144: The Anamorphic Squinch

00:00SPEAKER- Well, I'm back on my bullshit.

00:03SPEAKER- Oh no.

00:04SPEAKER- Some might say I never got off of it.

00:08SPEAKER- Okay, let me guess.

00:10SPEAKERYou need, both of your monitors died

00:13SPEAKERand you're using the voice interface

00:15SPEAKERfor the windows now to do this,

00:16SPEAKERbut you can't decide which monitors to buy.

00:18SPEAKER- No, I mean, I did famously once play

00:21SPEAKERMortal Kombat 3 with a broken monitor, but.

00:24SPEAKER- Wait, how did you do that?

00:26SPEAKER- Sounds.

00:27SPEAKER- You just played with sound?

00:29SPEAKER- We had an MK3 machine in the GameSpot office

00:32SPEAKERthat the monitor died on, repeated.

00:34SPEAKERWe tried to get it fixed, whatever, it wouldn't stick.

00:37SPEAKERAt some point, Jeff and I just started playing MK3

00:40SPEAKERwith no screen.

00:41SPEAKER- Who won?

00:43SPEAKER- Mostly him.

00:44SPEAKER- Okay.

00:45SPEAKER- In my defense, I never liked MK3.

00:47SPEAKERI was all in on MK2 and I consider three

00:51SPEAKERto be a massive downgrade.

00:54SPEAKER- Is it because of Striker?

00:56SPEAKER- No, it was the dial-a-combo stuff.

00:57SPEAKERI hated the getting stuck in a lengthy combo

01:01SPEAKERthat you couldn't break out of, anyway.

01:04SPEAKER- Perfectly reasonable.

01:05SPEAKEROkay.

01:06SPEAKER- He was able to do a fatality or two.

01:07SPEAKER- Wow.

01:10SPEAKER- Pretty much the only fatalities you could pull off

01:12SPEAKERare the ones that were screen length away.

01:13SPEAKER- Okay, I was gonna say, 'cause you have to be

01:15SPEAKERlike the right number of pixels away.

01:17SPEAKER- Yes, the positioning is pretty specific on those,

01:19SPEAKERbut so yeah, pretty much all you could do

01:21SPEAKERif you did like two jumps away

01:22SPEAKERfrom where you thought the opponent was,

01:24SPEAKERit should put you a full screen length so you could.

01:27SPEAKER- And could you see anything at all

01:29SPEAKERor was it just like, oh, wow.

01:30SPEAKER- Just black, black pit, nothing.

01:32SPEAKER- This is amazing.

01:34SPEAKER- It was an interesting exercise.

01:36SPEAKERAnyway, this particular bullshit

01:38SPEAKERis my quest for a PC speaker.

01:40SPEAKER- Like an old school, like a piezoelectric one?

01:45SPEAKER- So no, every PC I ever had had a cone speaker in it.

01:49SPEAKER- Oh, you want a paper one?

01:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's weird, like I went on YouTube

01:53SPEAKERand I found a dude who is messing with 86 box

01:56SPEAKERand like that thing synthesizes the PC,

01:59SPEAKERthe, you know, the, it's not FM synth,

02:01SPEAKERit's like what it's square wave.

02:03SPEAKER- It's a square, it's like a square of piezo usually

02:05SPEAKERis what the sound would make, yeah.

02:08SPEAKER- Whatever came out of the speaker header

02:09SPEAKERon the motherboard.

02:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I had one of those in my wing.

02:11SPEAKER- Right, so like I interestingly found a video of a dude

02:16SPEAKERwho thought it sounded too good coming out of 86 box

02:18SPEAKERbecause his PC, his family PC in the 90s

02:20SPEAKERdid have one of the piezo electric ones.

02:23SPEAKERSo he actually wanted it to sound worse

02:25SPEAKER'cause this is all about nostalgia, let's be honest here,

02:28SPEAKERlike.

02:29SPEAKER- Yeah, like you want that bad sound from,

02:32SPEAKERI feel like Doom had, Doom and Wolfenstein

02:34SPEAKERwould both play sound out of your PC speaker.

02:37SPEAKER- Yeah, actually this led me on a weird rabbit hole

02:39SPEAKERof like you could find like software,

02:41SPEAKERdigital audio playback drivers from that period

02:44SPEAKERthat could play sound through the PC speaker,

02:47SPEAKERpurely on the CPU, there's YouTube videos

02:49SPEAKERof that stuff out there, there's a lot of wiles.

02:50SPEAKERAnyway, I never had one of the piezo electric ones,

02:53SPEAKERthose are very tinny and thin sounding,

02:55SPEAKERI have, we always had cone speakers in our cases.

02:58SPEAKER- Yeah.

02:59SPEAKER- So you can't like, if you go to Amazon or even Google

03:02SPEAKERand type like PC case speaker,

03:04SPEAKERthey're kind of not around anymore.

03:06SPEAKER- Hmm, like nobody makes one

03:07SPEAKERthat's just like a little tiny speaker

03:09SPEAKERwith a speaker header on it?

03:10SPEAKER- The piezo electric ones are for days,

03:13SPEAKERyou can pay five bucks and get 10 of them on Amazon.

03:16SPEAKER- Yeah, it seems right.

03:17SPEAKER- But the bigger cone type.

03:18SPEAKER- Well, it was like a one and a half inch cone probably,

03:20SPEAKERit wasn't very big.

03:21SPEAKER- So that's the thing is that I've been searching

03:24SPEAKERwith language like PC case speaker all this time.

03:26SPEAKER- Yeah.

03:27SPEAKER- I was watching a video last night

03:29SPEAKERwhere a guy pulled the speaker out of a literal IBM XT

03:32SPEAKERand it's just a little eight ohm, like half watt speaker.

03:36SPEAKER- Yeah.

03:37SPEAKER- Turns out if you go to Amazon

03:38SPEAKERand type in eight ohm speaker, there are--

03:40SPEAKER- A bazillion?

03:41SPEAKER- Yes, there's more choices you can possibly parse.

03:42SPEAKERSo now my question is, can I just buy an eight ohm speaker

03:46SPEAKERand like wire the terminals to the header

03:49SPEAKERon the motherboard?

03:50SPEAKERIs there any reason that won't work?

03:52SPEAKER- Probably it's fine.

03:53SPEAKERWhat is the, huh?

03:55SPEAKERI guess theoretically you could blow out the circuit

03:58SPEAKERon the motherboard, but you're about to replace

04:00SPEAKERthat motherboard, so who cares?

04:02SPEAKERLet it rip.

04:02SPEAKER- Oh, well that motherboard doesn't work.

04:04SPEAKER- Oh.

04:05SPEAKER- Like that would, I would not be,

04:05SPEAKERI would have to test it on a good motherboard.

04:07SPEAKERNo, and yes, I saw some people talking like maybe current

04:11SPEAKERcould be an issue, you could blow something out

04:12SPEAKERif you don't pair things up right.

04:14SPEAKERLike, do I need an extra resistor in there?

04:16SPEAKERI know so little about electricity.

04:18SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it's scary.

04:19SPEAKERI don't, I just know, I know how to use computers.

04:21SPEAKERI don't know anything about electricity.

04:22SPEAKERBut I need to hear that beep.

04:24SPEAKERI need, I need beep on boot.

04:26SPEAKER- I realized, I realized that Windows 11

04:29SPEAKERhas a startup sound again.

04:31SPEAKER- Wait, what?

04:32SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

04:33SPEAKERIt makes, it plays a little chime.

04:35SPEAKERIt's just like dun, dun, dun.

04:37SPEAKER- Is it Brian Eno level quality, or?

04:39SPEAKER- Yeah, it's okay.

04:40SPEAKERIt's not Brian Eno level quality.

04:41SPEAKERBut the Brian Eno one, frankly, is too long.

04:43SPEAKER- You think?

04:44SPEAKER- It goes for a long time.

04:46SPEAKER- I like how kind of indulgent it is.

04:47SPEAKERIt's funny though, 'cause there are interviews out there

04:49SPEAKERof him talking about how short it was,

04:51SPEAKERlike how hard it was to compose sounds that fit in,

04:54SPEAKERlike, it can't be more than three seconds?

04:56SPEAKER- It's like seven seconds or something, isn't it?

04:58SPEAKER- Yeah, like he's talked about how like hard

04:59SPEAKERand weird that exercise was.

05:01SPEAKER- Yeah, this one's just like a,

05:02SPEAKERit's like a slightly long chime.

05:05SPEAKERIt's not bad.

05:06SPEAKERI like a good startup sound.

05:08SPEAKERI miss 'em.

05:09SPEAKER- Event sounds, we've talked about it for ages.

05:11SPEAKERWe should do an event sounds episode.

05:13SPEAKER- Did you, okay, this is completely off topic.

05:16SPEAKERAnd we're breaking the format here a little bit.

05:19SPEAKERBut did you ever replace Windows sounds

05:21SPEAKERwith like a sound pack?

05:24SPEAKERI did Simpsons sounds.

05:27SPEAKER- Oh, actually, yes, no.

05:28SPEAKERI totally had the Star Wars quotes for startup and shutdown.

05:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I had Star Wars stuff for a while.

05:34SPEAKERBut the Simpsons one, when I went through

05:36SPEAKERand watched the Simpsons with my daughter,

05:38SPEAKERit's funny because like I would hear a quote

05:40SPEAKERthat I associated with like error messages in Windows.

05:45SPEAKERAnd it just kind of, it made it,

05:49SPEAKERit's like the computer equivalent of a smell memory

05:52SPEAKERwhere you smell some specific smell

05:54SPEAKERand you're like, oh God.

05:55SPEAKERAnd I was like, oh, this was the time

05:56SPEAKERthat I messed up the modem.

05:57SPEAKERThis is the modem bad sound.

05:59SPEAKERI don't, oh, I don't like this at all.

06:02SPEAKER- Yeah, you're absolutely right.

06:04SPEAKEREvery time that I hear Yoda say help you, I can.

06:06SPEAKERYes, hmm, I know, but it's time to compute.

06:11SPEAKER(upbeat music)

06:15SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

06:38SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod, I'm Will.

06:41SPEAKER- I'm Brad and I am very self-indulgently

06:43SPEAKERgoing to actually say to anybody listening to this

06:45SPEAKERwho understands, let me know,

06:47SPEAKERlet me know about this ADAM speaker thing.

06:48SPEAKERI need to crowdsource my bad DIY project idea.

06:52SPEAKER- Yeah, it should be fine.

06:53SPEAKERLike my guess is that there's not a whole lot

06:56SPEAKERyou can mess up there.

06:59SPEAKERIf the old speakers were ADAM speakers,

07:01SPEAKERI'm sure that it's probably okay.

07:03SPEAKER- Yeah, that's probably like,

07:04SPEAKERI assume I can just wire a couple of jumper cables

07:07SPEAKERto the terminals on the speaker

07:08SPEAKERand just plug it into the headers probably should be good.

07:11SPEAKER- If you take an old, if you have like an old header

07:15SPEAKERfrom a motherboard cable, you can also buy those,

07:18SPEAKERthose they're like four pin molex connectors.

07:21SPEAKERThey're mini molex.

07:22SPEAKERI can't remember the name of the connector is,

07:23SPEAKERbut it's a standard connector type

07:25SPEAKERand you can buy a bag of those for probably like 50 of them

07:28SPEAKERfor like a dollar.

07:29SPEAKER- Oh, I have, trust me.

07:30SPEAKER- Yeah, so then you need to buy the pins, the cables

07:34SPEAKERand they just snap in.

07:35SPEAKERSo you solder the cable onto the speaker thing.

07:39SPEAKERYeah, it should be easy.

07:40SPEAKER- You get to, I'm curious now.

07:46SPEAKER- How are you?

07:48SPEAKER- I'm alive.

07:50SPEAKER- You're here, you sound more normal.

07:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm a little deeper than normal, I think still.

07:55SPEAKERThe long-term repercussions seem minor so far,

08:01SPEAKERbut I took the kiddo.

08:03SPEAKERWe took advantage of our brief immunity window

08:07SPEAKERand went to see a movie yesterday in a theater,

08:09SPEAKERwhich was exciting.

08:10SPEAKERMasks on.

08:12SPEAKER- Okay, should I ask what movie?

08:14SPEAKER- We went to see the Minions, The Rise of Gru.

08:16SPEAKERIt was her request.

08:17SPEAKER- Did you dress up? - It's a classic.

08:19SPEAKERI did not, I did not, what do they call it?

08:22SPEAKERMinion formally or whatever.

08:24SPEAKERI didn't wear a suit to the Minions.

08:26SPEAKER- Apparently it's been banned a lot of places.

08:27SPEAKER- Oh, wow. - It's probably.

08:29SPEAKER- It was 118 degrees out here yesterday

08:31SPEAKERand there were four other people

08:33SPEAKERin a 200 seat theater with us, so yeah.

08:36SPEAKER- That's prudent.

08:37SPEAKERSo wait, how long is the immunity window now?

08:39SPEAKERIs it like two to four weeks?

08:41SPEAKER- Is what we're assuming.

08:43SPEAKERYeah, we're a little tighter than normal, I think though.

08:49SPEAKERBut yeah, the big thing though was like,

08:53SPEAKERwe got to our seats and I realized we'd forgotten straws,

08:56SPEAKERso I had to go back and get straws.

08:57SPEAKERAnd by the time I climbed back up,

08:59SPEAKERshe was like, "Hey dad, do you have any napkins?"

09:00SPEAKERI was like, "Aw, crap."

09:01SPEAKERSo I walked back down the stairs

09:04SPEAKERand by the time I got back up the stairs,

09:05SPEAKERI was like, "I need a nap.

09:06SPEAKER"I am so fricking tired."

09:08SPEAKER- Wow, wow.

09:09SPEAKER- And it was like 12 stairs.

09:10SPEAKERSo my endurance is not what it once was is what I will say.

09:15SPEAKER- Did you fall asleep?

09:16SPEAKER- I did not fall asleep during the movie.

09:18SPEAKERBut we did manage to spend,

09:22SPEAKERwe managed to not get Gina sick.

09:24SPEAKERSo she masked up in the house the whole time.

09:26SPEAKER- That's kind of amazing.

09:28SPEAKER- Washed her hands and like was super, super careful.

09:32SPEAKERBut yeah, she did a PCR the other day and she's clean.

09:37SPEAKERAnd I think I tested negative after nine days

09:42SPEAKERand the kiddo did after eight or seven.

