00:00SPEAKERA lot of chatter on the Discord about last week's episode, Brad.
00:03SPEAKERYeah. I guess that could be good or bad, but I'll choose to believe that it's good. Go
00:07SPEAKERon.
00:08SPEAKERIt's good. No, no, it was good. People were sharing all of their tasks, their commonly
00:12SPEAKERused tools, a bunch of good ones in that chat. We might have to do a follow-up with that
00:15SPEAKERstuff.
00:16SPEAKERThere's one in particular. It might be out of scope for a cold open, but there was one
00:19SPEAKERI was introduced to in particular in there that I flipped my shit about. I haven't tried
00:23SPEAKERit yet.
00:24SPEAKEROkay.
00:25SPEAKERShould I get into it?
00:26SPEAKERNo, no, no. We'll save it. We'll talk about the QA next week or week after. But the other
00:31SPEAKERthing, people, it wasn't just apps talk. People also had some strong feelings about your American
00:35SPEAKERcheese position.
00:36SPEAKEROh God, that's right. It was like half cheese discussion.
00:38SPEAKERYeah. Like real strong cheese talk. And the thing I realized that we didn't talk about
00:43SPEAKERwhen we were talking about your reluctance to American, your dislike of American cheese
00:49SPEAKERis that you can Americanize pretty much any cheese.
00:52SPEAKEROkay. Maybe we should take a step back here and can, can you, can you just delineate what
00:57SPEAKERthe nature and process of American cheese is? Like it's not, I've understood it to not
01:01SPEAKERbe normal cheese. Like it's some kind of cheese products.
01:04SPEAKERYeah. They call it a cheese product or a cheese food, but basically what they do is they reduce
01:08SPEAKERthe cheese to powder to just get the cheesiness. They take all the liquid out and then they
01:13SPEAKERreconstitute the powder into a brick that gets sliced with a, with a, like a wire slicing
01:18SPEAKERmachine. And then they, they plastic wrap each of those to add more plastic to our oceans,
01:24SPEAKERI assume. And then you put it on your burger or your grilled cheese sandwich, if you're,
01:29SPEAKERif you will.
01:30SPEAKERAnd to be clear, this is not just like your craft singles grocery store style. Like this
01:34SPEAKERis any American cheese that you encounter or like even in a deli has gone through this
01:37SPEAKERprocess.
01:38SPEAKEROh, that's a good question. I don't know. I mean, the way the thing, the Americanizing
01:42SPEAKERof cheese is just adding some special salts to it and then melting it and blending it
01:47SPEAKERand then pouring it into a mold. Basically you can do it for like Gruyere, Gouda or any
01:53SPEAKERit's a specific, the things that are important is that the proteins have to, that has to
01:57SPEAKERhave the right amount of protein.
01:58SPEAKERYeah. There, there, there was some discussion in there about additives that make the cheese
02:01SPEAKERmeltier and I can't remember if it was a, some kind of a citrate, I believe.
02:04SPEAKERI'm going to go ahead and tell you exactly what you need. You need a couple of grams
02:08SPEAKERof sodium citrate and a little tiny, tiny bit of sodium hexa metaphosphate.
02:13SPEAKEROkay. Right off the top of the head help emulsify. And and basically what you do is you melt
02:20SPEAKERthe cheese together with some milk and the, and the salts. And then you take that goopy,
02:26SPEAKERhorrible mess which like typically I, when I've done in the past, I've done it in a sous
02:31SPEAKERvide bag, so I'll put it in the sous vide bath to get it to the right temperature melt.
02:34SPEAKERAnd then you take that gloopy mess and you pour it in a real good blender and blend the
02:38SPEAKERshit out of it while it's still really hot. And then you take that out and you pour it
02:42SPEAKERinto a mold and then you have a real soft melty cheese that melts just like American
02:46SPEAKERcheese, but tastes like nice cheese.
02:48SPEAKERYeah, that sounds good. I mean, honestly it was pointed out in there that there are quite
02:51SPEAKERa few, well, I don't want to get into cheese stratification here. Okay. But there were,
02:55SPEAKERthere were a number of people arguing that, Hey, there are better cheeses that also melt
02:58SPEAKERjust fine. Like a cheddar for example.
03:01SPEAKERSo I would say that cheddar generally like cheddar is a kind of greasy melt for me. I
03:05SPEAKERdon't like a sweaty cheddar.
03:06SPEAKERYou're not wrong. Yeah. Melting cheddar does produce some oil.
03:10SPEAKERYeah. But, but like American, the American cheese slice is usually like cheddar and Jack
03:16SPEAKERmelted together with your salts. So now there's also, there's two different kinds of there's
03:23SPEAKERlike the craft deluxe American cheese, which is actually American cheese. Then there's
03:28SPEAKERthe craft singles, which I think are cheese food, technically cheese product. Yeah. Yeah.
03:34SPEAKERI don't know what the, like, I'm sure Wisconsin has some rules about what you can and cannot
03:38SPEAKERcall a cheese, but we live in California. So I don't think we have any of that stuff.
03:41SPEAKERNo, maybe we do. Who knows? Maybe, maybe we add sodium citrate and sodium hexa metaphosphate
03:47SPEAKERto anything. We can Americanize it.
03:49SPEAKERI'm always saying this.
04:19SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made of Tech Pod. I'm Will.
04:22SPEAKERI'm Brad.
04:23SPEAKERBrad, I am so, so excited about this week's show.
04:26SPEAKEROh my, I just got back from the vintage computer festival and boy are my fingers tired.
04:33SPEAKERSo much typing. I am especially excited to welcome our guests this week who also went
04:38SPEAKERto the vintage computer festival with you. Yes. Steve Lin, who is a longtime friend of
04:43SPEAKERthe show and a genuinely delightful human being. He's on the board of the video game
04:47SPEAKERhistory foundation. And I think he's also the person that you and I, and many of the
04:53SPEAKERpeople we know call when we have weird computer problems with old hardware that we don't exactly
04:57SPEAKERknow what to do with and there's no readily apparent answer.
05:00SPEAKEROh yeah. And encyclopedic knowledge of both computers and video games from the last 40
05:05SPEAKERplus years. But yeah, Steve and I both went to the vintage computer festival West, the
05:09SPEAKERone in Mountain View, California at the computer history museum. We saw a ton of cool stuff.
05:15SPEAKERI took a bunch of photos and videos, which I haven't worked this out yet, but look for
05:19SPEAKERa link somewhere that we'll have photos and videos. So you can kind of follow along with
05:23SPEAKERsome of the stuff we're talking about here. It was a good time.
05:25SPEAKERYeah. Welcome to the show, Steve. We're so glad to have you here. Okay. You guys went
05:30SPEAKERa couple of weeks ago to the vintage computer festival West 2024. Well, I'm just doing the
05:37SPEAKERofficial name, keeping it on the reel. Well, yeah, there's a couple of other shows,
05:42SPEAKERso yeah, I assume they have an East and possibly a North and South.
05:47SPEAKERI was looking it up. I couldn't find a full list. There's a Southeast in Atlanta. There's
05:50SPEAKERa Midwest in Chicago. And by the way, you really should go check out the Midwest website.
05:57SPEAKERIt's very era appropriate. Okay. Okay. A lot of tables, frames, maybe.
06:01SPEAKERYes. No, no. I mean like early eighties, like this shouldn't even be a webpage. It's like
06:05SPEAKERtext mode looking. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's very cool.
06:08SPEAKERCool. But yeah. Welcome to the show, Steve. It's good to have you here. And always nice
06:12SPEAKERto talk about old hardware with you. Yeah. It's fantastic to be here. I'm excited.
06:16SPEAKERYes. And thank you. Thank you for getting me out to the show. I was like waffling like
06:21SPEAKERa day of when I woke up, I woke up on not much sleep and was just like, ah, maybe I
06:26SPEAKERcould just like bum around the house today. And then thankfully, thankfully I went because
06:30SPEAKERthis is frankly one of the coolest things I've ever been to.
06:34SPEAKERYeah. So I was sad because I was planning on going
06:36SPEAKERon Friday, the day before, I think you, you ended up going, Brad, and then my wife and
06:40SPEAKERdaughter had other plans for me that day. And, and and then Saturday was, was dog surfing
06:45SPEAKERat the beach by my house, which basically turns the entirety of Pacifica into a parking
06:50SPEAKERlot for about 10 hours on Saturday. So I, I just, I stayed at home and grilled hamburgers
06:55SPEAKERand started going. So, but, but yeah, I want to hear all about it. Let's look, can I live
06:58SPEAKERvicariously through the two of you? Yeah, for sure. For sure. Before, before we get
07:01SPEAKERinto this year's I was going to ask Steve, like how long have you been going to this?
07:05SPEAKERHow long has it been around, you know? Well, I have definitely been going pre pandemic
07:10SPEAKERbut I can't remember how many years before that, because I had seen some of these displays
07:15SPEAKERbefore. And so I'll have to go back, but it's, it's at least probably six, seven years, I
07:20SPEAKERthink for me. Okay, cool.
07:22SPEAKERAnd yeah, you see some people come back and then whenever there's something new, it's
07:26SPEAKERalways, let's gather around and see and then folks that I wish would come back because
07:31SPEAKERthey just had amazing displays. For sure. For sure. In fact, it was looking
07:34SPEAKERover the exhibitor list that the morning of that I was like, okay, I'm insane if I don't
07:38SPEAKERgo to this because 15 year old me would be jumping out of his shoes, looking at even
07:42SPEAKERlike two or three of these things, let alone two dozen of them. So this is the vintage
07:48SPEAKERcomputer festival west. It is at the computer history museum in mountain view in California.
07:54SPEAKERWhich like the computer history museum is its own episode topic, like setting the VCF
08:00SPEAKERaside and maybe touch on at the end a little bit here, but yeah, it was, it was a great
08:05SPEAKERtime like walking into that hall. It just kind of like, it's a little overwhelming the
08:10SPEAKERamount of hardware that was arrayed in there. Well, I was going to ask, what's the setup.
08:14SPEAKERIs this like a, is this like a ballroom at the computer history museum? Is that where
08:17SPEAKERthey put it all or is it in something nearby? Yeah, it's the upstairs area where they usually
08:22SPEAKERhold talks and everything. And so there's the, the auditorium where they, they have
08:26SPEAKERactual people going through their projects. And then there's the convention space for
08:31SPEAKERlack of a better term, which is the big open room. And they have basically as soon as you
08:35SPEAKERwalk in, you see things like an inside 8080 and a bunch of table full of portable computers
08:41SPEAKERand everything else. And it's like, Oh, I know what I'm walking into here. And then
08:45SPEAKERyou walk into the, through the show floor and you just see this, the sea of all kinds
08:50SPEAKERof cool displays. There was almost like overflow out in the hall going into that main exhibit
08:55SPEAKERroom because like, well, I think the very first thing I saw was a PDP 11, like a full
08:59SPEAKERPDP 11 that had been condensed into like a two you rack unit.
09:06SPEAKERWhat's a PDP 11.
09:07SPEAKERPDP 11 is like, it's like the mainframe, right. Or it's one of the biggest, but not biggest
09:12SPEAKERphysically necessarily, but like most important mainframes in history. I think it's like,
09:16SPEAKERI think the PDP 11 is what the C compiler was developed on originally. Like that's what
09:20SPEAKERthey invented the C language on, if I'm not mistaken and Unix to a large extent.
09:25SPEAKERYeah. And it's really funny how that guy got into it. He was at weird stuff warehouse,
09:29SPEAKERwhich no longer exists. And he was digging through a box and found one of the boards
09:33SPEAKERfor the PDP 11 as like, I should do something with this. And then basically just kind of
09:39SPEAKERbuilt the whole project around it. And he had the whole display and it was, it's wonderful
09:44SPEAKERas how something like that really spiraled into what he built.
09:48SPEAKERYeah. Like, like seeing like that, that was a perfect encapsulation of what this whole
09:52SPEAKERshow was about. It's like classic important hardware, but also like hacked into this like
09:56SPEAKERreally impressive hobbyist project, you know, at the same time, we should, we should fill
10:00SPEAKERin the detail that the PDP 11 is like your refrigerator size, classic mainframe, right?
10:05SPEAKERLike it was a huge, like thousand pound computer or something.
10:08SPEAKERYeah. And the main reason it was so big was actually the storage, right? So it was using
10:12SPEAKERmagnetic tape and then all these other things. And what he had was basically a compact flash
10:18SPEAKERcard or an SD card in there attached to the IO. And so you don't need the rest of it.
10:24SPEAKERRight. And yeah, there was obviously more efficient power supplies and everything else.
10:29SPEAKERAnd so it was, it was really cool to see, you know, what, what parts of it were original
10:33SPEAKERand what have we made much, much smaller.
10:36SPEAKERSo was this stuff that like, I mean, I'm sure some of this, I'm sure he was not, was definitely
10:41SPEAKERin the no touch zone, but was like, do you have a terminal setup that you could like
10:44SPEAKERlog in and mess around with it?
10:46SPEAKEROh, absolutely. In fact, I would say that the vast majority of things were touch, please.
10:52SPEAKERIt was very much out there and like keyboards attached to everything and then displays and
10:57SPEAKEReven people there to walk you through how to use something, because there's a lot of
11:01SPEAKERpeople that's like, what am I looking at?
11:03SPEAKERYeah, yeah. I would say, I would say it was just about a hundred percent hands on with
11:07SPEAKEReverything with, with the exception of like, there's an auction house that had some artifacts
11:10SPEAKERthat we'll get to there that, which obviously you're not going to take those out and handle
11:14SPEAKERa check from Apple computer in 1976 or whatever, but like every piece of hardware there, people
11:19SPEAKERwere very eager for you to, to put your hands on it and use it. And then, and they really
11:23SPEAKERwanted to tell you about it.
