136: The Hubble-ub

00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I've been playing with my play date a lot.

00:02SPEAKER- I'm sorry, you've been playing with your what?

00:04SPEAKER- I've been playing with my play date a lot.

00:06SPEAKER- Oh, your play date, okay.

00:08SPEAKER- What'd you think I said?

00:10SPEAKER- What's up with your play date?

00:13SPEAKER- Well, I haven't been playing the games as much as--

00:17SPEAKER- Okay, that sounds like a handheld portable device.

00:19SPEAKER- I mean, look, I expected to be cranking it more,

00:24SPEAKERalthough I have enjoyed the time travel adventure

00:27SPEAKERand the bird watching game.

00:30SPEAKERI'm only on week three so far,

00:32SPEAKERso I don't have that many games,

00:33SPEAKERwhich is, there's a lovely feeling

00:36SPEAKERon like Sunday night, Monday morning,

00:38SPEAKERwhen I come out and I see the play date there

00:40SPEAKERand the little purple lights flashing,

00:41SPEAKERit's like, yo, you got new games.

00:43SPEAKER- That is, that purple LED is, first of all,

00:45SPEAKERI think that's the first time I've ever seen an LED,

00:47SPEAKERthat particular shade of purple.

00:48SPEAKERIt's something, there's something so pleasant about it.

00:51SPEAKERIt's like, it looks like candy.

00:53SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like all of the brightness of a blue LED

00:56SPEAKERwithout any of my eyes wanting to bleed.

00:59SPEAKER- It's like a lavender, I guess I would say.

01:02SPEAKER- It's like comforting in a weird way.

01:04SPEAKER- Yeah, so yeah, you're having the experience, I did not,

01:07SPEAKERwhich is the actual week-by-week rollout of games.

01:10SPEAKERI just got the whole dump.

01:11SPEAKER- I think that's my favorite, like, okay,

01:14SPEAKERit's an eminently pleasant little device, right?

01:16SPEAKERLike you hold it in your hand,

01:17SPEAKERit makes you, it's like a really good size.

01:19SPEAKERIt's small enough that it fits

01:20SPEAKERin the front pocket of my jeans.

01:22SPEAKERSo like when I went to practice the other day,

01:26SPEAKERmy daughter's practice the other day,

01:27SPEAKERI sat and took it and I sat outside

01:29SPEAKERwhile she was practicing and played some Play Date games

01:31SPEAKERon the back, in the field behind the gym.

01:36SPEAKERIt needs a case when I put it in my pocket though.

01:38SPEAKER- I could see that, yeah.

01:40SPEAKERLike it's fairly durable, but sure.

01:42SPEAKER- I don't want to scratch up the screen.

01:44SPEAKERYeah, so I fired up the laser cutter and I scanned it

01:49SPEAKERand I made a little, and I looked at the corners.

01:52SPEAKERI was like, oh, these four corners are probably Ferris

01:54SPEAKERand I put a magnet up to them and the little,

01:56SPEAKERyou know, the little nuts on the corners.

01:58SPEAKERThey're magnet, they're iron-based, so they magnet.

02:02SPEAKERSo I made a little case that has three magnets

02:04SPEAKERon the corners and cutouts for the buttons

02:06SPEAKERand the D-pad and the screen.

02:09SPEAKERAnd it just kind of snaps on with magnets

02:12SPEAKERand holds in my pocket and makes me real happy.

02:14SPEAKER- Yeah, so you sent me a video of this on Discord before.

02:16SPEAKERI think you also posted it to Twitter, naturally, right?

02:18SPEAKERPeople can see this on your Twitter feed.

02:20SPEAKER- Yeah, I've done like four or five versions now.

02:22SPEAKERI'm getting close to a point where I like it.

02:24SPEAKERI'm still having a little bit of trouble.

02:25SPEAKERI'll talk about it in a minute.

02:26SPEAKER- Yeah, people can go check it out on your Twitter feed.

02:28SPEAKERI'm sure everybody's like, well,

02:30SPEAKERit sucks that you slapped Chris Rock,

02:31SPEAKERbut you also made a cool Playdate case, so wow.

02:34SPEAKER- The Chris Rock complaints have gone down

02:36SPEAKERa little bit lately, which is kind of nice.

02:38SPEAKER- Anyway, listen, I promise I am not trying to flatter you.

02:42SPEAKERBut when you sent me that video of this thing

02:44SPEAKERthat you had made, I was like, did you order this?

02:47SPEAKERDid you buy it?

02:48SPEAKERLike, I genuinely thought it was like a retail product.

02:49SPEAKERLike, it looks so professional.

02:51SPEAKERLike, I don't know how you matched the dimensions.

02:53SPEAKERI'm sure there's some process for scanning

02:55SPEAKERto match the dimensions perfectly.

02:57SPEAKERBut I mean, it literally looks like a factory-produced,

02:59SPEAKERlike, professional magnetic cover for the Playdate.

03:01SPEAKERIt's kind of awesome.

03:02SPEAKER- Well, so yeah, I scanned it.

03:03SPEAKERThe hard part was matching the curves.

03:05SPEAKERBut when I, 'cause I tried to do it with the photo first,

03:07SPEAKERbut then the camera lens kind of warps things a little bit.

03:10SPEAKERSo if you don't correct for that,

03:11SPEAKERthen it's never gonna quite line up, right?

03:14SPEAKERBut when I put it on the flat bed,

03:15SPEAKERI got a real clean, relatively flat size of it,

03:19SPEAKERwhich I was then able to place the buttons and stuff on.

03:22SPEAKERAnd like, the tolerances on the buttons

03:24SPEAKERare such that it doesn't really wiggle.

03:25SPEAKERLike, you put it down, I had to open up one of them

03:28SPEAKER'cause if you press the kind of top right button

03:30SPEAKERfor too long, it'll eventually crash.

03:32SPEAKERAnd the magnet was just strong enough

03:34SPEAKERto just barely push it if it wasn't lined up exactly right.

03:37SPEAKERBut yeah, no, somebody on Twitch, Twitter,

03:40SPEAKERrecommended cutting out the screen

03:43SPEAKERso that that didn't scratch.

03:45SPEAKERSo like, if there was dust or something in there,

03:46SPEAKERyou wouldn't scratch the screen, which was a good call.

03:47SPEAKER- Sure.

03:49SPEAKER- The figuring out the curves,

03:51SPEAKERI just opened it up in Photoshop and did bezier curves

03:53SPEAKERand then, and matched what was there.

03:56SPEAKERWhat else?

03:59SPEAKERI'm doing two different colors of,

04:00SPEAKERso I'm cutting two plates of acrylic.

04:02SPEAKEROne has the cutouts for the buttons,

04:04SPEAKERand then there's a top sheet that goes on top of that.

04:07SPEAKERThe thing I'm having trouble with right now

04:08SPEAKERis figuring out how to bond those two pieces of acrylic

04:10SPEAKERto each other in a way that is like optically clear

04:13SPEAKERand doesn't add a bunch of weird distortion to it.

04:15SPEAKERI don't think, you probably can't see it on the camera,

04:17SPEAKERbut like, where the glue goes,

04:19SPEAKERthere's a bunch of like, I don't know.

04:22SPEAKERIt's just weird.

04:23SPEAKERIt looks like, it looks like oil and water combining

04:25SPEAKERkind of in a way that--

04:26SPEAKER- A little gross.

04:27SPEAKER- It's not entirely unpleasant,

04:29SPEAKERbut it's not uniform enough to look intentional.

04:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

04:32SPEAKER- So if anybody has advice on that,

04:34SPEAKERI've been using like the really,

04:36SPEAKERI tried cyanoacrylate or crazy glue.

04:39SPEAKERI tried the thick acrylic cement stuff

04:43SPEAKERthat kind of gel, the gel stuff.

04:45SPEAKERI just got some of the really liquidy acrylic cement

04:48SPEAKERyesterday and I tried that,

04:50SPEAKERbut it's having the exact same problems.

04:52SPEAKERSo I'm open to suggestions, I guess is what I'm saying.

04:55SPEAKERSo if anybody has ideas, holler.

04:57SPEAKERSo I would love to know,

04:58SPEAKERbut I'm pretty stoked with how this go.

05:00SPEAKERAnd if people like them,

05:01SPEAKERI'll check them on Etsy or post the files on a geo

05:03SPEAKERor something and we can get some acrylic.

05:09SPEAKERI want to do a wood one next.

05:10SPEAKER- Oh, wow.

05:11SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause I can do like a wood top on an acrylic base.

05:14SPEAKERI think that would look pretty cool too.

05:15SPEAKER- Yeah, the wood grain against that yellow,

05:17SPEAKERthat orange-ish yellow, I think would be a nice contrast.

05:20SPEAKERWhere'd you get the four perfect little round magnets?

05:23SPEAKER- You can buy magnets from Amazon.

05:26SPEAKERSo these are just, these are five mil neodymium magnets.

05:30SPEAKERAnd then the reason they're perfect is 'cause I cut the holes

05:33SPEAKERto be exactly the right size for them.

05:34SPEAKERSo they're like glued in with a tiny, tiny dot of crazy glue,

05:38SPEAKERbut they're basically like,

05:40SPEAKERthey friction fit into the holes, basically.

05:43SPEAKER- Are you excited for your forthcoming career change

05:46SPEAKERinto manufacturing?

05:47SPEAKER- No, I do not want to work in manufacturing at all,

05:49SPEAKERbut I will happily make manufacture some nonsense

05:51SPEAKERfor myself when it's easy and I can do it in Photoshop.

05:54SPEAKER(upbeat music)

06:16SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

06:22SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

06:25SPEAKERI'm Will.

06:26SPEAKER- I am Brad.

06:28SPEAKER- But I really like how the games roll out.

06:30SPEAKERI know some people are like,

06:31SPEAKER"Give me all the games right now," which I get.

06:34SPEAKERBut like for me, it's nice to just sit down

06:36SPEAKERand have a week to spend with these two new games

06:39SPEAKERbefore I decide whether I'm gonna like try something new

06:41SPEAKERor move on to the next one.

06:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I've seen it both ways.

06:44SPEAKERYou seem to really like this slow rollout, the drip feed.

06:47SPEAKERI've seen some other people that are very frustrated

06:50SPEAKERthat they don't have more to play.

06:52SPEAKERWhat order?

06:53SPEAKER- There's so much stuff on itch though, man.

06:55SPEAKERLike there's so much stuff on itch.

06:56SPEAKER- Is there more stuff out there?

06:57SPEAKER'Cause I haven't-

06:58SPEAKER- People are releasing stuff every day, it's crazy.

07:00SPEAKER- Okay, I've been traveling and busy

07:02SPEAKERand just haven't had a ton of time to spend with it

07:04SPEAKERafter it came out out.

07:05SPEAKERBut prior to release,

07:06SPEAKERI found like maybe half a dozen things on itch

07:09SPEAKERthat were ready to download.

07:11SPEAKERIs there a lot, oh man.

07:12SPEAKERLike Bloom is really cool, it's 10 bucks,

07:14SPEAKERbut it's super cool.

07:16SPEAKERIt's like a real time flower game.

07:20SPEAKERThere's a bunch of small, like there's a Tetris clone.

07:25SPEAKERWhat's the other stuff that I've been playing

07:26SPEAKERthat came from itch?

07:27SPEAKERThere's a Space Invaders clone that's pretty good.

07:29SPEAKERThe, so the order is first week I got the surfing game

07:34SPEAKERand the birder adventure game.

07:37SPEAKER- Yes, so those are the two I had when I unboxed it

07:39SPEAKERand then I wrote them an email and said,

07:41SPEAKER"Hey, give me everything else."

07:42SPEAKER- So the next one is the audio, like the loop thing.

07:48SPEAKER- Oh, I wanted to say for the animals, but it's not that.

07:51SPEAKERIt's something loop.

07:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:54SPEAKER- It's like the music sequencer.

07:55SPEAKER- Music sequencer and kind of, oh, Cranklin.

08:01SPEAKERCranklin's time travel adventure.

08:02SPEAKER- Oh, oh, the robot game, yes.

08:05SPEAKERI think I did, I wasn't aware of this.

08:06SPEAKERApparently that was like the thing they used

08:08SPEAKERto demo this thing way back home early on.

08:11SPEAKER- That's the kind of Takahashi game, I think, isn't it?

08:13SPEAKER- I may be, I don't know.

08:15SPEAKERI'm not sure who made that one.

08:17SPEAKERThat one's, that one is a good crank use for sure.

08:20SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, and it's very clever and really satisfying

08:24SPEAKERand surprisingly comp, like for something

08:26SPEAKERthat is essentially a one axis video game,

08:28SPEAKERlike it's surprisingly, the puzzles are good.

08:31SPEAKER- Yeah, my one other play date anecdote

08:33SPEAKERbefore we get onto this episode,

08:36SPEAKERI was actually reading about Gopher last night as one does.

08:39SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah.

08:39SPEAKER- 'Cause there's a new Gopher client out

08:41SPEAKERthat was getting some attention called Gophie.

08:44SPEAKERAlso actually, boy, this could go in multiple directions now

08:47SPEAKERlike, okay, number one, I found out that there is more

08:50SPEAKERthan one co-founder of Panic,

08:52SPEAKEReven though Cable Sasser is the one

08:54SPEAKERthat kind of is in the public all the time,

08:57SPEAKERbut I don't know how many there are total,

08:58SPEAKERbut there's another guy named Steve something

09:01SPEAKERwho apparently exclusively posts his blog through Gopher.

09:05SPEAKERLike that, he apparently, he wrote like a big celebratory

09:09SPEAKERpost the day the play date shipped or the day it came out,

09:11SPEAKERbut only posted it on his blog.

09:14SPEAKER- He's the number one Gopher blog?

09:15SPEAKER- Exclusively via Gopher.