09:46SPEAKERBut it wasn't great.

09:48SPEAKERI would advise people to not get the Rona, it sucks.

09:52SPEAKER- Not a recreational activity.

09:54SPEAKER- No, like get vaccinated and stuff too.

09:56SPEAKER'Cause it's like when the doctor was like,

09:57SPEAKER"Hey, this is minor."

09:59SPEAKERI called the doctor, the doctor was like,

10:00SPEAKER"Hey, do you want Paxilabid?"

10:01SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Yeah, tell me about Paxilabid."

10:03SPEAKERAnd she was like, "Look, here's the side effects."

10:05SPEAKERAnd then she ran down the list of side effects.

10:07SPEAKERAnd she's like, "Okay, so there's some minor stuff.

10:10SPEAKERLike you'll have a bitter taste in your mouth

10:11SPEAKERthe entire time you take it."

10:13SPEAKER- Huh.

10:14SPEAKER- I was like, "That doesn't sound that minor."

10:15SPEAKERAnd she's like, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

10:16SPEAKERCompared to the other stuff, it's minor."

10:17SPEAKERAnd she's like, "Kidney failure is a potential thing."

10:20SPEAKERI was like, "Oh, no, I'm probably good.

10:22SPEAKERIf this is up, I'll be okay."

10:23SPEAKER- Oh, they have to tell you that.

10:25SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's just what the man wants you to think.

10:27SPEAKERSo, but yeah, I feel generally speaking much better,

10:33SPEAKERa little congested, a little coughier than normal.

10:37SPEAKERAnd I'm still kind of taking it easy, so.

10:39SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm glad to hear you're on the mend.

10:41SPEAKERAnd yes, don't push yourself too hard.

10:43SPEAKERThere's like a bunch of messaging coming out lately

10:46SPEAKERfrom the medical community, basically saying like,

10:48SPEAKER"Hey, please continue to take this seriously."

10:50SPEAKERNot from the standpoint of like,

10:52SPEAKERtrying to avoid getting infected,

10:54SPEAKERbut more like once you get it,

10:55SPEAKERlike don't just like work through it.

10:57SPEAKERWell, don't act like it's just a cold.

10:59SPEAKERLike the harder you push yourself

11:01SPEAKERwhile you're in the active infection,

11:02SPEAKERthe longer it's gonna take you to get better

11:03SPEAKER'cause this really takes it out of you.

11:05SPEAKER- Well, and my understanding is also,

11:07SPEAKERthere's a fair amount of data that indicates,

11:12SPEAKERthat seems to indicate that the longer it takes you

11:15SPEAKERto recover and the more you push hard during the recovery,

11:18SPEAKERthe more likely you are to suffer from long COVID symptoms.

11:20SPEAKERSo like the doctor was like, "Okay, so here's the deal.

11:23SPEAKERYou have to exercise, you have to do enough activity

11:26SPEAKERthat like you get your lungs going,

11:28SPEAKERbut not so much that you are straining yourself."

11:33SPEAKERSo I was like, "What does that mean?"

11:34SPEAKERShe's like, "Well, normally I tell you

11:35SPEAKERto go take a walk around the block,

11:36SPEAKERbut since you're someplace that's 120 degrees outside,

11:39SPEAKERthat's a bad idea."

11:40SPEAKERI was like, "What if I go out and like move my arms

11:43SPEAKERand legs in the pool for 15 minutes?"

11:45SPEAKERShe was like, "That's perfect."

11:46SPEAKER- Ooh, that sounds pretty good.

11:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so I did a lot of floating in the pool.

11:50SPEAKERLike it turns out,

11:51SPEAKERif you're gonna have a fever and chills and stuff,

11:54SPEAKERbeing someplace where it's 115 degrees outside

11:56SPEAKERduring the day and you can just go outside

11:57SPEAKERand immediately be warm, pretty good.

12:00SPEAKER- Sounds all right.

12:01SPEAKER- Yeah.

12:02SPEAKER- Get sick in the desert if you can.

12:03SPEAKER- Yeah.

12:04SPEAKERHey, happy birthday by the way, Brad.

12:05SPEAKER- Thank you.

12:06SPEAKER- I missed you earlier this week, I'm sorry.

12:07SPEAKER- Thank you for that.

12:08SPEAKERYeah, while you were convalescing, I had a birthday,

12:10SPEAKERwhich I guess per hour now annual tradition

12:13SPEAKERmeans we're going to do a year in review.

12:15SPEAKER- Yeah, congratulations on another revolution.

12:17SPEAKER- Oh boy.

12:18SPEAKEROh, it's just, I'm deep into the,

12:21SPEAKERI'm thinking now I'm sitting here pondering like,

12:23SPEAKERI'm still in my early forties, right?

12:25SPEAKERLike 43 is like late.

12:26SPEAKER- It's still early forties, yeah.

12:27SPEAKER- That's like, that's like late early forties,

12:29SPEAKERnot early mid forties, right?

12:30SPEAKER- Borderline early mid, yeah.

12:32SPEAKER- That's what I'm going to keep calling it.

12:34SPEAKER- Look, I'm late mid now, so.

12:36SPEAKER- Oh no.

12:37SPEAKER- I've got one year until I'm in late.

12:38SPEAKER- Oh no.

12:40SPEAKER- What, how much longer is the ponytail this year

12:43SPEAKERthan last year is the real question.

12:44SPEAKER- It's pretty long.

12:45SPEAKER- Really?

12:46SPEAKER- I never put a ponytail.

12:47SPEAKER- You got like four inches on it this year?

12:48SPEAKERWow, that is a tight.

12:50SPEAKER- I have developed a fairly tight bun.

12:52SPEAKER- That's a tight knot, yeah.

12:53SPEAKERLike you could put a hat on that thing,

12:54SPEAKERyou wouldn't even know it's there.

12:55SPEAKER- True, it's true.

12:57SPEAKERIf I, if I let it down, it is like mid chest now.

12:59SPEAKER- Wow.

13:00SPEAKER- Like I'm kind of tempted to just keep going

13:02SPEAKERand see what happens.

13:03SPEAKER- I mean, look, it's not like you leave the house ever.

13:04SPEAKERIt's probably fine.

13:05SPEAKER- Very true, very true.

13:07SPEAKERAnyway, I just copied you.

13:11SPEAKER- Yes.

13:12SPEAKER- From a couple of months ago when we did,

13:14SPEAKERafter your last birthday,

13:15SPEAKERyou chose the year you graduated from high school.

13:17SPEAKER- 1993, a fine year.

13:19SPEAKER- Yes, so I went and did the same.

13:21SPEAKER- Which is 1997.

13:22SPEAKER- Well, we talked about it,

13:23SPEAKER'cause like 97's an interesting year,

13:24SPEAKER98's an interesting year,

13:25SPEAKER99's an interesting year.

13:26SPEAKERThey're all kind of like a lot of, it was active.

13:29SPEAKER- 96, hey, it turns out every year, a lot of,

13:31SPEAKERyou know what?

13:32SPEAKER- Things happen.

13:33SPEAKER- Stuff is happening all the time, it turns out.

13:38SPEAKERBut yes, we settled on 97.

13:40SPEAKER- Yeah, 97 is the year before I graduated from college.

13:44SPEAKERI don't remember a lot of 97 'cause I was working,

13:46SPEAKERlike working, I was putting networks in businesses at night

13:52SPEAKERand then going to school kind of during the day,

13:54SPEAKERbut mostly just playing a lot of Quake world, I guess.

13:57SPEAKER- Installing networks overnight

13:59SPEAKERis not the kind of senior itis partying

14:01SPEAKERthat I was expecting to hear, but.

14:03SPEAKER- Well, I ended up, I didn't pay,

14:05SPEAKERlike I finished college with no debt

14:07SPEAKERbecause I was able to charge people 40 bucks an hour

14:10SPEAKERto run 10 base two for them 'cause I bought a crimper.

14:13SPEAKER- Wow, 40 bucks an hour in 1997 is pretty good.

14:16SPEAKER- Everybody wanted networks and they had no idea why,

14:18SPEAKERbut I was like, dude, I can put a network in for you.

14:20SPEAKERI'm good, I will make this happen.

14:22SPEAKERI was charging 10 an hour for the like computer tutoring

14:25SPEAKERand stuff that I was doing around that time.

14:27SPEAKERWhat was I doing?

14:28SPEAKER- Well, I mean, look, it was a weird thing

14:33SPEAKERthat I kind of fell into 'cause I was talking to somebody

14:35SPEAKERand they were like, hey, do you know how to do this?

14:38SPEAKERI was like, yeah.

14:39SPEAKERAnd they were like, my boss wants to put a network in.

14:41SPEAKERI was like, I can absolutely.

14:42SPEAKERIt was a friend of mine from school.

14:44SPEAKERMy boss wants to put a network in.

14:46SPEAKERI was like, well, I can come talk to him

14:47SPEAKERand show him how to do it.

14:48SPEAKERAnd then I helped him do it at a much lower price.

14:52SPEAKERAnd then he was like, look,

14:53SPEAKERyou should be charging more for this.

14:55SPEAKERAnd also I can introduce you to a bunch of people

14:58SPEAKERwho want the same thing done.

14:59SPEAKERSo I ran a bunch of networks for people and paid for school.

15:03SPEAKER- That's pretty awesome.

15:04SPEAKER- It was good.

15:05SPEAKER- That sounds fun.

15:06SPEAKER- I was very lucky.

15:07SPEAKERIt was the right time at the right place

15:08SPEAKER'cause two years later and it wouldn't have been possible.

15:12SPEAKER- Okay, shall we get into it?

15:13SPEAKER- Yes, let's do.

15:16SPEAKER- These are kind of scattershot.

15:17SPEAKERThese are sort of all over the place.

15:18SPEAKER- It was an all over the place kind of,

15:20SPEAKERit was the Clinton years, man.

15:21SPEAKERThings were weird.

15:22SPEAKER- Yeah, tell me about it.

15:24SPEAKERSpeaking of.

15:26SPEAKER- Yes.

15:26SPEAKER- That was the year that the Dolly the sheep

15:28SPEAKERwas cloned in Scotland, remember that?

15:30SPEAKER- Yeah.

15:31SPEAKER- Do you remember?

15:32SPEAKERThat was huge, right?

15:33SPEAKERLike, am I misremembering?

15:34SPEAKERLike, I feel like that was a kind of massive media event.

15:37SPEAKER- Well, so, okay, it was a massive media event,

15:39SPEAKERbut also I was a junior in a biochemistry

15:43SPEAKERand molecular biology program.

15:45SPEAKERAnd the professors had really mixed vibes about it.

15:48SPEAKERLike, some of them were like, this is really cool.

15:49SPEAKERAnd then some of them were of the opinion

15:51SPEAKERthat this was just some really nice pipette work

15:53SPEAKERand nothing really to be celebrated.

15:56SPEAKERBecause all they did was take,

15:59SPEAKERI think it was that they micro pipetted a nucleus

16:04SPEAKERfrom a mammary cell into an embryo,

16:07SPEAKERinto a fertilized embryo.

16:09SPEAKERSo they pulled one nucleus out and then spat a new one in.

16:12SPEAKERAnd they were like, okay, let's see if any of these work.

16:15SPEAKERAnd then one of them worked.

16:17SPEAKER- And I assume they'd, well, of course,

16:19SPEAKERthey would have genetically verified that.

16:22SPEAKER- Well, yeah.

16:23SPEAKER- That the sheep was identical after the fact.

16:25SPEAKER- I mean, Tim and me, sheep all look the same,

16:27SPEAKERbut to an expert, they could tell.

16:29SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.

16:30SPEAKERI didn't realize reading about this in research

16:34SPEAKERthat this was not the first mammal ever cloned, period.

16:38SPEAKER- Though the rest of them they did from-

16:40SPEAKER- embryonic cells.

16:41SPEAKER- Yeah, so they had cloned embryos essentially previously.

16:44SPEAKERBut the big deal here

16:45SPEAKERwas that they had cloned an adult animal.

16:47SPEAKER- Yeah.

16:50SPEAKER- And I didn't put it in here.

16:52SPEAKERI also noticed this was the same year

16:54SPEAKERthat Clinton signed a ban on federal funding

16:58SPEAKERfor research on human cloning.

17:01SPEAKERI don't know if that was a response to this.

17:03SPEAKER- Well, it was federal funding on human cloning

17:05SPEAKERand also stem cell research.

17:07SPEAKER- Oh, was that all in the same bill?

17:08SPEAKER- I don't know if it was the same bill,

17:09SPEAKERbut it was, look, back then things have moved a little bit,

17:15SPEAKERbut it was a weird time for politics

17:18SPEAKERand the fundamentalists, right?

17:21SPEAKER- Oh, compared to now.

17:23SPEAKER- It was the beginning of all the problems that we have now.

17:27SPEAKERNewt Gingrich was elected Speaker of the House in 1997 also.

17:30SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, enough said.

17:33SPEAKER- It was bad news.

17:34SPEAKERThe animals that got cloned

17:35SPEAKERhad almost universally bad outcomes.

17:38SPEAKER- Yeah, you're not wrong, although reading about this,

17:39SPEAKERit was not as bad as I thought.

17:41SPEAKERLike in my memory, like this was like,

17:43SPEAKERoh, they technically pulled it off and the sheep did live,

17:46SPEAKERbut it was not really of like a viable animal,

17:48SPEAKERbut like reading about it, like she did okay, not amazing.

17:51SPEAKERI mean, she had six lambs.

17:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

17:54SPEAKER- Over the course of her shortened life.

17:58SPEAKERBut so I guess her, let's see,

18:01SPEAKERshe's a finned dorset is the breed of sheep.

18:04SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:05SPEAKER- Which normally lives 11 to 12 years.

18:06SPEAKER- Yeah.

18:07SPEAKER- She at the age of four developed arthritis

18:09SPEAKERand started having walking problems.

18:10SPEAKERAnd then she was actually euthanized at six and a half

18:14SPEAKERdue to a progressive lung disease and worse arthritis.

18:18SPEAKERSo yeah, you're right, you're right.

18:20SPEAKERShe was not doing great.

18:21SPEAKER- Not a great outcome.

18:22SPEAKER- No.

18:23SPEAKER- I mean, it's weird though.

18:25SPEAKERI wonder if that's, 'cause like now my understanding

18:27SPEAKERis you can, if you have a lot of money,

18:29SPEAKERyou can pay someone to clone like a dead pet if you want.