11:25SPEAKERIt's run by enthusiasts, right? And there's people who are super personally passionate
11:28SPEAKERabout this and they want to share that with you. And so you probably spent half a day
11:33SPEAKERjust walking between two booths and getting into deep conversations with the person about
11:38SPEAKERtheir display.
11:40SPEAKERThis is, this is one of the things that we found it tested early on is that when you
11:44SPEAKERgo places like this, where people are doing something because they're really passionate
11:47SPEAKERabout it, the conversations were always good because when, when people care enough to go
11:52SPEAKERto this, to this, like kind of like, even if, even if, even if you don't care about
11:57SPEAKERthe original 8080, you're going to learn something interesting and you're going to, you're going
12:00SPEAKERto, life is going to be better for having a conversation with a person who built a modern
12:05SPEAKERversion of the 80. Was that, was this a real 8080 or is this like a raspberry pie inside
12:09SPEAKERa box that has headers connected to it that gives it the input and outputs of an 80 of
12:13SPEAKERan M-Sci 8080?
12:14SPEAKERHe had the original M-Sci 8080 and this guy was like very classic gray beard. And I say
12:19SPEAKERthat in the most loving way possible. Did he have suspenders on? I can't remember if
12:22SPEAKERhe literally had suspenders. I think he was literally wearing suspenders. He had a gray
12:26SPEAKERbeard. I was asking him, I was telling him, I was like, Oh, you know, there's, there's
12:30SPEAKERall these like Arduino based 8080 clone projects out there. Those are all I've ever seen. It's
12:35SPEAKERso cool to see one of these, like a real one in person. He immediately started talking
12:39SPEAKERabout is it DRI digital research, right? Was the company that made CPM?
12:44SPEAKERI think so. Yeah.
12:45SPEAKERLike, like I know this is like esoteric computer history, but he started rattling off the name
12:49SPEAKERof the companies that have been defunct for 45 years that made software for the 8080 as
12:54SPEAKERif they were still around because he had like talked to them back in the day. Like it was
12:58SPEAKERvery clear. He had known all the people who were writing the operating systems for this
13:01SPEAKERstuff back then.
13:02SPEAKEROkay. So I guess it's kind of a lot to talk about, but let's just start with the stuff
13:07SPEAKERyou guys were stoked about. I see at the top of the list, it says prodigy reloaded. I assume
13:14SPEAKEReither you're really into star Trek. Maybe you like, like nineties bands or alternately
13:20SPEAKERthe internet's coming back in nineties form.
13:22SPEAKERYeah. But before we get into this one, I'll say real quick, they, they handed everybody
13:25SPEAKERa ticket when you checked in, because there was like a, was a kind of a like audience
13:28SPEAKERchoice, like fan favorite contest. Like you, you mark your favorite exhibit at the end
13:34SPEAKERand dropped it in a box. And this was my pick for the best thing at the whole show. There
13:39SPEAKERwere like three, like the first three exhibits we'll talk about here, I think were our sort
13:43SPEAKERof like finalists for, were the coolest things here. And this was definitely one of them.
13:47SPEAKERI love the idea of them giving you a chit to, to like, like everybody who comes gets
13:53SPEAKERa vote into what the good thing is instead of just having like picking a bunch of people
13:56SPEAKERto be judges. That's cool. I thought they, the idea was to hand the exhibitor, the ticket
14:01SPEAKERthat we wanted to have it to vote for, you know, it was like, it was going to be something
14:04SPEAKERlike, like showing up to their booth and blessing them with your vote or something, but it was
14:08SPEAKERmore of a secret ballot kind of thing.
14:10SPEAKEROkay. Agonizing decision too, because they were such great displays, but okay. Prodigy
14:15SPEAKERreloaded. I wrote in the notes here, do we have to talk about what prodigy was? Because
14:20SPEAKERI don't know if everybody knows.
14:22SPEAKERI think it's, yeah. I mean, it's worth, it's worth hitting like in the early days before
14:27SPEAKERAOL, there were a handful of kind of like nationwide BBS is basically that also would
14:33SPEAKERlet you pipe into the internet. CompuServe was one of them. Prodigy was one of them.
14:37SPEAKERDelphi was another. They, they all had like, yeah, they, they had kind of very nineties
14:43SPEAKERnames when I think about it, but, but this was, this was one of the, this was one of
14:46SPEAKERthe early ones. I don't know anything beyond that. Like that's, that's, that's the extent
14:49SPEAKERof my knowledge about prodigy. I didn't have an account ever.
14:51SPEAKERYeah. So I was a prodigy subscriber late eighties, early nineties. And the thing that really
14:57SPEAKERset it apart was it had a GUI, right? This was mouse driven and it was doing vector graphics
15:04SPEAKERin terms of drawing. So you were getting a lot more fidelity than anything like ASCII
15:08SPEAKERart or whatever that you were seeing with BBSs at the time. And they had a bunch of
15:13SPEAKERdifferent sections. There was a section where you could shop. And then there were the most
15:17SPEAKERpopular thing for me were the message boards, which was like proto, it was basically using
15:21SPEAKERthat before I got access to use net and then email. And so you would pay a monthly fee
15:26SPEAKERand you would log in and there were all these different features and you can get, and they
15:30SPEAKERactually hired editorial staff. So they had, you know, news articles and weather and everything
15:35SPEAKERelse. So it was sort of this all in one portal you know, before that was really a thing.
15:41SPEAKERHow did you get access to it in the first place? Steve, do you remember?
15:44SPEAKERYeah. So we had a PC, I want to say it was probably a 386 at the time with 2,400 bond
15:52SPEAKERmodem. And so similar to AOL, well, you would actually have to buy the package and it would
15:57SPEAKERinclude the starter disc and a personal disc. And in many cases it came with a modem because
16:02SPEAKERpeople didn't have modems. They weren't sort of widespread. And a lot of that was subsidized
16:07SPEAKERby Sears and I think IBM, you know, one of their partners. So it was, Hey, I can get
16:11SPEAKERa modem and I get this prodigy service for like a hundred bucks or whatever it is.
16:15SPEAKERWell, and the neat thing was that they had local numbers, a lot of like local numbers
16:20SPEAKERin many exchanges. So anyway, it was, it was like a community, basically community/ISP
16:27SPEAKERkind of thing.
16:28SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. But also came out of, gosh, help me out, Steve. It was IBM.
16:32SPEAKERSears and I think one other company. Right. Yeah. I can't remember who the other one was
16:37SPEAKERoff the top of my head. But like very corporate backed, you know, like very, very much like
16:41SPEAKERbig capital venture kind of thing. Not, not grassroots.
16:45SPEAKERI assume that there were people in suits standing around a presentation at some point saying
16:50SPEAKERthe internet, eh? Before the internet, right.
16:54SPEAKERIt was like the online service or whatever it was. And you know, if you look at it, if
16:58SPEAKERyou look at screenshots of prodigy, it has a very distinct look because like I said,
17:02SPEAKERa lot of the images are done via vector, right? And so you, I even remember since I was on
17:08SPEAKERa 2,400 bond modem, I could see it being drawn when I would go to different sections and
17:13SPEAKERso it would draw like the background and then sort of foreground. And then for me, it was
17:17SPEAKERobviously the sharing messages about what the latest PC engine game or something was
17:21SPEAKERand just diving in there.
17:24SPEAKERCBS was the third partner. Just FYI, Brad, you should know that.
17:28SPEAKERSo anyway, the service no longer exists, right? It was shut down. And this guy, Phil Heller
17:39SPEAKERwas working actually on a quantum link restoration, which was the precursor to AOL. And then heard
17:45SPEAKERabout someone who started doing something with prodigy and then dove in like headfirst
17:51SPEAKERinto basically restoring prodigy using data that we had.
17:56SPEAKERRight. So that, that was the, like this thing just becomes progressively more jaw-dropping
18:01SPEAKERas you drop more facts about what he's having to go through to restore this thing. So like
18:05SPEAKERthe correct me if I've got any of this wrong, but a lot of the, the assets he's harvesting
18:10SPEAKERare out of like cash files from the original clients, right? Like people that still had
18:15SPEAKERthe client installed from 35 years ago, right?
18:18SPEAKERYeah. So it comes off the hard drive directories. There's a stage.dat and personal.dat files
18:25SPEAKERthat basically hold all the information of the things that you viewed on prodigy. And
18:31SPEAKERso he got, you know, the, the sort of unmodified disks and then was getting the data from other
18:37SPEAKERpeople. Right. And so, and he's still looking for them. So he's got a discord server and
18:41SPEAKERyou can drop in additional files for him to dig through and see if it's something he has
18:45SPEAKERor not. But it's a never ending hunt.
18:48SPEAKERYeah. Like it was such an amazing idea that he's basically assembling this patchwork of
18:52SPEAKERjust whatever people browsed back in the day. Like that's, that's the bulk of what he's
18:56SPEAKERgot access to. Just kind of everybody's personal experience being rolled up into this collection.
19:02SPEAKERIt's like, it sounds like he's trying to figure out what the statue looks by, what the statue
19:06SPEAKERlooked like by looking at the shadow it casts at different times of day. This is bonkers.
19:10SPEAKERVery much so. If I understood some of this stuff, like some, some of the vector images
19:14SPEAKERhe's having to like retrace over to reproduce, is that correct? And he's doing it in, I think
19:19SPEAKERhe said like the original DOS paint program. Yeah. Yeah. So he's very similar one. I mean,
19:25SPEAKERit's kind of like doing the onion skin animation, right? He's he can kind of see what the outline
19:29SPEAKERlooks like at the original and then he just redraws it using the original tools. And he
19:35SPEAKERhad mentioned that he reverse engineered some of the tools to generate the files. And then
19:41SPEAKERhe ended up getting access to the originals and his were incredibly accurate which is
19:47SPEAKERjust phenomenal. Yeah. What he, if I understood that stuff correctly, like the Prodigy, the
19:53SPEAKERprograms that ran on Prodigy ran, ran in some kind of like virtual machine, you know, they
19:56SPEAKERdid kind of a like write once, run anywhere sort of thing. So it could run on different
20:00SPEAKERtypes of computers. He reverse engineered that stuff and like wrote his own compiler,
20:05SPEAKERI believe. And then he was basically comparing those binary files that he had compiled himself
20:09SPEAKERand they were basically identical. So he was very proud of his reverse engineering effort.
20:13SPEAKERSo what's the, like, is this something that you can go look at now or is he still in progress?
20:18SPEAKERLike how far along is he, are they, I guess? Yeah. He's got like a demo client, I think,
20:24SPEAKERan experience that you can pop open. I think that they, I'm actually not sure of, of what
20:29SPEAKERthe level of access is. For me, it's really just, you walk up to the terminal and it is
20:35SPEAKERlike you walk back in time, right? It's like, I was doing a keyboard shortcuts and going
20:40SPEAKERto places. He's like, Oh, you're looking for this. You're just remembering the name wrong.
20:43SPEAKERLike, Oh, wow, that that's, you're right. And I like loaded up the game and I started
20:47SPEAKERplaying the game and it was, it was just just a wonderful experience.
20:52SPEAKERWas Prodigy a pay per hour, like a timed connection thing? It was, right?
20:56SPEAKERIt was monthly. And the funny thing, and this is what really dates it. So it was a monthly
21:02SPEAKERfee. And then after a while they started limiting the number of emails you could send a month
21:07SPEAKERto 30 and any additional email was 25 cents. And so imagine paying 25 cents per email message.
21:17SPEAKERAnd so my friends and I, what we would do is we create, we create an account and we
21:22SPEAKERwould just send messages to an address that didn't exist and it would bounce back to you.
21:27SPEAKERAnd so, and it wouldn't charge you. And so we basically had unlimited messages through
21:32SPEAKERthis sort of hack of the Prodigy service. And I very distinctly remember doing that
21:39SPEAKERin the early nineties, I think.
21:41SPEAKERThat's really funny.
21:42SPEAKERYeah. This thing was a real trip. I don't know what newsfeed he was hooked into. I think
21:47SPEAKERhe might've explained to you, Steve. I don't know if I caught what he was doing there,
21:50SPEAKERbut he had you go to headlines at one point and it was pulling up current up to the minute
21:54SPEAKERheadlines about the 2024 election in, in this old Prodigy client. I don't know how he was
21:58SPEAKERgetting this stuff in there.
21:59SPEAKERI think it was just a regular RSS feed and it was just rendering it in the client, but
22:04SPEAKERyeah, it was like, Hey, these are the actual temperatures right now. You know, the, the
22:08SPEAKERweather report and because the map was being drawn differently, they actually had to sort
22:14SPEAKERof transform the data so that it was showing the correct temperature above the correct
22:18SPEAKERarea because of the difference in the way the map was drawn.
22:22SPEAKERAnd so you think, Oh, that's real simply. It is overlaid. It's like, well, not really,
22:26SPEAKERbecause here's how the data doesn't match with what Prodigy expects.
22:29SPEAKERYeah. And like prodigy prodigy was early nineties. Right. So was we, I guess we had GPS in the
22:37SPEAKEReighties, but not for consumers and not like, okay. Yeah. This is, this is, this is just
22:44SPEAKERsuch a weird time for computers when this, when this thing was happening. So, so a lot
22:51SPEAKERof times when people do restorations of these big projects, like for example, when people
22:55SPEAKERmade city of heroes work again, someone on the inside had leaked a giant data file for
23:01SPEAKERthem. Has that ever happened with Prodigy or not so much?
23:03SPEAKERGo ahead, Brad, you talked to him about this.