09:16SPEAKERSo you can, there are multiple ways

09:19SPEAKERyou can find his Twitter, I forget what it is right now,

09:21SPEAKERbut like A, Gopher, B, if you wanna go read this blog post,

09:26SPEAKERlike you'll get, you know, a lot of, you know,

09:28SPEAKERwe talked about this before, the people who looked

09:31SPEAKERat this thing, like, oh, the thing will never take

09:33SPEAKERon the Switch or like whatever, it's like, no,

09:35SPEAKERthey're not trying to, this is not a video game console,

09:38SPEAKERbut like he gets into it in that blog post very clearly

09:40SPEAKERwhy they made this thing and like, it was very much like,

09:43SPEAKERhey, we started this company hoping that one day

09:45SPEAKERwe would get to the point where we could just make cool

09:47SPEAKERstuff that we think would be neat to make

09:49SPEAKERand not worry about whether it's gonna make

09:50SPEAKERa ton of money or not.

09:52SPEAKER- I mean, look, they're making them as fast,

09:54SPEAKERthey're selling them as fast as they can make them

09:56SPEAKERa year in advance now, so I feel like they're probably okay.

10:00SPEAKER- The other thing, maybe we should revisit this later.

10:03SPEAKERI was introduced to a couple of terms

10:06SPEAKERin the course of looking at the Gopher stuff,

10:10SPEAKERthe Dork web and the small web, like the S-M-O-L web.

10:15SPEAKERApparently it's like, okay, like the kind of rings,

10:19SPEAKERyes, basically like the kind of retro like stripped down

10:22SPEAKERrudimentary internet communication community,

10:25SPEAKERthe people who are, you know, to put it in context

10:28SPEAKERof last week's episode, the people who were nostalgic

10:29SPEAKERfor the time before the eternal September.

10:32SPEAKER- I'm kind of into, like there's an argument that,

10:35SPEAKERhey, like if you want to break out on the web someplace,

10:38SPEAKERit's probably much easier to break out onto Gopher

10:40SPEAKERat this point, you know, in the community of folks

10:43SPEAKERwho still use Gopher than it is to like make a sub stack

10:47SPEAKERthat's gonna land for millions of people, right?

10:49SPEAKERYou can probably get like 70, 80% of the Gopher users

10:52SPEAKERon the internet pretty easily.

10:54SPEAKER- Right, you know, there's just, there is a growing

10:55SPEAKERcommunity of like makers and nerds of various flavors

10:59SPEAKERwho are just very disillusioned with the state

11:01SPEAKERof the modern web and long for the time

11:04SPEAKERwhen you just communicated with people

11:05SPEAKERand there weren't corporations getting in the way

11:07SPEAKERand dictating what could be done

11:08SPEAKERand trying to sell you stuff constantly,

11:10SPEAKERyou know what I mean?

11:11SPEAKER- I mean, so one of the things that came up

11:13SPEAKERas part of this 1993 double episode now

11:17SPEAKERis that 1993 is pretty much the year that, you know,

11:20SPEAKERcommercial, there was no commercial use of the web

11:24SPEAKERand commercial use of the internet at this point

11:26SPEAKERwas pretty new.

11:27SPEAKERSo, yeah, I mean, there's something to be,

11:33SPEAKERlike we have a friend who was fairly instrumental

11:36SPEAKERin launching advertising on the internet.

11:42SPEAKERAnd, you know, I at one point asked him, you know,

11:44SPEAKERdo you ever feel like giving people the right

11:46SPEAKERto execute arbitrary code on random people,

11:50SPEAKERthe right to execute arbitrary code on every computer

11:53SPEAKERthat connects to the internet in exchange for hot takes

11:55SPEAKERwas maybe a mistake and he's like,

11:57SPEAKERI mean, look, would I change the way

12:00SPEAKERsome of that stuff works?

12:01SPEAKERProbably.

12:02SPEAKERI mean, if you look at like programmatic targeted advertising

12:06SPEAKERas a positive or a negative, it's undoubtedly a negative.

12:09SPEAKERLike the advertisers don't like it, users don't like it.

12:12SPEAKERThe only people who like it

12:13SPEAKERare the corporations that sell it.

12:14SPEAKERSo, yeah, I don't know.

12:17SPEAKERIt's a weird, maybe run an ad blocker.

12:20SPEAKERThat's the TLDR.

12:21SPEAKER- If corporations are the only entities that like something,

12:24SPEAKERthere's a good chance that maybe that something is not.

12:26SPEAKER- Dude, it's not even all corporations.

12:28SPEAKERIt's just a subset of corporations.

12:30SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, anyway.

12:33SPEAKER- So before we get started, I need to apologize to Europe.

12:35SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, so yes, just in case people are coming

12:39SPEAKERto this fresh and don't know what we did last week,

12:41SPEAKERif you missed last week's episode,

12:42SPEAKERwe were doing another year in review, which was 1993,

12:44SPEAKERbut we got through like not nearly all of our material

12:47SPEAKERin that one episode.

12:48SPEAKER- Turns out it was a big year.

12:49SPEAKER- Yes, we are back with the sequel, 1993 part two.

12:53SPEAKER- Part two.

12:53SPEAKER- This feels like cheating.

12:55SPEAKERWe did all this research for last week

12:57SPEAKERand we got this giant show notes doc

12:58SPEAKERand this week we just got to roll in here and record it

13:02SPEAKER'cause we already did all the research.

13:03SPEAKERThis genuinely feels like cheating.

13:05SPEAKERThis is awesome.

13:06SPEAKER- So, so apologies to Europe.

13:08SPEAKERYour history is complicated and frightening to me

13:11SPEAKERand I'm not going to try to rectify my error.

13:13SPEAKERMany, many and varied errors with actual corrections.

13:18SPEAKERI'm just gonna say, I'm sorry.

13:20SPEAKER- Okay.

13:21SPEAKER- And, you know, maybe Cliff's notes, you know,

13:28SPEAKERit's complicated.

13:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I assume this is in reference

13:31SPEAKERto the European single market and the Schengen zone

13:33SPEAKERand all the pre-

13:34SPEAKER- I'm just saying nice job on not having any,

13:36SPEAKERwell, nevermind, nice job on reducing the number

13:40SPEAKERof wars dramatically and the open travel seems really nice.

13:45SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, yes.

13:47SPEAKERI pulled up the notes from last week

13:49SPEAKERand you had added a new bullet point at the top

13:51SPEAKERthat just says apologize to Europe.

13:53SPEAKER- Mission accomplished.

13:55SPEAKERI'm sorry Europe.

13:56SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, well, good to know.

13:59SPEAKER- Look, all of this,

14:00SPEAKERI tested out of Western civilization in college

14:03SPEAKERand honestly this was all happening

14:05SPEAKERat the time I was in college,

14:07SPEAKERso it probably wouldn't have helped too much.

14:08SPEAKER- Yeah, perfect excuse.

14:09SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

14:11SPEAKER- All right, what is next on the list of our review of 1993?

14:14SPEAKER- Well, I was gonna ask everybody who complained

14:16SPEAKERto send me a 300 word essay on the Monroe Doctrine

14:18SPEAKERand why it was wrong, so I'm gonna get some angry letters

14:23SPEAKERabout that one now.

14:24SPEAKER- You need a five paragraph essay on the difference

14:26SPEAKERbetween the Marshall Plan and the Morgenthau Plan.

14:28SPEAKER(laughing)

14:31SPEAKER- I would like a thousand words on the Teapot Dome scandal

14:35SPEAKERand its impact on the Taft presidency, Brad.

14:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

14:39SPEAKERWhat, who's power computing?

14:42SPEAKER- Power computing.

14:43SPEAKERSo in the heady days of the early 90s, Apple said,

14:46SPEAKERyou know what, what if other people made Macintoshes,

14:50SPEAKERnot just Apple, what if we did this PC thing,

14:52SPEAKERbut we did it in a very Apple-y way

14:54SPEAKERand we only licensed out the rights to build Macs

14:57SPEAKERto certain trusted partners?

15:00SPEAKERSo power computing was the first of those.

15:02SPEAKER- Right, yes, I remember, they made some news.

15:06SPEAKER- Yeah, they made, if your beige Mac of the early 90s,

15:10SPEAKERyour Performa or your Spectra was a stylish beige,

15:16SPEAKERyou know, forward-looking computer

15:17SPEAKERthat was signed by the designers inside,

15:20SPEAKERthe power computing Mac clones were basically like

15:23SPEAKERbog standard-ass cases and board designs.

15:29SPEAKERSo they used normal PC parts, but they put the,

15:32SPEAKERI'm sorry, they used normal PC specs

15:37SPEAKERfor Mac boards and PCI slots and stuff like that.

15:42SPEAKERSo you like, actually, probably not PCI slots at this point,

15:45SPEAKERbut basically you could get, like a normal Mac board

15:48SPEAKERthat went into an Apple-built Macintosh

15:51SPEAKERwouldn't fit in a PC case.

15:53SPEAKERPower computing built Macs that fit in PC cases.

15:59SPEAKER- So you're saying like a Macintosh board that was like ATX?

16:02SPEAKER- Mini, micro ATX or whatever, yeah.

16:03SPEAKER- ATX specific or whatever, yeah.

16:05SPEAKER- And the upshot is they were a lot cheaper than an Apple Mac.

16:09SPEAKER- Interesting, like, so they really were just like

16:12SPEAKERvery consistent with the beige box PCs of the era.

16:15SPEAKERLike, and when I think back,

16:16SPEAKERI don't remember what they look like.

16:17SPEAKERI could Google one right now.

16:18SPEAKERLike in my memory, the power stuff still like

16:20SPEAKERkind of looked like it was trying to have

16:22SPEAKERthe same design language as the Mac stuff.

16:24SPEAKER- But it was mostly just the plastic on front of the case,

16:27SPEAKERthe snap onto the front of the case.

16:28SPEAKER- Okay, yeah.

16:29SPEAKER- So the interesting thing about them

16:31SPEAKERis they lasted a long time.

16:33SPEAKEREventually Apple shut down the licensing program

16:36SPEAKERand I assume as part of the deal agreed to buy them

16:41SPEAKER'cause, you know, without the Mac license,

16:42SPEAKERthey had basically no business.

16:44SPEAKERAnd they spent a hundred million dollars buying them back.

16:47SPEAKER- Oh, I'm looking at some pictures now.

16:49SPEAKERAnd yeah, these things are barely more stylish

16:52SPEAKERthan the PCs of the time.

16:53SPEAKERAlso, I think shutting down the licensing program

16:55SPEAKERwas part of jobs coming back, right?

16:56SPEAKER- That was one of his return things, yeah.

16:59SPEAKER- That's literally like new presidential administration

17:01SPEAKERcoming in issuing executive order day of the inauguration.

17:05SPEAKERLike one stroke of the pen,

17:08SPEAKERSteve Jobs killed the Mac clone market.

17:10SPEAKER- I mean, I don't, the people who made the,

17:12SPEAKERthe power computing people I'm sure were disappointed,

17:16SPEAKERbut also they made a buttload of money

17:18SPEAKER'cause I think that it was started

17:19SPEAKERwith like a three or $4 million seed investment from Sequoia.

17:22SPEAKERSo like the people there got paid.

17:25SPEAKER- Oh, so these things actually sold.

17:27SPEAKER- Yeah, they saw, so power computing,

17:29SPEAKERI don't know if this is true, this is what was on Wikipedia

17:31SPEAKERand there seemed to be citations.

17:34SPEAKERIt was the first company to sell a million dollars

17:35SPEAKERworth of product on the internet.

17:37SPEAKER- Wow.

17:38SPEAKER- 'Cause they basically mimicked the Dell and Gateway

17:40SPEAKERdirect to consumer model of, hey,

17:43SPEAKERif you wanna buy a Mac on the internet,

17:45SPEAKERhere's the place to do it and we will send it to you

17:47SPEAKERand then we'll support it and yada, yada down the line.

17:49SPEAKER- Did you ever use one?

17:50SPEAKERAre they pretty much functionally identical?

17:52SPEAKER- We had some that ran, I think system seven in,

17:56SPEAKERor system eight in the computer lab,

17:59SPEAKERone of the computer labs I worked in

18:01SPEAKERand they were functionally identical from a Mac.

18:03SPEAKERThe nice thing was if the power supply crapped out,

18:06SPEAKERyou could just get a normal power supply

18:08SPEAKERand you didn't have to get the special Apple one.

18:10SPEAKERLike there was a, from an IT perspective for us,

18:14SPEAKERas long as the parts were continued to be available,

18:16SPEAKERthey were much easier to work on

18:18SPEAKER'cause they used like normal CD-ROM drives

18:20SPEAKERand they used normal floppy drives

18:22SPEAKERand be like, I guess this was before Apple

18:25SPEAKERtook the floppy drive out of everything,

18:26SPEAKERbut like the parts were, they were normal parts,

18:29SPEAKERwhich was really nice.

18:30SPEAKER- Okay.

18:31SPEAKER- So.

18:32SPEAKER- I'm fascinated by that era of Apple,

18:33SPEAKERthe like the jobs intermission, I guess,

18:36SPEAKERlike the era of like what was John Sculley,

18:38SPEAKERI think was running it when he left.

18:41SPEAKERAnd then there were some other people that I forget

18:43SPEAKERand I think El Emilio was the last CEO

18:45SPEAKERbefore jobs came back.

18:46SPEAKERBut like, they were just like lost in the woods

18:48SPEAKERin this period of time, right?

18:49SPEAKERLike they had no idea what to do.

18:51SPEAKER- Well, they had a lot of money still.

18:53SPEAKERLike if you read the books about this time,

18:55SPEAKERthey had a lot of money from like the Apple two,

18:57SPEAKERlike the Apple two continued to sell for a really long time.

19:01SPEAKERAnd then the Mac classic and the color Mac

19:03SPEAKERand those machines sold pretty well

19:05SPEAKERinto the early mid nineties.

19:08SPEAKERAnd then this is about the time

19:10SPEAKERthat they started having problems.