18:33SPEAKERAnd I wonder if the same, like I have to imagine

18:36SPEAKERyou're gonna have similar outcomes.

18:39SPEAKERI don't know, the whole thing is really weird.

18:41SPEAKER- I really should not go to Google

18:44SPEAKERand type pet cloning that I've already done so.

18:46SPEAKER- Oh no.

18:50SPEAKERI think you mean back rub also.

18:52SPEAKER- Oh, yes, we'll get to that.

18:55SPEAKEROh, let's see.

18:56SPEAKERWow, okay, here's a company called ViaGen.

18:59SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a good clothing company.

19:01SPEAKER- That's right.

19:03SPEAKERThe total cost of dog cloning is $50,000.

19:06SPEAKER- That's, it seems like it'd be a lot easier

19:07SPEAKERto just go to the animal rescue and get another puppy.

19:10SPEAKER- Yeah, you might think so.

19:12SPEAKER- I love my dog, but I wouldn't want another,

19:16SPEAKERI'd just get another dog at this point, I think.

19:18SPEAKER- That's probably the thing to do.

19:20SPEAKERI'm not even down with purebreds.

19:23SPEAKERI'm always like a fun shelter mud.

19:25SPEAKERThere's a lot of shelter muds that need homes.

19:28SPEAKER- What?

19:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I just, I don't, I mean, this is,

19:35SPEAKERso one of the things that happened with the cloning stuff

19:36SPEAKERis that we ended up having a lot of,

19:39SPEAKERit made it possible to,

19:42SPEAKERthere's good science that came out of this.

19:44SPEAKERWe joke about Dolly, but

19:51SPEAKERit's been beneficial in some way.

19:55SPEAKERI'm sure.

19:57SPEAKER- Okay.

19:59SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yes, I see some stuff here about

20:02SPEAKERfurther stem cell research that came from it

20:04SPEAKERand that sort of thing.

20:05SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:08SPEAKERContinuing cell lines and stuff like that.

20:09SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

20:10SPEAKERAnyway, also a big media event.

20:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:14SPEAKER- Here's a name I have written down here.

20:16SPEAKER- I do really, I want to shout out to my genetics professor

20:19SPEAKERwho literally in that thing was like,

20:21SPEAKERsomebody asked a question at the end of a lecture one day

20:24SPEAKERwhen the news broke and he was like, okay, look,

20:27SPEAKERthis is the most bullshit you've ever heard, right?

20:30SPEAKERAnd he's like, here's why.

20:32SPEAKERThey took a nucleus.

20:34SPEAKERSomebody who did this is really good at pipetting

20:37SPEAKERwithout breaking cell membranes.

20:38SPEAKERAnd he's like, anybody in this room could do that

20:40SPEAKERif you spent a few weeks practicing

20:43SPEAKERand look, here they are on Newsweek

20:46SPEAKER'cause people cared about Newsweek back then.

20:48SPEAKER- I could have cloned that sheep in my sleep.

20:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

20:51SPEAKER- There seems like a fair amount of low key shade

20:54SPEAKERin the academic world.

20:55SPEAKER- I was kind of an asshole for what it's worth.

20:57SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but also like there's just a lot

20:58SPEAKERof contentious disagreements about study results

21:01SPEAKERand so forth.

21:02SPEAKER- Yes, that's also true.

21:04SPEAKER- Okay, here's a name I've written down.

21:06SPEAKEROkay, Wynn Nuke.

21:09SPEAKER- Oh, yes.

21:10SPEAKER- Do you remember Wynn Nuke?

21:11SPEAKER- Yeah, nuke.exe.

21:13SPEAKERI remember at the end of hackers, they run that

21:15SPEAKERand it's the thing that brings to you,

21:17SPEAKERyou hack the planet, bro.

21:20SPEAKER- I wonder, wait a minute.

21:22SPEAKERI wonder if this was the Nuke type of exploit

21:25SPEAKERnamed after that scene.

21:27SPEAKER- I think it's the other way around.

21:28SPEAKERWell, no, hackers was 95, right?

21:29SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the thing.

21:30SPEAKERSo Wynn Nuke was released in 97.

21:32SPEAKERWynn Nuke is the first--

21:33SPEAKER- God, it might've been.

21:34SPEAKER- Yeah, and hackers was a couple of years before that.

21:35SPEAKERI think that's entirely possible.

21:39SPEAKERWynn Nuke is the first like wide scale internet

21:42SPEAKERvulnerability exploit type thing

21:44SPEAKERthat I remember making the news and being a big deal.

21:46SPEAKER- Well, 'cause it ran across TCP, right?

21:48SPEAKERInstead of like local networks.

21:50SPEAKERAt that point, the stuff that was a problem

21:53SPEAKERwas like word macro viruses and worms and stuff,

21:56SPEAKERlike worms that ran over local networks

21:59SPEAKERrather than the broadly addressable internet.

22:03SPEAKER- Right, I know you had internet access a good bit before me

22:06SPEAKERon account of going to college earlier and stuff,

22:09SPEAKERbut like this is like a matter of months

22:11SPEAKERafter I even got on the internet period,

22:13SPEAKERlike ever touched the internet for the first time.

22:15SPEAKER- Oh, wow, I had ISTN in 97 by the end point, yeah.

22:21SPEAKERIt wasn't, look, I'm gonna go and tell you.

22:22SPEAKERIt was twice as fast as a modem, still not great.

22:25SPEAKER- Look, hey man, I was happy

22:28SPEAKERto get three kilobytes a second, okay.

22:31SPEAKER- It was symmetrical though, so that's nice.

22:34SPEAKER- Downloading a megabyte in what,

22:36SPEAKERtwo and two and a half minutes instead of five

22:39SPEAKERwould have changed my life.

22:41SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, yeah.

22:44SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know if we wanna get into the nitty gritty.

22:45SPEAKERYes, they exploited a specific component of the TCP header

22:51SPEAKERcalled an urgent pointer.

22:54SPEAKERApparently that flag is used,

22:56SPEAKERI'm quoting from Wikipedia,

22:57SPEAKERused to indicate that some of the data in the TCP stream

22:59SPEAKERshould be processed quickly by the recipient.

23:02SPEAKERThe affected operating systems

23:03SPEAKERdid not handle that field correctly.

23:05SPEAKERSo that was, and this caused a blue screen to be clear.

23:08SPEAKERThis was Windows 95, NT and the 3.1s

23:13SPEAKERwould all blue screen from this.

23:17SPEAKER- Yep, that would do it.

23:20SPEAKER- We had a computer lab that was all Linux machines

23:23SPEAKERat this point in the CS department

23:26SPEAKERand the admin of that group after the lab closed,

23:30SPEAKERwe would all go play three wave CTF in there.

23:35SPEAKER- Like the Linux version of Quake?

23:38SPEAKER- No, we probably booted to Windows

23:39SPEAKERfor that would be my guess.

23:41SPEAKERBut also people knew the IP addresses of those machines

23:46SPEAKERand you'd occasionally get a mysterious blue screen

23:48SPEAKERif you're doing too well in the game, weird.

23:50SPEAKER- What a weird coincidence.

23:51SPEAKER- Very strange.

23:52SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, shocking.

23:54SPEAKER- God, what Linux was even out in '97?

23:57SPEAKER- Slackware. - Slackware.

23:58SPEAKER- Slackware, Red Hat, probably Debian, I guess.

24:05SPEAKER- I guess Red Hat was that early, right?

24:06SPEAKER- Yeah, Red Hat, Slackware were the two kind of early ones.

24:08SPEAKERGentoo was probably out shortly thereafter, if not by then.

24:11SPEAKER- You're right, the Debian was

24:12SPEAKERand I would not be surprised if Gentoo,

24:14SPEAKERI assume Gentoo has been around since the stone ages.

24:17SPEAKERWe found it in a cave.

24:19SPEAKER- Gentoo was like the one that the hardcore people did,

24:23SPEAKERbut I feel like the lab ran Slackware

24:25SPEAKERbecause that's the guy who was the admin

24:27SPEAKERwas a Slackware guy.

24:28SPEAKER- Okay, that makes sense.

24:30SPEAKERSlackware was the one I had heard of in the '90s

24:32SPEAKERfor what that's worth.

24:33SPEAKERAnd also like as much as Arch, I think has the reputation

24:37SPEAKERfor being like the gray beard distro these days,

24:40SPEAKERlike I get the sense that Gentoo

24:41SPEAKERis like an order of magnitude more nuts than that.

24:44SPEAKER- Gentoo, I installed Gentoo a couple of times

24:47SPEAKERand the problem with Gentoo was you had to compile everything.

24:50SPEAKER- That's exactly it.

24:51SPEAKERIt's the one that makes you compile everything.

24:53SPEAKER- Yeah, which like back then,

24:55SPEAKERyou'd get like probably a pretty decent speed increase

24:57SPEAKERon the hardware that you were running.

24:59SPEAKERNow, it's just a thing that a crazy person would do

25:01SPEAKERbecause the power, like you don't, it doesn't matter.

25:05SPEAKERThat's the, yeah.

25:07SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's the stereotype I've read about

25:09SPEAKERis like people just endlessly trying

25:10SPEAKERto optimize the compile flags for their kernel

25:14SPEAKERwhen they built Gentoo to get like 0.001% more speed.

25:17SPEAKER- Yeah, but like if you're running a lab

25:19SPEAKERwith 30 computers in it, then students are running it,

25:22SPEAKERlike Slackware or Red Hat or something like that

25:24SPEAKERis the way to go.

25:24SPEAKERThis is when Slack, when Red Hat was still not

25:26SPEAKERa like enterprise product at that point.

25:28SPEAKERIt was just a, it was just a Linux distro, I guess.

25:31SPEAKER- Interesting.

25:32SPEAKER- 'Cause they didn't go public until like '99 or 2000,

25:35SPEAKERI think.

25:36SPEAKER- So the username of the person who published the C code

25:39SPEAKERfor this exploit was _eci.

25:42SPEAKER- What is eci?

25:43SPEAKERIt's short for?

25:45SPEAKER- How much do you wanna bet that was just their initials?

25:46SPEAKERDo you think that's?

25:47SPEAKER- Oh, Eric, Chris.

25:52SPEAKER- Don't know.

25:53SPEAKER- Wow, maybe.

25:54SPEAKERDid they find out who wrote it?

25:56SPEAKER- Not that I've seen.

25:59SPEAKERMicrosoft eventually issued patches

26:00SPEAKERsome weeks or months later,

26:02SPEAKERbut because the source code was out there,

26:04SPEAKERlike a zillion little tools were made

26:06SPEAKERby all kinds of people with names such as FedUp,

26:09SPEAKERKill Me, Liquid Nuke, Muerte, Nuke Attack.

26:15SPEAKERSo we'll see.

26:17SPEAKER- I mean, it's important to remember at this point,

26:19SPEAKERMicrosoft was the enemy of freedom on the internet.

26:21SPEAKER- Oh yeah, of course.

26:22SPEAKERThis was firmly in the micro dollar sign off era.

26:27SPEAKER- It may have even been a little bit before that.

26:29SPEAKERThis is just like they were just the evil empire,

26:32SPEAKERyou know, destroying everything.

26:34SPEAKERThey'd killed OS2 warp.

26:36SPEAKERThey were coming after your computers.

26:39SPEAKER- God, Jean-Paptiste on the VLC FOSS pod

26:41SPEAKERthat we put up recently talking about

26:43SPEAKERthere still being a version of VLC maintained for OS2

26:46SPEAKERhas made me really want to go install OS2.

26:48SPEAKER- You should install OS2.

26:50SPEAKERYeah, that's your out for your computer problems.

26:54SPEAKER- The second time I've mentioned 86Box on this episode,

26:56SPEAKERI've been eyeballing that thing for a while

26:58SPEAKERand kind of putting it off until I build a new desktop

27:01SPEAKER'cause it does need a fair amount of CPU grunt.

27:04SPEAKER- What was it?

27:05SPEAKERJust a software emulator for an app for like a 586 CPU?

27:09SPEAKER- I don't know how much actual virtualization it's doing.

27:11SPEAKERI haven't really looked at what's going on under the hood.

27:13SPEAKERIf it's like actual VMs or what the deal is,

27:16SPEAKERit's like conceptually, you can think of it

27:18SPEAKERas a much more capable glorified DOSBox.

27:21SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

27:22SPEAKER- But instead of like DOSBox,

27:23SPEAKERI think it's just sort of an interpreter

27:25SPEAKERfor like DOS system calls or whatever.

27:27SPEAKERThis thing emulates everything from the BIOS up

27:31SPEAKERand it's like, I believe it might be actual classic BIOSes

27:35SPEAKERor maybe those are copyrighted and it uses like a substitute

27:37SPEAKERbut like you can define everything about the system.

27:41SPEAKERYou can tell it like what kind

27:42SPEAKERof hard drive geometry you want.

27:44SPEAKER- Wow.

27:45SPEAKER- You can say, hey, I want the platters of this hard drive

27:47SPEAKERto be like they were in a quantum fireball from 1998.

27:50SPEAKER- Jesus.

27:51SPEAKER- Like it's a super hardcore way

27:53SPEAKERto run old x86 PC stuff, anyway.

27:55SPEAKER- That sounds fun.

27:56SPEAKERA lot of the stuff from that time period

27:57SPEAKERis really hard to run on modern machines.

28:00SPEAKERThis is the thing.

28:00SPEAKER- It sounds kind of amazing

28:02SPEAKERand then that would be the natural place

28:03SPEAKERto do something like play with OS2 warp or OS2-3 pre-warp.

28:08SPEAKER- Ooh, OS2 warp was way before

28:11SPEAKERthis though.

28:12SPEAKERShould we talk about wifi?

28:15SPEAKER- Yeah, 802.11, just 802.11.

28:19SPEAKER- Yeah, this was just the spec for the underlying layer.

28:23SPEAKER- Yeah.

28:25SPEAKER- And it was like nothing shipped.

28:27SPEAKERLike this was, hey, here's a way to do wireless networking

28:31SPEAKERas defined by the IEEE and then nothing happened

28:35SPEAKERuntil I think 1999 or early 2000 is when I first saw

28:38SPEAKER802.11 hardware in the wild.

28:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked about this before.

28:44SPEAKERI've talked about that like weird hole in my memory,

28:46SPEAKERthat gray period where I think wifi was around,

28:50SPEAKERbut I wasn't super aware of it.