23:07SPEAKERI was waiting. I was waiting to see if you said anything. Cause I had, I assume he's
23:10SPEAKERokay talking about this stuff. He didn't, he didn't say it was like under, you know,
23:14SPEAKERkeep it under your hat or anything. He said he has spoken to a former prodigy employee
23:20SPEAKERin the last handful of years who had taken a full backup of the service, which was about
23:26SPEAKERtwo and a half terabytes. And again, that's two and a half terabytes in like late eighties
23:30SPEAKERdata. So quite a lot.
23:32SPEAKERYeah. Two and a half terabytes, even in the mid nineties was a ton, right? That's right.
23:36SPEAKERThat's a lot of data.
23:38SPEAKERSo conclusion to that story is this former employee had just deleted that backup like
23:43SPEAKERa couple of years before he got it.
23:45SPEAKERHe said, I think it was like two or three months. Oh my God. And he's like, Oh no, I'm
23:52SPEAKERsorry. I just deleted that. And I, I, Brad, I think you said like, how can you manage
23:56SPEAKERto go on after hearing something like that?
23:59SPEAKERThat's so demoralizing to come that close to just getting the Holy grail. Like, I don't
24:02SPEAKEReven know how you can continue, but he flat out said, this is like maybe one of the most
24:06SPEAKERnoble things I've ever heard. He said, he said, I will work on this project for the
24:09SPEAKERrest of my life. Like he flat out just said like, this is, this is like the work of a
24:13SPEAKERlifetime basically. And I'm just going to keep going with it. He, he said, he's confident
24:18SPEAKERthat there are other backups out there.
24:20SPEAKERYeah. There's a lot of patents that were related to the development of prodigy and actual litigation
24:26SPEAKERthat had occurred. And so his thought was in some legal law office, like vault or whatever
24:33SPEAKERis a backup of this because they needed it for the litigation. And so I think that that
24:39SPEAKERwas for him. The he's like, I'm pretty confident it's there. I just need someone to leak it
24:44SPEAKERout. And that will obviously be a big shot in the arm to the project.
24:48SPEAKERCool. Yeah. Yeah. It was just, you know, a lot of, a lot of passion projects at this
24:53SPEAKERon display at this festival, but this one was just above and beyond in terms of the
24:57SPEAKERamount of work going into it.
24:59SPEAKERYou said he has a discord. I assume there's a website someplace too.
25:02SPEAKERYeah. Prodigy prodigy reloaded.com. I'll I'll put, I'll put links to a bunch of the projects
25:07SPEAKERand stuff in the show notes for this one. And I bet he's for sure.
25:11SPEAKERYeah. And I, like you said, he's collecting stage dot data, personal dot dat files. If
25:16SPEAKERyou have your old computers around and we're on broad duty 35 years ago, 30 years ago.
25:22SPEAKERThat's so crazy to me because we're not talking about install disks that you might still have
25:25SPEAKERfor the client, right? Like, you know, you need to still have the install directory for
25:29SPEAKERan original hard drive. Like, you know, like never have wiped an old hard drive that still
25:32SPEAKERhas an old Dawson stall or something on it.
25:35SPEAKERWell, so one of the things he mentioned was that a lot, there was actually a disc only
25:39SPEAKERinstall and so you would boot with the disc and then you would swap it out for a personal
25:45SPEAKERdisc and it came with a label to label a floppy with personal disc. And then that will have
25:51SPEAKERthe personal dot dat file. And so he'll just like like cruise auction sites for floppy
25:56SPEAKERdiscs and see if he can spot that label for personal and we'll buy the lot because he's
26:02SPEAKERlooking for whatever's on that disc.
26:03SPEAKEROh man, that is incredible. That's like that's some of the coolest digital archeology I think
26:08SPEAKERI have ever heard.
26:09SPEAKERYeah. I don't think I ever used a modem in the pre windows days. So like, yeah, this
26:14SPEAKERis, this is incredible. It's very cool. Yeah. What else, what else did y'all see? What else
26:19SPEAKERwas neat?
26:21SPEAKERRight across the tail of the hall, right? From the literally, literally like right across
26:26SPEAKERfrom this guy. Yeah. Uh, open source CRT. Uh, and I think that we've talked for a long
26:31SPEAKERtime about how no one's going to make CRTs again. Um, and this guy is open sourcing a
26:38SPEAKERpart of it. Um, I don't know. Do you feel, should I go into Steve describes how it CRT
26:44SPEAKERworks or might be helpful in basic terms. So like I certainly didn't understand a lot
26:49SPEAKERof the ins and outs of what he was showing off.
26:51SPEAKERYeah. So there's kind of four main parts of a CRT. There's the glass tube itself. Um,
26:57SPEAKERthat sort of Hershey kiss looking thing. There's the yoke, which is a lot of the wound magnets
27:01SPEAKERand everything that goes around the neck of it. There's the neck board, which is the interface
27:05SPEAKERto the chassis, which is what the open source CRT project is. It's basically this universal
27:11SPEAKERchassis and you know, neck board that if you have a tube and a yoke and you have the right
27:20SPEAKERnumber of neck pins, you could theoretically drive any tube that you can find.
27:26SPEAKERAnd so this, you know, when we talk about the arcade world, that was what this was originally
27:32SPEAKERdesigned for is because they have like a Pac-Man maze burnt into the screen, right? Or certain
27:37SPEAKERcolors have completely disappeared because there's oxidation on the cathode side. And
27:42SPEAKERwhen we talk about preserving arcade machines, the biggest problem was you had to find the
27:48SPEAKERright tube to fit the arcade chassis. And so there's like lists of like these consumer
27:53SPEAKERTVs use the tube that's compatible with a K7000 chassis, which is one of the arcade
27:59SPEAKERchassis. And what he's doing is kind of removing that from the equation. So if you can find
28:04SPEAKERa tube, you know, a TV that's sitting on the sidewalk or eat recycling or whatever, you
28:09SPEAKERcould theoretically connect it to this chassis and start driving it, just like you would.
28:15SPEAKERAnd so there, it really opens up the possibility for a lot of these tubes that might have like
28:20SPEAKERdead or weird chassis or whatever to sort of bring them back to life.
28:25SPEAKERSo, so if you, when you say it's burned in, yeah, this, you can replace the hardware in
28:30SPEAKERthe back and that'll fix the burn-in. I thought that was on the phosphor side on the inside
28:33SPEAKERof the tube.
28:34SPEAKEROh, I'm sorry. So you're replacing the tube.
28:36SPEAKEROh, okay.
28:37SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. So basically it's like, yeah, okay. I've got, I've got a tube with burn-in
28:42SPEAKERor it's, you know, it's lost. It hasn't been rejuvenated, whatever it is. You can actually
28:48SPEAKERjust yank that out. And as long as you can find a tube, in fact, his demo was running
28:53SPEAKERoff an RV TV that he found on the sidewalk. And so he just like pulled that TV off and
28:59SPEAKERbuilt like a clear case to kind of demonstrate what it could do. And so it was just super
29:05SPEAKERcool. Like this really changed the game.
29:07SPEAKERYeah. I'm not sure what that case was. The case was kind of like clear laser cut acrylic,
29:11SPEAKERI guess, or something along those lines. It was basically just a, just a clear plastic
29:16SPEAKERlooking box that you could see all the components in. I did ask him what's, I asked him, what
29:22SPEAKERis the potential for degradation on tubes other than burn-in? And he said, not much.
29:25SPEAKERI think there was like maybe one other thing that can happen, but the point is like, he
29:29SPEAKERmade it sound like the tubes are relatively durable. So as long as, like you said, as
29:33SPEAKERlong as you can get a good tube, you can kind of put the rest of the, of the contraption
29:37SPEAKERtogether and have the, have a working CRT.
29:39SPEAKERYeah. There, there can be oxidation that can occur on the cathode side. And there's a thing
29:45SPEAKERlike a rejuvenator that basically just shoves a ton of voltage in there and kind of burns
29:49SPEAKERit off. But of course that you're burning off layers of the sort of heavy metals and
29:54SPEAKEReverything that, that make it work. So that you kind of do that in your end of life of
29:59SPEAKERa tube. But because most TVs aren't on 24 hours a day, you know, seven days a week,
30:05SPEAKERlike in an arcade, this really allows you to take, you know, those discarded tubes or,
30:11SPEAKERyou know, the folks are like, oh, I'm moving to a flat screen or whatever. You can pull
30:15SPEAKERout those tubes and now you can drive them without the original chassis. And so you can
30:19SPEAKERput all kinds of different signals and everything into it.
30:23SPEAKERSo is there anything on a tube on the, like the way the phosphors are applied to the tube
30:27SPEAKERor anything that, that limits the resolution? Is this going to change the resolution of
30:31SPEAKERthe, like, are you going to be able to turn these, take a standard deaf TV tube and make
30:35SPEAKERit a better resolution than you would have had before? Or is it, is that relatively fixed?
30:38SPEAKERI know it'll be the same resolution, but yeah, basically it'll just make it do what it did
30:43SPEAKERbefore. Right. And so yeah, it, and so he was saying like, I think on that RV monitor,
30:49SPEAKERthe dot pitch was really high. So he's like, Hey, you can kind of see where it's a little
30:53SPEAKERchunky, but it, it basically acts like, I don't care what, what tube you're throwing
30:59SPEAKERat me. I should be able to throw a picture up.
31:02SPEAKERAnd I know that there's a lot of I don't want, I don't know what the right term is, but I,
31:07SPEAKERmy understanding is that in the manufacturer of CRTs, there's a lot of kind of like lost
31:13SPEAKERknowledge that, that went when the last of those factories shut down. Because even though
31:19SPEAKERwe'd been making, making CRTs for 50 or 60, 70 years, by the time we stopped making them,
31:24SPEAKERlike there was a lot of kind of handed down oral, oral tradition of how, how to make these
31:29SPEAKERthings work. Does this, does this help with that? Or is that more on the tube and kind
31:33SPEAKERof phosphor application side? Yeah, that's more on the tube. And, and I
31:37SPEAKERthink the biggest thing there in my mind, there's no sort of scalable, practical reason
31:43SPEAKERto make those glass tubes again. And it's not just sort of the process of the glass,
31:47SPEAKERbut there's a lot of heavy metals like barium and a couple other things in the creation
31:51SPEAKERof that tube. And so I don't see how it could ever be cost effective for someone to spin
31:57SPEAKERup like a CRT, a tube factory. And so what this is doing is basically whatever tubes
32:04SPEAKERexist out in the universe we could potentially keep those running and kind of have that CRT
32:10SPEAKERglow for at least within our lifetimes. Right. That's cool.
32:14SPEAKERAnd make them make them more flexible, like you said and more efficient, I guess. I, you,
32:18SPEAKERI think Steve, you can speak to the detail a lot better than I can here, but there are
32:22SPEAKERsome parts of the design here that he said are more efficient than they would have been.
32:26SPEAKERI mean, you know, go figure, of course, things get efficient over time, but, but he was talking
32:30SPEAKERabout certain like electrical components in there that are, are just much, I guess, less
32:34SPEAKERpower hungry or less hot or smaller, all of the above that he's been able to improve on.
32:41SPEAKERIt's a lot of the, all of the above. I think it's what he described specifically was the
32:45SPEAKERhorizontal deflection. And so that's when it gets to the end, like drawing that sort
32:49SPEAKERof decks line. And a lot of that's done with capacitors, but he's using, I think a Silicon
32:54SPEAKERcarbide MOSFET, which is a lot more efficient and a lot more, it doesn't create as much
33:00SPEAKERheat because usually it's this giant heat sink on the, on most monitor chassis. And
33:05SPEAKERhe's like, yeah, this is stuff that really didn't exist when CRTs were sort of mainstream.
33:11SPEAKERAnd now he's able to use this because they're using it in other applications. I think he
33:14SPEAKERsaid like model trains or something. I thought this was like, okay, I'm going to start stealing
33:19SPEAKERthat part and just make this more bulletproof than it was before.
33:22SPEAKERYeah. That's an awesome project. That's gonna hopefully keep CRTs viable for as long as
33:28SPEAKERpeople who care about CRTs are around.
33:30SPEAKERI mean, yeah, he's, and he's looking for people with like, Hey, I have wonky tube, like what's
33:34SPEAKERgoing on here because, because he has circuitry on the chassis, he can output the data to,
33:40SPEAKERand he had it like on a tablet. And so he can make adjustments sort of in real time
33:44SPEAKERon a touchscreen it to, you know, change the voltage, change color, all these things that
33:49SPEAKERyou could never do before. But he can because of digital technology. So it's super cool.
33:56SPEAKERSoon for the yoke and the tube that you connected to.
33:59SPEAKERCorrect.
34:00SPEAKERNeat.
34:01SPEAKERYeah.
34:02SPEAKERHow difficult is this? Like, this seems like a fairly intense process for, for somebody
34:07SPEAKERwho doesn't know what they're like, would you recommend that Brad and I try this is
34:11SPEAKERwould you recommend you try this or is this like, take it to the expert expert and like,
34:17SPEAKERgo from there?
34:19SPEAKERI mean, I could do it. Nothing in here seems insurmountable in terms of putting this together.
34:25SPEAKEREverybody's sort of making prefab boards based off the, I mean, it's open source, right?
34:29SPEAKERSo everything is available on GitHub. And so you could start like running a run of PCBs.
34:38SPEAKERAnd yeah, if you have the motivation, you can solder one together. And it's just finding
34:43SPEAKERthe donor tubes. So and those are everywhere. I had literally found a TV on the street a
34:48SPEAKERcouple of weeks ago that I fixed. And you know, this stuff like that, this can really
34:55SPEAKERhelp with.
