351: if Name == "Will Smith" { Grade = "A" }

00:00SPEAKER(upbeat music)

00:28SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

00:30SPEAKERI'm Will.

00:31SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

00:32SPEAKER- Hey, welcome back, Brad.

00:33SPEAKER- Hi, thank you for having me.

00:36SPEAKER- That's not how this works,

00:38SPEAKERbut it's good to have you back, my friend.

00:40SPEAKER- I am here.

00:41SPEAKER- We won't get, like, Brad, you've been out for good reason.

00:45SPEAKERWe talked about it on the Patreon episode last month.

00:49SPEAKERBut yeah, we're all glad to have you back

00:52SPEAKERand excited to just have a normal podcast this week,

00:56SPEAKERjust the two of us talking about technology.

00:58SPEAKER- Talk about some tech.

00:59SPEAKER- We've both been on adventures recently, I guess, maybe?

01:03SPEAKER- Yeah, it's kind of a project episode, exactly.

01:06SPEAKERA trip report, maybe.

01:07SPEAKER- This is a literal trip report this time for both of us.

01:09SPEAKER- Kind of get back into the podcast

01:12SPEAKERand groove a little bit here.

01:13SPEAKER- Yeah, so-

01:14SPEAKER- With some what we've been doing.

01:15SPEAKER- Yeah, here's some interesting things,

01:17SPEAKERwhat happened to us.

01:20SPEAKERYou went to the Vintage Computer Festival West edition

01:24SPEAKERthis weekend. - I did, that's right.

01:25SPEAKERMy third one, actually. - Wow.

01:27SPEAKER- Third one in a row.

01:29SPEAKER- It's funny, every year since I've known it existed,

01:31SPEAKERI've been either out of town or about to,

01:34SPEAKERlike on the cusp of leaving and just haven't been able to go.

01:38SPEAKER- It's a shame because I think this is extremely your scene.

01:41SPEAKER- Really?

01:42SPEAKER- Maybe even more than mine.

01:43SPEAKER'Cause I mean, I think you touched old computers.

01:45SPEAKERWhen I say old computers, I mean like the 8-bit era,

01:48SPEAKERthe Apple IIs and the, you know, like that kind of-

01:51SPEAKER- Yes, I am very old, Brad.

01:53SPEAKERThank you for calling that out.

01:55SPEAKER- I'm also pretty old, to be fair.

01:57SPEAKERWe were both born in the '70s, but.

01:59SPEAKER- There were classrooms in my elementary school

02:02SPEAKERwhere there were like, there was an Apple II.

02:05SPEAKERAnd I think at one point or another,

02:06SPEAKEReverybody got TI-99 4As 'cause it's just the state PTO

02:10SPEAKERbought them for everybody.

02:11SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.

02:11SPEAKERI mean, you know, there were Apple IIs

02:14SPEAKERin my schooling as well, like I used them to be fair.

02:16SPEAKERBut like, I think you engaged with this era of computing.

02:20SPEAKERWell, but also, to be fair, this, as we'll get into,

02:25SPEAKERthis thing covers a lot of areas of computing.

02:27SPEAKERIt's not all just like late '70s 8-bit, you know,

02:30SPEAKERbasic, and when I say basic, I mean all caps basic,

02:33SPEAKERthe programming language type computers.

02:35SPEAKER- Yeah, like vintage computer now contains

02:38SPEAKERlike Windows 95 era machines.

02:39SPEAKERThey're 30 years old.

02:40SPEAKER- Yeah, we'll get into some of that.

02:41SPEAKERThere's definitely stuff from that era here too.

02:44SPEAKERSo, and also, yes, that gets into the thorny

02:47SPEAKERor depressing conversation of what constitutes vintage,

02:50SPEAKERwhich seems to be, I guess, like anything more

02:53SPEAKERthan 20 to 25 years old in these days.

02:56SPEAKER- It's like the antique rules, right?

02:58SPEAKERLike, furniture has to be a hundred years old

03:00SPEAKERto be an antique, but a car has to be 30 years old

03:03SPEAKERto be an antique because, you know.