28:51SPEAKERAnd then the next thing you do, everything was wireless.

28:53SPEAKERLike I didn't get my first wireless router until 2008.

28:57SPEAKER- Wow, really?

28:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I was probably late on that.

29:00SPEAKER- Well, so yeah, it was the thing that kicked it off

29:04SPEAKERwas when Intel started advertising laptop chipsets on TV

29:07SPEAKERwith wireless and like the Centrino stuff with 802.11 B

29:13SPEAKERjust being a feature of like going from, hey,

29:17SPEAKERhere's the thing you have to pay an extra a hundred bucks

29:18SPEAKERfor that nobody wants to, a thing that you already have

29:21SPEAKERand you just need to buy a router to make work

29:23SPEAKERsuddenly became a good thing.

29:24SPEAKERAlso, the other thing that pushed it over the edge

29:27SPEAKERis everybody suddenly started needing a router

29:28SPEAKER'cause there were a bunch of worms

29:29SPEAKERthat spread over the internet that if you had a 95

29:34SPEAKERor 20,000 machine just on the raw internet,

29:36SPEAKERyou'd have real problems.

29:38SPEAKER- Yes, we have talked about your past indiscretions.

29:41SPEAKER- Look, I got a nasty letter from the ISP.

29:43SPEAKERI was like, there's nothing wrong with my computer.

29:44SPEAKERI looked at my computer, I was like,

29:45SPEAKERoh God, there's a lot wrong with my computer.

29:47SPEAKER- This unpatched Windows 2000 machine

29:49SPEAKERthat is directly connected to the internet.

29:52SPEAKER- It was patched, it just wasn't firewalled.

29:54SPEAKERMistakes were made.

29:55SPEAKER- That was a, look, that was a naughty computer.

29:58SPEAKER- We all get an SDSL machine and think

30:02SPEAKERwe have a SDSL connection.

30:04SPEAKERWe're like, we have, I have a T1 coming into my bedroom.

30:06SPEAKERI should have a server.

30:08SPEAKERIt turns out I should not have had a server.

30:11SPEAKER- I've always wondered what the separation is

30:13SPEAKERbetween the letter designations on 802.11.

30:16SPEAKERLike there is technically an A,

30:17SPEAKERalthough I think that's like some very early spec

30:19SPEAKERthat's described as OFDM waveform here.

30:22SPEAKER- Well, A, there were two, no, A,

30:27SPEAKERwasn't A the 5.4 gigahertz variant?

30:31SPEAKER- Yes, A does operate in the five gigahertz band.

30:34SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, the early Sonos stuff was based on A.

30:37SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.

30:39SPEAKERSo A is not super consumer facing from the sound of,

30:41SPEAKERI mean, B obviously, it was B, G, N,

30:43SPEAKEReverybody knows then AC.

30:44SPEAKER- Well, no, A was available,

30:46SPEAKERbut the spectrum wasn't as unified around the world.

30:50SPEAKERIf you could buy 802.11.A stuff,

30:52SPEAKERit didn't penetrate as well

30:54SPEAKER'cause it was higher frequency,

30:56SPEAKERbut you had much better bandwidth on the A hardware

30:59SPEAKERthan you did on the B hardware.

31:01SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.

31:02SPEAKERIt turns out most people, if you go back

31:04SPEAKERand use 802.11b now, the range is abysmal

31:08SPEAKERand there wasn't a easy way to do access point hopping

31:14SPEAKERor anything like that even.

31:16SPEAKERSo unless you had a high-end commercial setup,

31:20SPEAKERwhich really didn't exist because you'd go to,

31:24SPEAKERokay, it's hard to remember,

31:26SPEAKERbut there were big technology events,

31:29SPEAKERlike there were Apple events and CES keynotes

31:31SPEAKERand stuff like that where the Wi-Fi immediately died

31:34SPEAKERthe moment the event started

31:36SPEAKERbecause all the reporters would connect

31:37SPEAKERon their laptops to Wi-Fi

31:39SPEAKERand it would just completely crash the network.

31:42SPEAKER- Oh, I remember.

31:42SPEAKER- And that didn't get fixed until N really

31:45SPEAKERwhen we started having more spectrum available

31:48SPEAKERand heavier access points.

31:52SPEAKERThe A was unusual, but available in the US regularly.

31:57SPEAKERWe reviewed A cards and AB cards

32:00SPEAKERwere not super uncommon.

32:03SPEAKEROften you would buy an AB,

32:05SPEAKERlike often laptops would have AB,

32:07SPEAKERbut they wouldn't wire antennas onto the A ports.

32:10SPEAKERSo you wouldn't have anything,

32:11SPEAKERlike they just turn them off in the BIOS.

32:16SPEAKER- Also, yeah, on the point of the naming,

32:17SPEAKERlike there are no intermediate standards.

32:20SPEAKERIt's not like there's B, C, D, E.

32:23SPEAKERLike it literally just goes from B to G

32:25SPEAKERand then from G to N.

32:26SPEAKERSo I don't know what drives that naming.

32:28SPEAKER- There's C, D, and E probably were things

32:30SPEAKERthat either faltered and didn't get ratified

32:32SPEAKERor are other aspects of the protocol,

32:37SPEAKERlike security access or handshaking or something like that.

32:40SPEAKERNegotiation.

32:42SPEAKER- Standards.

32:44SPEAKER- I mean, at some point we should do a,

32:45SPEAKERhey, how does the IEEE work episode?

32:48SPEAKERBut I feel like that'll just be a bunch of companies

32:50SPEAKERget together and talk to each other

32:51SPEAKERand then everybody yells about the things that they want

32:54SPEAKERand then it all gets jammed in

32:55SPEAKERand then a handshake happens

32:57SPEAKERand an IEEE standard was born.

33:00SPEAKER- Yes.

33:02SPEAKEROr in the USB case,

33:03SPEAKERthey make the worst possible version of every decision.

33:07SPEAKER- Look, it's USB 3.2 generation C now.

33:10SPEAKER- I cannot, don't get me started.

33:14SPEAKERI'm in the position of buying a new motherboard

33:16SPEAKERand looking at what IO is on there as one does

33:20SPEAKERand realizing how God awful USB naming has gotten.

33:23SPEAKERLike what happened?

33:24SPEAKER- You mean super speed USB 20 gigabits?

33:27SPEAKER- Oh, sorry.

33:28SPEAKERUSB 3.2 Gen two by two or USB 3.2?

33:32SPEAKERWhich one are you looking for Brad?

33:33SPEAKER- I mean, I guess the upside is the board I'm looking at

33:35SPEAKERdoes have one of those 20 gigabit ports on it,

33:37SPEAKERwhich is cool.

33:38SPEAKERI didn't know that even existed, but like what?

33:40SPEAKER- USB four Gen two by two or just USB four?

33:44SPEAKER- How did we get to a 3.2 Gen one and two?

33:47SPEAKERWhat are you people doing?

33:48SPEAKER- They simplified the naming scheme.

33:50SPEAKER- Oh, of course they did.

33:50SPEAKER- Yeah, that was what,

33:53SPEAKERso instead of having USB three and 3.1 and 3.2,

33:57SPEAKERnow we have USB 3.1, 3.2, and USB 3.1 Gen two,

34:01SPEAKERand then USB 3.2, and then USB Gen 3.2 Gen two by two,

34:05SPEAKERwhich is a double wide 3.2 Gen two connection.

34:10SPEAKERIt all makes perfect sense, Brad.

34:11SPEAKER- Hey, did you know that September 97

34:13SPEAKERwas when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple?

34:16SPEAKER- The triumph at the prodigal son returns.

34:18SPEAKER- Yes, well known.

34:20SPEAKERI don't know how much we need to get into it.

34:22SPEAKERApple acquired and actually the thing I have been reading

34:25SPEAKERabout a lot for whatever reason is the absolute boondoggle

34:29SPEAKERof Apple operating systems in the nineties.

34:32SPEAKER- Oh yeah, it was real bad.

34:33SPEAKER- Granted like everything at Apple in the nineties

34:35SPEAKERwas a boondoggle.

34:36SPEAKERI mean, they were like, what was it?

34:37SPEAKER90 days from bankruptcy or something?

34:39SPEAKERWhat's the famous stats when Microsoft invested

34:43SPEAKERa ton of money.

34:44SPEAKER- Yeah, Microsoft put $150 million in and,

34:47SPEAKERbut more importantly committed to releasing office on Mac

34:50SPEAKERso that people continued buying Macs.

34:51SPEAKERThat was the thing that like they were like IT purchasers

34:58SPEAKERwere worried that office was gonna go away

35:00SPEAKERand then they'd buy a bunch of these expensive Macs

35:02SPEAKERand then there'd be no software to run on them

35:04SPEAKERand they'd be hosed.

35:06SPEAKER- And this was back when like format wars

35:08SPEAKERwere a much bigger deal, right?

35:09SPEAKERLike if you needed to be in the office ecosystem,

35:12SPEAKERyou needed to be in the office ecosystem, right?

35:14SPEAKERLike it's not like every word processor now

35:16SPEAKERpretty much can open every format.

35:18SPEAKER- Well, it's still kind of the case though.

35:19SPEAKER'Cause like if you do contract work and your lawyer

35:22SPEAKERsends you word document files that are annotated

35:24SPEAKERand have all the like the subheads and all that stuff

35:26SPEAKERand you open them in something else,

35:27SPEAKERit's gonna jack up the subheads even today.

35:30SPEAKER- That's fair.

35:31SPEAKERSo that investment,

35:31SPEAKERwas that literally the same announcement?

35:33SPEAKERLike was that all one?

35:34SPEAKER- It was a couple of weeks later, as I recall,

35:36SPEAKERor maybe before.

35:37SPEAKERIt was an important, like it was Bill Gates's way

35:44SPEAKERof saving Apple, of doing what he could to save Apple.

35:47SPEAKERBut also, well, I started to say

35:49SPEAKERin the shittiest way possible,

35:51SPEAKERbut I think my memory is entirely colored

35:52SPEAKERby the way this is portrayed in "Pirates of Silicon Valley."

35:56SPEAKERWhich is where like, which is like Noah Wiley

35:58SPEAKERas Steve Jobs, like giving some presentation

36:00SPEAKERand like, it's a real, it's like a real dark,

36:03SPEAKERlike the "Empire Strikes Back," the doors opening

36:05SPEAKERand Darth Vader is there moment of what just like

36:08SPEAKERthe giant looming face of Bill Gates appears on a screen.

36:11SPEAKER- Well, that's how it happened at Mac world.

36:13SPEAKER- And everybody loses their minds in a bad way.

36:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it was Mac world

36:17SPEAKERthat's where that happened, right?

36:18SPEAKER- Is that fairly historically accurate?

36:20SPEAKERWe really need to watch that movie at some point.

36:22SPEAKER- My understanding is that Bill Gates's face

36:25SPEAKERis pure giant on the screen at Mac world behind Steve Jobs

36:28SPEAKERand was like, "Hey, office, we're gonna keep making office.

36:30SPEAKER"And here's $115 million strategic investment in Apple."

36:33SPEAKER- I'm like, correct me if I'm wrong,

36:35SPEAKERI feel like I remember like the Macintosh community

36:37SPEAKERjust treated this like the end of the world, right?

36:42SPEAKER- It's difficult to say because there's like, as always,

36:45SPEAKERwell, okay, so there was a game you used to play

36:47SPEAKERwhen you went to Mac world,

36:47SPEAKERwhich is this person on the phone with somebody

36:49SPEAKERlike with a headset in, or are they talking to themselves?

36:52SPEAKERBecause the community was pretty evenly divided

36:54SPEAKERbetween like old school home brew computer aficionados

37:02SPEAKERand like the kind of people who were into computers

37:04SPEAKERin the 80s before they were really a business thing

37:07SPEAKERfor most people.

37:08SPEAKERAnd then like, by that point there was a burgeoning new class

37:12SPEAKERof people who were like putting Macs in IT environments

37:16SPEAKERand stuff like that.

37:17SPEAKERAnd the reactions were wildly different

37:19SPEAKERin all the different places.

37:21SPEAKERThe working community was pretty strongly pro

37:26SPEAKERbecause that meant that like they could actually

37:28SPEAKERsafely invest in these computers that they clearly liked

37:30SPEAKERif they were going to Mac world.

37:32SPEAKERThe people who were the true believers

37:33SPEAKERthought it was bad news, as I recall.

37:35SPEAKER- Yeah, that's kind of the faithful, you might say,

37:39SPEAKERor who I was talking about there, but-

37:41SPEAKER- Yeah, but like, but like those faithful,

37:43SPEAKERthose faithful, like they all, like when the,

37:47SPEAKERthey didn't like when the candy-colored IMAX came out,

37:51SPEAKERthey didn't like any of the,

37:53SPEAKERthey were upset by the entire thing.

37:55SPEAKERThey were carrying Newton's around still probably.

37:57SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.

37:58SPEAKERAnyway, like, you know, Steve Jobs' second tenure at Apple

38:01SPEAKERis very well-documented and we don't need to get into that.

38:03SPEAKERBut like, I'm endlessly fascinated by like,

38:05SPEAKERI think we've talked about it recently,

38:06SPEAKERlike the Copland project at Apple was their first attempt

38:10SPEAKERto replace the Macintosh system software

38:12SPEAKERsince the beginning of the Mac, you know?

38:13SPEAKERThey got up to, they got up to system seven

38:15SPEAKERand it was all the same operating system.

38:17SPEAKERAnd then Copland was the like absolutely like disastrous

38:22SPEAKERattempt to- - It never released, did it?

38:23SPEAKER- No, it never came out, it never came out.

38:24SPEAKERLike if you go back and read about like the demo events

38:26SPEAKERthey were having people out to for that thing,

38:28SPEAKERlike it literally couldn't just sit at a desktop

38:30SPEAKERwithout crashing.

38:31SPEAKER- Yeah, and system eight and system nine,

38:33SPEAKERwhile they were functional and shipped

38:35SPEAKERon a whole bunch of machines were not, were not good OSs.

38:39SPEAKERLike system eight, they literally took what was going

38:42SPEAKERto be the last major feature release for system seven

38:45SPEAKERand like gussied it up with slightly new UI and stuff

38:48SPEAKERand renamed it to system eight.

38:49SPEAKERLike that's how dire things were.