34:56SPEAKERSuch a good TV too. Such a good find when you showed me those pictures. It's like a,
35:00SPEAKERwhat brand is it? It's a 14 inch with component on it?
35:02SPEAKERYeah, it's a 14 inch Toshiba CRT with component in this video. And it's, it's, it's a very
35:09SPEAKERnice small TV.
35:10SPEAKERYeah, that's fabulous. That's really cool. Does it, he has a site for this as well or
35:15SPEAKERnot so much?
35:16SPEAKERI couldn't find much of like a presence for him. Like there's a retro RGB interview with
35:20SPEAKERhim about this project from a couple of years ago that I put in the show notes. He does
35:25SPEAKERhave the GitHub repo, but that's pretty much just designs and stuff. So there's not much
35:29SPEAKERof an online, I mean, I think he has an X account, maybe Mastodon or something, but
35:35SPEAKERif you look at the GitHub is where everything lives and then handful of interviews, but
35:39SPEAKERreally cool.
35:40SPEAKERLove the, love the passion once again, of the project and him recognizing the need and
35:45SPEAKERhaving the ability to create something.
35:48SPEAKERIt's really cool. I'd never like it. It's funny. The MOSFET thing makes a ton of sense,
35:51SPEAKERbut like I remember the price on those, I don't know why the price on those has gone
35:56SPEAKERdown so much in the last 10 years. But I remember when we bought, when we built the first 3D
36:00SPEAKERprinter that we built and tested in like 2010 or 2011, they were really expensive. And then
36:06SPEAKERlike three years later, four years later, we were putting drones together and you just
36:10SPEAKERgot a big, giant sack of them and they were twice the size that they were. And yeah, anyway.
36:15SPEAKERYeah. That's what he said. It was like, Hey, this is like, when he first started, it wasn't
36:20SPEAKERsuper practical, but then over the past, even five years, the price has just plummeted.
36:26SPEAKERSo he was able to just make it as part of the design.
36:29SPEAKERWhat else we got?
36:31SPEAKERApricot computers?
36:32SPEAKERI think you mean Apple computers, Brad. That's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They started
36:36SPEAKERit. They made the Apple II. They made the Apple I. It was a failure. Then the Apple
36:40SPEAKERII and then on and on down the line.
36:42SPEAKERLike no joke. When we hit on this exhibit, I was just like, this feels like the fake
36:46SPEAKERold computer brand named after a fruit from a movie. Like how does this actually exist?
36:51SPEAKERAnd I've never heard of it. But I will say this Apricot computers exhibit, I think exemplified
36:57SPEAKERwhat the majority of this festival was about, which was just sort of collectors bringing
37:01SPEAKERa lot of cool old stuff and showing it off. You know, like the previous two projects we
37:05SPEAKERtalked about are very hands-on, very engineering focused, a lot of custom work being done,
37:10SPEAKERbut a lot of the stuff at this thing was very much just like, Hey, I've curated like a pretty
37:14SPEAKERextensive or even like comprehensive collection of this one specific, very hardcore niche.
37:20SPEAKERAnd I'm going to show it to you now.
37:22SPEAKERAnd so, yeah, Steve, did you have any Apricot computers experience at all? This stuff was
37:26SPEAKERcompletely new to me and it was like looking at something out of an alternate future that
37:29SPEAKERnever happened.
37:30SPEAKERYeah. I had never heard of it before either. And when he described, Hey, this is pretty
37:34SPEAKERmuch a UK centric computer for a company. It was like, Oh, OK, maybe that makes sense.
37:40SPEAKERBut I mean, these computers look like they came out of like severance or something, right?
37:45SPEAKERIt is. They had a design aesthetic that is very unique. And so you can look at them online.
37:52SPEAKERAnd then when you see some of the hardware that they were putting together, it just kind
37:57SPEAKERof blows your mind like, how are they doing this in 1984? Right. So the one I put in here,
38:02SPEAKERthe Apricot F.P. portable. So it's a portable computer with like a 600 by 200 LCD display.
38:09SPEAKERIt had a fold out mic and speech recognition that was from the same people who did like
38:14SPEAKERDragon naturally speaking, had a wireless keyboard, programmable keys. And it's when
38:21SPEAKERyou like, how did this come out in 84? Like, I think of like what its contemporaries were
38:27SPEAKERin the United States. It's just like mind boggling.
38:30SPEAKERThat's what I meant about the alternate future stuff. When you line up those bullet points
38:33SPEAKERof features, you just rattled off. It's again, just how how did this exist in a single product
38:38SPEAKERin the mid 80s? And people still aren't talking about it every day. It's crazy. The wireless
38:43SPEAKERkeyboard was infrared, I believe he said, with like a pretty, pretty good like a much
38:47SPEAKERbigger range than you could read that screen you pointed out.
38:50SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. He was saying like, oh, I could be across the room and it would still pick
38:54SPEAKERthis up, but you would never be able to look at the screen because it was like that era
38:59SPEAKERappropriate LCD screen. Right? Yeah. One of the other models they had I didn't make a
39:05SPEAKERnote of the model, unfortunately, but it had the keyboard on. It had a like an LCD display
39:11SPEAKERwith I don't know what type of tails, like a text mode kind of LCD display, you know,
39:15SPEAKERjust like two line, like, like a WordPress center almost like 40 character, two line,
39:20SPEAKERlike little display. Yeah. And so that display had six buttons under it with lights, LEDs
39:25SPEAKERon each one or an LED on each one. And what that display was used for was to create like
39:31SPEAKERmacros or specific, like one touch functionality for different applications that you would
39:35SPEAKERrun on the computer, including windows, including like things like windows and word processors.
39:40SPEAKERAnd they basically, Steve, do you remember what any of the windows functionality was?
39:44SPEAKERFor example, like I'm trying to think of, I don't know if it was like close window open
39:47SPEAKERfile explorer or file manager. Well, there were two things because a lot of these ran
39:51SPEAKERlike CPM. Right. And they had this like DOS and windows compatibility mode. And the funny
39:57SPEAKERthing is that there weren't enough function keys. And so what would happen is when you
40:01SPEAKERwent into this like windows compatibility mode, the screen would say, oh, I'm F nine
40:06SPEAKERF 10 of 11, F 12. Right. And so turn those into function keys so that you would have
40:13SPEAKERcompatibility or you could, you know, if you opened up a word processor, it would be like
40:17SPEAKERcut paste, whatever. And, and that was on the keyboard. It's crazy. I think he said
40:23SPEAKERthat there was a TSR that ran, right. A terminate and stay resident, which I guess, can we describe
40:28SPEAKERthat as sort of a primitive form of system service, I guess. Yeah. Like it ran on boot.
40:34SPEAKERRight. And so the CSR would detect which application you were in and tailor the macros on those
40:39SPEAKERprogrammable keys to whatever you were running. And he showed us, you know, it's like, Hey,
40:42SPEAKERI want windows now. And you would watch the functions on, on those programmable keys,
40:46SPEAKERchange update on the LCD in real time. And again, this is, this is a mid eighties computer.
40:51SPEAKERYeah.
40:52SPEAKERThis is bonkers. Like this is at the time when like the office that I was with, like
41:00SPEAKERpeople were using like shared terminal workstations at this point. Right. Like it was the PC was
41:05SPEAKERrelatively new. Were these just crazy expensive? Is that why they didn't take off or did you
41:08SPEAKERget a, I guess they don't have prices on the cards. So I don't, I don't know.
41:13SPEAKERThey were actually quite expensive. And I think the other thing that he is a big collector
41:18SPEAKERand he admitted this, he's like, it's more form over function. Some of these things are
41:23SPEAKERbeautiful and the keyboards look amazing, but actually using them is quite painful.
41:29SPEAKERAnd so I think that it's once again, it is the design aesthetic is amazing, but when
41:35SPEAKERyou actually stick your hands on it and try to use it as a computer, you run into these
41:39SPEAKERissues and it also sounds like they were really heavily focused on the business market. Right.
41:44SPEAKERAnd so this is like office and things like that. So it wouldn't have seen much consumer
41:49SPEAKERpenetration. I think you were looking at like ZX Spectrums and Sinclair and stuff like that
41:56SPEAKERfor the whole market at the stock Commodore, things like that.
42:01SPEAKERWhat was the next stop on this tour of, let me, let me guess, we're going to go back to
42:05SPEAKERmainframe days. Not quite mainframe. That was more in the actual museum downstairs,
42:13SPEAKERwhich we'll get to, but I guess we are, we are like walking through chronologically with
42:17SPEAKERthe exhibits we saw in the room. Cause like straight past the apricot stuff was the sort
42:22SPEAKERof farm of big iron workstation type computers, like giant SGIs and sun machines like spark
42:27SPEAKERstations and some HP Unix machines kind of doing all kinds of stuff in there. I'm not
42:33SPEAKERsure you want to start with that giant SGI. That was like an SGI power series, I believe.
42:37SPEAKERYeah. So actually we didn't notice it at first because it was so big and that sounds strange
42:43SPEAKERto say, but it was, it was like kind of like an end table, but just this giant brick. And
42:48SPEAKERthere was like, you know, a screen on top and a keyboard. And so at first your mind
42:52SPEAKERprocesses it as, Oh, this is like a table or something. And then you take a closer look
42:56SPEAKERand realize it's this enormous SGI workstation. That's, you know, probably two, two by three
43:03SPEAKERby two or something like that. I mean, it's just, and it was a sitting on the floor.
43:08SPEAKERIt looks like a filing cabinet. It's so big. Yeah, I've got, I've got a bunch of photos
43:13SPEAKERand videos I'll try to post along with this episode. So people can kind of look at some
43:16SPEAKERof the stuff, but yeah, we, we did two circuits around the exhibit room and we literally didn't
43:20SPEAKERcatch the existence of this machine until the second loop through the room. Because
43:24SPEAKERlike you said, it was, it was so comically big that you could just, your brain would
43:27SPEAKERjust write it off as, as a table or something. That was a 1992 one, I believe he said.
43:33SPEAKERYeah, I think so. Yeah. I don't know what those specific is. This is like the two pedestal
43:38SPEAKERhour. I believe it's called the twin towers, what the card says in the, in the photo gallery.
43:43SPEAKERYeah. So like, like 91, 92 is like very directly like pre Jurassic park. Yeah. And I don't
43:50SPEAKERknow. So like you, you definitely, in that era, you really start to think about like,
43:54SPEAKERokay, there were not that many of these machines made. I mean, there were quite a few of them,
43:56SPEAKERbut still, and especially being in the Bay area, like what piece of history did this
44:00SPEAKERparticular workstation maybe contribute to? It's hard to say. I mean, obviously we'll
44:04SPEAKERnever know, but it's, it's super cool. I was doing a render of like a jet or something.
44:08SPEAKERAnd then, and so you can say, okay, I, your mind starts going, oh, it's probably a military
44:12SPEAKERcontractor or somebody that has this. But then then we got to Brad, what you were always
44:18SPEAKERlooking for is the spark stations. Yes. Yeah. I think I've talked about it before
44:22SPEAKERwhen my university, when I was there in the late nineties, our computer labs were full
44:25SPEAKERof spark station twos, I want to say, which was sons, like, I guess, lower ends, like
44:31SPEAKERthey're sort of like two pizza boxes stacked on top of each other, desktop machines. They're
44:35SPEAKERkind of lower end workstations. And yeah, they had a number of them there. We got into
44:39SPEAKERquite a conversation with a guy who like, he took us into the back room. Actually. He
44:43SPEAKERcould tell when I was like, I've thought about buying a spark station here and there. And
44:47SPEAKERhe's like, oh, I've got one open back here. If you want to come look at it and Q about,
44:51SPEAKERI don't know what 20 minutes of watching him bang on the CG ROM and the, the boot program,
44:57SPEAKERbecause if you've ever, if you can, you can go try to boot like Solaris or SunOS, the
45:01SPEAKERsun's version of Unix from the era, like a VM of it, you can just find one, like a web
45:05SPEAKERhosted VM of that thing. It doesn't even take you into like the actual user interface. You
45:09SPEAKERget to like open boot, which is the sort of pro like PROM boot environment where you have
45:14SPEAKERto like kind of bootstrap the hardware to make it boot from this other command line
45:19SPEAKERwith its own totally different set of commands. And he spent like 10 minutes in there banging
45:22SPEAKERon that stuff, literally whacking it with like screwdrivers and stuff. I think, did
45:28SPEAKERhe, did he do any actual whacking? He was fiddling around with one of the, the, I like
45:33SPEAKERthe SCSI cables or something, but it wasn't just him. It was another guy. And it's not
45:37SPEAKERlike these people didn't know what they were doing. Right. They're clearly enthusiasts
45:41SPEAKERand every, almost every sentence of his was telling us not to buy it because he's just
45:47SPEAKERlike, oh, this stupid mouse, you have to add the special mouse pad that's reflective. And
45:51SPEAKERthe, the monitor needs a special box. And then, you know, they were kind of bantering
45:56SPEAKERback and forth because they were trying to get like the, the drive to mount. And he's
46:00SPEAKERlike, maybe try this. He's like, I already tried that. Right. So everything we saw was
46:05SPEAKERthis is demonstration of, okay, I like that this exists. I do not need this in my house.
46:11SPEAKERYes. Very much like it very much. It was like, okay, unless, unless you want to devote basically
46:15SPEAKERall of your free time to this project, you're probably not even gonna get this thing to
46:18SPEAKERboot. So I was happy to just see some up close and then move on with my life.
46:23SPEAKERYeah.
46:24SPEAKERSo this, this is growth, Brad. That's good. This is getting into this kind of collection
46:30SPEAKERis a, is a path of sadness and infamy.