19:11SPEAKERThey were making big gambles on things

19:13SPEAKERthat didn't have an immediate market,

19:16SPEAKERbut were clearly future looking and interesting,

19:19SPEAKERlike the Newton.

19:20SPEAKER- Like the Newton.

19:20SPEAKERSo I'm sorry, before we move into the Newton,

19:22SPEAKERI just have to bring up Copland real quick.

19:23SPEAKERDo you remember Copland?

19:25SPEAKER- No.

19:26SPEAKER- I went down the rabbit hole of reading

19:27SPEAKERlike a bunch of history about,

19:29SPEAKERCopland was supposed to be system eight.

19:31SPEAKERIt was supposed to be like, I think system seven,

19:34SPEAKERlike original Macintosh through system seven

19:36SPEAKERwas all one continuum, right?

19:38SPEAKERIt was all the same system software.

19:40SPEAKERCopland was supposed to be the full like rewrite, refresh,

19:43SPEAKERbrand new operating system, system eight.

19:45SPEAKERYou should read the Wikipedia page about Copland sometime.

19:47SPEAKERIt sounds like the most disastrous attempt

19:50SPEAKERto develop an operating system ever.

19:51SPEAKERIt's what led to them shopping around

19:54SPEAKERfor an external operating system.

19:57SPEAKERIn fact, and yes, it was supposed to be for a while,

20:01SPEAKERit was rumored that it was going to be B,

20:02SPEAKERthey were going to buy BOS and Jean-Louis Gasset

20:04SPEAKERwas going to come in and run Apple.

20:06SPEAKERAnd that was going to be their next generation

20:08SPEAKERoperating system.

20:09SPEAKERAnd then they ended up on Next and Steve Jobs instead.

20:11SPEAKERRest is history, but like Copland, seriously,

20:14SPEAKERyou should go read about it.

20:14SPEAKERLike the disaster of them trying to make that OS

20:18SPEAKERand demo it for press and like complete,

20:20SPEAKERcomplete institutional failure.

20:23SPEAKERAnyway, I'm sorry.

20:24SPEAKER- I will check it out.

20:24SPEAKERWell, so like in that same vein,

20:26SPEAKERthey looked and they were like,

20:27SPEAKERoh, handheld computers are going to be a big deal.

20:30SPEAKERLet's invest.

20:30SPEAKERAnd they, this was the year '93 was the year

20:33SPEAKERthat they launched the first Newton,

20:35SPEAKERwhich probably wasn't the first PDA it seemed like.

20:38SPEAKERIt seemed like there were other,

20:38SPEAKERlike things out of, out of Southeast Asia and Japan

20:43SPEAKERthat were maybe PDAs before that.

20:45SPEAKERBut it was the first one that did handwriting recognition

20:47SPEAKERthat worked, that I knew of at least.

20:51SPEAKERAnd you could actually write with real handwriting kind of,

20:56SPEAKERlike if you did block letters, it was pretty reliable.

20:58SPEAKERIf you tried to do cursive, like it showed in the ads,

21:00SPEAKERthat seemed to never work in my experience.

21:03SPEAKER- And it ate batteries, the first Newton ate batteries

21:06SPEAKERat a rate that's unprecedented.

21:08SPEAKERLike it's right up there with the Game Boy,

21:10SPEAKERthe original Game Boy and the Game Gear

21:13SPEAKERin terms of handheld stuff that ate batteries

21:17SPEAKERin my recollection.

21:18SPEAKER- Ouch, it had zero, I'm trying to,

21:21SPEAKERI started to say zero wireless connectivity of any kind,

21:24SPEAKERright, but I'm trying to think,

21:25SPEAKERwas there even a wireless standard

21:26SPEAKERit could have used at the time?

21:27SPEAKER- No, there was no wireless network at that point.

21:29SPEAKEREventually you could get,

21:31SPEAKERI wanna say eventually they had expansion cards,

21:33SPEAKERyou'd get cell modems for them.

21:35SPEAKERBut I think by the time Wi-Fi rolled around,

21:37SPEAKERthe Newton was essentially a moribund.

21:39SPEAKERIt was killed by Apple

21:40SPEAKERand nobody was building stuff for it anymore.

21:42SPEAKER- Yeah, imagine an iPhone

21:44SPEAKERthat you have to put an expansion card into.

21:46SPEAKER- Well, I mean, A, that sometimes would be nice.

21:50SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.

21:51SPEAKER- B, it would use styluses for this.

21:53SPEAKERIt was all resistive touchscreens

21:54SPEAKERand it was a single color display.

21:57SPEAKERIt was a weird, like PDAs at that time were weird.

22:00SPEAKERI ended up, I never had a Newton,

22:02SPEAKERbut I bought a bunch of Palms later on.

22:04SPEAKERAnd the Palm, like I had at one of my first jobs,

22:08SPEAKERI had like a ticket system that was building the Lotus Notes

22:12SPEAKERand you updated the tickets that you had

22:14SPEAKERby sitting down at your desk and plugging in the,

22:16SPEAKERdropping the thing on the cradle and hitting the button.

22:19SPEAKER'Cause there was no wireless.

22:20SPEAKER- That's kind of neat.

22:21SPEAKER- I would go out on a job, I'd fill in the ticket,

22:24SPEAKERI'd put it back on my thing, hit the button,

22:26SPEAKERI'd get the next ticket when I picked up the device again.

22:30SPEAKERThat's neat.

22:31SPEAKER- It was a weird time.

22:33SPEAKERDefinitely a weird time.

22:33SPEAKER- A lot of people trying a lot of stuff.

22:36SPEAKERA lot of technology not quite ready yet.

22:39SPEAKER- But like, you can definitely see the glimpse

22:42SPEAKERof the future in the Newton,

22:43SPEAKERlike the apps ran and the apps were icons on a desktop

22:46SPEAKERand like the input area was at the bottom of the screen,

22:50SPEAKERwhich made sense for how you use the screen.

22:52SPEAKERAnd the barest hints of iOS were there

22:59SPEAKERand carried forward, I think kind of secretly probably.

23:01SPEAKER- Sure, sure.

23:02SPEAKERAlso, I assume the years,

23:04SPEAKERthe several years of BlackBerry dominance

23:06SPEAKERdirectly descended from this wave of PDAs too, right?

23:08SPEAKERIt was like, oh, let's slap a keyboard on there

23:10SPEAKERand make it a phone kind of.

23:12SPEAKER- I think the Blackberries kind of came

23:13SPEAKERfrom the two-way pager world.

23:15SPEAKER- Oh, you think so?

23:16SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause they were much more,

23:17SPEAKERthey were much more kind of linear devices.

23:19SPEAKERLike the main navigation device for a BlackBerry

23:23SPEAKERwas a scroll wheel.

23:24SPEAKERSo you would, like it was designed,

23:25SPEAKERthere was no concept for a long time on Blackberries

23:29SPEAKERof going right or left.

23:29SPEAKERYou only went up and down in the UI.

23:32SPEAKER- Okay.

23:33SPEAKER- Which is very much a pager-y thing for me.

23:34SPEAKER- Huh, interesting.

23:35SPEAKER- Yeah, but it was like,

23:41SPEAKERit's important to not underestimate how weird it was

23:46SPEAKERto have a pocket computer in the mid-90s, just in general.

23:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

23:51SPEAKER- Like that was a novel concept.

23:52SPEAKERAnd even though they were like barely computers

23:56SPEAKERby today's standards, yeah, it was a weird heady time.

24:02SPEAKERAnd they were like, I mean, I guess they were,

24:04SPEAKERwith inflation, they were probably pretty expensive,

24:06SPEAKER'cause they had Newton was 500 bucks.

24:08SPEAKERThe Palm pilots were 250 or $300 usually.

24:11SPEAKERSo it was a reasonably accessible product.

24:14SPEAKER- Yeah, that's cool.

24:16SPEAKERAll right, as our astrophysics correspondent.

24:20SPEAKER- Yes.

24:21SPEAKER- I have developed a tradition in these episodes

24:23SPEAKERof a bullet point entitled "Space."

24:27SPEAKER- I always say that with the Wheatley voice.

24:29SPEAKER- Oh, you don't?

24:30SPEAKERWhat do you got?

24:31SPEAKER- No, it's in my head.

24:32SPEAKERI'm not gonna try it.

24:33SPEAKER- Oh, you're not gonna, oh, come on.

24:34SPEAKER- No, I'm no, no, thank you, sir.

24:35SPEAKER- Come on, come on.

24:37SPEAKERYou don't do a good Stephen Merchant?

24:38SPEAKERCome on.

24:39SPEAKER- Stephen Merchant is a hard voice, man.

24:41SPEAKER- Yeah, no, I'm his.

24:42SPEAKERHe's got a really good voice.

24:43SPEAKER- He's got a really good voice.

24:44SPEAKERI don't wanna do that. - Very good delivery.

24:45SPEAKER- Yes.

24:46SPEAKER- I've already got Europe pissed off at me.

24:48SPEAKERI don't want them to be murderous with rage.

24:50SPEAKER- Yes, yes, I get it.

24:51SPEAKER- Okay, here are some of the headlines

24:55SPEAKERfrom "Space Stuff" in 1993.

24:57SPEAKER"The Mars Observer Was Lost."

25:00SPEAKER- Which one is that?

25:01SPEAKERThe one with the little robot?

25:02SPEAKER- No, so that was an orbital probe.

25:04SPEAKERThat was a, it was actually, I didn't write it down here,

25:07SPEAKERbut I read it.

25:08SPEAKERIt was adapted from a terrestrial satellite or, you know.

25:12SPEAKER- Oh, like an earth satellite.

25:13SPEAKER- Yeah, a communication satellite that was in use

25:16SPEAKERaround earth at the time.

25:17SPEAKERThe Mars Observer was adapted from that.

25:20SPEAKERIt was going to assume orbit around Mars

25:24SPEAKERin order to study the geology, geophysics,

25:26SPEAKERand climate of the planet,

25:29SPEAKERbut they lost it en route.

25:31SPEAKER- Like how far, like right, is it left earth or?

25:35SPEAKER- Three days before it was to assume orbit around Mars,

25:38SPEAKERthey lost communications.

25:39SPEAKERActually, so they don't actually know what happened to it.

25:43SPEAKERThey don't know if, in fact, I quoted this here.

25:47SPEAKER"It is unknown whether the spacecraft was able

25:49SPEAKERto follow its automatic programming and go into Mars orbit,

25:51SPEAKERor if it flew by Mars and is now in a heliocentric orbit."

25:54SPEAKERSo like, there's something so like a lonely and chilling

25:59SPEAKERto me about thinking about objects that are in some

26:03SPEAKERunknown orbit, like rogue planets that have escaped

26:05SPEAKERtheir solar systems or the satellite that never made it

26:08SPEAKERand they just be out there, you know what I mean?

26:10SPEAKER- They just keep going forever.

26:11SPEAKER- Yeah, well, in this case, they assume that it went

26:13SPEAKERinto orbit around the sun if it didn't make it

26:15SPEAKERto Mars properly, but what they think happened

26:20SPEAKERafter a review, can you imagine the lead time

26:24SPEAKERon a project like this, like devoting years of your life

26:27SPEAKERto something like this and having it just like,

26:29SPEAKERgo completely AWOL and that the,

26:31SPEAKERlike right before the finish line?

26:33SPEAKER- I mean, yeah, that would be heartbreaking.

26:37SPEAKER- It's tough.

26:39SPEAKERWhat they think happened after a review is that

26:41SPEAKERthere was a fuel leak and that the little bit of thrust

26:45SPEAKERcoming out of this fuel leak put the craft into a spin

26:47SPEAKERand they dissected the spin and went into like a sort

26:50SPEAKERof contingency, like fallback mode, sort of disaster mode,

26:54SPEAKERwhich disabled the transmitter.

26:57SPEAKERSo that would do it, poor Mars observer.

27:01SPEAKER- I know, the interesting thing, this was part of the,

27:05SPEAKERlike in the '90s, they spent, like the idea was,

27:09SPEAKERhey, we're gonna do a lot of Mars shots

27:10SPEAKER'cause like the Viking missions were billions of dollars,

27:13SPEAKERlike they used leftover Saturn fives,

27:15SPEAKERthey cost a ton of money in the '70s.

27:18SPEAKERThe whole point of going back to Mars was, though,

27:20SPEAKERthat they wanted to make a bunch of cheaper,

27:23SPEAKERtake advantage of the orbit synchronization

27:28SPEAKERwhere you can do the cheap 18-month trip to Mars

27:32SPEAKERand like take a bunch of inexpensive shots.

27:39SPEAKERAnd this was, I think, the first of them.

27:42SPEAKERThe next one was like global Mars global surveyor,

27:47SPEAKERwhich was later on, and then like the probes,

27:51SPEAKERlike the Perseverance and the Curiosity descended directly

27:55SPEAKERfrom the Odyssey and the, what's the other one?

28:01SPEAKEROh God, the two solar powered ones.

28:06SPEAKER- The rover's on the planet?

28:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:09SPEAKER- And there's, what is there, is Opportunity one of them?

28:13SPEAKER- Yeah, Opportunity and Spirit.

28:16SPEAKER- Again, was Molly try in vain to remember the name

28:19SPEAKERof various Mars rovers?

28:20SPEAKER- This is what happens when I record too early

28:21SPEAKERin the morning, too.

28:22SPEAKER- My apologies, time zones.

28:24SPEAKER- No, it's okay, yeah, time zones, time zones.

28:26SPEAKER- Time zones.

28:28SPEAKER- I remember when this happened, like this is,

28:30SPEAKERMars ate a lot of probes for a while.

28:31SPEAKER- Interesting.

28:32SPEAKER- The ESA lost Beagle, like there's a,

28:35SPEAKERit was a place into which we threw spaceships.

28:38SPEAKERA lot of space junk.

28:39SPEAKERAnd I knew the Soviets had lost some attempts as well,

28:41SPEAKERbut I didn't realize that we had.