03:04SPEAKER- Is Windows XP vintage yet?

03:07SPEAKER- Look, if it's not, it will be in the next five years.

03:09SPEAKER- Yep, yep.

03:10SPEAKER- The interesting thing, so, like,

03:14SPEAKERmy experience with computers in this era

03:17SPEAKERwas mostly that I annoyed, I think,

03:19SPEAKERmy fifth grade teacher enough that he was like,

03:20SPEAKER"Hey, you gotta get this kid out of my classroom

03:23SPEAKERduring this part of the day."

03:25SPEAKERSo, the principal was like, "Hey, we have an Apple II

03:28SPEAKERin the, like, the teacher workroom adjacent to my office.

03:33SPEAKERYou can come and, why don't you do something with that?"

03:35SPEAKERLike, write a grade-keeping program or something.

03:38SPEAKER- That's a good kind of kid.

03:39SPEAKERLike, the highly intelligent and motivated enough

03:42SPEAKERto be annoying and needs to be given something to do kid

03:46SPEAKERis probably gonna go do some cool stuff at some point.

03:48SPEAKER- I don't know if I lived up to the mandate there, but-

03:53SPEAKER- Wait, wait, did you actually write software

03:55SPEAKERthat your school used?

03:57SPEAKER- They had me write a grade-track,

03:59SPEAKERshe had me write a grade-tracking program,

04:02SPEAKERlike a database, like a, so I made a form and database

04:06SPEAKERwith probably Lotus 123 or something,

04:08SPEAKERI don't know what it was, but it was some,

04:09SPEAKERit was some, like, basic scripting program

04:12SPEAKERthat I could do, like, really rudimentary

04:16SPEAKERdatabase stuff in forms.

04:17SPEAKERSo, I had, like, a student name, student ID,

04:21SPEAKERclasses, grades, grade level, like, that kind of stuff,

04:25SPEAKERand I don't know whether they ever actually used it or not.

04:28SPEAKERIt would have been incredibly irresponsible

04:31SPEAKERfor them to take pieces of software that I had written.

04:33SPEAKERIt wasn't on, like, a modem-connected computer or anything,

04:35SPEAKERso I couldn't do any cool, like, '80s hacker movie

04:38SPEAKERchange your grade business.

04:39SPEAKER- I was just going with some real war games,

04:41SPEAKERjust like, if name equals Will Smith, grade equals A.

04:44SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the beginning

04:46SPEAKERof my good academic career.

04:49SPEAKERBut yeah, so, beyond that, it was mostly, like,

04:52SPEAKERtaking the TI-99 and 4A that we had bought

04:55SPEAKERand writing, you know, copying basic programs

04:58SPEAKERout of them, out of the backs of magazines and books

05:01SPEAKERand stuff like that, and then adjusting them

05:04SPEAKERa little bit to do something that I wanted,

05:06SPEAKERbut I never got any deeper than that,

05:08SPEAKER'cause I didn't, honestly, at the time,

05:10SPEAKERI didn't realize that there was a deeper than that.

05:12SPEAKERI was like, I don't see how you can do anything useful

05:13SPEAKERwith this basic stuff.

05:14SPEAKERIt seems like, seems like really limiting,

05:17SPEAKERand I didn't know about assembly, and there were,

05:19SPEAKERI didn't, I wouldn't have had references,

05:21SPEAKERI wouldn't even know where to get references for that,

05:23SPEAKEReven at, probably at the library and stuff like that.

05:24SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I think back a lot on my early exposure

05:28SPEAKERto computing, or lack of exposure, rather,

05:30SPEAKER'cause I didn't really, like, seriously touch computers

05:33SPEAKERuntil I was well in my teens, in the '90s,

05:35SPEAKERand I always think, like, ah, if I had this computer,

05:37SPEAKERwould I have gotten into this?

05:38SPEAKERYou know, like, programming or whatever,

05:40SPEAKERbut, like, all my early experiences with programming,

05:42SPEAKERkind of the same thing.

05:43SPEAKERLike, I feel like it was probably a failure of creativity

05:46SPEAKERon my part, because all I ever did was, like,

05:48SPEAKERthe classic lemonade stand program, you know?

