SPEAKER- I might turn that on right now, actually.

04:22SPEAKERYou know, anything on the NAS is super backed up,

04:24SPEAKERbut the file has to make its way to the NAS before that.

04:27SPEAKER- Well, it's almost like there's a flaw

04:30SPEAKERin your otherwise bulletproof system.

04:31SPEAKER- Mm, let's start the show.

04:34SPEAKER(upbeat music)

04:48SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

05:01SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Check Pod."

05:04SPEAKERI'm Will.

05:04SPEAKER- I am Brad.

05:06SPEAKER- What's up?

05:08SPEAKER- Why do we keep doing that?

05:10SPEAKERThey didn't hear any of the pre-recording banter.

05:12SPEAKERThey don't know what that means.

05:13SPEAKER- We're talking about 1993, man.

05:15SPEAKER- Oh, was that actually '93?

05:17SPEAKER- No, it was '99.

05:18SPEAKERI looked it up.

05:18SPEAKERIt was kind of sad.

05:19SPEAKERI thought it was '93.

05:20SPEAKER- Okay.

05:21SPEAKER- And then I thought, "Bud, wise, err."

05:25SPEAKERBut that was '95, so that was disappointing.

05:27SPEAKER- That one was okay.

05:28SPEAKER- Yeah, the '93 was when, I think,

05:34SPEAKERthe "Real Men of Genius" ads started,

05:35SPEAKERif you want to go for your great years

05:39SPEAKERin bad beer advertising.

05:41SPEAKER- I'm looking here.

05:42SPEAKERIt looks like "Bud Bowl 5" was the big Super Bowl 1993.

05:46SPEAKER- Yep.

05:47SPEAKER- Let's see.

05:49SPEAKERThere was the Jordan versus Bird McDonald's ad.

05:52SPEAKER- Oh, that was pretty good.

05:53SPEAKERThat was a good ad.

05:54SPEAKER- There was the Crystal Pepsi launch ad.

05:56SPEAKER- Oh, you mean the jump, jump, jump, jump?

05:59SPEAKERNo, no, it was clear.

06:01SPEAKER- Look at it right now.

06:02SPEAKERIt was-

06:03SPEAKER- Was he right here right now?

06:03SPEAKER- Right now.

06:04SPEAKER- No, it was right now, right now, yeah.

06:05SPEAKER- Van Halen right now.

06:07SPEAKERVan Hagar, excuse me.

06:08SPEAKER- Yeah, not real Van Halen, man.

06:10SPEAKER- Why are we talking about 1993?

06:13SPEAKER- Well, you know, today's my birthday.

06:16SPEAKER- Wait, is it actually today?

06:17SPEAKER- Well, today for them, not today for us.

06:19SPEAKER- Happy birthday.

06:20SPEAKER- It's tomorrow for you.

06:21SPEAKER- Happy preemptive birthday.

06:22SPEAKER- Thank you.

06:23SPEAKERAnd as has become our new tradition on our birthdays,

06:26SPEAKERwe delve, we open the history books

06:29SPEAKERand we go back to a formative year for us in technology.

06:33SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, last year on our birthdays,

06:34SPEAKERwe each did our birth year.

06:36SPEAKER- Yep, yep, 1997 and 1979 respectively.

06:42SPEAKER- That's right.

06:43SPEAKERI enjoy these enough that I would say

06:45SPEAKERwe should do them more than twice a year, but.

06:47SPEAKER- I'm into that.

06:48SPEAKERI mean, we might run out of years

06:50SPEAKERif we do more than one a year though.

06:51SPEAKER- That is true.

06:52SPEAKER- Yeah.

06:53SPEAKER- Anyway, yes, we have waited for your birthday again.

06:55SPEAKERYou chose 1993, I believe,

06:56SPEAKERbecause it's the year you graduated from high school?

06:58SPEAKER- You know, it's-

07:00SPEAKER- Is that correct?

07:01SPEAKER- The year that I graduated from high school

07:02SPEAKERis like a normal formative year for most people, I think.

07:04SPEAKERFor me, it's the year that I got on the internet.

07:07SPEAKER- Okay.

07:08SPEAKER- 'Cause I went to college,

07:08SPEAKERI was part of the eternal September, which we'll talk about.

07:11SPEAKER- I see.

07:12SPEAKER- I got on, I went to college and they were like,

07:14SPEAKER"Hey, here's a Vax thing."

07:18SPEAKERAnd then I went and I didn't buy my meal plan

07:22SPEAKERand was like, "I'm just gonna eat garbage

07:24SPEAKER"for the first half of the year."

07:27SPEAKERAnd I used that money to buy a modem and a sound card.

07:30SPEAKER- Good choice.

07:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:32SPEAKERAnd then I got on the Vax and I was like,

07:34SPEAKER"This is cool, I can Archie and Gopher from anywhere

07:38SPEAKER"and get information from anywhere in the world."

07:40SPEAKERIt's like a list of FTP sites.

07:42SPEAKERI'm meeting people from all around the world.

07:44SPEAKERThis is great and positive

07:46SPEAKERand will never be misused by anyone.

07:48SPEAKER- Yeah, well, like literally there were some neighbors

07:52SPEAKERwho were exchange students from Malaysia

07:55SPEAKERand they were using IRC to talk to like family members

07:57SPEAKERat home and I was like, "This is incredible."

08:01SPEAKERAnd then I discovered Usenet and like went down.

08:04SPEAKERAnyway, it was a good year for me.

08:07SPEAKER'93 was a good year.

08:08SPEAKER- Yes, a fine vintage.

08:10SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe the last of the good ones.

08:13SPEAKER- Hmm, that's a bold claim.

08:16SPEAKERThat'll take some extra consideration.

08:17SPEAKERBut anyway, yeah, we're basically just here

08:20SPEAKERto recap some of the-

08:23SPEAKER- It's a walk down memory lane.

08:24SPEAKER- Yeah, the big items, the historical factoids.

08:28SPEAKER- No bummers though.

08:30SPEAKER- In tech and science of 1993.

08:32SPEAKER- Like we had a hard rule this year

08:34SPEAKER'cause last, like 1975, pretty good year all around.

08:38SPEAKERThere was, you know, little badness here and there.

08:41SPEAKERYou had Three Mile Island in '79,

08:43SPEAKERwhich is, you know, as nuclear accidents go, pretty good.

08:46SPEAKER- Yeah, could have been worse.

08:49SPEAKER- 1993, a lot of bummers.

08:51SPEAKERSo we're just skipping those.

08:52SPEAKER- Yeah. - Yeah.

08:54SPEAKER- Funny how that just keeps getting worse.

08:57SPEAKERAnyway, what do we got here?

08:59SPEAKER- You wanna just start at the top of the list and go down?

09:01SPEAKER- Let's just, yeah.

09:02SPEAKERSo yeah, these are not in any specific order.

09:05SPEAKERWe didn't really-

09:07SPEAKER- They're kind of like order of impact, kind of.

09:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:10SPEAKER- But there's some special stuff

09:11SPEAKERseparated out into its own little segments, so.

09:13SPEAKER- I did mean to move the file formats from the end

09:16SPEAKERbecause I don't know the ending on.

09:18SPEAKER- Yeah, but you bump, move, look, there's still time.

09:20SPEAKERThe document will update itself.

09:22SPEAKER- Okay, let's get started.

09:24SPEAKER- But I think in terms of the things

09:26SPEAKERthat had the largest impact of the year,

09:28SPEAKERit's hard to overstate the importance of the dawn of the EU.

09:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

09:32SPEAKER- So in '93, in November, on November 1,

09:37SPEAKERthe European Common Single Market was formed,

09:40SPEAKERwhich was the birth of the euro,

09:42SPEAKERand it basically meant goods, services, money,

09:46SPEAKERand people could move freely amongst the signatory states,

09:50SPEAKERwhich was a new thing.

09:51SPEAKERThere were a handful of countries

09:53SPEAKERthat didn't sign on for the euro right away,

09:56SPEAKERand the UK famously never did

09:58SPEAKERbefore they bailed out a couple of years ago.

10:00SPEAKERBut for the most part, this is all of Europe,

10:06SPEAKERformerly frequently warring, antagonistic Europe,

10:10SPEAKERbundling up together into a happy collective

10:14SPEAKERof super power-sized collective.

10:18SPEAKERIt was a big deal.

10:19SPEAKER- Yes, was the euro there at the start?

10:22SPEAKER- The euro was there at the start,

10:24SPEAKERbut I think France and Germany and the UK,

10:28SPEAKERthe people with strong currencies, and Norway,

10:31SPEAKERmaybe Switzerland, I can't remember, signed on late.

10:34SPEAKERSo they came in over subsequent years

10:39SPEAKERfor probably reasons involved.

10:43SPEAKERBut the big deal was, from a hey,

10:46SPEAKERwe wanna make stuff in these areas,

10:49SPEAKERit meant that if something was manufactured in Sweden,

10:51SPEAKERsomebody in Italy could buy it

10:53SPEAKERwithout having to worry about tariffs

10:55SPEAKERand border crossings and stuff like that.

10:57SPEAKERYou could just ship stuff, for all intents and purposes,

11:00SPEAKERall the border crossings in Europe opened up at that point.

11:02SPEAKER- Yeah, you could ship yourself for that matter, right?

11:04SPEAKER- You could just walk if you wanted.

11:06SPEAKER- Right, you could just travel.

11:07SPEAKERSo I just Googled the name, the Schengen area.

11:10SPEAKERAre you familiar with that?

11:11SPEAKER- No.

11:12SPEAKER- So I think that, so that was established in 1985.

11:15SPEAKERI mean, I'm literally researching this on the fly,

11:17SPEAKERso I don't have a lot to add here other than like,

11:20SPEAKERthat's the name I see today applied to the area,

11:24SPEAKERthe region of, what is it, 26 countries?

11:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it was 27 until a year or few years ago, weird.

11:30SPEAKER- Officially abolished all passport

11:31SPEAKERand other types of border control at their mutual borders.

11:34SPEAKERI don't know if that is maybe like a superset

11:37SPEAKERof the original view zone, I'm not sure.

11:40SPEAKER- So look, this all happened

11:41SPEAKERafter I took Western civilization last time.

11:43SPEAKERSo, you know, the details are sometimes fuzzy.

11:48SPEAKERMy understanding is that this whole thing started,

11:51SPEAKERit's like is a post, like this is a process

11:54SPEAKERthat was going on for a long period of time

11:56SPEAKERand the Maastricht Treaty, which is what happened

11:58SPEAKERon November 1, '93, was the kind of like the moment,

12:08SPEAKERunlike say the formation of the United States

12:10SPEAKERwhere it was a bunch of old white guys

12:11SPEAKERwho got together and signed the Declaration of Independence

12:12SPEAKERand told King George to go fuck himself,

12:16SPEAKERthis was more of a gradual process over a period of time.

12:18SPEAKERSo like there's stair steps all along the way,

12:21SPEAKERis my understanding.

12:22SPEAKERThe Europeans are screaming at their radios right now

12:24SPEAKERand I apologize.

