329: A Plaid Decade

00:00SPEAKER- How many orbs do you have?

00:03SPEAKER- I like to ponder them, is all I know, Brad.

00:05SPEAKER- Look, I've got so many orbs over here,

00:07SPEAKERI can't ponder them all anymore.

00:08SPEAKERI've got 18,000 and change, I think now.

00:12SPEAKER- What?

00:13SPEAKER- Roughly?

00:14SPEAKER- Okay, so you asked this this morning.

00:17SPEAKERI became aware of orbs about 45 seconds

00:19SPEAKERbefore you got on the call

00:20SPEAKER'cause I got a notification from Discord that was like,

00:23SPEAKERhey man, what's up with your orbs?

00:25SPEAKER- Wait, you didn't even know about orbs before?

00:27SPEAKER- I did not know about orb exclusive frames on Discord.

00:31SPEAKER- Wait, you've got a weird vanity name effect on Discord.

00:35SPEAKERI assumed you spent orbs to get that.

00:37SPEAKER- No, that's a perk.

00:39SPEAKERI got a note that was like,

00:41SPEAKERhey man, what's your orb sitch or your perk sitch?

00:45SPEAKERAnd it just was like, you can change your name if you want.

00:47SPEAKERI was like, oh, okay, cool, I'll change my name.

00:48SPEAKERThat sounds great.

00:49SPEAKER- We are not actually advocating for Discord orbs here.

00:52SPEAKERIt's probably a bad thing.

00:54SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they're bad.

00:55SPEAKER- To be talking about here,

00:56SPEAKERI have 18,200 orbs currently.

01:00SPEAKERI've never spent money on orbs to be clear.

01:02SPEAKER- Do you know how many orbs I have?

01:03SPEAKER- How many do you have?

01:04SPEAKER- Zero.

01:05SPEAKER- Man, what?

01:06SPEAKER- I got an orb deficit.

01:08SPEAKER- Like an orb millionaire over here.

01:10SPEAKER- Well, we have people in the Discord who do this,

01:12SPEAKERbut I know other people who do it too,

01:13SPEAKERpeople who do all the Microsoft quests

01:16SPEAKERto get free Xbox Live Ultimate.

01:18SPEAKER- Yeah, I think they've tamped that stuff down a little bit.

01:21SPEAKERMy impression is you can't quite earn as much

01:23SPEAKERin the way of free Microsoft services as you used to,

01:26SPEAKERbut I'm sure there's still ways to game that system.

01:28SPEAKER- So people, when I complained

01:31SPEAKERthat I wasn't going to jump through hoops

01:32SPEAKERto keep Windows 10 alive,

01:33SPEAKERpeople were like, "Oh, you just have to click

01:35SPEAKERon like three things to get enough points

01:37SPEAKERto turn on Windows 10 for one more year."

01:40SPEAKERAnd then I went and did it and I was like,

01:41SPEAKER"Oh yeah, it really was like clicking on three things."

01:43SPEAKERAnd then I had the 1,000 points or whatever it was.

01:46SPEAKERBut yeah, like, I don't know, man,

01:48SPEAKERthis all feels like, it feels like,

01:51SPEAKER"Hey, what if we turn frequent flyer miles

01:54SPEAKERinto an even more hellish system

01:56SPEAKERthat's tied to your digital online presence?"

01:59SPEAKER- Yeah, it's bad.

02:00SPEAKERMy propensity for every time Discord offers me a video quest,

02:03SPEAKERI can't believe I'm,

02:05SPEAKERsee, I'm screwing up by even using the word quest here.

02:07SPEAKERI'm playing into their game.

02:09SPEAKERBut every time they're like,

02:10SPEAKER"Hey, watch a 30-second trailer and get 700 orbs,"

02:14SPEAKERI just click play and then go back to the other monitor

02:16SPEAKERuntil it's over.

02:17SPEAKERAnd then I have enough orbs to buy the Christmas lights

02:19SPEAKERavatar frame around the holidays.

02:22SPEAKER- Is this our fault?

02:23SPEAKER- Did we do this? - Probably, probably.

02:25SPEAKER- 'Cause I feel like- - Wait, whose fault?

02:27SPEAKER- Us.

02:27SPEAKERWhen we were in Whiskey Media in the basement

02:30SPEAKERand Dave was like,

02:30SPEAKER"Hey, what if we added achievements to the websites?"

02:33SPEAKER- Oh man.

02:34SPEAKER- And then we added achievements to the websites.

02:36SPEAKER- Yeah, you're not entirely, well, okay, okay, look,

02:39SPEAKERachievements existed prior to that.

02:41SPEAKERAlso, we didn't monetize the achievements.

02:43SPEAKERI'm gonna say we were-

02:44SPEAKER- We kind of monetized the achievements,

02:46SPEAKERbut not on the user.

02:47SPEAKERWe used them to drive people to pages that were like,

02:51SPEAKERthat had advertising campaigns attached to them

02:53SPEAKERand stuff like that.

02:54SPEAKER- All three advertising campaigns we ran

02:57SPEAKERin the duration of that entire business.

02:58SPEAKER- It wasn't a wildly successful business, but-

03:01SPEAKER- I'm gonna say we were a link in a very long chain

03:04SPEAKERthat led to where we are.

03:05SPEAKER- Okay, fair, I'll take that.

03:07SPEAKER- But I don't know.

03:09SPEAKERWe're not history's greatest monsters,

03:11SPEAKERbut probably in there somewhere.

03:13SPEAKER- Why do they name them orbs?

03:15SPEAKERIt's so weird and creepy.

03:16SPEAKER- Because every other common noun in the English language

03:19SPEAKERhas already been used

03:20SPEAKERfor at least one micro transaction currency.

03:22SPEAKER- Oh, man.

03:23SPEAKER- What else you got?

03:24SPEAKER- Money balls, money balls.

03:26SPEAKER- Yeah, tokens, jelly beans.

03:29SPEAKER- Yeah.

03:30SPEAKER- Seeds.

03:31SPEAKER- Buffy.

03:32SPEAKER- If you had a micro transaction currency,

03:34SPEAKERwhat would you call it?

03:35SPEAKER- Man, what's the most important thing in my house?

03:37SPEAKERProbably the maple syrup.

03:38SPEAKER- Mm, how much syrup you got?

03:41SPEAKER- Can never have enough syrup, Brad.

03:43SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:52SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

04:11SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."

04:13SPEAKERI'm Will.

04:14SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.

04:15SPEAKER- Hi, hello.

04:16SPEAKERIt is, as we're recording this,

04:19SPEAKERit is now finally March, 2026,

04:22SPEAKERthe year that I've been waiting for for 25 years.

04:24SPEAKER- Oh?

04:25SPEAKER- The month I've been waiting for for 25 years.

04:28SPEAKER- Why is that?

04:29SPEAKER- Well, because 25 years ago,

04:31SPEAKERsomething magical happened.

04:33SPEAKERIt set, in its course,

04:36SPEAKERit set a chain of events that was impossible to predict

04:40SPEAKERthat ended with us teaching computers to lie

04:42SPEAKERand all sorts of other bad downstream consequences

04:45SPEAKERthat we don't need to get into

04:46SPEAKER'cause no bummers this week.

04:48SPEAKERThis is a fun one, everybody.

04:49SPEAKERWe're not gonna talk about how expensive RAM is.

04:51SPEAKER- Well- - Except for in a,

04:53SPEAKERoh man, look, you could get 64 megabytes of RAM for $128.

04:57SPEAKER- Oh, way less than that, actually.

05:00SPEAKER- Yeah. - I flagged an ad here,

05:02SPEAKERwhich is to say it's another retro magazine week.

05:04SPEAKER- Yeah. - Here.

05:05SPEAKERBut there's an occasion to it, and I mean,

05:08SPEAKERdid you actually know this anniversary was coming up

05:10SPEAKERor did you discover this anniversary was coming up

05:12SPEAKERin the course of trying to find a topic for this week?

05:15SPEAKER- I, so about, I guess on the GeForce,

05:19SPEAKERI can't remember, it might be the 30 series launch,

05:22SPEAKERNvidia had me do a sponsored stream.

05:24SPEAKER- Oh, right, yes, when you went through tech demos, right?

05:27SPEAKER- And I loaded up all the old tech demos.

05:29SPEAKERAnd when that happened, I was like, oh man,

05:32SPEAKERwhat's the next milestone

05:33SPEAKERso we can talk about why the GeForce 3 matters?

05:35SPEAKERAnd, 'cause that was the Chameleon demo.

05:37SPEAKER- Can I just pause briefly and say,

05:40SPEAKERI can't believe they paid you to do that

05:41SPEAKERbecause if I had thought of that stream,

05:44SPEAKERI would have like, I started to say,

05:46SPEAKERlike crawled over broken glass.

05:48SPEAKERThat's maybe a little extreme,

05:49SPEAKERbut I would have gone to length to do that stream for free.

05:52SPEAKER- We can do it again 'cause I didn't archive it

05:55SPEAKERand it's like a dumb ass and it's gone forever

05:58SPEAKER'cause you too, 'cause Twitch.

05:59SPEAKER- I mean, I have powerful nostalgia

06:02SPEAKERfor a bunch of those GeForce tech demos

06:04SPEAKERfrom back in the day.

06:05SPEAKER- Well, so both the GeForce ones and the Radeon ones,

06:07SPEAKERthey both did really neat stuff.

06:08SPEAKERLike the AMD did one that was like

06:10SPEAKERone of those marble machines that was incredible.

06:13SPEAKERIt was-

06:15SPEAKER- Sorry, was it easy to run

06:16SPEAKERthe other vendors tech demos on your card?

06:19SPEAKERLike could you, was it easy to run ATI demos

06:20SPEAKERon an Nvidia card?

06:21SPEAKERI don't remember how specific that stuff was.

06:23SPEAKER- In the old days, no, in the modern era, yes.

06:26SPEAKER'Cause I ran emulated, yeah, yeah.

06:28SPEAKERLike the, yeah, they're all super sets.

06:31SPEAKER- Back then, back then they were probably all using

06:33SPEAKERlike custom written straight to the metal

06:35SPEAKERor using custom vendor APIs or something.

06:37SPEAKER- So at the era, so this was,

06:40SPEAKERfor all intents and purposes in my memory,

06:42SPEAKERthis was the beginning of the good demo era.

06:44SPEAKERAnd part of it was because each of the cards

06:48SPEAKERfor the next like five or six years

06:50SPEAKERwould have their own versions

06:51SPEAKERof the programmable shader components.

06:54SPEAKERSo like Nvidia had their own programmable shader branch

06:58SPEAKERof the DirectX shader hardware.

07:01SPEAKERAMD had one, 3D labs makers of the,

07:04SPEAKERof the like workstation cards had one.

07:09SPEAKERMatrox and AMD shared one, I guess.

07:12SPEAKERAnd Nvidia had different ones

07:14SPEAKERfor different revs of the cards, so.

07:15SPEAKER- Right.

07:16SPEAKER- So if you were trying to run a DirectX,

07:19SPEAKERsorry, a shader model 1.4,

07:21SPEAKERa pixel shader model 1.4 piece of software

07:25SPEAKERon a pixel shader 1.1 card,

07:28SPEAKERit either would be very not performant

07:30SPEAKERor it just wouldn't work, so yeah.

07:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I think we buried the lead here.

07:34SPEAKERThe anniversary is the 25th anniversary

07:37SPEAKERof the launch of the GeForce 3,

07:38SPEAKERwhich like I think we can pretty objectively say

07:41SPEAKERushered in the modern era of 3D graphics.

07:43SPEAKER- Yeah, it was the first programmable shader card.

07:45SPEAKERSo it was like up until that point,

07:47SPEAKERgraphics pipelines were fixed function,

07:48SPEAKERwhich meant you sent, in the beginning,

07:51SPEAKERyou sent triangles and vertices and textures in,

07:54SPEAKERand then the textures got wrapped around the vertices

07:57SPEAKERand around the polygons.

08:00SPEAKERAnd then like things got blasted out

08:03SPEAKERunder your CRT from there.

08:05SPEAKERAnd there wasn't a whole lot,

08:06SPEAKERlike there was a lot of math happening,

08:07SPEAKERbut it was all fixed function matrix math.

08:09SPEAKERAnd there wasn't like,

08:11SPEAKERthere wasn't the opportunity for developers

08:14SPEAKERto really manipulate things like what's on the textures

08:17SPEAKERor how the textures behave

08:19SPEAKERafter they were sent to the graphics card, right?

08:22SPEAKERIt was, once you put frames into that pipeline,

08:25SPEAKERit came out.

08:25SPEAKERAnd in a lot of ways, it was a much simpler time

08:27SPEAKERbecause like how fast the card could process frames

08:32SPEAKERwas really dependent on things like the clock speed

08:35SPEAKERof the main chip and the graphics processing chip

08:39SPEAKERand the texture units, right?

08:41SPEAKERAnd how fast the memory was.

08:43SPEAKERSo there wasn't a whole lot of variability.

08:44SPEAKERThere wasn't different math happening

08:45SPEAKERon different pixels, really.

08:47SPEAKERIt was just, we're putting this many textures on the scene.

08:49SPEAKERWe're putting this many polygons on the scene.

08:51SPEAKERAnd we're overlaying this many polygons

08:54SPEAKERwith this many different texture passes.

08:56SPEAKERThere'd be like a base color path.

08:58SPEAKERThere'd be a lighting path.

08:59SPEAKERThere'd be maybe a shininess path,

09:02SPEAKERlike stuff like that.

09:03SPEAKERBut it wasn't complicated.

09:04SPEAKER- Right, I mean, the ultimate consequence of that

09:06SPEAKERis that there wasn't a lot of variation

09:07SPEAKERin the way games looked, right?

09:08SPEAKER'Cause there was a pretty narrow range of functionality

09:11SPEAKERthat developers had to work with at the time.

09:13SPEAKER- Well, I mean, yes and no.

09:15SPEAKERPart of it was that there weren't

09:16SPEAKERthat many people making 3D games.

09:18SPEAKERThere weren't like, it wasn't like today

09:20SPEAKERwhere you get 65 games released every day on Steam, right?

09:23SPEAKERIt was, and with that comes 65 different viewpoints.

09:26SPEAKERBack then, you'd get five or six shooters

09:30SPEAKERon a really good year that were kind of worth playing.

09:33SPEAKERAnd yeah, like your color palettes were limited

09:36SPEAKER'cause people were doing software rendering

09:37SPEAKERand like the number of colors you could show was limited

09:39SPEAKERand stuff like that.