46:33SPEAKERThat's the great thing about this event though. You know, there's a bunch of wish fulfillment
46:37SPEAKERbuilt in for people who are huge nerds about old computer stuff. So you can see a bunch
46:42SPEAKERof stuff you've always marveled at and then walk away, just like wipe your hands and walk
46:46SPEAKERaway.
46:47SPEAKERYou can stop it in and out of the way home, have a nice burger and not think about it
46:50SPEAKERfor another year.
46:51SPEAKERI didn't realize until I looked at the exhibitor list right before we recorded here, that there
46:56SPEAKERwas an actual SIM city exhibit attached to this area. I thought it was just, I thought
47:01SPEAKERit was just a weird coincidence that a bunch of these different old Unix machines were
47:05SPEAKERall running SIM city. Also, I don't know if you guys have opinions on how to pronounce
47:09SPEAKERold versions of Unix. So to Irix or Erix for SGI.
47:13SPEAKERI always said Irix, but yeah, me too.
47:15SPEAKERYeah, we always said Erix and, but we were in Tennessee and it's entirely possible that
47:19SPEAKERevery single person I talked to that worked on those machines had never heard anybody
47:22SPEAKERelse pronounce it. So, right, right. I had only read it in magazines, like the Hewlett
47:27SPEAKERPackard Unix, like HPUX. I don't know if that's how people say that. Anyway, the point is
47:31SPEAKERthey had a lot of old Unix hardware from a lot of these big iron companies and they were
47:35SPEAKERall running SIM city because apparently SIM city got ported to like every version of Unix
47:39SPEAKERback in the day.
47:40SPEAKERI didn't know that. That's fascinating.
47:42SPEAKERIt was great. And you know, it's like separate windows and stuff. So you had like, you know,
47:45SPEAKERall the resources in a window and you can drag them around and all kinds of stuff. So
47:49SPEAKERit was really cool.
47:50SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. In fact, like, like that, that big SGI machine, but all these smaller ones
47:53SPEAKERas well, like seeing that level of GUI functionality from an early nineties computer was really
47:58SPEAKERfun because if you think about, think about the types of computers you were using at home
48:02SPEAKERin the early nineties, that level of GUI and interoperability and multitasking was just
48:06SPEAKERa pipe dream.
48:07SPEAKERYeah. Well, I think that it's like 20 inch monitors and higher resolutions and things
48:11SPEAKERlike that, that just really weren't consumer level. I mean, I remember the first time I
48:16SPEAKERgot a 17 inch monitor and I thought it was the largest monitor I'd ever seen. And so
48:20SPEAKERthese were already like way bigger than that.
48:24SPEAKERSame. I went from like a 13 inch and I got a, I got, I got a 17 inch Hitachi cause they
48:29SPEAKERwere on sale someplace and I was like, Oh, this is the best, best day of my life. It's
48:34SPEAKERincredible.
48:35SPEAKER0.42 dot pitch. Look out.
48:36SPEAKERYeah, exactly. I can, I can go all the way up to 1280 by 1024. Let's see. I think we
48:42SPEAKERhave a speed run now. You want to speed run some stuff, some high points. The speed dating
48:47SPEAKERsegment. Yeah. Vintage computer festival.
48:50SPEAKERYeah. Well, I mean, the, you know, this is, this is like the front of the magazine where
48:53SPEAKERthe articles are short. So yes, we get a dollar per word. No, no, this isn't that you may
49:00SPEAKERbe talking about computers from the nineties, but we're not paying nineties rates, Steve.
49:04SPEAKERSorry, man. All right.
49:05SPEAKERThis was kind of scattered around the exhibit area, some in the swap meet area. And then
49:09SPEAKEReven down in the, in the actual museum proper, I saw some of these as well. There were a
49:12SPEAKERlot of these, like, I guess they must be sixties era. They're very mid century, like jetson's
49:18SPEAKERfuturistic retro, futuristic styling serial terminals. Yep. And forgive me. I don't know.
49:24SPEAKERI think they're like RS two 32 serial connections, like that very common connector. Like I don't
49:28SPEAKERknow all the terminology here. I don't know if this is like from the kind of VT two 20
49:31SPEAKERera or something, but it's monitors and keyboard monitor and keyboard units that are just terminals,
49:37SPEAKERright? They just plug into a thing that feeds them. There's no computer in there. I have,
49:40SPEAKERI have that same type of serial connection coming out of my NASA as we speak. And some
49:46SPEAKERof these things were for sale in the swap meet. Oh my God, Brad, unfortunately they
49:50SPEAKERwere a bit expensive. I think the ones I saw were two, two 50, something like that for
49:54SPEAKERthe couple that I saw on sale, but this is, this is going on my list. If I have a basement
49:58SPEAKERsomeday, I need to get my hands on one of these things and make it the console for my,
50:02SPEAKERmy home server.
50:03SPEAKERMy understanding is that dumb terminals are the future of computing. And like, I think
50:09SPEAKERyou're investing in the future. If you buy this. Yeah. What was it? The sun Ray was that,
50:13SPEAKERwas that the little tiny, tiny, tiny. Yeah. It was a little, little, you could, you could
50:19SPEAKERrun 20 of those on one spark station or whatever it was. Yeah.
50:24SPEAKERIt's actually, we're kind of walking around the, there was a Telabit trailblazer modem,
50:28SPEAKERwhich was, you know, Hayes and everybody else is trying to get 2,400 baud modems into consumers
50:34SPEAKERhands. Right. And so they're using the cheapest parts. This I think came out of the need for
50:41SPEAKERpeople who are trying to run, use net nodes to transfer data as quickly as possible from,
50:47SPEAKERyou know, one to another. And so they basically threw hardware at it. So, you know, adding
50:52SPEAKERa lot more processing power to the modem itself to try to compensate for the noise in a plain
50:59SPEAKERold, you know, the, the, the twisted copper. And so they were hitting something like 9,600,
51:05SPEAKERlike 12,000 baud like speeds at the same time, like most consumer modems are like 300 to
51:13SPEAKER1200 baud. And so this was like, it was really cool, especially when you looked at the difference
51:19SPEAKERin the modems, there was just like so much hardware, like packed into the box PCB. So
51:24SPEAKERit was great. Yeah, for sure. This would have been like late eighties, like post acoustic
51:29SPEAKERcoupler probably, but pre mid, maybe pre eighties. I think it's mid yeah. Cause he actually did
51:36SPEAKERhave an acoustic coupler that was as part of the display. But yeah, it's one of those
51:43SPEAKERthings where for a very short period of time, this was the absolute cutting edge. And then,
51:48SPEAKERyou know, once we started seeing things like the, the 56 K or 32, once people started getting
51:55SPEAKERbetter at like compression and things like that, we started basically aged out and they
52:00SPEAKERdidn't keep up with the times. And we were kind of hitting the theoretical limits on
52:04SPEAKERwhat you can do through a phone line anyway. And so it was just for a short period of time,
52:09SPEAKERthis was the best thing you could buy. And of course you were paying for it, right?
52:13SPEAKERYeah. He, he, he said these were very much geared toward institutions, you know, universities
52:18SPEAKERor other kind of entities with money. Let's say these were not really end user focused.
52:23SPEAKERThese were more for like big operations to connect up.
52:26SPEAKERI was going to say the other fascinating concept here is that you could maintain a use net
52:30SPEAKERnode on 9,600 bod and it would stay in sync, right? Like the fact that you could maintain
52:36SPEAKERany, any user group at all on 96, what is it? 9.6 kilobits per second. Is that what
52:43SPEAKER8,600 bod is? BPS. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's bits per second. Yeah. So divide by eight,
52:48SPEAKERI guess. Okay. So yeah. So anyway, it's not very many. Yeah. Although, but I don't remember
52:54SPEAKERwhat year it was. They lifted the restrictions on who could access the internet, but this
52:57SPEAKERmight've been before that. Was that late eighties? That's a whole, we should, we should do like
53:01SPEAKERa history of the internet episode sometime, but I think the government, the government
53:05SPEAKERonly lifted those restrictions in 87 maybe or something like that.
53:09SPEAKERYeah. Something like that. And to opening it up to everybody. Right. Yeah. So probably
53:14SPEAKERnot a ton of people posting at that point. It was a simpler time. Brad, you were pretty
53:20SPEAKERexcited about seeing some Japanese PCs. Yes. Yeah. So I pulled this straight from the exhibitor
53:25SPEAKERpage. There was an X 68,000. Is that a, that's the sharp, right? Yep. With the kind of twin
53:30SPEAKERtower looking design. Yeah. There was a PC, PC 98. Is that an EC? Yeah. PC 98 radiator
53:37SPEAKERand AC. Yeah. So an MSX two plus a PC 88 and an FM towns, which like, I mean, I have been
53:45SPEAKERhearing the FM towns name and seeing them in magazines going back to like the early
53:48SPEAKERnineties, you know, those were pretty legendary at the time of like 16 bit consoles. You know,
53:53SPEAKERyou would see these magazine features like look at what, look at the games they're playing
53:56SPEAKERon computers in Japan, you know, like some, some pretty legendary names there. And also
54:01SPEAKERthose Japanese computers of that era are like probably the coolest looking computer designs
54:05SPEAKERof all time. We're pretty close to it. If you go Google pictures of some of these things.
54:10SPEAKERYeah. I mean, the processing power that they had available to them, I mean, the X 68,000
54:14SPEAKERis basically like the Capcom CPS boards, right? And so their ports of, you know, street fighter
54:20SPEAKERand everything are, are pretty much perfect because they designed them on the X 68,000.
54:26SPEAKERAnd then, you know, you see all these, these capabilities, but they're also super expensive.
54:31SPEAKERAnd so I find that kind of surprising because it's, you know, given the amount of space
54:35SPEAKERand cost, but this was for the cutting edge of gaining of at least, you know, computer
54:41SPEAKERgaming in Japan and they had a great display with all of them lined up original hardware.
54:47SPEAKERAnd to Brad's point, it was very much like the, I remember seeing pictures of this in
54:52SPEAKEREGM or like diehard game fan. And then this is right in front of me and I can do anything
54:56SPEAKERI want on it. So very, very cool. Like, like the FM towns has this kind of like vertical,
55:01SPEAKERlike fold out CD-ROM tray, for example, from the front. It's crazy. Yeah. One of the others
55:07SPEAKERhas a modular CD-ROM that is like, we'll see, is that the NEC? Yeah. So yeah, it kind of,
55:14SPEAKERit almost looks like this tray on top of the tower and the CD-ROM drive that fits in there
55:21SPEAKERis actually the same one from the PC engine. So changeable. Yeah. You just like swap that
55:28SPEAKERin. In fact, you would probably grab a turbo graphics one and stick it in there and have,
55:32SPEAKERyou know, a TG 16 branding on this NEC beige box. It's just really, really cool to see
55:38SPEAKERthe little, there's a little latching mechanism, you know, cause the CD-ROM is basically just
55:41SPEAKERsort of a cartridge that you slot into the top of the computer.
55:45SPEAKERWas the market for these game developers, is that who was buying these or were they
55:48SPEAKERselling these to consumers too in Japan at the time? You think it was consumers? Yeah.
55:51SPEAKERThese are all consumer PCs. And so, but it was, you know, the kind of the people on the
55:56SPEAKERhigh end and there was, if you look at the game selection, you know, there's a ton of
56:00SPEAKERshooters and action games and finding even the things, but there's also like a lot of
56:04SPEAKERlike dating simulator, like, you know, stuff like that, that, that, you know, wasn't super
56:09SPEAKERcommon and they wanted to be able to, to shoot out the video for that. So it's worth also
56:14SPEAKERworth mentioning the X 68,000 has a sick handle on top between the two towers, the pop-out
56:20SPEAKERhandle that it's so good. Yeah. It's one of the coolest computers of all time, just by
56:26SPEAKERlooks the only, the only thing that could have topped it is what is the red line of
56:29SPEAKERJapanese computers from the era? Was it, say it was Sony's MSX computers were red in a
56:34SPEAKERlot of cases. Yeah. The Sony has a line of MSX systems. Like usually they're branded
56:39SPEAKERlike hit bit or something. And it's a very like striking, like red color, either a Stripe
56:44SPEAKERor in some cases the entire case. And that's, what's cool about MSX is like, it was an open,
56:50SPEAKERit was a, you know, Microsoft standard. And so there's a lot of different manufacturers
56:53SPEAKERkind of with their take on it. So those were all super cool. I just looked it up. The sharp
56:58SPEAKERX one is the other one I've got in mind. If you've seen that one, it's got a tape deck
57:02SPEAKERin the front of it. I think that was the one where I played doom. It was just like running
57:06SPEAKERdoom and I walked up to it and I just started playing the game. What am I, what am I doing?
57:14SPEAKERBecause it was doom. I had to laugh. Like you put your hands on the keyboard just cause
57:17SPEAKERyou want to interact with it. And the next thing I know is like, man, he's like kind
57:20SPEAKERof getting a ways into this level. That's what happens. Even now, when you play doom,
57:25SPEAKERyou just start playing. Yeah, that was great. Did you use the mouse to Steve or were you
57:29SPEAKERjust arrow keys? Not even. Yeah. Okay. So our auctions was there. And I think we talked
57:39SPEAKERabout this earlier where they had a bunch of things up for auction. One of my favorite
57:44SPEAKERthings was Bill Gates's badge, his Microsoft badge. And it's a really funny Providence
57:52SPEAKERstory in that it was early on when they were doing RFID security on the Microsoft campus.
57:58SPEAKERAnd this was like 20 something year old guy that was helping out and Bill Gates came storming
58:04SPEAKERin. He's like, I can't get into my office. Right. And he's like, I want to help me, Mr.
