00:00SPEAKER- Do you remember where you got your computer information
00:03SPEAKERin the nineties?
00:05SPEAKER- Probably from the Sugar Shack.
00:09SPEAKER- I definitely got like,
00:10SPEAKERI definitely like by the late nineties for sure.
00:13SPEAKERMaybe even mid.
00:14SPEAKERI remember I used to get PC magazine
00:17SPEAKERlike that came to the house.
00:18SPEAKER- Yes. Okay, sorry.
00:19SPEAKERI'm jumping the gun a little bit here.
00:22SPEAKERSugar Shack, that stuff would have been,
00:24SPEAKERlet me quite didn't even come out tonight.
00:25SPEAKER- I think it was the Quake Holio also.
00:27SPEAKER- Yes, I started on the Quake Holio,
00:29SPEAKERbut I figured most people would know it
00:31SPEAKERby its later moniker, but yeah, you're right.
00:34SPEAKERYeah, it was probably more magazines in '96.
00:36SPEAKERWe got our first internet connection in '96,
00:38SPEAKERbut it was a lot of Computer Shopper
00:41SPEAKERand probably PC Magazine or PC World.
00:45SPEAKER- Okay, so I'm enough of a nerd that I saw Computer Shopper
00:48SPEAKERwhen I was at like the B Dalton,
00:51SPEAKERI guess was our bookstore in town.
00:53SPEAKERAnd I was like, I flipped through and I was like,
00:55SPEAKERthis is all ads, I don't want this.
00:57SPEAKERSo I just put it back on the shelf and never bought one.
00:59SPEAKERBut I got, I signed up, I'm gonna go and tell you a secret.
01:02SPEAKERIf you told PC Magazine that you were a CIO or CTO,
01:08SPEAKERthey would just send you the subscriptions
01:10SPEAKERbasically for free, it was like $6 a year or something.
01:14SPEAKERYeah, so I got PC Magazine illicitly for years.
01:17SPEAKER- Holy shit, man, if I had only known.
01:19SPEAKER- Yeah, you work for a 500 person company
01:21SPEAKERand you're the CTO?
01:22SPEAKERYes, we will send you a copy of our business magazine.
01:25SPEAKER- That is duplicitous.
01:28SPEAKERNo shots, no ill intent for the fine folks
01:31SPEAKERthat worked on PC Magazine at the time.
01:33SPEAKERBut that magazine did not align
01:34SPEAKERwith my interests whatsoever.
01:37SPEAKER- I've probably got some in my parents' basement still.
01:39SPEAKERI don't remember for sure,
01:40SPEAKERbut is it kind of a beige box khaki wearing style
01:43SPEAKERof PC Magazine?
01:44SPEAKER- Yeah, like imagine a guy that had some stuff
01:47SPEAKERin holsters on his belt.
01:48SPEAKER- Okay, yeah.
01:49SPEAKER- And that also was really into contact management software
01:52SPEAKERor databases or, hey, what do you think
01:57SPEAKERabout a work group printer, Brad?
01:59SPEAKER- Oh, I think that everybody should be able
02:01SPEAKERto print to the same printer at any time.
02:03SPEAKER- Yeah, they didn't cover Doom for like a year.
02:06SPEAKERSo anyway, I transitioned from PC Magazine
02:11SPEAKERto the early internet in like '95
02:14SPEAKERwhen I got on a shell account, a PPP account.
02:18SPEAKERAnd then like 1997, I was at the screwdriver shop in my,
02:25SPEAKERI've told this story before,
02:25SPEAKERbut I was in the screwdriver shop in Knoxville, Tennessee,
02:28SPEAKERwhere I would buy like stuff that was expensive to ship
02:31SPEAKERwhen I was building new computers for people.
02:33SPEAKERSo like cases, basically, and monitors.
02:36SPEAKERAnd the guy there was like,
02:38SPEAKERhey man, have you seen this new magazine?
02:40SPEAKERI was like, what are you talking about?
02:41SPEAKERMagazine, it's the internet age, man.
02:43SPEAKERWe don't use magazines.
02:44SPEAKERHe's like, no, you should check out this,
02:45SPEAKERyou should check out this boot magazine, man.
02:48SPEAKERI was like, wait, it's a magazine about, it's a shoe?
02:52SPEAKERAre you a foot guy?
02:54SPEAKERAnd he was like, no, it's computer boot.
02:55SPEAKER- I mean, yes, but also.
02:58SPEAKER- So I bought the, which was actually
03:02SPEAKERthe September 1997 issue is the first one I picked up.
03:06SPEAKERThe 13th issue, I was like, oh.
03:09SPEAKER- He was like, yo, look at these guys, the B is lowercase.
03:12SPEAKERThat's how cool these guys are.
03:13SPEAKER- They're speaking my language, man.
03:14SPEAKERHere's the thing, they're into the same things I'm into.
03:17SPEAKERThey're into like fast computers and 3D accelerators
03:22SPEAKERand like having a LAN at your house in 1997.
03:25SPEAKER32 bit operating systems.
03:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a revelation.
03:30SPEAKERAnd honestly, like they did the first
03:33SPEAKERhow to build your PC thing around the same time that I saw.
03:36SPEAKERLike I had, when I built my first PC,
03:39SPEAKERI read the how-to on Tom's Hardware
03:41SPEAKER'cause there was a famous how-to like end of '97,
03:44SPEAKERmid '97 sometime.
03:46SPEAKERThere was like, hey, here's how to build a K6
03:48SPEAKERor a Pentium computer with a Socket 7 CPU.
03:52SPEAKERAnd I read all that, but then I needed to take the parts
03:55SPEAKERout of the old PC 'cause some of them
03:56SPEAKERwere going in the new PC and I had to copy a boot.
04:01SPEAKERAnd I flipped it open and I kept it open
04:03SPEAKERand I looked at the tiny little pictures on the page
04:05SPEAKERand I was like, okay, you do this and this
04:06SPEAKERand this and this and this.
04:07SPEAKERI think I can do it.
04:08SPEAKERAnd I only had to take the bits out that needed,
04:10SPEAKERI needed to make the old PC work once to go back online
04:13SPEAKERand find out what I'd messed up
04:15SPEAKERbefore I finally got it up and running.
04:16SPEAKERAnd like that was the beginning of me
04:19SPEAKERwas being in a, that was beginning of a nerd phase
04:21SPEAKERthat's now lasted 30 some years, so.
04:24SPEAKER- The rest was history.
04:25SPEAKERWe've violated tech pod law number one.
04:29SPEAKER- Which is?
04:30SPEAKER- We've done the cold open about the episode topic.
04:32SPEAKERWe got to pivot immediately.
04:34SPEAKER- Oh crap.
04:35SPEAKER- Apple pie.
04:37SPEAKER- What's your favorite, what's your St. Patrick's day food?
04:39SPEAKER- Something something old monitors.
04:41SPEAKER- Yeah, I really, I really, I really like hot sauce.
04:46SPEAKER- Hot sauce?
04:48SPEAKER- I barely knew her.
04:50SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:54SPEAKER(upbeat music)
05:18SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
05:21SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:21SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
05:24SPEAKER- I don't have, I got nothing.
05:26SPEAKERNow is the part where we usually do the thing
05:27SPEAKERthat I just did, I fucked up.
05:29SPEAKERI'm sorry, I messed it all up.
05:31SPEAKER- Too late, nope, we're going.
05:33SPEAKERWe're already going, we're in it.
05:35SPEAKER- So we are, okay, we had some options for stories this week
05:40SPEAKERand kind of everything in the tech news right now,
05:42SPEAKERa little bit of a bummer.
05:44SPEAKERAnd we already did a machine learning thing a few weeks ago.
05:47SPEAKERSo GPT-4, we're not talking about that.
05:50SPEAKER- It's like, it's all, everything is GPT-4
05:52SPEAKERand mid-journey five right now.
05:55SPEAKERWe can't just do every other episode about AI.
05:57SPEAKER- At one point, well, I mean, that's what the singularity is
06:01SPEAKERis all stories become about AI eventually.
06:03SPEAKER- I guess so.
06:06SPEAKER- I logged on to Mastodon and everybody's like,
06:08SPEAKER"Oh man, everything I see on the internet
06:09SPEAKERis just bumming me out more this week."
06:11SPEAKERAnd then I was like, "Well, I'll go to where
06:13SPEAKERand see if it's any better over there."
06:14SPEAKERAnd same post, it was the exact same post
06:16SPEAKERfrom a completely different person.
06:17SPEAKERIt was like everything on the internet is bumming me out
06:19SPEAKERmore than the last thing I saw.
06:21SPEAKER- I can tell you with confidence,
06:23SPEAKERit is never better over on Twitter these days.
06:25SPEAKER- Oh yeah, no, Twitter is never good.
06:27SPEAKERTwitter is, it's always a mistake to go to Twitter.
06:31SPEAKERBut anyway, so Mastodon generally pretty positive,
06:35SPEAKERbut a lot of people, a lot of folks that I follow there
06:38SPEAKERare like run small businesses
06:39SPEAKERand were affected by the SVP stuff,
06:41SPEAKEReven though it ended up being kind of okay.
06:44SPEAKERAnyway, we decided this week to do something
06:47SPEAKERthat we haven't done in a minute
06:49SPEAKERand delve into a classic magazine issue.
06:54SPEAKER- That's right, we decided to take a trip back
06:57SPEAKERto a simpler time, 1996, September,
07:01SPEAKERbut probably realistically like May or June,
07:05SPEAKERmaybe even April.
07:06SPEAKER- Well, it's spoken like a magazine editor.
07:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
07:09SPEAKER- All I know is what's on the book.
07:10SPEAKER- Yeah, the book, so, okay, so first issues are weird
07:14SPEAKERbecause they usually, with the first issue of a magazine,
07:20SPEAKERyou're not just writing the content of the magazine,
07:22SPEAKERyou also have to figure out what the sections
07:25SPEAKERof the magazine are.
07:26SPEAKER- Right, and what the tone is.
07:27SPEAKER- And the tone, and then you have to figure out the design
07:29SPEAKERand you have to, usually it takes longer than a month
07:32SPEAKERto put together the first couple issues of a magazine
07:34SPEAKER'cause there's some speed bumps, especially back then,
07:37SPEAKER'cause this was all, this would have all been done
07:39SPEAKERon QuarkXPress and then shot on film,
07:41SPEAKERwhich adds an extra week to the whole process, so maybe two.
07:44SPEAKER- Did we say what we're doing?
07:45SPEAKERIt's the first issue of boot.
07:47SPEAKER- Yeah, this is the first issue of boot magazine.
07:48SPEAKER- Boot magazine issue numero uno,
07:51SPEAKERwe'll put a link to the PDF,
07:52SPEAKERit's right there on archive.org in the show notes.
07:56SPEAKER- This is the magazine that later on became Maximum PC
07:58SPEAKERwhere I kind of, where I became a magazine person.
08:03SPEAKERA boot ran from September of '96 until like,
08:07SPEAKERI think August of '99 or 2000, must have been '99.
08:12SPEAKERAnd then Future bought the list of a magazine
08:17SPEAKERcalled I think Home PC and they combined boot and Home PC.
08:21SPEAKERSo Home PC was like this,
08:24SPEAKERit was like good housekeeping, but for computers.
08:27SPEAKER- Wait a minute.
08:28SPEAKER- If you wanted to find a magazine that would tell you
08:30SPEAKERhow to like do your taxes or keep a family budget
08:34SPEAKERor have a recipe catalog, Home PC was it.
08:38SPEAKER- Okay, I was trying to understand 'cause I mean,
08:40SPEAKERwe've talked about the beige box khaki PC magazines.
08:43SPEAKERWe've talked about the edgy gamer rags.
08:47SPEAKERI was trying to figure out
08:48SPEAKERwhere the kind of homemaking PC part fit in,
08:51SPEAKERbut that makes sense.
08:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so the thing I will say,
08:58SPEAKERI did not, okay, I never actually read
09:00SPEAKERthis copy of the magazine, this issue of the magazine.
09:02SPEAKERI don't think, we didn't have very many of them
09:04SPEAKERat the office when I was there.
09:05SPEAKERSo it wasn't, somebody scanned it a few years ago
09:07SPEAKERand put it on archive.org, which was kind of,
09:09SPEAKERwe'll put a link to the show notes so you can follow along.
09:12SPEAKERI was surprised by how much conversation
09:14SPEAKERabout erections there is in this magazine.
09:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I wasn't gonna lead with that, but yes,
09:19SPEAKERlike the dream machine cover story in this,
09:21SPEAKERlike in paragraph one is like, don't do this.
09:25SPEAKERThat's sissy stuff.
09:26SPEAKERYou go, you wanna do that instead.
09:28SPEAKERIt's just like, man, it was the nineties.
09:30SPEAKER- The tone is, it is very much of the nineties.