09:41SPEAKERSo the GeForce 3 was a really, was a big deal.

09:43SPEAKERAnd we knew it at the time, like, so this was,

09:47SPEAKERI'd been at Maximum PC at this point for almost a year.

09:50SPEAKERI think I started writing for them in February of 2000,

09:54SPEAKERFebruary 2000 issue, and this was the April 2001 issue.

09:57SPEAKERAnd I started full-time that previous summer.

09:59SPEAKER- Let's pause here real quick.

10:00SPEAKERJust in case people haven't scrutinized the episode notes,

10:02SPEAKERwe are talking about the April 2001 issue of Maximum PC.

10:06SPEAKER- Yeah, which would have come out in March of 2001

10:09SPEAKERas a street date.

10:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I'll put the archive.org link to this issue

10:13SPEAKERin the show notes if you haven't pulled it up

10:15SPEAKERand want to follow along.

10:16SPEAKER- It's in Google Books as well,

10:17SPEAKERif you're more of a Google Booksy person.

10:19SPEAKER- Yeah, or on RetroMag, there's a lot of places

10:22SPEAKERto get old magazines out there these days.

10:24SPEAKER- Turns out, yeah.

10:25SPEAKERSo yeah, it was the NV20, which was GeForce 3,

10:30SPEAKERwas the first programmable shader card that Nvidia had made.

10:33SPEAKERIt was the first programmable shader that any card

10:35SPEAKERthat anybody had made for consumer use, right?

10:38SPEAKERIt was, that was the big deal.

10:39SPEAKER- Yeah, we're starting, I guess,

10:41SPEAKERlet's just start with the cover story here,

10:43SPEAKERwhich is on page 30 of the magazine.

10:44SPEAKER- That's why we're talking about this issue, I think.

10:46SPEAKERYeah, so that's the--

10:46SPEAKER- That's the main thing.

10:47SPEAKEROh, there's some other fun stuff to get into in here, but--

10:50SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

10:52SPEAKER- There's a good Gordon Ma on Star Trek argument sighting

10:55SPEAKERin here to get to later.

10:56SPEAKER- You want to just get, you want to get right there?

10:58SPEAKERYou want to start with that?

10:59SPEAKER- Sure, you know what?

11:00SPEAKER- Just start with the showstopper?

11:01SPEAKER- Let's start with the showstopper on page,

11:03SPEAKERit's the first page of the letters.

11:04SPEAKER- It's in the letters.

11:04SPEAKER- Yeah, page eight.

11:05SPEAKERThe first page of the letters is Gordon arguing

11:09SPEAKERwith somebody about Starfleet uniform colors.

11:12SPEAKER- He said something in the previous episode

11:16SPEAKERwhere he said that the command staff always wears gold

11:18SPEAKERand that the first six movies everybody just wears red,

11:21SPEAKERbut they were wearing those gross gray uniforms

11:23SPEAKERin Star Trek the motion picture.

11:25SPEAKERAnd Gordon was like,

11:26SPEAKER"I don't consider Star Trek the motion picture canon.

11:28SPEAKER"It's a bad episode, it's a bad episode.

11:31SPEAKER"It's out of canon, we don't talk about that."

11:34SPEAKERAnd he made up some Organian peace treaty article.

11:37SPEAKER- He responded in character basically, in universe.

11:41SPEAKERGood stuff.

11:42SPEAKER- Whenever Star Trek came up,

11:43SPEAKERwe always refer to him as Lieutenant Commander Gordon Mong,

11:45SPEAKERwhich he was annoyed because he was like,

11:47SPEAKER"By now I'd be a commander."

11:48SPEAKER- Of course he would say that.

11:50SPEAKERAnyway, all right, back to page 30.

11:53SPEAKERSo this is-

11:55SPEAKER- And we'll hit some other stuff too, just to be clear.

11:57SPEAKER- Yeah, this is like directly before the launch of the card.

12:00SPEAKERIt sounds from the sound,

12:01SPEAKERI don't think there's a release date

12:02SPEAKERmentioned in this feature,

12:03SPEAKERbut it sounds like the release is imminent of the card.

12:06SPEAKER- So yeah, the timing on this,

12:08SPEAKERlike often we've talked about print publication schedules

12:11SPEAKERa lot over the years,

12:13SPEAKERbut typically there'd be kind of,

12:17SPEAKERwe didn't do a lot of hardware covers

12:18SPEAKERbecause it was hard to get stuff

12:19SPEAKERthat wasn't already out on the web.

12:21SPEAKERAnd Nvidia really wanted a cover for this.

12:23SPEAKERSo they called and I was like,

12:25SPEAKER"Well, here's what we have to do."

12:26SPEAKERAnd they called way in advance

12:27SPEAKERand we worked out the timing.

12:29SPEAKERAnd I don't know if,

12:30SPEAKERI assume they didn't change the timing on their launch

12:32SPEAKERto line up with the new stand dates of the magazine.

12:35SPEAKERBut they were really hot to get me down and test the card

12:39SPEAKERso that it could be on the magazine covers

12:41SPEAKERwhen they did the announcement.

12:43SPEAKER- Yeah, actually Wikipedia lists the release date

12:46SPEAKERof the GeForce 3 as February 27th,

12:48SPEAKERwhich I guess is about the time this magazine

12:50SPEAKERwould have been in the stands. - That would have been about,

12:51SPEAKERright, yeah.

12:52SPEAKERYeah, so, and just so folks know,

12:55SPEAKERthe fastest we could go from writing something

12:57SPEAKERto getting it in reader's hands was about two weeks.

13:00SPEAKERSo if I wrote something- - Wow.

13:02SPEAKER- If I wrote something on-

13:03SPEAKER- That's way faster than I would have expected.

13:05SPEAKER- Well, 'cause once we were,

13:07SPEAKERby this point we were doing digital.

13:09SPEAKER- Okay, sure. - So we were just sending

13:10SPEAKERPDFs to a printer instead of having to FedEx stuff

13:12SPEAKERand we weren't FedExing film or anything anymore.

13:15SPEAKER- And then there's like a proof,

13:16SPEAKERI'm sure we've talked some of this before,

13:18SPEAKERbut was there like, I assume a proof process,

13:20SPEAKERlike you needed to get physical samples back

13:22SPEAKERor was it streamlined enough at that point

13:24SPEAKERthat you could just get it out to subscribers

13:26SPEAKERwithout ever seeing physical finished product?

13:28SPEAKER- So the print runs on these magazines

13:29SPEAKERwere like half a million at the outside.

13:32SPEAKERAnd that means that by the time FedEx

13:35SPEAKERwould get the first issue off of the printing press to us,

13:38SPEAKERthey'd already be done with the last one.

13:41SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.

13:42SPEAKER- So like once, the proving happened in the house

13:45SPEAKERbefore we sent the PDFs.

13:46SPEAKERIf we messed up anything at that point, it was too late.

13:48SPEAKER- Okay.

13:49SPEAKER- And we had, one time we did the wrong spot color

13:52SPEAKERon a cover, like a spot color is a special ink

13:55SPEAKERthat's like not a combination of the four colors.

13:57SPEAKERIt's like a color that is,

14:00SPEAKERit has a pigment that is that color

14:02SPEAKERrather than a combination of four other colors.

14:04SPEAKERAnd we picked the wrong Pantone color

14:06SPEAKERand we made a peachy kind of like a conch meat cover color.

14:12SPEAKERIt was an unfortunate choice.

14:13SPEAKERIt did not sell well.

14:14SPEAKER- Yeah, not to keep digressing too much.

14:16SPEAKERDid you ever have to worry about printer errors though?

14:19SPEAKERLike did the printer screwing things up

14:20SPEAKERor was it pretty such so dead simple

14:23SPEAKERthat that was not really a concern?

14:24SPEAKER- There would sometimes be like registration errors

14:26SPEAKERon cuts and stuff like that.

14:27SPEAKERSo like they'd print the pages right.

14:30SPEAKERThe biggest printer error that consistently would happen

14:34SPEAKERis that the last line in a column would get clipped off

14:37SPEAKERbetween the PDF and the printer.

14:40SPEAKERAnd sometimes that would happen in our phase

14:43SPEAKERwhen we were converting from Quark or InDesign to a PDF.

14:46SPEAKERSometimes that would happen in the post-PDF phase, I think.

14:50SPEAKERWe never were able to prove it.

14:52SPEAKERI, like when I was doing the proofing later on,

14:57SPEAKERthe thing that I always was the most careful about

14:59SPEAKERwas reading and making sure that every last line

15:01SPEAKERon every column was exactly right.

15:03SPEAKER'Cause like that was the most embarrassing mistake

15:05SPEAKERof all to make, I think.

15:07SPEAKERBut anyway, yeah, two weeks.

15:08SPEAKERSo if we, like our last week of the month

15:11SPEAKERwas the production week.

15:12SPEAKERThat was when we were locking all the pages down.

15:15SPEAKEREverybody was doing copy, last minute copy passes

15:17SPEAKERand content passes and stuff like that.

15:19SPEAKERAnd then they'd go to PDF and get sent to the printer.

15:24SPEAKERAnd if I wrote something that week,

15:27SPEAKERthen we could squeeze it in.

15:28SPEAKERIt was tight and it made everybody's lives miserable.

15:31SPEAKERBut as I recall, I went down on like a Thursday

15:33SPEAKERbefore the third week Thursday, tested all day Thursday,

15:37SPEAKERtested all day Friday, wrote all weekend,

15:40SPEAKERhanded that stuff in first thing on Monday morning.

15:43SPEAKERAnd then it was in people's hands

15:45SPEAKERlike two and a half weeks later.

15:46SPEAKER- Wow, so this was all at NVIDIA.

15:48SPEAKERI can't imagine they were letting the card

15:50SPEAKERout of their campus at this point.

15:52SPEAKER- So yeah, this is the only time I ever did that actually.

15:54SPEAKERUsually people brought stuff to us

15:55SPEAKERor we got like release hardware later.

15:57SPEAKER'Cause we didn't test pre-release hardware very often.

15:59SPEAKERIt generally wasn't, there was no upside to it.

16:01SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, we'll get to it later toward the end

16:03SPEAKERwhen you run benchmarks and stuff.

16:04SPEAKERThere's all these caveats in here about like,

16:06SPEAKERah, these benchmarks were done on the non-final drivers.

16:08SPEAKERThey're not really binding yet.

16:11SPEAKER- Yeah, and well, and this would have been,

16:14SPEAKERif we did this, this was three weeks before,

16:16SPEAKERthree or four weeks before the cards actually were available,

16:19SPEAKERif I had to guess.

16:19SPEAKERI don't actually have my calendar from back then.

16:21SPEAKERI should, I would probably save some place, but.

16:25SPEAKERAnd as a result, they gave me what was a final board.

16:30SPEAKERIt didn't have like weird jumpers or anything like that.

16:32SPEAKERBut it was very much a,

16:36SPEAKERit was very much the drivers are raw

16:37SPEAKERand they're games that are not gonna perform well

16:40SPEAKERin a whole host of places.

16:42SPEAKERBecause I think they were still kind of figuring out

16:44SPEAKEReven things like what they could emulate

16:46SPEAKERwith the Vertex shader versus what should run

16:49SPEAKERthrough the old T and L pipeline and stuff like that.

16:52SPEAKERAnd then they sent me home with a dead board

16:55SPEAKERthat I could take, that we could take photos of.

16:56SPEAKER'Cause that was the other hard part

16:57SPEAKERis we had to get the photography done.

16:59SPEAKER- I was about to ask if this big photo of a card

17:03SPEAKERon page 31 is the one you tested,

17:04SPEAKERbut I guess that's the dead one.

17:06SPEAKER- I think that's a dead one.

17:07SPEAKERI'm not 100%.

17:08SPEAKERThat was their reference design back then.

17:10SPEAKERThat was what they looked like.

17:11SPEAKER- Just dead and like, well, it doesn't really matter.

17:14SPEAKERI wonder if that like died in the course of their testing.

17:16SPEAKERSo they gave it to you

17:17SPEAKERor did they intentionally disable this one

17:19SPEAKERis really my question.

17:20SPEAKERWas this like a dummy sample

17:22SPEAKERthat they made sure was non-functional?

17:24SPEAKER- Well, so I didn't even plug it in.

17:25SPEAKERI didn't bother.

17:26SPEAKERI don't know.

17:27SPEAKER- I still to this day, I'm like thrown for a loop.

17:31SPEAKEREvery time I see a picture of a graphics card

17:33SPEAKERfrom this era, they just look so quaint.

17:35SPEAKERThey're so quaint.

17:36SPEAKER- They're tiny.

17:37SPEAKER- Single slot, like tiny, tiny little fan.

17:39SPEAKERLike some of them, you know,

17:40SPEAKERthe first graphics cards didn't even,

17:42SPEAKER3D graphics accelerators didn't even have fans

17:44SPEAKERor heat sinks on them.

17:45SPEAKERYou know, like so little to this.

17:48SPEAKER- In the nineties, people viewed having to have a fan

17:51SPEAKERon a processor as a detriment.

17:53SPEAKER- Yeah, that's like they failed, right?

17:55SPEAKERLike they've screwed up somewhere

17:56SPEAKERif you need active cooling on this thing.

17:57SPEAKER- Yeah, you've made it a thing that is gonna fail

17:59SPEAKERwhen the, because like you're adding a mechanical component

18:03SPEAKERthat can fail to your machine.

18:05SPEAKERThis was the first time I think I saw heat sinks on RAM though

18:07SPEAKERfor what it's worth.

18:08SPEAKER- Interesting.

18:09SPEAKER- So yeah, so the chip, the art that they did provide,

18:14SPEAKERthey gave me the block map,

18:15SPEAKERwhich was the sketchiest block map I think I've ever seen.

18:19SPEAKER- I mean, I didn't read a lot of PC hardware magazines

18:21SPEAKERat this time.

18:22SPEAKERI was surprised, frankly, I'm surprised generally

18:24SPEAKERhow technical this feature gets.

18:26SPEAKERBut also yes, seeing like kind of a block diagram

18:29SPEAKERof what's on the die was a surprise.

18:31SPEAKER- Well, this is one of the things they hired.

18:33SPEAKERLike they hired me because of my GeForce STR coverage,

18:36SPEAKERI guess two years before they wanted somebody to come in

18:38SPEAKERwho could write more technical GPU stuff.

18:42SPEAKER- Also real quick, I wrote this in the show notes.