28:43SPEAKERSo I was waiting to ask you if this made a lot of news,

28:46SPEAKER'cause I mean, you're a little bit older than me,

28:47SPEAKERyou would remember better.

28:49SPEAKERI have some memory of this time.

28:51SPEAKER- This was a talking point.

28:53SPEAKERSo every time we lost a Mars probe or any kind of probe

28:57SPEAKERbefore it did any science, it resulted in a lot

29:00SPEAKERof Republicans or fiscal conservatives talking

29:03SPEAKERabout pissing away space station money.

29:05SPEAKER- Okay, that's exactly.

29:06SPEAKER- Or space money.

29:06SPEAKER- Well, that's exactly what I was waiting to ask you

29:08SPEAKERabout, but we need to get through our next one first,

29:10SPEAKERwhich is that this is the year they fixed

29:13SPEAKERthe Hubble defective mirror problem.

29:16SPEAKER- Yeah, that was a big deal.

29:18SPEAKER- I do remember that making news.

29:20SPEAKERI don't remember exactly what the like tenor

29:22SPEAKERof the discussion was, but I have to assume

29:24SPEAKERthere was quite a bit of like, ah, the damn eggheads

29:26SPEAKERcan't even make a mirror, right?

29:27SPEAKERThey're just wasting my tax dollars.

29:29SPEAKER- I mean, there was a lot, at least in Northeast Tennessee,

29:31SPEAKERwhere I was at the time, there was a lot of,

29:32SPEAKERwhat are they wasting our tax dollars on this war

29:34SPEAKERwhen we have two wars to prosecute or whatever nonsense

29:37SPEAKERthey were coming up with at the time.

29:39SPEAKERYes.

29:39SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so Hubble, I think Hubble was launched

29:42SPEAKERin 1990, if I'm not mistaken.

29:45SPEAKER- Yes.

29:46SPEAKER- So yes, even I remember, I was pretty young,

29:48SPEAKERbut even I remember that the fact that, okay,

29:51SPEAKERso here's what happened, you know, space telescopes

29:54SPEAKERhave gigantic mirrors in them.

29:56SPEAKER- It's like a, what, eight foot mirror or something?

29:57SPEAKER- I'm not sure, Hubble.

29:58SPEAKERI don't have the size of the mirror in front of me here,

30:01SPEAKERbut you know, the mirror has got to be ground to like,

30:05SPEAKERwhat's the term, like a focal length,

30:08SPEAKERor I'm not sure exactly what the optical term is.

30:12SPEAKER- Basically, they want an incredibly,

30:14SPEAKERfor this kind of a space telescope,

30:16SPEAKERyou want incredibly precise focusing on the element,

30:20SPEAKERthe thing that sits in front that reflects the light back.

30:22SPEAKER- Right, right, so they have to be grounded

30:23SPEAKERto an incredibly specific--

30:26SPEAKER- Seven foot, 10 inch mirror.

30:27SPEAKER- Okay, yes, yes, so essentially I can read

30:30SPEAKERfrom the NASA information about what happened here.

30:35SPEAKERThe outer perimeter of this mirror was too flat

30:39SPEAKERby about 2200 nanometers, which is--

30:42SPEAKER- Oh, God, how did they make that big a mistake, Jesus.

30:45SPEAKER- That is about 1/450th of a millimeter,

30:49SPEAKERor 1/11,000th of an inch.

30:52SPEAKERBut it resulted in all of the photos coming back

30:54SPEAKERfrom the Hubble being incredibly blurry.

30:56SPEAKER- Yeah.

30:58SPEAKER- And they say after a review that the reason

31:01SPEAKERthat error happened was that one of the lenses

31:03SPEAKERand one of the pieces of calibration equipment they used

31:06SPEAKERto grind the mirror was out of position by 1.3 millimeters.

31:10SPEAKER- Good God, man.

31:12SPEAKER- So the part I didn't, I mean,

31:13SPEAKERI probably knew this at some point,

31:15SPEAKERand it certainly makes sense when you think about it,

31:18SPEAKERbut the part I hadn't thought about

31:18SPEAKERis they didn't just fly a new mirror up there.

31:21SPEAKERLike that was not exactly-- - Turns out.

31:22SPEAKER- Not exactly practical.

31:23SPEAKER- Well, I mean, they'd have to disassemble

31:25SPEAKERthe entire telescope 'cause it's not like--

31:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not like they're equipped

31:29SPEAKERto take it apart in space and put it back together.

31:32SPEAKERWhere is the Hubble? I assume is it one of the range points?

31:35SPEAKER- No, it was low earth.

31:36SPEAKER- Oh, is it? - Well, it's high low earth,

31:38SPEAKERbut it's low earth. - Oh, okay, okay.

31:39SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause the shuttle can't go further than low earth.

31:42SPEAKERSo-- - Oh, oh, okay.

31:44SPEAKER- So yeah, they launched it out of the space shuttle

31:46SPEAKERand it had a little bit of a booster to jet it up

31:48SPEAKERabove space shuttle height when they launched it,

31:50SPEAKERas I recall. - I see, I see.

31:51SPEAKERWhere's James Webb, is it?

31:52SPEAKER- It's at a Lagrange trailing earth, I think.

31:55SPEAKER- Okay, it is, that's what I thought, okay.

31:57SPEAKER- Yeah, so Lagrange points, if you don't know,

31:59SPEAKERare like, they're the places where multiple gravity wells

32:04SPEAKERintersect with each other and they cause kind of eddies.

32:07SPEAKER- I think, is it any two-body system, I think?

32:10SPEAKERI think you only have them between three-body systems,

32:12SPEAKERbut they're complicated then.

32:13SPEAKER- So I think the ones we're talking about

32:15SPEAKERare between the earth and sun, right?

32:16SPEAKERAt least in that case, there are five of them.

32:18SPEAKERThey're just points of gravitational equilibrium

32:20SPEAKERbetween multiple bodies. - Yes, so the meaningful ones,

32:23SPEAKERthere's ones trailing earth, leading earth,

32:27SPEAKERbetween earth and the sun on a radius

32:29SPEAKERfrom the sun to the earth.

32:30SPEAKERThere's also really useful ones

32:32SPEAKERbetween the moon and the earth that, yeah,

32:36SPEAKERthat are potentially interesting for a multitude of reasons.

32:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I may be incorrect about the earth-sun stuff.

32:42SPEAKERI'm not sure exactly which points we're talking about,

32:44SPEAKERbut the ones in question, I think they're generally denoted

32:47SPEAKERby like L1 through L5 and that kind of thing.

32:49SPEAKER- Yeah, the JWST is at a earth-sun Lagrange points.

32:54SPEAKER- Okay, so yeah, what they did instead of,

32:57SPEAKERyou know, they couldn't replace the mirror.

32:59SPEAKERThey, I'll quote from the NASA page on this thing.

33:02SPEAKERReplacing the mirror was not practical,

33:03SPEAKERso the best solution was to build replacement instruments

33:06SPEAKERthat fixed the flaw much the same way a pair of glasses

33:09SPEAKERcorrect the vision of a nearsighted person.

33:11SPEAKERThey put glasses on the Hubble.

33:13SPEAKER- Yeah, the spacewalk that did this,

33:15SPEAKERif like the history of this is fascinating,

33:17SPEAKERit is, it was at the time one of the most

33:21SPEAKERlike mechanically intense operations that was done,

33:25SPEAKER'cause I don't believe that any of this

33:27SPEAKERwas designed to be serviced in orbit.

33:28SPEAKERLike they never intended to open this up

33:31SPEAKERand fix stuff in it.

33:32SPEAKER- A daring mission.

33:34SPEAKER- Yeah, it was kind of incredible.

33:36SPEAKERAnd like the nightly news reported each day how it went,

33:39SPEAKER'cause it was like a multi-day series of spacewalks

33:41SPEAKERand like, here's how it's going, here's the update.

33:44SPEAKERIt's all the stuff we get on the live feed now.

33:46SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I'm sad that I missed the hubbub

33:50SPEAKERaround third, I caught someone, excuse me, the hubble bub.

33:55SPEAKER- No, the hubbub is the right word, hubble bub.

33:57SPEAKER- It's too early for that kind, nope, nope.

33:59SPEAKERHubble bubble is a different thing.

34:00SPEAKER- Okay, the COSTAR instrument,

34:04SPEAKERthe corrective optics space telescope

34:06SPEAKERaxial replacement instrument.

34:08SPEAKER- Do you think there was somebody whose whole job

34:10SPEAKERwas to take the words and make an acronym out of them?

34:12SPEAKER- I hope so, COSTAR is a pretty good name.

34:14SPEAKER- That's a pretty good one, yeah.

34:15SPEAKER- Apparently it was about the size of a telephone booth

34:17SPEAKERaccording to NASA.

34:19SPEAKER- Wow. - Yeah, that's wild.

34:22SPEAKER- Do you think they put it in the end?

34:23SPEAKERLike the business end?

34:24SPEAKER- I don't know.

34:25SPEAKER- Telephone booth's pretty big.

34:26SPEAKER- It's true, it says it placed five pairs

34:30SPEAKERof corrective mirrors in the counter defects of the flaw.

34:32SPEAKER- There you go.

34:33SPEAKER- All right, lastly, in space news,

34:36SPEAKERComet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered.

34:39SPEAKER- Are we only talking about this

34:39SPEAKER'cause it's your name, Brad?

34:41SPEAKER- You brought this up beforehand and said I had to take this

34:44SPEAKERand then implied that there was like something comical

34:46SPEAKERor, I don't know. - Cometical?

34:50SPEAKERGod damn it.

34:51SPEAKER- We're losing hemorrhaging listeners now.

34:53SPEAKERThis is cool 'cause it's the first time we saw something

34:55SPEAKERsmash into another planet, right?

34:56SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, I guess, or anything.

34:59SPEAKERAccording to the Wikipedia summary,

35:01SPEAKERsaid it was the first time they observed any two objects

35:04SPEAKERin the solar system directly as they collided.

35:08SPEAKERNot just a planet, I guess. - Yeah, I'm sure that

35:08SPEAKERsomebody had seen a meteorite hit the Earth before,

35:11SPEAKERbut probably didn't live to report it.

35:13SPEAKER- Right, or at least in modern astronomy

35:15SPEAKERwith modern instruments and stuff like that.

35:17SPEAKER- Yeah, this was cool.

35:19SPEAKERYou got to see the six fragments hit Jupiter,

35:23SPEAKEReach with like more energy

35:25SPEAKERthan the entire world's nuclear arsenal.

35:27SPEAKER- Yes, like by a lot, I was, man, you took my,

35:30SPEAKERoh, sorry, that was my hero stat.

35:33SPEAKER- How many times, Brad?

35:35SPEAKER- A lot, hang on, let me, we'll get there.

35:37SPEAKEROkay, let's see, it was also the first comet

35:39SPEAKERthey found orbiting Jupiter.

35:40SPEAKERThey think they thought that it was a capture.

35:43SPEAKER- That makes sense.

35:44SPEAKER- They accidentally orbited the sun like every other comet

35:45SPEAKERand then Jupiter captured it.

35:47SPEAKERBut the tidal forces of being in orbit around Jupiter

35:50SPEAKERare supposedly what broke it up.

35:52SPEAKERAnd then yes, these different fragments collided

35:54SPEAKERover a series of days, I believe, in 1994 with Jupiter.

35:57SPEAKER- It was fast, as I recall, but yeah.

36:00SPEAKER- So yes, the largest fragment of the comet

36:02SPEAKERwhen it impacted Jupiter released 600 times more energy

36:06SPEAKERthan the entirety of the world's nuclear arsenal.

36:08SPEAKER- We're really missing out.

36:09SPEAKERWe should have some comets, get rid of those nukes.

36:12SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, hey man, it's just--

36:15SPEAKER- If that had hit us, we'd be done, right?

36:18SPEAKERThat's the idea?

36:19SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I certainly would.

36:22SPEAKERI forget how big that thing was,

36:23SPEAKERor I didn't see how fast it was going.

36:25SPEAKERI mean, I'm assuming, but yes, that sounds,

36:28SPEAKERthat certainly sounds like an Earth scale

36:29SPEAKERplanet killer to me.

36:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:32SPEAKER- I found a visualization, like a pretty nice CG simulation

36:38SPEAKERof what would happen if Ceres impacted the Earth

36:41SPEAKERat a high velocity.

36:42SPEAKER- Ceres, the large asteroid?

36:43SPEAKER- So yes, the spherical asteroid,

36:45SPEAKERor I guess it might be a planetoid, actually.

36:47SPEAKERIt may be considered--

36:47SPEAKER- It's a dwarf planet, I think.

36:49SPEAKER- Or maybe even a dwarf planet, yeah.

36:52SPEAKERIt was chilling to watch.

36:53SPEAKERIt was chilling to watch.

36:54SPEAKER- The good news is that's not gonna happen.

36:55SPEAKER- No, that's not gonna happen, but just the idea of it,

36:58SPEAKERlike the amount of energy that was deposited,

36:59SPEAKERI mean, it essentially turned the entire surface

37:01SPEAKERof the planet molten over the course of a few hours.

37:06SPEAKERScoured everything from the surface, let's move on.

37:09SPEAKER- Yeah, it's grim.

37:12SPEAKER- 1993 was the year that SGI launched the Onyx,

37:16SPEAKERwhich was a big giant, one of the early 3D workstations.

37:20SPEAKERThey came in both rack mounts and like a desktop cube

37:23SPEAKERthat was about the size of a small refrigerator.

37:25SPEAKERIt was huge.

37:29SPEAKERAnd of note, this was the dev kit that Nintendo used

37:34SPEAKERfor early N64 games.

37:37SPEAKER- Interesting.

37:38SPEAKERExcuse me, I think you mean Ultra 64.

37:39SPEAKER- Sorry, Ultra 64.

37:41SPEAKER- Project reality.

37:42SPEAKER- Yes.