12:25SPEAKER- Well, let me have some context real quick here then.

12:27SPEAKERYeah, so the Schengen Area apparently,

12:29SPEAKERspecifically applies to people travel

12:33SPEAKERand then the free movement of goods and services

12:35SPEAKERis the European single market, so.

12:38SPEAKER- Oh, okay, so this was the second to last stair step then,

12:41SPEAKERI guess.

12:42SPEAKER- Something like that, yeah.

12:43SPEAKERAnyway, a big deal for future globally trade and commerce

12:48SPEAKERand new technological development and all that stuff.

12:50SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.

12:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

12:52SPEAKER- It was just like, sometimes we do big news stuff in here.

12:54SPEAKERCan we talk about 3D graphics?

12:56SPEAKERYou wanna talk about the birth of the interwebs?

12:58SPEAKERThose are both pretty big.

12:59SPEAKERI think one is bigger than the other.

13:01SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, inarguably, I think.

13:03SPEAKERThe birth of the web is how I have described this,

13:05SPEAKERthe set of goings on in '93.

13:09SPEAKERSo the final 1.0 version of NCSA Mosaic came out in April.

13:13SPEAKERI guess at least some kind of beta version was out

13:16SPEAKERin like January of that year though.

13:18SPEAKER- That's the National Center

13:19SPEAKERfor Supercomputing Applications.

13:21SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's a UIUC, right?

13:24SPEAKERUniversity of Illinois, Urbana and Champaign, right?

13:27SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they call it Urbana and Champaign,

13:29SPEAKERbut I don't know.

13:30SPEAKER- Is that how you say that?

13:30SPEAKER- I know a couple of people who work there, I think.

13:32SPEAKER- It's weird, I think we talked about this before,

13:34SPEAKERlike being on the relatively early internet,

13:36SPEAKERthere was a small set of universities

13:38SPEAKERthat you saw the addresses of constantly,

13:39SPEAKERand that was one of them, you know what I mean?

13:41SPEAKER- Yeah, like the people who had big FTP sites,

13:44SPEAKERit turns out, had an oversized influence early on.

13:46SPEAKER- What else was there?

13:47SPEAKER- Like MIT, there was SUNY, MIT, RIT.

13:52SPEAKER- There was one in Texas.

13:53SPEAKERWas it Texas Tech?

13:55SPEAKER- Maybe.

13:56SPEAKER- I feel like hoptoed.texastech was one of the Texas, TC,

14:00SPEAKERI can't remember.

14:01SPEAKER- Anyway, there was a handful of universities

14:03SPEAKERaround the country that were just super big

14:05SPEAKERin early internet development,

14:06SPEAKERand that was UIUC.edu, I think is one that I saw constantly.

14:13SPEAKERI didn't realize there was government money

14:14SPEAKERbehind the first version of Mosaic.

14:17SPEAKER- Didn't you know that Al Gore invented the internet, Brad?

14:19SPEAKER- Yes, I've heard the memes, and the stereotypes,

14:22SPEAKERand the jokes constantly, but I didn't realize

14:24SPEAKERthat the Gore bill is actually what provided the funding

14:28SPEAKERfor the development of NCSA Mosaic.

14:30SPEAKER- Indeed, and a bunch of other stuff.

14:32SPEAKER- Yeah, sure, sure.

14:33SPEAKERAlso, National Center for Supercomputing Applications

14:37SPEAKERis like a weirdly, trying to think how to describe it,

14:41SPEAKERit's not quite militaristic,

14:43SPEAKERbut there's almost like a shadowy government agency

14:47SPEAKERsound to it.

14:48SPEAKER- Well, now they do fluid and weather modeling stuff there,

14:52SPEAKERso they measure, 'cause fluid modeling's really complicated

14:55SPEAKERbecause every single bit can impact every other bit,

14:59SPEAKERso you have to, it's not like a sequential problem,

15:01SPEAKERyou have to do it all, anyway.

15:03SPEAKER- It's chaotic.

15:04SPEAKER- It's interesting, but so Tim Berners-Lee

15:08SPEAKERis the one I generally think of in terms of,

15:10SPEAKERhey, here's the World Wide Web starting.

15:13SPEAKER- Absolutely, real quick though,

15:14SPEAKERbefore we move on from Mosaic,

15:15SPEAKERI didn't realize there was such a direct through line

15:18SPEAKERfrom that browser, which was developed

15:20SPEAKERwith government money straight through to Netscape.

15:22SPEAKER- Oh yeah, 'cause it was, wasn't Mosaic open?

15:25SPEAKER- I think so, I don't have it in front of me,

15:27SPEAKERI don't know like what the state also,

15:28SPEAKERthat was like so early in the kind of concept of open source,

15:31SPEAKERI don't know what that would have looked like,

15:32SPEAKERI believe it was just kind of freely accessible,

15:34SPEAKERbut Marc Andreessen was the leader of the team

15:37SPEAKERthat developed the first Mosaic,

15:39SPEAKERand then he left with some other people

15:42SPEAKERand started a company that I think actually

15:43SPEAKERwas originally called Mosaic Communications

15:45SPEAKERbefore they rebranded to Netscape.

15:48SPEAKER- I believe that that is correct, yeah.

15:49SPEAKERMosaic, Netscape had a, this is based on code

15:52SPEAKERfrom NCSA Mosaic tag for as long as I remember.

15:57SPEAKER- Huh, I did not realize that.

15:59SPEAKERBut anyway, yes, you're right,

16:00SPEAKERTim Berners-Lee was like the actual guy.

16:04SPEAKERThat same year in April, 1993, at CERN,

16:10SPEAKERoh, it's a French acronym, so I don't remember this one.

16:13SPEAKER- Dude, CERN is so cool.

16:14SPEAKER- Norm got, Norm, when I was attested,

16:17SPEAKERand the year my daughter was born,

16:19SPEAKERNorm got to go to CERN while I was off on paternity leave,

16:22SPEAKERand he went to the Large Hadron Collider

16:24SPEAKERand did all the stuff there, and I was like,

16:26SPEAKERthis is literally the most jealous I've ever been

16:29SPEAKERof a coworker for like work-related stuff.

16:33SPEAKER- That's why CERN, I mean, there are a lot of reasons,

16:34SPEAKERI think it's cool, but among them are

16:37SPEAKERthat they both invented the web

16:38SPEAKERand also have a bunch of particle accelerators there,

16:40SPEAKERand even the name being French

16:42SPEAKERmakes it somewhat more exotic to me.

16:46SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, Tim Berners-Lee developed all of it,

16:49SPEAKERlike HTTP, the protocol, HTML, the markup language

16:53SPEAKERfor webpages, the client and server, and all that stuff.

16:57SPEAKER- Did he put the Blink tag in?

16:59SPEAKERWas that him?

16:59SPEAKER- Oh, I don't know.

17:01SPEAKERDoes that make him history's greatest monster?

17:04SPEAKER- Look, I think the Blink tag had a place.

17:06SPEAKER- It did at one time.

17:09SPEAKERYeah, so I found a bunch of different references

17:11SPEAKERto the language, I think from Wikipedia,

17:13SPEAKERor this might've been from CERN's own site,

17:15SPEAKERwas, quote, put the World Wide Web software

17:17SPEAKERin the public domain.

17:18SPEAKERI'm not quite sure what that means

17:19SPEAKERin terms of opening code or whatever,

17:22SPEAKERbut it was free to use from the get-go.

17:24SPEAKER- Well, so that, we talked about this on the license gap,

17:26SPEAKERso it just means that there's no terms attached to it.

17:29SPEAKERSo there's no ownership, there's no--

17:32SPEAKER- There's no nothing, there is no license.

17:33SPEAKER- It's just there, it's for everyone to use,

17:35SPEAKERfor all mankind.

17:36SPEAKER- Yes, so.

17:37SPEAKER- All humankind.

17:38SPEAKER- Yes.

17:39SPEAKER- It was all built on a next box, which I was shocked by.

17:42SPEAKER- Yes, I don't know where that thing has ended up,

17:44SPEAKERbut the next workstation that he developed all that stuff on

17:47SPEAKERis a piece of history.

17:49SPEAKER- I thought it was in--

17:50SPEAKER- I think it got auctioned or something.

17:51SPEAKER- It belongs in a museum, Brad.

17:54SPEAKER- It probably does.

17:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:56SPEAKER- Wasn't he dabbling with NFTs for a while recently?

18:01SPEAKER- I mean, he worked at Google for a long time.

18:03SPEAKERI don't know what he did after that.

18:04SPEAKERThe interesting thing about the browser,

18:08SPEAKERthe interesting thing about this is it's,

18:10SPEAKERthis is the thing that comes up in the metaverse talk a lot,

18:13SPEAKERis everybody's like, oh, the metaverse is an application,

18:15SPEAKERbut it's really not.

18:17SPEAKERThe reason the web took over was it was a protocol

18:20SPEAKERthat delivered these HTML files via a server.

18:24SPEAKERAnd those, the client, the server, the protocols,

18:27SPEAKERand the HTML spec all worked together to make this thing

18:31SPEAKERlike extensible and functional in a way that wasn't,

18:36SPEAKERthat we hadn't really seen before from web protocols.

18:38SPEAKER'Cause previously, like IRC is a good example.

18:42SPEAKER'Cause no matter what IRC client you used,

18:44SPEAKERthe input and output were the same.

18:46SPEAKERIt was just a scrolling chat window, right?

18:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:49SPEAKER- Usenet was kind of similar.

18:50SPEAKERPeople extended and stuff like that.

18:51SPEAKERSo you could do things like share files and binary files

18:54SPEAKERand stuff like that.

18:55SPEAKERBut fundamentally, you were looking at these posts

18:57SPEAKERthat were encoded in ASCII and, you know,

19:01SPEAKERtransmitted as ASCII files across modem,

19:05SPEAKERyou know, internet connections.

19:08SPEAKERI don't know, it was a big deal.

19:09SPEAKERThe web, huh? - It was a big deal.

19:10SPEAKER- Who knew? - It was a big deal.

19:11SPEAKERI have, I found a picture here of that first next box,

19:14SPEAKERwhich according to the attribution,

19:17SPEAKERlooks like it may reside at the Science Museum in London now.

19:21SPEAKER- Oh, that's a good place for it.

19:22SPEAKER- Also, there's a big sticker still on it to this day

19:25SPEAKERin written in like pink Sharpie.

19:28SPEAKERThis machine is a server, do not power down,

19:30SPEAKERexclamation mark, exclamation mark.

19:32SPEAKER(laughing)

19:34SPEAKER- Like you think the cleaning crew's gonna come in

19:37SPEAKERand like literally turn off the web?

19:39SPEAKER- No, that sticky note is a piece of history, come on.

19:43SPEAKER- No, no, no, no, I'm saying like,

19:44SPEAKERwhy was the sticky notes there?

19:45SPEAKERBecause like the person who comes in

19:46SPEAKERand empties the trash cans at night is like,

19:47SPEAKERoh, this computer's still out, I'm gonna turn off.