18:44SPEAKERLike I don't think the term GPU actually appears anywhere

18:47SPEAKERin this magazine that I could find.

18:48SPEAKERI guess that hadn't caught on yet.

18:49SPEAKER- I don't think they had come up with GPU at this point.

18:52SPEAKER- So I'm trying to remember now,

18:54SPEAKERI could have sworn that the first GeForce,

18:57SPEAKERGeForce 256 was the point where they started pushing

19:00SPEAKERthe GPU term.

19:01SPEAKER- I don't think so.

19:04SPEAKER- My memory is that the term GPU was entirely an invention

19:08SPEAKERof Nvidia marketing.

19:08SPEAKER- A hundred percent, yeah.

19:11SPEAKER- Which is like, it's kind of crazy how much it's,

19:13SPEAKERit's like right up there with everybody using the term PC

19:15SPEAKERthese days, even though PC is literally

19:19SPEAKERan IBM marketing term.

19:21SPEAKER- Yeah, it's interesting cause like I don't,

19:24SPEAKERthe Wikipedia page for GPU lists a bunch of pre Nvidia cards

19:28SPEAKERas GPUs, which was absolutely not the case.

19:32SPEAKERNvidia's assertion was that,

19:35SPEAKERhey, if you're doing general purpose compute,

19:37SPEAKERif your video card processor can do compute,

19:43SPEAKERlike do actual compute math

19:44SPEAKERrather than just a fixed function pipeline,

19:46SPEAKERit became a processing unit.

19:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so my memory is that the hardware transform

19:50SPEAKERand lighting on the first GeForce is what they used

19:52SPEAKERas in rhetorically to argue that that term is appropriate.

19:56SPEAKERIt doesn't really matter.

19:57SPEAKERIt's just some fun old computer history stuff.

19:59SPEAKER- We kind of didn't like it for a long time at Maximum PC

20:02SPEAKERcause we felt like it was,

20:04SPEAKERit wasn't until other vendors started using it

20:06SPEAKERthat we started using it more regularly, if I recall.

20:09SPEAKERBut anyway, yeah, so this card, they called,

20:13SPEAKERthey wanted the cover, Jensen specifically wanted the cover.

20:17SPEAKERJensen wasn't as big a deal then as he is now, obviously.

20:22SPEAKERAnd I was like, well, here's what we have to do

20:24SPEAKERto make it work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

20:25SPEAKERWe got the video card cover, which was kind of a big bet

20:28SPEAKERcause hardware, that kind of hardware cover

20:31SPEAKERtypically didn't sell great for Maximum PC.

20:33SPEAKERIt was really risky.

20:35SPEAKERSometimes it sold really well, sometimes it didn't.

20:37SPEAKERAnd there was no way to know what was gonna be

20:40SPEAKERwhat people would like.

20:41SPEAKERSo like the Athlon, the first Athlon cover we did

20:43SPEAKERsold really well.

20:44SPEAKERAnd the Pentium 3 cover was a dog, if I recall,

20:49SPEAKERI can't remember. - Really?

20:49SPEAKER- Yeah, so.

20:51SPEAKER- What was like the most surefire,

20:53SPEAKERjust like this is going to move issues, cover,

20:55SPEAKERwas it like pre-built, like an entire machine?

20:57SPEAKER- Attractive blonde woman in a vinyl versus costume.

21:00SPEAKER- Setting that aside, I mean like subject

21:03SPEAKERmatter cover story. - How-to covers.

21:04SPEAKER- How-to, interesting.

21:05SPEAKER- Yeah, like, hey, your computer's jacked up.

21:07SPEAKERCause remember most of our newsstand sales

21:08SPEAKERwere in grocery stores.

21:09SPEAKERSo it was people walking around that were like,

21:11SPEAKERman, my windows is all jacked up.

21:13SPEAKERI got 50 toolbars on my browser.

21:15SPEAKERHow do I fix that?

21:15SPEAKERAnd if you put a cover out about that, love that.

21:18SPEAKER- I'm waiting in line to buy these bananas.

21:19SPEAKERI might as well grab this.

21:20SPEAKER- Exactly, we didn't pay for National Enquirer placement.

21:24SPEAKERAre you kidding?

21:24SPEAKERIt was back in the magazine with the hunting magazines

21:26SPEAKERand the card magazines.

21:27SPEAKER- Fair.

21:29SPEAKER- So anyway, the point is this card was a big deal.

21:34SPEAKERThey knew it was a big deal.

21:36SPEAKERI was like, hey, I'd love to get the card in the lab.

21:38SPEAKERThey're like, we're not doing that.

21:39SPEAKERYou are not gonna have final drivers.

21:40SPEAKERSo there's not a whole lot to test.

21:41SPEAKERAnd I was like, well, what if I bring a test bench down

21:43SPEAKERto you guys and we test it there?

21:46SPEAKERAnd they're like, yeah, we're totally down for that.

21:48SPEAKERWe had a whole negotiation process.

21:49SPEAKERAnd the thing we ended up doing was bringing

21:52SPEAKERmy standard video card test bench down,

21:53SPEAKERwhich was a Pentium 3 700 or 733 or something.

21:57SPEAKERAnd then also they were concerned

22:02SPEAKERcause they hadn't actually done a lot of testing

22:03SPEAKERon Pentium 3s.

22:04SPEAKERThey were concerned that it wouldn't be able to,

22:06SPEAKERlike there wasn't enough CPU horsepower

22:08SPEAKERto actually make the bottleneck the video card.

22:11SPEAKER- What were they testing on Pentium 4s?

22:13SPEAKER- Pentium 4 1.4s, I think is what their test bench was.

22:17SPEAKER- Which was like very new at the time, I believe.

22:19SPEAKERCause I mean, there's another,

22:21SPEAKERone of the other big stories in this magazine

22:22SPEAKERthat we'll touch on later is like how to prepare

22:25SPEAKERfor your P4 build.

22:27SPEAKERLike here's everything you need to know to build a new P4.

22:30SPEAKER- Yeah, so it was, Pentium 4 was new.

22:32SPEAKERIt had some weird performance issues early on

22:34SPEAKERcause it really needed higher clock speeds

22:36SPEAKERthan they were shipping to take advantage

22:38SPEAKERof the deep pipelines.

22:41SPEAKERBut the point is they wanted to run both.

22:43SPEAKERI was like, that's fine, we'll test on both.

22:44SPEAKERSo like they're giving me three benchmarks I can run.

22:46SPEAKERSo, and two of them were Quake 3.

22:49SPEAKERSo we did the, I set it up, I did the benchmarks.

22:54SPEAKERI ran both an older Hercules GeForce 2 Ultra

22:58SPEAKERand the GeForce 3 prototype on the same driver

23:02SPEAKERon the three benchmarks that would run.

23:05SPEAKERAnd yeah, that was it.

23:07SPEAKERI wrote about the art.

23:08SPEAKERI was like, we have to have benchmarks

23:09SPEAKERso we're not doing a cover story.

23:10SPEAKERAnd that was how we got benchmarks for the cover story.

23:13SPEAKERThis was before they really did like press days.

23:15SPEAKERThis was, I wanna say the GeForce 3 or the GeForce 4

23:19SPEAKERwas the first time they did a,

23:21SPEAKERhere's what we've done inside this chip.

23:24SPEAKERHere's how it works.

23:24SPEAKERHere's why it's interesting kind of pre-brief

23:28SPEAKERfor tech press.

23:29SPEAKER- I mean, this is really the era of the like very fast ramp

23:33SPEAKERon Nvidia dominance, right?

23:35SPEAKERLike my memory is TNT and TNT2 were a pretty big deal.

23:40SPEAKERThey were the first like real credible threat to 3D effects.

23:44SPEAKERThen GeForce 256 was like hardware T and L.

23:47SPEAKER- That was a huge deal and then nothing used hardware T and L.

23:50SPEAKER- I was gonna say that was a huge deal.

23:51SPEAKERWe need to get to that because that's mentioned

23:52SPEAKERin multiple places in this issue that like,

23:54SPEAKERhey, hardware T and L was supposed to be a huge deal

23:56SPEAKERand then no developer used it.

23:57SPEAKERBut then it was obviously the combination of pixel shaders

24:03SPEAKERon PC and the way Doom 3 looked.

24:05SPEAKERAnd then also as is mentioned multiple times in here,

24:08SPEAKERa version of the GeForce 3 showing up in the Xbox

24:10SPEAKERis probably, that was probably like the two prongs

24:14SPEAKERkind of attack that really made like the style

24:17SPEAKERof pixel shader institutional.

24:19SPEAKER- Well, yeah.

24:20SPEAKER- And then that's, you know, and then like from there

24:22SPEAKERNvidia was just like the thing to get basically.

24:24SPEAKEROh, well, the ATI was pretty competitive at the time.

24:26SPEAKER- They were competitive.

24:28SPEAKERThe thing that happened here,

24:31SPEAKERthe other thing that happened around this timeframe

24:33SPEAKERthat isn't in this article is that 3D FX shut down

24:35SPEAKERand was bought by Nvidia about three months before this.

24:37SPEAKERSo like the end of 2000, 3D FX shut down.

24:41SPEAKERThey had also been working on a programmable shader card

24:43SPEAKERthat was code named Rampage.

24:45SPEAKERYeah.

24:46SPEAKER- Oh, I remember the name Rampage.

24:47SPEAKER- Yeah, that was so, it's funny in doing this,

24:51SPEAKERa lot of the stuff that was a little secret

24:53SPEAKERbefore it came out, pixel shader 1.0,

24:56SPEAKERthe picture shader model 1.0 was the 3D FX part.

25:00SPEAKERPixel shader 1.1 was the GeForce 3, this card.

25:06SPEAKERPixel shader 1.2 was that 3D labs workstation chip

25:09SPEAKERthat I talked about.

25:11SPEAKERPixel shader 1.3 was the next Nvidia card,

25:15SPEAKERthe GeForce 4 stuff.

25:16SPEAKERAnd pixel shader 4, 1.4 was AMD

25:20SPEAKERand then later the matrix paralia.

25:22SPEAKER- ATI, you mean?

25:23SPEAKER- Yeah, ATI at the time.

25:25SPEAKERYeah, yeah, there was Radeon, sorry.

25:26SPEAKER- Pretty well in advance of the AMD acquisition of ATI.

25:29SPEAKER- Two years before it, yeah.

25:31SPEAKER- So I, God, I haven't thought about version shader models

25:34SPEAKERin a minute and by a minute, I mean like 30 years,

25:37SPEAKERbut like for those, so those were just being defined

25:39SPEAKERby the vendors, the card?

25:42SPEAKER- It was the classic situation of the vendor says,

25:44SPEAKER"Hey, we have hardware coming and they can do this.

25:47SPEAKERWe need to give you, you need to give us this in DirectX."

25:51SPEAKERAnd then they handed it over and Microsoft would

25:53SPEAKERbasically rubber stamp the things that they were putting in.

25:57SPEAKERBut they weren't enforcing cross-brand compatibility.

26:02SPEAKERSo basically if you were making a game

26:05SPEAKERduring this time period,

26:06SPEAKERyou had to make a shader model 1.1 and a 1.4 path

26:09SPEAKERbecause they weren't necessarily supersets of each other.

26:11SPEAKERLike 1.4 didn't include 1.1 and so on and so forth.

26:16SPEAKERSo your card ran the version for your hardware.

26:20SPEAKERNow that changed around DirectX 9 eventually

26:23SPEAKERwhen they unified the shader models, which was nice.

26:26SPEAKERCaused a whole host of other exciting problems

26:28SPEAKERthat we're not going to get into here.

26:30SPEAKER- Sure, sure.

26:31SPEAKERAnyway, like this article is again,

26:32SPEAKERlike kind of shockingly technical.

26:34SPEAKERLike you talk about,

26:37SPEAKERyou don't really get into software rendering too much,

26:39SPEAKERbut you do talk about like what the traditional

26:40SPEAKERpre graphics card doing the triangle setup era was like.

26:46SPEAKER- Yeah.

26:47SPEAKER- And then you talk about what that was like

26:48SPEAKERon the GeForce 256 when the graphics card took over

26:50SPEAKERthe basic geometry setup and then start getting

26:54SPEAKERinto vertex effects and then vertex shaders

26:57SPEAKERand pixel shaders on this card.

26:58SPEAKER- Some of it's, there's some gross oversimplifications

27:01SPEAKERin here that I kind of cringe at now.

27:03SPEAKERBut yeah, like overall I think it's a pretty good job

27:06SPEAKERof explaining how, you know, fixed function pipeline worked

27:09SPEAKERand then how these new, and just to be clear,

27:12SPEAKERthese are baby programmable pipelines.

27:14SPEAKERThis card had, I think two pixel shader units

27:17SPEAKERand one vertex shader unit or something.

27:18SPEAKERIt was incredibly rudimentary when you look at each,

27:23SPEAKERlike each operation thing in a raster pipeline,

27:28SPEAKERin a pipeline on a modern graphics card

27:30SPEAKERhas a hundred thousand times the capability of this card.

27:33SPEAKER- Like massively, massively parallel now, right?

27:36SPEAKER- Yeah, this was a 57 million transistor GPU.

27:38SPEAKERSo, and we're talking about billions of transistors

27:41SPEAKERon modern GPUs.

27:43SPEAKER- And like thousands of shader units

27:45SPEAKERor whatever the modern term is, right?

27:48SPEAKER- Yeah, but so the complicated thing about this

27:51SPEAKERis you had to explain something in a way

27:53SPEAKERthat somebody who picked up the grocery store

27:54SPEAKERand doesn't really know what computers can do

27:56SPEAKERand why they would care.

27:57SPEAKER- It reads as like pretty technical,

28:00SPEAKEReven by that standard to me, frankly.

28:02SPEAKER- Well, and at the same time we were being compared

28:03SPEAKERto like Anand Tech and Tom's Hardware

28:05SPEAKERwho were doing, you know, incredibly in-depth,

28:08SPEAKERlike, you know, transistor by transistor counts.

28:14SPEAKERAnd we did things like do infographics

28:16SPEAKERthat kind of explain where things are happening

28:18SPEAKERin the old way versus the new way and stuff like that.

28:22SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, I think I learned a little bit

28:23SPEAKERreading this, honestly.

28:24SPEAKER- Okay, I hope it was right.

28:26SPEAKERI don't know, this is a long time ago.

28:29SPEAKERDifferent me.

28:30SPEAKER- I have a very lay understanding of 3D graphics

28:32SPEAKERthat's mostly based on osmosis

28:34SPEAKERand intuiting from various things,

28:36SPEAKERbut the vertex shaders were part of the GeForce 3, correct?