38:50SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and it's important to note at this time

38:53SPEAKERMicrosoft was really taking over and like Windows 95, 98

38:57SPEAKERwere both good releases.

39:00SPEAKERAnd at the same time NT4- - They were getting there.

39:02SPEAKER- Well, but at the same time NT4 was really, really exciting

39:06SPEAKER'cause it was like doing symmetrical multiprocessing.

39:08SPEAKERIt was like there was all sorts of stuff

39:10SPEAKERthat was happening in NT.

39:13SPEAKERLike, I mean, we'll get to this in a minute.

39:15SPEAKERWell, actually we can talk about it now if we want,

39:16SPEAKERbut like they released, Microsoft released DirectX five,

39:19SPEAKERincluding betas for DirectX five,

39:21SPEAKERwhich gave low level like metal access to hardware on NT4.

39:27SPEAKERLike you can get a beta for DirectX five on NT4.

39:30SPEAKER- Is five the first one that ran on NT4?

39:32SPEAKER- There were bits of DirectX three that ran before,

39:34SPEAKERbut like the 3D acceleration stuff never worked before.

39:37SPEAKER- Oh God, you're taking me back now.

39:39SPEAKERYes, I think this is definitely around the time

39:43SPEAKERthat I had my dalliance with NT4.

39:45SPEAKERI was like, oh, I'm gonna run the powerful

39:47SPEAKERnext generation future windows.

39:50SPEAKERBut yes, I remember like trying to install,

39:52SPEAKERlike I think there was no direct 3D.

39:54SPEAKER- There was no direct 3D three for NT4.

39:57SPEAKER- When you were running DirectX three on NT,

39:59SPEAKERit was like, I think you got sound and maybe-

40:02SPEAKER- Networking and input as I recall.

40:04SPEAKER- But no 3D acceleration.

40:05SPEAKERSo no, you couldn't play direct 3D games on NT,

40:07SPEAKERbut you could play OpenGL.

40:09SPEAKER- Right, so you could play OpenGL and Glide.

40:11SPEAKER- Which at the time was kind of all that mattered.

40:13SPEAKERI mean, they were like-

40:13SPEAKER- Yeah, you're playing Quake mostly.

40:15SPEAKER- Right, not a lot of direct 3D game.

40:16SPEAKERI mean, there were, that was starting to happen,

40:18SPEAKERbut anyway, just real quick,

40:20SPEAKERjust to close the loop on the Apple stuff,

40:21SPEAKERlike that, you know,

40:23SPEAKERJobs came back because Apple bought Next

40:25SPEAKERbecause the reason they bought Next

40:26SPEAKERwas to get the next step, the operating system.

40:29SPEAKER- Yeah.

40:29SPEAKER- But they were, they basically,

40:30SPEAKERthey basically hit a wall where they were like,

40:32SPEAKERwe cannot, we don't have it in ourselves to architect

40:36SPEAKERour next generation operating system.

40:37SPEAKERWe need to just go buy one

40:38SPEAKERbecause we're gonna go out of business.

40:40SPEAKER- Well, making OSs was hard.

40:41SPEAKERAnd they shopped, by all reports,

40:43SPEAKERthey shopped around Next and B also,

40:47SPEAKERBOS, Jean-Luc Essay's other Mac spinoff operating system.

40:54SPEAKER- That's the, the Gil Amelio was running Apple at the time.

40:56SPEAKERI think they, I think they looked at some others as well,

40:58SPEAKERbut you're right.

40:59SPEAKERLike B and Next were the two like major candidates

41:01SPEAKERto become the next Mac OS.

41:03SPEAKER- But both, both former high profile Apple employees

41:07SPEAKERwho had gone off to do other things and yeah.

41:09SPEAKER- Dude, how, how incredibly different,

41:12SPEAKERdifferent would the history of computing be

41:13SPEAKERif they had bought B instead of Next?

41:16SPEAKER- Who, who knows what would have ended up happening?

41:18SPEAKER'Cause Next wasn't in super fine,

41:20SPEAKERsuper good financial shape.

41:21SPEAKER- Oh.

41:22SPEAKER- Like the, the market for that kind of computer

41:24SPEAKERwas evaporating under the, the growth of like the,

41:27SPEAKERthe PC market at that point.

41:30SPEAKER- Commodity harp, yeah.

41:31SPEAKERLike Next, Next for people who don't know,

41:33SPEAKERlike those were like academic and research workstations.

41:35SPEAKERThey were like, what, 50, 60,000.

41:37SPEAKERNo, no, no, that's not right.

41:38SPEAKER- No, that's SGI.

41:39SPEAKER- I'm not thinking about SGI.

41:40SPEAKER- It was still very expensive though.

41:41SPEAKER- I think they were, I think they were in the like six

41:42SPEAKERto $10,000 range for, for Next boxes or something like that.

41:46SPEAKER- They were, they were wildly overpriced

41:48SPEAKERand they were being outperformed by the Intel hardware,

41:50SPEAKERIntel and AMD hardware by, by like really, really quickly.

41:54SPEAKER- Right, but they had a really robust, like well-designed

41:56SPEAKERUnix based operating system, which became Mac OS 10.

42:00SPEAKERAnyway.

42:01SPEAKER- Turned out to be important.

42:04SPEAKER- This was, this is, this is right up there with Dolly

42:06SPEAKERin my memory of like big media sensations.

42:08SPEAKERThis was the year that Garry Kasparov competed

42:12SPEAKERagainst IBM's deep blue supercomputer in chess.

42:15SPEAKER- It was the second time, right?

42:17SPEAKER- Oh, was it?

42:19SPEAKER- I think they had, I thought they had another game

42:20SPEAKERbefore that, but, but this was the computer beat him.

42:24SPEAKER- Yes, this was the six game series where, yes, he lost,

42:30SPEAKERbut like it went to a tiebreaker.

42:34SPEAKEROr a final game, I should say.

42:36SPEAKER- Yeah.

42:37SPEAKERYeah, it was their second six game showdown.

42:38SPEAKER- Okay.

42:40SPEAKER- But, but the computer won in the, the, the final game

42:43SPEAKERin like, in like an hour or something.

42:45SPEAKER- Yes.

42:45SPEAKER- It was, I want somebody to make a movie about this,

42:48SPEAKERbut I don't know how you make the computer the antagonist.

42:52SPEAKER- Oh, I'm sorry.

42:53SPEAKERYes, I had glossed over that.

42:54SPEAKERThis is, this is, this is the year that it beat him.

42:56SPEAKER- Yeah, previously I think he brought,

42:58SPEAKERfought to a draw maybe, I can't remember.

43:02SPEAKER- I think he won.

43:03SPEAKER- Yes, no, he, he beat it four to two the first time for 96.

43:08SPEAKERThe thing I was interested in here was that actually

43:10SPEAKERit was like, I stopped and was like, wait a minute,

43:12SPEAKERwhat was the thing made out of?

43:13SPEAKERLike, what did it run?

43:15SPEAKERAnd I went and looked.

43:16SPEAKERSo they described it as a supercomputer at the time.

43:19SPEAKER- Yeah.

43:20SPEAKER- But it was mostly like massively parallelized.

43:23SPEAKERLike it had, so it had 30 power PC CPUs in it.

43:26SPEAKER- Well, that makes sense, given IBM.

43:28SPEAKERYeah.

43:29SPEAKER- But it also had, it also had 480 custom microprocessors,

43:32SPEAKERwhich this article describes as chess chips.

43:35SPEAKERLike there are quite literally.

43:37SPEAKERSo those, I've got a quote here from the museum

43:40SPEAKERwhere the blue is shown off.

43:43SPEAKERLet's see, the chips contained 1.5 million transistors

43:46SPEAKERand ran at 24 megahertz.

43:49SPEAKER- Well, I mean, if you think about the time,

43:51SPEAKERlike Pentium 2 is running at 233 megahertz.

43:55SPEAKERSo that's not.

43:55SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

43:56SPEAKERIt's not, but still well, but so that this,

43:58SPEAKERthis museum display actually comments on that and see this,

44:01SPEAKERthe chip contained only one quarter

44:03SPEAKERof the number of transistors of a Pentium 2.

44:06SPEAKERBut it was quite literally designed

44:08SPEAKERjust to accelerate the algorithms,

44:10SPEAKERthe kind of search algorithms they were using

44:13SPEAKERto play chess with.

44:14SPEAKERSo this is like literally the world's first hardware

44:17SPEAKERchess accelerator.

44:18SPEAKER- Wow.

44:19SPEAKER- Which, you know, maybe 3FX should have gotten

44:22SPEAKERinto the chess acceleration markets.

44:24SPEAKER- Hmm, I don't know, maybe.

44:26SPEAKER- But still, they were too busy making graphics cards

44:29SPEAKERand physics cards when they could've been making chess cards.

44:33SPEAKER- Yeah, it's funny, that stuff didn't land for me,

44:36SPEAKERbut also I was, I don't know that I had a TV connected

44:39SPEAKERto TV, like at that point I had probably just a TV

44:43SPEAKERwith a Genesis and a SNES hooked up to it.

44:45SPEAKER- Sure.

44:46SPEAKER- I don't remember. - And a VCR maybe.

44:48SPEAKER- Yeah, I didn't pay a ton of attention to it either

44:51SPEAKERat the time, but another interesting fact here is that

44:56SPEAKERKasparov wanted to study other games

45:00SPEAKERthat the computer had played prior, and IBM said no.

45:05SPEAKER- Oh, wow, really?

45:06SPEAKER- So he actually just went and got a bunch of off-the-shelf

45:08SPEAKERcommercial PC chess games and started playing those

45:11SPEAKERto try to flake under--

45:12SPEAKER- Battle chess and chess master 3000 and--

45:14SPEAKER- I'm really curious which ones he was playing,

45:16SPEAKERbut yeah, he just went and played like straight up

45:18SPEAKERchess games to try to understand how chess algorithms worked

45:22SPEAKERbecause they wouldn't let him see Deep Blue's history.

45:26SPEAKER- That's really interesting 'cause like normally in chess,

45:28SPEAKERthe chess world, all past games are public knowledge.

45:32SPEAKERLike you can go back and watch everybody,

45:33SPEAKERlike that's all recorded.

45:35SPEAKERYou can go back and watch Garry Kasparov's games

45:37SPEAKERagainst everybody he ever played in a tournament.

45:40SPEAKER- That seems like maybe questionable.

45:44SPEAKERI don't know.

45:45SPEAKER- Yeah, you gotta give the computer some sort of edge.

45:47SPEAKER- Fair.

45:49SPEAKERLet's see, not a ton going on in space

45:51SPEAKERand astrophysics in '97.

45:54SPEAKERThere was a Mars window there, right?

45:56SPEAKER- Yes, the Mars Pathfinder mission.

45:59SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the one with the little tiny itsy bitsy rover

46:01SPEAKERwhich was the first rover, I believe, first wheeled rover.

46:04SPEAKER- The Sojourner.

46:05SPEAKER- Sojourner to tread another planet.

46:08SPEAKERAnd it was kind of an early internet phenomenon,

46:10SPEAKERas I recall.

46:11SPEAKER- Was it?

46:12SPEAKER- Yeah, like the Quake news sites would post new pictures

46:16SPEAKERfrom the rover.

46:18SPEAKERThe rover was a little solar powered, six wheeled baby rover.

46:22SPEAKERSo the Pathfinder was the one that landed

46:24SPEAKERin the bag, I believe, right?

46:27SPEAKERIt was a bouncing beach ball and it had to land wheels.

46:29SPEAKERIt had to land flat side down.

46:31SPEAKER- Yes, right.

46:34SPEAKERPathfinder was the overall mission and lander, I believe.

46:36SPEAKER- Yeah.

46:37SPEAKER- Sojourner was just the rover.

46:39SPEAKER- Yeah, and so it opened up the side panels

46:42SPEAKERand then the rover rolled off after a few days.

46:46SPEAKERAnd we got a lot of pictures.

46:48SPEAKERI remember seeing pictures constantly from that.

46:51SPEAKERIt was cool.

46:52SPEAKERI'm surprised I don't remember that being more

46:54SPEAKERof a sensation because you're right.

46:56SPEAKERIt was the first rover to ever drive on another body

46:59SPEAKERin the solar system.

47:00SPEAKER- Well, I also believe that that was the first time

47:02SPEAKERI ever went to a NASA or one of the first times

47:04SPEAKERI ever went to a NASA website.

47:05SPEAKERLike the NASA website, they posted the pictures

47:09SPEAKERfrom the rover and you could see them

47:11SPEAKERbefore they were on the news.

47:14SPEAKERIf you just went to the FTP site

47:16SPEAKERand they had to set up a whole bunch of mirrors

47:17SPEAKER'cause everybody was hitting it all the time.

47:19SPEAKERAnd we all had terrible connections.

47:21SPEAKERSo each of these pictures would take 10 minutes to download.

47:25SPEAKERAnd if they timed out, you'd have to download it again.

47:27SPEAKERIt was a weird time.

47:30SPEAKERIt was also the year that they launched

47:31SPEAKERthe Cassini probe to Saturn,

47:34SPEAKERwhich was the kind of sister mission to Galileo,

47:38SPEAKERwhich was the one that went to Jupiter.

47:41SPEAKERBut it launched from Cape Canaveral

47:42SPEAKERand did a couple of gravity assists around Venus

47:46SPEAKERand then back to Earth and then Jupiter

47:47SPEAKERon the way out to Saturn.

47:50SPEAKERBut the thing that I remember most about that

47:54SPEAKERwas we were supposed to go down for the launch

47:57SPEAKERto watch the launch.

47:58SPEAKERAnd then they kind of had to shut down guest access

48:02SPEAKERor whatever to the launch because of people protesting

48:06SPEAKERthe RTGs on the probe.

48:10SPEAKERIt was a nuclear powered probe.

48:11SPEAKERIt had, I think, 35 pounds or kilograms, kilograms, I think.

48:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it was like 70 something pounds of plutonium.

48:18SPEAKER- Yeah, 33 kilograms of nuclear fuel,

48:19SPEAKERwhich would be like 70 something pounds.

48:23SPEAKERAnd people were upset, but Saturn was far enough away

48:26SPEAKERthat solar panels of the time wouldn't work

48:29SPEAKERor wouldn't provide enough power for the length of time.

48:32SPEAKERAnd as a result, they used a little radioactive isotope decay.

48:41SPEAKERI feel like there were...