58:08SPEAKERGates. And I printed up another badge and gave him that and then kept the original. And
58:14SPEAKERso that's auction. This is the original one. This isn't even a replacement. Wow. So this
58:19SPEAKERis the pre RFID badge. It is an RFID badge, but apparently it didn't work. So the, the
58:27SPEAKERone that Bill Gates carried after that would open doors and we're kind of joking. Could
58:31SPEAKERyou like run around Microsoft campus, like getting into the catacombs with this badge,
58:37SPEAKERbut that badge gets you into the extreme vault. Yeah. Yeah. I think, Brad, you mentioned like
58:42SPEAKERnot being able to touch some things and he pulled it out of the holder for me and did
58:47SPEAKERhe really? Yeah. Well, this was on Friday and he held it out. And so I just grabbed
58:53SPEAKERit. It was like flipping it around. He's like, okay, can I have that back now? But here you
58:58SPEAKERgo. Yeah. They didn't have any kind of price ranges or like estimated value on any of these
59:04SPEAKERartifacts I noticed. I guess you could maybe go look that stuff up. Yeah. I mean, I think
59:08SPEAKERhe was saying the badge is probably going to go for like four grand and like checks
59:13SPEAKERand everything, you know, five figures. The other weird thing, and this is where history
59:18SPEAKERis strange is like sealed iPhone ones are now going for like five, six figures and sealed
59:25SPEAKERiPads. They had a sealed G-force 40 90 signed you know, by the CEO. And so the sealed collector
59:33SPEAKERmarket is very strange, especially for electronics. I love the, can we talk about the check, the
59:40SPEAKERApple check? Yeah. They had three or four different checks. I only took a picture of
59:44SPEAKERa couple, but yes, there is a check signed by Stephen Jobs from March 19th, 1976 for
59:49SPEAKER$4 and 95 cents to Zach Electronics. It's also worth mentioning. It's the kind of check
59:57SPEAKERyou get when you've just opened a bank account because it doesn't have the imprint of Apple
1:00:01SPEAKERelectric Apple computer in the top left. It's handwritten in the top left where the kind
1:00:07SPEAKERof address, the name and address would go. I always thought of those as the kind of checks
1:00:12SPEAKERthat you just like people don't take because they back then you would take them, I guess.
1:00:17SPEAKERBut now if you roll in with the, they don't even bother giving you the brand, the new
1:00:22SPEAKERaccount checks anymore because no one's going to accept them. So apparently Zach Electronics
1:00:27SPEAKERstill exists. If this is assuming this is the same company, that's funny, a leading
1:00:31SPEAKERWest coast distributor of wire cables, connectors, and installation solution, like just kind
1:00:36SPEAKERof a parts vendor, it sounds like. Well, it was also like different era. So it was like
1:00:40SPEAKERthe $4 check. And then there was one in the middle that was like a couple hundred dollars.
1:00:45SPEAKERAnd then the last one's like $145,000 check. So it was like different eras of Apple. This,
1:00:50SPEAKERthis is, this is a check from Google. Can't quite tell the reflection on it. I can't quite
1:00:57SPEAKERsee who the check is made out to, but yes, it's for, it's for over $145,000 also issued
1:01:02SPEAKERby Silicon Valley bank. If you remember their somewhat recent turn in the news.
1:01:08SPEAKERGoogle's do enough that they would, when they got funded, the money would have almost certainly
1:01:12SPEAKERhad to go to SVP. Yeah. Yeah. This was, this was 99 is the date on that check. A bunch
1:01:17SPEAKERof other job stuff like his, his and was his business cards. Some like Polaroids from the
1:01:25SPEAKERera around the office, some stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, it's a cool ephemera that's
1:01:30SPEAKERcoming out and, and yeah. You know, some of it, you kind of, Hey, this belongs in a museum.
1:01:36SPEAKEROthers like, yeah, there's probably hundreds of checks, thousands of checks, right. That
1:01:39SPEAKERare out there signed. And I think one of my favorite signatures was the the letter where
1:01:45SPEAKERhe, someone asked for his autograph and he said, sorry, I don't sign autographs, but
1:01:49SPEAKERthen signed the letter. That's pretty good. There's a real quick, before we move on there,
1:01:56SPEAKERthere's an invite to his 30th birthday party, which will, if you remember back to the pirates
1:01:59SPEAKERof Silicon Valley, it was his birthday party depicted right at the end of the movie. Right
1:02:04SPEAKERbefore they bounced him out of Apple. Oh, wow. So there's an invite to that party here.
1:02:09SPEAKERSome fun stuff. And then a fun story with that. I guess like anything, if you were over
1:02:13SPEAKER30 or kind of like over the Hill at Apple. And so they made that 30th birthday, a big
1:02:19SPEAKERevent for anybody that was crossing that threshold. And so like they, they threw parties that
1:02:24SPEAKERthat's a very specific party, which I, I didn't know about. And carousel, the lightness hand
1:02:32SPEAKERturned colors and he gets into space. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's just blinking. Let's see.
1:02:37SPEAKERI want to actually talk about floppy disk paradise. Yes. So it's these folks that had
1:02:41SPEAKERa, you know, these different, they're basically helping attendees retrieve their data right
1:02:47SPEAKERoff of magnetic media. And so just bring in the dear disks and, and a thumb drive and
1:02:53SPEAKERthey would do whatever they could to try to get off, say like a cryo flux and all these
1:02:56SPEAKERother things. And then I think we also talked to them about spinning up old hard drives.
1:03:02SPEAKERYes. Your will, your, your strategy of kind of thunking the old hard drive to unstick
1:03:06SPEAKERanything that's stuck in there was validated by the experts. Although he was a lot more
1:03:10SPEAKERanimated about it. He said he would take it in both hands and kind of like whack it on
1:03:13SPEAKERthe side of the table. Yeah. Cause the idea is that the, if the, if the viscosity of the
1:03:19SPEAKERlubricant on the bearings gets too, too, too thick, then that, that physical jar is enough
1:03:25SPEAKERto release it so that the motor can spin it up at that point. Yeah. I, this, I, you know,
1:03:30SPEAKERI felt this was, this kind of went without saying, but he really stressed the second
1:03:34SPEAKERyou get that hard drive spun up and can read data off of it, back everything up immediately.
1:03:38SPEAKERYeah. Never turn it off again. He was like, don't, don't, don't faff about, you know,
1:03:43SPEAKERlike, Oh, I'm going to open that document and see what was in there or something. He
1:03:45SPEAKERwas like, like DD that whole drive to a disk image as soon as you can. And then just never
1:03:49SPEAKERtouch it again. Cause that's probably the only time it's ever going to work. So I was
1:03:53SPEAKERgoing to ask, do they have a toolkit or something that they were using? Were they plugging these,
1:03:57SPEAKERthese things into like Linux machines and just running DD on them? Or were they using
1:04:00SPEAKERsomething, something more esoteric? Did you ask? I didn't see what was running on his
1:04:05SPEAKERlaptop but he was helping somebody actually while we were talking with them to, to pull
1:04:11SPEAKERstuff off. And so I think it's actually like a variety of tools that they use depending
1:04:15SPEAKERon what they're trying to pull out. But yeah, there was like, Hey, here's the image. And
1:04:19SPEAKERthen here's the files we were able to pull out. Right. And even if you didn't know what
1:04:24SPEAKERthe format was. That's really good. Yeah. Yeah. Another, another aspect of this festival
1:04:28SPEAKERthat I thought was needed that this exhibit and at least one other one, there was also
1:04:31SPEAKERa live circuit board repair rejuvenation kind of thing going on. There was just kind of
1:04:37SPEAKERa community or community oriented aspect of the whole thing of like, Hey, bring in your
1:04:40SPEAKERold floppies and we'll, we'll help you on the spot. You know, like this is data recovery
1:04:45SPEAKERis normally very expensive, but we'll just do it for you for free. You know, that's lovely.
1:04:49SPEAKERIt's really cool circuit boards. Yeah, it was neat. I walked in there and the guy who
1:04:52SPEAKERwas doing the circuit board repair had a turbo express opened up. I'm like, yeah, that makes
1:04:57SPEAKERsense because I always have to recap those. So, and then we commiserated on the, how horrible
1:05:03SPEAKERgame gear caps were. So it was good times. Good times. Oh, that's, that's random aside.
1:05:08SPEAKERYou were telling me about a, like a factory sealed game gear. Yeah. It's like graded factory
1:05:13SPEAKERsealed game gear. And I was like, that is just mush inside there. Like sludge inside
1:05:19SPEAKERof the actual game gear. Cause the caps leaked so long ago. Yeah. Yeah. They're notorious
1:05:23SPEAKERfor being awful inside. This is a real quick one. We did, there wasn't a lot to do with
1:05:29SPEAKERthis one, but the monster 6502, which is a, a full scale like circuit, almost like breadboard
1:05:36SPEAKERstyle MOS 6502, which is a, you know, a very classic CPU that ran the apple two and a bajillion
1:05:42SPEAKERother devices. But it's like big enough. You can, it's, it's like, it's not like a microchip.
1:05:48SPEAKERIt's like a full size. It's like a two foot by two foot board that you can see what's
1:05:52SPEAKERgoing on on it. Yeah. Sorry. I lack the vocabulary to describe this thing properly, but their
1:05:56SPEAKERpitch is this is a, this is a disintegrated circuit to make a complete, a complete working
1:06:02SPEAKERtransistor scale replica of the 6502. And it's got a bunch of really cool lights on
1:06:06SPEAKERit that you can see blinking as it does stuff. But like it, as far as I can tell, it does
1:06:11SPEAKERfunction as a 6502. That's crazy. Somebody should make a huge apple too, to put that
1:06:16SPEAKERthing in. And then you have like a computer the size of a building. It's funny and funny.
1:06:21SPEAKERYou mentioned, uh, what, what did, what did they call that? Gigantic Mac, big Mac. The
1:06:25SPEAKERbig, I think I've got a little video of you typing on that thing. Like the keys are like
1:06:31SPEAKERalmost the size of your hand, maybe. Yeah. It's made this gigantic Mac. And the funny
1:06:35SPEAKERthing was Brad was like, Oh, can you go type on it? And I immediately tried to put my hands
1:06:40SPEAKERon a keyboard like you would, but then, then my brain short circuited like, wait a minute,
1:06:45SPEAKERI can't do that. These keys are enormous. And so there's a version of the big scene
1:06:50SPEAKERwith the, with the, with the floor piano and you just get on the keys and you're jumping
1:06:54SPEAKERfrom key to key to type in your, your DOS command or your, your apple, uh, commands
1:07:00SPEAKERor play, uh, you know, doom or something maybe. Yeah. So can I ask about the Soviet computers?
1:07:06SPEAKERCause I saw this in the, in the gallery of photos that you guys shared. There's this
1:07:11SPEAKERblue, there's this, there's this computer with what looks like Tetris running on a black
1:07:15SPEAKERand white screen. Yeah, I, this was, this was one of my top exhibits that I wanted to
1:07:20SPEAKERsee going down on Saturday. And it turned out, I think they had only been there on Friday.
1:07:23SPEAKERIs that right? Yeah. So they unfortunately packed up their stuff on, on Friday night,
1:07:28SPEAKERbut yeah, it was a bunch of like Soviet computers and most of them running Tetris as you can
1:07:34SPEAKERimagine. But the picture I posted, if you look at the arrow key configuration, it is
1:07:38SPEAKERjust, it doesn't make any sense. It's just like function keys in the middle and all kinds
1:07:43SPEAKERof weird stuff. Um, but in fact, I think in the swap me room, there was a, a, uh, a microcomputer
1:07:50SPEAKERthat had Cyrillic on it as well. So there was, it just kind of like, okay, this is a
1:07:55SPEAKERSoviet era computer. It looks and feels like a Soviet era computer. Like the space that's
1:08:01SPEAKERwhere the backs, the key, the key that's where the backspace key is like kind of cattywampus
1:08:07SPEAKERand it's worth mentioning. There's like the arrow key configuration weirdness is, is impossible
1:08:12SPEAKERto overstate because it's got left and right on one row. And then there's three function
1:08:18SPEAKERkeys, F2, F3, F4. And then there's two down arrows next to each other inexplicably seemingly
1:08:24SPEAKERidentical down arrows. Yeah. But the, the piece de resistance is the up into the left
1:08:30SPEAKERkey that is up into the left of the, of the, of the up key. Like I just, I'm, I don't understand
1:08:36SPEAKERwhy. There's only one diagonal when it's up into the left. Yeah. Why the one diagonal?
1:08:42SPEAKERThis is very much like I'll put it in H situation from the Simpsons, right? Like what is happening
1:08:49SPEAKERwith this keyboard? I'm sure our Russian readers will write in and be like, Oh yeah, no, that's
1:08:53SPEAKERjust how Russian keyboards are. It's we always have an up and the left. Yep. Looking at the,
1:08:58SPEAKERthey have the list of computers they have there from the exhibit page. And it sounds
1:09:01SPEAKERlike it's a lot of models that were sort of clones of other computers. Like there's a
1:09:04SPEAKERclone of the PDP 11. There's a clone of an Intel 8080 clone of the ZX spectrum, an Apple
1:09:10SPEAKERone prototype board. So yeah, like a lot of, a lot of kind of clones of familiar computers,
1:09:15SPEAKERit sounds like. Yeah. Which is not surprising. I mean, we see that even in the arcade world
1:09:19SPEAKERwhere it's just like, Hey, here's the Russian knockoff of, of whatever was available. And
1:09:23SPEAKERso reverse engineered. That's fascinating. Yeah. So we did talk about a couple of times
1:09:29SPEAKERabout the swap meet rooms. And so this is where the people who are obsessive collectors
1:09:34SPEAKERof things decide to unload things. And you just see, it's basically like electronics
1:09:41SPEAKERflea market, which we went to kind of on steroids because it is just like all kinds of super
1:09:47SPEAKERrandom mostly computing parts. Right. So the things that I noted, so there's an SGI 1600
1:09:55SPEAKERSW, which was an extremely expensive LCD monitor for the time. I want to say it was like $2,500
1:10:03SPEAKERbecause it's like a 16 by nine LCD monitor with this like thing on the back that allows
1:10:11SPEAKERyou to move it up and down. And it was $40. And so, but of course it's a very proprietary
1:10:17SPEAKERconnector and people are looking at that. Yeah. And it only does like one resolution
1:10:21SPEAKERlike nowadays it's probably a $40 monitor, but it's just like seeing that and then remembering
1:10:28SPEAKERreading like PC world and talking about this revolutionary, I think even out on tech did
1:10:33SPEAKERa review of it. And he's like, this is the most absurd monitor I've ever seen in my life.