28:40SPEAKER- Vertex shaders were part of the GeForce 3, yeah.

28:43SPEAKER- That is to be distinguished from the prior

28:45SPEAKERlike vertex lighting that you would see

28:47SPEAKERon older hardware, right?

28:48SPEAKER- So vertex, yeah, the difference is,

28:51SPEAKERwell, the thing that happened with this

28:53SPEAKERis they were able to do per pixel lighting.

28:55SPEAKERSo previously each vertex on a model

28:58SPEAKERwould be lit the same, right?

28:59SPEAKERSo, I mean, sorry, each polygon attached to vertices

29:03SPEAKERwould be lit the same.

29:05SPEAKER- I'm understanding this in real time.

29:06SPEAKERThe vertex shaders you're talking about on this card

29:08SPEAKERwere for kind of deforming,

29:09SPEAKERdoing operations on vertices on polygons,

29:12SPEAKERlike being able to deform them in real time

29:14SPEAKERand that kind of thing.

29:14SPEAKER- That's it, or to, it wasn't even,

29:17SPEAKERyeah, it was to programmatically describe changes.

29:19SPEAKEREventually we used vertex shaders for things like grass

29:22SPEAKERand like making things grow out of the vertices.

29:24SPEAKER- Yeah, but I guess I'm distinguishing

29:26SPEAKERfrom the prior model.

29:27SPEAKERAnd again, I'm trying to understand or unpack this

29:29SPEAKERas we discuss it where you have like fixed geometry

29:31SPEAKERthat couldn't change, but you could do operations on,

29:34SPEAKERI mean, I guess flat shading was like doing an operation

29:36SPEAKERon an entire polygon uniformly.

29:39SPEAKERAnd then vertex lighting, I guess,

29:41SPEAKERwould allow you to do gradations toward the vertices

29:43SPEAKERof individual faces, right?

29:45SPEAKEROkay.

29:46SPEAKER- Yeah, vertex lighting would let you highlight

29:49SPEAKEReach vertex individually, right?

29:52SPEAKERThe people worked around that by like,

29:55SPEAKERwhen you're talking about like light maps,

29:57SPEAKERthe light map is a pre-generated thing

29:59SPEAKERthat would run over like 48 hours in the case of Quake

30:02SPEAKERon the hardware at the time.

30:03SPEAKERAnd that would generate a texture

30:06SPEAKERthat then applies a radiance

30:09SPEAKERto the different parts of the map.

30:11SPEAKERSo light and dark areas of the map

30:12SPEAKERare basically described in that texture.

30:15SPEAKER- Yeah, and I haven't just digressed very briefly.

30:18SPEAKERI haven't watched this whole video yet,

30:20SPEAKERso I can't speak with too much specificity,

30:21SPEAKERbut I have seen part of it.

30:23SPEAKERThere's a YouTube channel called Kiwi Talks

30:25SPEAKERthat talks to a lot of developers from different spheres.

30:28SPEAKERAnd they did at least one, if not a series of videos

30:31SPEAKERwith Jack Matthews, you remember him?

30:32SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

30:33SPEAKER- Like who came out of the Quake community.

30:35SPEAKER- Was it retro and worked on Metroid Prime, yeah.

30:37SPEAKER- Yes, and it's about Metroid Prime remastered.

30:39SPEAKERAnd I went down a little bit of the like

30:41SPEAKERTwitter thread rabbit hole about this video,

30:43SPEAKERbecause part of it is him talking about

30:45SPEAKERhow certain lighting effects from Metroid Prime

30:48SPEAKERwere hard to recreate and remastered

30:51SPEAKERbecause the kind of vertex lighting techniques

30:53SPEAKERthat were trivial on that old hardware

30:55SPEAKERnow are not easy to account for.

30:58SPEAKERAnd it was actually like quite demanding.

31:01SPEAKER- Yeah, probably they had to write

31:02SPEAKERsome real nasty vertex shaders

31:04SPEAKERto mimic something that was just free in 1999.

31:07SPEAKER- That was kind of the implication

31:08SPEAKERthat I got from people discussing it.

31:11SPEAKER- So I wanna, will you link that video?

31:13SPEAKERI wanna see that video.

31:13SPEAKER- I'm not familiar with that channel, that sounds dope.

31:15SPEAKER- I'll throw that in the show notes

31:17SPEAKERthat I've just recently discovered that channel

31:19SPEAKERthat he seems to get some pretty interesting interviews

31:21SPEAKERwith different game developers.

31:23SPEAKER- So of the things that like this,

31:25SPEAKERwhat is this technology good for?

31:27SPEAKERWell, vertex shaders eventually we use

31:28SPEAKERfor stuff like grass and things like that.

31:30SPEAKERI feel like that didn't really happen

31:31SPEAKERa whole lot in this era just 'cause this was,

31:33SPEAKERthe single vertex shader was pretty limited.

31:36SPEAKERPeople were doing like mesh deformation

31:38SPEAKERand stuff like that, but not much else.

31:40SPEAKERBut the pixel shaders were a really big deal

31:42SPEAKERand kind of, not immediately

31:45SPEAKER'cause nothing was really immediately,

31:46SPEAKERbut it let you do bump mapping

31:48SPEAKERfor the first time on textures.

31:50SPEAKER- Or just to back up real quick,

31:51SPEAKERjust to extend what I was talking about before

31:53SPEAKERabout lighting on an entire polygon

31:55SPEAKERor then like the corners of polygons.

31:57SPEAKERThis moved all the lighting to the pixel level, right?

31:59SPEAKERI mean, you heard the John Carmack's of the world

32:02SPEAKERtalk about per pixel lighting a ton back at this time.

32:05SPEAKERSo that's basically applying the lighting

32:07SPEAKERto an already rendered frame geometrically, right?

32:10SPEAKEROr not frame, it's not a final frame,

32:12SPEAKERbut like- - No, but at the texture level

32:15SPEAKERrather than per polygon or per vertex, yeah.

32:18SPEAKER- Which obviously just gives you a much finer gradation

32:20SPEAKERof if each pixel can be addressed individually,

32:24SPEAKERthat gives you much more flexibility

32:26SPEAKERthan working on at the level of polygons or vertices.

32:30SPEAKER- It's weird 'cause it's still not really a simulation

32:33SPEAKERof how light works in the real world,

32:34SPEAKERbut this is one of those,

32:37SPEAKERhey, this is a really good approximation

32:38SPEAKERto the point that most people aren't gonna really notice

32:40SPEAKERthat it's just an approximation.

32:43SPEAKERAnd yeah, it worked really well.

32:45SPEAKERSo that was, this card also added multi-sampling AA

32:50SPEAKERand the QuinCux AA, which helped reduce jaggies a lot,

32:55SPEAKERwhich was important as monitors were getting,

32:57SPEAKERlike this was the era of the 19 inch CRT

32:59SPEAKERthat you were running a 1600 by 1200.

33:01SPEAKERSo you had a lot of pixels

33:03SPEAKERand they were real, real jaggy at this time period.

33:05SPEAKER- I mean, you devote an entire third of the spread

33:08SPEAKERon tech demos they showed you to the anti-aliasing,

33:11SPEAKERwhich like these days, like I saw that

33:12SPEAKERand I was like, oh, boring.

33:14SPEAKER- Let me tell you how hard it was.

33:16SPEAKER- Yeah, AA was like kind of a huge deal at this time.

33:19SPEAKER- Here's a picture of the darkest video game

33:21SPEAKERI've ever played.

33:22SPEAKERAnd we have a two inch square,

33:27SPEAKERthree two inch square images.

33:29SPEAKERHow can we illustrate this?

33:30SPEAKERThis was the first time we tried it

33:32SPEAKERand it was a disaster every time.

33:33SPEAKERThis third shot's okay,

33:35SPEAKERbut the first two were a complete waste of space.

33:37SPEAKER- Yeah, now the demos that were pretty cool though.

33:42SPEAKERWell, hold on, let's talk about the pixel shaders for a second

33:44SPEAKER'cause the dot product bump mapping was a big deal.

33:47SPEAKERThis let you do math on textures, right?

33:51SPEAKERAnd some of the math could be used to emulate,

33:53SPEAKERto create like a shadow look, dark and light sides

33:57SPEAKERso that you emulate shadows

33:58SPEAKERand you make things look a little bumpy.

34:01SPEAKERYou could make things look like both the predator

34:05SPEAKERand the Terminator by making them translucent

34:10SPEAKERwith like a kind of a shimmer or a warp on them.

34:14SPEAKERYou could also make them look like a liquid metal,

34:18SPEAKERlike the abyss or the Terminator 2 liquid metal robot.

34:23SPEAKERT-1000, T-2000, I never can remember.

34:25SPEAKER- T-1000. - T-1000, yeah.

34:28SPEAKERAnd they built a demo that showed this

34:32SPEAKER'cause there weren't any games at the time.

34:34SPEAKERThe demo was this chameleon

34:37SPEAKERthat just walked along a branch.

34:38SPEAKER- I remember the chameleon.

34:39SPEAKER- Yeah, and at first you look at him, he's flat shaded.

34:41SPEAKERFirst you see vertices, just a grid.

34:44SPEAKERThen you see him flat shaded.

34:46SPEAKERThen you see some dot product bump maps

34:48SPEAKERthat make him look like a pretty good looking lizard.

34:50SPEAKERAnd then he gets all terminated and is like translucent.

34:54SPEAKERAnd then they make him into a liquid metal,

34:57SPEAKERlike Mario 64, you know, portal pool or Terminator.

35:04SPEAKERAnd he reflects the environment around him.

35:06SPEAKERNow, look, there's a lot of cheats here

35:08SPEAKER'cause the environment was real thin.

35:09SPEAKERIt was basically just a giant box that the guy was in

35:13SPEAKERand the stick he was walking on.

35:15SPEAKER- That's all those tech demos,

35:16SPEAKERlike 100% of the processing is going into like one thing.

35:19SPEAKER- It's what I like to call the fighting game style

35:23SPEAKERof Pixel, a polygon budget,

35:26SPEAKER'cause you just apply all of your stuff

35:28SPEAKERto one or two characters.

35:29SPEAKER- Right, but if you knew what you were looking at though,

35:30SPEAKERyou could extend the time scale out to,

35:32SPEAKERI don't know what, five years or something.

35:34SPEAKERYou could look at it and say, hey,

35:35SPEAKERlike all of the entire game is going to look like this

35:38SPEAKERin five years or something.

35:39SPEAKERThis is more where things are headed

35:40SPEAKERrather than what the games are gonna look like right now.

35:44SPEAKERTo my mind, bump mapping is like probably

35:46SPEAKERa top three graphical effect

35:48SPEAKERin terms of just the sort of like eye-popping wow factor

35:51SPEAKERwhen you saw it for the first time.

35:52SPEAKER- In terms of things that have-

35:54SPEAKER- In terms of like evolution of 3D graphics.

35:56SPEAKER- Well, in terms of the things

35:57SPEAKERthat had like a measurable impact on,

35:59SPEAKERoh wow, this looks a lot better.

36:00SPEAKER- Yes, that's what I mean.

36:01SPEAKERIt's like hardware and T&L made sense

36:03SPEAKERwhen you heard it explained,

36:04SPEAKERbut you didn't necessarily like see that on screen.

36:07SPEAKERThe first time, I think the first, I'm trying to remember,

36:10SPEAKERI think the first game I played that had bump mapping in it

36:13SPEAKERwas the Chronicles of Riddick game on Xbox,

36:16SPEAKEREscape from Butcher Bay.

36:17SPEAKER- That makes sense, that would be the right timeframe.

36:19SPEAKER- Like Doom 3, they had that like huge splashy reveal

36:22SPEAKERat Macworld Tokyo, I think it was, you remember that?

36:24SPEAKERLike the first Doom 3 footage that got out,

36:26SPEAKERlike everybody lost their minds about,

36:27SPEAKERbut then the game took a while to come out

36:29SPEAKERafter they revealed it, right?

36:30SPEAKERAnd in the interim, we got a preview build

36:33SPEAKERin a game spot of that Riddick game,

36:35SPEAKERand I got assigned to preview for it

36:37SPEAKERand threw it in the Xbox debug and lost my mind

36:39SPEAKERwhen I turned it on because they had-

36:41SPEAKER- That game looked real good at the time.

36:42SPEAKER- It looked incredible, and they had gotten

36:44SPEAKERlike advanced bump mapping into a game

36:45SPEAKERbefore Doom 3 shipped, and it was a real watershed, honestly.

36:51SPEAKER- Halo 1 doesn't have bump mapping, does it?

36:54SPEAKER- There might be light amounts of it.

36:56SPEAKERActually, Riddick may have been doing more

36:59SPEAKERthan just bump mapping.

37:00SPEAKER- They did a lot of stuff with light, if I recall.

37:03SPEAKER- They might've been doing like stencil shadows.

37:05SPEAKERThere might've been more to what they were doing

37:06SPEAKERto get the Doom 3 style of effects.

37:10SPEAKERYou know, it was all iterative, of course.

37:11SPEAKERBut anyway, the point is like, you know,

37:14SPEAKERthe technologies enabled by this card

37:16SPEAKERlike really showed on the screen

37:19SPEAKERin a way nothing had before.

37:20SPEAKER- Well, it was one of those watershed moments

37:22SPEAKERwhere all of a sudden things went from looking like video,

37:24SPEAKERlike video games that you'd seen forever,

37:26SPEAKERjust more polygons.

37:28SPEAKER- 'Cause like that was the benefit of hardware T and L

37:30SPEAKERis you can have a lot more polygons on the scene, really.

37:33SPEAKERThat was it.

37:34SPEAKER- But then stuff like bump mapping was allowing you

37:36SPEAKERto show texture on surfaces

37:39SPEAKERwithout spending more polygon budget.

37:40SPEAKER- That's it.

37:41SPEAKERInstead of using like texture tricks and lighting tricks,

37:44SPEAKERit looked like it made things look like

37:46SPEAKERthey were real surfaces.

37:46SPEAKERNow, people abused the hell out of it almost immediately,

37:49SPEAKERand it would've been a meme if we had memes then.

37:52SPEAKERBut anyway, yeah, the Chameleon demo was quite good.

37:57SPEAKERThe Blobby Dinosaur less so,

37:59SPEAKERbut they made the vertices shimmer

38:01SPEAKERto demonstrate how vertex shaders work, basically.