48:44SPEAKERSo I believe my understanding was that the two complaints

48:47SPEAKERabout the anti-nuclear activists at the time

48:49SPEAKERwere that if it exploded at launch,

48:51SPEAKERit would irradiate a large portion of central Florida,

48:54SPEAKERwhich, you know, whatever.

48:57SPEAKER- Wow, judgy.

48:59SPEAKER- Or also on the Earth assist loop,

49:03SPEAKERif something happened and it crashed back into the planet,

49:05SPEAKERit could irradiate the entire planet.

49:08SPEAKERAnd then NASA did the math on what that would mean,

49:11SPEAKERwhich I'm sure was their version of the math was rosy,

49:15SPEAKERbut they were like at most,

49:16SPEAKERit would cause like 5,000 early deaths or something like that

49:20SPEAKERdue to cancer, which it was like kind of on one hand,

49:25SPEAKERyeah, you know, radiate the entire planet,

49:28SPEAKERkill 5,000 people, that's not too bad.

49:29SPEAKEROn the other hand,

49:31SPEAKERI mean, killing 5,000 people always is bad.

49:34SPEAKERIt's always to be avoided.

49:35SPEAKERSo luckily the Cassini did not crash on the gravity assist.

49:42SPEAKERThose are pretty well established processes.

49:46SPEAKERAnd we got a lot of really good pictures

49:52SPEAKERand science out of that.

49:54SPEAKERAnd we sent a probe to Titan, I think.

50:00SPEAKERWe dropped something,

50:01SPEAKERI can't remember which of Saturn's moons,

50:03SPEAKERthe Huygens probe.

50:04SPEAKERI don't know how you say that actually.

50:06SPEAKER- Huygens, I believe. - Huygens.

50:11SPEAKERRealizing that this is a word I've only ever seen spelled

50:13SPEAKERand never heard said.

50:14SPEAKER- I believe that's right.

50:15SPEAKER- It landed on Titan, yeah.

50:17SPEAKER- Okay.

50:18SPEAKER- It's a little itsy bitsy thing.

50:20SPEAKER- Hang on, this can't have been the first

50:21SPEAKERnuclear powered probe.

50:22SPEAKERI thought Voyager was-

50:24SPEAKER- No, no, we sent a bunch of nuclear powered probes.

50:25SPEAKER- Yeah, like why now?

50:27SPEAKERWas it the quantity of fuel?

50:29SPEAKER- It was 'cause it was a lot of fuel and people also,

50:35SPEAKERI don't believe that either of the Voyagers

50:38SPEAKERdid earth gravity slingshots.

50:44SPEAKER- Okay, okay.

50:45SPEAKERSo just increased kind of risk surface.

50:49SPEAKERYeah, got it.

50:51SPEAKER- Yeah, also it's convenient.

50:56SPEAKERWho knows what people decide to protest, right?

50:59SPEAKER- Sure, yes, fair, fair.

51:02SPEAKERGot a little game section here.

51:04SPEAKERAs you mentioned, DirectX 5 came out in '97,

51:06SPEAKERwhich was like, in my mind, that was the first

51:08SPEAKERlike kind of complete DirectX, right?

51:11SPEAKER- It's the first one that felt real.

51:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:15SPEAKER- It's the first one that like was a cohesive thing

51:19SPEAKERthat worked better than the manufacturer specific APIs

51:23SPEAKERpretty universally.

51:24SPEAKER- Right, like that was the point I remember thinking like,

51:26SPEAKERoh, I guess this DirectX thing is actually the thing.

51:28SPEAKERLike that's gonna be what underpins all of this

51:30SPEAKERgoing forward and not just like a failed experiment.

51:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean DirectX 3 introduced Direct3D,

51:37SPEAKERbut Direct3D at that time was a little janky

51:40SPEAKERand you were usually better off running

51:41SPEAKERthe manufacturer specific versions

51:43SPEAKERif there happened to be one.

51:45SPEAKERDirectX 5 is when we stopped seeing

51:46SPEAKERthe manufacturer specific versions

51:48SPEAKERand we started seeing games like Jedi Knight,

51:51SPEAKERDark Forces 2 ship as fully 3D, Direct3D accelerated games.

51:56SPEAKER- Yeah, when you mentioned earlier

51:57SPEAKERthat there were not a lot of Direct3D games at the time,

51:59SPEAKERJedi Knight is the first, not the first,

52:02SPEAKERbut it's one of the first major ones that I remember.

52:04SPEAKER- It was the first of the like,

52:06SPEAKERit was the first of the ones

52:07SPEAKERthat were actually also good games, I would say.

52:10SPEAKER- Like a lot of the Direct3D games

52:11SPEAKERyou were getting at that time

52:12SPEAKERwere like packed in with your 3D accelerator.

52:15SPEAKER- Yeah, Hyperblade.

52:16SPEAKER- Right, like Revolt.

52:18SPEAKER- Revolt was okay, it was like a bedroom racing game.

52:22SPEAKER- It's a good game actually.

52:23SPEAKERNo, it's like a totally good game.

52:25SPEAKERYeah, I don't mean to malign it in any way,

52:27SPEAKERbut it was not super high profile.

52:28SPEAKER- Lot of MechWarrior 2 ports.

52:30SPEAKER- I mean, this was, you know, this was as we've mentioned,

52:32SPEAKERthis was right in the middle of like John Carmack's

52:34SPEAKERsoap boxing about how terrible Direct3D was all the time.

52:37SPEAKERSo it was still a lot of the big game development

52:40SPEAKERwas happening with OpenGL.

52:42SPEAKER- Yeah, or OpenGL specifically tuned to work with Glide.

52:47SPEAKER- Oh yeah, Glide, like the Glide wrapper.

52:49SPEAKER- GL, yeah, the wrapper.

52:50SPEAKER- Good old Glide wrapper.

52:52SPEAKER- But it was kind of like, it was weird

52:54SPEAKER'cause it was also, I mean,

52:55SPEAKERthe N64 came out in '96 technically,

52:58SPEAKERbut I don't think I knew anybody who had one until '97.

53:01SPEAKERYou reminded me of this 'cause you mentioned that for this

53:04SPEAKERand I was like, what are you talking about?

53:06SPEAKERIt came out in '96, I got one on a lunch day.

53:07SPEAKERLike no, but then now you're making me think

53:10SPEAKERI've forgotten that like,

53:11SPEAKERwere they actually really hard to get for a while?

53:13SPEAKERI think you might be right.

53:15SPEAKER- I remember like the first time I heard about

53:18SPEAKERthem being available in stores where you could get one

53:20SPEAKERif you hadn't like pre-ordered or put money down

53:22SPEAKERor something was that Walmart and Target

53:25SPEAKERstarted having them just after Christmas.

53:27SPEAKER- I think you're actually right.

53:30SPEAKER'Cause I got mine in January and I ended up driving

53:34SPEAKERto four different stores to find copies of,

53:38SPEAKERdid it come with Mario 64 or did you pay for Mario 64?

53:41SPEAKER- Oh gosh, I'm trying to think.

53:42SPEAKERIt was not packed in, but something happened where they like,

53:46SPEAKERI'd have to go pull this up.

53:47SPEAKERI want to say they like lowered the price of the console

53:49SPEAKERright before launch.

53:51SPEAKERIf I'm not mistaken, something strange happened

53:53SPEAKERwith the pricing right around launch.

53:55SPEAKER- I feel like when I bought it, when I bought the console,

53:58SPEAKERI got, the only game that they had that I was interested in

54:01SPEAKERwas Wave Race.

54:02SPEAKERAnd then I had to drive another 40 miles

54:04SPEAKERto get Super Mario 64.

54:06SPEAKER- Like look- - How do you think?

54:08SPEAKER- Oh, you said the only game they had

54:09SPEAKERthat you were interested in.

54:10SPEAKER- Yeah, at the store.

54:11SPEAKERLike there weren't, there were not a large selection

54:13SPEAKERof games available at launch for the N64.

54:15SPEAKER- I was going to say Wave Race is a fine game,

54:17SPEAKERbut maybe not the only game to get for it.

54:21SPEAKERI want to, man, I don't know if I can find something

54:27SPEAKERas obscure as a price drop right before launch

54:29SPEAKERof the Nintendo 64, but I am positive that happened.

54:33SPEAKER- It wouldn't, maybe that they unpacked the game

54:35SPEAKERand did the price drop.

54:37SPEAKER- Oh gosh, no, I found it right here on Wikipedia.

54:39SPEAKERYeah, originally intended to be priced at 250.

54:41SPEAKERThe console was ultimately launched at 199.99.

54:45SPEAKER- And did it come with Mario 64?

54:47SPEAKER- No, it did not.

54:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:48SPEAKER- To compete, so yeah, you still had to,

54:50SPEAKERbut to compete with the, sad,

54:54SPEAKERphrasing here is to compete with the Sony and Sega offerings.

54:57SPEAKERI don't think that the Saturn was a very competitive

54:59SPEAKERposition at that point, but anyway.

55:02SPEAKER- Rough here for Saturn.

55:03SPEAKER- But I do remember like I desperately,

55:05SPEAKERI needed a Nintendo 64 more than anything on the planet.

55:08SPEAKERLike I did so much, so many odd jobs that summer

55:12SPEAKERto make enough money to buy one in September.

55:14SPEAKER- It had SGI hardware in there.

55:16SPEAKER- I mean, I just, I, you know, that was like some

55:19SPEAKERof the earliest internet videos I ever downloaded

55:21SPEAKERwere like Mario 64 import clips from IGN,

55:23SPEAKERlike little postage stamp quick time videos.

55:26SPEAKERBut anyway, I remember like just saving relentlessly.

55:29SPEAKERAnd then like at the last second they dropped the price

55:31SPEAKERand I was like, oh man, now I can definitely afford it.

55:33SPEAKER- Yeah, you can get Wave Race.

55:34SPEAKER- How often does that happen?

55:36SPEAKER- The cartridges were expensive too.

55:38SPEAKER- Yes.

55:39SPEAKER- The cartridges were like 70 bucks as I recall.

55:41SPEAKER- Well, it varied by size of course, but yeah, you're right.

55:44SPEAKERI found an article from, I don't know who originally

55:48SPEAKERwrote this from 1997 about stock shortages.

55:51SPEAKERBut the N64 was very difficult to get for a while.

55:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I think I was able to get a second controller

55:58SPEAKERand Wave Race when I found mine.

56:00SPEAKERAnd then the next day I would manage to get a copy

56:01SPEAKERof Mario 64.

56:03SPEAKER- Other notable releases in '97, Final Fantasy 7.

56:07SPEAKER- Oh yeah, the best Final Fantasy.

56:08SPEAKER- Uh-huh, Diablo?

56:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I never played, I bought Diablo and returned Diablo

56:14SPEAKER'cause I didn't understand what you're supposed to do.

56:17SPEAKER- Wow, really?

56:18SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:19SPEAKER- Interesting. - It's embarrassing.

56:20SPEAKER- The history of Diablo I think is pretty well documented

56:23SPEAKERthese days, but like it started as a turn-based game.

56:26SPEAKERLike it started as an ex-com-ish sort of thing.

56:29SPEAKERAnd they only made it real time, like late in development

56:31SPEAKERwhen they realized like, oh, this is fun.

56:33SPEAKERSo yes, it was like kind of a new type of game at that time.

56:36SPEAKER- The thing that was interesting too about it was dynamic.

56:39SPEAKERRight, the dungeons were dynamically generated off of tiles,

56:41SPEAKERwhich was novel.

56:43SPEAKER- Right.

56:45SPEAKER- Jedi Knight, which we talked about.

56:47SPEAKERQuake 2, Quake 2 was my, probably the release

56:51SPEAKERI was most hyped for

56:52SPEAKERand then simultaneously disappointed by.

56:55SPEAKER- I can agree with that, sure.

56:57SPEAKERYes, I was also desperate to get my hands on Quake 2

56:59SPEAKERand yes, the multiplayer was 10 hertz continues to suck.

57:04SPEAKERI'm a bit of a step down.

57:05SPEAKER- Yeah. - That's what I'm gonna say.

57:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it did have its part.

57:07SPEAKERLook, the rail gun is a pretty good idea.

57:09SPEAKERLike there were plenty of good ideas in Quake 2.

57:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I just didn't, the rail gun was fully realized

57:16SPEAKERin Quake 3.

57:17SPEAKER- Yes, yes, Quake 3, some might say Quake 3

57:20SPEAKERis the game fixed on Quake 2's problems.

57:22SPEAKERAnyway, Goldeneye, like, you know,

57:25SPEAKERfirst probably really major console shooter,

57:28SPEAKERif not first one ever.

57:30SPEAKER- Goldeneye was the first game I played

57:31SPEAKERwith two stick controls.

57:33SPEAKER- Oh yeah, right, that madness.

57:35SPEAKER- 'Cause you could grab both center prongs,

57:38SPEAKERtwo center prongs and you could two stick it.

57:40SPEAKER- Yeah.

57:41SPEAKER- Which basically made you unstoppable compared to people

57:43SPEAKERwho were only using one stick and a D-pad.

57:45SPEAKER- Oh sure.

57:46SPEAKER- And of course the big what if for me on this list

57:48SPEAKERis Ultima Online.

57:50SPEAKERThe what if being what if Ultima Online had been the thing.

57:54SPEAKER- Did you not play Ultima Online?

57:56SPEAKER- No, I did not at the time.

57:57SPEAKERBut like what if it had been the thing that caught on

57:59SPEAKERand like all games, all online games were made

58:01SPEAKERin its image after?

58:02SPEAKER- I mean, they kind of were.

58:04SPEAKER- Well, no, but they sanded all the rough edges off

58:07SPEAKERis what I mean.

58:08SPEAKERLike Ultima Online in the sense that Ultima Online

58:11SPEAKERwas the first big multiplayer anything goes game.

58:13SPEAKERI guess that never was gonna survive

58:15SPEAKERbecause too many people would have had too bad a time

58:18SPEAKERin a game with literally no rules

58:20SPEAKERwhere you could do anything to anybody.

58:21SPEAKER- Yeah, so my Ultima Online experience was that I was

58:26SPEAKERwith a friend, we went to EB or Babbage's

58:29SPEAKERor wherever you bought games then.

58:30SPEAKERI bought a copy of the game.

58:32SPEAKERWe went to the food court in the mall.

58:33SPEAKERWe grabbed some food and we were reading the manual

58:37SPEAKERfor Ultima Online.