19:49SPEAKERBoom, the web goes dark.

19:51SPEAKER- I guess at one time that physical machine

19:52SPEAKERwas the entire worldwide web.

19:54SPEAKER- Wow.

19:56SPEAKERWell, okay, so I remember using the web

20:00SPEAKERin like late '93 using links on a terminal mostly.

20:04SPEAKERI like, there were a couple of computer labs

20:05SPEAKERthat had Mosaic installed, but there wasn't a lot to do

20:09SPEAKERon the web at that point.

20:10SPEAKERSo kind of, it was like a thing you would go to

20:13SPEAKERif somebody sent you a link and they were like,

20:15SPEAKERhey, you should check this out

20:16SPEAKERand you'd load it up in links and go there.

20:17SPEAKERBut most of the time spent on like using it

20:19SPEAKERin IRC and stuff like that.

20:21SPEAKERWhat, how, I know at one point that Tim Berners-Lee

20:25SPEAKERmaintained a list of all of the websites himself.

20:28SPEAKER- Just right there on the page?

20:30SPEAKER- He was the first Yahoo basically.

20:32SPEAKER- Sure, I'm looking at his first webpage right now

20:35SPEAKERas we speak, it is still archived on CERN.

20:38SPEAKER- Yeah, well, and then, but then at some point

20:40SPEAKERthat became too onerous for him, right?

20:42SPEAKERLike he couldn't keep up with all the pages

20:44SPEAKERand like there's, for me, there's a big gap from,

20:49SPEAKERhey, Tim Berners-Lee has all of the web,

20:52SPEAKERthe websites linked on his page to like the rise of Yahoo

20:57SPEAKERand Lycos and WebCrawler

20:58SPEAKERand all of those kinds of early search engines.

21:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

21:02SPEAKER- And I don't know where, like, like what,

21:05SPEAKERwhat were people, I don't even really understand

21:07SPEAKERwhat people were using the web for in like early '93

21:10SPEAKERthrough like probably '95 is when it started

21:12SPEAKERto really take off.

21:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I would assume it was mostly academia

21:15SPEAKERresearch, stuff like that.

21:17SPEAKER- That makes sense.

21:18SPEAKER- Early on.

21:20SPEAKER- Should we talk about 3D graphics?

21:22SPEAKER- Yes, I did not realize there were so many formative

21:24SPEAKERcompanies formed in that space in 1993.

21:27SPEAKER- So this is when, this is the moment when all of this stuff

21:32SPEAKERwas kind of like research was happening.

21:35SPEAKERPeople were starting to split out

21:37SPEAKERfrom the original semiconductor companies

21:38SPEAKERand start their own things.

21:40SPEAKERAnd Nvidia and Rendition, Rendition kind of was popular

21:44SPEAKERbecause they were the first 3D accelerated Quake.

21:47SPEAKERCarmack made the first version of 3D accelerated Quake

21:49SPEAKERfor like normal computers on the Rendition card later on,

21:53SPEAKERon a Rendition card later on.

21:55SPEAKERBut Nvidia was founded also in 1993 by three dudes

22:03SPEAKERwho were like, we think massively parallel computing

22:05SPEAKERis gonna be important one day.

22:06SPEAKER- No, you don't say.

22:07SPEAKER- And we think that the 3D acceleration,

22:14SPEAKERthey specifically, their specific thesis was,

22:17SPEAKERwe think that video games can be the flywheel

22:20SPEAKERthat accelerates the development

22:21SPEAKERof these highly specialized processors.

22:24SPEAKERSo when I say flywheel in this case,

22:27SPEAKERI mean that they specifically thought,

22:31SPEAKERhey, the video game market will buy enough of these,

22:35SPEAKERif we make these 3D accelerators good,

22:37SPEAKERthe video game market will buy enough of these

22:39SPEAKERthat they will fund the research and development

22:41SPEAKERthat will get us to massively parallel computing

22:43SPEAKERin the next 10 to 20 to 30 years.

22:45SPEAKERAnd it turns out they were right.

22:47SPEAKER- Yes, I mean, obviously they were very forward looking.

22:50SPEAKERI doubt any of this was an accident,

22:52SPEAKERbut it does still kind of blow my mind

22:54SPEAKERlooking at Nvidia now and how many different areas

22:56SPEAKERof computing they are actually in that are not just games.

22:59SPEAKER- Well, I mean, that was the whole point.

23:00SPEAKER- Right, like data centers and AI

23:02SPEAKERand like lots of other hardware accelerated stuff, right?

23:04SPEAKERLike you just thought of them

23:06SPEAKERas a video game hardware company for so long

23:08SPEAKERthat to see them have such a presence

23:10SPEAKERin non-video game markets these days,

23:12SPEAKERagain, I'm sure that they planned for it, but.

23:14SPEAKER- They, it was an avowed public goal

23:17SPEAKERas early as like 2002 or 2003, as I recall.

23:20SPEAKER- Right, do you know when 3D effects was founded?

23:25SPEAKER- I think it was earlier.

23:26SPEAKER- Let me find that.

23:27SPEAKER- 'Cause I think they were making arcade cards

23:28SPEAKERby this point almost.

23:30SPEAKER- Oh, oh wow.

23:31SPEAKER- Later.

23:32SPEAKER- Nvidia is older than 3D effects.

23:34SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.

23:35SPEAKER- 3D effects wasn't founded until August 94.

23:38SPEAKER- Oh, well there you go.

23:39SPEAKERSo at the time Nvidia was founded,

23:42SPEAKERthere were 24 other companies making public,

23:46SPEAKERlike independent companies making three,

23:48SPEAKERworking on 3D accelerator and graphics technology.

23:50SPEAKER- Yeah, I know we've talked about it endlessly

23:53SPEAKER'cause we're old and we like looking back on that era,

23:55SPEAKERbut if you weren't really around in that 90s explosion of,

23:58SPEAKERI mean, today it's Nvidia, it's kind of AMD.

24:02SPEAKERI guess it's about to be Intel.

24:02SPEAKER- No, I think AMD counts,

24:04SPEAKERbut AMD and Intel are both part of much larger

24:08SPEAKERlike processor manufacturers, right?

24:09SPEAKERNvidia is the only one that remains independent.

24:11SPEAKER- I just mean in the graphics card space in particular,

24:14SPEAKERlike AMD has been putting out cards for a while,

24:16SPEAKERbut I don't think they've been as competitive

24:18SPEAKERfor the last few years on performance, not bad.

24:22SPEAKER- I think, I mean, yeah, I think they're,

24:25SPEAKERthe high end isn't as competitive,

24:27SPEAKERthe mid range they're very competitive

24:28SPEAKERis from my understanding.

24:29SPEAKER- Right, I'm just thinking back to the,

24:30SPEAKERlike the Half Life 2 era where like Geforce and Radeon

24:33SPEAKERwere kind of trading the performance crown

24:35SPEAKERevery year or two.

24:36SPEAKER- Well, yeah.

24:37SPEAKER- That's what I'm talking about is like,

24:39SPEAKERyou don't see the like shootout of the top end cards

24:41SPEAKERas much these days

24:42SPEAKER'cause Nvidia just kind of dominates in the high end.

24:45SPEAKER- Well, I mean, oh boy, that's a whole episode,

24:47SPEAKERbut that happened because it became more about

24:49SPEAKERmanaging thermals and like how,

24:51SPEAKERwhat ridiculous things you were willing to do

24:54SPEAKERthan about the math that's happening, anyway.

24:57SPEAKER- I'm not saying it's like practically applicable

24:59SPEAKERto anything, it's more just bragging rights and stuff,

25:01SPEAKERbut anyway.

25:02SPEAKER- Well, so that those 24 competitors ballooned up to 70

25:05SPEAKERin the late nineties and then like consolidated down to three

25:10SPEAKERbasically now, two or three now,

25:12SPEAKERdepending on how you count PowerVR and where they landed

25:14SPEAKERand Intel.

25:16SPEAKERSo yeah, and the first real product wouldn't be the,

25:19SPEAKERwouldn't come out for a couple of years.

25:20SPEAKERIn '95, they launched the NV1,

25:23SPEAKERwhich was an all-in-one card that was basically analogous

25:26SPEAKERto say a Saturn kind of hardware.

25:28SPEAKERThey ran, Sega ported a bunch of games to it

25:31SPEAKERand it had a, it was all, it was literally a sound card,

25:34SPEAKERa video card, and like an IO card

25:36SPEAKER'cause you could plug a joystick port into it.

25:39SPEAKERAnd it was an incredible commercial flop.

25:43SPEAKER- So yeah. - But they kept plugging.

25:45SPEAKER- Well, yeah, they rolled out the Revo 128

25:48SPEAKERa couple of years later and that like started the path.

25:52SPEAKERLike the Revo 128 was one of the first,

25:55SPEAKERpreviously the competitive 3D accelerators

25:59SPEAKERwere standalone cards and the Revo 128 was an all-in-one

26:02SPEAKERwhere it could do to both 2D desktop windows and 3D.

26:06SPEAKERAnd it kind of opened the door for games on windows

26:09SPEAKERin a big way.

26:10SPEAKER- Yeah, that history of GeForce video

26:11SPEAKERthe digital founder did a little while back has some stuff

26:14SPEAKERabout the Revo 128 and it was, yeah,

26:15SPEAKERit was the first card Nvidia put out

26:16SPEAKERthat was like kind of competitive.

26:18SPEAKERIt wasn't like, it didn't set the world on fire,

26:20SPEAKERbut it was definitely like a strong, like, okay,

26:23SPEAKERthis is a company to watch.

26:24SPEAKERAnd then the TNT and the TNT2 came along

26:26SPEAKERand things started to shift

26:28SPEAKERand then the first GeForce kind of sealed it.

26:30SPEAKER- Well, and the interesting thing about the Revo is it was,

26:32SPEAKERit like had a bad launch

26:33SPEAKER'cause their initial drivers were rough,

26:35SPEAKERlike Quake rendered with gaps in the window

26:37SPEAKERin between tiles and triangles and stuff like that.

26:42SPEAKERAnd as a result, it kind of highlighted to Nvidia

26:46SPEAKERhow important DevRel and driver building were

26:50SPEAKERand they invested heavily in that

26:52SPEAKERand that's continued for the last 30 years.

26:54SPEAKERLike they never stopped doing that, so.

26:57SPEAKER- What else we got?

26:59SPEAKER- You wanna go, you wanna talk about the Macintosh early,

27:02SPEAKERthe Macintosh Color Classic,

27:03SPEAKERthe first of the cheap Macintoshes?

27:06SPEAKER- Is that what that is?

27:07SPEAKERLike, I don't know what a Mac Classic is.

27:09SPEAKERI'm going to type that in Google, right?

27:11SPEAKER- A Mac Classic is a small all-in-one computer

27:14SPEAKERwith a 512 by 384 inch Sony Tranetron display

27:18SPEAKERthat I think was 10 inches.

27:20SPEAKERI didn't write that down.

27:21SPEAKERMight've been seven, it was small.