05:50SPEAKERIt's like, okay, I can do, like, simple math here,

05:52SPEAKERand, like, take input, and do output, and then that's cool.

05:56SPEAKERI guess I'm gonna go play video games again.

05:58SPEAKERLike, maybe I just didn't have the spark of creativity

06:00SPEAKERon me to do anything more with it,

06:02SPEAKER'cause you can definitely do some stuff with basic.

06:04SPEAKER- You can, but, like, so when I went to middle school,

06:06SPEAKERand we had a computer class, we learned how to, like,

06:08SPEAKERanimate, basically move, like, a little block

06:12SPEAKERaround a grid, right, stuff like that.

06:14SPEAKERI feel like that's a lot of, like, game developers' origin

06:16SPEAKERstories is, like, the second.

06:18SPEAKEROr you've talked about, like, making a light blink

06:20SPEAKERon and off, like, interfacing with hardware,

06:22SPEAKERusing software, or making something move on the screen

06:26SPEAKERis, like, the gateway, but.

06:28SPEAKER- Yeah, but it was, the information about what to do next

06:31SPEAKERwas so unevenly distributed that, like, my,

06:34SPEAKERit's not like I had a teacher.

06:36SPEAKERIt's, I remember we had Mike Micah on.

06:38SPEAKERHe talked about a woman in his neighborhood

06:40SPEAKERwho was, like, running a software piracy BBS

06:43SPEAKERin her living room.

06:46SPEAKER- She was, like, at the head of, like,

06:47SPEAKERan organized crime network of software.

06:50SPEAKER- Like preteens?

06:51SPEAKER- Smuggling or something is how I like to think of it.

06:54SPEAKER- Yeah, but at the same time, and actually,

06:56SPEAKERthis came up in the John Romero book, too.

06:58SPEAKERLike, he talked about having early access

07:01SPEAKERto somebody who was, like, yeah, well, if this doesn't do

07:03SPEAKERwhat you wanted to do, you can use this other thing.

07:06SPEAKERAnd I don't know that I had anybody that knew that existed

07:09SPEAKERor even knew where to start finding that information.

07:11SPEAKERLike, I wouldn't, like, I wouldn't have,

07:13SPEAKERif I went to the library, the books that they would have had

07:17SPEAKERon programming were probably, like, learning to program

07:19SPEAKERwith BASIC and stuff like that, and it would have been,

07:23SPEAKERyou know, do this, go two, three,

07:24SPEAKERand none of them got as far as, hey,

07:27SPEAKERif you want this to be a game, you have to have a loop

07:30SPEAKERthat repeats the actions of the game

07:31SPEAKERevery, you know, 30th of a second or whatever.

07:34SPEAKER- Right, right.

07:35SPEAKER- But anyway, so you went to the, okay,

07:37SPEAKERso two things this week, long rambling intro.

07:40SPEAKER- VCF, you went to the VCF, and I was in LA

07:43SPEAKERand got to go back to Disneyland and see the stuff

07:45SPEAKERthat they've added in the last couple of years.

07:47SPEAKER- Cool.

07:48SPEAKER- Which is, I think, in the Disney community

07:51SPEAKERhas been divisive, Brad, this may shock you.

07:53SPEAKER- Okay, and as we've talked about,

07:57SPEAKERit seems like trips to Disneyland or World these days

07:59SPEAKERare extremely and increasingly tech-driven,

08:02SPEAKERboth in, like, how you interact with, like,

08:03SPEAKERthe commerce side of it and the ride access and stuff,

08:06SPEAKERand also, like, a lot of the advanced tech they're using

08:08SPEAKERin the exhibit on ride and experience stuff themselves.

08:12SPEAKER- Yeah, the, like, they're definitely using, like,

08:14SPEAKERmotion tracking, and there was, like,

08:16SPEAKERthere's a ride at California Adventure

08:18SPEAKERwe didn't actually go on last time,

08:19SPEAKER'cause it was, the lines were too long.