37:44SPEAKER- But I mean, it's like, how do you make 3D games

37:47SPEAKERwhen there's no 3D hardware, right?

37:49SPEAKER- That's a good question.

37:50SPEAKER- Yeah, well, it turns out you buy a quarter

37:52SPEAKERof a million dollar workstation for dev kits.

37:55SPEAKERAnd then only probably one person in the studio

37:58SPEAKERor two people in the studio have access to machines

38:01SPEAKERthat can show you what the game is gonna look like

38:02SPEAKERon a hardware that won't exist for another year,

38:05SPEAKERtwo years probably.

38:06SPEAKER- It's kept in a climate control room.

38:08SPEAKERTwo keys have to be turned simultaneously to open the vault.

38:11SPEAKER- I assume that at that point,

38:18SPEAKERextrapolating out what I know about PC game dev

38:20SPEAKERat that time, the teams were still pretty small.

38:23SPEAKERLike we're talking 20 to 40 people on a big game.

38:25SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

38:26SPEAKER- And the dev cycles were like 18 months at the outside.

38:29SPEAKER- Right, right.

38:30SPEAKERI mean, to put it in context, I mean, this, you know,

38:32SPEAKERobviously this was the direct successor

38:33SPEAKERto the Super Nintendo.

38:35SPEAKEREven some of the biggest Super Nintendo games,

38:37SPEAKERlike Final Fantasy six, like one, you know, in my mind.

38:41SPEAKER- Enormous game.

38:42SPEAKER- Yes, in my mind, one of the more sprawling games

38:43SPEAKERon that system, I think had like six developers, maybe seven.

38:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

38:47SPEAKER- It was a tiny team.

38:48SPEAKERLike the development teams were still pretty scrappy.

38:52SPEAKER- So the launch versions of these used MIPS processors,

38:58SPEAKERbut they had reality engine two graphics pipelines.

39:00SPEAKERAnd then eventually you could buy it in either MIPS

39:02SPEAKERor I think deck alpha configurations,

39:05SPEAKERdepending on what kind of processor architecture you wanted.

39:08SPEAKERBut like the panel, the input panel on the back

39:13SPEAKERof this thing, especially the workstation ones is the best.

39:16SPEAKERCause it's got like 55 different weird analog DBS plugs,

39:21SPEAKERlike all VGA and serial and the screwy things

39:25SPEAKERthat we'd never seen before, so.

39:27SPEAKER- Also, this is one of the cool ones.

39:29SPEAKERIf you Google the SGI Onyx,

39:31SPEAKERthis is up there with cool SGI case designs.

39:35SPEAKER- Yeah, I think I like the late nineties,

39:37SPEAKERlike the tower, when they got more reasonably sized,

39:40SPEAKERwhen the 3D accelerators got more accessible.

39:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.

39:44SPEAKERThey got a little too curvy for my taste later on though.

39:46SPEAKERI like the Onyx, true to its name,

39:48SPEAKERthe Onyx is just this like big black cube.

39:50SPEAKERIt's just an obelisk.

39:51SPEAKER- Those curved ones look like something,

39:53SPEAKERit looks like a spaceship from Babylon five or something.

39:56SPEAKER- Yes, there is a distinct late nineties cheese,

39:59SPEAKERsci-fi cheese to those cases for sure.

40:02SPEAKER- Look, there was,

40:03SPEAKERlook, taking a normal-ass PC case

40:06SPEAKERand then putting a bunch of injection molded plastic stuff

40:08SPEAKERclipped onto the outside was a very popular thing

40:10SPEAKERfor a while in the late nineties or early two thousands.

40:13SPEAKER- It sure was.

40:14SPEAKERAll right, speaking of video game related stuff, I guess,

40:17SPEAKERI mean, this has much broader applications,

40:18SPEAKERbut Lua was created in 1993, the...

40:21SPEAKER- Descripting language?

40:22SPEAKER- Yes, the programming language, you might say.

40:25SPEAKER- Sorry, I didn't realize it was that old.

40:28SPEAKER- Yeah, a lot of the stuff is,

40:29SPEAKERlike Python also is very old.

40:31SPEAKERLike a lot of the languages that are still in use

40:33SPEAKERare from this era, like early nineties.

40:35SPEAKERLike the, you know, there's a lot of the frameworks

40:37SPEAKERthat were built for them came later.

40:40SPEAKER- That makes sense.

40:41SPEAKER- Initial releases of a lot of these,

40:42SPEAKERa lot of the current,

40:43SPEAKERlike the garbage collected languages that are,

40:46SPEAKERI think programming languages just take a very long time

40:48SPEAKERto architect and design and implement

40:50SPEAKERand then start catching on, you know, like even Rust is,

40:53SPEAKERI think 10 to 15 years old from its genesis at this point

40:57SPEAKERor something like everything's been around for a while

41:00SPEAKERbefore you heard of it,

41:01SPEAKERunless you're like a bleeding edge software developer.

41:03SPEAKER- If you think about it, when I first started,

41:06SPEAKERwhen I took CS100 in college, like it was one of the,

41:10SPEAKERI think they'd been teaching C in that class

41:12SPEAKERfor like two years at that point.

41:14SPEAKERAnd before that it was Fortran probably.

41:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like all Fortran and COBOL.

41:19SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, like ancient stuff at that point.

41:22SPEAKER- Right, right.

41:23SPEAKERSo yeah, Lua is notable for being all over the place

41:26SPEAKERin video games, right?

41:26SPEAKERLike Roblox uses it for scripting.

41:30SPEAKERUnreal uses it for scripting stuff.

41:32SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, World of Warcraft uses it for UI mods.

41:36SPEAKER- It's funny, that was the first place I was exposed to it

41:38SPEAKERI think was probably in WoW UI mods 20 years ago.

41:41SPEAKER- Yes, for sure.

41:42SPEAKERGod, wait, what?

41:43SPEAKER- It's still all over the, like it's still super,

41:45SPEAKERlike the play date you can write Lua games for.

41:47SPEAKER- Did you just say 20 years ago?

41:49SPEAKER- WoW came out 2018 years ago, Brad.

41:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I know, I know.

41:52SPEAKERI just, I'm not quite ready to hear the World of Warcraft

41:55SPEAKERis basically 20 years old.

41:56SPEAKER- Have you played, have you looked at WoW in recent history?

41:59SPEAKER- I don't get into my weird perversions.

42:02SPEAKERI keep the PTR client installed at all times

42:06SPEAKERbecause like several times a year

42:08SPEAKERI'm just seized by nostalgia.

42:10SPEAKER- Want to go back to Orgrimmar?

42:12SPEAKER- Yeah, pretty much.

42:13SPEAKERSo yes, here's a little tip.

42:15SPEAKERYou can, I might've gotten this from the Discord.

42:16SPEAKERYou can play the PTR for free.

42:19SPEAKERNobody is on it, and I mean nobody.

42:21SPEAKERLike usually when I get in there,

42:23SPEAKERI'll do a slash who to see if anybody else is online

42:25SPEAKERand there might be one other person in a given zone, maybe.

42:28SPEAKER- We should be the PTR's only raid.

42:30SPEAKERWe're, do they give you free gear on the PTR still?

42:33SPEAKER- We're going to be the top guild on the PTR, no.

42:35SPEAKER- Top raid guild on the PTR.

42:37SPEAKER- No, you still have to play it as normal.

42:38SPEAKERBut you can import all your old characters.

42:40SPEAKERIf you have any old characters from back in the day,

42:44SPEAKERyou can bring them right into that server

42:45SPEAKERand like all the level balancing that they did

42:47SPEAKERwhere everything is like level 30 now,

42:48SPEAKERyou can basically just,

42:50SPEAKERmost zones except the current content,

42:52SPEAKERyou can just run in there and kill everything in one hit.

42:54SPEAKERSo like I also stopped playing before flying mounts

42:57SPEAKERreally became a thing, especially in the old game.

43:00SPEAKERSo it's kind of fun to fly around all those old zones

43:02SPEAKERyou played way back when and check stuff out that way.

43:04SPEAKERAnd like, I've run through a bunch of old raids,

43:06SPEAKERlike Scholomance that I only heard about back in the day

43:08SPEAKER'cause I wasn't high level enough to check them out.

43:11SPEAKERAnd I was just like, I want to see what Scholomance was like

43:14SPEAKERand I just run in there and kill everything and it's fun.

43:16SPEAKER- That sounds fun.

43:17SPEAKER- It's a neat little trip down memory lane.

43:19SPEAKERAnyway, Lua, still in use.

43:21SPEAKERYeah, like you said, Lua is one of the two.

43:24SPEAKERI think C is the other one.

43:25SPEAKERYou can write games for the play date in Lua or C.

43:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you can do it.

43:31SPEAKERIt pops up all over the place.

43:32SPEAKERIt's that's the weird thing.

43:35SPEAKERShould we talk about math?

43:38SPEAKER- Sure, not my favorite or best subject, but sure.

43:42SPEAKER- I'm gonna mispronounce his name 'cause I've never,

43:44SPEAKERI realized as I was getting ready to talk about this,

43:46SPEAKERI've never actually heard his name pronounced

43:47SPEAKERand I think he's French.

43:48SPEAKERSo Fermat's last theorem.

43:50SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the maybe phonetic way to say it.

43:54SPEAKER- Yeah, I apologize again.

43:56SPEAKERI think that this is math's greatest troll.

43:59SPEAKER- Okay.

44:00SPEAKER- So he wrote in the margins of another manuscript

44:05SPEAKERthis thing right near the end of his life.

44:08SPEAKERAnd he said it's impossible to separate.

44:10SPEAKERSo it's impossible to separate a cube into two cubes

44:13SPEAKERor a fourth power into two fourth powers

44:15SPEAKERor in general, any power higher than the second

44:17SPEAKERinto two like powers for any number greater than one or two

44:21SPEAKERis the implication here.

44:23SPEAKERI've discovered a truly marvelous proof of this

44:25SPEAKERwhich this margin is too narrow to contain.

44:28SPEAKER- It's a definite troll.

44:30SPEAKER- So basically it's the idea is, you know how A squared

44:34SPEAKERplus B squared is equal to C squared

44:35SPEAKERwhen you're talking about a right triangle,

44:38SPEAKERthe Pythagoras theorem theorem.

44:40SPEAKER- Yes.

44:41SPEAKER- He's saying that you can't do that for other constructs.

44:48SPEAKERIt only applies to like right triangles basically.

44:50SPEAKERAnd this guy named Andrew Wiles, a mathematician

44:53SPEAKERfigured out a proof, I think when did Fermat die?

44:59SPEAKERIt was a long time.

45:01SPEAKERIt was in 1600s, so it was a 400 year old conjecture

45:07SPEAKERat this point.

45:10SPEAKERAnd yeah, and it was a conversation that like,

45:12SPEAKERit opened up a lot of math basically,

45:15SPEAKERthat obviously most high level math stuff

45:18SPEAKERhas to do with cryptography,

45:19SPEAKERbut it also changed a bunch of like,

45:22SPEAKERit was a foundational piece of math that was developed

45:26SPEAKERand Andrew Wiles' initial proof ended up being,

45:29SPEAKERhaving some errors that they were able to patch later on.

45:31SPEAKERSo. - Okay.

45:33SPEAKERIs it really a troll if you actually have the goods?

45:36SPEAKER- The, so the analysis of the solution

45:40SPEAKERthat Andrew Wiles came up with,

45:41SPEAKERand it's possible there's still another proof out there

45:43SPEAKERthat's simpler, but the analysis was that the math foundation

45:49SPEAKERthat was required to generate Andrew Wiles' proof

45:53SPEAKERdid not exist in the 1600s

45:55SPEAKERwhen Fermat wrote this in the thing.

45:58SPEAKERSo either he came up with a different proof

46:00SPEAKERthat was simpler, which is possible, but unlikely,

46:04SPEAKERor he was just trolling people.

46:07SPEAKER- The world will never know.

46:09SPEAKER- The world will, I mean,

46:10SPEAKERthis is what we need time machines for, Brad.

46:11SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

46:13SPEAKEROkay, this next one.

46:15SPEAKERYou explicitly told me to read nothing about this topic

46:17SPEAKERbefore we came in here.

46:19SPEAKER- Okay.

46:20SPEAKER- So I've avoided looking at your bullet points.

46:22SPEAKERWhat do you got?

46:23SPEAKER- Biosphere 2 was a scientific endeavor.

46:26SPEAKER- Oh, it's the one with Pauly Shore, right?

46:29SPEAKER- No, that's a movie.

46:29SPEAKERThat movie's, he tweeted two days ago.

46:34SPEAKER- What?

46:35SPEAKER- That Biosphere 2, the movie, is in the works.

46:39SPEAKER- What?

46:40SPEAKER- Because of continued, continued audience interest.

46:45SPEAKER- It's a fan favorite cult classic.

46:48SPEAKER- Have you ever seen it?

46:49SPEAKER- No.

46:49SPEAKER- I have not.

46:50SPEAKER- This was the movie just called Biosphere?

46:52SPEAKER- It was called Biosphere.

46:53SPEAKER- Okay.

46:54SPEAKER- So this is the pop culture implementation

46:56SPEAKERof the Biosphere project,

46:57SPEAKERbut the Biosphere project was an actual real thing

47:00SPEAKERwhere they had a two year mission

47:02SPEAKERinto a sealed environment in the desert in Arizona.

47:08SPEAKERIt had seven biomes that were with 3.4,

47:11SPEAKER3.14 total acres inside.

47:13SPEAKERThere were eight people that lived inside

47:15SPEAKERand they wanted to do it as a test

47:17SPEAKERto see what they would learn,

47:19SPEAKERtrying to maintain a sealed environment

47:21SPEAKERin case we wanted to build habitats in space

47:26SPEAKERthat were sealed in a similar way.