27:23SPEAKERAnd it was, it's the Mac, it's not the first Mac,

27:27SPEAKERthe one that you think of

27:27SPEAKERas the one with the little floppy slot on the front,

27:29SPEAKERbut it's the second, it's the updated version of that.

27:31SPEAKERIt was a massively popular Macintosh.

27:34SPEAKERIt ran system 7.1.

27:37SPEAKERIt was one of the last of the Motorola 68030 Macs.

27:42SPEAKERAnd I think it shipped with like four megabytes of RAM,

27:44SPEAKERbut you could go up to 128 megabytes

27:46SPEAKERwith the appropriate extension cards.

27:49SPEAKER- Okay, yes, I just found a picture of this thing.

27:50SPEAKERA Macintosh Color Classic, we should point out,

27:53SPEAKERis a different line than the Macintosh Classic.

27:56SPEAKER- Yeah, but it's the kind of spiritual successor

27:58SPEAKERto the Macintosh Classic.

27:59SPEAKER- Upgraded version of that.

28:01SPEAKEROkay, yes, this is starting to look like middle school to me.

28:05SPEAKER- I was gonna say, this is the computer

28:07SPEAKERyour high school library probably had.

28:09SPEAKER- This is squarely, oh,

28:10SPEAKERI remember using one of these at school.

28:13SPEAKERBut also probably worth pointing out,

28:14SPEAKERthis is like deep into the post-jobs era.

28:16SPEAKERThe post-jobs, pre-jobs return.

28:20SPEAKERHe left in '85, I just saw, so this is...

28:23SPEAKER- In '95.

28:25SPEAKER- No, no, no, he left in '85.

28:27SPEAKER- Oh, right, right, right, right.

28:28SPEAKER- He left Apple in '85 and came back in like what, '96, '97?

28:31SPEAKER- Yeah, '97.

28:32SPEAKER- So this is like deep, this is verging into that territory

28:36SPEAKERwhere they were flip-flopping CEOs constantly

28:38SPEAKERand on the verge of bankruptcy.

28:40SPEAKER- They weren't, yeah, this is when they were spending

28:43SPEAKERthe money that put them on the verge of bankruptcy

28:45SPEAKERa few years later.

28:46SPEAKER- Right.

28:48SPEAKER- It was 1400 bucks, Brad.

28:49SPEAKER- Ooh.

28:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:51SPEAKER- That's pricey, let's see.

28:53SPEAKERI have it right here in front of me.

28:54SPEAKERThat is over, try that again,

28:57SPEAKERthat is over $2,600 in 2021 dollars.

29:01SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a cheap Mac and a very expensive computer.

29:06SPEAKERIt was fine, it was a fine computer.

29:08SPEAKERMy favorite note that I learned about it today

29:11SPEAKERis that it had a little cutout on the front

29:13SPEAKERwhere it had the name of the computer,

29:15SPEAKERwas something that was put on in the factory

29:18SPEAKERso they could sell it in multiple regions

29:19SPEAKERwithout having to screen print it on multiple times

29:22SPEAKERbecause of the U in the Commonwealth countries.

29:25SPEAKER- Yeah, just a little badge that just snaps right off.

29:27SPEAKER- Just snaps in and off, yeah.

29:29SPEAKER- Remember case badges?

29:30SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

29:31SPEAKER- Man, I miss case badges.

29:33SPEAKER- Really?

29:34SPEAKER- Yeah, I do.

29:34SPEAKER- I'm probably good.

29:36SPEAKER- I may have lamented this before,

29:37SPEAKERmy parents got rid of our old family computer

29:40SPEAKERfrom the 90s not long ago, which really bummed me out.

29:43SPEAKER- Oh wow, you should call that one in.

29:45SPEAKER- I made a mistake when I said it was okay

29:47SPEAKERto get rid of that.

29:48SPEAKERAnyway, I was going through some boxes

29:49SPEAKERlast time I was there and I did find a bunch of parts

29:51SPEAKERfrom that era of computers,

29:53SPEAKERlike I found my first 3D effects card.

29:55SPEAKERAnd somehow the case badge from that very first

29:57SPEAKERfamily computer was stuck to the 3D effects card.

30:00SPEAKERSo I still have the little vinyl, is it vinyl?

30:03SPEAKERI guess it was vinyl.

30:04SPEAKER- Was it a puffy one?

30:05SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like the puffy plastic kind of rounded

30:08SPEAKERand it's stuck on the front in the little case badge slot.

30:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny 'cause like you put Intel stickers

30:15SPEAKERon those usually, right?

30:15SPEAKERIntel or AMD stickers?

30:17SPEAKER- Yeah, well at the time the screwdriver shop,

30:19SPEAKERwhich I finally was able to find the name of again,

30:22SPEAKERPeople's Computers in Asheville.

30:24SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, of course people's.

30:25SPEAKER- So I've got the little case badge from,

30:29SPEAKERI also found apparently at some point in college,

30:32SPEAKERI thought it would be funny to get a dark side

30:34SPEAKERof the moon case badge.

30:36SPEAKER- Wow.

30:37SPEAKER- I found that in the box as well.

30:38SPEAKER- I never engaged with case badge culture, I guess.

30:41SPEAKER- Case badges were cool.

30:42SPEAKERI think I also modded a blue LED into my case at the time.

30:46SPEAKERRemember when blue LEDs were like very new?

30:48SPEAKER- Yeah, they were phenomenally expensive.

30:50SPEAKER- Yeah, like I think I spent, God, I don't know.

30:52SPEAKER- Probably 10 bucks.

30:53SPEAKER- They're like, yeah, it was several dollars at least

30:55SPEAKERfor this one LED that I wired into my case,

30:59SPEAKERso it would look cooler.

31:00SPEAKER- See, as soon as blue LEDs got cheap,

31:03SPEAKERI got a piece of electrical tape

31:05SPEAKERand stuck it over every blue LED in the house.

31:07SPEAKER- Yeah, remember that era when literally everything

31:09SPEAKERhad a blue LED in it?

31:10SPEAKER- It was so bright too.

31:11SPEAKER- They seemed exotic and people couldn't stop using them

31:14SPEAKERand oh.

31:14SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a dark time.

31:16SPEAKER- Yes, I mean bright, but also yes.

31:18SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, fair.

31:20SPEAKER- All right, formats?

31:22SPEAKER- Oh, everybody loves a good file format, what you got?

31:24SPEAKER- Standards, codecs?

31:25SPEAKER- Look, all of these things, these are all hot words for me.

31:28SPEAKER- Should we, I've got a bunch here.

31:30SPEAKERShould we just burn through all of them?

31:31SPEAKER- Look, man, you're driving.

31:33SPEAKER- Okay, the MPEG-1 spec was published in 1993.

31:37SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it's a compact disc video,

31:40SPEAKERvery popular in Europe and piracy scenes,

31:42SPEAKERnot so much in the United States as I recall.

31:44SPEAKER- Yes, apparently it was designed

31:46SPEAKERto compress VHS quality video.

31:48SPEAKERLike that was the objective was obtain

31:50SPEAKERor achieve VHS quality video at 1.5 megabits per second.

31:56SPEAKER- Wow.

31:57SPEAKER- And then, I mean, I guess that was basically the first,

31:58SPEAKERthat was like kind of the dawn of digital TV, right?

32:00SPEAKERLike that was when they finally were able to compress,

32:05SPEAKERcompress encode video in a way that you could distribute

32:07SPEAKERover cable and satellite and stuff like that.

32:09SPEAKER- Well, so I feel like the cable boxes stayed analog

32:11SPEAKERfor a long time, but maybe the DirecTV boxes of that era,

32:14SPEAKERI think the DirecTV boxes were all MPEG-2.

32:17SPEAKER- That's probably right.

32:18SPEAKER'Cause like MPEG-2 is also what DVDs use, right?

32:20SPEAKERLike that was a much wider, more widely adopted standard.

32:24SPEAKERBut the point is like, this is the beginning

32:25SPEAKERof standardization that would lead to all of that.

32:28SPEAKER- Well, yeah, it's the precursor format

32:31SPEAKERfor like everything that's kind of like H.264 and all.

32:34SPEAKERI mean, the math isn't the same,

32:36SPEAKERbut like in terms of lossy digital video compression,

32:39SPEAKERthis was the beginning of it from a consumer perspective.

32:42SPEAKER- Speaking of lossy compression.

32:45SPEAKER- I love a good lossy compressor.

32:47SPEAKERThe MP3 format was also published in 1983.

32:51SPEAKER- Brad, tell me about psychoacoustics.

32:53SPEAKER- I don't have much to tell you other than I think

32:55SPEAKERthey subtract the stuff that most people can't hear.

32:58SPEAKER- Yeah, there was a lot of interesting research done

33:00SPEAKERabout what you can and can't hear.

33:03SPEAKERAnd then they built a couple of,

33:05SPEAKERFraunhofer, right, built some codecs on that.

33:10SPEAKER- I tried to make sense of the Fraunhofer involvement

33:13SPEAKERin MP3 and just gave up at some point.

33:15SPEAKER- Okay.

33:16SPEAKER- There were a bunch of different bodies

33:18SPEAKERoriginally involved in defining the spec,

33:20SPEAKERbut then like, you know, cue 10, 15 years

33:24SPEAKERof running into Fraunhofer copyright

33:26SPEAKERon everything that used MP3 and stuff.

33:28SPEAKERYou know what I mean?

33:29SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

33:30SPEAKER- I don't know how they came to solely control this format.

33:32SPEAKER- I wonder if it was that they were the last,

33:34SPEAKERthe last like stick in the mud.

33:35SPEAKEREverybody else signed co-licensing agreements

33:37SPEAKERand Fraunhofer was just like, "No, pay me, man."

33:39SPEAKER- That might be it.

33:40SPEAKERI don't know, like I said, it was too complicated

33:42SPEAKERto make a lot of sense of.

33:44SPEAKER- It's weird to me that we still, 'cause, okay,

33:48SPEAKERso one of the things is they're like, okay,

33:50SPEAKERpart of the idea here is that these frequencies

33:53SPEAKERwill drown out these other frequencies.

33:55SPEAKERSo if you have these frequencies,

33:56SPEAKERyou can just X out that data,

33:58SPEAKERwhich turned out to not be true in a lot of cases.

34:01SPEAKERLike one of the reasons MP3 kind of, the format,

34:03SPEAKERthe quality kind of sucks is that you actually

34:05SPEAKERlose some harmonics and stuff that people can detect

34:07SPEAKEReven if they don't necessarily realize

34:10SPEAKERthey're detecting them.

34:12SPEAKERBut for some reason, we still like,

34:14SPEAKERI can go to Amazon right now and buy a bunch of MP3s.

34:17SPEAKER- Why are we still using MP3, dude?

34:20SPEAKERNext year, it will be 30 years old.

34:22SPEAKER- I mean, look, I can still take a file

34:24SPEAKERthat I download from Amazon and play it

34:26SPEAKERon my Diamond Rio PMP 300.