1:10:37SPEAKERAnd it's just like sitting on this table next to like a tape drive or something.
1:10:41SPEAKER1600 by 1024. It was not a 16 by nine. It was a 16 by 10, like all good monitors were
1:10:48SPEAKERback then. Yes. So I posted a picture of this in the photos. There was a control panel for
1:10:56SPEAKERa Raytheon RDS 500. So this is once again, big iron, and it's just full of buttons and
1:11:02SPEAKERswitches and everything. And I was thinking of buying that and connecting it to home assistant
1:11:07SPEAKERso that I could do things in my house with it. And it's expensive. It was like 200 bucks
1:11:13SPEAKERor something. So I'm like, Oh, kind of sleep on it. And then we went on Saturday. I was
1:11:16SPEAKERlike, it's gone. And now I'm like, I should have bought the Raytheon, like the control
1:11:22SPEAKERpanel.
1:11:23SPEAKERI remember you now talking about that home assistant idea. That's an amazing idea for
1:11:26SPEAKERthis thing.
1:11:27SPEAKERI mean, the good news, the good news is you're going to go, we're going to go to the, the,
1:11:32SPEAKERthe swap meet the, the market, and there will be something that is similar that has a bunch
1:11:37SPEAKERof buttons and lights on it. And the opportunity will rise again. It may not be the same panel,
1:11:41SPEAKERbut there will be something you can do that. You can do that with Steve. Yeah. Yeah. Tons
1:11:47SPEAKERof like email machines, power max. There was even some SGI stuff in there. The free stuff
1:11:53SPEAKERtable was just the mishmash of everything. I saw like two eight track players in there.
1:11:58SPEAKERAnd so it was, it is, it's a real fun time for sure. Dumping out their cable bin. I think
1:12:04SPEAKERyou might've mentioned the eight inch floppy drive. Yeah. Yeah. There was, Oh yeah, I didn't.
1:12:08SPEAKERBut yeah, there was eight inch floppy drive and floppies like straight up nuclear command
1:12:12SPEAKERand control style floppies. Apple threes. I think there were like a couple of Lisa's
1:12:18SPEAKERin there. And so definitely this weird mix, my favorite thing was actually free. It was
1:12:24SPEAKERa picture. Someone had like stuck it to the wall and I was like, do you have a power book
1:12:29SPEAKERduo? Do you like the movie hackers? Take these screen accurate vinyl decals and make your
1:12:34SPEAKERlaptop look like acid burns laptop. And it's like, he just gave them away for free because
1:12:39SPEAKERhe wanted to do it and share with everybody else. Another one of those, another one of
1:12:44SPEAKERthose things that just, just a tiny bit of a vibe of like peace, love and old computers
1:12:49SPEAKERat this thing, you know, people just very excited to share their passion for this stuff.
1:12:54SPEAKERSo I have to ask, where did you all leave your best in show chits? What did you vote
1:12:58SPEAKERfor? I had to go prodigy reloaded. I just, I had to salute the unbelievable level of
1:13:05SPEAKERdedication and efforts that that guy is bringing to bear. Yeah. So I did apricot because I
1:13:11SPEAKERhad previously voted for prodigy and open source CRT for me. It was like I just like
1:13:21SPEAKERthe fact that this person collects very large, not so useful things and then hauls it all
1:13:28SPEAKERhere so we can experience it. Yeah. And he mentioned because it was a UK computer company,
1:13:33SPEAKERhe has spent quite a bit of money on freight or whatever type of shipping he needs to use
1:13:37SPEAKERto get these large computers across the Atlantic ocean. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Real, real quick
1:13:43SPEAKERbefore we move on from the, the VCF, there was one other quick exhibits that I jotted
1:13:48SPEAKERin here at the last second, the, the consoles, the video game, video game consoles as computers
1:13:53SPEAKERexhibit. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like they had, they had a Famicom with, I think it had
1:13:58SPEAKERto have a disc system, right. To run family basic or tape drive. So it's a cartridge and
1:14:04SPEAKERthere's a tape drive and a keyboard add on. Ask me how I know. So you could make it like
1:14:10SPEAKERa T994A is what you're saying basically. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You did the family basic was
1:14:15SPEAKERone of them. And there's a couple other things that you can do with it. Yeah. I had no idea
1:14:19SPEAKERthere were programming languages available on the, on the classic Famicom, the, the incentive
1:14:23SPEAKERentertainment system for people who don't know, did not have a Saturn Saturn also had
1:14:27SPEAKERa version of basic. I found out recently they did not have that there. They did have the
1:14:31SPEAKERfloppy drive attachment though for the Saturday. So you can save onto a floppy disc. I have
1:14:37SPEAKERto ask you, what in the world is a Casio Loopy? So Casio Loopy is I think a mid nineties console
1:14:44SPEAKERthat has a sticker printer on it. So if you remember the kind of craze of the photo booths
1:14:49SPEAKERwith the stickers this was designed for that market. And so you could actually create sticker
1:14:55SPEAKERpacks and then print them out. It would actually, you know, like I said, there's a printer cartridge
1:14:59SPEAKERon in like built into the unit and that weird hump in the front. And so there's a lot of
1:15:05SPEAKERgames related to that. You can also do capture and do screenshots of like VHS or TV things
1:15:13SPEAKERin there as well. And so it's, it's a real funky machine. I think it was actually just
1:15:17SPEAKERrecently added to Mame. And so, well, yeah, it's either Mame or, or a Mr. I can't remember,
1:15:24SPEAKERbut there is definitely like, you know, the ability to play some of the loopy stuff. If
1:15:28SPEAKERyou want, it's, it's got the weirdest controller I've seen in a long time because it's got
1:15:32SPEAKERa normal D pad and then it's got four buttons, but they're all in a row, like a, like a Genesis,
1:15:37SPEAKERlike a first run Genesis controller, except for instead of three buttons, there's four.
1:15:42SPEAKERSo that means it clearly one button better than a Genesis. Yes. I add the actual buttons,
1:15:47SPEAKERbut the loopy is a funky, funky system for sure. Yeah. I was really hoping to see a PlayStation
1:15:51SPEAKERtwo or three running Linux there. Could you run Linux on the two too? Yes, yes. They put
1:15:56SPEAKERout a, in fact, like I watched a video, a YouTube video on this recently. It's like
1:16:00SPEAKERliterally a PlayStation two looking case. Like it's a game case, you know, like it's
1:16:04SPEAKERgot the PlayStation two logo at the top, just like a game, a PS2 game, but it's Linux on
1:16:10SPEAKERthe cover and not a video game. What's the logo for Linux? Was it like Slackware or something?
1:16:15SPEAKERWhy were they running on a PS2? I don't know. Actually. It's probably PlayStation Linux.
1:16:20SPEAKERIt might've been their own, their own distribution that they put together at that point. I should
1:16:25SPEAKERput together like a greatest hits, like game case for it. It's like, Oh, sold a million
1:16:30SPEAKERcopies and now you can get it. If I can shill our discord very quickly because this is the
1:16:37SPEAKERkind of discord we have a user in the Linux channel, like not three days ago, came on
1:16:41SPEAKERthere showing off the PS3 there, his own custom distro he had put together to run on a PS3.
1:16:48SPEAKEROh, that's awesome. With like up-to-date kernel and everything, like really impressive stuff.
1:16:53SPEAKERYeah. The tech pod discord is a very fun place to hang out. I will shill as well.
1:17:00SPEAKERWell, that's kind of everything we had from the, from the festival proper upstairs.
1:17:05SPEAKERYeah. It's, I mean, it's so we've talked about it before, but the computer history museum,
1:17:10SPEAKERif you're in the Bay area ever for, for like a trip or whatever is worth making the trip
1:17:14SPEAKERdown to Mountain View for it's pretty remarkable. Everything from like the hand, I guess is
1:17:20SPEAKERthe Babbage engine still there. It was there the last time I was there, but I think I feel
1:17:24SPEAKERlike that was a temporary loan.
1:17:26SPEAKERI think it's still there. So they, they like kind of walk you through the history of computing
1:17:31SPEAKERand it's in that very first room that you walk into.
1:17:35SPEAKERIt's a giant mechanical computer that like we didn't, they couldn't manufacture with
1:17:40SPEAKERthe technology of them. They, a few years ago, people assembled one in, in, in the Bay
1:17:45SPEAKERarea. And it was on display there all the way through you know, the complete, the complete,
1:17:50SPEAKERit's the complete history. It's like you said, it starts from there. It starts from the beginning
1:17:54SPEAKERand works all the way up through the eighties and nineties and 2000s up to, I assume there's
1:17:58SPEAKERlike iPhones and iPads and stuff there now.
1:18:00SPEAKEROh yeah. Yeah. Modern game, modern game consoles, the whole, the whole shebang. We did, we did
1:18:05SPEAKERkind of a quick, kind of a quick run through there. At the, at the end of our day, I will
1:18:10SPEAKERsay you could spend an entire day just in this museum, like vintage computer festival,
1:18:15SPEAKERnot withstanding just the museum itself. Oh, there was an absolute ton of stuff to look
1:18:19SPEAKERat in there. If I could just very quickly rattle off some of the highlights for me that
1:18:22SPEAKERwe saw in there, a chunk of ENIAC or ENIAC. I've never known how what's the, is there
1:18:27SPEAKERan accepted pronunciation?
1:18:28SPEAKERI always said ENIAC.
1:18:31SPEAKERMy grandmother said ENIAC. She worked for the DOD in the fifties on computers. I don't
1:18:35SPEAKERthink she worked on ENIAC, but she worked on the UNIVAC machines that followed.
1:18:39SPEAKERRight. I'm sure she was adjacent enough to it to know. Yeah. They had a chunk of, I mean,
1:18:44SPEAKERdoes that kind of accept it as the first like big computer or close to it?
1:18:48SPEAKERNo, there was like the bomb and there's other things that were computers before that, but
1:18:52SPEAKERthat was maybe the first programmable computer. I can't remember. There's a, I'm not a computer
1:18:56SPEAKERhistory guy.
1:18:57SPEAKERRight. Yeah. There's, there's, there's something that is a first about it anyway. It was the
1:19:00SPEAKERsize of a giant room and they have a big chunk of that there. They also have an entire Cray
1:19:04SPEAKERthere. I don't know what model it was, but it was, it's basically the one from sneakers
1:19:08SPEAKERwith the bench seating coming off of it. I think it was like a 1975 model that they said
1:19:12SPEAKERat the time was the fastest computer in the world.
1:19:14SPEAKERYeah.
1:19:15SPEAKERSo that was cool to see.
1:19:16SPEAKERAnd they had like some panels were clear so you could see inside and you just like look
1:19:20SPEAKERat the wiring inside it and it was just maddening. Like I can't imagine troubleshooting. It's
1:19:25SPEAKERlike, Oh, this tiny wire that's one of millions is like frayed or something.
1:19:30SPEAKERTerrifying.
1:19:31SPEAKERWhat's it black?
1:19:32SPEAKERIs it the black one? That's the one a yeah. Okay. It's it's the wiring loom inside is
1:19:37SPEAKERa nightmare. It looks, it looks like, it looks like it did. Whoever did that as a bad person,
1:19:43SPEAKERI'm just going to say I'm looking at it and I'm, I'm, I'm having horrible feelings inside
1:19:48SPEAKERright now.
1:19:49SPEAKEROh yeah. Actually, I mean, like I said, I'll link all this stuff, but computerhistory.org
1:19:53SPEAKERhas a bunch of pictures of some of their exhibits and you can see this, this Cray right there
1:19:57SPEAKERwith the God awful rat's nest of wires in there. They had a, they had a ton of hardware
1:20:03SPEAKERthat we won't have to get into too much from the sort of forties fifties era of, Hey, computers
1:20:08SPEAKERare useful in defense. We're going to start making a lot of automated stuff for, you know,
1:20:12SPEAKERmissile guidance, whatever, whatever. The reason that was notable to me, I took a picture
1:20:16SPEAKERof there was a specific IBM console and I think a lot of them had stuff like this. It
1:20:21SPEAKERhad a rotary dial on it, like a phone for one thing. But the more interesting part to
1:20:25SPEAKERme was that it had an ashtray and a car style cigarette lighter built right into the console.