38:05SPEAKERThe other thing this card did is it supported,

38:08SPEAKERlike I said, MSAA and that quincunx thing

38:11SPEAKERthat NVIDIA came up with it.

38:12SPEAKERI think it shifted everything a half pixel.

38:14SPEAKERAll the jaggy surfaces a half pixel,

38:16SPEAKERso it made them real blurry, but it performed well.

38:19SPEAKERLike it was a performant form of AA

38:21SPEAKERin one of the first ones.

38:24SPEAKERAnd then obviously, like I said,

38:27SPEAKERin terms of like programmability,

38:29SPEAKERthese versions of the shader models,

38:31SPEAKERthe 1.0 versions of the shader model

38:33SPEAKERwere incredibly limited.

38:34SPEAKERLike they couldn't do loops.

38:37SPEAKERThey didn't have conditionals.

38:38SPEAKERThey were missing a lot of pieces of,

38:43SPEAKERa lot of the important pieces

38:45SPEAKERthat made programmable shader units more general purpose,

38:48SPEAKERmore useful for general purpose computing.

38:50SPEAKERThat didn't come until much later.

38:52SPEAKERAnd it was also missing things that we later,

38:55SPEAKERthat we had gotten DirectX 9 and 10 later,

38:57SPEAKERlike geometry shaders and tessellation shaders

39:01SPEAKERand compute shaders and all that kind of stuff.

39:04SPEAKERSo that all came later, but this was the beginning.

39:06SPEAKERThis was the moment.

39:07SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, like just to tie this

39:08SPEAKERinto the modern experience in case it isn't obvious,

39:11SPEAKEReven today when you boot up a game

39:13SPEAKERand try to play it for the first time

39:14SPEAKERand it stops you to compile shaders,

39:16SPEAKERthat's conceptually the same thing.

39:19SPEAKERSame thing we're talking about here.

39:20SPEAKERThat's the beginning of that.

39:21SPEAKER- Well, and this is also the beginning of,

39:24SPEAKERhey, if we want to do compute on millions of pixels

39:28SPEAKERevery 60 or a hundred times a second,

39:31SPEAKERwe need to build these massively parallel processors,

39:33SPEAKERwhich is, it turns out what Nvidia needed

39:35SPEAKERto do all their AI business and all of the CUDA stuff

39:38SPEAKERand all the in-betweens, so.

39:41SPEAKER- Yeah, but before we move on from the subject,

39:43SPEAKERI mean, have there, I'm trying to think,

39:45SPEAKERthere really have not been any major paradigm shifts

39:49SPEAKERsince this time on this scale, right?

39:52SPEAKERLike, I mean, pixel--

39:52SPEAKER- The computer shader stuff is the next one.

39:54SPEAKER- Yeah, although, I mean, that's,

39:56SPEAKERI guess that's still kind of iterative.

39:57SPEAKERI mean, this is just a semantic debate at this point,

40:00SPEAKERbut that just seems like iterative downstream of this.

40:03SPEAKER- I mean, the computer shaders led way

40:05SPEAKERto the ray tracing pipeline,

40:07SPEAKERwhich is what gives us the general purpose lighting

40:12SPEAKERthat mimics the real world.

40:13SPEAKER- Ray tracing seems like the next big shift

40:17SPEAKERoperable to this, I don't know if it's quite as big.

40:19SPEAKERAnd it's also taking much, much longer

40:22SPEAKERto gain dominance compared to this pixel shader games.

40:26SPEAKERLike I said, the Xbox sold relatively well,

40:28SPEAKERlike every graphics card after this

40:31SPEAKERalso supported pixel shaders.

40:32SPEAKERLike that just became the standard immediately.

40:34SPEAKERRay tracing is taking much, much longer

40:36SPEAKERto become performant in a practical way and take over.

40:40SPEAKERLike we're getting there very slowly, but.

40:42SPEAKER- Well, it's interesting 'cause like this was,

40:45SPEAKERthat the, we mentioned it earlier,

40:47SPEAKERbut in John Phillips's editorial for the issue,

40:50SPEAKERhe complains that like none of the GeForce 256

40:54SPEAKERor GeForce two features really got supported in games.

40:56SPEAKER- Yeah, you mentioned that too in the cover story.

40:58SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

40:59SPEAKER- Was that, that was actually true?

41:00SPEAKERI don't remember that. - It was a common refrain.

41:01SPEAKERThere was not a lot of, there was,

41:03SPEAKERby this point there was not a lot of use.

41:04SPEAKERAnd in part of it was that up until this point,

41:07SPEAKERNvidia was releasing stuff into the void, right?

41:10SPEAKERSo they were making the game dev cycles

41:12SPEAKERand the hardware dev cycles were short enough

41:14SPEAKERthat you would release your card,

41:16SPEAKERdevelopers would be like, oh man, we need to implement this.

41:19SPEAKERAnd then, you know, the game,

41:21SPEAKERlike Quake took 18 months to develop, right?

41:23SPEAKERAnd it was long, that was a long dev cycle in 1998.

41:28SPEAKERWhen, by this point, the dev cycles were getting longer,

41:33SPEAKERthe pipelines were getting more fixed

41:34SPEAKERand the work required to support this stuff

41:36SPEAKERhad to happen earlier in the pipeline.

41:37SPEAKERSo it wasn't like they could, you know,

41:39SPEAKERsupport a second texture mapping unit

41:41SPEAKERjust by adding a different API call

41:44SPEAKERat one point in the graphics pipeline.

41:45SPEAKERYour artists had to go back and create all these bump maps

41:48SPEAKERand like you had to write all the shader code

41:50SPEAKERand like you couldn't just tack this stuff in anymore.

41:52SPEAKERSo this is also, I don't know if it was around this time,

41:55SPEAKERbut when I talked to folks at Nvidia later,

41:58SPEAKERthey said that the hardware T and L thing

42:00SPEAKERand nobody using it, 'cause they thought

42:02SPEAKERthey were gonna light the world on fire with that,

42:05SPEAKERliterally was the moment that they realized

42:06SPEAKERthat they had to go out and start engaging

42:09SPEAKERwith developers upfront and, you know,

42:12SPEAKERembedding people with big developers

42:14SPEAKERand making sure that their stuff was supported

42:16SPEAKERand probably also doing a little bit of light torpedoing

42:18SPEAKERof the other guy's stuff.

42:19SPEAKERBut maybe that was just incidental, who knows.

42:21SPEAKER- Eh, it was pretty contentious back then.

42:25SPEAKER- People were fairly upset about it.

42:27SPEAKERAnd like, and it was hard because Nvidia

42:29SPEAKERwas overdoing their own thing tied to their own hardware.

42:31SPEAKERAnd meanwhile, AMD and ATI and Matrox

42:34SPEAKERwere kind of, you know, the Canadian contingent

42:36SPEAKERwere off, you know, sharing, using the same APIs,

42:41SPEAKERusing the same version of shader model and stuff like that.

42:43SPEAKERSo the games that ran on one card were running on the other.

42:45SPEAKER- Yeah, and I mean, that was also the era of conspiracies

42:48SPEAKERabout like driver tweaks based on the name

42:50SPEAKERof the executable of the program being run.

42:53SPEAKER- Well, that definitely was the thing that happened.

42:54SPEAKER- And stuff like that.

42:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

42:56SPEAKER- Things were a bit crass back then.

42:58SPEAKERAlso speaking of crass, this editorial at the beginning

43:02SPEAKERfrom John sure hits a little different in this modern era

43:06SPEAKERof hardware being like wildly unaffordable.

43:10SPEAKERAnd like here he is going like, hey, make games

43:12SPEAKERthat require this brand new $500 graphics card,

43:15SPEAKERlike stop supporting the entire rest of the market.

43:19SPEAKER- Well, but it's, hey.

43:22SPEAKER- I get it, I mean.

43:23SPEAKER- Like this was before crisis, right?

43:24SPEAKERWe didn't know how bad it would be if you released a game

43:26SPEAKERthat wouldn't run on all the hardware.

43:28SPEAKER- Yeah, I do wanna reiterate though,

43:30SPEAKERand this was mentioned again in your cover story,

43:32SPEAKERthis is a $500 graphics card in 2001.

43:35SPEAKER- Yeah, this was the first expensive one.

43:37SPEAKER- I did not remember the GeForce 3 being that expensive.

43:39SPEAKERI went straight, I had a GeForce 1 SDR still at this time

43:43SPEAKERand I went straight to a GeForce 4 TI 4200,

43:47SPEAKERwhich was the budget GeForce 4.

43:49SPEAKER- That was a good jump.

43:50SPEAKER- So I was very much in like budget college student

43:54SPEAKERand freelancer land at this point.

43:56SPEAKERI had no memory of the GeForce 3 being that expensive.

43:59SPEAKER- I think that they were on 12 month dev cycles

44:01SPEAKERat this time 'cause the GeForce 1 SDR came out

44:04SPEAKERwhile I was at ours, which would have been '99.

44:07SPEAKER- 'Cause it's crazy looking at the compressed timeline

44:09SPEAKERof these graphics card launches.

44:10SPEAKERI think we've said similar in the past

44:13SPEAKERdiscussing the subject but the time from the GeForce 1

44:17SPEAKERto the GeForce 3 was less than 18 months.

44:20SPEAKERIt's crazy to think how fast they were iterating

44:22SPEAKERon like major graphics technologies back then.

44:25SPEAKER- Well, the GeForce 2 was basically

44:27SPEAKERsouped up memory architecture for the GeForce 1,

44:29SPEAKERhigher clock speeds.

44:30SPEAKERThe GeForce 3 was the next.

44:32SPEAKERSo like if you're doing it in the modern era,

44:35SPEAKERthe GeForce 2 would have been a super, right?

44:38SPEAKERIt would have been like the mid cycle refresh

44:40SPEAKERof the GeForce 1.

44:41SPEAKER- Sure, okay, that helps put it in context a little more.

44:45SPEAKER- And also there were two revs of the GeForce 1

44:48SPEAKER'cause they launched with an SDR version

44:50SPEAKERand then they almost like three months later

44:52SPEAKERreleased the DDR versions.

44:54SPEAKER- I screwed up getting the SDR.

44:56SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe, it depends on what your monitor was.

44:58SPEAKERBut anyway, so yeah, that's the GeForce 3.

45:00SPEAKERLike we wouldn't be talking,

45:01SPEAKERNvidia wouldn't be a trillion dollar company.

45:03SPEAKERWe wouldn't have ray tracing, all of these things.

45:06SPEAKERI mean, just to be clear, when this card came out,

45:09SPEAKERAMD had a card in development that we knew about

45:11SPEAKERand had heard a ton of rumors about

45:13SPEAKERthat we knew were using the DirectX 8 pixel shader

45:16SPEAKERand vertex shader technology.

45:18SPEAKERBut we didn't know if it was gonna be good.

45:19SPEAKERThe first Radeon they had done a good job with

45:22SPEAKERbecause it had a really wide memory bus.

45:25SPEAKERAnd so memory bus was tied directly to fill rate

45:28SPEAKERand fill rate meant your frames were faster, right?

45:31SPEAKER- Is the one they had in development

45:32SPEAKERthe one that ended up being the Radeon 9,700

45:35SPEAKERor was that later?

45:36SPEAKER- I think it was the 8,500 was the first one

45:38SPEAKERthat I'd have to look for sure.

45:39SPEAKER- I think the 9,700 was the one that came out

45:42SPEAKERwith Half-Life 2, right?

45:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that's correct, yes.

45:44SPEAKER- That's the one that had the Half-Life 2

45:46SPEAKERtie in on the box, I think.

45:48SPEAKER- Yeah, that's correct.

45:51SPEAKERThe Radeon 8,500.

45:53SPEAKERSo the first Radeon was just called the Radeon.

45:55SPEAKERThe second one was called the Radeon 8,000,

45:58SPEAKERthe 8,000 series, which was an RV 250, I think.

46:02SPEAKEROr R200 rather.

46:04SPEAKER- Yes, okay, yes.

46:05SPEAKERI'm looking at the Radeon R300 page, that is correct.

46:08SPEAKER- Yeah, and so it came out later this same year.

46:13SPEAKERLike I said, with the Pixel Shader 1.4 Pixel Shaders.

46:18SPEAKERAnd that, it was a big deal.

46:20SPEAKERLike this was still,

46:22SPEAKERthey still had like substantial market share at this point.

46:24SPEAKERAMD was kind of the 800 pound gorilla in the space

46:27SPEAKERgiven that 3DFX had gone under

46:29SPEAKERand Nvidia was the scrappy upstart still, so.

46:32SPEAKER- Yeah, real quick, before we move on from this cover story,

46:36SPEAKERI told myself I wouldn't razz you or your fellow editors

46:39SPEAKERtoo much for the language used.

46:41SPEAKER- Can't believe the 15th word in here is 3D gaming whore.

46:45SPEAKERI apologize unreservedly.

46:46SPEAKER- I wasn't even gonna bring that up.

46:48SPEAKER- It's terrible.

46:49SPEAKER- It was a different time, but I do have-

46:50SPEAKER- It was a bad time, yeah.

46:51SPEAKER- I did pull out one sentence for this story.

46:54SPEAKERIf you're stoked after reading about all the wacky magic

46:57SPEAKERthat vertex shaders can do,

46:58SPEAKERPixel Shaders should make you blow a gasket.

47:00SPEAKER- I liked wacky magic.

47:02SPEAKERI used wacky magic a lot.

47:03SPEAKER- That's fine.

47:04SPEAKERThere is some real, I mean, you know,

47:06SPEAKERthe mildly edgelordy stuff in this aside,

47:09SPEAKERthere is also just a lot of goofy language in this magazine.

47:12SPEAKERLike the writing was just, it was a different time.

47:16SPEAKER- It was, like, here's the thing.

47:18SPEAKERIt was very of the moment, right?

47:20SPEAKER- Yes, definitely.

47:21SPEAKER- And the thing we were doing is like,

47:24SPEAKERit was weird though, 'cause by this point,

47:26SPEAKERyou know how like TV shows, you see somebody who,

47:30SPEAKERlike the third season comes on

47:31SPEAKERand all the people who made the first season

47:33SPEAKERhave moved on and done other stuff

47:34SPEAKERexcept for like the show runner.

47:35SPEAKERAnd then you get people who liked the first season coming in

47:38SPEAKERand writing the third season.

47:40SPEAKERThis was like, maximum of PC started

47:43SPEAKERa lot of the writing tech, like the boot.

47:45SPEAKERBoot was, the boot and the future magazines

47:48SPEAKERwere responsible for a lot of the way language

47:50SPEAKERworked on enthusiast websites in the late 90s.