47:29SPEAKERThe environments were rainforest,

47:31SPEAKERthere was an ocean with a reef,

47:32SPEAKERthere was a mangrove wetland, there was a savanna,

47:35SPEAKERthere was a fog desert, an agricultural area,

47:38SPEAKERand then just the human,

47:40SPEAKERlike the living quarters for the humans.

47:42SPEAKERAnd power came from a natural gas plant

47:45SPEAKERthat was outside the dome, I believe.

47:47SPEAKER- Do we know, can we assume

47:48SPEAKERthat the eight people they chose were competent,

47:50SPEAKERprobably experts in their field

47:52SPEAKERand not just like people off the street?

47:53SPEAKER- Oh no, yeah, they absolutely,

47:55SPEAKERthey did not get Pauly Shores in to run this thing.

47:58SPEAKERThey had people who were specialists in various things.

48:03SPEAKER- Right.

48:04SPEAKER- And it sounded awful.

48:06SPEAKER- Okay.

48:07SPEAKER- Like it really went to shit fast, but like--

48:10SPEAKER- That's why I wanted to establish

48:12SPEAKERthat these were like kind of the best suited people

48:14SPEAKERto carry this out and even then.

48:16SPEAKERThere was a public perception at the time

48:18SPEAKERthat the whole thing was a boondoggle and was a stunt.

48:22SPEAKERWhich, I mean, I'm waving my hand, right?

48:26SPEAKER- Sure.

48:27SPEAKER- It seems like in retrospect that it was actually,

48:30SPEAKERlike they made a real effort to like see what happened

48:34SPEAKERwhen you, see if you could generate enough oxygen

48:36SPEAKERout of these biomes to offset the carbon dioxide

48:40SPEAKERproduced by the people, by the humans.

48:46SPEAKER- But it sounded really, really, truly awful.

48:48SPEAKERLike the first year, everybody reported constant hunger.

48:51SPEAKERThey were all on like sub 1500 calorie diets

48:54SPEAKERbecause they couldn't produce enough food inside.

48:57SPEAKERThe oxygen levels were low

49:00SPEAKERand the carbon dioxide levels were really high.

49:02SPEAKERSo they were kind of, you know how you get

49:04SPEAKERwhen you've been in a conference room for too long

49:06SPEAKERand then the PBM spikes, little loopy.

49:09SPEAKERYeah, so oxygen started at 20.9% when they closed the door.

49:14SPEAKERAnd after 16 months, it was a 14.5%, just pretty low.

49:18SPEAKERAt which point they decided they wanted to inject

49:20SPEAKERfrom the outside to stabilize the experiment

49:23SPEAKER'cause they didn't want people to start having problems.

49:26SPEAKER- Right.

49:27SPEAKER- They also consumed the low calorie, high nutrient diet

49:30SPEAKERfrom this guy named Roy Walford's life extension experiments.

49:34SPEAKERThis is the, his stuff is the basis

49:36SPEAKERfor a lot of the kind of fasting diets that you see now

49:43SPEAKERthat are supposed to make people like Peter Thiel

49:45SPEAKERlive a long time.

49:47SPEAKERAlmost all of the vertebrates

49:49SPEAKERinside the different biospheres died.

49:51SPEAKER- Oh no.

49:52SPEAKER- Almost all of the pollinating insects died.

49:54SPEAKER- Oh no.

49:57SPEAKER- And even though the humans inside

50:00SPEAKERalmost immediately split into two factions

50:03SPEAKERthat were basically at war with each other,

50:05SPEAKERthey still work together and they got the work done

50:08SPEAKERto keep the experiment going,

50:10SPEAKERpartly out of a sense of self-preservation,

50:12SPEAKERbut partly I think because they had all invested

50:14SPEAKERa lot of ego in the thing.

50:16SPEAKERAnd it was a weird mix, there were like some executives,

50:18SPEAKERthere were some ecologists, there was a doctor,

50:21SPEAKERthere was a psychologist, like it was not a,

50:24SPEAKERit was a group of people who were all really committed

50:26SPEAKERto this idea and it was called,

50:28SPEAKERof course it was called Biosphere 2

50:30SPEAKERbecause the first biosphere is the earth.

50:32SPEAKER- Of course.

50:34SPEAKEROf course, hey, they understand branding, scientists.

50:36SPEAKER- Yeah, the two factions were the ecology research

50:40SPEAKERversus the closed system research factions.

50:42SPEAKER- Of course, that's how it always goes.

50:44SPEAKER- The nerdiest factions possible.

50:45SPEAKER- Yes.

50:47SPEAKER- They did it again after they finished the first year,

50:50SPEAKERwhich finishing the first year happened in '93,

50:53SPEAKERit started in '91.

50:55SPEAKERThey started again in '94 and ran out of money

50:59SPEAKERmidway through it, but it's still there.

51:01SPEAKER- Wow, really? - You can go visit it now.

51:04SPEAKERPolyshore is not there, as far as I know.

51:05SPEAKER- What state is, well, you said it's in the desert.

51:08SPEAKER- It's in Arizona, I think. - Arizona, okay.

51:09SPEAKERWhere did the money come from?

51:11SPEAKERI'm sure, as we've established previously,

51:13SPEAKERI'm sure that had a lot of effect

51:14SPEAKERon the public response to this.

51:17SPEAKER- It was funded by billionaire philanthropist Ed Bass

51:22SPEAKERand systems ecologist John P. Allen.

51:25SPEAKERBass provided $150 million in funding, which lasted until '91.

51:29SPEAKER- Okay.

51:31SPEAKER- And yeah, they wanted, this spun off

51:33SPEAKERof the Buckminster Fuller Spaceship Earth concept,

51:37SPEAKERwhich we, I learned about that as a kid.

51:41SPEAKER- Yeah, one more quick thing.

51:43SPEAKERYou have a sub bullet point here

51:45SPEAKERthat you did not comment on, which says secret food stashes.

51:50SPEAKER- Oh yeah, so that was the kind of stuff

51:51SPEAKERthat got reported on the nightly news.

51:53SPEAKERThe news treated this thing as a thing

51:55SPEAKERthat was cursed to failure,

51:58SPEAKERand talking about secret food stashes,

52:01SPEAKERor when they had to add oxygen,

52:03SPEAKERit was like, this is horrible.

52:05SPEAKERBut in reality, it was always an experiment

52:08SPEAKERand there were always contingencies.

52:10SPEAKERFrom reading the post, who knows who writes this stuff,

52:15SPEAKERbut from reading the post wrap ups

52:16SPEAKERand the journal articles that came out of it,

52:19SPEAKERit seems like things were done deliberately

52:21SPEAKERand with the best intent to get clean results out of this.

52:26SPEAKER- So those were intentional stashes

52:28SPEAKERthat were put there in case of emergency?

52:29SPEAKER- The stashes, I don't know about.

52:31SPEAKERThe oxygen definitely was a real thing.

52:33SPEAKERThe stashes, I believe, were just alleged

52:35SPEAKERand never actually confirmed.

52:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I took that to mean certain self-interested members

52:40SPEAKERof the experiment maybe were shoring up their own positions.

52:43SPEAKER- Well, so I will say from watching

52:45SPEAKERa fair amount of "Survivor" over the years,

52:48SPEAKERif people are eating low calorie diets

52:51SPEAKERand one person is hoarding food,

52:55SPEAKERit's gonna go real bad for the person who's hoarding food.

52:58SPEAKER- Fair. - Yeah.

52:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:01SPEAKER- That's a real good way to get voted off the island,

53:04SPEAKERif you know what I mean. - Cautionary tale.

53:06SPEAKER- Yeah, toward the end of the year,

53:08SPEAKERthis is a thing I remember fondly, "The Doom Shareware."

53:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:15SPEAKER- Carmack and Id had been working for 30 hours straight.

53:19SPEAKERThey uploaded the first episode of the game

53:22SPEAKERto a big FTP server at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

53:27SPEAKERand immediately, the server went down before they could get

53:31SPEAKERthe file all the way uploaded, as I understand it.

53:34SPEAKERI didn't know, but at this point,

53:35SPEAKERbut we downloaded it shortly after,

53:37SPEAKERlater that night from one of the mirrors

53:39SPEAKERand went downstairs and played in the computer lab

53:41SPEAKERin the basement of my dorm when the lab closed at midnight.

53:44SPEAKERAnd yeah, it was an amazing,

53:49SPEAKERit was like, Wolfenstein was a thing

53:52SPEAKERthat we had played before that point.

53:54SPEAKER- So you knew this was coming?

53:56SPEAKER- I would say that there were two kids

53:58SPEAKERon the floor of my dorm that were really dialed in

54:01SPEAKERto what was coming out.

54:04SPEAKERAnd then one of them was like,

54:05SPEAKER"Hey, I got the Doom Shareware."

54:07SPEAKERSo we copied it to floppies and went downstairs

54:08SPEAKERand put it on all the computers in the lab.

54:10SPEAKERAnd we were like, "What's this multiplayer thing?"

54:12SPEAKERAnd then we got yelled at by the network admins.

54:14SPEAKER- You left out the part

54:14SPEAKERwhere your heads all collectively exploded

54:16SPEAKERwhen you played "Deathmatch" for the first time?

54:19SPEAKER- I'm gonna go ahead and tell, okay,

54:20SPEAKERso we started out by playing some single-player

54:24SPEAKERand then somebody was like,

54:24SPEAKER"Hey, what's this multiplayer thing?"

54:26SPEAKERWe fired it up and it worked.

54:28SPEAKERAnd we were just like,

54:29SPEAKER"This is the most amazing thing in the world.

54:30SPEAKERWe're shooting each other."

54:31SPEAKER'Cause that you, literally, that was the thing.

54:34SPEAKER'Cause at that point,

54:36SPEAKERI don't think I'd ever played a computer game

54:39SPEAKERthat one person,

54:41SPEAKERthat wasn't two people sitting in front of the same TV.

54:44SPEAKER- Right, the game on this computer

54:47SPEAKERis interacting with the game on this other computer.

54:49SPEAKERI just, man, I cannot imagine being in college

54:52SPEAKERin a dorm that Doom released.

54:55SPEAKER- My roommate almost lost his work study.

54:57SPEAKER- That's bad.

54:57SPEAKER- 'Cause we fucked up the network for the school.

54:59SPEAKER'Cause there was a bug that basically,

55:02SPEAKERI think it packet flooded the IPX network

55:05SPEAKERwhenever you had a multiplayer game going.

55:06SPEAKERSo it basically brought down all network traffic

55:09SPEAKERon the whole school land

55:11SPEAKER'cause they didn't have it segmented the way we would now.

55:14SPEAKER- Oops.

55:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and that was bad.

55:17SPEAKERSo there was an update the next day,

55:20SPEAKERbut we were not allowed to play Doom in the lab anymore.

55:22SPEAKER- The damage had been done.

55:24SPEAKER- Yeah, it was very sad.

55:25SPEAKER- I didn't come to Doom until I think the year after.

55:28SPEAKERAnd I had a much reduced version of what you're describing

55:32SPEAKERby playing it over the modem with one friend across town.

55:35SPEAKERBut even then it was just like, oh my God.

55:37SPEAKER- I did that for years afterwards.

55:40SPEAKERMy friend Marty and I played Doom and Duke 3D and Descent

55:45SPEAKERand all those kind of early modem to modem multiplayer.

55:49SPEAKERYou're like, I remember, you may not,

55:51SPEAKERwhen Quake came out, it was controversial

55:53SPEAKER'cause there wasn't an easy way to play modem based

55:55SPEAKER'cause it was a server host game.

55:57SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I remember.

55:58SPEAKERYou had to have an internet connection,

55:59SPEAKERwhich not everybody had.

56:00SPEAKER- Yeah, and most people didn't have an internet connection

56:02SPEAKERthat could play network Quake at launch, especially.

56:05SPEAKER- Also, I mean, you can still, not to get off topic,

56:07SPEAKERyou can go back and read the Carmack plan update

56:09SPEAKERright after Quake came out where he basically says like,

56:11SPEAKERoh yeah, we didn't test the net code over modems.

56:13SPEAKERI have a T1 to my house.

56:15SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:15SPEAKER- Is what he said.

56:16SPEAKERThey had no idea how badly Quake was going to play

56:19SPEAKERover modems 'cause they didn't,

56:20SPEAKER'cause they were living that life.

56:23SPEAKER- They weren't that concerned about market fit

56:24SPEAKERback then, it turns out.

56:25SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, yes.

56:27SPEAKER- But yeah, no, it was a really,

56:33SPEAKERit was the first time that Shareware,

56:35SPEAKERso I think the copy of Wolfenstein

56:38SPEAKERthat everybody was passing up and down the hallway,

56:39SPEAKER'cause freshman dorms at college

56:42SPEAKERare one of the great software piracy scenes, it turns out.

56:47SPEAKERThe copy of Wolfenstein was one of the retail packages

56:51SPEAKERthat was sold eventually.

56:53SPEAKERAnd so I had never been exposed to Shareware before that.

56:58SPEAKERI was like, wait, what, we reached the end of the game?

56:59SPEAKERWe gotta start, how do we get the rest of this?

57:03SPEAKERYou had to call a phone number

57:04SPEAKERand give them your credit card number

57:05SPEAKERand then they would send you a key

57:07SPEAKERthat would unlock the rest of it or something.

57:08SPEAKERI don't know, it was weird.

57:09SPEAKER- 1-800-8-Games, if I'm not mistaken.

57:12SPEAKER- Yeah, that seems right, that seems right.

57:14SPEAKEROperators are standing by, but yeah,

57:16SPEAKERit was like that moment when,

57:18SPEAKERand of course we all played on keyboard only, right?

57:21SPEAKERNobody knew to use the mouse at that point, too,

57:22SPEAKERso that's the other funny thing.

57:24SPEAKERLike the moment somebody was like,

57:25SPEAKERwhat is it, wait, you can turn a lot faster

57:27SPEAKERif you use the mouse, that changed the game.

57:30SPEAKER- I mean, dude, I played Doom on a Gravis game pad

57:32SPEAKERfor the first few months, I didn't know any better.