09:33SPEAKER- Although like frankly, this is kind of mild, I think,
09:37SPEAKERby the standards of the time, considering that like
09:39SPEAKERPC accelerator was only a couple, three years away.
09:43SPEAKER- Well, yeah, PC accelerator was a different,
09:45SPEAKERPC accelerator trying to do like a UK style lad mag
09:49SPEAKERfor video games.
09:50SPEAKER- Yes.
09:53SPEAKER- So of the folks that are on this initial masthead in 1998,
09:58SPEAKERJohn Phillips wrote a thing or two here and Michael Brown,
10:01SPEAKERwho ended up working with me when I was at Maximum PC
10:04SPEAKERwith the only ones there.
10:05SPEAKERThere's some other names that you'll recognize
10:07SPEAKERthat pop up here and there, but like it was the tone,
10:13SPEAKERmy understanding is that the tone both in the office
10:16SPEAKERand of the magazine changed pretty dramatically
10:18SPEAKERin the two years following the publication
10:20SPEAKERbetween when this came out
10:22SPEAKERand when I started writing for the book.
10:25SPEAKER- Probably natural for any new thing of this nature, right?
10:28SPEAKER- Not a bad thing.
10:29SPEAKER- You're gonna try a bunch of stuff
10:30SPEAKERand then things are going to evolve.
10:31SPEAKERCan I just ask, I mean, yeah, I mean this respect
10:36SPEAKERand this question is not really serious,
10:38SPEAKERbut is Brad Dosland a real name?
10:41SPEAKER- Brad Dosland is Brad's real name.
10:44SPEAKERSo my overlap with Brad at the company
10:46SPEAKERwas precisely one day.
10:48SPEAKERMy first day at the magazine was his last day at Imagine.
10:53SPEAKERSo I met him a couple of times at other things since then,
10:56SPEAKERbut yeah.
10:57SPEAKER- I just, Dosland is such an amazing name
11:00SPEAKERfor somebody who runs a computer.
11:01SPEAKER- I think you pronounce it Dosland is how he says it,
11:04SPEAKERbut I'm not sure.
11:05SPEAKER- I'm sorry.
11:06SPEAKER- I mean, it is a funny name for a computer guy though.
11:08SPEAKERSo, but it's not like a real,
11:09SPEAKERit's not like a fake character.
11:11SPEAKER- No, I don't like it.
11:13SPEAKER- But like what's his name?
11:14SPEAKERCringely on the back of the PC mag issues
11:18SPEAKERwas a completely made up character.
11:21SPEAKER- Oh, or yes, your Sushi X's.
11:23SPEAKER- Your Sushi X or whatever, yeah, exactly.
11:26SPEAKERI was gonna say to give context, this is the first issue.
11:29SPEAKERProbably they worked on it for at least two months,
11:31SPEAKERmaybe a little bit more.
11:33SPEAKERThey rolled CD-ROM today.
11:35SPEAKERFuture had this magazine called CD-ROM today
11:37SPEAKERthat was like about all your multimedia shit
11:40SPEAKERthat people clearly were not enthusiastic about anymore
11:42SPEAKERin mid 1996.
11:44SPEAKERAnd they rolled that magazine to this.
11:45SPEAKERSo CD-ROM today became boot.
11:48SPEAKERAnd the letter section is clearly people responding
11:54SPEAKERto the news that CD-ROM today was going to become boot.
11:58SPEAKER- That was like one of my first questions
12:00SPEAKERwas coming across the letters page
12:01SPEAKERin the first issue of this magazine.
12:03SPEAKERI was like, how did they get letters?
12:04SPEAKER- So typically you just made them up for the first episode,
12:07SPEAKERfor the first issue of a new magazine.
12:08SPEAKER- Okay.
12:09SPEAKER- Like you would get-
12:10SPEAKER- Stephanie, was that common?
12:12SPEAKER- So you would, there were often preview issues.
12:15SPEAKERSo you'd make like a preview,
12:16SPEAKERa little like 20 page preview thing
12:18SPEAKERthat would go to advertisers and stuff
12:19SPEAKERso they could sell ads in it.
12:21SPEAKERAnd you would take those preview things
12:24SPEAKERand take them to other staffs at the publishing company
12:29SPEAKERand be like, hey, can you read this and write me a letter
12:33SPEAKERfor this issue and give it a fake name.
12:36SPEAKER- Wait a minute, we could be doing Q&A episodes every week
12:38SPEAKERif we just made up all the questions.
12:40SPEAKER- Hey Brad, what questions would you like to ask today?
12:43SPEAKERYeah, so people didn't always do that,
12:46SPEAKERbut that was often what happened.
12:48SPEAKER- Man, everything I knew was a lie.
12:51SPEAKER- I mean, look, the thing you have to remember,
12:53SPEAKERand I say this with a lot of love,
12:57SPEAKERwhen you're sitting at home reading a magazine,
12:58SPEAKERyou think, oh man, these people are in an ivory tower
13:02SPEAKERon top of a hill.
13:03SPEAKERThey're so smart, they know everything and they're working,
13:05SPEAKERthey're like, they're the best of the best of the best.
13:08SPEAKER- Yeah, they wouldn't have these jobs
13:09SPEAKERif they were not the best of the best, would they, right?
13:12SPEAKER- Well, I mean, so realistically,
13:15SPEAKERthe reason most magazine people had jobs in my experience
13:18SPEAKERwas because they understood the topic pretty well,
13:21SPEAKERbut were pretty good writers
13:22SPEAKERand could write consistently on deadlines.
13:24SPEAKER- Yes, that actually, now that you say that,
13:26SPEAKERand that all just went into kind of hyper gear
13:29SPEAKERonce everything moved online, it was like,
13:32SPEAKERcan you turn copy out very fast
13:35SPEAKERwas kind of like the number one job requirement.
13:37SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like, they hired me at Max PC specifically
13:39SPEAKERbecause I understood the technology really well
13:42SPEAKERand I could write, and they needed somebody to make sure
13:46SPEAKERthat like the staff, over the years,
13:49SPEAKERthat magazine staff became less and more technical
13:52SPEAKERover at different periods.
13:54SPEAKERAnd I came in at a time when we were probably
13:57SPEAKERat the nadir of technical, not like,
14:00SPEAKERwe weren't people who didn't use technology,
14:03SPEAKERbut it was, there were, Gordon was on staff
14:06SPEAKERand pretty much nobody else was like a kind of gear head
14:09SPEAKERnumbers and bits guy, bits person.
14:12SPEAKERSo they brought me in to like fact check
14:15SPEAKERthe entire magazine basically every month.
14:17SPEAKER- Whoa, that sounds like a lot.
14:21SPEAKER- I mean, I was 25 and had a lot of energy
14:23SPEAKERand a fair amount of free time
14:25SPEAKERand didn't believe in work-life balance
14:27SPEAKERat that point in my life.
14:28SPEAKERSo yeah, it was a lot.
14:29SPEAKER- A familiar story.
14:30SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
14:32SPEAKERYou know the same people.
14:33SPEAKER- Yes, let me ask real fast.
14:35SPEAKERYou said the spun out of a future book, but the Imagine.
14:38SPEAKER- Imagine at the time.
14:39SPEAKER- Okay, so you're using that as a stand-in, so.
14:43SPEAKER- Well, so Imagine got bought by Future PLC in the UK
14:46SPEAKERin like '96, I think, sometime right before this.
14:50SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
14:50SPEAKER- Chris Anderson started them both,
14:52SPEAKERbut he got runoff from the UK or something
14:55SPEAKERand then ended up coming back triumphantly and taking it.
14:57SPEAKERI don't remember the full story
14:58SPEAKERthat that was before my time, but.
15:00SPEAKER- Okay, I mostly bring this up
15:01SPEAKERbecause Next Generation magazine also started
15:03SPEAKERright around this time, maybe '95, if I had to guess.
15:07SPEAKERAnd like people, a lot of people will remember that
15:09SPEAKERas the somewhat highfalutin video game magazine
15:13SPEAKERwith the extremely thick glossy cover stock.
15:16SPEAKER- Well, it was, so at the time the common wisdom was,
15:21SPEAKERhey, you can't do a cross-platform game book
15:24SPEAKER'cause Nintendo people are gonna buy Nintendo Power
15:27SPEAKERand PlayStation people are gonna buy OPM or PSM,
15:31SPEAKERthe PlayStation magazine, the unofficial one, et cetera.
15:35SPEAKERThe thing about Next Gen was they thought
15:39SPEAKERthat there was a high-end market for game coverage.
15:43SPEAKERLike somewhere, they live somewhere
15:45SPEAKERbetween like a high-end enthusiast book
15:48SPEAKERand an industry trade book where you were doing kind of like
15:52SPEAKERwhat became stuff you'd see in like Game Developer Magazine.
15:55SPEAKERThey often had like interviews
15:57SPEAKERthat got into like the business of games
15:59SPEAKERand stuff like that in addition to just playing,
16:01SPEAKERtalking about which games ripped.
16:02SPEAKERAnd yeah, Next Gen, I don't know if this was true,
16:07SPEAKERbut the joke at the office was always
16:08SPEAKERthat Next Gen continued to run for so long
16:10SPEAKERdespite being tiny and making no money
16:13SPEAKERbecause Bill Gates was known to read it
16:15SPEAKERand would give them interviews all the time.
16:17SPEAKER- They didn't make no money.
16:18SPEAKER- Didn't make any money.
16:19SPEAKER- Interesting, so okay,
16:21SPEAKERlike three things dovetailing together here.
16:23SPEAKERSo on page 22, gaming according to Gates,
16:28SPEAKERas you pointed out in the no stock we made for this,
16:30SPEAKERthey got an interview with Bill Gates in this thing
16:32SPEAKERand it wasn't even like the lead.
16:33SPEAKER- But they didn't even make a feature out of it.
16:35SPEAKER- It's just this two-page little interview
16:37SPEAKERat the front of the magazine
16:38SPEAKERabout video games in Windows according to Bill Gates.
16:43SPEAKERChris Charla of Next Generation Magazine
16:45SPEAKERwas involved in this interview.
16:46SPEAKERSo like they mentioned right in the interview
16:48SPEAKERor in the intro to this piece here,
16:51SPEAKERChris Charla of Boots' sister publication, Next Generation.
16:54SPEAKER- My guess is that they trotted Gates to E3
16:58SPEAKERto talk about, or GDC maybe,
17:01SPEAKERto talk about what was gonna be direct.
17:05SPEAKERI mean, I guess direct X was out by that point,
17:07SPEAKERbut he came to beat the drum for direct X would be my guess.
17:11SPEAKERAnd they got a 10 minute interview with him at the booth
17:15SPEAKERwould be my assumption.
17:17SPEAKERCharla now of course is, you know,
17:20SPEAKERit at Xbox and does games for Xbox.
17:23SPEAKER- Wait, is that how you say that?
17:25SPEAKERIt at Xbox?
17:26SPEAKER- It at Xbox.
17:27SPEAKER- Oh. - You say ID?
17:28SPEAKER- I always said ID at Xbox.
17:30SPEAKER- I don't know.
17:31SPEAKER- Let's get some marketing people on the phone,
17:33SPEAKERclear this up.
17:35SPEAKER- My game is published by, or not published by, but anyway.
17:38SPEAKER- Are you guys part of that program?
17:39SPEAKER- We associate with them on the regular.
17:40SPEAKERI have no idea how they say it.
17:42SPEAKER- I mean, that's a whole other tangential thing
17:44SPEAKERthat people outside the games industry
17:46SPEAKERprobably don't care as much about,
17:47SPEAKERbut like, yeah, Charla has mentioned it here,
17:49SPEAKERDoug Lombardi is the news editor of this first issue.
17:52SPEAKER- He was the news editor for almost the whole first year
17:54SPEAKERand then he went to work for Valve.
17:55SPEAKER- Yeah, and yes, Doug Lombardi,
17:57SPEAKERthe very, very long time Valve PR guy
18:00SPEAKERwho has just recently left, I believe.
18:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I believe so.
18:03SPEAKER- Yeah, so we flagged a bunch of stuff to talk about in here.
18:07SPEAKER- But well, not to roll back, but my point is,
18:11SPEAKERmy point about how these folks were putting together
18:16SPEAKERa really big magazine that covered a lot of stuff
18:19SPEAKERon probably a four or $5,000 contribs budget,
18:22SPEAKERwhich sounds like a lot, but when you consider each review,
18:25SPEAKERit was probably four or $500.
18:27SPEAKERThe art costs money, the photos cost money,
18:29SPEAKEReverything costs money, it doesn't go very far.
18:32SPEAKERSo everybody that was on the staff was writing stuff
18:34SPEAKERfor these future books, that was the model.
18:37SPEAKERAnd they were going, this wasn't,
18:41SPEAKERI mean, I know the joke that you web people
18:44SPEAKERalways used to say was that we would fuck around
18:46SPEAKERfor three weeks and then bang out a magazine
18:47SPEAKERin the last week.