47:53SPEAKERAnd then by this point, it was people like me coming in

47:56SPEAKERwho'd grown up reading that stuff and came back

47:58SPEAKERand were trying to emulate the emulation of the emulation.

48:00SPEAKERAnd we ended up with real sad stuff.

48:03SPEAKERThere's a Tim Sweeney interview in here too

48:05SPEAKERthat I don't remember doing also.

48:08SPEAKERI think I probably must have sent him some email questions

48:11SPEAKERand just gotten email questions back.

48:12SPEAKER- The responses definitely read like the responses

48:15SPEAKERto an email interview.

48:16SPEAKER- They may have been filtered.

48:17SPEAKER- Having done a bunch of those myself.

48:19SPEAKER- Like they may have even been filtered.

48:20SPEAKERLike Nvidia may have been like,

48:22SPEAKER"Hey, do you wanna talk to Tim Sweeney or blah, blah, blah?"

48:24SPEAKERAnd I'd be like, "Yeah, I talked to Tim Sweeney."

48:27SPEAKER'Cause it's like, when I asked,

48:28SPEAKER"What would you like to add to the Geforce?"

48:29SPEAKERHe's like, "Oh, I could do all sorts of stuff,

48:31SPEAKERbut that wouldn't be a good idea.

48:32SPEAKERThis product hits the target head on

48:34SPEAKERin terms of delivering maximum performance

48:36SPEAKERand programmability at a good price."

48:38SPEAKER- Sure Nvidia loved that answer.

48:39SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a great answer for Nvidia.

48:41SPEAKERAnyway.

48:42SPEAKER- Should we move on to this?

48:44SPEAKERI mean, your mention of boot magazine

48:46SPEAKERand multiple generations of editors

48:47SPEAKERseems like a good segue into this,

48:50SPEAKERthis is your life maximum PC feature.

48:53SPEAKER- The features in this episode of this issue are weird

48:56SPEAKER'cause I don't really,

48:57SPEAKERI must have been either wholly consumed

48:59SPEAKERby trying to get this video card thing going

49:01SPEAKERor working on something for an upcoming month.

49:03SPEAKERI don't remember any of these at all,

49:05SPEAKERexcept for the Geforce cover.

49:06SPEAKER- This is, I mean,

49:07SPEAKERthis is basically like a five-year retrospective.

49:09SPEAKERI don't know what occasioned this other than like,

49:11SPEAKER"Hey, we need another feature for this magazine."

49:14SPEAKERBut one of the footnotes in here mentions,

49:15SPEAKERI'll just read it.

49:16SPEAKER"Just as maximum PC grew from boot,

49:19SPEAKERboot grew from another magazine, CD-ROM today."

49:21SPEAKER- Yep.

49:22SPEAKER- Which made it smart covering those multimedia discs

49:24SPEAKEReveryone bought, but no one enjoyed.

49:25SPEAKER- CD-ROM today was wildly popular in the UK.

49:28SPEAKERSo they did a US version of it

49:29SPEAKERthat was a little bit less popular.

49:31SPEAKER- Interesting.

49:32SPEAKER- I mean, because by the time it came out in the US,

49:33SPEAKERthat kind of multimedia, like,

49:35SPEAKER"Hey, you got an Encarta disc or you got a clip art disc

49:38SPEAKERwith 3000 pieces of CorelDRAW clip art,"

49:40SPEAKERwas already like, that time had passed.

49:42SPEAKER- I mean, was this the five-year anniversary

49:45SPEAKERof boot or something?

49:46SPEAKERLike there's almost no context

49:47SPEAKERfor why there is this five-year hardware retrospective

49:49SPEAKERjust plopped in the middle of the magazine.

49:52SPEAKER- My guess, this is 2001,

49:53SPEAKERit would have been about five years.

49:55SPEAKERIt would not quite five years

49:56SPEAKER'cause it launched in September, boot did.

49:59SPEAKERMy guess is that something fell out

50:01SPEAKERand we had to come up with a feature real fast

50:03SPEAKER'cause there's no,

50:05SPEAKERI don't think there's a byline on this,

50:07SPEAKERwhich we almost never did.

50:08SPEAKER- No, there's not, there's not.

50:09SPEAKERAnd it's basically, it's basically five pages

50:11SPEAKERof here are the top like six to eight hardware technologies

50:15SPEAKERof each year from '96 to 2000.

50:18SPEAKER- So my guess is either there was a big ad deal

50:20SPEAKERthat fell through or we had a feature

50:21SPEAKERthat had to get pushed for some reason

50:23SPEAKERor it's like a freelance,

50:24SPEAKER'cause at this point we were still doing

50:25SPEAKERa lot of freelancer features.

50:26SPEAKERLike we were writing the reviews

50:28SPEAKERand the freelancers were doing most of the features.

50:31SPEAKERAnd my guess is that something slipped

50:34SPEAKERand they had to come up with something fast.

50:35SPEAKERBut maybe this was the, maybe they did this.

50:37SPEAKERI don't know.

50:38SPEAKERI don't remember working on this at all,

50:40SPEAKERfor what it's worth.

50:41SPEAKER- 3D effects, Voodoo, probably rightfully named

50:44SPEAKERthe top trailblazer of '96.

50:46SPEAKERThere's a picture of the Orchid Righteous 3D in here,

50:48SPEAKERwhich is the one that I had.

50:49SPEAKER- I mean, look. - It makes me very excited.

50:50SPEAKER- Oh, that was a good card.

50:52SPEAKERIt says that those were all the same cards

50:53SPEAKERis the other thing. - Yeah, yeah.

50:54SPEAKERExcept for the cannabis ones,

50:55SPEAKER'cause they had extra memory.

50:56SPEAKER- Actually, I'm looking at these,

50:57SPEAKERthe Diamond card and the Orchid card

51:01SPEAKERhave the memory in different layouts,

51:02SPEAKERwhich is weird. - Yeah, yeah.

51:04SPEAKER- And different numbers of chips, I think.

51:05SPEAKERNo, same number of chips, just different chips.

51:07SPEAKER- I do remember that being the conventional wisdom

51:09SPEAKERfor the 3D effects one is that it kinda didn't matter

51:11SPEAKERwhich one you bought, unless again, I think that,

51:13SPEAKERI wanna say that cannabis card was only sold in Japan,

51:16SPEAKERmaybe, you had to like import it

51:17SPEAKERto get the extra video around?

51:18SPEAKER- No, no, no, you can get-- - Was it sold here?

51:21SPEAKER- The cannabis cards also had an internal pass-through.

51:23SPEAKERSo if you had a cannabis TNT card,

51:24SPEAKERyou could pass through the 3D effects card

51:28SPEAKERon an internal pass-through,

51:30SPEAKERrather than using the big, giant loopy VGA cable.

51:33SPEAKER- Interesting.

51:34SPEAKER- So '96 also had the first digital camera,

51:38SPEAKERfirst real digital camera, it had Quake.

51:41SPEAKERIt had Windows 95, which is a squeeze, I think,

51:45SPEAKERbut whatever. - The Awe 32.

51:47SPEAKER- Yep, yep, it was a righteous sound card, Brad.

51:51SPEAKER1997 had the Pentium II in the slot factor.

51:54SPEAKERThat was a real, kind of a dog in retrospect, but whatever.

51:59SPEAKERI think the hit on that page, on the next page that I loved,

52:03SPEAKERwas the Hitachi 19-inch CRT, which was wildly popular,

52:08SPEAKER'cause it was cheap, like it was the first giant CRT monitor

52:12SPEAKERthat you could get that wasn't like a million dollars,

52:14SPEAKERand it was pretty good.

52:16SPEAKER- Oh, it was a Hitachi tube.

52:17SPEAKER- It was a Hitachi tube.

52:18SPEAKER- Because it looked like that tube showed up

52:20SPEAKERin a lot of different brands of monitors.

52:22SPEAKER- Hitachi would sell them as well.

52:24SPEAKERLike Hitachi sold them too.

52:26SPEAKERThe one I bought was a Hitachi one,

52:28SPEAKERbut it was the kind of thing that like,

52:29SPEAKERyou'd see a post on Shaq News or Blues News

52:32SPEAKERor somebody would do a,

52:33SPEAKER"Hey, there's a deal on this Hitachi monitor,"

52:36SPEAKERand it would be like, it was normally like 500 bucks

52:38SPEAKERand you could get it for 250 or three,

52:39SPEAKERand they would just immediately disappear.

52:41SPEAKER- God, that takes me back.

52:42SPEAKERLike that was such the era of A, word of mouth and B, deals.

52:46SPEAKERI mean, obviously everybody loves a deal to this day,

52:48SPEAKERbut you know, like it was-

52:49SPEAKER- Deals are great.

52:50SPEAKER- What is the best hardware for the buck

52:53SPEAKERand also when is it gonna be mega cheap

52:54SPEAKERwas like such a thing that spread

52:56SPEAKERamong all the hardware and gaming sites constantly.

52:59SPEAKER- Yep.

52:59SPEAKERAnd then the other stuff in this list,

53:01SPEAKERlike the first 3D MP3 player is in here.

53:04SPEAKERThe Rio PMP 300 came out in 1998.

53:07SPEAKERThat's right.

53:08SPEAKERThat's important.

53:09SPEAKER- Yeah, affordable CD burners is the top 1998 product.

53:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know about that one.

53:14SPEAKER- '98 is when I remember CD-Rs really starting to show up.

53:17SPEAKER- That's the first time I made a burn CD for somebody

53:20SPEAKERand she was really impressed.

53:21SPEAKER- Yep.

53:23SPEAKER- The 100 megahertz system bus,

53:24SPEAKERthat's the most maximum PC thing

53:26SPEAKERyou could put on this list.

53:27SPEAKER- Mm-hmm.

53:29SPEAKER- The Athlon for '99,

53:31SPEAKERclips from media of 2.0 v2, 4.1s.

53:35SPEAKERMan, those are good speakers.

53:36SPEAKER- I was gonna ask what you're talking about in,

53:38SPEAKERyou know, your test bench, NVIDIA's test bench,

53:40SPEAKERall being Intel based, like where was,

53:42SPEAKEReverybody standardized on Intel at that time?

53:44SPEAKER'Cause I was all AMD for like a decade

53:46SPEAKERstarting from about '99.

53:49SPEAKER- So we, about 2010?

53:51SPEAKER- Gordon used to say nobody ever got fired for buying Intel.

53:55SPEAKER- Yep.

53:57SPEAKER- At that time, pre-Athlon,

54:01SPEAKERthe AMD test beds were under-performant compared to Intel.

54:05SPEAKER- Okay.

54:07SPEAKER- Post-Athlon, it depended on what generation it was.

54:11SPEAKERWe typically did Intel on the test beds

54:15SPEAKERbecause it was what everybody else was testing on.

54:19SPEAKERSo when we were doing pre-release stuff or something early,

54:21SPEAKERit was less likely to be janky

54:22SPEAKERbecause of something that they hadn't discovered yet.

54:25SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:26SPEAKER- And also, by the time the Pentium 4 came out,

54:28SPEAKERlike the Athlon had like a six-month period

54:31SPEAKERwhere it was dominant in terms of performance

54:34SPEAKERaround that time in like 2000, 2001,

54:37SPEAKERwhen they hit a gigahertz first,

54:39SPEAKERand then the Pentium 4 just poured gas on the fire

54:42SPEAKERand they were constantly releasing faster ones.

54:44SPEAKER- Sure.

54:45SPEAKERCan I read another footnote really quick?

54:47SPEAKER- Yeah, of course.

54:48SPEAKERIn 1997, the magazine saw the emergence

54:50SPEAKERof Andrew speak in 1997.

54:53SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

54:54SPEAKER- How reviews editor Andrew Sanchez came up with puns

54:56SPEAKERlike bright lights, big scuzzy, we'll never know.

54:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

55:00SPEAKER- Bright lights, big scuzzy.

55:02SPEAKER- It was a big scuzzy card.

55:03SPEAKERIt was a big, long scuzzy card, yeah.

55:05SPEAKER- Yeah.

55:07SPEAKERBold move, putting Napster at the top of the 2000 list,

55:10SPEAKERconsidering where things were going litigiously

55:13SPEAKERwith Napster.

55:14SPEAKER- Well, I mean, you know, it was the one that won, right?

55:19SPEAKERIt was the thing that won the MP3 wars.

55:23SPEAKERThe month previous, so I had written two MP3 cover stories

55:27SPEAKERfor Maximum PC over this, like one in 2001 and 2001.

55:31SPEAKERThe first one people loved,

55:33SPEAKER'cause we told people how to steal MP3s,

55:35SPEAKERand the second one, we were like,

55:36SPEAKER"Hey, maybe don't steal MP3s,"

55:37SPEAKERbut also there's this Napster thing

55:38SPEAKERand people were less enthusiastic about that one.

55:40SPEAKER- I see.

55:41SPEAKERThis, I'm trying to find the quote here.

55:45SPEAKERYeah, I don't think I realized this about Napster

55:47SPEAKERuntil I read this this morning.

55:49SPEAKERThough Napster wasn't the only peer-to-peer

55:51SPEAKERfile transfer application,

55:53SPEAKERit was certainly most widely used,

55:55SPEAKERit also paved the way for services such as Gunutella,

55:58SPEAKERwhich learned from Napster's troubles

56:00SPEAKERand avoided legal eagles by operating strictly

56:03SPEAKERfrom user to user without middleman servers

56:05SPEAKERconnecting everybody together.

56:06SPEAKERSo I don't think I ever realized

56:08SPEAKERthat Napster had centralized servers

56:11SPEAKERand that I assumed that that is what gave them

56:13SPEAKERsuch much worse legal exposure.

56:15SPEAKER- Well, it also meant to you they could turn it off.

56:17SPEAKER- Right, it could, A, it could be disabled easily,

56:19SPEAKERB, it could be tracked easily to see who was running it

56:21SPEAKERand pin the blame on somebody actionably.

56:25SPEAKER- Shout out to the page 58, the IBM 75 GXP,

56:30SPEAKERnow known colloquially, we called it the Desk Star back then.

56:34SPEAKER- Is that the infamous Death Star?

56:36SPEAKER- That's the first of the last platter disks,

56:38SPEAKERand yeah, the heads crashed and almost all of those failed,

56:41SPEAKERthey were walking, they were dead men walking,

56:43SPEAKERthey just didn't know it at this period.

56:45SPEAKER- It's like the Xbox 360 of hard drives.