08:23SPEAKERBut it's, like, you're using, like,

08:24SPEAKERKinect-style motion tracking to shoot Spider-Man webs

08:29SPEAKERat monsters, and weirdly, like, I say Kinect-style,

08:34SPEAKERI feel like that is a derogatory statement these days,

08:37SPEAKERbut imagine a Kinect that worked.

08:39SPEAKER- Right, it's, like, Kinect plus 15 years of R&D

08:41SPEAKERplus, like, Disney's limitless resources.

08:44SPEAKER- And, like, infinitely higher compute.

08:47SPEAKERBut then there's also, like, the trackless ride loop.

08:49SPEAKERLike, we talked about Rise of the Resistance last time,

08:51SPEAKERwhich is basically, like, six, or eight seat cart

08:58SPEAKERwith an R5-style droid on the front.

09:01SPEAKERBut the whole thing is motion tracked, right?

09:03SPEAKERIt's all loose, there's no tracks,

09:05SPEAKERand the carts ride around the rooms as you're on the ride,

09:09SPEAKERand their position in space is tracked with technology,

09:11SPEAKERwith, obviously, like, you know,

09:13SPEAKERlike, Vive-style motion trackers.

09:16SPEAKERBut, yeah, the technology's kind of ridiculous these days.

09:21SPEAKERAnd the new, we rode the Mickey and Minnie's

09:24SPEAKERRunaway Railroad, which is another one

09:28SPEAKERof those trackless rides, and it's kind of the next,

09:30SPEAKERseems like the next evolution in that,

09:31SPEAKERfrom what they did with Rise, it's really cool.

09:33SPEAKER- Cool, yeah, we'll run through some of that stuff.

09:36SPEAKERShould we start with VCF?

09:37SPEAKER- Yeah, I think so, that's probably more relevant.

09:39SPEAKER- It's at the top of the notes dock here,

09:41SPEAKERso I'll just go from the top.

09:42SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds good.

09:43SPEAKER- Yeah, we're just gonna run through

09:44SPEAKERsome of the stuff we saw at these things

09:45SPEAKERthat are of interest to us, and hopefully the listeners.

09:49SPEAKER- And you were there with two recent guests on the show,

09:53SPEAKERWes Fenland and Steve Lynn, right?

09:55SPEAKER- And Wes Fenland, and yeah, like, the kind of,

09:58SPEAKERI feel like the flea market crew has just expanded

10:01SPEAKERinto kind of a general nerdy stuff crew in the Bay Area,

10:05SPEAKERlike we're really just, like a lot of us

10:07SPEAKERwill be at California Extreme next week.

10:09SPEAKER- And one, I wanna go to the Alameda Flea Market

10:12SPEAKERat some point too, Steve says that's worth going to

10:14SPEAKERif you're into the old computer stuff.

10:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I can't remember if that's the one,

10:17SPEAKERit's not the Alameda one, there's another one

10:19SPEAKERthat starts with an A, Alamany?

10:22SPEAKER- Alamany, the Alamany one is-

10:24SPEAKER- Is that the one with a lot of questionable goods?

10:28SPEAKER- It definitely is some stuff that is wrapped in asbestos

10:31SPEAKERor maybe fell off the back of a truck.

10:32SPEAKER- Yes, it's either fell off a truck

10:34SPEAKERor like came from an estate sale.

10:37SPEAKER- Yeah, that one also has,

10:39SPEAKERthat one's much more of like a junk sale than a,

10:42SPEAKERlike if you wanna clean out your garage

10:44SPEAKERand have a garage sale in the city,

10:45SPEAKERit seems like you maybe do that stuff

10:47SPEAKERand then load it up into a U-Haul

10:48SPEAKERand go to the Alamany Flea Market.

10:52SPEAKERBut yeah, the Alameda one is much more,

10:55SPEAKERit's more, like it seems like it kind of shoots the gap

10:59SPEAKERbetween the Bay Area Electronics Flea Market,

11:01SPEAKERwhich is definitely like ham radio,

11:03SPEAKEReverything from ham radio stuff to old computers to like,

11:06SPEAKERyou know, tape play Walkman's and stuff like that.