18:48SPEAKER- I'm not saying every magazine did that.
18:50SPEAKERI just got the impression the ones I knew
18:52SPEAKERwere sort of that way.
18:56SPEAKER- If we had done that, then we would have,
18:57SPEAKERlike with hardware stuff, you had to have
18:59SPEAKERthe hardware stuff done 'cause it had to be done
19:01SPEAKERin time to be photographed and have the photographs developed
19:03SPEAKERand put in the magazine or else the issues
19:06SPEAKERjust wouldn't get done.
19:07SPEAKER- Sure.
19:07SPEAKER- So yeah, anyway, that's the end of my.
19:11SPEAKER- It's a pretty big spread in here of areas of coverage.
19:15SPEAKERI mean, this cover story is this $5,000 dream machine build,
19:18SPEAKERbut then like there's an interview with Jean-Louis Gasset
19:21SPEAKERin here about the B box, which they were about to launch.
19:25SPEAKERAnd he's in there talking about C++ developers
19:27SPEAKERand courting them.
19:28SPEAKERAnd there's like stuff about T1s and ISDN lines in here.
19:32SPEAKERThere's all kinds of like gadget PDA type reviews.
19:35SPEAKER- Web design stuff.
19:36SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a web design article.
19:38SPEAKERThere's a whole game review section.
19:41SPEAKERThere's a review of 3D Studio Max in here.
19:44SPEAKERThere's a lot of stuff.
19:45SPEAKERThere's a speaker roundup.
19:46SPEAKER- Yeah.
19:47SPEAKER- This is like, it's kind of, this magazine
19:49SPEAKERis like kind of all things to all people almost,
19:51SPEAKERit feels like.
19:51SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it was, I think the idea originally
19:55SPEAKERwas to make an enthusiast, I mean, it always was really,
19:58SPEAKER'cause even at Maximum PC, we tried to do the same thing.
20:00SPEAKERIt was always a magazine for enthusiasts,
20:05SPEAKERcomputer enthusiasts who did whatever you could do
20:07SPEAKERwith the computer.
20:08SPEAKERSo it was a broad mandate.
20:11SPEAKERThe thing that struck me just in general reading this,
20:15SPEAKERI don't think a lot of the people who were writing
20:16SPEAKERabout this stuff were very good at the stuff
20:18SPEAKERthat they were writing about sometimes.
20:20SPEAKERLike, you know, like the 3D Studio Max review
20:24SPEAKERis clearly written by somebody who has used some software
20:26SPEAKERand not who is like a day-to-day 3D Studio Max user.
20:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I get it.
20:31SPEAKERHaving done freelance myself not long after this,
20:34SPEAKERI kind of get it, you know, sometimes you get an assignment
20:37SPEAKERand you just need to make rent.
20:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you figure, well, you figure it out
20:40SPEAKERand like, no, no, no knock on whoever wrote that review.
20:44SPEAKERI apologize for being snarky about it.
20:46SPEAKERBut like later on, we, like once the magazine
20:49SPEAKERwas established and definitely by the time I was in charge
20:51SPEAKERof it in like 2004, 2005, we would just say,
20:55SPEAKER"No, we're not going to cover that
20:56SPEAKER'cause we can't find somebody who knows enough
20:58SPEAKERto do the review."
20:59SPEAKERBut when you're starting on your fledgling
21:01SPEAKERand also all of this stuff is a lot newer in '96, right?
21:06SPEAKERSo you kind of, you get the opportunity
21:08SPEAKERto try 3D Studio Max.
21:09SPEAKERSomebody's like, "Yeah, I'll try that.
21:10SPEAKERI'd like to see how that works."
21:11SPEAKERThat's cool.
21:12SPEAKERAnd you make it work, so.
21:16SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, where do you want to start?
21:17SPEAKERWe talked about Bill Gates.
21:18SPEAKERThe Bill Gates interview has a real good quote
21:21SPEAKERwhere he says, let's see, he says--
21:27SPEAKER- Oh, the SGI stuff?
21:29SPEAKER- Yeah, he's like, "In a couple of years,
21:31SPEAKERthe computer hardware is going to be good enough
21:33SPEAKERthat we're going to be faster
21:34SPEAKERthan the fastest SGI workstation."
21:36SPEAKERWhich turned out to be 100% true
21:38SPEAKERbecause the fastest SGI workstation
21:40SPEAKERwas the same workstation that was available at this point
21:43SPEAKERtwo years later when they went out of business, so.
21:45SPEAKER- A lot of things you can say about Bill Gates,
21:47SPEAKERbut he nailed that one on the head.
21:48SPEAKERI mean, that's quite literally like the narrative
21:50SPEAKERis that's what put SGI out of business
21:52SPEAKERwas the commodity x86 boxes.
21:54SPEAKER- Yeah.
21:54SPEAKER- Getting better at a 10th of the cost, right?
21:57SPEAKER- Working as intended.
21:59SPEAKERBill Gates does like boxing games better
22:01SPEAKERon dedicated consoles though.
22:02SPEAKERSo you got that going for you, Dreamcast.
22:05SPEAKER- I do this, I don't know how I glossed over this.
22:08SPEAKERThis mock-up of Bill Gates as a like virtual fighter
22:11SPEAKERlooking polygonal fighter.
22:13SPEAKER- Yep, that's 500 bucks right there.
22:15SPEAKER- That's incredible.
22:16SPEAKERThat is going to be the show art for this episode for sure.
22:20SPEAKERThat's completely ridiculous.
22:22SPEAKERLet's see, early on, did you see this little NMX article?
22:26SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
22:27SPEAKER- Do you remember the marketing blitz around them?
22:29SPEAKERIf you don't remember,
22:30SPEAKERMMX was a set of extension.
22:33SPEAKER- Multimedia extensions.
22:35SPEAKER- There was a set of extensions to the x86 instruction set
22:38SPEAKERthat Intel rolled out to accelerate multimedia functions,
22:41SPEAKERbut I didn't know what an instruction set was in 1995, 96.
22:46SPEAKERAll I remember was they kind of a marketing blitz
22:49SPEAKERaround MMX.
22:50SPEAKERDoes that ring any bells for you?
22:51SPEAKER- They spent a lot of money marketing it.
22:53SPEAKERThe point of it was that it accelerated some floating point
22:57SPEAKERmath that was important for video rendering
22:59SPEAKERand games basically, but mostly video rendering.
23:02SPEAKER- That's kind of what I was going to bring up here.
23:04SPEAKERLike if I had read this article back then,
23:05SPEAKERI would have had a better idea of what MMX did
23:07SPEAKERbecause like the deck on this article straight up talks
23:09SPEAKERabout it accelerating matrix multiplication,
23:11SPEAKERfast Fourier and discrete cosine transforms.
23:15SPEAKERIt's like, oh, okay.
23:17SPEAKERThere's actual math getting faster here.
23:18SPEAKERThat makes sense.
23:19SPEAKERAt the time, the way they bandied that acronym around
23:24SPEAKERkind of made you feel like,
23:26SPEAKERis this a thing that they're making a big deal out of
23:28SPEAKERthat's going to actually make very little to no difference?
23:31SPEAKERBut of course it was actually quite a big deal.
23:34SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it was a big deal more
23:35SPEAKERbecause it was the beginning of extensions
23:37SPEAKERto the x86 instruction set, right?
23:39SPEAKERLike there's a bazillion of things like SSE and SSE2
23:42SPEAKERand all that stuff spawned out of this beginning.
23:46SPEAKEREven the AMD 64 extensions that everybody uses now.
23:50SPEAKER- Before this though, like electrical engineers yell at me
23:56SPEAKERin the comments, I guess.
23:59SPEAKERBut like I viewed this as them adding marketing
24:02SPEAKERto the 487 floating point math processor
24:07SPEAKERthat was part of the four series generation of processors.
24:11SPEAKER- Yeah, well, it's consistent with the move
24:13SPEAKERfrom the 486 name to the Pentium name, right?
24:16SPEAKERLike they just, Intel just decided it was time
24:18SPEAKERto start branding and marketing all of the products,
24:20SPEAKERwhich like was of course the right thing to do.
24:22SPEAKER- It turned out to be a good idea, yeah.
24:24SPEAKER- It worked.
24:25SPEAKER- Who knew?
24:26SPEAKERYeah, this was interesting.
24:28SPEAKERI thought the interesting thing
24:29SPEAKERin the news section actually,
24:32SPEAKERit might be before this.
24:33SPEAKEROh, did you see the let's do lunch note on page 19
24:37SPEAKERwhere they talked about Steven Spielberg
24:40SPEAKERofficially entering the world of multimedia
24:42SPEAKERwhen Knowledge Adventure releases his game Movie Maker?
24:45SPEAKER- Huh.
24:46SPEAKER- Is that the thing that Microsoft bought
24:48SPEAKERthat became Microsoft Movie Maker?
24:50SPEAKER- Like 3D Movie Maker or?
24:51SPEAKER- 3D Movie Maker, yeah.
24:52SPEAKER- I don't know, Knowledge Adventure Movie Maker.
24:56SPEAKERI'm not familiar with that.
24:58SPEAKER- You'll also note on that page,
25:00SPEAKERthere's a headline that says Smart Phones for Smart People.
25:04SPEAKERWell, so-called smart telephones offer a mind boggling array
25:07SPEAKERof exciting new features.
25:08SPEAKERLearning all the somewhat complicated functions
25:10SPEAKERrequires training and often ends up
25:11SPEAKERin potentially valuable calls being lost.
25:14SPEAKERLike this is just some business shit,
25:16SPEAKERbut also it's the first time I probably ever saw smartphones.
25:18SPEAKER- Like I said, there's a pretty broad spread
25:21SPEAKERof subjects covered here.
25:22SPEAKERI think you're right.
25:23SPEAKERI think I just found there's a bunch of YouTube videos
25:25SPEAKERlike entitled things like Knowledge Adventure logo effects
25:28SPEAKERin Windows Movie Maker 2.6.
25:30SPEAKER- There you go.
25:31SPEAKER- So I think that probably did become Windows Movie Maker.
25:34SPEAKER- Or 3D Movie Maker.
25:36SPEAKER- Yeah, something.
25:38SPEAKER- So it's funny 'cause this design,
25:40SPEAKERthe design of this magazine carried forward
25:41SPEAKERinto the early maximum PCs even to the point
25:43SPEAKERthat I worked there.
25:45SPEAKERLike the framing, the black trim on the pages
25:48SPEAKERand the cutouts and all that stuff.
25:51SPEAKERIt was very like, hey, we wanna make a computer magazine
25:54SPEAKERthat looks kind of like Thrasher.
25:57SPEAKER- Okay, that's not the reference point I was expecting,
25:59SPEAKERbut is that what Thrasher, did you read Thrasher?
26:02SPEAKER- We, when we did redesigns,
26:04SPEAKERwe talked about Thrasher a lot.
26:06SPEAKER- Interesting.
26:07SPEAKER- Not in 2005, but in the early days, yeah.
26:10SPEAKER- Does Thrasher still exist?
26:11SPEAKER- I have no idea.
26:14SPEAKER- They still have a website.
26:15SPEAKER- Should we give one of the,
26:17SPEAKERI like looking at the ads in the old magazines
26:19SPEAKERbecause it gives you a good point of reference
26:20SPEAKERfor like what, like just to be clear,
26:23SPEAKERthe opening fold ad in this magazine was a Micron PC ad.
26:30SPEAKER- Yeah, this, I hadn't thought about the name Micron
26:32SPEAKERin 20 something years, but before I became aware
26:38SPEAKERthat you could build your own computers,
26:39SPEAKERI always thought of Micron as like the high end,
26:41SPEAKERlike desirable pre-built.
26:43SPEAKER- They were fancy, I think.
26:45SPEAKER- I never had one,
26:46SPEAKERbut I always like fawned over them in the magazines.
26:48SPEAKERI was like, man, if I had $7,649,
26:52SPEAKER'cause that's the most expensive model in this ad.
26:55SPEAKERIf I had that much money, I would buy this,
26:58SPEAKERis that a Pentium Pro?
26:59SPEAKERIt is.
27:00SPEAKER- It's a Pentium Pro 200, yeah.
27:01SPEAKER- I would buy this Pentium Pro 200
27:03SPEAKERwith 128 megabytes of RAM for, like I said, almost $7,700.
27:07SPEAKERAnyway, I mean, this was the era of the compacts
27:11SPEAKERand Packard Bells, like the kind of big box,
27:15SPEAKERall in one pre-built stuff that were maybe not as great,
27:18SPEAKERbut then like, if you wanted the upgrade mail order stuff,
27:21SPEAKERyou would get a Gateway or maybe a Micron.
27:23SPEAKER- It was more if you wanted just exactly
27:25SPEAKERthe thing you wanted instead of like
27:26SPEAKERwhatever happened to be in the box at the store.