58:38SPEAKERWe went back to my house.

58:39SPEAKERWe fired up the ISDN, the internet,

58:43SPEAKERthe guide in the manual had said,

58:45SPEAKER"Hey, if you wanna fight,

58:47SPEAKERthen you should start with blacksmithing and mining

58:49SPEAKER'cause you need the ore in order to make weapons

58:51SPEAKERand yada yada."

58:54SPEAKERAnd I went to the starting city where the game sent me.

58:57SPEAKERI went to the mine.

58:59SPEAKERI mined for about an hour until I was so much shit

59:01SPEAKERthat I couldn't carry it.

59:03SPEAKERI carried it back to town where the forge was.

59:05SPEAKERAnd on the way between the mine and town,

59:08SPEAKERyou moved out of the no PVP zone

59:10SPEAKERand I was ganked in the five pixel area.

59:13SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Fuck this."

59:14SPEAKERI took the game back to EB and I was like,

59:15SPEAKER"I'm never playing this shit again."

59:17SPEAKER- Wow.

59:17SPEAKERI didn't realize there was a no PVP zone.

59:20SPEAKERAnd that guy was like, "Again, I've never played it."

59:21SPEAKERMy understanding or my impression was always

59:23SPEAKERthat there were just literally no safeguards of any kind.

59:26SPEAKER- So in the cities, if you attack someone unprovoked,

59:29SPEAKERthe city guards would kill you.

59:31SPEAKERAnd the city guards were like high level NPCs.

59:33SPEAKER- I see, okay.

59:35SPEAKER- And they were fast.

59:36SPEAKERSo it's not like you could tag somebody,

59:38SPEAKERkill them, grab their shit and run.

59:39SPEAKERYou just basically would tag them

59:41SPEAKERand then immediately get murked.

59:42SPEAKERBut the problem was, as I recall, when you died,

59:45SPEAKERyou dropped everything on the ground

59:46SPEAKERand whoever was there just hoovered it up.

59:47SPEAKERAnd then you were just like out your two hours of work.

59:50SPEAKERI was like, "This is a terrible game."

59:51SPEAKER- That's so amazing.

59:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:54SPEAKER- I mean, I could totally understand

59:56SPEAKERwhy I probably also would not have wanted

59:58SPEAKERanything to do with it.

59:59SPEAKERThat's so amazing.

1:00:00SPEAKER- Well, so then the really unfortunate thing as I recall

1:00:03SPEAKERis I wasn't able to return it because it had code

1:00:05SPEAKERand you had to activate an account.

1:00:06SPEAKERSo like at that point I was used to,

1:00:08SPEAKERlike for example, when I purchased

1:00:10SPEAKERHell, A Cyberpunk Thriller featuring Dennis Hopper.

1:00:19SPEAKER- Yes.

1:00:20SPEAKER- I was like, "This game is terrible."

1:00:21SPEAKERAnd I took it back to the store

1:00:22SPEAKERand they gave me my 50 bucks back and I bought another game.

1:00:25SPEAKERYou couldn't do that without Ultima Online.

1:00:27SPEAKERIt was a big disappointment.

1:00:29SPEAKERSo I ended up playing a little bit more,

1:00:31SPEAKERbut I never got good at the Ultima Online.

1:00:34SPEAKER- I don't understand what Ultima Online is at this point.

1:00:38SPEAKERI'm on uo.com.

1:00:40SPEAKER- It still exists.

1:00:41SPEAKER- And it seems like quite active.

1:00:43SPEAKERThere is a post from July 12th.

1:00:46SPEAKER- If only you had a video game website

1:00:48SPEAKERwhere you play video games

1:00:49SPEAKERand could get into a 20 year old MMO.

1:00:52SPEAKER- There's seriously a blog post from July 12th

1:00:55SPEAKERby aligned by the UO dev team.

1:00:57SPEAKERLike apparently this, and there's an EA logo still

1:01:00SPEAKERat the bottom of this website.

1:01:00SPEAKERLike is UO just still going?

1:01:02SPEAKER- It's still going, yeah.

1:01:03SPEAKER- How?

1:01:04SPEAKER- The interesting thing is a lot of the early designers

1:01:06SPEAKERon UO were hired straight out of like the mud

1:01:09SPEAKERand Mu worlds from the early nineties.

1:01:12SPEAKERAnd then most of them went on to do other things

1:01:14SPEAKERlike Raph Koster was early on UO

1:01:17SPEAKERand ended up making Star Wars Galaxies

1:01:18SPEAKERand working on EverQuest and a bunch of stuff

1:01:20SPEAKERfor Sony Online.

1:01:21SPEAKER- Yeah, did Brad McQuaid have it?

1:01:23SPEAKERHe's the main EverQuest name that you remember.

1:01:26SPEAKERDid he have anything to do with Ultima Online?

1:01:27SPEAKER- I don't know if he was at Ultima Online.

1:01:28SPEAKERI think he was a mud.

1:01:30SPEAKERI think he had a mud at that point.

1:01:31SPEAKERI can't remember.

1:01:33SPEAKER- But yeah, I mean like that's super interesting.

1:01:37SPEAKERSee, yeah, you're right.

1:01:39SPEAKERHe was working on EverQuest while Ultima Online

1:01:42SPEAKERwas in the process of coming out.

1:01:44SPEAKERBut yeah, like that's a really interesting through line

1:01:46SPEAKERto me from like from mud to UO to EverQuest to wow, right?

1:01:51SPEAKERLike it took all these steps to get to the one

1:01:53SPEAKERthat really blew up and became like the phenomenon.

1:01:56SPEAKERAnd that was the, like, I mean, you know,

1:01:59SPEAKERpeople make all kinds of derisive jokes about, you know,

1:02:04SPEAKERtheme park content and Care Bear or whatever about wow.

1:02:07SPEAKERBut like, that was the one with all the rough edges

1:02:10SPEAKERkind of smooth down.

1:02:12SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, but there is like UO

1:02:15SPEAKERand EverQuest especially, like UO was a graphical interface

1:02:21SPEAKERon top of like a lot of mud mechanics

1:02:25SPEAKERthat then also had other mechanics that made sense

1:02:27SPEAKERin a graphical game layered on top.

1:02:29SPEAKERSame thing for EverQuest, like EverQuest,

1:02:31SPEAKERthere was like positioning and stuff like that in that game

1:02:34SPEAKERbecause it was a 3D world and you had to like, you know,

1:02:37SPEAKERrogues had to attack from the back to get their bonuses

1:02:39SPEAKERand stuff like that.

1:02:40SPEAKERBut for all intents and purposes,

1:02:45SPEAKERlike you could have played a text only version of EverQuest

1:02:47SPEAKERthat wasn't substantially different

1:02:49SPEAKERthan the graphical version.

1:02:52SPEAKER- Right.

1:02:53SPEAKER- It's weird time for games.

1:02:54SPEAKER- Yeah, got a short list of domains that were registered

1:02:58SPEAKERin 1997 that you may have heard of.

1:02:59SPEAKER- Oh, these are my favorite.

1:03:00SPEAKERI love a good domain registration.

1:03:02SPEAKER- Oh yes, google.com was registered.

1:03:05SPEAKERSo yeah, formerly this was where we became aware

1:03:10SPEAKERthat the original name for Google,

1:03:11SPEAKERthe search engine was back rub.

1:03:14SPEAKER- You think that's because the algorithm benefited

1:03:17SPEAKERlike rewarded links.

1:03:18SPEAKERSo like you give me a back rub, I'll give you a back rub.

1:03:21SPEAKER- Interesting, I don't know.

1:03:22SPEAKER- Linking back was the benefit.

1:03:23SPEAKER- Like that was Google's big innovation when it launched,

1:03:25SPEAKERright, like other search engines weren't really doing

1:03:28SPEAKERlike algorithmic sorting of results, right?

1:03:30SPEAKER- Well, no, there was all sorts

1:03:32SPEAKERof algorithmic sorting of results.

1:03:33SPEAKERThe big thing was that they valued links based

1:03:37SPEAKERon the number of links coming into your site.

1:03:39SPEAKERSo like if you were a site like Slashdot

1:03:40SPEAKERwhere you had a bunch of other sites that linked to you,

1:03:44SPEAKERa link out from Slashdot was more valuable

1:03:46SPEAKERthan a link out from chudhaven.com

1:03:49SPEAKERor some site that like eight people linked to.

1:03:52SPEAKER- I guess what I mean is like what's the word I'm looking

1:03:55SPEAKERfor like intentional or intelligent sorting of results.

1:03:58SPEAKERLike they have like an actual methodology

1:04:01SPEAKERthat was like serving a specific purpose.

1:04:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I think everybody else did too.

1:04:05SPEAKERThe thing that everybody else did before though

1:04:08SPEAKERwas just weighting the number of links into a site.

1:04:11SPEAKERSo like Lycos or web crawler or whatever would,

1:04:15SPEAKERI'm sure there was some sort of proprietary secret sauce,

1:04:17SPEAKERbut the main gist was, hey, this site is very popular

1:04:23SPEAKERtherefore we'll put it above the site

1:04:25SPEAKERthat is slightly less popular in the rankings.

1:04:27SPEAKER- Right, I've distinctly remember like pre-Google

1:04:30SPEAKERis like I whatever, like I used UltaVista for a while,

1:04:34SPEAKERprobably used Lycos here and you know what I mean?

1:04:36SPEAKERLike you weren't that attached to a search engine.

1:04:38SPEAKER- Yeah, there was a search engine

1:04:39SPEAKERthat literally popped up four frames

1:04:42SPEAKERwith four different search engine results in it

1:04:44SPEAKERfor everything that you searched.

1:04:45SPEAKERLike it was-

1:04:46SPEAKER- Oh, that's right.

1:04:47SPEAKERI forget what that was called.

1:04:47SPEAKER- Metacrawler or something I think.

1:04:48SPEAKER- Was that Metacrawler?

1:04:49SPEAKERI definitely remember the name Metacrawler.

1:04:53SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, like once I distinctly remember

1:04:55SPEAKERlike once Google came along and people started talking

1:04:57SPEAKERabout it, it was like, oh, well,

1:04:58SPEAKERthis was the search engine to use from now on.

1:05:01SPEAKER- So they registered the name and the domain

1:05:03SPEAKERand probably incorporated the company and all that

1:05:04SPEAKERbut we didn't see Google for another two to three years.

1:05:07SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:05:08SPEAKERI was in college like '99, 2000

1:05:10SPEAKERbefore I remember seeing it at all.

1:05:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:14SPEAKER- It was definitely not at this time.

1:05:16SPEAKER- What other famous domains you got, Brad?

1:05:18SPEAKER- Netflix.com, Facebook.com.

1:05:20SPEAKERI think we talked about this earlier

1:05:22SPEAKERand I think there's a pretty good chance

1:05:23SPEAKERthe people who run those companies now

1:05:25SPEAKERwere not the ones registering those at the time.

1:05:27SPEAKER- Oh no, no, Netflix was incorporated in 1997

1:05:29SPEAKERas a DVD, as a mail order DVD rental service.

1:05:32SPEAKER- Wow, so that's wild 'cause our next topic

1:05:34SPEAKERis the DVDs didn't even launch until 1997.

1:05:36SPEAKERSo they were pretty ahead of the game there.

1:05:39SPEAKER- Well, I think they looked at the cost of mailing a disc

1:05:42SPEAKER'cause disc mailers had a different rate on the USPS

1:05:44SPEAKERand they were like, hey, here's a business.

1:05:49SPEAKERFacebook, I'm sure was not,

1:05:52SPEAKERMark Zuckerberg would have been like two at that point.

1:05:55SPEAKER- Sure.

1:05:57SPEAKER- But, and we all know how Facebook was made

1:06:00SPEAKERin that documentary, "The Social Network,"

1:06:02SPEAKERbut Craigslist, I think was actually Craigslist.

1:06:05SPEAKERCraigslist was in 1999, like popped up in the late '90s.

1:06:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I got to reading about the history of Craigslist

1:06:12SPEAKERa while back, not recently enough to remember

1:06:14SPEAKERa lot of the details, but I was really fascinated

1:06:16SPEAKERby the way he's run that thing.

1:06:18SPEAKER- It is a fascinating company.

1:06:20SPEAKER- It's like, I mean, he makes an extremely healthy living

1:06:24SPEAKERoff of it, but he's like, he's resisted like most attempts

1:06:27SPEAKERto monetize it in really deep shitty ways.

1:06:31SPEAKER- Yeah, he viewed it as like, it's funny.

1:06:34SPEAKER'Cause like on one hand, good intentions and well-meant.

1:06:39SPEAKEROn the other hand, he literally decimated

1:06:40SPEAKERthe entire newspaper business in the Western world.

1:06:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:44SPEAKER- So like, you know, good with the bad, I guess.

1:06:47SPEAKER- That's fair, that's fair.

1:06:49SPEAKERBut it is kind of a public service, right?

1:06:51SPEAKERLike for the end user, the thing is extremely valuable.

1:06:54SPEAKERI mean, look, I don't think any of us are in a position

1:07:01SPEAKERto say whether net positive or net negative at this point.

1:07:06SPEAKERThe thing I will say is that, yeah, it's incredibly useful

1:07:09SPEAKERto have a shared digital marketplace

1:07:12SPEAKERfor all sorts of different things.

1:07:14SPEAKERAnd Craigslist, like everybody else

1:07:16SPEAKERthat's been around for 20 plus years

1:07:18SPEAKERhas made some mistakes along the way,

1:07:19SPEAKERbut overall has been good for people, I think.

1:07:22SPEAKER- Yeah, as mentioned, the DVD format launched

1:07:25SPEAKERin March, 1997, the same day as the Academy Awards.

1:07:29SPEAKER- In the U.S. or everywhere?

1:07:30SPEAKER- Oh, U.S., so I guess we were like the last region

1:07:32SPEAKERto get DVD, actually.

1:07:33SPEAKERIt came out in Japan in November of '96.

1:07:36SPEAKERThe rest of Asia got it in, I think, January.

1:07:39SPEAKEREven like New Zealand and Australia, which,

1:07:41SPEAKERhow many regions?

1:07:42SPEAKERThere were five DVD regions, right?

1:07:43SPEAKER- Five DVD regions, yeah.

1:07:45SPEAKER- I wonder, was Australia and New Zealand a region

1:07:47SPEAKERby itself? - Oceana, I believe,

1:07:48SPEAKERis what that one was.