11:11SPEAKER- That sounds fun.

11:12SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

11:13SPEAKER- That does sound fun.

11:14SPEAKERAll right, I'll get into it here.

11:15SPEAKERThe Vintage Computer Festival West,

11:16SPEAKERthey call it West because there's actually

11:18SPEAKERa bunch of these.

11:19SPEAKER- Yeah, the other one's in Ohio or something, right?

11:21SPEAKER- There's like four or five more of them, I think.

11:23SPEAKERLike if you just Google Vintage Computer Festival,

11:25SPEAKERyou'll find like a list, but there's,

11:28SPEAKERI think there's Midwest, there is East,

11:31SPEAKERthere's Montreal, maybe South, I forget,

11:35SPEAKERbut they're like, they're scattered around the country,

11:36SPEAKERbut they're all different because it's, you know,

11:38SPEAKERpeople are not traveling the country to go to all of these.

11:41SPEAKERIt's kind of localized, you know,

11:44SPEAKERmost exhibits probably are within, you know,

11:46SPEAKERpeople that live within two, three hours coming to exhibits.

11:48SPEAKERSo you're going to get a completely different lineup

11:50SPEAKERat the different ones.

11:51SPEAKER- That's cool.

11:52SPEAKER- But they're all going to have a pretty common theme.

11:54SPEAKERAnd so the West one,

11:56SPEAKERwe talked about this a couple of years ago

11:58SPEAKERwhen we had Steve on,

12:00SPEAKERbut just to recap real quick,

12:01SPEAKERthe West one is at the Computer History Museum

12:03SPEAKERin Mountain View, which is very close to, I believe,

12:05SPEAKERthe original Google campus or location.

12:09SPEAKERAnd that museum, if you're ever in the Bay Area,

12:11SPEAKERlike, and you care about all the computers,

12:12SPEAKERyou absolutely should just go to that museum generally.

12:14SPEAKERLike the, they've got everything from a large piece

12:18SPEAKERof the ENIAC in there to parts of the Apollo Guidance

12:22SPEAKERcomputer to like tons and tons of commercial computers

12:26SPEAKERthat were released.

12:27SPEAKER- There's a Cray tower in there somewhere, I think.

12:27SPEAKER- Yes, there's a Cray in there.

12:29SPEAKERThere's just like everything you can think of

12:30SPEAKERfrom the history of computing.

12:31SPEAKERThere's a Beowulf cluster from NASA.

12:34SPEAKER- Ooh, I didn't know that.

12:34SPEAKER- That I had missed that I saw this time.

12:36SPEAKERBut anyway, that's all the permanent museum exhibit.

12:38SPEAKER- Is the working Babbage machine still there?

12:40SPEAKER- Probably, yeah, it starts with a ton

12:42SPEAKERof mechanical adding machines and stuff like that.

12:44SPEAKERThere's like a whole giant room of that kind of pre-digital

12:48SPEAKERor pre-electronic.

12:50SPEAKER- I saw an exhibit on Curta, like cylinder calculators

12:53SPEAKERthere one time that was unbelievable.

12:55SPEAKERWith those, they're like these really tight

12:57SPEAKERmechanical calculators, they're like cylindrical.

13:01SPEAKER- Yeah.

13:01SPEAKER- And they let you do crazy precision.

13:04SPEAKERLike they let you do the kind of precision

13:06SPEAKERyou have to have about a 12 foot slide world

13:08SPEAKERwas my recollection.

13:10SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

13:11SPEAKERI'll just run through some of the stuff though.

13:12SPEAKERThe VCF though is mostly upstairs in the big exhibit hall

13:16SPEAKERand there's a theater as well that they do talks in.

13:18SPEAKERAnd I went to some talks for the first time this year

13:20SPEAKERand that turned out to be a great decision

13:22SPEAKERwhich I'll get into in a second.

13:24SPEAKERBut you can go back if you didn't hear that episode

13:27SPEAKERtwo years ago, it's right about this time of year or two

13:30SPEAKERin 2024, we did that original episode.