27:29SPEAKERBut yeah, so like a mid range $2,500 PC at this point
27:33SPEAKERwas a Pentium 200, not a Pentium Pro
27:36SPEAKERwith an 8X SCSI CD-ROM drive.
27:41SPEAKERThat was pretty nice if it had SCSI.
27:43SPEAKERAnd it had a 64-bit 3D video.
27:46SPEAKERIt was probably a Rage Pro, if I had to guess,
27:50SPEAKERwhich would have run like MechWarrior 2, but not GLQuake,
27:53SPEAKERwhich wasn't out yet at this point, just to be clear.
27:56SPEAKER- What was the Rage, the ATI, right?
27:59SPEAKER- ATI Rage Pro, yeah.
28:00SPEAKERAnd that would have been probably eight megabytes of RAM
28:02SPEAKERwould be my guess.
28:03SPEAKERSo a little thin by today's standards
28:05SPEAKERand like a pretty good sized hard drive was
28:10SPEAKERlike 16, sorry, one gigabytes rather than, yeah.
28:14SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, that checks out.
28:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a different time.
28:17SPEAKERThis was after Quake came out,
28:19SPEAKERbut before GLQuake and Quake World came out.
28:22SPEAKER- Yes, this was like two months after Quake
28:25SPEAKERor Quake would have been coming out around the time
28:26SPEAKERthey were probably going to press with this.
28:29SPEAKER- Yeah, Quake, let's see, Unreal.
28:31SPEAKERThere's a preview for Unreal, I think in this issue,
28:33SPEAKERbut not a preview for Quake
28:35SPEAKER'cause probably even Q3 Test wasn't out yet, I guess.
28:37SPEAKERAnyway, oh no, Q3 Test came out way before that.
28:42SPEAKER- Oh yeah, that was '99.
28:42SPEAKER- It was old news by the time this came out, I guess.
28:44SPEAKER- Yeah, yes.
28:47SPEAKER- Let's see, other stuff, the, there's a,
28:50SPEAKERShell Kimmen did a, she was like a web design person
28:54SPEAKERat that point, I think, who wrote about
28:56SPEAKERlike what would have been called web creation software
29:00SPEAKERat that period, I guess.
29:01SPEAKER- Yes, she, according to this,
29:03SPEAKERshe was the web director for The Net magazine.
29:05SPEAKER- And she was the column, she was one of our,
29:07SPEAKERshe was a long running column, she stayed for a long time.
29:10SPEAKERShe wrote a story about ISDN,
29:12SPEAKERchoosing between ISDN or cable modems
29:15SPEAKERin San Francisco in the mid '90s.
29:17SPEAKER- Interesting, and in retrospect,
29:19SPEAKERthat's not even a choice, but go on.
29:21SPEAKER- Well, it is because she,
29:23SPEAKERwhen she references cable modems,
29:24SPEAKERshe tells what the installed base for cable modems is
29:27SPEAKERat that point, which was 50.
29:30SPEAKER- People?
29:31SPEAKER- Households.
29:32SPEAKER- Wow.
29:33SPEAKER- 50.
29:34SPEAKER- All in San Francisco?
29:36SPEAKER- In Northern California, but in the entire world,
29:39SPEAKERis my understanding.
29:40SPEAKERThis was like during the beta rollout
29:41SPEAKERfor cable modem technology with at home.
29:45SPEAKER- Yeah, I got my first cable connection
29:47SPEAKERin probably like 2001, so sure, yeah, that makes sense.
29:50SPEAKER- Yeah, so this was, this would have been,
29:54SPEAKERDSL was maybe starting to roll out,
29:56SPEAKERbut I think even that was, that was unusual at the time.
30:01SPEAKERAnd then she broke down the costs for ISDN
30:03SPEAKERin Northern California at that point,
30:04SPEAKERwhich was 125 bucks for a one-time installation,
30:08SPEAKERplus a $35 one-time line installation,
30:12SPEAKERplus 25 bucks a month in addition to usage charges.
30:18SPEAKERSo that was how I, like Tennessee
30:20SPEAKERdidn't have ISDN usage charges,
30:22SPEAKERwhich is why I was able to get ISDN in Tennessee.
30:24SPEAKER- Sure, imagine 28 megabytes per second.
30:28SPEAKER- 28 megabytes per second,
30:29SPEAKERI would have murdered somebody for 1996.
30:31SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely, that goes without saying.
30:34SPEAKER- Megabytes or megabits, it would have been mega.
30:35SPEAKER- Well, she used capital B here.
30:37SPEAKER- She said megabytes, yes,
30:39SPEAKERthis is why they needed a technical editor.
30:41SPEAKER- I was going by the technical,
30:42SPEAKERthe literal reading of that,
30:44SPEAKERbut maybe she meant megabits here.
30:46SPEAKER- Yeah, no, it would have been,
30:48SPEAKERit would have been a 10 megabit connection,
30:50SPEAKERprobably sort of been, anyway, doesn't matter.
30:52SPEAKERIt was still really fast.
30:54SPEAKER- Have you ever had functional DSL?
30:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I had DSL until I moved,
30:59SPEAKERI had DSL until 2006 probably.
31:03SPEAKER- Was that here?
31:04SPEAKER- Yeah, 2007 maybe.
31:06SPEAKER- Was it functional?
31:07SPEAKER- I had SDSL from COVAD.
31:10SPEAKER- Okay.
31:10SPEAKER- Which was a, they licensed,
31:12SPEAKERsub-licensed lines from Pac Bell.
31:15SPEAKERAnd it was the only way I could get symmetrical connection,
31:18SPEAKERso I had like a two megabit per second, both ways.
31:22SPEAKER- Okay, at the time, that's not terrible.
31:26SPEAKER- No, it wasn't great.
31:27SPEAKERI switched to cable when we started doing podcasts
31:31SPEAKER'cause I wanted to be able to upload stuff at home
31:32SPEAKERand it took too long on the two megabit.
31:35SPEAKER- Yeah, we got a speakeasy connection
31:37SPEAKERwhen I moved here 20 years ago.
31:38SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I did.
31:39SPEAKER- And it was God awful,
31:40SPEAKERbut I think that was because the copper lines
31:42SPEAKERgoing into our crappy apartment were probably, I don't know,
31:46SPEAKER75, probably not that old, but very old.
31:49SPEAKER- Yeah, no, our speakeasy connection was fantastic.
31:51SPEAKERI really liked it.
31:52SPEAKER- Oh, really?
31:53SPEAKER- We had no problems.
31:54SPEAKER- Ours was not stable.
31:57SPEAKER- It was consistent and reliable.
31:59SPEAKER- Okay, I both moved out of that apartment after a year
32:02SPEAKERand also ran screaming to a Comcast connection,
32:06SPEAKERwhich tell you how badly I needed something better.
32:08SPEAKER- My experience with Comcast was really good
32:11SPEAKERright up until we moved into this house
32:12SPEAKERwhere there's been a,
32:13SPEAKERhey, Comcast needs to service this connection,
32:16SPEAKERthis wire for the entire time I've lived here,
32:19SPEAKERwhich is now we're like 15 years into this house.
32:22SPEAKERDoesn't feel like it's been that long.
32:24SPEAKERAnyway, yeah, so I think that's the big one.
32:29SPEAKEROh, the other thing about this issue
32:30SPEAKERthat I thought was really funny
32:32SPEAKERis I had never seen a magazine.
32:36SPEAKERThe fact that they opened the case sides
32:38SPEAKERon the computer reviews,
32:41SPEAKER'cause they have a feature that's a roundup
32:43SPEAKERof like three or four 200 megahertz Pentiums.
32:47SPEAKERThey popped the case side off,
32:48SPEAKERand I believe that the vendors were super pissed
32:52SPEAKERthat they opened the case sides and showed them.
32:55SPEAKERYeah.
32:56SPEAKER- I looked at that article with great interest,
32:58SPEAKER'cause of course I did.
32:58SPEAKERAnd there's some weird stuff in here,
33:00SPEAKERlike this Compaq Presario,
33:03SPEAKERall the expansion cards fit into this removable card cage.
33:07SPEAKER- Compaq loves a riser board.
33:09SPEAKER- That's right, I had never seen anything like this before.
33:12SPEAKERIt seems kind of convenient, actually.
33:14SPEAKER- Well, except if you need to replace the motherboard,
33:17SPEAKERyou're completely hosed,
33:18SPEAKER'cause nobody else sells one that's anything like that.
33:20SPEAKER- Oh, I forgot Compaq was making its own boards,
33:23SPEAKERwasn't it, at that time?
33:25SPEAKER- Yeah, Compaq was,
33:27SPEAKERwell, as soon as Compaq switched
33:28SPEAKERto those weird plastic front cases,
33:30SPEAKERthe everything inside was weird.
33:32SPEAKERI think Compaq and even early Dells would do,
33:35SPEAKERthey'd do like left-handed cases.
33:37SPEAKERSo the PCI express slots would be oriented backwards.
33:42SPEAKERSo you had to, you could even like,
33:44SPEAKERyou could use cards from other people,
33:46SPEAKERbut you couldn't replace some other board in those cases,
33:49SPEAKER'cause the stuff didn't light up right.
33:51SPEAKER- That's right, man.
33:52SPEAKERThis, I mean, reading this stuff
33:53SPEAKERis bringing a thousand memories back,
33:55SPEAKERbut I never owned a Compaq, but that's one of them.
33:56SPEAKERI remember now, like that was the reputation around Compaq
33:59SPEAKERwas like, hey, everything is totally unique
34:01SPEAKERand bespoke and made by them.
34:03SPEAKERLike you can't upgrade anything in this thing.
34:06SPEAKER- The thing I love about this
34:07SPEAKERis like how just spectacularly half,
34:10SPEAKERlike their wiring jobs are really funny.
34:14SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, that's why I love having these photos on here,
34:17SPEAKERlike this Aptiva, this IBM Aptiva,
34:19SPEAKERlike the power cord power cable for the motherboard,
34:22SPEAKERlike runs right between the two PCI slots.
34:25SPEAKER- Yep.
34:26SPEAKER- That seems problematic if you want to put two cards in.
34:29SPEAKER- Well, the cards were one slot thick always back then,
34:32SPEAKERbut the NEC Power Player 2001
34:37SPEAKERalso has a weird riser board off of it
34:39SPEAKERthat all the slots are on.
34:40SPEAKERSo it's like, there's a bus that connects to,
34:43SPEAKERso the motherboard sits on the bottom of the case,
34:46SPEAKERnot the normal backplane,
34:48SPEAKERand then the riser board comes off of it
34:49SPEAKERand you plug the cards into that riser board.
34:52SPEAKERIt's a choice, but that machine had a 3DFX voodoo card in it.
34:56SPEAKER- That's true.
34:57SPEAKER- It was a good one.
34:58SPEAKER- A lot of companies do a lot of wild shit
35:00SPEAKERwith pre-built computers back then.
35:02SPEAKER- It's worth noting, so later on,
35:06SPEAKERthey wouldn't have done this kind of thing
35:08SPEAKERwithout putting numbers on these reviews.
35:11SPEAKERSo they would have rated these products
35:14SPEAKERbecause they wouldn't have done like a cushy, hey,
35:16SPEAKERhere's just a round of some shit you can buy
35:18SPEAKERwithout saying this is the good one.
35:21SPEAKER- Oh man, this NEC came with a copy
35:22SPEAKERof Battle Arena Toshinden for the voodoo.
35:25SPEAKER- Yeah, they also did,
35:26SPEAKERthey did a classic mid-90s computer vendor thing,
35:29SPEAKERwhich is like, hey man,
35:31SPEAKERwe're going to put a joystick in here too.
35:33SPEAKERAnd maybe a game pad, you like game pads, right?
35:35SPEAKER- There are a number of shots of game pads
35:38SPEAKERthroughout this issue and all of them make me feel queasy.
35:42SPEAKER- Some bad fight pads from back then.
35:44SPEAKER- There were some terrible controllers on PC in this time.
35:47SPEAKER- That there was Bill Gates referenced
35:49SPEAKERthe Sidewinder game pad in his thing.
35:53SPEAKERAnd that was an all time bad game pad.
35:56SPEAKER- Look at that thing, like the D pad on that thing,
35:59SPEAKERit looks like a wad of chewing gum.
36:02SPEAKERLike it's completely amorphous.
36:04SPEAKERIt has no shape to it at all.
36:06SPEAKER- I don't, at least it had six buttons.
36:08SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, fine.
36:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know.
36:11SPEAKER- But you always had to bind everything to everything.
36:14SPEAKERIt was not a great time.
36:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
36:17SPEAKER- That was when you couldn't do a plus though,
36:18SPEAKER'cause Nintendo still had the,
36:19SPEAKERthat was still patented, right?
36:21SPEAKER- I think that's, is that not still the case?
36:23SPEAKER- No, it's fair game,
36:25SPEAKER'cause Microsoft had a plus on the Xbox 360.