57:35SPEAKER- I mean, look, Gina played on a 32,

57:39SPEAKERthe only version of Doom she ever played

57:40SPEAKERwas the 32X version.

57:41SPEAKER- Oh, one, oh no, oh no.

57:43SPEAKERWell, that's not a terrible version, it's playable.

57:46SPEAKER- It's fine, and it didn't make her motion sick, so yeah.

57:49SPEAKER- First and last first person shooter, anyway, Doom.

57:53SPEAKER- Doom, all right, we maybe could have put

57:56SPEAKERa little more thought into the flow of this episode.

57:58SPEAKERWe're on our last topic, it's a real banger,

58:03SPEAKERit's text encoding and file formats.

58:06SPEAKER- Look, man, if you wanna show me a more interesting topic

58:08SPEAKERthan text encoding and file formats,

58:10SPEAKERI'll scroll back up to the space section

58:11SPEAKERand be waiting for you.

58:12SPEAKER- Okay, fine, all right, let's just do this here.

58:15SPEAKER- UTF-8, UTF Unicode in general.

58:19SPEAKER- Is this the eighth version of the Unicode text format?

58:22SPEAKER- No, this is an eight bit implementation

58:24SPEAKERof the Unicode spec, that's what the different UTFs are.

58:28SPEAKERUTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32, so those are 16 and 32 bit.

58:32SPEAKERIt essentially is how many bytes per character

58:34SPEAKERthey use to encode them and it determines

58:37SPEAKERhow many characters in the spec,

58:39SPEAKERhow many different characters they can represent.

58:41SPEAKERI don't know what, I tried to do a little more research

58:43SPEAKERon what UTF-16 and 32 are used for.

58:47SPEAKERCouldn't come up with a ton because UTF-8

58:49SPEAKERapparently covers basically every writing system on earth.

58:53SPEAKERSo-- - Emoji, right?

58:54SPEAKER- I'm sorry?

58:55SPEAKER- We'll eventually run out of emoji space in UTF-8.

58:57SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe that's what it is, yeah, I'm not sure.

59:00SPEAKERBut this is essentially my impression.

59:04SPEAKERYou tell me a little bit of reading I did about this.

59:06SPEAKERLike UTF-8 is kind of the successor to ASCII.

59:09SPEAKERRemember ASCII text? - That's my understanding.

59:11SPEAKER- Yeah, so also the ASCII text apparently

59:14SPEAKERgrew straight out of the telegram.

59:17SPEAKER- Really, that I didn't know.

59:18SPEAKER- Yes, so I went look, the ASCII text was defined

59:21SPEAKERbeginning in 1961 and it was based on telegram code.

59:26SPEAKERBut the A in ASCII stands for American,

59:28SPEAKERso it is pretty much just Latin characters, I believe.

59:30SPEAKER- Okay.

59:32SPEAKER- Here's a fun, here's another fun tidbit

59:34SPEAKERabout Unicode UTF-8.

59:37SPEAKERIt is backwards compatible with ASCII.

59:39SPEAKERThe first 128 characters of UTF-8 are the same

59:43SPEAKERas the first 128 characters of ASCII.

59:46SPEAKER- Oh, that makes sense.

59:47SPEAKER- So ASCII becomes valid UTF-8 encoded text as well.

59:51SPEAKER- Oh, that's, wow, that's really clever.

59:55SPEAKERSo then it just works.

59:56SPEAKER- Yeah, but yes, gosh, I had it in front of me

59:59SPEAKERand I may have lost it.

1:00:01SPEAKERThe number of characters that can be represented

1:00:03SPEAKERin UTF-8 is quite a few.

1:00:07SPEAKEROnce you get up into 16, oh, here it is.

1:00:09SPEAKERYeah, it's well over a million.

1:00:11SPEAKERIt's basically over 1.1 million characters

1:00:14SPEAKERcan be represented in the 8-bit UTF.

1:00:17SPEAKER- So you're saying we have room for more emoji?

1:00:19SPEAKER- Probably, probably.

1:00:21SPEAKER- Thank goodness.

1:00:21SPEAKER- Yes.

1:00:24SPEAKERI guess it's UTF-8 is like all over the place

1:00:27SPEAKERin all the Unix likes these days.

1:00:29SPEAKERIt is, the current stats I could find are that 98%

1:00:33SPEAKERof webpages and up to 100% in some languages

1:00:35SPEAKERare encoded in UTF-8.

1:00:37SPEAKER- Well, yeah, it's a weird thing

1:00:39SPEAKER'cause it's one of those things

1:00:40SPEAKERthat you kind of probably didn't have to know anything about

1:00:42SPEAKERand then all of a sudden it was everywhere.

1:00:44SPEAKERI mean, 20 years later, but still.

1:00:46SPEAKER- Also, if you ever work with like text parsing

1:00:48SPEAKERand stuff like that in a Unix like or whatever,

1:00:51SPEAKERlike sometimes you do have to care about what,

1:00:54SPEAKERhow the text is actually encoded,

1:00:55SPEAKEReven though you can't see it,

1:00:56SPEAKERit just looks like text, but it does matter.

1:00:59SPEAKER- It's important for smart quotes, that's all I know.

1:01:02SPEAKER- The last thing I wrote here, which is kind of tangential,

1:01:05SPEAKERit still really weirds me out to see emojis

1:01:07SPEAKERin a terminal program.

1:01:11SPEAKER- The thing I didn't realize is that a lot of the emojis

1:01:13SPEAKERare copyrighted.

1:01:14SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know that.

1:01:15SPEAKER- So yeah, that's why everybody has different ones.

1:01:17SPEAKERSo there's no standard drawings, it's just a rep,

1:01:20SPEAKERlike the emoji spec includes the description of the drawing,

1:01:24SPEAKERbut not the actual drawing.

1:01:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I have seen out there comparisons

1:01:28SPEAKERof like here is the Apple version of this

1:01:29SPEAKERand the Google version and the Windows version.

1:01:31SPEAKER- Like Apple's gun is a squirt gun and Android's gun is,

1:01:35SPEAKERwell, I mean, I think it's a squirt gun now,

1:01:36SPEAKERbut for long it was a regular gun.

1:01:38SPEAKERThe interesting thing is I think Twitter released

1:01:43SPEAKERtheir emoji spec as it's open source.

1:01:47SPEAKERSo you can actually just, like if you wanna implement

1:01:50SPEAKERa emoji font in your application,

1:01:53SPEAKERyou just grab their glyphs and you're good to go.

1:01:56SPEAKER- That's probably smart branding.

1:01:58SPEAKER- I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

1:02:00SPEAKERAnd they also do a really nice job

1:02:01SPEAKER'cause they have full color and outline only ones,

1:02:04SPEAKERwhich is important.

1:02:05SPEAKERThe outline only ones, it turns out are really good

1:02:07SPEAKERfor stuff like terminals and things like that.

1:02:09SPEAKER- Right, it's just weird to me

1:02:10SPEAKERbecause I understand how like a terminal

1:02:12SPEAKERis drawing text to a screen in graphics mode and everything.

1:02:15SPEAKERBut to me, terminals are still a descendant of that era

1:02:18SPEAKERwhen you had nothing but text mode.

1:02:20SPEAKERAnd it shouldn't be able to display graphics

1:02:22SPEAKERin a fixed width terminal output.

1:02:24SPEAKER- Should we do an emoji episode?

1:02:26SPEAKER- Maybe, I like, that's such a,

1:02:29SPEAKERlike I remember when phones were new,

1:02:30SPEAKERyou had to download a special app to get access to them.

1:02:33SPEAKERAnd then all of a sudden they were built into the phones

1:02:34SPEAKERand then the next thing you knew,

1:02:35SPEAKERyour parents were using them.

1:02:37SPEAKERSo, what happened to the humble emoticon, Brad?

1:02:41SPEAKER- You're ubiquitous.

1:02:42SPEAKERI am a, you might be shocked to find,

1:02:46SPEAKERI'm a stubborn emoticon holdout.

1:02:48SPEAKER- Me too.

1:02:49SPEAKERI think this is a generational definer probably.

1:02:52SPEAKER- It absolutely is.

1:02:53SPEAKERI turned off all the text to emoji translation on Discord.

1:02:57SPEAKER- Wow.

1:02:58SPEAKER- Stubbornly, I am a colon close parenthesis type of person.

1:03:03SPEAKER- Okay.

1:03:04SPEAKER- I always, actually, I always like equal sign,

1:03:06SPEAKERclose parenthesis.

1:03:07SPEAKERI thought that was, or even equal sign, like close bracket.

1:03:09SPEAKERI thought those were fun smiles.

1:03:11SPEAKER- I did, I was a colon O and then a parenthesis

1:03:14SPEAKER'cause I like my smiley faces to have noses.

1:03:18SPEAKER- Sure.

1:03:19SPEAKERI like, I'm a big fan of carrot underscore dash.

1:03:25SPEAKER- Oh yeah, carrot underscore dash is pretty good, yeah.

1:03:27SPEAKER- It's kind of like a,

1:03:29SPEAKERalso capital O underscore little O is a good one

1:03:32SPEAKERof a kind of, that is a kind of confused--

1:03:35SPEAKER- Is that like the cockeyed one?

1:03:36SPEAKER- Discombobulated though,

1:03:38SPEAKERyou're kind of squinting with one eye.

1:03:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess this is,

1:03:42SPEAKERI always interpreted that one as stink eye.

1:03:44SPEAKERLook, for a long time, I'm not gonna lie,

1:03:45SPEAKERI was afraid of emoji 'cause I was afraid I would like,

1:03:47SPEAKERthat people use them for different things

1:03:49SPEAKERthan they were like obvious for.

1:03:51SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's a valid concern.

1:03:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I didn't wanna accidentally

1:03:54SPEAKERproposition someone or something.

1:03:55SPEAKER- Right, yes, you never know.

1:03:57SPEAKER- Never used the eggplant, Brad, and trees mean weed.

1:04:01SPEAKERWho knew?

1:04:02SPEAKER- Who knew?

1:04:03SPEAKER- A couple more file formats here real quick.

1:04:06SPEAKERThe RAR format.

1:04:08SPEAKER- Oh, only the hottest stuff.

1:04:09SPEAKER- Debuted in 1983.

1:04:10SPEAKER- RAR is really this new?

1:04:11SPEAKER- I guess so.

1:04:12SPEAKER- Wow.

1:04:13SPEAKER- So RAR, it was and is proprietary to this day.

1:04:18SPEAKERIt's still controlled by,

1:04:19SPEAKERI guess now the brother of the programmer who conceived it.

1:04:22SPEAKER- Okay.

1:04:23SPEAKER- They kept it in the family, I guess.

1:04:24SPEAKERBut like, I'm sure you've noticed over the years, right?

1:04:27SPEAKERLike the RAR support in various programs

1:04:29SPEAKERis like pretty limited.

1:04:30SPEAKERLike you can't create a RAR, you can't create a RAR.

1:04:33SPEAKERThere's a distinction.

1:04:34SPEAKERYou can uncompress RARs

1:04:37SPEAKERwith I think publicly provided libraries,

1:04:39SPEAKERI think is how it works,

1:04:40SPEAKERbut you can't create them in anything

1:04:41SPEAKERbut an officially licensed program

1:04:43SPEAKERthat is licensed to create RAR files.

1:04:46SPEAKER- I'm trying this right now.

1:04:49SPEAKER- In?

1:04:50SPEAKER- 7-Zip.

1:04:51SPEAKER- Yeah, 7-Zip is the example I'm thinking of.

1:04:53SPEAKERYou can-

1:04:54SPEAKER- You can't make a RAR.

1:04:55SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely not.

1:04:56SPEAKERYou can uncompress RARs in 7-Zip all day long,

1:04:57SPEAKERbut you can't make them.

1:04:59SPEAKERThere might be an add-on, I forget.

1:05:03SPEAKER- I'm blown away.

1:05:04SPEAKERAlso, I had no idea it was proprietary.

1:05:06SPEAKERI assumed it was something that some open source people made

1:05:09SPEAKERand it became the popular thing.

1:05:11SPEAKER- Yes.

1:05:13SPEAKERRAR files can be created only with commercial software

1:05:16SPEAKERwhen RAR, RAR for Android, Command Line RAR,

1:05:21SPEAKERand other software that has written permission

1:05:23SPEAKERfrom Alexander Rochelle.

1:05:25SPEAKER- The interesting thing about RAR is it immediately,

1:05:28SPEAKERlike it seemed to take,

1:05:30SPEAKERlike at a time when bandwidth was at a premium

1:05:32SPEAKERfor most home users,

1:05:34SPEAKERit took over a very specific space,

1:05:37SPEAKERmostly in the piracy community in my recollection.

1:05:40SPEAKER- Mostly on Usenet.

1:05:41SPEAKER- Yeah, Usenet, early Usenet.

1:05:43SPEAKER- Usenet binaries are absolutely

1:05:45SPEAKERwhere I first encountered RAR files,

1:05:47SPEAKERand I don't know why it took off the way it did.

1:05:49SPEAKERWas it better compression?

1:05:50SPEAKER- It was better compression, yeah.

1:05:52SPEAKER- Okay.

1:05:53SPEAKER- So the other place you would see is on,

1:05:56SPEAKERthere was a thing that people used to do.

1:05:57SPEAKERThis is weird when I think about it.

1:05:58SPEAKERI haven't thought about this in a long time,

1:05:59SPEAKERbut like it used to be that you would get a link

1:06:02SPEAKERto a random FTP server, like some public FTP server,

1:06:05SPEAKER'cause people used to have publicly writable FTP directories

1:06:09SPEAKERwhere you could just upload your file to their server,

1:06:12SPEAKERand you would get a deep link into some like

1:06:16SPEAKER20 layers deep FTP tree.

1:06:18SPEAKER- Hidden directory.