13:32SPEAKERI feel like the exhibit floor was kind of just okay

13:35SPEAKERthis year, like it's not, it didn't have quite as many

13:38SPEAKERlike big idea projects I feel like as in the last couple

13:42SPEAKERof years, it was a lot of like collections

13:44SPEAKERof people's computers, which is definitely cool

13:46SPEAKERif you have not seen that before.

13:48SPEAKER- I think you described it as like a science fair vibe.

13:50SPEAKER- Yeah, it is very much a science fair vibe.

13:52SPEAKERI mean, there are straight up like placards set up

13:54SPEAKERand like, I mean, people are not quite doing full on

13:56SPEAKERscience fair poster boards, but pretty close

13:59SPEAKERin a lot of cases to explain what they're showing off.

14:01SPEAKERBut you know, it's a lot of like, Hey, I've got like

14:04SPEAKERall the Xerox, like Xerox Alto computers that were used

14:07SPEAKERin very early desktop publishing, or here are some

14:10SPEAKERUnix workstations from the nineties or here's my big

14:12SPEAKERcollection of Apple stuff.

14:13SPEAKERLike it was a lot of that, which is cool in its own right.

14:18SPEAKERBut I had seen a fair amount of that stuff before,

14:20SPEAKERbut like, you know, the first year we went there

14:21SPEAKERwas that Prodigy, what is the actual name of this?

14:24SPEAKERA Prodigy reloaded, I want to say.

14:26SPEAKER- It's the rebuild of the old Prodigy kind of pre-internet

14:31SPEAKERpseudo online service, I guess.

14:33SPEAKER- So like there's, yeah, the guy who was cobbling together

14:36SPEAKERProdigy from the cache files of everybody's old

14:38SPEAKERProdigy installs that he's finding on floppy disks.

14:41SPEAKER- Insane.

14:42SPEAKER- The open source CRT guy was there that year,

14:44SPEAKERthat first year I went.

14:45SPEAKERSo that's what I mean by big idea projects, you know,

14:48SPEAKERlike something that's really off the wall

14:49SPEAKERand takes a ton of ingenuity.

14:51SPEAKERThere were some of those though, this year,

14:54SPEAKERI want to talk about some of them.

14:55SPEAKERAnd a lot of them fell into a specific category,

14:58SPEAKERwhich is actually what that Prodigy thing is,

15:00SPEAKERwhich is people recreating old online services or old like

15:04SPEAKERdigital distribution sorts of platforms.

15:07SPEAKERI don't know why that's,

15:09SPEAKERmaybe that's just what's on the brain these days,

15:11SPEAKERbut like there were,

15:12SPEAKERthere were like three pretty notable examples of people

15:16SPEAKERtaking an online service and trying to like rebuild it in a

15:19SPEAKERway that you can access again.

15:20SPEAKER- Do you think that's because of the Prodigy thing?

15:22SPEAKERSo people started thinking about it and were like, oh wait,

15:25SPEAKERthis would work for AOL or whatever else as well.

15:28SPEAKER- The first one I saw,

15:29SPEAKERwhich really kind of blew me away was the AOL 2.5 experience.

15:34SPEAKERAnd this is online and you can try it yourself.

15:36SPEAKERThat was just the guy who does it was there and talking

15:38SPEAKERabout how he did it and stuff.

15:39SPEAKERBut I'll link the show notes doc.

15:42SPEAKERIt has links for a lot of these projects in there that you

15:44SPEAKERcan click on and check out.

15:45SPEAKERBut this guy has reverse engineered and restored the America

15:50SPEAKERonline 2.5 clients from kind of roughly, I guess,

15:55SPEAKERthat's like 94 or 95 era AOL.

15:57SPEAKER- Yeah. That's pre windows 95. Yeah.

16:00SPEAKER- Yeah. So he has it running in a,

16:02SPEAKERin a 95 like VM or emulation environment or whatever.

16:04SPEAKERBut yeah, I think that client did run on windows three one.

16:08SPEAKER- That is wild.

16:09SPEAKER- So it's like the fully functional client basically.

16:11SPEAKERAnd he somehow has recovered like a fair amount of AOL data

16:14SPEAKERto populate it with as well.