36:27SPEAKER- It's weird, I want to say that Microsoft did something
36:30SPEAKERthat got around that.
36:33SPEAKERGosh, now I need to know.
36:38SPEAKER- While you're looking that up,
36:39SPEAKERwe can talk about, let's see,
36:41SPEAKERthe other stuff, there's Tom McDonald,
36:44SPEAKERwho wrote columns for a ton of computer magazines
36:47SPEAKERback in the day.
36:48SPEAKER- Wait, I'm sorry, do you mean T. Liam McDonald?
36:51SPEAKER- Yeah, T. Liam is Tom McDonald.
36:54SPEAKER- No, I know, I was being a little bit facetious there,
36:57SPEAKERbut the point is, I don't know why,
36:59SPEAKERwhen I saw T. Liam McDonald's name in this,
37:01SPEAKERI was like, oh my God, didn't he have a column
37:03SPEAKERin every PC magazine ever back then?
37:06SPEAKERI just, I remember seeing a ton of his columns
37:08SPEAKERunder that byline back then.
37:10SPEAKER- We had two Tom, so we had Tom Halfhill wrote a CPU,
37:14SPEAKERlike a valley kind of fab and chip technology column.
37:20SPEAKERSo I feel like that's why T,
37:22SPEAKERI don't remember if we asked,
37:23SPEAKERI don't know if they asked Tom McDonald to go by T. Liam,
37:27SPEAKERor if that's just what his pen name was.
37:29SPEAKER- Interesting, yeah, like something about,
37:31SPEAKERalso just that first, the first initial middle name,
37:34SPEAKERlast name construction is just kind of like mysterious
37:38SPEAKERand authoritative sounding.
37:40SPEAKERIt's like, oh man, anybody who goes by that
37:42SPEAKERin their byline must really know their shit.
37:44SPEAKER- Well, so when I started, John Phillips was like,
37:46SPEAKERhey, do you want to go by Verlin or like V. William
37:49SPEAKERor V. Liam or something?
37:51SPEAKERI was like, I can't do V. Liam
37:53SPEAKERbecause we already have a T. Liam.
37:55SPEAKERThat would be really stupid.
37:57SPEAKER- Anyway, just to hear the man debased by Tom McDonald
38:01SPEAKERis just like, it really threw me for a loop.
38:04SPEAKERAlso, he starts this column by saying, I hate Miss.
38:09SPEAKERI mean, look, that was a popular,
38:13SPEAKERthat was a popular vibe in the age of real-time graphics.
38:16SPEAKER- You know, it's true.
38:17SPEAKERA lot of people got a lot of mileage
38:19SPEAKERout of hating Missed back then.
38:21SPEAKER- I think the good news is now he has real,
38:23SPEAKERhe can play Missed in real time.
38:25SPEAKERHe can just throw that bad boy up, 3D render,
38:27SPEAKERand he can just get in there.
38:28SPEAKER- That's right.
38:29SPEAKERHas anybody modded a rocket launcher into that real Miss?
38:32SPEAKER- I don't know.
38:33SPEAKER- I hope so.
38:34SPEAKER- Let's see, other things I loved on page 35,
38:39SPEAKERthere's like there, hey, here's the stuff
38:41SPEAKERwe're excited about.
38:42SPEAKERAnd there's, well, on page 34, there's a hanging TV.
38:45SPEAKERThat's a plasma, early plasma from Sony
38:48SPEAKERthat has the thickest bezel I've ever seen.
38:51SPEAKER- Yes, is that 12 inch?
38:54SPEAKER- Oh, it goes up to 50.
38:56SPEAKER- Okay.
38:57SPEAKER- Also, on page 34, the first one of those U.S. robotics,
39:02SPEAKERtriple boomerang, triple prom boomerang,
39:05SPEAKERconference room phones that every conference room
39:08SPEAKERin the country has in it now.
39:11SPEAKERAnd then on page 35, the thing that is,
39:16SPEAKERI am blown away by is this Panasonic CF62 laptop,
39:21SPEAKERwhich was $7,200.
39:23SPEAKER- Wow.
39:24SPEAKER- It has a motorized keyboard that pops up
39:26SPEAKERto reveal a CD-ROM drive.
39:29SPEAKER- Oh, that's wild.
39:30SPEAKER- Yes, you can put your CD-ROMs in,
39:32SPEAKERbut it unfolds the entire laptop.
39:34SPEAKERThat thing, I can't imagine that that thing lasted
39:37SPEAKERlike four disc insertion and ejects.
39:40SPEAKERLike what a nightmare.
39:41SPEAKERAnyway.
39:42SPEAKER- There's got to be video of that thing
39:43SPEAKERoperating out there, right?
39:45SPEAKER- I'm sure somebody has one.
39:46SPEAKERThere were a lot of weird mechanical engineers
39:50SPEAKERdoing weird stuff in the laptop world in that time period.
39:55SPEAKER- There's not a lot out there about that thing, actually.
39:58SPEAKERI wonder if they didn't make a lot of those.
40:00SPEAKERWhat about the Nintendo D-pad patent?
40:03SPEAKERIs that a real thing?
40:04SPEAKERIs that just urban legend?
40:06SPEAKER- I mean, I've been coming upon like Reddit threads.
40:09SPEAKERThose are, you know, you always want to like double confirm
40:11SPEAKERwhat you see in those.
40:15SPEAKERI think it may have expired at this point.
40:17SPEAKERYes, that did expire in 2005.
40:19SPEAKER- Worldwide 1985, yeah, it's expired.
40:21SPEAKER- For some reason I had thought Microsoft had just like done
40:23SPEAKERsome very subtle thing to get around it,
40:25SPEAKERbut I think that it's just fair game at this point.
40:27SPEAKERAlthough Microsoft is back to a disc now.
40:30SPEAKER- Yeah, that one is okay.
40:32SPEAKERI like the plus one better.
40:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, I like the D-pad on the Xbox One controllers
40:38SPEAKERI thought was pretty good.
40:39SPEAKER- Yeah, it was fine, a little squishy.
40:41SPEAKER- Yes, do you want to talk about this interview
40:44SPEAKERwith Jean-Louis Gasset a little bit?
40:48SPEAKER- Yeah, he's just starts off.
40:49SPEAKERHe just goes right at it with some real racist shit.
40:52SPEAKERAnd then...
40:53SPEAKER- He does mention political correctness in the first answer.
40:56SPEAKER- I mean, it's a very French approach to American politics
41:01SPEAKERin the '90s.
41:05SPEAKERThis was interesting because this interview
41:08SPEAKERwould have happened before the bee boxes shipped.
41:13SPEAKERWell, maybe not, they shipped, they debuted in 1995
41:16SPEAKERand they were upgraded in 1996, in August of 1996.
41:22SPEAKERI don't know when they actually started shipping though.
41:26SPEAKERSo bee, if people don't know,
41:28SPEAKERJean-Louis was an Apple executive who left Apple
41:32SPEAKERand made the other company that was former Apple engineers
41:37SPEAKERmaking some bespoke hardware and bespoke OS that wasn't NeXT.
41:42SPEAKERAnd it was the one that Apple didn't choose to go with
41:47SPEAKERwhen they brought Steve Jobs back into the company
41:49SPEAKERand acquired NeXT.
41:51SPEAKERWhen it was Gil Amelio on the way out
41:54SPEAKERand they were about to go bankrupt in 90 days.
41:55SPEAKERAnd it was like, God, what do we do?
41:57SPEAKERIt was either buy NeXT or buy Bee, right?
42:00SPEAKERAnd either bring in Steve Jobs or Gasset to run Apple.
42:05SPEAKERGasset is in this article saying,
42:06SPEAKERno, I will never go back to Apple in here.
42:08SPEAKER- Jobs also said the same thing at the same time period.
42:12SPEAKER- Yeah, well, he founded the company.
42:13SPEAKERHe's got a connection there.
42:15SPEAKER- Yeah, but well, the point is
42:20SPEAKERthe Bee machine was like, hey, we're gonna start
42:22SPEAKERfrom scratch, we're gonna take everything we learned
42:23SPEAKERmaking these first waves of computers.
42:25SPEAKERAnd we're going to build a, like no backward compatibility,
42:30SPEAKERno legacy, just like designed to be massively parallel
42:34SPEAKERand work with a lot of, like you're gonna put a bunch
42:37SPEAKERof cheap, slow CPUs in here and it's gonna run real fast.
42:42SPEAKERAnd the demo of this Bee box, which was like a couple
42:44SPEAKERof 66 megahertz processors that wasn't super fast,
42:47SPEAKERwas basically like, hey, look, we can open like six videos
42:50SPEAKERat a time on this thing, which was nuts.
42:52SPEAKER- I think he says in here, they got like a standing ovation
42:54SPEAKERfrom developers watching this demo or something.
42:57SPEAKERThere's like some-
42:59SPEAKER- There's a fair amount of hyperbole in this interview
43:01SPEAKERfor what it's worth.
43:01SPEAKER- He is like, they described him as a flamboyant Frenchman
43:05SPEAKERin this article, like he's got a reputation
43:07SPEAKERfor being like an outsized personality, right?
43:09SPEAKER- By they, you mean Doug Lombardi?
43:11SPEAKER- Yeah, they, the authors.
43:13SPEAKER- Yes. - Yes.
43:14SPEAKER- He was, look, part of it, so the interview,
43:18SPEAKERthe interview, they did an interview every month,
43:21SPEAKERit was called LIP, the section was called LIP.
43:24SPEAKERIt sometimes was a feature, sometimes it was just
43:27SPEAKERa interview, sometimes they didn't run it.
43:29SPEAKERBut they always got people, like Alex St. John
43:32SPEAKERwas featured in LIP later on.
43:34SPEAKERThey had Carmack in LIP, like they would get people
43:36SPEAKERwho would talk some real smack about people
43:38SPEAKERand they encouraged it, right?
43:41SPEAKER- I mean, this is, he's kinda, at one point he's talking
43:43SPEAKERsmack about his own product, though.
43:46SPEAKER- I mean.
43:47SPEAKER- When he's saying like, hey, if you want to own a,
43:49SPEAKERif you wanna buy a B-Box, you should have two computers
43:52SPEAKERbecause, I'll just read, seriously, the reason I ask people
43:56SPEAKERto have two PCs or more is the lack of applications
43:58SPEAKERon the B-Box, it's intolerable if you don't already
44:01SPEAKERhave PCs or cannot program.
44:03SPEAKER- Well, I mean, but his point was it's essentially
44:06SPEAKERa dev kit for the future, for the OS to come, right?
44:09SPEAKER- Yes, he does go on to elaborate here that like,
44:10SPEAKERthey're looking for people to make software for this thing.
44:14SPEAKERLike, I don't know if I could find it.
44:16SPEAKERHe says it here somewhere, like they flat out subsidized
44:20SPEAKERheavily the cost of the box to people who could prove
44:23SPEAKERthey would develop applications for it,
44:24SPEAKERlike less than a thousand dollars for one of these things.
44:27SPEAKER- Yeah, and they would subsidize to, if you were a developer
44:30SPEAKERthey would give you a price cut on the machine.
44:33SPEAKERLike if you weren't, you had to pay the full price.
44:35SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
44:36SPEAKERThere's some interesting stuff in here.
44:38SPEAKERLike they ask him about Commodore and the Amiga,
44:40SPEAKERthey ask him about NeXT.
44:41SPEAKER- Well, it's interesting 'cause like in the modern context,
44:44SPEAKERhe doesn't really have, like he doesn't have a good,
44:48SPEAKERhey, here's who this machine is for in this interview,
44:50SPEAKERwhich is like what you think, like he's like,
44:52SPEAKERmaybe people can use it, programmers can use it,
44:54SPEAKERblah, blah, blah, blah, but he doesn't say,
44:56SPEAKERhey, if you want to edit video, this is the thing for you.
44:58SPEAKERIt wasn't like, he was saying,
44:59SPEAKERwe're gonna make a video toaster.
45:02SPEAKERHe just, like he kind of whiffed on this whole thing
45:07SPEAKERall the way through and he did make a bunch
45:10SPEAKERof really good flamboyant claims.
45:12SPEAKERHey, we're gonna sell 100,000 of these in the first year.
45:14SPEAKERBrad, do you know how many they actually sold?
45:16SPEAKER- How many did they sell?
45:17SPEAKER- About 1,800.
45:20SPEAKER- Oh my God, wait, like lifetime?
45:23SPEAKER- Uh-huh. - No.
45:25SPEAKER- Well, 'cause what happened was it became clear
45:27SPEAKERthat making hardware was a bad idea
45:29SPEAKERand so they switched to running on PowerPC Max
45:32SPEAKERand you could just buy the OS
45:34SPEAKERand then install it on your PowerPC Mac
45:36SPEAKERand later on your x86 machines as well
45:38SPEAKERwith the 4.0 release of the OS.
45:40SPEAKER- X86 makes more sense, but like, why would you buy a Mac
45:43SPEAKERjust to put a different operating system on it?