56:47SPEAKER- Oh God, kind of, yeah.

56:50SPEAKER- Real quick before we move on from this piece,

56:51SPEAKERI'm delighted at the number of uses of the term IDE in here

56:55SPEAKERand ATA, it's just further evidence

56:58SPEAKERfor my slightly pedantic crusade to stress

57:02SPEAKERthat Pada was not a term used ever back then.

57:06SPEAKER- Well, no, Pada is a retronym, right?

57:08SPEAKER- Yes.

57:09SPEAKER- It was created when we added serial ATA to the vernacular.

57:12SPEAKER- Actually way after that even, I think, but.

57:15SPEAKER- Maybe, yeah.

57:16SPEAKER- Anyway, I see a lot of people using it

57:17SPEAKERas if it was used back then, which it was not.

57:19SPEAKER- But don't hate on Pada, Brad, it's fine.

57:23SPEAKERI want to shout out the,

57:24SPEAKERhey, you can crop your digital images article

57:27SPEAKER'cause digital cameras were just getting popular

57:29SPEAKERand we were like, we should do something

57:30SPEAKERabout digital photography.

57:31SPEAKERSo we taught people how to use a copy

57:34SPEAKERof like the stripped down light version of Photoshop

57:36SPEAKERthat we also put on the disc that came with the magazine.

57:38SPEAKERSo that was fun.

57:39SPEAKER- Yeah, that starts on page 45.

57:41SPEAKERI mean, I blew right past that feature reading this

57:43SPEAKER'cause these days it's all just like

57:45SPEAKERthe most boiler plate photo editing ever.

57:48SPEAKER- It's things that your phone does automatically

57:50SPEAKERfor a lot of it, yeah.

57:51SPEAKER- Right, or there are web apps that do,

57:54SPEAKERit's like clone stamping and cropping

57:56SPEAKERand like very basic color leveling type stuff.

57:59SPEAKERBut I guess back then,

58:00SPEAKERlike who knew anything about digital photo editing?

58:01SPEAKERLike digital cameras had just basically come about.

58:05SPEAKER- At the time I started at Maximum PC,

58:07SPEAKERthe only people who, like Gordon knew how to do that

58:10SPEAKER'cause he was into photography

58:12SPEAKERand the art directors knew how to do Photoshop touch up,

58:14SPEAKERbut like I was the only other editor

58:16SPEAKERbesides Gordon who knew how to do touch up stuff

58:19SPEAKERthat looked good.

58:20SPEAKER- Sure.

58:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so let's see what else we have.

58:24SPEAKERWe have-

58:25SPEAKER- All kinds of little tidbits in here.

58:26SPEAKERDo you want to just start going through,

58:27SPEAKERwhipping through some of the small-

58:28SPEAKER- Yeah, we can whip through.

58:29SPEAKER- Page 15, the Windows XP name was unveiled.

58:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:34SPEAKER- Which was just a little sidebar

58:36SPEAKERkind of like quick hits news thing.

58:38SPEAKERAnd this was written by Gordon

58:40SPEAKERand I had never thought about this before.

58:43SPEAKERHe ties the name XP to things like DirectX

58:46SPEAKERand ActiveX and Xbox.

58:48SPEAKERLike, I guess I never put those together

58:50SPEAKERbecause the X is more of a kind of a suffix

58:53SPEAKERin those other cases.

58:54SPEAKERBut I guess there was a lot of X going on at Microsoft.

58:57SPEAKER- And he pinged Alex St. John for a quote.

58:59SPEAKERSorry about that again.

59:01SPEAKERBut yeah, X was a Microsoft brand for a long time.

59:06SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:07SPEAKER- I don't know.

59:07SPEAKERYeah, that was weird.

59:09SPEAKER- Love the end of this article.

59:11SPEAKERMicrosoft had to defest itself

59:13SPEAKERfrom using years in its product names.

59:15SPEAKERUnlike car companies,

59:16SPEAKERMicrosoft can't seem to ship its products in the same year.

59:19SPEAKER- Yeah, that is extremely true.

59:22SPEAKER- Action, real quick, next page.

59:23SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:24SPEAKER- Something weird that leapt out at me,

59:25SPEAKERthis little bit about Juno.

59:27SPEAKERDo you remember Juno, the free ISP?

59:28SPEAKER- Yeah, the free internet, right?

59:30SPEAKER- Like they were one of the ones where you could get

59:31SPEAKERfree dial up if you ran their like dialer

59:33SPEAKERthat shoved ads in your face?

59:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:36SPEAKER- This is a story about them moving from display ads

59:38SPEAKERto fund the free internet access

59:41SPEAKERto instead just distributed compute?

59:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:44SPEAKER- Like effectively running,

59:45SPEAKERI don't know exactly what use they were planning

59:48SPEAKERto put this to.

59:49SPEAKERIt's stuff like SETI@Home.

59:50SPEAKERI don't think it was going to be SETI@Home exactly,

59:53SPEAKERbut it was that kind of thing.

59:54SPEAKER- I think they were using that as the model

59:56SPEAKERand they were like, hey, people need,

59:58SPEAKERI think this seems like the last desperate gasp

1:00:00SPEAKERof a dying ISP.

1:00:01SPEAKER- Probably, probably.

1:00:02SPEAKERAnd so I'm not sure if this ever actually rolled out

1:00:04SPEAKERto users or not, but effectively, just to be clear,

1:00:06SPEAKERthey were talking about using your spare CPU cycles

1:00:08SPEAKERto crunch data, to make money off of,

1:00:10SPEAKERto fund the free internet they were giving you.

1:00:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I think this is probably more of a response

1:00:16SPEAKERto the ad market collapsing around this time

1:00:18SPEAKERthan anything else.

1:00:20SPEAKER'Cause this was like,

1:00:22SPEAKERthis was right when the writing was on the wall

1:00:24SPEAKERfor internet ads for the next few years, right?

1:00:27SPEAKER- Yeah, this, the piece ends by saying,

1:00:29SPEAKERJuno is testing the project,

1:00:30SPEAKERbut isn't sure when it would make it mandatory for members

1:00:33SPEAKERthat I didn't look this up,

1:00:34SPEAKERbut that seems like the kind of detail

1:00:36SPEAKERthat could easily be lost to time,

1:00:37SPEAKERwhether this actually rolled out or not.

1:00:38SPEAKERBut it seems crazy to me thinking about

1:00:41SPEAKERhow much extra electricity usage that would generate.

1:00:43SPEAKER- And they were only 300 watt computers is probably fine.

1:00:46SPEAKER- I guess, but--

1:00:47SPEAKER- Electra seems cheap.

1:00:48SPEAKERThis was before Emron really collapsed.

1:00:49SPEAKER- Fair, okay fair.

1:00:51SPEAKERI was just thinking like,

1:00:53SPEAKERdid this actually offset the cost

1:00:54SPEAKERof an internet connection or not at the time,

1:00:57SPEAKERthe amount of extra electricity you would be burning?

1:00:58SPEAKERBut anyway.

1:00:59SPEAKER- Look, those are different bills, different people.

1:01:01SPEAKERLike if I'm a kid and I want internet access,

1:01:04SPEAKERI'm not gonna buy that damn internet.

1:01:06SPEAKERThey don't know if the power bill goes up 10 bucks.

1:01:09SPEAKER- What do you know about a power bill?

1:01:10SPEAKER- Yeah, power's free.

1:01:12SPEAKERI just plug it into the wall, it works.

1:01:15SPEAKERLet's see what else we got.

1:01:16SPEAKERWe got the first USB thumb drive on page 23.

1:01:19SPEAKERDid you see this?

1:01:20SPEAKER- Yes, I did.

1:01:21SPEAKERRequired drivers.

1:01:23SPEAKER- It required drivers.

1:01:24SPEAKER- It did not.

1:01:25SPEAKERIt was before USB mass storage was a thing.

1:01:28SPEAKER- It ranged from 16 megabytes to 64 megabytes,

1:01:31SPEAKERbut there's only one price listed here of $130.

1:01:34SPEAKERSo I don't know which size that corresponded to.

1:01:35SPEAKER- I would assume that's the 16 megabyte version.

1:01:37SPEAKER- Wow.

1:01:39SPEAKER- So it didn't have Windows 2000 or NT drivers.

1:01:43SPEAKERAnd about, I don't know, a few months after this,

1:01:46SPEAKERa company called Disk on Key released one

1:01:48SPEAKERthat used the USB mass storage framework

1:01:51SPEAKERthat you just plugged in and it worked on everything.

1:01:53SPEAKERAnd it was magical.

1:01:54SPEAKERI still have my 64 megabyte Disk on Key, amazing device.

1:02:01SPEAKERLet's see what else we got.

1:02:01SPEAKERWe got, oh, here's a classic maximum PC tradition.

1:02:05SPEAKERThis is another shout out to my dear friend Gordon.

1:02:09SPEAKERWhen somebody would leave the magazine,

1:02:11SPEAKERhe would, as soon as they announced they were leaving,

1:02:13SPEAKERhe'd start sniffing around their desk

1:02:15SPEAKERto see if there's anything good to lift.

1:02:17SPEAKER- That's page, this is page 66.

1:02:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so we immortalized it in,

1:02:23SPEAKERJosh wrote a nice goodbye column.

1:02:24SPEAKERHe ended up coming back at least once,

1:02:26SPEAKERI think maybe twice after this.

1:02:29SPEAKERBut we had like a little three strip funny segment

1:02:33SPEAKERat the bottom of the reviews intro.

1:02:36SPEAKERAnd he said, I'm leaving.

1:02:38SPEAKERThis was all shot with one of those DC,

1:02:39SPEAKERwith one of those little Kodak cameras, by the way.

1:02:42SPEAKER- Wait, is that you carting off his monitor?

1:02:44SPEAKER- That is me carting off his monitor, yes.

1:02:46SPEAKER- Beardless plaid?

1:02:48SPEAKER- Different shirt on than the medium, than the mid-frame.

1:02:51SPEAKERSo I'm in the mid-frame blowing my nose.

1:02:54SPEAKERLook, it was a plaid decade, Brad.

1:02:57SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.

1:02:59SPEAKER- Tucked in though, I apologize.

1:03:01SPEAKERSo yeah, I'm carting off a 19 inch Viewsonic monitor,

1:03:05SPEAKERit looks like, if I had to guess.

1:03:08SPEAKERAnd everybody's very sad.

1:03:09SPEAKERBut the irony here is of course

1:03:11SPEAKERthat Gordon wouldn't be photographed stealing shit

1:03:13SPEAKERfrom people's desks.

1:03:15SPEAKER- 'Cause he was really stealing.

1:03:16SPEAKER- 'Cause he was really, like he was there.

1:03:18SPEAKERLike everybody when they left would give the,

1:03:23SPEAKERGordon come by your desk when you said you were leaving.

1:03:25SPEAKEROh yeah, yeah, he does that.

1:03:28SPEAKERMake sure there's no hidden gems.

1:03:30SPEAKERAnyway.

1:03:31SPEAKER- Real quick, I'm just gonna kind of go through random stuff

1:03:33SPEAKERwe've got called out here at this point.

1:03:37SPEAKERPage 13 is an ad for RAM from Crucial.

1:03:42SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:03:42SPEAKER- Just as a sign of the times,

1:03:43SPEAKER128 megabytes for $51.29.

1:03:47SPEAKER- That's pretty good.

1:03:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:03:49SPEAKER- Is that SDRAM or is that DDR?

1:03:51SPEAKER- I don't think they specified in that.

1:03:52SPEAKER- I don't think we had DDR RAM at this point, really.

1:03:54SPEAKER- I'm not actually sure.

1:03:56SPEAKERThat brings me to another, actually,

1:03:58SPEAKERlet's pop over to the Pentium 4 story

1:04:01SPEAKERI mentioned on page 61.

1:04:02SPEAKERSpeaking of types of RAM.

1:04:04SPEAKER- Okay, PC 100 SDRAM is not DDR and yeah.

1:04:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:04:09SPEAKERThis Pentium 4 story mentions that both the P3 and P4

1:04:13SPEAKERused a Rambus or DRAM.

1:04:15SPEAKER- Yeah, so you bought--

1:04:16SPEAKER- Is that really a thing?

1:04:17SPEAKER- Yeah, you bought, the memory control was on the board.

1:04:19SPEAKERSo they, some boards would have Rambus

1:04:22SPEAKERand some RAMs would have SDRAM.

1:04:25SPEAKER- Okay, 'cause I went from Celeron 300A,

1:04:27SPEAKERwhich was a Pentium 2 knockoff, or not knockoff,

1:04:30SPEAKERbut derivative straight to an AMD system.

1:04:32SPEAKERAnd again, stuck with AMD for like a decade.

1:04:34SPEAKERSo I just never touched RD RAM at all.

1:04:36SPEAKER- Yeah, the Rambus RAM,

1:04:39SPEAKERI think that they thought it was gonna scale

1:04:40SPEAKERbetter than it did.

1:04:41SPEAKERAnd then the DDR, once DDR started taking over,

1:04:45SPEAKERthere was no reason to use Rambus anymore.

1:04:47SPEAKERThe benefit of Rambus, if I recall,

1:04:49SPEAKERwas it was real wide interfaces compared to SDRAM.

1:04:52SPEAKER- Also didn't have to deal with their patent trolling

1:04:53SPEAKERor whatever it was.

1:04:55SPEAKER- They had patent trolling problems.

1:04:56SPEAKERThey also required terminators.

1:04:57SPEAKER- I was gonna say, what the hell is this having to terminate

1:05:00SPEAKERthe unpopulated slots?

1:05:02SPEAKERWhat the hell is that?

1:05:03SPEAKER- So I don't remember the reason why you had to do it,

1:05:05SPEAKERbut part of the Rambus spec was that if you had four slots

1:05:08SPEAKERon the board, they all had to be populated.

1:05:10SPEAKERAnd if they weren't populated by sticks,

1:05:11SPEAKERthen you had terminators that you jam

1:05:13SPEAKERinto the extra two slots.

1:05:15SPEAKERYou had to put C-RIMs in there.

1:05:16SPEAKER- Yeah, but it was, I mean, 3.2 gigabits per second

1:05:20SPEAKERwas pretty fast, right?

1:05:22SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:23SPEAKEROh, you mean, you mean taking full advantage

1:05:26SPEAKERof dual channel, 3.2 gigabytes per second, 11?

1:05:29SPEAKER- Don't be hatin'.

1:05:31SPEAKERDon't be hatin', Brad.

1:05:33SPEAKER- You didn't write this one in fairness.