34:29SPEAKERMaybe, I don't know.

34:30SPEAKERActually, I probably can't,

34:31SPEAKERI think I need a parallel port to use that thing.

34:33SPEAKERSo I probably can't actually use that.

34:35SPEAKER- Dude, AAC is like 20 years old now.

34:37SPEAKERWhy are we?

34:39SPEAKER- Yeah. - Madness.

34:41SPEAKER- Yep. - Madness.

34:42SPEAKER- I get a lot of, I download a lot of

34:44SPEAKERgame soundtracks from Steam.

34:46SPEAKER- Yeah, all MP3s?

34:48SPEAKER- It's changing, it varies.

34:51SPEAKER- Okay. - Actually,

34:51SPEAKERI actually wonder if Steam has maybe started standardizing

34:53SPEAKERthis 'cause the last several I have gotten

34:55SPEAKERhave all been the exact same contents,

34:57SPEAKERwhich is one folder of tagged MP3s

34:59SPEAKERand then another folder of untagged waves.

35:02SPEAKER- Oh, that's nice.

35:02SPEAKER- Like they're all doing that now,

35:04SPEAKERwhich makes me wonder if maybe Valve

35:05SPEAKERhas finally mandated that 'cause in the past,

35:07SPEAKERit would be like, oh, this one might be MP3,

35:08SPEAKERthis one might be flak, this one might be both.

35:10SPEAKERLike it was very much up to the composer, I guess, but.

35:14SPEAKER- Well, part of it is that the Steam music player

35:17SPEAKERonly plays certain formats, I think, right?

35:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that might have something to do with it,

35:20SPEAKERbut I appreciate the inclusion of lossless.

35:25SPEAKERYou might be surprised to hear.

35:26SPEAKER- Look, I ripped, until I finally gave up

35:29SPEAKERand started subscribing to Spotify or RDO originally,

35:32SPEAKERI ripped CDs still for a long, long time.

35:35SPEAKER- I have ripped all of mine.

35:38SPEAKER- Anyway, you wanna talk about PCI cards?

35:40SPEAKER- Yes.

35:42SPEAKER- Brad, do you remember,

35:43SPEAKERyou are too young to remember this,

35:44SPEAKERso my very first computer was a Wang

35:47SPEAKERwith a VL bus card slot,

35:50SPEAKERwhich was a high-speed like CPU interconnect slot,

35:53SPEAKERand then ISA slots.

35:54SPEAKERSo the old, the sound card slot in the old days, right?

35:59SPEAKER- As a matter of fact, what you just described

36:02SPEAKERalso describes our very first family computer

36:04SPEAKER'cause that's exactly what we had,

36:06SPEAKERwas a knockoff 486 with a VLD slot

36:09SPEAKERand a bunch of ISAs.

36:10SPEAKERISA, ISA?

36:11SPEAKER- ISA is what we always called them.

36:12SPEAKERI don't know what people actually, yeah.

36:14SPEAKER- Or I think for a while I said ISA

36:16SPEAKERas if it was VISA without the V.

36:18SPEAKERLook, I was like 13, man, come on.

36:21SPEAKER- So before that though, they would have,

36:24SPEAKERpeople would build special slots

36:27SPEAKERthat would directly connect to your CPU.

36:29SPEAKERSo like on Apple IIs and old Macintoshes

36:32SPEAKERand early PCs and stuff like that,

36:33SPEAKERyou had this weird slot that only worked

36:36SPEAKERon the one PC usually,

36:37SPEAKERone brand of PC that would slot in

36:40SPEAKERand give you a high-speed connection directly to the CPU.

36:42SPEAKERPCI was basically designed to give,

36:45SPEAKERmake that kind of high-speed connection universal.

36:48SPEAKERSo it would connect, they were parallel.

36:51SPEAKERThey would connect directly to a shared bus

36:54SPEAKERthat was usually integrated in the north bridge

36:56SPEAKERat that point, north bridge being the thing

36:58SPEAKERclosest to the CPU, the connected memory

37:02SPEAKERand CPU and I think storage maybe.

37:05SPEAKERI think storage was maybe in the south bridge

37:06SPEAKERback then, I can't remember.

37:09SPEAKERBut it was a 32 and 64-bit spec

37:12SPEAKERthat ran at 33 megahertz for 66 megahertz

37:15SPEAKERfor a maximum throughput of 533 megabytes per second,

37:20SPEAKERwhich is kind of funny when you think about it now

37:22SPEAKER'cause your internet connection's faster than that.

37:27SPEAKERBut the other huge thing about it was it auto configured.

37:31SPEAKERSo there was space dedicated to the PCI Express bus

37:35SPEAKERon the CPU registers in the memory

37:37SPEAKERand the PCI Express controller new enough,

37:41SPEAKERI'm sorry, PCI controller new enough

37:43SPEAKERto configure DMA and memory address spaces

37:46SPEAKERand stuff like that for it

37:47SPEAKERwithout you having to flip dip switches.

37:49SPEAKERAnd it also enabled sharing, like bandwidth sharing.

37:55SPEAKERSo one device that was a bandwidth hog

37:58SPEAKERwouldn't saturate the bus.

38:01SPEAKERLike it would basically, they basically did time slicing.

38:04SPEAKERSo like one card would have this much time

38:07SPEAKERand then the next card and queue would get some time

38:10SPEAKERif there was another card and queue,

38:11SPEAKERbut if the bandwidth hog needed,

38:14SPEAKERif there was nothing else in the queue,

38:15SPEAKERthen the bandwidth hog would just keep taking those slots

38:17SPEAKERuntil such a time as something else asked for time.

38:22SPEAKER- It was a huge deal.

38:25SPEAKER- It is impossible to overstate how important PCI was.

38:27SPEAKER- Yeah, like in some sense, thinking back on that era,

38:30SPEAKERlike there is very much like the time before PCI

38:32SPEAKERand the time after, right?

38:34SPEAKER- Well, yeah, 'cause I mean, if you think about it,

38:37SPEAKERthe thing that you got was PCI was what empowered

38:41SPEAKERthe early video cards, 3D accelerators.

38:43SPEAKER- I mean, the performance aspect is huge,

38:45SPEAKERbut actually you talking about the auto configuration stuff

38:47SPEAKERmakes me realize how equally huge that was

38:49SPEAKERbecause having to manually configure all your expansion cards

38:52SPEAKERwas a pain in the ass.

38:54SPEAKER- Well, not just that, it meant that like,

38:56SPEAKERit wasn't a thing that most normal people would do.

38:58SPEAKER- Right. - You had to like,

39:00SPEAKERliterally the process was take out all the old ISA cards,

39:02SPEAKERlook at what the jumpers were set to in terms of IRQs

39:04SPEAKERand memory addresses, and then you would have to,

39:08SPEAKERyou would have to know enough as a user to know,

39:09SPEAKERokay, this one gets this IRQ and this memory address,

39:12SPEAKERand then this one's gonna be clear.

39:14SPEAKERAnd if you mess that up, then the result was

39:16SPEAKERthat the computer would just crash immediately

39:18SPEAKERwhen you plugged it in and turned it on, it was bad.

39:20SPEAKER- And then, you know, later you started being able

39:21SPEAKERto configure those things through software,

39:23SPEAKERbut still you had to know what those things were

39:25SPEAKERand what to set them to, and it was just a lot.

39:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and often you would have to configure it

39:30SPEAKERin hardware and software.

39:31SPEAKER- Yeah. - So like, or,

39:33SPEAKERyou'd have a situation where like the card would be like,

39:34SPEAKERokay, this card can use IRQ five or seven,

39:37SPEAKERbut not anything else.

39:39SPEAKERSo like, it was weird.

39:41SPEAKER- We can use Sound Blaster.

39:43SPEAKER- Yeah, thanks, Sound Blaster.

39:46SPEAKERSo that, and then for me, that and the Pentium

39:48SPEAKERare kind of hooked together in my brain.

39:52SPEAKERPentium was the P5 era, the i586 compatible,

39:56SPEAKERyou know, Intel's successor to the 486, which was a monster.

40:00SPEAKER- Right, also seeing, you listed both of these here

40:02SPEAKERon this list we made and seeing that kind of mind blowing

40:05SPEAKERfor me because we didn't get our first family computer

40:08SPEAKERuntil after 1993 and did not have a Pentium or PCI.

40:11SPEAKERAnd I was like, wait a minute, what were we doing?

40:14SPEAKERBut I guess those things were probably like massively

40:15SPEAKERexpensive at that time, right?

40:17SPEAKER- Well, so I bought a Pentium for my sophomore year

40:20SPEAKERin school 'cause I had inherited the old family Wang

40:24SPEAKERwhen I went to my freshman year.

40:26SPEAKERAnd then I was like, I need a faster computer.

40:28SPEAKERMy daughter, my sister needed a computer

40:31SPEAKERfor high school at that point.

40:32SPEAKERSo they got the Wang back and I took the, I got a,

40:36SPEAKERwe went to Best, not Best Buy, we went to Sam's

40:39SPEAKERand bought an AST pizza box, Pentium 60.

40:43SPEAKERThat was the, one of the first wave of Pentium 60s.

40:47SPEAKERThe neat thing about it was it was,

40:48SPEAKERit could do multiple instructions per clock.

40:51SPEAKERSo it had like a main pipeline that could do everything

40:54SPEAKERand that had a secondary pipeline that could do

40:57SPEAKERa subset of everything basically.

41:00SPEAKERAnd they could do that simultaneously.

41:04SPEAKERIt required a lot of compiler work apparently by Intel

41:06SPEAKERto like make applications take advantage of that

41:09SPEAKER'cause it was kind of conceptually,

41:11SPEAKERat least in the x86 space, it was conceptually new.

41:14SPEAKERLike DC had done super scaler before.

41:17SPEAKERBut then later on they added the MMX extension things

41:22SPEAKERwhich were kind of marketing nonsense

41:23SPEAKERbut also helped video playback and stuff like that.

41:27SPEAKERAnd that they were, they could do the same instruction

41:29SPEAKERon multiple data.

41:30SPEAKERSo you could like, you could do the math on decoding video

41:34SPEAKERwith a faster pipeline,

41:36SPEAKERfaster throughput on the pipeline basically.

41:37SPEAKER- Right, also you've listed the fdiv bug here

41:40SPEAKERwhich I had completely forgotten about.

41:42SPEAKER- Oh yeah, well, yeah.

41:44SPEAKERSo the fdiv bug was this researcher was doing

41:48SPEAKERprime number division and found that the Pentium,

41:52SPEAKERearly Pentiums, the Pentium 60 and 66 mostly I think were,

41:56SPEAKERthey would do division wrong in very predictable ways.

42:02SPEAKERIt didn't apply to virtually any normal computing load.

42:06SPEAKERLike if you were calculating large prime numbers

42:08SPEAKERand dividing large prime numbers, it would apply there

42:11SPEAKERbut that was kind of it.