45:44SPEAKERLike if you're buying a Mac,
45:45SPEAKERyou're there for the Apple experience, right?
45:48SPEAKER- See, you say that, but this was in the time
45:50SPEAKERof System 7 and when System 8 was taking five years
45:53SPEAKERand Windows had taken five, Windows 95 had taken five years
45:56SPEAKERand he was like, there's a window for other OSs back then.
46:00SPEAKER- That's fair, I forgot that Apple was kind of lost
46:02SPEAKERin the wilderness with their operating system at the time.
46:05SPEAKER- 1800 units? - 1800 units.
46:08SPEAKER- Oh my God, man.
46:09SPEAKER- It's not great.
46:10SPEAKER- I feel like nausea.
46:12SPEAKER- That's according to Wikipedia for what it's worth.
46:14SPEAKER- That is incredible.
46:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I bet they were mostly the developers.
46:18SPEAKER- Yeah, oh, absolutely.
46:20SPEAKER- They come up on eBay occasionally.
46:21SPEAKERI've looked at them and thought maybe I should buy a B box,
46:24SPEAKERbut they've moved out of my price range
46:26SPEAKERin the last few years.
46:28SPEAKER- That few of them and probably even fewer
46:30SPEAKERthat will still work.
46:33SPEAKER- I mean, they're pretty easy.
46:35SPEAKERI think they'd be pretty easy to manage, but.
46:39SPEAKER- Sure.
46:40SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's an interesting interview.
46:43SPEAKERThey did a jump, we stopped doing jumps
46:45SPEAKERto the back of the magazine.
46:47SPEAKERI hate jumps.
46:49SPEAKERThe design on this thing is a trip though.
46:52SPEAKERThere's so much text on these pages compared to later on.
46:55SPEAKER- What is a jump exactly?
46:57SPEAKER- Jump is when you go, when it's like,
46:58SPEAKERhey, interview continues on page 120.
47:00SPEAKER- Oh, okay.
47:02SPEAKER- Wow, I never knew the term of art for that, the jargon.
47:06SPEAKER- I will say, if you look on the bottom of page 41,
47:10SPEAKERyou can see a little graphic that says
47:12SPEAKERthe BOS facilitates multitasking as the caption,
47:16SPEAKERincluding rendering fractals, display FMV
47:18SPEAKERand mixing multi-channel audio.
47:20SPEAKERIt has the little contacts pane,
47:22SPEAKERthe contacts icon with the three guys.
47:24SPEAKERIt's a fabulous icon.
47:27SPEAKER- Yes, I fawned over that screenshot actually in this.
47:30SPEAKER- Yeah, whoever they had designing their icons,
47:33SPEAKERI assume it was somebody from early Apple,
47:35SPEAKERdid a just absolutely delightful job with the icon design.
47:39SPEAKER- B had some fantastic logo design,
47:42SPEAKERkind of all the design around B was very nice.
47:45SPEAKERWell, the case, I don't know.
47:48SPEAKERI'm a little mixed on the case now that I see it again.
47:51SPEAKER- The actual case?
47:52SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:53SPEAKER- Well, I mean, look, man,
47:56SPEAKERit was not a good time for PC case design in the mid 90s.
48:00SPEAKER- Fair, but the OS design, the UI design
48:02SPEAKERand the graphic design and all that stuff were top-notch.
48:05SPEAKER- Yeah, their window chrome was really lovely.
48:09SPEAKERAnyway, let's see, they had a flight sim article later on.
48:15SPEAKER- Yeah, like a kind of a real time,
48:17SPEAKERthe future of flight simulators.
48:18SPEAKERIt's kind of like, here's what all this new hardware
48:20SPEAKERis gonna mean for flight simulators.
48:22SPEAKER- Though it's five years old,
48:23SPEAKERFalcon 3.0 remains the benchmark for many virtual pilots.
48:27SPEAKERWith the scheduled winter arrival of Falcon 4.0,
48:30SPEAKERBrad, do you know when Falcon 4.0 shipped?
48:33SPEAKER- You flagged that in the notes and I had forgotten.
48:36SPEAKERWasn't Falcon 4.0 like a legendary boondoggle?
48:40SPEAKER- It was historically late, historically delayed.
48:44SPEAKER- And like super broken, right, when it came out?
48:46SPEAKER- I don't know if it ever became not broken.
48:49SPEAKER- Not what was promised, let's say.
48:51SPEAKER- It shipped on the 11th of December, 1998.
48:54SPEAKERSo it shipped two full years late.
48:59SPEAKERWell, so in fairness, they probably had to ship that late
49:03SPEAKERbecause the 3D accelerators,
49:05SPEAKERthey were gonna do 3D acceleration
49:07SPEAKERand the 3D accelerators at the time couldn't handle
49:09SPEAKERwhat was going on in a flight sim.
49:11SPEAKERThat was the problem.
49:12SPEAKER- Maybe don't bet your franchise
49:14SPEAKERon an emerging bleeding edge technology.
49:16SPEAKER- Yeah, they did an Intel API.
49:18SPEAKERThat's what they started on,
49:20SPEAKERwhich was probably a mistake in retrospect.
49:23SPEAKER- Falcon games are also the ones
49:24SPEAKERwith the phone book size manuals, right?
49:26SPEAKER- Yeah, the binder came in, Falcon 3.0's manual
49:29SPEAKERcame in a binder, which I still had then.
49:31SPEAKER- Excellent. - Yeah.
49:34SPEAKER- Let's see, as we were going through this issue on Discord,
49:38SPEAKERyou messaged me at one point
49:42SPEAKERand said that they reviewed your speakers in here.
49:45SPEAKER- Oh yeah, well-
49:45SPEAKER- At which point I was like,
49:46SPEAKERnow we have to do this episode.
49:49SPEAKER- Not exactly, what they reviewed is what looks like
49:52SPEAKERthe sort of nicer high-end original version of the speakers
49:56SPEAKERthat I still have on my desk today.
49:58SPEAKERAnd I got the, I bought the cheaper mass market plastic ones
50:01SPEAKERthat came out three or four years later.
50:03SPEAKER- Well, there you go.
50:04SPEAKER- We're talking about the, they reviewed,
50:06SPEAKERor I'm sorry, this was a hands-on test in a hotel suite.
50:09SPEAKERThey say-
50:10SPEAKER- There are no reviews in this thing.
50:12SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.
50:13SPEAKERThe Cambridge Soundworks MicroWorks for $349,
50:18SPEAKERbut it's the classic Cambridge little power cubes,
50:20SPEAKERthe desk cubes with the big subwoofer,
50:23SPEAKERexcept it's a big subwoofer.
50:24SPEAKERIt's like twice the size of the one I have.
50:27SPEAKERSame cubes, except, yeah, everything is metal.
50:30SPEAKERLike these cubes are metal, not plastic, so.
50:33SPEAKER- Your cubes are metal or your cubes are plastic?
50:35SPEAKER- Mine are plastic.
50:36SPEAKER- Oh, the ones I had on my bench were metal.
50:38SPEAKERThey were heavy.
50:40SPEAKER- Wow, do you still have them?
50:41SPEAKER- No, I didn't.
50:42SPEAKERI left them when I left my SPC 15 years ago, 13 years ago.
50:46SPEAKERI think mine were like $99.
50:49SPEAKERI feel like I remember it was like,
50:50SPEAKERoh my God, these speakers are affordable
50:52SPEAKERand sound amazing, holy crap.
50:53SPEAKER- That was where I had the altar glancing ACS 48s
50:57SPEAKERthat were in the same like $110 price range or something.
51:00SPEAKERI like in this issue, in that fight sim article,
51:04SPEAKERthey talked about force feedback
51:07SPEAKERand they explained how force feedback worked in arcades
51:10SPEAKERversus in like rumble on different games.
51:15SPEAKERIt's fascinating.
51:16SPEAKER- Hey, we're gonna be able to simulate real physics
51:18SPEAKERon the desktop here real soon.
51:22SPEAKERI mean, yeah, I think out there.
51:23SPEAKER- That was a lofty claim, but sure.
51:27SPEAKER- Can we talk about the dream machine?
51:29SPEAKER- Yes, that's probably, I mean, that's the cover story.
51:31SPEAKERThat's probably the last big thing
51:32SPEAKERto talk about here, right?
51:33SPEAKER- I think so, probably.
51:36SPEAKER- The only other ad I mentioned, let's see.
51:38SPEAKEROh, well, no, we didn't talk about the ads yet, did we?
51:40SPEAKER- We talked a little bit about them, but not a ton.
51:43SPEAKER- All right, let's do the dream machine
51:44SPEAKERand then we can wrap up with a few ads.
51:46SPEAKER- So what do you, did you notice anything missing?
51:49SPEAKERThe dream machine every year,
51:50SPEAKERMaximum PC did in September a increasingly ridiculous build.
51:55SPEAKERUsually the idea was it was a,
51:57SPEAKERhey, what's the nicest computer we can build, right?
51:59SPEAKERSometimes we do a lean machine, which was a budget,
52:02SPEAKERmore budget oriented PC
52:04SPEAKERthat was like a no compromises budget machine.
52:06SPEAKERBut the dream machine was supposed to be like,
52:08SPEAKERusually there was a little bit of a hook.
52:09SPEAKERSometimes we'd put some stupid screen in it,
52:12SPEAKERlike put something unnecessary,
52:13SPEAKERbut fun was often the idea.
52:15SPEAKEROr we'd like, or we'd get it chromed
52:18SPEAKERor get a fancy paint job or whatever,
52:20SPEAKERsomething that a normal person might not do,
52:22SPEAKERbut it would be exciting.
52:23SPEAKERPut five monitors, put six monitors on it, right?
52:26SPEAKERIn the CRT days, just to be clear.
52:28SPEAKERSix monitors, CRT days, pretty substantial undertaking.
52:31SPEAKER- That's, man, that's a commitment.
52:34SPEAKERI don't even know where you would put all those.
52:36SPEAKER- Well, you had to get a rack
52:37SPEAKERand you had to run the extra power
52:39SPEAKERfrom across the room on a different circuit
52:42SPEAKERis the answer to that question.
52:43SPEAKERAnyway, but the rule was it had to work
52:50SPEAKERand there had to be benchmarks.
52:52SPEAKERExcept in this first one, no benchmarks.
52:57SPEAKER- Didn't even occur to me that, yeah,
52:59SPEAKERthere's not really any sign in here of them using it.
53:03SPEAKER- Nope, they don't talk about building it.
53:05SPEAKERThey mentioned, they don't mention building it.
53:06SPEAKERThey just list a bunch of parts.
53:09SPEAKERAnd I haven't confirmed with anybody who was there.
53:14SPEAKERI don't know that John was there yet for this one.
53:16SPEAKERI think he was just a contributor
53:17SPEAKER'cause I think he was still on the net.
53:20SPEAKERBut yeah, I am not sure
53:23SPEAKERthat they actually built this machine ever.
53:26SPEAKER- Scandal.
53:27SPEAKER- I know.
53:29SPEAKERWe built all of the ones that were while I was there.
53:32SPEAKERI will, I can guarantee that.
53:35SPEAKERBut yeah, they talked, it's a lot of like theoretic.
53:37SPEAKERIt's theory crafting more than actual building, I think.
53:43SPEAKER- Yeah, another thing that, another memory
53:45SPEAKERthat this issue jogged was in this dream machine build
53:48SPEAKERwhere they're talking about choice of CPU.
53:51SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - And they're flat out,
53:51SPEAKERand they're flat out, I had completely forgotten about this.
53:53SPEAKERThey're flat out like,
53:55SPEAKERhey, are you running Windows 95 and DOS?
53:57SPEAKERAre you playing a lot of games?
53:58SPEAKERThen you want a Pentium
53:59SPEAKERbecause Pentium Pros suck ass at 16-bit software.
54:02SPEAKER- Yeah, 16-bit there, 16-bit emulation stuff was bad.
54:06SPEAKER- Right, I had completely forgotten that the Pentium Pro,
54:09SPEAKERthe big new next generation CPU from Intel
54:12SPEAKERran previous software like shit.
54:14SPEAKER- Yeah.
54:15SPEAKER- And then, of course, they're like,
54:16SPEAKERhey, if you're on NT4,
54:17SPEAKERif you're doing like big workstation stuff,
54:20SPEAKERof course, 32-bit stuff in particular,
54:22SPEAKERa Pentium Pro obviously makes sense, but.
54:24SPEAKER- But I mean, not much was doing 32-bit at that point.
54:28SPEAKERLike if you were doing like 3D modeling
54:30SPEAKERand stuff like that, maybe.
54:31SPEAKER- Yes. - But there wasn't really
54:32SPEAKEReven a lot of video editing on the PC at this point.
54:35SPEAKERLike the video editing tools at this point were thin.
54:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, you couldn't even get drivers
54:39SPEAKERfor everything in Windows NT at the time.