1:07:49SPEAKER- Yeah, so there was Asia, Europe, North America,

1:07:52SPEAKERSouth America, Africa.

1:07:54SPEAKER- Oh, interesting. - South America and Africa

1:07:55SPEAKERwere one, I think, right?

1:07:56SPEAKER- Oh, that was a huge region, actually.

1:07:57SPEAKERSo yeah, region one, U.S., Canada, and Bermuda,

1:08:01SPEAKERand other U.S. territories.

1:08:02SPEAKERRegions, oh, I knew, I'm sure I knew this at the time.

1:08:06SPEAKERI had forgotten that region two

1:08:07SPEAKERincluded both Japan and Europe.

1:08:10SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know that.

1:08:11SPEAKER- Yeah, region two was Japan, Europe, South Africa,

1:08:13SPEAKEREgypt, and the Middle East.

1:08:15SPEAKERThree was Southeast Asia and East Asia, including Hong Kong.

1:08:23SPEAKERAustralia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Central America,

1:08:26SPEAKERSouth America, and the Caribbean for region four.

1:08:29SPEAKER- Oh, and then Africa was region five?

1:08:31SPEAKER- Five was Eastern Europe, Baltic States, Russia,

1:08:34SPEAKERCentral and South Asia, Indian subcontinent,

1:08:36SPEAKERAfrica, North Korea, and Mongolia.

1:08:38SPEAKER- Yeah, suck it, North Korea.

1:08:40SPEAKER- And then this is on an Amazon help page.

1:08:41SPEAKER- Wow.

1:08:43SPEAKER- This is listing China as a region six.

1:08:45SPEAKERI don't know if that came later.

1:08:46SPEAKERI don't remember there being a region six at the time.

1:08:49SPEAKER- We might not have ever seen region six stuff.

1:08:52SPEAKER- So I don't think I saw...

1:08:55SPEAKERThe first place, the first way to get a DVD player

1:08:58SPEAKERthat was reasonable for my income bracket

1:09:01SPEAKERand the amount of money I was willing to spend

1:09:03SPEAKERwas to buy a creative kit for 200 bucks

1:09:06SPEAKERthat had an MPEG-2 decoder card and a DVD-ROM drive

1:09:10SPEAKERthat went into the computer.

1:09:12SPEAKERAnd then I ran a really long-ass analog cable

1:09:17SPEAKERfrom the bedroom where the computer was

1:09:19SPEAKERinto the living room where the TV was.

1:09:23SPEAKER- Well done.

1:09:24SPEAKER- You could anamorphic squeeze those...

1:09:26SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:09:28SPEAKER- That big Panasonic TV I had.

1:09:31SPEAKER- Oh, you can't beat the anamorphic squeeze.

1:09:34SPEAKER- Oh yeah, all those extra pixels, no black pixel.

1:09:36SPEAKERNo, don't waste any pixels on black, no bars.

1:09:40SPEAKER- It was much later before I had a TV that could do that.

1:09:43SPEAKERProbably my last CRT, my Sony Vega that I got.

1:09:47SPEAKER- I had to do it manually.

1:09:48SPEAKERYou had to manually squinch the pixels down

1:09:51SPEAKERuntil it looked like it was the right height with the knobs.

1:09:55SPEAKER- You had to do the anamorphic squinch.

1:09:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a big deal.

1:10:02SPEAKERI think I bought that creative thing

1:10:03SPEAKERbecause at the time the DVD publishers were doing,

1:10:07SPEAKERsend us your receipt for buying a DVD player

1:10:10SPEAKERand we'll send you five or seven free movies or something.

1:10:13SPEAKERAnd it was like "Twister" and "Lost in Space"

1:10:16SPEAKERand a bunch of not great movies probably.

1:10:18SPEAKER- It sure was.

1:10:19SPEAKERI remember "The Matrix" was the first big DVD release

1:10:23SPEAKERthat was like, "Oh my God, you have to see this.

1:10:26SPEAKERYou have to find somebody with a DVD player

1:10:27SPEAKERand go see this."

1:10:28SPEAKER- Well, when you walked around in...

1:10:32SPEAKER"The Matrix" is a whole different, whole interesting thing.

1:10:34SPEAKER'Cause it was such a slow burn for a movie.

1:10:37SPEAKERI had a professor that I worked for tell me about it

1:10:39SPEAKERand he was like, "Hey, you should go see this.

1:10:40SPEAKERYou'll like this."

1:10:41SPEAKERAnd I was like, "Okay."

1:10:41SPEAKERAnd when it's on, I was like, "Oh man, this is a good movie."

1:10:44SPEAKERBy the time I went to Comdex in 2000,

1:10:49SPEAKERwhich would have been fall of 2000,

1:10:50SPEAKERthe DVD had been out for a while

1:10:52SPEAKERand walking around the floor of a computer trade show

1:10:56SPEAKERwas basically like you could watch

1:10:57SPEAKERthe entirety of "The Matrix"

1:10:59SPEAKERin the time it would take you to walk down an aisle

1:11:01SPEAKERin the hallway, everybody was using "The Matrix."

1:11:03SPEAKERIt was amazing.

1:11:05SPEAKERBut yeah, DVDs were weird.

1:11:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I was looking again at this region list.

1:11:09SPEAKERI think the only reason I'm even really acquainted

1:11:11SPEAKERwith DVD regions was from the like utility

1:11:13SPEAKERthat would let you change the region code on your DVD ROM.

1:11:18SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:11:19SPEAKER- But it was like limited, right?

1:11:20SPEAKER- You do five, as I recall.

1:11:21SPEAKER- I don't know if that was a per manufacturer thing

1:11:23SPEAKERor if that was like a DVD consortium standard stipulation.

1:11:26SPEAKER- DVD consortium stipulation, as I recall.

1:11:29SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I figured.

1:11:30SPEAKERYou could only change it like five times, right?

1:11:32SPEAKER- Yep, five times.

1:11:33SPEAKERThe other interesting thing is there was a lot of resistance

1:11:38SPEAKERfrom even the studios that had signed on to make DVDs.

1:11:42SPEAKERLike there was a lot of, like there was a competing format

1:11:46SPEAKERcalled DivX that was a rental only format, basically,

1:11:49SPEAKERthat the discs were disposable that people didn't like

1:11:52SPEAKERfor a multitude of reasons.

1:11:54SPEAKERI don't believe that landed in '97.

1:11:56SPEAKERThat was a little bit later.

1:11:57SPEAKERBut early on, a lot of studios didn't do new transfers.

1:12:03SPEAKERSo you'd have like a VHS quality transfer onto a DVD.

1:12:07SPEAKERA lot of studios wouldn't do anamorphic discs.

1:12:09SPEAKERSo you'd have like 480 lines.

1:12:12SPEAKERYour DVD was a 480 line vertical lines of video.

1:12:17SPEAKERAnd if you had a 16 by nine movie, non-anamorphic,

1:12:22SPEAKERit was like basically VHS quality transfer at that point

1:12:26SPEAKERbecause you're getting the same number of lines

1:12:28SPEAKERyou got on VHS, which was like 240 or something.

1:12:32SPEAKERAnd then also a lot of studios didn't do extras.

1:12:35SPEAKERExtras were really important.

1:12:36SPEAKERAnd there were sites like the Digital Bits

1:12:38SPEAKERand a bunch of DVD review and stuff like that

1:12:42SPEAKERthat would do reviews of the discs, not of the movies,

1:12:47SPEAKERbut of the quality of the release

1:12:50SPEAKERand whether the commentaries were any good

1:12:53SPEAKERand who was on the commentaries.

1:12:55SPEAKERAnd there was a whole hierarchy of, okay,

1:12:59SPEAKERa commentary with a director and a couple of stars

1:13:02SPEAKERor a cinematographer and a director talking about the movie

1:13:05SPEAKERwas definitely better than a commentary that was like

1:13:08SPEAKERfive different people who watched the movie by themselves.

1:13:11SPEAKERAnd some editor just cut in the different bits

1:13:14SPEAKERfrom the different commentary tracks

1:13:16SPEAKERinto one long commentary track.

1:13:20SPEAKERSome people would do journalist commentaries.

1:13:23SPEAKERSo you'd get a critic that would talk about,

1:13:29SPEAKERGene Siskel would talk about one of his favorite movies

1:13:31SPEAKERon a commentary track, which feels weird to me.

1:13:34SPEAKERIt was a really,

1:13:35SPEAKERpeople just didn't know what to do with this at all.

1:13:38SPEAKERIt was a really fun time.

1:13:40SPEAKER- I had completely forgotten about that early DVD phase

1:13:42SPEAKERwhere, yeah, you kind of had to do some research

1:13:45SPEAKERto see if the movie you were buying

1:13:46SPEAKERwas actually worth buying or not

1:13:47SPEAKERbecause they had just, like you said,

1:13:48SPEAKERjust shit whatever transfer they already had

1:13:51SPEAKERonto a disc with nothing and just like, oh.

1:13:53SPEAKERAnd then that led to the situation later

1:13:54SPEAKERwhere once DVD blew up,

1:13:56SPEAKEReverybody wanted to re-release their movies

1:13:59SPEAKERin nicer transfers with more features.

1:14:00SPEAKERAnd then you had to go like,

1:14:02SPEAKERokay, which one am I buying here?

1:14:03SPEAKERAm I getting the crappy early release

1:14:05SPEAKERor is this the nice deluxe later one?

1:14:06SPEAKERLike that was, yeah.

1:14:07SPEAKER- Well, and sometimes they like,

1:14:09SPEAKERJurassic Park famously released like five different boxes

1:14:13SPEAKERin the same day.

1:14:14SPEAKERAnd like there was Adobe digital box

1:14:18SPEAKERand there was a DTS box.

1:14:20SPEAKERThe DTS box because the DTS audio took up more data

1:14:24SPEAKERhad fewer special features,

1:14:26SPEAKERbut it had the good audio mix 'cause it had the DTS mix.

1:14:28SPEAKERSo if you wanted the special features and the good audio,

1:14:31SPEAKERyou had to buy two different disks.

1:14:34SPEAKERIt was a lot.

1:14:35SPEAKER- This was pre multi-disc releases, I assume.

1:14:38SPEAKER- No, these were still multi-disc releases,

1:14:40SPEAKERbut like, so they couldn't put five,

1:14:42SPEAKERlike the DTS version had multiple audio commentaries

1:14:46SPEAKERand there wasn't enough room on the main disc

1:14:49SPEAKERfor multiple audio commentaries

1:14:51SPEAKERand the DTS track was the big thing.

1:14:54SPEAKER- I, God, I miss the heyday of DVD special features

1:14:58SPEAKERand extras and behind the scenes.

1:15:00SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:15:01SPEAKER- Reached its apex.

1:15:02SPEAKERLord of the Rings,

1:15:03SPEAKERlike especially on the extended edition DVDs,

1:15:05SPEAKERlike easily, easily the best behind the scenes

1:15:08SPEAKERand special features that have ever been produced

1:15:10SPEAKERfor any film ever.

1:15:11SPEAKER- Look, I'm gonna make a strong argument

1:15:13SPEAKERfor the Criterion edition of Armageddon,

1:15:17SPEAKERwhere Ben Affleck is so hammered doing the commentary,

1:15:20SPEAKERhe just tells you what it was like working with Michael Bay.

1:15:22SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no.

1:15:23SPEAKER- It's a very good commentary track.

1:15:24SPEAKER- I wanna say which Schwarzenegger movie is it

1:15:26SPEAKERwhere he also got really drunk for the commentary?

1:15:28SPEAKERI think it might be Conan.

1:15:29SPEAKER- There was a lot of them.

1:15:30SPEAKERRacer, he just, there's one where he just like narrates

1:15:34SPEAKERwhat's happening on this,

1:15:35SPEAKERthis is when I shoot the guy in the face.

1:15:37SPEAKER- Ridley Scott loves to do that too.

1:15:39SPEAKERLike if you've watched like the Ridley Scott commentaries

1:15:41SPEAKERfor like Prometheus and the Alien Covenant and stuff,

1:15:44SPEAKERlike half of it is him literally

1:15:45SPEAKERjust describing what's happening on screen.

1:15:48SPEAKER- I'm gonna say, like I learned so much

1:15:51SPEAKERabout how people talk about movies

1:15:54SPEAKERand what people think about when they're making movies

1:15:56SPEAKERand what their intent,

1:15:59SPEAKERlike the neat thing about it was it was a place

1:16:01SPEAKERto get direct kind of from the horse's mouth.

1:16:03SPEAKERSometimes they were, you know,

1:16:05SPEAKERthe little hagiography stories

1:16:09SPEAKERabout what they were trying to do

1:16:10SPEAKERwhen they were making a movie.

1:16:12SPEAKERAnd like that doesn't exist

1:16:14SPEAKERin the streaming world as much anymore.

1:16:16SPEAKERLike you don't see a lot of director commentaries

1:16:17SPEAKERand stuff like that.

1:16:19SPEAKERSo it's a little bit of a bummer.

1:16:20SPEAKERRyan Johnson famously releases commentaries as podcasts

1:16:23SPEAKERso you can take them, put them on your phone

1:16:25SPEAKERand listen to them while you're watching the movie

1:16:26SPEAKERin the theater.

1:16:27SPEAKER- That's nice, that's something.

1:16:28SPEAKER- Which I like, yeah.

1:16:29SPEAKER- My understanding is, yeah, they just,

1:16:31SPEAKERnobody feels like they can justify the expense anymore.

1:16:33SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a, given the expense

1:16:36SPEAKERof making a two hour audio production

1:16:37SPEAKERis like basically the people's time

1:16:40SPEAKERplus a couple hours of editing.

1:16:44SPEAKER- I'm talking more like having a crew on set,

1:16:47SPEAKERlike actually shooting as production's happening

1:16:49SPEAKERand stuff like that.

1:16:50SPEAKERLike the big deluxe, like again,

1:16:52SPEAKERif you have never seen the Lord of the Rings stuff,

1:16:56SPEAKERit's like--

1:16:57SPEAKER- It's like seven discs.

1:16:58SPEAKER- It's like 20 hours per film of stuff.

1:17:01SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:17:02SPEAKER- Like it's insane.

1:17:02SPEAKERAnd it's all so interesting

1:17:04SPEAKERand like the cast was clearly having such a good time.

1:17:07SPEAKER- Well, and Peter Jackson cared about what he was doing too,