42:14SPEAKERBut nonetheless, because Intel had spent like,

42:19SPEAKERthe other thing that was noteworthy about the Pentium era

42:21SPEAKERis that they spent money marketing the brand

42:24SPEAKER'cause they had gotten hosed on 486

42:26SPEAKER'cause you can't trademark a number, it turns out.

42:29SPEAKER- Right, and then all the clones appeared

42:30SPEAKERwhich is what we had.

42:31SPEAKERWe had our first computer, the family computer I mentioned,

42:35SPEAKERit was, I think I've said this before,

42:36SPEAKERit was a Texas Instruments knockoff of a Cyrix chip

42:40SPEAKERwhich itself was kind of a knockoff of the Intel 486.

42:43SPEAKER- Yeah, and well--

42:44SPEAKER- So like there were clones, there were other types of CPUs

42:47SPEAKERcalled 486 out there everywhere.

42:49SPEAKERAnd yeah, like Pentium, they actually named,

42:50SPEAKERthey branded it instead of just calling it a 586.

42:53SPEAKER- And their whole thing was all of the clones

42:56SPEAKERhave devalued the 486 brand to the point

42:58SPEAKERthat they couldn't, because people would buy

43:02SPEAKERa bad Cyrix knockoff of the 486 and be like,

43:04SPEAKERthis thing isn't that fast at all,

43:05SPEAKERthese things, computers suck, blah, blah, blah.

43:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I got to looking at it.

43:09SPEAKERApparently, so Texas Instruments apparently

43:12SPEAKERwas manufacturing the Cyrix 486s.

43:14SPEAKERAnd then at some point they just started making their own

43:16SPEAKERwhich is how we ended up with what we had

43:17SPEAKERbut it was a 486 DLC at 40 megahertz

43:20SPEAKERwhich from what I've read was actually

43:22SPEAKERin the sort of like high-end 386 territory of performance.

43:26SPEAKER- Yeah, that reads from what I remember at the time.

43:29SPEAKER- It got the job done.

43:32SPEAKER- But the EFTIV thing was like a huge,

43:34SPEAKERbecause Intel had spent all this money

43:36SPEAKERmarketing these Pentium processors,

43:37SPEAKERthen the people who wrote about technology

43:40SPEAKERand business at the time in mainstream newspapers,

43:43SPEAKERlike the EFTIV bug was covered in the New York Times

43:45SPEAKERand the Boston Globe and like big newspapers.

43:48SPEAKER- It was like a huge boondoggle for public relations, right?

43:50SPEAKER- Yeah, it was on the nightly news

43:53SPEAKERand Intel was like, yo man,

43:55SPEAKERyou're not ever going to do the math

43:57SPEAKERthat causes this problem, so it's probably fine.

43:59SPEAKERBut then they ended up having to replace the processors

44:01SPEAKERfor anybody who wanted them.

44:02SPEAKER- Interesting, I didn't know that.

44:03SPEAKER- Yeah, which like it took a long time for them to get there

44:07SPEAKERbut it actually, the two knock-on effects of this

44:11SPEAKERwere later generations, like I think 10 years later

44:15SPEAKERwhen they released Nehalem,

44:17SPEAKERthey were able to do microcode changes

44:19SPEAKERthat would have been able to fix bugs like the EFTIV bug.

44:22SPEAKERAnd also they started testing with theoretical math models

44:25SPEAKERbefore they would release processors,

44:27SPEAKERfinalize processor designs

44:29SPEAKERto hopefully find these types of errors beforehand.

44:32SPEAKERAnd then the other thing that they came on to

44:34SPEAKERwas the way they handled like recalls,

44:37SPEAKER'cause they completely,

44:37SPEAKERlike they actually had a recall plan after this

44:41SPEAKER'cause this went so poorly.

44:42SPEAKER- Yeah.

44:45SPEAKERWhat do you want to do now?

44:45SPEAKERYou want to shift gears here a little bit?

44:50SPEAKER- 1993 was the year that Jurassic Park was released.

44:53SPEAKER- Oh yes, the dinosaur movie, eh?

44:56SPEAKER- I watched, I meant to watch it last night.

44:57SPEAKERI got about halfway through it and fell asleep,

44:59SPEAKERwhich was not a commentary on the movie.

45:01SPEAKERI think the movie still holds up pretty well.

45:03SPEAKER- I find having re-watched it fairly recently,

45:07SPEAKERthe CG especially is still stunning.

45:09SPEAKER- Some of it, like that first reveal of the brontosaurus,

45:12SPEAKERlike the, you know, it's the classic scene,

45:14SPEAKERthe like, you know, Sam Neill like takes his glasses off

45:17SPEAKERand ruffles his hair.

45:18SPEAKERHe's so taken aback or whatever,

45:19SPEAKERbut like it was like kind of shocking how well,

45:21SPEAKERand a lot of the T-Rex scenes too,

45:23SPEAKERlike some of that CG like shockingly still effective

45:27SPEAKERfor how old it is.

45:28SPEAKER- Well, so yeah, the story on Jurassic Park

45:32SPEAKERis that Spielberg wanted to make "Schindler's List"

45:33SPEAKERand Universal was like, yeah, you can do that,

45:35SPEAKERbut you gotta make a dinosaur movie.

45:36SPEAKERYou gotta make this dinosaur movie first.

45:38SPEAKER- Really?

45:39SPEAKER- Yeah.

45:41SPEAKERThis is not a joke.

45:42SPEAKER- I have to look this up.

45:42SPEAKERThat sounds insane to me.

45:44SPEAKERLike, he had to be goaded into making this?

45:46SPEAKER- No, no, he wanted to make it,

45:48SPEAKERbut he wanted to do them in the other order.

45:49SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

45:50SPEAKER- So they wouldn't agree to the budget

45:52SPEAKERthat he wanted for this until,

45:54SPEAKERand the budget he wanted for "Schindler's List"

45:56SPEAKERuntil he signed up to do the dinosaur movie first.

46:00SPEAKERThey got in a big bidding war for the script

46:02SPEAKER'cause Michael Crichton, before the book was even out,

46:05SPEAKERlike the movie people were like, we gotta make this movie.

46:08SPEAKERAnd so Spielberg was like, I wanna make like a movie

46:10SPEAKERthat's like a monster movie, like "Jaws"

46:12SPEAKERin same kind of vein.

46:13SPEAKERAnd he put together a team, Stan Winston,

46:17SPEAKERwho did the puppets, the life-size Tyrannosaurus Rex head

46:21SPEAKERand stuff like that.

46:23SPEAKERILM did VFX, and he brought in Phil Tippett

46:26SPEAKERto do stop motion for the wide shots,

46:27SPEAKERfor the big shots of dinosaurs and stuff in the background.

46:30SPEAKERPhil Tippett animated the,

46:34SPEAKERdid stop motion work for "Starship Troopers"

46:36SPEAKERand a bazillion things.

46:39SPEAKERHe did the hollow chests in "Star Wars," I believe.

46:45SPEAKERHe did the AT-ATs, and he did the animation

46:47SPEAKERfor the AT-ATs in "Empire Strikes Back."

46:50SPEAKER- It's like a stop motion legend, basically.

46:53SPEAKER- He is a stop motion legend, yeah.

46:54SPEAKER- But so are you saying there was originally gonna be no CG

46:57SPEAKERin "Jurassic Park," that it was all gonna be stop motion

46:59SPEAKER'cause I feel like the movie would be remembered

47:01SPEAKERincredibly differently if it had not had

47:03SPEAKERthe incredibly impactful CG that it did.

47:06SPEAKER- So originally the plan was to do all stop motion,

47:09SPEAKERand Tippett was gonna do the stop for the wide shots,

47:11SPEAKERpuppets for the close-ups, and that was it, right?

47:16SPEAKERSo they did the animatics, and they did the first mock-ups

47:19SPEAKERfor the wide shots of the brontosauruses

47:20SPEAKERand the dinosaur herds and stuff like that,

47:22SPEAKERand they were like, "Oh, this isn't gonna work."

47:24SPEAKERAnd one of the folks from ILM was like,

47:26SPEAKER"Hey, I think we can do the dinosaurs computer animated."

47:32SPEAKERSo they did the first animatics of the skeleton

47:35SPEAKERfor the T-Rex, and they were like,

47:36SPEAKER"Okay, this can probably work.

47:38SPEAKER"Let's keep going on this, blah, blah, blah."

47:40SPEAKERThey brought in a paleontologist

47:42SPEAKERto be the dinosaur consultant, so they didn't have,

47:46SPEAKERwhich is where all the modern,

47:48SPEAKERthe 1993 modern paleontology of the dinosaurs

47:53SPEAKERbeing more avian than reptilian and stuff like that came from.

47:57SPEAKERAnd Phil Tippett and Spielberg were looking

48:00SPEAKERat the animatics come back at one point,

48:02SPEAKERthe computer animatics come back,

48:04SPEAKERand Spielberg said to Tippett,

48:06SPEAKER"I think you're out of a job," and Tippett replied,

48:08SPEAKER"Don't you mean extinct?"

48:09SPEAKERAnd they literally lifted that and put it in the movie.

48:11SPEAKER- Wow. - And Spielberg liked that

48:12SPEAKERso much they put it in the movie.

48:13SPEAKER- Oh, that's incredible.

48:14SPEAKER- So Tippett's credit on this is Dinosaur Wrangler.

48:17SPEAKER- Huh, okay.

48:19SPEAKER- They brought in the folks that were gonna do

48:20SPEAKERthe stop motion to supervise the animation

48:23SPEAKERand make sure that it looked like,

48:24SPEAKER'cause one of the things that stop motion animators

48:26SPEAKERare traditionally really good at

48:27SPEAKERis making things look like they behave like normal,

48:31SPEAKERlike animals and like real creatures.

48:34SPEAKERSo they did that.

48:35SPEAKERA lot of those stop motion animators

48:37SPEAKERlearned to do computer animation as a result of this,

48:40SPEAKERand they worked with ILM, so ILM did the renders,

48:42SPEAKERand Tippett's folks did a lot of the animation,

48:44SPEAKERand it was a real,

48:48SPEAKERand they were rewarded massively

48:51SPEAKERin terms of commercial success,

48:52SPEAKER'cause it was the highest grossing movie

48:54SPEAKERuntil Titanic came out.

48:55SPEAKER- Was it really?

48:56SPEAKER- Oh yeah, and then they released it,

48:58SPEAKERthey re-released it at the 20 year anniversary,

49:00SPEAKERit became the oldest movie to have a billion dollars gross

49:03SPEAKERat the box office after that 2013 re-release.

49:06SPEAKER- I knew it was big, I knew it was like biggest film

49:08SPEAKERof the year easily, I didn't realize it was the biggest film

49:09SPEAKERof all time until Titanic, that's, huh.

49:12SPEAKER- For a long time, yeah, yeah.

49:14SPEAKER- I think of it as kind of the dawn

49:17SPEAKERof the CG effects driven blockbuster, like I, well.

49:21SPEAKER- It is.

49:22SPEAKER- It's making determinations like that

49:24SPEAKERis incredibly arbitrary at the point

49:26SPEAKERthat it's kind of useless, I mean like.