54:43SPEAKERI mean, it was getting there, but.
54:45SPEAKER- For, like if you had like a,
54:48SPEAKERif you had like a workstation-type graphics card,
54:50SPEAKERyou absolutely could.
54:51SPEAKERBut if you wanted drivers for a Voodoo card, you were host.
54:54SPEAKER- That's what I mean, like consumer-level stuff
54:56SPEAKERthat you might just happen to have at your desk.
54:59SPEAKER- Yeah.
55:00SPEAKER- The bigger thing though is this just reminds me
55:02SPEAKERthat the Pentium Pro was like kind of a,
55:05SPEAKERI shouldn't say a failed launch exactly, but like it.
55:09SPEAKER- Well, it was a workstation part.
55:11SPEAKER- Well, okay, maybe, yeah, you're right, I guess.
55:12SPEAKERI guess they did like position it more as a high-end
55:15SPEAKERlike server and professional kind of thing.
55:17SPEAKER- The failure on the Pentium Pro was that they,
55:21SPEAKERbecause they couldn't test,
55:23SPEAKERthey couldn't unit test the cache.
55:25SPEAKERSo the Pentium Pro was a Pentium, was a 32-bit processor
55:29SPEAKERthat they fused some really fast full-speed L2 cache
55:34SPEAKERonto the chip.
55:35SPEAKERIt was a big L2 cache,
55:36SPEAKERbigger than you could put on the die at the time.
55:39SPEAKERAnd L2 cache is like short-term memory for the CPU.
55:44SPEAKERThey fused it on, and you couldn't unit test the cache
55:48SPEAKERor the CPU before they were fused.
55:51SPEAKERSo if either one of them were duds
55:52SPEAKERout of the manufacturing process,
55:54SPEAKERyou wouldn't find out until you'd burned one
55:55SPEAKERthat was potentially good.
55:57SPEAKERSo their yields were half what they expire,
55:59SPEAKERquarter what they expect,
56:00SPEAKERthird what they expect to be, I can't remember.
56:01SPEAKERLike the math was bad on them.
56:03SPEAKERAnd they ended up having to charge
56:04SPEAKERa really high premium for them,
56:05SPEAKERwhich is why the Pentium 2,
56:08SPEAKERwhich came out later the next year,
56:09SPEAKERlater in '97 even, was a separate cache.
56:15SPEAKERIt was on, everything was on a daughter board.
56:17SPEAKERSo the CPU and the cache were on daughter boards.
56:19SPEAKER- Oh, that's why.
56:20SPEAKER- And they could test each one individually.
56:22SPEAKERAnd if you had a dud,
56:23SPEAKERyou'd find out before you physically attached them
56:25SPEAKERto each other in a permanent way.
56:27SPEAKER- Okay, I always wondered why the Pentium 2
56:29SPEAKERhad that bizarre design.
56:30SPEAKER- But it was half speed was the trade-off,
56:33SPEAKERwas the cache to CPU conversation happened
56:36SPEAKERat every other clock instead of every clock.
56:39SPEAKER- I mean, the Pentium Pro,
56:40SPEAKERlike the P6 architecture was the basis
56:42SPEAKERof their entire product line
56:43SPEAKERfor the next like several years, right?
56:45SPEAKER- Yeah, that CPU formed the basis.
56:48SPEAKERThey also improved the 16-bit performance
56:50SPEAKERin the Pentium 2 eventually.
56:52SPEAKER- Right, right.
56:53SPEAKER- But yeah, so the Dream Machine first one,
56:55SPEAKERlet's say kind of bullshit.
56:56SPEAKERThis is before Andrew Sanchez started working there too.
56:59SPEAKERHe was like the first,
57:01SPEAKERnot that the other guys weren't real nerds,
57:03SPEAKERbut like he was a real nerd by all reports.
57:08SPEAKERI never knew Andrew.
57:08SPEAKERHe passed before I started working there.
57:13SPEAKERBut yeah, so.
57:14SPEAKER- Do you know what happened to the Dream Machine every year
57:17SPEAKERafter all the coverage was done?
57:19SPEAKER- Depends on the year.
57:21SPEAKERTypically, like one year we got like an early rate,
57:25SPEAKERATI, or maybe it was AMD by then,
57:28SPEAKERbut DX9, eight or nine part.
57:31SPEAKERSo it was like a pre-pro part that had to go back to,
57:33SPEAKERlike often they would get taken apart
57:35SPEAKERand the parts would go back to manufacturers
57:36SPEAKERand stuff like that.
57:37SPEAKER- I see, okay.
57:38SPEAKER- Usually the cases would stay around for a little bit
57:41SPEAKERif it was, if we did something custom to it.
57:42SPEAKER'Cause like one year HP was making these amazing,
57:49SPEAKERI don't know if you remember the HP Voodoo cases
57:51SPEAKERwhere they were all like, they had cool fins
57:54SPEAKERand they were up on a stand and they were cantilevered
57:55SPEAKERand all that.
57:56SPEAKERWe got HP to give us one of those and we got it chromed.
58:01SPEAKER- Huh.
58:02SPEAKER- That one, that one, I think one of the editors
58:07SPEAKERended up taking that one home,
58:08SPEAKERbut I can't remember for sure.
58:11SPEAKERI have an old Dream Machine case in my garage
58:13SPEAKERthat I haven't used in like 10 years.
58:15SPEAKERI need to take it to Gordon sometime when I go down
58:17SPEAKERfor full nerd, I'll take it down for him.
58:19SPEAKER'Cause they have a place to display, yeah.
58:21SPEAKER- Yes, they've got some interesting artifacts in there.
58:24SPEAKER- So that's it, like others they do,
58:26SPEAKERthey do do a handful of reviews in the back.
58:28SPEAKERThey hadn't, they did have the boot kick ass product award,
58:33SPEAKERwhich was like our editor's choice.
58:35SPEAKERThey did not, however, do the traditional
58:37SPEAKERone to 10 review scale, 'cause we eventually switched to,
58:42SPEAKERor they eventually switched to a one to 10
58:45SPEAKERwith nines and tens, nines being eligible for a kick ass
58:49SPEAKERif it was good and tens always getting a kick ass.
58:52SPEAKER- This review section is insane.
58:54SPEAKERIt's literally everything that they could think of
58:56SPEAKERto review all in one section.
58:58SPEAKERThere is, okay.
59:00SPEAKER- Well, that's how the reviews always were in boot.
59:01SPEAKERIt was always in the back.
59:02SPEAKER- The kick ass product award went to Duke Nukem 3D.
59:06SPEAKERRight next to it is reviewed a Hewlett Packard Pavilion
59:09SPEAKER7130P, there's an RDC1 digital camera reviewed in here.
59:15SPEAKERThere is Frank Lloyd Wright presentation
59:18SPEAKERand conceptual drawings, which got an 87.
59:20SPEAKER- Yeah.
59:22SPEAKER- Let's see, total mayhem is in here.
59:24SPEAKER3D Studio Max, as I said, and a color quick cam.
59:27SPEAKER- So a lot of this would happen,
59:29SPEAKERbattleground three, Waterloo.
59:31SPEAKER- Yeah, it's just bizarre to see this broad a range
59:36SPEAKERof products all thrown into one review section.
59:38SPEAKER- Well, so this is the way the review section
59:39SPEAKERof the magazine often worked.
59:41SPEAKERSo there was usually like an anchor PC review,
59:44SPEAKERlike an enthusiast PC review that would range
59:47SPEAKERfrom a budget one all the way up to something really,
59:48SPEAKERreally, really expensive and crazy.
59:53SPEAKERThen there'd be like some like in the case hardware,
59:56SPEAKERlike video cards or sound cards
59:59SPEAKERor some sort of like network card or accelerator
1:00:01SPEAKERor something like that, SSDs, hard drives, whatever.
1:00:05SPEAKERAnd then there would be some peripheral stuff
1:00:07SPEAKERand software at the end.
1:00:08SPEAKERWe eventually moved away from doing software
1:00:11SPEAKERjust 'cause it was too hard to review, like it's hard.
1:00:14SPEAKERIf you're writing, like if you wanna review
1:00:17SPEAKERsome sort of content creation software
1:00:19SPEAKERfor something that's a specialist software,
1:00:22SPEAKERyou have to understand how to use it.
1:00:23SPEAKERAnd it was too expensive and too hard
1:00:25SPEAKERand time consuming to do that.
1:00:27SPEAKERI feel like like nine worlds being in here
1:00:29SPEAKERis the thing that happened
1:00:29SPEAKERbecause they used to be CD-ROM today.
1:00:31SPEAKERAnd they probably already had the review done for that
1:00:33SPEAKERbefore they decided to change the name.
1:00:35SPEAKER- Explore the solar system via disc and the web.
1:00:38SPEAKERIt says, wait a minute, is that Patrick Stewart?
1:00:41SPEAKER- Is it Patrick Stewart?
1:00:42SPEAKERThat is the tiniest.
1:00:44SPEAKER- It does look like Patrick Stewart.
1:00:46SPEAKER- It sure does look like, oh yeah, no,
1:00:47SPEAKERI can just barely make out hosted by Patrick, wow.
1:00:50SPEAKER- Yeah, there you go.
1:00:51SPEAKERHe was in hot demand back then.
1:00:53SPEAKERThey had the Wingman Warrior.
1:00:54SPEAKERI don't know if you remember that,
1:00:55SPEAKERbut that was a joystick plus a spinner.
1:00:57SPEAKERSo you can play first person shooters with a joystick.
1:01:01SPEAKERSo you use the spinner to turn
1:01:03SPEAKERand the joystick you'd use for movement,
1:01:05SPEAKERbut there was no up and down.
1:01:07SPEAKERSo maybe not that great.
1:01:10SPEAKERThey also had a StarCraft preview, which I thought was funny.
1:01:12SPEAKERThere were a couple of previews in here.
1:01:14SPEAKER- Oh, I missed that.
1:01:16SPEAKER- Will Wright, Will Wright's SimCopter was in here
1:01:19SPEAKERand he has a quote that was like, man, we better hit.
1:01:21SPEAKERThey were like, what is this coming out?
1:01:22SPEAKERAnd he was like, we better hit holiday
1:01:24SPEAKERor I'm gonna be in real trouble.
1:01:25SPEAKERIt came out holiday of that year.
1:01:26SPEAKERSo good job. - SimCopter, huh?
1:01:28SPEAKER- Do you remember SimCopter?
1:01:29SPEAKER- I know, I was gonna say that's not one of the ones
1:01:32SPEAKERthat gets a lot of the attention in the Will Wright oeuvre.
1:01:36SPEAKER- Okay, so SimCopter, there wasn't a lot of game there,
1:01:39SPEAKERbut what you could do was import your SimCity 2000 save
1:01:44SPEAKERand then you could load up a helicopter
1:01:46SPEAKERand fly around your city in the helicopter
1:01:48SPEAKERand like rescue people from burning buildings
1:01:50SPEAKERand put out fires.
1:01:52SPEAKERAnd I think that's pretty much it.
1:01:53SPEAKERLike you could do two things, maybe three.
1:01:57SPEAKER- They promised to simulate a helicopter and they did.
1:01:59SPEAKER- Not a fabulous game, but it was indeed a game
1:02:02SPEAKERand it shipped on time.
1:02:04SPEAKER- I found the StarCraft preview.
1:02:06SPEAKERSure enough, I wondered if this would be the case.
1:02:07SPEAKER- It is, it's the version of StarCraft
1:02:09SPEAKERfrom before they completely overhauled
1:02:11SPEAKERand remade the whole thing.
1:02:12SPEAKER'Cause when it had that very bad showing.
1:02:15SPEAKER- Yeah, it was like a 3D space
1:02:21SPEAKERwith 2D graphics kind of thing, I think.
1:02:23SPEAKER- Well, yeah, I'd have to go double check.
1:02:25SPEAKERMy memory of what happened is essentially
1:02:27SPEAKERthe people very sort of derisively started calling it
1:02:30SPEAKERWarcraft in Space.
1:02:31SPEAKER- Oh yeah, of course.
1:02:32SPEAKER- Like it just like kind of did not do anything
1:02:35SPEAKERto evolve the game that they have made already
1:02:39SPEAKERexcept to put an alien graphics in.
1:02:42SPEAKERAnd they, I think they took that to heart.
1:02:44SPEAKER- There you go.
1:02:45SPEAKER- Threw out everything they had and started over.
1:02:48SPEAKER- They have phone numbers in here
1:02:49SPEAKERfor all of these software companies.
1:02:50SPEAKERThat's a terrible idea.
1:02:51SPEAKER- That's so weird.
1:02:52SPEAKERGod, you're right.
1:02:53SPEAKERAt the end of the StarCraft preview
1:02:54SPEAKERis a phone number for Blizzard.
1:02:57SPEAKER- Yeah. - What?
1:02:58SPEAKER- If you want to call the makers of Drowned God Inscape,
1:03:01SPEAKERyou can call them at 800-693-3253.