1:06:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that had some character

1:06:21SPEAKERthat would make it not register,

1:06:23SPEAKERand then you'd find like two gigs of pirated software

1:06:27SPEAKERin there.

1:06:28SPEAKER- Bunch of zero-day sitting there on a government server.

1:06:31SPEAKER- God only knows how many viruses,

1:06:34SPEAKERlike what a vector for viruses that stuff was.

1:06:36SPEAKERLike it was a trip, but those were always RAR files,

1:06:40SPEAKERlike in various, like you could go to FTP searches

1:06:42SPEAKERand search for asterisk.rar to find the folders,

1:06:46SPEAKERoften is the gist.

1:06:47SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.

1:06:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:50SPEAKER- Don't do that, it's a bad idea also.

1:06:52SPEAKERI'm surprised RAR caught on as much as it did,

1:06:54SPEAKERconsidering how locked down it is licensing-wise,

1:06:57SPEAKERbut anyway.

1:06:58SPEAKER- I think it caught on because of like you would,

1:07:03SPEAKERI literally think somebody was like,

1:07:04SPEAKER"Hey, I want a copy of Photoshop,"

1:07:06SPEAKERand they would go download a Photoshop and it was a RAR,

1:07:08SPEAKERand then they'd have to download REN-RAR

1:07:10SPEAKERto unpack their pirated version of Photoshop.

1:07:12SPEAKERI don't know.

1:07:13SPEAKER- Everybody was using WinRAR back then,

1:07:15SPEAKERso it was not a problem.

1:07:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you had it,

1:07:17SPEAKERand you just had to wait 30 seconds for the little,

1:07:20SPEAKERlike the splash screen would come up and be like,

1:07:21SPEAKER"Hey, WinRAR is commercial software.

1:07:24SPEAKER"If you wanna keep using this for commercial use,

1:07:26SPEAKER"you have to pay us 20 bucks,"

1:07:28SPEAKERor you could just wait 30 seconds and click the thing

1:07:30SPEAKERand it would go away.

1:07:31SPEAKER- Fair.

1:07:32SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:33SPEAKER- All right, last thing, PDF.

1:07:35SPEAKER- I can't believe we've reached the end of 1993.

1:07:37SPEAKER- That's it, that's all that happened.

1:07:39SPEAKER- This is maybe, like in a lot of ways,

1:07:43SPEAKERkind of one of the most impactful things

1:07:45SPEAKERthat happened in 1993, I think.

1:07:47SPEAKER- PDF?

1:07:48SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause prior to this point,

1:07:49SPEAKERlike prior to PDF, there wasn't,

1:07:51SPEAKERyou could send an encapsulated postscript file,

1:07:54SPEAKERbut that wasn't really a,

1:07:56SPEAKERlike they're challenging the postscript files.

1:08:00SPEAKERPDF was designed to be a cross-platform way

1:08:04SPEAKERto share fonts and page designs

1:08:08SPEAKERin a way that they would render the same on multiple,

1:08:11SPEAKERon all sorts of different systems.

1:08:12SPEAKER- Right, bitmap graphics, vector graphics, fonts,

1:08:15SPEAKERlike kind of all like self, fully self-contained.

1:08:18SPEAKER- Portable, you might say, a portable format for documents.

1:08:21SPEAKER- Wow, weird.

1:08:23SPEAKER- Why was it not PFD then?

1:08:25SPEAKER- I don't know, yeah.

1:08:26SPEAKERWas there any--

1:08:29SPEAKER- Acrobat, this came with Acrobat, by the way.

1:08:31SPEAKER- Yes, Acrobat was the first reader from Adobe.

1:08:34SPEAKER- And creator.

1:08:34SPEAKER- Yeah, was there any like concern at the time

1:08:37SPEAKERthat you remember about like, oh, Adobe is trying

1:08:39SPEAKERto control the publishing space

1:08:40SPEAKERwith their own format type stuff, or?

1:08:42SPEAKER- No, because at that point,

1:08:44SPEAKERthere were 50 different desktop publishing tools

1:08:46SPEAKERthat were like, remember, this was way before,

1:08:51SPEAKERInDesign wouldn't start becoming popular

1:08:52SPEAKERfor another seven or eight years.

1:08:54SPEAKERSo people were mostly using stuff like Quark

1:08:56SPEAKERand Microsoft Publisher on the low end.

1:09:00SPEAKERAnd then there were some other tools, too,

1:09:02SPEAKERthat I never touched.

1:09:04SPEAKERBut Adobe, at that point, Adobe was the Photoshop

1:09:08SPEAKERand Illustrator company, but CorelDRAW was the good one,

1:09:10SPEAKERprobably still at that point in terms of vector graphics.

1:09:13SPEAKER- Okay, and then there's one distinction here

1:09:15SPEAKERI was hoping you could help demystify.

1:09:16SPEAKERSo the spec was free at launch,

1:09:20SPEAKERbut PDF did not become an open ISO spec until 2008.

1:09:24SPEAKER- Yeah, so Adobe said, hey, anybody can use this.

1:09:27SPEAKER- Okay.

1:09:27SPEAKER- Like if you want to build PDF into your applications,

1:09:29SPEAKERthat's fine, go for it.

1:09:31SPEAKERThe ISO process is a more,

1:09:33SPEAKERlike it's an industry agreed upon spec.

1:09:36SPEAKERAnd basically Adobe said, hey, you can have this

1:09:40SPEAKERas a international specification at this point.

1:09:45SPEAKERAnd handed it over at that point.

1:09:47SPEAKER- So that means they're giving up sole control

1:09:49SPEAKERof the design, like then other actors are able

1:09:52SPEAKERto start expanding the specification?

1:09:54SPEAKER- Theoretically, yeah.

1:09:55SPEAKERI mean, you move at the pace of the ISO.

1:09:57SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:09:58SPEAKER(laughing)

1:09:59SPEAKER- But no, like, if you remember, in the old days,

1:10:04SPEAKERin order to make a PDF from something like Word,

1:10:07SPEAKERyou had to, you know, the Acrobat would install

1:10:09SPEAKERa weird printer driver that basically absorbed

1:10:13SPEAKERthe print from Word and would take whatever you printed

1:10:18SPEAKERand make that into a PDF.

1:10:20SPEAKER- Right.

1:10:21SPEAKER- So there was no export as PDF option in most apps

1:10:23SPEAKERuntil like mid 2000s, probably around the time

1:10:26SPEAKERthe ISO thing happened.

1:10:28SPEAKER- Right, dude, I remember when save to PDF

1:10:31SPEAKERor print to PDF started becoming a thing,

1:10:33SPEAKERit was like magic.

1:10:33SPEAKERIt was like manna from heaven, like, oh, what do you mean?

1:10:36SPEAKERI don't need a printer, I can just make this a digital thing

1:10:39SPEAKERand hang on to it and not have a piece of paper.

1:10:42SPEAKER- Well, and it completely changed the way

1:10:45SPEAKERpublishing worked, like, 'cause we went,

1:10:48SPEAKERso we shipped encapsulated postscript files

1:10:51SPEAKERto printers for a long time after I started the magazine.

1:10:55SPEAKERAnd then when we switched to PDF,

1:10:56SPEAKEReverything became much easier 'cause we were able

1:10:58SPEAKERto actually proof on screen rather than proofing on paper,

1:11:01SPEAKERwhich was like, I mean, we still proofed on paper

1:11:04SPEAKERfor final, final, final, final, but we would look

1:11:06SPEAKERat the prepress in PDF format, which saved a ton of time.

1:11:12SPEAKERIt was really nice.

1:11:14SPEAKER- 'Cause I assume, 'cause you knew that what you were

1:11:15SPEAKERsending to the printer was gonna look the same for them

1:11:17SPEAKERthat it did for you.

1:11:19SPEAKER- Yeah, and we still printed everything

1:11:22SPEAKERand sent the prints too.

1:11:23SPEAKER- Right.

1:11:24SPEAKER- So like--

1:11:25SPEAKER- That's always good to have a fallback.

1:11:27SPEAKER- Well, you sent the prints in case there was some sort

1:11:29SPEAKERof color repro issue or somebody had jacked up

1:11:32SPEAKERsome setting somewhere so that then when they're printing

1:11:34SPEAKERthe first pages off the press and they look at them,

1:11:36SPEAKERthey have something to compare to that's gonna be accurate.

1:11:38SPEAKER- Right.

1:11:39SPEAKER- So I guess there's still an analog check

1:11:41SPEAKERat the very, very end, but yeah, so that's it.

1:11:45SPEAKERThat's the year I went to college.

1:11:47SPEAKER- Yeah, a lot of stuff.

1:11:48SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a weird, weird time.

1:11:50SPEAKERThis is the best of times.

1:11:51SPEAKERIt was the first time I was on the internet.

1:11:54SPEAKERSorry, we blew this out into two episodes.

1:11:58SPEAKER- Also, you're welcome.

1:12:00SPEAKER- Yeah, wait, did we not?

1:12:02SPEAKEROh yeah, we talked about the Macintosh Color Classic.

1:12:04SPEAKERYou didn't strike through that,

1:12:05SPEAKERbut we talked about it last week for sure.

1:12:07SPEAKER- My striking through was inconsistent.

1:12:10SPEAKER- This is the part of the show

1:12:11SPEAKERwhere we thank our patrons.

1:12:12SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.

1:12:13SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.

1:12:15SPEAKERIf you would like to find out how to support

1:12:17SPEAKERBrad and Will Made a Tech Pod,

1:12:18SPEAKERwhich is, as always, a 100% listener-supported show,

1:12:22SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techpod,

1:12:24SPEAKERand for two bucks a month,

1:12:26SPEAKERyou can join the fabulous community on our Discord,

1:12:29SPEAKERwhich is a constant source of joy to me, I would say.

1:12:34SPEAKER- Absolutely, we have a new channel.

1:12:36SPEAKERI made a new channel yesterday.

1:12:37SPEAKER- You made it?

1:12:37SPEAKERWait, this is the first new channel in a long time.

1:12:39SPEAKERWe kind of slowed down and we got threads.

1:12:40SPEAKER- Yes, threads have helped to silo off certain discussions,

1:12:46SPEAKERbut yes, Discord super user, Teddy,

1:12:51SPEAKERis running a retro game of the month club.

1:12:53SPEAKER- Ooh.

1:12:54SPEAKER- Which is, he built a whole web tool and everything

1:12:56SPEAKERfor people to vote on a big mister community,

1:12:59SPEAKERbig emulation community on the server,

1:13:01SPEAKERand so they are going to focus down

1:13:03SPEAKERon some specific classic retro games

1:13:05SPEAKERand play them and talk about them.

1:13:08SPEAKER- Oh man, that's really cool.

1:13:09SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a neat idea.

1:13:10SPEAKERHe put some work into it, it's cool.

1:13:13SPEAKER- I, yeah, I like that a lot.

1:13:15SPEAKERI spent a lot of time in there talking,

1:13:18SPEAKERin the video games channel,

1:13:19SPEAKERtalking about the Playdate case,

1:13:21SPEAKERor I guess in general, actually,

1:13:22SPEAKER'cause it seemed like it kind of,

1:13:23SPEAKERthe maker channel is where I put it,

1:13:25SPEAKERand people had really good ideas

1:13:26SPEAKERfor helping me figure out how to do everything

1:13:29SPEAKERexcept for the gluing the two flat sheets

1:13:31SPEAKERof acrylic to each other.

1:13:33SPEAKERThat's the thing I need the next wave of help with, I guess.

1:13:36SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, there are some very experienced makers

1:13:39SPEAKERon that server.

1:13:39SPEAKEREd, my hard drive, my rattling hard drives

1:13:42SPEAKERin the NAS problem, Ed suggested getting some neoprene,

1:13:45SPEAKERsome very thin neoprene.

1:13:46SPEAKER- That is a much better solution than it felt.

1:13:48SPEAKER- Yes, much better.

1:13:49SPEAKERHe said, maybe don't put something in there

1:13:51SPEAKERthat could degenerate into kind of particulates.

1:13:54SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

1:13:56SPEAKER- So, good call.

1:13:58SPEAKER- So anyway, it's patreon.com/techbaud.

1:14:01SPEAKERYou can join the group of supporters,

1:14:05SPEAKERincluding our executive producer tier patrons.

1:14:08SPEAKERThe name thing is getting good now.

1:14:10SPEAKERIncluding our executive tier patrons

1:14:12SPEAKERwho we like to thank every week,

1:14:13SPEAKERincluding Paddle Creek Games, makers of Fractured Veil,

1:14:16SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Bunny Thorpe,

1:14:19SPEAKERparentheses, Modem Noises, Grimes.

1:14:23SPEAKERDo I have to make the modem?

1:14:24SPEAKERIt's like Bunny Thorpe.

1:14:25SPEAKER(imitates motor revving)

1:14:27SPEAKER(imitates motor revving)

1:14:30SPEAKER- You know, I'll take it.

1:14:32SPEAKER- Just Wedge, Jacob Chappell, Joel Krauska,

1:14:35SPEAKERThe Sound of Twinkies, David Allen, and James Kamik.

1:14:38SPEAKERThank you all so much.

1:14:39SPEAKERWe really appreciate you.

1:14:40SPEAKER- We do.

1:14:41SPEAKER- And we appreciate everybody who supports the show.

1:14:43SPEAKERWe will be back next week

1:14:45SPEAKERwith another edition of the Tech Pod.

1:14:47SPEAKERHey,

1:14:49SPEAKERprobably listen to the Fos Pod when it lands this week,

1:14:53SPEAKER'cause it's gonna be a banger.

1:14:54SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a good one.

1:14:55SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's all I'll say.

1:14:58SPEAKER- It will be of interest.

1:14:59SPEAKER- Yeah, you'll like it.

1:15:00SPEAKER- Yes, promise, yes.

1:15:02SPEAKER- Have a good week, everybody.

1:15:03SPEAKERWe'll see you next time on the Tech Pod.

1:15:06SPEAKER(upbeat music)