49:28SPEAKER- Also true.

49:29SPEAKER- 'Cause I also think of like, I think of Terminator 2

49:30SPEAKERas the first like really resounding use of CG,

49:35SPEAKERbut then like even as I say that, I think like, well,

49:37SPEAKERthe abyss had stuff that was also super impressive,

49:40SPEAKERbut like, I don't know, like T2 in my mind

49:43SPEAKERis the one that made a ton of news for its use of CG.

49:47SPEAKERAnd then Jurassic Park came along and was like,

49:49SPEAKERthe entire movie was sort of, I started to say propped up

49:53SPEAKERby it, which is not what I mean, but you know what I mean?

49:54SPEAKERLike I said, Jurassic Park would be a very different movie

49:56SPEAKERwithout the CG.

49:59SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna say the thing about this is,

50:01SPEAKERthe thing about Jurassic Park is you,

50:03SPEAKERthe CG was good enough that you didn't really think

50:05SPEAKERabout it as being CG, like when you watch the abyss

50:08SPEAKERand you saw the tentacle or you watch Terminator 2

50:10SPEAKERand you saw the metal man, like those things were like,

50:13SPEAKERoh, that's cool, I've never seen anything like that before.

50:16SPEAKERBut then like the tagline is you'll believe dinosaurs

50:19SPEAKERare real and like it played, like I saw Jurassic Park

50:24SPEAKERthe weekend it opened at the uptown in DC,

50:25SPEAKERwhich is like a big Santa Rama theater,

50:28SPEAKERyou know, an 80 foot screen or whatever.

50:30SPEAKERAnd people gasped, like the reaction wasn't like cheering

50:35SPEAKERand woo's and all that, it was like these dinosaurs

50:38SPEAKERlook real, like the T-Rex chase scene in the car,

50:42SPEAKERthe brontosaurus reveal, like all of that is so good.

50:48SPEAKERAnd they blended, like Stan Winston's puppets are incredible,

50:52SPEAKERthe puppets that he made for the velociraptors are awesome.

50:56SPEAKERLike the whole thing is, it's just a,

51:00SPEAKERlook, it's Spielberg doing some of his very best work.

51:04SPEAKERLike that period with that and Schindler's List

51:06SPEAKERand I mean, even Hook.

51:10SPEAKER- Hook, oh boy.

51:12SPEAKER- Look, Hook has problems, but I love Hook, anyway.

51:16SPEAKER- Yeah, watching it last night reminded me

51:18SPEAKERof that particular Spielbergian mode that is very like,

51:22SPEAKERwhat's the word I'm looking for?

51:24SPEAKERLike it's very theatrical, like there's a certain kind

51:26SPEAKERof movie he makes that absolutely knows it's a movie,

51:28SPEAKERyou know what I mean?

51:29SPEAKERIt's got this like heightened, like staged kind of thing.

51:32SPEAKER- Well, I mean, so when you look at like

51:34SPEAKERhow the book changed, how,

51:36SPEAKER'cause Crichton wrote the first draft of the script

51:38SPEAKERand then they handed it off and Spielberg did his thing

51:40SPEAKERto make it more human and like the changes that they made

51:45SPEAKERin that process resulted in like these really lovely

51:48SPEAKERcharacter arcs that are also super easy to follow

51:51SPEAKERand like it was kind of an early four quadrant film

51:54SPEAKER'cause like a kid can watch that and be like,

51:55SPEAKERoh man, I see these kids and they represent me

51:59SPEAKERand a dad can watch it and it's like,

52:00SPEAKERyou see Sam, Neil and Laura during like, oh wow,

52:02SPEAKERthey're kind of parents but also really shit out

52:04SPEAKERat the beginning and then they get good at the end

52:05SPEAKERand like there's a series of really great,

52:07SPEAKERand Ian Malcolm is there for the 20 something,

52:11SPEAKERlike this 20 something, I'm too cool for this kid business.

52:15SPEAKERLike it is such an intentional,

52:19SPEAKERlike it is a designed product in the most,

52:24SPEAKERyeah, in a lovely, lovely way.

52:25SPEAKERI don't want that to take away from it.

52:27SPEAKER- That's kind of what I mean.

52:27SPEAKERThere's a theatricality to everything.

52:29SPEAKERLike it's not going for any kind of verisimilitude,

52:32SPEAKERwhich like it's the opposite of Schindler's list, right?

52:34SPEAKERWhere like that is trying to depict like real events

52:36SPEAKERand this is very much like,

52:39SPEAKERyou know, it's not like it looks like it's happening

52:41SPEAKERon a sound stage, but this is a hard thing to articulate.

52:44SPEAKERLike it has a larger than life,

52:47SPEAKERnot real like kind of stage quality to it

52:50SPEAKERthat I kind of enjoy 'cause it's kind of silly.

52:52SPEAKER- Well, but at the same time, it's like,

52:54SPEAKERit's self-aware enough to not do the thing

52:57SPEAKERwhere it's like, holy shit, look at these dinosaurs.

53:00SPEAKERLike the way they convey that is with Sam Neill

53:02SPEAKERtaking his hat off and pulling his glasses down

53:04SPEAKERso he can see with unfiltered through his own eyes, right?

53:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:10SPEAKER- And also, like this is,

53:13SPEAKERI mean, I guess we had had some green screen acting

53:15SPEAKERup until that point, but before that point,

53:17SPEAKERbut like this was early in the green screen days

53:19SPEAKERand the fact that they cast people who could do that,

53:22SPEAKERwho could do that work,

53:23SPEAKERlike Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill and Laura Dern

53:26SPEAKERdid a spectacular job with that whole thing.

53:30SPEAKERLike there's a couple of really good documentaries about it

53:33SPEAKERand the, God, what's the VFX magazine?

53:38SPEAKERI can't believe I'm not remembering.

53:39SPEAKERI read their "Jurassic Park" article about this last night.

53:42SPEAKERIt was super good.

53:44SPEAKERAnyway.

53:46SPEAKER- Yeah, I had that thought during the Brontosaurus reveal

53:50SPEAKERwhen they both stand up in the Jeep.

53:53SPEAKERLike their eye lines are like perfect,

53:56SPEAKERlike they're both looking at exactly the same place

53:58SPEAKERthat looks like they should be looking, right?

53:59SPEAKERBut like that was probably like pre,

54:01SPEAKERlike all these standards and processes

54:03SPEAKERhave been developed, right?

54:04SPEAKEROf like kind of putting the tennis ball

54:05SPEAKERup on the post or whatever.

54:07SPEAKER- Well, I mean, they developed it,

54:08SPEAKERlike this is when all those things

54:10SPEAKERwere starting to be figured out, right?

54:12SPEAKERLike the difference between this

54:13SPEAKERand a bad version of this movie

54:15SPEAKERis that people aren't looking at the same thing.

54:17SPEAKERThey're not reacting to the same thing.

54:19SPEAKERYou know, there's a million ways to mess this up

54:22SPEAKERin one way to make it right.

54:23SPEAKERAnd they did a wonderful job with it.

54:24SPEAKER- It's just amazing that they threaded the needle so well

54:26SPEAKERfor how early and kind of primordial this is.

54:28SPEAKERYeah, I got through the Brontosaurus,

54:31SPEAKERthe T-Rex Jeep attack, like all that stuff last night.

54:33SPEAKERAnd like, I had that exact same thought

54:35SPEAKERthat you mentioned earlier.

54:35SPEAKERLike even now, like literally last night

54:38SPEAKERcoming out of some of those big showpiece scenes,

54:40SPEAKERlike after the fact, it hit me like,

54:43SPEAKERI didn't even think about the CG while I was watching that.

54:45SPEAKERLike I didn't even, like I didn't take that apart

54:48SPEAKERin my mind going like, oh, I can see where the lighting

54:50SPEAKERcould be a little better there or whatever.

54:51SPEAKERLike even now, like watching it,

54:54SPEAKERyou just absorb it as dramatic events on the screen

54:56SPEAKERand you don't really, like the effects don't stand out

54:58SPEAKEReven now.

54:59SPEAKER- I will also say, if you have an opportunity

55:01SPEAKERto see it on a big screen ever, it's worth going.

55:04SPEAKERIt age, like it presents much better,

55:07SPEAKERlike it looks fine on a TV, on a big TV, it's great,

55:10SPEAKERwhatever, it's a fantastic film.

55:12SPEAKERIf you have the opportunity to watch another big screen,

55:13SPEAKERdefinitely go, 'cause the impact is much, much greater.

55:17SPEAKERAnd like the beautiful thing is, yeah,

55:19SPEAKERyou don't know what's a puppet and what's CG

55:22SPEAKERand what's, it's a lovely film.

55:25SPEAKER- September, 1993.

55:27SPEAKER- Oh, sounds ominous.

55:29SPEAKER- No, I mean, I went to college.

55:32SPEAKERLook, every September prior to 1993,

55:36SPEAKERthere was this thing that happened where the new college kids

55:39SPEAKERwould come in, they'd get access to the internet,

55:41SPEAKERthey'd hop on Usenet and then they would overwrite

55:43SPEAKERall social norms and the old Usenet,

55:46SPEAKER'cause like, look at 2022 where Usenet is the purview

55:51SPEAKERof pornographers and pirates and like not much conversation

55:54SPEAKERhappens there anymore, I assume.

55:57SPEAKERIn 1993, Usenet was basically the message board

56:00SPEAKERfor the entirety of the internet.

56:01SPEAKERAnd I'm gonna go and tell you, there were social norms

56:04SPEAKERand requirements and rules about the way you posted,

56:08SPEAKERlike you kept your topic, your posts were on topic,

56:13SPEAKERthey were as brief as you could make them,

56:16SPEAKERyou didn't ask questions that had already been answered,

56:19SPEAKERthings like all of the grumpy old man internet stuff

56:23SPEAKERcontinued there.

56:24SPEAKER- I don't know this for a fact,

56:25SPEAKERbut I'm guessing that Usenet was the incubator

56:28SPEAKERin which the concept of flaming came about.

56:32SPEAKER- Probably, yeah, I feel like that's where

56:35SPEAKERa good flame started, but I feel like flaming's--

56:38SPEAKER- Remember flame wars?

56:39SPEAKER- Yeah, well, you'd also have like,

56:41SPEAKERso Usenet was divided into subgroups.

56:44SPEAKERLike you would have top level groups that were like comp

56:47SPEAKERor sci or alt or whatever.

56:50SPEAKERAnd those were the kind of general buckets

56:51SPEAKERinto which topics went.

56:53SPEAKERAnd like, most of them were pretty on topic.

56:56SPEAKERThe alt dot was usually the kind of like,

56:59SPEAKERhey, here's where everything else goes.

57:01SPEAKERAnd the different groups would get pissed off at each other.

57:05SPEAKERLike this was the point at which like,

57:07SPEAKERwe had alt dot TV dot sci-fi dot Wesley Crusher,

57:13SPEAKERdie, die, die, or alt dot binaries dot Barney dot jiff.