1:03:04SPEAKER- Why would you do this?
1:03:07SPEAKER- People used to use the phone for Unreal.
1:03:09SPEAKERThere's a preview for Unreal in here.
1:03:10SPEAKERThis Unreal preview is a trip.
1:03:12SPEAKERIt has a screenshot from the Unreal ad too,
1:03:14SPEAKERwhich is hilarious.
1:03:16SPEAKER- That's kind of, that's cool to see.
1:03:18SPEAKEROh, that's right.
1:03:18SPEAKERI've heard this preview of Unreal mentions
1:03:20SPEAKERthat MMX was tied in with Unreal quite tightly.
1:03:24SPEAKER- Yeah, you couldn't get colored lights without MMX.
1:03:26SPEAKER- That's right, I forgot about that.
1:03:28SPEAKER- So yeah, that's it.
1:03:29SPEAKERThat's the first issue of Boot Magazine.
1:03:34SPEAKER- Yeah, like we said,
1:03:35SPEAKERwe will put a link to the PDF in the show notes
1:03:38SPEAKERif you want to read this issue yourself.
1:03:40SPEAKER- It's kind of a trip.
1:03:40SPEAKERI haven't, like I said, we didn't have any,
1:03:43SPEAKERlike none survived to my time at future, I'd imagine.
1:03:48SPEAKERSo it's cool that it's on archive.org.
1:03:51SPEAKERI appreciate it.
1:03:52SPEAKERThank you to whoever uploaded it and did the scanning.
1:03:56SPEAKER- Yes, real quick, we did promise ads.
1:03:58SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:03:59SPEAKER- You wrote down that the creative graphics blaster,
1:04:03SPEAKERMA302 is in here.
1:04:04SPEAKER- Yeah, that's a Cirrus,
1:04:05SPEAKERI looked it up, it's a Cirrus Logix chipset.
1:04:08SPEAKERIt was notable because it supported up to 1600 by 1200
1:04:12SPEAKERin 2D with video rendering.
1:04:14SPEAKER- That's, I mean, that is pretty notable at this time.
1:04:16SPEAKERI just, it also just reminds me, Creative Labs,
1:04:18SPEAKERof course, the makers of Sound Blaster,
1:04:19SPEAKERif you don't know somehow.
1:04:20SPEAKER- I think that's fair.
1:04:22SPEAKER- Reminds me that they did start trying to blast out
1:04:25SPEAKERinto other blaster categories.
1:04:27SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:28SPEAKER- Like there was graphics blaster.
1:04:30SPEAKERDidn't they make a 3D blaster?
1:04:31SPEAKER- 3D blaster was, they made a couple of them.
1:04:33SPEAKERThe notable one was a Voodoo card.
1:04:35SPEAKERThey made it a Voodoo 2 card, I think, eventually.
1:04:37SPEAKER- I'd swear there were others, right?
1:04:39SPEAKERWere there other blasters?
1:04:41SPEAKER- There was a phone blaster.
1:04:43SPEAKER- Okay, yes. - Modem blaster.
1:04:45SPEAKER- Was it literally called phone blaster?
1:04:47SPEAKER- It might have been called modem blaster,
1:04:48SPEAKERbut you could plug it into the phone line.
1:04:51SPEAKER- Please let that be a thing.
1:04:52SPEAKERThat's totally a thing.
1:04:54SPEAKER- Yeah, Creative Labs Modem Blaster V.92 PCI.
1:04:59SPEAKER- It's a hot modem action there.
1:05:01SPEAKER- I have found a phone blaster on eBay.
1:05:04SPEAKER- Is that a modem thing too?
1:05:05SPEAKEROr is that, I think that's a thing
1:05:06SPEAKERthat hangs up on people for you.
1:05:08SPEAKER- Creative CT3110, a phone blaster.
1:05:12SPEAKER- Oh man.
1:05:14SPEAKERI like at the end of this magazine,
1:05:16SPEAKERthey clearly were like, oh shit,
1:05:18SPEAKERwe gotta fill two more pages.
1:05:22SPEAKERHere's a section where if you send us product announcements,
1:05:24SPEAKERwe'll just print them as you write them.
1:05:27SPEAKERI don't think they, I think they actually rewrote them
1:05:29SPEAKERa little bit at least it looks like, but yeah.
1:05:32SPEAKERAnyway.
1:05:33SPEAKER- There's also this gossip page.
1:05:35SPEAKER- That's fake.
1:05:36SPEAKER- Okay.
1:05:37SPEAKER- That's glitch.
1:05:38SPEAKERSo the last page of the book was always glitch,
1:05:40SPEAKERwhich was a joke of, let's say, look, it was up and down.
1:05:47SPEAKERJohn really nailed it some months and some months,
1:05:50SPEAKERnot so much.
1:05:51SPEAKERThe bitchin' fast 3D video card.
1:05:58SPEAKERBitchin' fast 3D 2000.
1:06:02SPEAKERIt's a, it was a joke, but it included every 3D chip.
1:06:07SPEAKERWhen there were like eight companies
1:06:08SPEAKERmaking 3D graphics chip sets, it included all of them.
1:06:13SPEAKERSo, which was clearly not gonna happen.
1:06:15SPEAKERHere's this, I'll send you the link.
1:06:18SPEAKER- All right.
1:06:19SPEAKERLast ad that I had mentioned,
1:06:21SPEAKERthere was an earth link ad in here.
1:06:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:06:24SPEAKER- 1995 a month for internet access unlimited.
1:06:27SPEAKER- 1995 a month, wow.
1:06:29SPEAKER- They make a big deal out of it being unlimited though.
1:06:31SPEAKERI was trying to remember like were ISPs metering by time,
1:06:34SPEAKERlike connection time or by data back then?
1:06:36SPEAKER- Nobody metered by shit in the dial up days.
1:06:39SPEAKER- Did they not?
1:06:41SPEAKER- That's not true.
1:06:42SPEAKERThere were probably some people that were still kicking off
1:06:43SPEAKERif you're on for like extended periods of hours or whatever.
1:06:46SPEAKER- Okay.
1:06:47SPEAKERWell, like I said, they make a big deal in this ad
1:06:48SPEAKERabout it being unlimited.
1:06:50SPEAKERSo maybe that was an AOL thing?
1:06:51SPEAKER- AOL always would say it was, you'd get 3000 hours a month,
1:06:54SPEAKERbut it was always like, it very quickly became
1:06:57SPEAKERthat you had more hours than you could physically be online
1:06:59SPEAKERin the month with AOL.
1:07:01SPEAKER- Sure.
1:07:02SPEAKERWait, did they carry over?
1:07:03SPEAKER- No, but they just kept making the number bigger
1:07:04SPEAKER'cause it didn't matter.
1:07:06SPEAKER- Oh, well, 'cause at that point
1:07:07SPEAKERthey were probably losing market share, right?
1:07:09SPEAKER- Not at this point, no.
1:07:10SPEAKERAOL continued to grow until like early 2000s
1:07:13SPEAKERwhen broadband took off.
1:07:14SPEAKER- Did it really?
1:07:14SPEAKERThat's page, it's page 17.
1:07:17SPEAKERIf you wanna find the ad.
1:07:18SPEAKER- Page 17.
1:07:19SPEAKERI just wanted for people who are reading along at home.
1:07:21SPEAKER- Wow, it has a cake?
1:07:23SPEAKER- Mm-hmm, that's all the internet you can eat, pig out.
1:07:26SPEAKERIt says 1995 flat rate.
1:07:28SPEAKER- And Netscape Navigator is included.
1:07:29SPEAKERI had Earthlink for a little bit.
1:07:32SPEAKERI don't know about this.
1:07:33SPEAKERI don't know.
1:07:35SPEAKERMy guess is that's a response to AOL saying,
1:07:37SPEAKER"Hey, you get 500 hours a month or something."
1:07:40SPEAKER- Sure.
1:07:42SPEAKER- I can't imagine people being on the internet
1:07:44SPEAKERfor much more than that back then.
1:07:46SPEAKER- Oh, I can.
1:07:46SPEAKER- I mean, I guess when you put it that way,
1:07:49SPEAKERwhen you think about it taking,
1:07:50SPEAKERlet's see, you got basically one kilobyte per second.
1:07:53SPEAKERSo a 400 kilobyte file would take three, four minutes
1:07:57SPEAKERto download, five minutes to download.
1:07:59SPEAKERYeah, I guess probably.
1:08:00SPEAKERThat's not right, is it?
1:08:01SPEAKER100 kilobytes per minute.
1:08:03SPEAKER28.8 kilobytes per second.
1:08:05SPEAKERNo, that's probably about right.
1:08:07SPEAKERIt was slow.
1:08:08SPEAKERAnyway, you know what's not slow, Brad?
1:08:11SPEAKER- What's that?
1:08:12SPEAKER- Our patrons.
1:08:12SPEAKER- Wait, really?
1:08:13SPEAKERHow do you know?
1:08:14SPEAKERWhat metric are you measuring of the speed of our patrons?
1:08:17SPEAKER- I'm making an assumption.
1:08:18SPEAKERI was kind of just trying to do a segue into the next thing.
1:08:23SPEAKERBut yeah, we are always grateful
1:08:28SPEAKERto our patrons for their support.
1:08:29SPEAKER- It's true, we are.
1:08:31SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:08:31SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:08:32SPEAKER- It's gotten really warm in my office
1:08:34SPEAKERwhile we've been recording this podcast.
1:08:35SPEAKERI think--
1:08:36SPEAKER- It's technically still winter for another,
1:08:38SPEAKERwhat, five days once the--
1:08:39SPEAKER- March 21st.
1:08:41SPEAKER- No, four days, okay.
1:08:42SPEAKERIt's technically still winter
1:08:43SPEAKERand it feels like summer outside.
1:08:45SPEAKER- Oh, is it nice out?
1:08:46SPEAKERI haven't left my hole all day.
1:08:47SPEAKERI've been trapped in here.
1:08:49SPEAKER- It was quite warm today.
1:08:50SPEAKER- Well, anyway, we wanna thank our patrons,
1:08:52SPEAKERbut especially our executive producer tier patrons,
1:08:54SPEAKERincluding--
1:08:55SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons,
1:08:56SPEAKERfor listening to us talk about the weather.
1:08:58SPEAKER- Yeah, and old stuff.
1:09:00SPEAKERIf you like the show, please let us know.
1:09:01SPEAKERWe never know about these.
1:09:02SPEAKERSometimes some people seem to really like them.
1:09:04SPEAKERSome people are very anti them.
1:09:05SPEAKERSo if you didn't like it, maybe skip this one.
1:09:08SPEAKERI don't know.
1:09:08SPEAKER- Yeah, that's fair.
1:09:09SPEAKERLook, retro computing is pretty hot these days.
1:09:12SPEAKERYou know, there's clearly an audience for it.
1:09:13SPEAKER- That's true, that's true.
1:09:15SPEAKERBut we wanna thank our executive producer tier patrons,
1:09:17SPEAKERincluding Nick Johnston,
1:09:19SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games makers of "Fractured Vale,"
1:09:21SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Octo Thorpe, #bunnycrimes,
1:09:25SPEAKERJust Wedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie,
1:09:27SPEAKERDavid Allen, and James Kamik.
1:09:28SPEAKERThank you all so much.
1:09:29SPEAKERWe do really appreciate you.
1:09:30SPEAKER- Yes, yes we do.
1:09:31SPEAKER- And we hope everybody has a lovely week.
1:09:34SPEAKERWe will be back next week with another edition
1:09:37SPEAKERof the Tech Pod.
1:09:39SPEAKERSee y'all then.
1:09:39SPEAKER- That's right.
1:09:40SPEAKERIt's questions, wait, I'm hijacking this.
1:09:41SPEAKERIt's questions. - Oh, it's questions.
1:09:42SPEAKER- Next week is questions.
1:09:43SPEAKERGet your questions in. - How is it questions?
1:09:44SPEAKERI'm already, Brad.
1:09:45SPEAKER- Get your questions in.
1:09:46SPEAKER- Oh man, how do you get questions in?
1:09:48SPEAKER- You go to Questions Seeking Answers.
1:09:51SPEAKER- On the Discord.
1:09:52SPEAKER- Channel their name on the Discord.
1:09:55SPEAKER- Or you can send an email to techpod@content.town.
1:09:59SPEAKER- I'm sorry, what was that email address?
1:10:01SPEAKER- That email address is techpod@content.town.
1:10:03SPEAKER- Got it.
1:10:05SPEAKER- We will turn your queue into A's, maybe.
1:10:07SPEAKER- That's right.
1:10:07SPEAKER- Thanks for listening, everybody.
1:10:08SPEAKERWe'll see y'all next week.
1:10:10SPEAKERBye bye.
1:10:11SPEAKER(upbeat music)
1:10:15SPEAKER[BLANK_AUDIO]