1:20:29SPEAKERThey probably, that was probably an upsell, honestly. You think about it though, you think
1:20:34SPEAKERthat you're, you're on the 24 seven watch and you don't want, you don't want the soldier
1:20:40SPEAKERwhose fingers on the button to, to not be nicotine up. Right. It's really warm taking
1:20:45SPEAKERsmoke breaks. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So just smoke at the console. Why not? And you know, it
1:20:50SPEAKEReven had like the ashtray had like the little prompts to hold the cigarette, right? It's
1:20:54SPEAKERjust, okay, this is a different time. Cigarettes are a very important part of 20th century
1:20:59SPEAKERhistory. It's just how you just, yeah. I was just, I was just picturing there like so many,
1:21:04SPEAKERso many guys in short white button up shirts with ties and crew cuts, smoking cigarettes,
1:21:09SPEAKERthose consoles. Yeah. Or, or it was like uniform military guys, right? Yeah. Yeah. In the area
1:21:16SPEAKERwith the Cray, I kind of had to laugh at this. There was a, there was what they called the
1:21:19SPEAKERIntel personal supercomputer from 1985, the IPSC. I don't, I don't have diverted this
1:21:25SPEAKERone before it was a giant tower that had 128, two 86 is in it. Oh wow. Which I just had
1:21:32SPEAKERto laugh at. I don't know. I thought that was very amusing. Total, total speed of two
1:21:35SPEAKERmega flops. That's a lot of mega flops for back then for 1985. Sure. Yeah. The little
1:21:42SPEAKERcard next to it described it as having 16 MW of memory, which I assume is like million
1:21:47SPEAKERwords of memory. Cause I think didn't they, didn't they rate memory capacity in words
1:21:51SPEAKERat one time? I don't remember that in the two 86 era, but yeah, it seemed this thing
1:21:55SPEAKERwas just like, okay, what, how can we make the fastest things using like off the shelf
1:22:00SPEAKERCPU's and let's just shove 128 of these in there. Yeah. Well, back then that would have
1:22:05SPEAKERbeen a kind of ridiculous thing to do. And then it very quickly became just the, the
1:22:09SPEAKERway supercomputers worked. Yeah. Yeah. Steve, you, you pointed out this Neiman Marcus Honeywell
1:22:15SPEAKERkitchen computer. Yeah. I mean, this is very much like the not too distant future Jetsons
1:22:20SPEAKERthing where it was a computer that had a business function, but then they also had it in the
1:22:26SPEAKERNeiman Marcus catalog geared towards consumers. And you kind of see it as this swooping shape,
1:22:32SPEAKERbut it has a built in cutting board on the front. And so, but it's display is just lights.
1:22:39SPEAKERSo they're like, Oh, you can put like recipes in here. It's like, well, what is like on
1:22:43SPEAKERoff on, on, on, off. Right. And so yeah. And so there was, it was just like this really
1:22:51SPEAKERweird thing. And it even says in the display, they didn't actually sell any of them to consumers,
1:22:56SPEAKERbut it was marketed and you could actually pick it up. And as part of the purchase price,
1:23:00SPEAKERwhich I think it was like $10,000 at the time, it actually came with free programming classes.
1:23:06SPEAKERSo you could buy this computer for your kitchen that looks amazing. And that's what I should
1:23:12SPEAKERhave run out of the museum with and put that in my kitchen.
1:23:15SPEAKERYou see a teletype to get the recipes out. That's, that's clearly the solution for this
1:23:20SPEAKERproblem.
1:23:21SPEAKEROf course. Yeah. Teletype in the kitchen makes sense.
1:23:23SPEAKERYeah. This is just a tiny sample of, I mean, there's hundreds of exhibits in the computer
1:23:28SPEAKERhistory museum proper there. They had an entire intact CPU wafer you could see, which was,
1:23:33SPEAKERwhich was a bunch of Itanium CPUs, which I have to laugh at because that was famously
1:23:37SPEAKERIntel's failed architecture that nobody bought outside of like business customers who were
1:23:41SPEAKERcommitted to it.
1:23:42SPEAKERI think everybody has the same reaction when they see their wafer of Itaniums at the computer
1:23:46SPEAKERhistory museum, which is, oh yeah, of course, Intel gave them a failed Itanium wafer.
1:23:51SPEAKERYup. Yup. It's Frisbees.
1:23:53SPEAKERYes. They have the very first, like the legendary Pong prototype machine from HandyCaps. And
1:23:58SPEAKERwhere was that in the South Bay?
1:24:00SPEAKERIn Sunnyvale.
1:24:01SPEAKERSunnyvale.
1:24:02SPEAKERAnd he has the coin box on the side and you know, it's the thing that kind of kicked it
1:24:06SPEAKERall off and, and it's kind of a skew, right? It's very clearly like a one, one off. But
1:24:13SPEAKERyou know, and that's the thing that launched in the industry. So it was, it was very cool
1:24:16SPEAKERto see one that launched, I guess, computer spaces before that.
1:24:19SPEAKERYes, for sure. Now they had like more SGI workstations and stuff. They had an eighties
1:24:22SPEAKERera Pixar workstation, which I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of. It was huge.
1:24:27SPEAKERI don't know.
1:24:28SPEAKERYeah, it was this giant cube.
1:24:31SPEAKERThree or four square foot box.
1:24:32SPEAKERYeah. And it had like this, like almost like stone facade that said Pixar on the front.
1:24:40SPEAKERAnd so we were kind of curious what hardware was sitting in there.
1:24:42SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. They didn't say, I guess that was, that was way, you know, it was 10 years
1:24:46SPEAKERbefore Toy Story. That was in the, what's the little lamp mascot?
1:24:49SPEAKERLuxo.
1:24:50SPEAKERLuxo. Yeah. In that era, which was cool to see. They have a bunch of the Xerox parks.
1:24:56SPEAKERSo like the Xerox Alto, which is the machine that came out of the Palo Alto research center
1:25:00SPEAKERthat led to the GUI and the mouse and ethernet and all that stuff.
1:25:03SPEAKERYeah.
1:25:04SPEAKERThey also have the Utah teapot there. If you're interested in 3D graphics, it's just a white
1:25:09SPEAKERteapot. It looks like a normal, it's a normal, normal teapot, but it's the one that he used
1:25:14SPEAKERto that Martin Newell used to do the first three dimensional, one of the early three
1:25:19SPEAKERdimensional graphics for benchmarking purposes.
1:25:22SPEAKERYeah. I mean, just amazing artifacts. Right. And the fact that it's the companies were
1:25:27SPEAKERcoming out of, you know, here, right out of the Bay area and fortunately decided, thought
1:25:32SPEAKERto preserve some of these things and have the resources.
1:25:36SPEAKERThat's really cool.
1:25:37SPEAKERYeah. They have that, that, that mouse from, from Xerox park, made out of wood and you
1:25:42SPEAKERcan see the two rollers are just like little wheels underneath.
1:25:45SPEAKERYep. Yep. It's there. It's worth going to it's computer history museum. So they do this
1:25:51SPEAKERevery year, the vintage computer festival, right? This is an annual event.
1:25:54SPEAKEROr, well, like I said, they do a lot of them actually. So there's it seems like on their
1:25:59SPEAKERwebsite, they maybe remove the events as they happen. So I can't see what's happened this
1:26:03SPEAKERyear prior to the Bay area one, but like I said, there is there's one coming up in Chicago,
1:26:08SPEAKERlike soon, like September 7th, I want to say I'm trying to find it.
1:26:13SPEAKERYeah. And I've seen coverage of those shows. I would recommend if what we're talking about
1:26:17SPEAKERseems interesting to you, I think that this show would definitely be interesting to you.
1:26:21SPEAKERAnd each of them has their own flavor, right? Like obviously they all can't be held in the
1:26:25SPEAKERcomputer history museum and you know, there's different slants, but you all, you still have
1:26:30SPEAKERthat enthusiasm. Right. And like, I think I saw one of them from one of the East coast
1:26:34SPEAKERshows, it was a guy who collected a bunch of like those Acer Aspires. Right. And you're
1:26:39SPEAKERlike, why would you do that? It was like, well, it was a really interesting, it was
1:26:42SPEAKERlike frog design and you know, they were kind of doing a bunch of stuff. And so here's what
1:26:46SPEAKERthat experience is like. So if anything, you're going to be hanging out with a bunch of fellow
1:26:50SPEAKERnerds who are equally, if not more passionate than you are about stuff.
1:26:55SPEAKERWe'll see. I have found a list. There's, let's see, they do it in New Jersey. They do it
1:27:00SPEAKERin Southern California. I'm not sure where. There's one in Dallas. There is one, like
1:27:07SPEAKERI said, in Atlanta, there's the one coming up in Chicago. So yeah, it's again, I'll link
1:27:11SPEAKERall this stuff, vcfed.org for this organization that has all that information.
1:27:18SPEAKERCool. Well, Steve, thank you so much for coming by and talk about old computers. So this has
1:27:22SPEAKERbeen a blast. Thank you. Thank you. Your expertise is invaluable in talking about this stuff.
1:27:27SPEAKERWell thank you for having me. It's always been, it's a pleasure. And I was like sharing
1:27:32SPEAKERevents like this and hopefully you get more people to attend. And you know, Brad, if you
1:27:37SPEAKERwant to start doing your PlayStation three Linux display for next year, you can start
1:27:42SPEAKERright now. We've started putting together a table for you.
1:27:45SPEAKERFrom attendee to exhibitor in one year. That might be doable.
1:27:49SPEAKERYou can do it. Speed run. It's fine.
1:27:51SPEAKERSure.
1:27:52SPEAKERYeah. Steve, where can people find you if they want to find out more about what you're
1:27:55SPEAKERup to? You're busy on preservation.
1:27:57SPEAKERYeah. So the Video Game History Foundation is gamehistory.org and you can find me on
1:28:04SPEAKERBlue Sky under Steve Lin. And I post stuff, including the Sidewalk TV that I just repaired.
1:28:11SPEAKERSo you can see the whole process of getting that working.
1:28:14SPEAKERFantastic. Well, thank you so much. And, and we appreciate you coming by. Thanks. Thanks
1:28:18SPEAKERSteve.
1:28:19SPEAKERCool. Thanks for having me.
1:28:22SPEAKERThanks again to Steve Lin for coming by. You can find Steve at the Video Game History Foundation
1:28:26SPEAKERand where all people have questions about old computers and old video games. Brad, it's
1:28:32SPEAKERthe time of the show. When we talk about the listener supported nature of Brad and Will
1:28:36SPEAKERMade a Tech Pod.
1:28:37SPEAKERIt's a listener supported podcast. I understand.
1:28:39SPEAKERYeah. Well, a hundred percent listener supported. We would not be here without the support of
1:28:43SPEAKERgenerous listeners just like you. If you would like to find out how you can support the Tech
1:28:48SPEAKERPod, you can go to patreon.com/techpod. Again, that's patreon.com/techpod. And for as little
1:28:55SPEAKERas five bucks a month, you gain access to the fabulous Tech Pod Discord, where people
1:28:58SPEAKERtalk about Brad's cheese predilections all day long, around the clock, 24/7.
1:29:03SPEAKEREverybody's got their own cheese predilections. Okay.
1:29:06SPEAKERPeople were really upset about your dislike of American cheese. I've like, it wasn't angry,
1:29:10SPEAKERbut they were, they were disconcerted by it. They were, they were...
1:29:13SPEAKERMaybe there's a selection bias, but I feel, I thought, I thought it was about 50/50 for
1:29:16SPEAKERand against.
1:29:17SPEAKERI mean, look, I was shocked that anyone cared about American cheese that much, but here
1:29:23SPEAKERwe are. But yeah, you, you, you can gain access to the Discord. You get access to the monthly
1:29:27SPEAKERpatron exclusive episodes and just join a lovely community of nerds that are just like
1:29:33SPEAKERyou and highly, highly recommend it. So you can go to patreon.com/techpod for that. We
1:29:39SPEAKERlook, there's some drama in the world of Patreon this week. I don't know. People probably paying
1:29:44SPEAKERattention. Some people aren't. There's due charges coming. If you subscribe through the
1:29:50SPEAKERiOS app in November, whether we want them or not, we're looking at some other alternatives
1:29:54SPEAKERas a result of that, but the Patreon will run for the foreseeable future. So yeah.
1:29:59SPEAKERYeah. So I think we can say pretty confidently, do not, do not support us or anybody else
1:30:04SPEAKERon Patreon through iOS because you will pay 30% more to do so.
1:30:08SPEAKERWell, if you open Safari and go to patreon.com and then type tech pod and don't click open
1:30:13SPEAKERthe app, then you're fine. It's only in the app. It's very stupid.
1:30:17SPEAKERThe iOS app in particular. Yes.
1:30:19SPEAKERYeah. It's the thing Tim Epic was complaining about, about Fortnite over the last few years.
1:30:23SPEAKERAnd it's the kind of thing I would have thought that they would have stopped doing because
1:30:25SPEAKERit's costing them a lot of money. But what do I know anyway? That that's it on that front.
1:30:32SPEAKERAs always, we want to thank all of our listeners for supporting the show, but we want to give
1:30:36SPEAKERan extra special thank you to our executive producer tier patrons, including Andrew Slosky,
1:30:41SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games makers of Fractured Veil, Jordan Lippett, Bunny Fiend can't teach you
1:30:46SPEAKERhow to ride a bike. It's good cause I already know how to ride a bike. Twinkle Twinkie,
1:30:50SPEAKERDavid Allen, James Cammack, and Pantheon makers of the HS3 high speed 3d printer. Thank you
1:30:56SPEAKERalso so much.
1:30:57SPEAKERYes, thank you.
1:30:58SPEAKERAnd I guess on that note, we will go back to our modern computers, our, our computers
1:31:03SPEAKERof the current era without any diagonal up and to the left keys or a weird LCD screens.
1:31:12SPEAKERCardinal directions only here in the 21st century.
1:31:14SPEAKERYep. Our, our personal computers, our apples, no apricots here, just doing normal computer
1:31:20SPEAKERstuff. And we will be back next week with another edition of the tech pod. Thank you
1:31:24SPEAKERall so much. And we will see you then. Bye everybody.