57:19SPEAKER- Alt dot TV dot Simpsons, stuff like that.

57:21SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.

57:24SPEAKERThose different groups would get pissed off at each other

57:27SPEAKERfairly regularly and there'd be like cross pollination

57:30SPEAKERacross like these subcultures where people would get upset

57:32SPEAKERwith each other and send nasty messages

57:34SPEAKERand flood their channels.

57:35SPEAKER- I have a great historical example

57:36SPEAKERof what you're talking about here.

57:38SPEAKER- Ooh.

57:38SPEAKER- Called the Meow Wars.

57:41SPEAKER- I don't remember this one.

57:42SPEAKERI had never heard of it before until I just went

57:44SPEAKERand Googled the term flame wars.

57:45SPEAKERFlaming was just like being an asshole to somebody.

57:48SPEAKERIf it's not clear.

57:50SPEAKER- But sometimes it was like channel on channel violence.

57:52SPEAKER- Yes, that's apparently what the Meow Wars were.

57:54SPEAKERIt was a, let's see, the wars began

57:58SPEAKERwhen some Harvard students who had colonized

58:01SPEAKERan abandoned news group for fans of Carl Malden,

58:05SPEAKERwhich was alt dot fan dot Carl dash Malden dot nose.

58:10SPEAKER- Who doesn't love Carl Malden, really?

58:12SPEAKER- Let's see, and we're using it as a community news group

58:14SPEAKERfor such posts about daily student life.

58:17SPEAKERJokingly, okay, those students jokingly suggested

58:21SPEAKERharassing members of the Beavis and Butthead fan group,

58:23SPEAKERalt dot TV dot Beavis and Butthead.

58:25SPEAKER- That was probably a wildly popular fan group back then,

58:27SPEAKERif I had to guess.

58:28SPEAKER- Yes, so apparently the Meow Wars were denizens of,

58:31SPEAKERI'm quoting from Wikipedia here.

58:33SPEAKERThose were the members of the Beavis and Butthead news group

58:37SPEAKERwho responded to the invasion by adopting

58:39SPEAKERa scorched earth policy of rendering

58:41SPEAKERthe Carl Malden news group unusable.

58:45SPEAKER- So I guess punching up didn't work back then, huh?

58:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so anyway, I mean, even like, God,

58:52SPEAKEReven the idea of like flaming somebody on the internet

58:54SPEAKERsounds so quaint and outdated at this point

58:56SPEAKERthat like, that was kind of the,

58:58SPEAKERthat was the jargon of the time.

59:00SPEAKER- The funny thing about their eternal September complaining

59:03SPEAKERgenerally was that it wasn't about,

59:06SPEAKERit wasn't about like flame wars and stuff like that.

59:07SPEAKERIt was mainly like, hey, use punctuation

59:10SPEAKERand like, you know, don't do signature files on your,

59:15SPEAKERkeep your SIGs under X number of bits, you know,

59:18SPEAKERstuff like that.

59:19SPEAKERSo every September, the new kids would come to college

59:23SPEAKERand they'd jack up the Usenet for a few weeks or a month.

59:26SPEAKERBut in 1993, it never stopped

59:29SPEAKERbecause access to the internet started growing.

59:32SPEAKERCompuServe and AOL later in the fall and spring respectively,

59:37SPEAKERI believe, added Usenet access to their online services.

59:42SPEAKERAnd from then on,

59:44SPEAKERbasically the internet has been a free for all.

59:46SPEAKERSo we're still in eternal September, as near as I can tell.

59:49SPEAKER- It never ended.

59:50SPEAKERThat's what eternal means, it turns out.

59:52SPEAKER- It does.

59:54SPEAKERBrad, we have a, we're at a break point here.

59:57SPEAKER- We are.

59:58SPEAKER- We have been talking for an hour

1:00:01SPEAKERabout this apparently more formative year than I realized.

1:00:05SPEAKER- Yeah, we, let's see.

1:00:07SPEAKERWe made three and a half pages of notes for this episode

1:00:10SPEAKERand we've only gotten through page one so far.

1:00:12SPEAKERSo we're maybe, maybe gonna make this a two-parter.

1:00:15SPEAKER- I think, I think we should make this a two-parter.

1:00:17SPEAKERWe should come back next week and do a 1993 part two.

1:00:20SPEAKER- Yeah, we've got all kind cod.

1:00:21SPEAKERThere's like, I did a whole space section here.

1:00:24SPEAKER- We even talked about the Newton.

1:00:25SPEAKER- The Newton.

1:00:26SPEAKERThe Newton. - The Newton.

1:00:28SPEAKERWe got to talk about Lua.

1:00:30SPEAKER- Lua and RAR files and UTF-8 and-

1:00:34SPEAKER- What do you know about Biosphere 2?

1:00:36SPEAKERThat's my question.

1:00:36SPEAKERI can tell you nothing

1:00:37SPEAKER'cause you told me not to read about it

1:00:39SPEAKERbecause apparently the truth is so mind blowing

1:00:41SPEAKERthat I have to discover it on the show.

1:00:44SPEAKER- Like many things, it was unexpected and unknown

1:00:48SPEAKERwhat actually happened.

1:00:49SPEAKERSo we'll come back and finish 1993 part two next week,

1:00:53SPEAKERI guess.

1:00:54SPEAKER- Yes, gosh.

1:00:55SPEAKERMacintosh clones, Silicon graphics, Fermat's last theorem,

1:01:01SPEAKERall kinds of stuff still to talk about in '93.

1:01:03SPEAKER- Did you know that Fermat's last theorem

1:01:05SPEAKERwas actually a conjecture until 1993?

1:01:07SPEAKER- The nerve of that guy.

1:01:09SPEAKER- I know, the original troll, actually.

1:01:14SPEAKERBut now we've reached the point in time

1:01:15SPEAKERwhere we need to thank our listeners

1:01:17SPEAKER'cause this is a 100% listener supported show.

1:01:20SPEAKERSo thank you all for supporting the show

1:01:23SPEAKERand letting us do this every week.

1:01:24SPEAKERWe really enjoy it and we love having you all around

1:01:27SPEAKERand helping us out.

1:01:28SPEAKERIf you would like to become a patron of the show

1:01:31SPEAKERand help support the show yourself,

1:01:32SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techbaud.

1:01:35SPEAKERAgain, that's patreon.com/techbaud.

1:01:38SPEAKERAnd sign up for as little as two bucks a month.

1:01:42SPEAKERLook, in 1993, now we would say

1:01:46SPEAKERit's less than the price of a cup of coffee,

1:01:47SPEAKERbut I think a cup of coffee is like $6

1:01:49SPEAKERif you go to Starbucks now.

1:01:50SPEAKER- Sure.

1:01:51SPEAKER- So what's the equivalent in 1993?

1:01:55SPEAKERWhen I used to go downstairs

1:01:58SPEAKERwhen I worked for the congressman in Capitol Hill,

1:02:00SPEAKERI would buy a donut and a cup of coffee

1:02:03SPEAKERfor like two bucks, a buck 50, I think.

1:02:05SPEAKER- Okay.

1:02:07SPEAKER- So I don't know what the under two bucks in 1993 was.

1:02:11SPEAKER- Hmm, under $2, let's see.

1:02:15SPEAKER- You could go to McDonald's for four bucks back then.

1:02:18SPEAKER- Yes.

1:02:19SPEAKERI'm trying to think like gallon of gas or a pack of gum.

1:02:24SPEAKER- Oh no, gallon of gas was a buck 25 at most back then.

1:02:27SPEAKER- If that.

1:02:29SPEAKERLess than a dollar. - Maybe a Big Gulp.

1:02:30SPEAKER- Big Gulp would have been like 50 cents probably.

1:02:32SPEAKER- Sure, four Big Gulps, how about that?

1:02:35SPEAKER- Yeah, for less than the price of four Big Gulps,

1:02:37SPEAKERyou can support Brad and me

1:02:39SPEAKERand can encourage us to continue making this fine product.

1:02:43SPEAKERAnd the URL again for that is patreon.com/techpod.

1:02:47SPEAKERAs always, we would like to thank our executive producer

1:02:50SPEAKERto your patrons, including Paddle Creek Games,

1:02:52SPEAKERmakers of Fractured Veil, Andrew Slosky,

1:02:54SPEAKERBunny Thorpe, Stovetop Crimes.

1:02:57SPEAKEROh no, it's coming here too.

1:02:59SPEAKERJust Wedge. - What is going on?

1:03:01SPEAKER- Jacob Chapel, Joel Krauska, The Sound of Twinkies,

1:03:05SPEAKERDavid Allen, and James Kamik, thank you all so much.

1:03:07SPEAKERWe really appreciate your support.

1:03:08SPEAKER- Yes, we do. - And if you would,

1:03:09SPEAKERyou can again go to patreon.com/techpod to find out more.

1:03:15SPEAKERBrad, don't crush ice on your glass stove top.

1:03:16SPEAKERThat's the thing I learned this week.

1:03:18SPEAKER- Don't crush ice on your glass stove top.

1:03:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:03:21SPEAKER- That sounds like words to live by.

1:03:24SPEAKER- Look.

1:03:25SPEAKER- I'm gonna assume those were arrived at

1:03:26SPEAKERcompletely in a vacuum with no prior experience

1:03:28SPEAKERinforming that mandate.

1:03:31SPEAKER- No context whatsoever needed for the eight people

1:03:34SPEAKERwho will understand what I'm talking about.

1:03:36SPEAKERThat'll do it for us this week.

1:03:38SPEAKERApologies for making this a surprise two-parter.

1:03:40SPEAKER- Yes, that was absolutely not part of the plan,

1:03:42SPEAKERbut there's, oh.

1:03:44SPEAKER- Yeah?

1:03:45SPEAKER- I didn't even mention, okay, before we send it off.

1:03:48SPEAKER- Yeah?

1:03:49SPEAKER- Did you know that Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega

1:03:51SPEAKERwas the very first MP3 ever created?

1:03:53SPEAKER- Really?

1:03:54SPEAKER- Yes.

1:03:55SPEAKER- 'Cause they used Suzanne Vega,

1:03:57SPEAKER'cause her voice is so rich and mellifluous?

1:04:01SPEAKER- Maybe, I don't know.

1:04:02SPEAKEROr maybe the engineer,

1:04:03SPEAKERthis was in the development of the format, apparently.

1:04:05SPEAKERMaybe the engineer in question

1:04:07SPEAKERwas just a big Suzanne Vega fan.

1:04:09SPEAKER- She got tired of listening to the song?

1:04:11SPEAKER- Apparently they have referred to Suzanne Vega

1:04:13SPEAKERas the mother of the MP3 for that very reason.

1:04:16SPEAKER- Wow, the more you know.

1:04:18SPEAKERThis is a surprise last plug fact.

1:04:20SPEAKER- There you go.

1:04:21SPEAKER- Thank you all for listening so much.

1:04:22SPEAKERWe will be back next week with more 1993.

1:04:26SPEAKERBye everybody.

1:04:26SPEAKER(upbeat music)