1:05:35SPEAKER- This was Scott Tarr.

1:05:35SPEAKERI see Scott, he pops into the Full Nerd chat

1:05:39SPEAKERon Tuesday sometimes.

1:05:42SPEAKER- Okay.

1:05:43SPEAKERThere's a mention in here of a brand new copper heatsink,

1:05:46SPEAKERlike what appears to have been one

1:05:48SPEAKERof the first copper-based heatsinks.

1:05:50SPEAKERSo I guess this is around the time

1:05:52SPEAKERthe CPUs were really getting hot.

1:05:53SPEAKER- Yeah, the Pentium 4, notoriously hot.

1:05:57SPEAKERWe definitely had seen some copper heatsinks before this,

1:06:00SPEAKERbut this was the first time it became a standard item

1:06:03SPEAKERrather than a weird novelty.

1:06:05SPEAKER- But was the Pentium 4 good?

1:06:06SPEAKERLike, again, I just bypassed Intel for a decade.

1:06:09SPEAKERI feel like I remember there being some,

1:06:13SPEAKERI don't remember, like it wasn't infamous, right?

1:06:16SPEAKERBut weren't there some issues

1:06:18SPEAKERor like I feel like P4 had some downsides, I forget.

1:06:21SPEAKER- Was the Pentium 4 good is a,

1:06:25SPEAKERthat's a kind of fraught question, Brad.

1:06:28SPEAKER- I mean, it was the last Pentium.

1:06:29SPEAKERI mean, you know, modern day Pentiums aside,

1:06:32SPEAKER'cause they still make like low performance,

1:06:34SPEAKERthere's still a Pentium line.

1:06:35SPEAKER- Pentium M and stuff like that, yeah.

1:06:37SPEAKER- But Pentium 4 was the last flagship Pentium, right?

1:06:39SPEAKERDidn't they kind of have some time in the wilderness

1:06:42SPEAKERand then go to the core name after that?

1:06:44SPEAKER- Yeah, so the problem with Pentium 4

1:06:46SPEAKERwas that they made this bet

1:06:47SPEAKERthat they'd be able to get their process sizes down

1:06:50SPEAKERto get clock speeds up above like four gigahertz

1:06:53SPEAKERby doing a really deep pipeline.

1:06:55SPEAKERAnd the problem with doing a really deep pipeline

1:06:57SPEAKERis that when you have misfires, right,

1:07:00SPEAKERwhen you don't predict what math

1:07:02SPEAKERis gonna be needed properly,

1:07:04SPEAKERthen you have to throw out a whole boatload of work

1:07:06SPEAKERand then reset the state of the pipeline

1:07:07SPEAKERand feed it back in.

1:07:10SPEAKERAnd so in the beginning, the Pentium 4 was kind of meh.

1:07:13SPEAKERThere was a period of time around three gigahertz,

1:07:15SPEAKERwhich would have been like 20, 2005 probably, I guess.

1:07:19SPEAKERI don't know, 2005, 2007, when it was,

1:07:22SPEAKERlike it was really performant, but it was incredibly hot.

1:07:25SPEAKERThese were always really hot CPUs.

1:07:27SPEAKERThey were always really big CPUs.

1:07:29SPEAKERAnd like it wasn't, yeah, but they were stable, so.

1:07:35SPEAKER- Oh, okay, well, that's something.

1:07:38SPEAKER- Yeah, it was the first time we saw chipset heat sinks,

1:07:41SPEAKERright, like it was, there was a lot of new business

1:07:46SPEAKERon these, on the Pentium 4 machines

1:07:47SPEAKERthat was kind of pushing things forward.

1:07:50SPEAKERAnd remember, the Pentium 4 is what inspired Intel

1:07:53SPEAKERto try to push BTX on everyone, where they were reframing

1:07:56SPEAKERhow the airflow moves through the whole system.

1:08:01SPEAKER- That was the era of BTX, huh?

1:08:02SPEAKER- That was the era of BTX, yeah.

1:08:04SPEAKERFor folks who don't know, BTX was a successor to ATX

1:08:08SPEAKERthat didn't take off, that basically built an air channel

1:08:11SPEAKERthrough the center of the motherboard.

1:08:13SPEAKERAnd cleverly, like a couple of good things,

1:08:15SPEAKERlike they put the RAM sticks in the orientation

1:08:18SPEAKERwhere they, like airflow would move over them

1:08:20SPEAKERand sort of, you know, cause eddies, so, you know, whatever.

1:08:25SPEAKER- We're never getting a successor to ATX, are we?

1:08:27SPEAKER- ATX is gonna, ATX will out-survive us all,

1:08:30SPEAKERassuming the human race survives.

1:08:33SPEAKER- Yeah, page 80.

1:08:35SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:36SPEAKER- Links is spotted.

1:08:38SPEAKER- Yeah, this was the WRT54G, wasn't it?

1:08:40SPEAKER- No, it's not, it's the WAP110, but it sure does,

1:08:43SPEAKERI mean, you know, it looks like a slightly stripped down

1:08:45SPEAKERWRT54G.

1:08:47SPEAKER- Oh, wait, is this not the, is this a B router?

1:08:51SPEAKER- Yes, these are all B WiFi devices,

1:08:54SPEAKERonly some of which are routers, from what I could tell.

1:08:57SPEAKERSome of these are just WiFi access points

1:08:59SPEAKERto plug into an existing network.

1:09:00SPEAKER- Yeah, there was a lot of education at this point,

1:09:02SPEAKERbecause like a lot of people, routers were new,

1:09:06SPEAKERaccess points were new, combos were kind of rare.

1:09:09SPEAKER- Homelands were even new at the time, like,

1:09:12SPEAKERmost people didn't even have like a home network exactly

1:09:14SPEAKERat the time, they just had a computer,

1:09:15SPEAKERthey plugged into dial up or whatever.

1:09:17SPEAKER- Well, I wanna say this was pre-Centrino, wasn't it?

1:09:22SPEAKER- Yeah, Centrino was the Intel initiative

1:09:25SPEAKERthat pushed a lot of network technology, right?

1:09:27SPEAKER- It pushed, like basically it said,

1:09:31SPEAKERhey, if you want this badge and you want marketing money

1:09:33SPEAKERfrom us, you have to put a WiFi card in.

1:09:35SPEAKER- Ah, 2001 feels very early to be covering

1:09:38SPEAKERconsumer WiFi products.

1:09:40SPEAKER- No, it was starting to take off, but it was rare.

1:09:43SPEAKERIt was before phones, which is when WiFi really exploded,

1:09:46SPEAKERbut laptops were starting to ship with WiFi.

1:09:48SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, well, okay, laptops, sure.

1:09:51SPEAKER'Cause one of the notes I made in here was like,

1:09:52SPEAKERit didn't feel like there were a lot of devices

1:09:54SPEAKERto connect to WiFi at this time,

1:09:55SPEAKERbut I guess if laptops were getting pretty popular,

1:09:57SPEAKERthat alone was enough to drive adoption.

1:10:00SPEAKER- I say, yeah, this is pre-Centrino.

1:10:02SPEAKERSo these laptops that are reviewed on page 70 and 71

1:10:07SPEAKERdon't have WiFi built in.

1:10:09SPEAKERSo they have modems and they have ethernet cards.

1:10:12SPEAKER- Oh, of course, what am I talking?

1:10:13SPEAKERYeah, like I have work laptops,

1:10:15SPEAKERnot, I mean, two, three years after this.

1:10:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:10:18SPEAKER- That you still had to plug a thing into

1:10:20SPEAKERto get any kind of wireless connectivity.

1:10:21SPEAKER- Man, you guys had shit work laptops then,

1:10:23SPEAKER'cause three years from now,

1:10:25SPEAKEReverything should have WiFi.

1:10:26SPEAKER- Actually, maybe they probably had built-in WiFi

1:10:29SPEAKERat that point, but this was like cellular.

1:10:31SPEAKER- Yeah, cellular, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:10:33SPEAKER- That was definitely a thing.

1:10:33SPEAKERBut I remember WiFi, sorry, USB WiFi adapters.

1:10:37SPEAKERWere there like serial WiFi adapters for laptops?

1:10:41SPEAKER- I never saw serial 'cause they required power.

1:10:43SPEAKERThere were PCMCIA and the bus card stuff.

1:10:48SPEAKERIt was the other way that you get those added on.

1:10:51SPEAKER- It's funny though, it's funny though,

1:10:52SPEAKERlooking at this article and like, you know,

1:10:55SPEAKERseeing descriptions of what NAT are, what a firewall is,

1:10:58SPEAKERand then some of these WiFi boxes have those things

1:11:01SPEAKERand some do not.

1:11:02SPEAKERSome are routers and some aren't.

1:11:03SPEAKER- This was either the second or third spin

1:11:05SPEAKERof WiFi access points.

1:11:07SPEAKERI don't know why they put my full name in the byline here.

1:11:09SPEAKERThat's weird.

1:11:11SPEAKERSometimes people would add things for lulls.

1:11:15SPEAKER- I see.

1:11:16SPEAKERI appreciate this D-Link in here.

1:11:18SPEAKERI had a D-Link 100 megabit network switch around this time

1:11:22SPEAKERfor me and my roommate to both use the internet.

1:11:25SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:11:26SPEAKER- Those things were built like tanks.

1:11:27SPEAKER- Yep.

1:11:28SPEAKERI still have it.

1:11:29SPEAKERIt's still in my drawer of old network hardware.

1:11:31SPEAKERThe thing, it's like all metal.

1:11:33SPEAKER- Well, it's funny 'cause this is all pre-gigabit, right?

1:11:36SPEAKERThis is 100 base T, I think, at most.

1:11:39SPEAKER- Definitely, yep.

1:11:40SPEAKER- Yeah, so it was a different time.

1:11:43SPEAKERNetworks, like I always pushed really hard

1:11:46SPEAKERfor covering networking stuff

1:11:47SPEAKER'cause I was like, this is gonna be a big deal

1:11:48SPEAKERand people at broadband really will care about this.

1:11:50SPEAKERAnd everybody's like, yeah, I don't know, man.

1:11:52SPEAKERI think you're crazy.

1:11:52SPEAKERNobody wants a router.

1:11:54SPEAKER- Yeah, in fact, thinking back on it,

1:11:56SPEAKERso I had that D-Link switch because me and my roommate

1:11:59SPEAKERobviously both had computers at the time.

1:12:00SPEAKERThis was before I moved out here.

1:12:02SPEAKERWe just paid the ISP for two IPs.

1:12:04SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:12:05SPEAKER- Like that's how we both had internet access

1:12:06SPEAKERin the house off the same cable modem

1:12:07SPEAKERis we just had to pay for two public IPs.

1:12:10SPEAKER- And that's why Windows XP was such a huge success

1:12:13SPEAKERis when those worms started going, everybody got them.

1:12:16SPEAKER- Boy.

1:12:17SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, routers, turns out they're good.

1:12:20SPEAKERWho knew?

1:12:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:12:22SPEAKER- Let's see, what else do we have in here?

1:12:25SPEAKER- We ill advisedly still were splitting out technology

1:12:27SPEAKERand gameplay in our game reviews.

1:12:30SPEAKERThis Project IGI review that Josh Norum reviewed,

1:12:34SPEAKERhe gave an eight to the technology and an eight to a gameplay.

1:12:37SPEAKERI think if I recall right,

1:12:38SPEAKEReverybody who was annoyed by this system

1:12:41SPEAKERjust gave the same score to both things.

1:12:44SPEAKER- Okay.

1:12:45SPEAKER- Yeah, anyway, so that was fun.

1:12:50SPEAKERSpyware utilities, which nobody cared about at this time

1:12:52SPEAKERand would care deeply about in about 12 months.

1:12:55SPEAKER- Sure.

1:12:56SPEAKER- And that's probably it.

1:12:57SPEAKERThe ads were kind of disappointing in this one, I gotta say.

1:13:00SPEAKER- It's a lot of generic computer sales ads for the most part.

1:13:03SPEAKERI mentioned one pre-built in the notes here,

1:13:08SPEAKERthe Aberdeen Claymore.

1:13:09SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:13:10SPEAKER- They don't name them like that anymore.

1:13:12SPEAKER- No, nobody names a computer for a big S or these days.

1:13:17SPEAKER- Yeah, but also the company name.

1:13:18SPEAKERThere's something powerful about naming your company

1:13:20SPEAKERafter the town that it's presumably based in.

1:13:22SPEAKERPuget is one these days where it feels like

1:13:26SPEAKERthere's something classic about that, I don't know.

1:13:29SPEAKER- Here's this Alienware ad

1:13:31SPEAKERwhere they're using the old chain tech case

1:13:33SPEAKERwith the hole cut in the side for ventilation,

1:13:35SPEAKERbut also just have some cool speakers

1:13:38SPEAKERand an Intel mouse Explorer

1:13:40SPEAKERand a force feedback Microsoft joystick plugged in.

1:13:44SPEAKERIt's pretty good.

1:13:45SPEAKERAnd they have both the maximum PC kick ass

1:13:47SPEAKERand the boot kick ass award on their awards page for that.

1:13:51SPEAKER- A lot of ass being kicked at the time.

1:13:53SPEAKER- We were all about kicking ass.

1:13:54SPEAKERThe Kensington Expert Mouse Pro

1:13:56SPEAKERis the design that they stuck with for years.

1:13:58SPEAKERThat's their big blue track ball.

1:14:01SPEAKERThat thing was, they made that for years and years and years.

1:14:05SPEAKER- A couple other quick things, page 83,

1:14:08SPEAKERthere's a writeup of partition magic 6.0.

1:14:10SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:14:11SPEAKER- I don't remember ever using partition magic myself,

1:14:13SPEAKERbut I feel like I remember that being

1:14:15SPEAKERa very widely pirated piece of software.

1:14:18SPEAKER- I don't know about widely pirated,

1:14:19SPEAKERbut we used it a lot in the lab

1:14:21SPEAKER'cause it made it easy for us to,

1:14:23SPEAKERwe could back up partitions with it.

1:14:25SPEAKERSo we made test images with that

1:14:28SPEAKERand then would restore everything to the image

1:14:33SPEAKERso that we'd have exactly the same system state

1:14:34SPEAKERwhen we were doing testing.

1:14:35SPEAKER- Yeah, I can see that being super useful at the time.

1:14:38SPEAKERI just, I don't know why the phrase partition magic

1:14:43SPEAKERis jogging some like wares memories is all that I can say.

1:14:47SPEAKER- Almost certainly the case.