16:15SPEAKERSo like news of the day I was clicking around in it.

16:20SPEAKERHe's got some like AOL used to run these, like,

16:23SPEAKERI guess sort of like live chat room presentations sort of

16:27SPEAKERlike there was one on,

16:29SPEAKERthere was one on Oracle versus Microsoft,

16:31SPEAKERlike can Larry beat bill or think was like the tagline.

16:34SPEAKERAnd I joined it and it seemed to be,

16:37SPEAKERI assume this is archived in real time.

16:39SPEAKERIt was like scrolling the messages as they were typed.

16:41SPEAKERIt was like a chat room of like some experts debating this

16:45SPEAKERquestion or something.

16:46SPEAKERAnd it seemed like it had like the time codes where it was,

16:48SPEAKERunless he's faking it,

16:49SPEAKERlike it was actually just scrolling this like chat,

16:52SPEAKERtext conversation about this subject in real time.

16:54SPEAKERI guess AOL used to do stuff like that.

16:56SPEAKER- Was this, was this like one of their hosted chat things?

16:58SPEAKERIs that what it was?

16:59SPEAKER- That's basically yes. Yeah.

17:01SPEAKER- So I wonder, I wonder if that was required,

17:03SPEAKERif it's just, yeah, that's wild.

17:05SPEAKER- Yeah. So he's somehow, unless again,

17:06SPEAKERunless he's faking it,

17:07SPEAKERthat seemed like real data that he was doing.

17:09SPEAKERHe had a bunch of downloads.

17:09SPEAKERYou could go to the download center and he had a bunch of

17:11SPEAKERactual files there available for stuff like the Wolfenstein

17:14SPEAKER3D shareware and like FTP clients you could download.

17:19SPEAKERAnd it seems to really actually be simulating the speed

17:23SPEAKERthrough like a real 2,400 baud modem in terms of the

17:26SPEAKERdownload speed that it's giving you for everything.

17:28SPEAKERAnd in fact, the dialing experience,

17:30SPEAKERwhen I ran it the first time at home here,

17:33SPEAKERvery strong sense memory of the AOL dialing experience.

17:36SPEAKERI mean, like I know that the modem sound is just typical

17:39SPEAKERmodem, like a knit string audio.

17:41SPEAKERLike it's not, there was nothing unique about that to AOL,

17:43SPEAKERbut like pairing that with the little three panel.

17:46SPEAKERDid you ever use AOL at the time?

17:47SPEAKER- Only one time when I was on a trip to Alaska

17:50SPEAKERand I needed to dial into work.

17:51SPEAKER- Really? Wow.

17:53SPEAKERSo I burned through tons of like 10 hour free trial,

17:56SPEAKERAOL disks in the liminal space between being on BBSs.

18:01SPEAKERAnd then when we got our first real dial up PPP connection

18:03SPEAKERto the internet.

18:05SPEAKER- I had university shell accounts at that point.

18:07SPEAKERAnd then I learned how to do slip and I was like,

18:10SPEAKERoh, this is, this is way better than anything else.

18:12SPEAKER- No, you had no need of AOL.

18:14SPEAKERIt's just kind of, it was kind of all I had

18:15SPEAKERor all I knew until we got real internet.

18:17SPEAKERBut I definitely had spent a good few months or a year.

18:20SPEAKER- That's wild.

18:21SPEAKER- On AOL off and on, but like that,

18:23SPEAKERthe specific dialer screen of AOL paired with that,

18:26SPEAKERlike that whole process.

18:27SPEAKERIt was just a like real sense memory,

18:30SPEAKERlike neuron firing kind of nostalgia trip for me.

18:33SPEAKER- Yeah, I have no nostalgia for this era, unfortunately.

18:38SPEAKER- It was fun for me.

18:39SPEAKERAlso, apparently AOL was on the Apple two.

18:42SPEAKER- I thought that was a retro port down client.

18:46SPEAKER- No, so I asked him, I was like, wait, really?

18:48SPEAKER'Cause he had it running there.

18:49SPEAKERAnd I was like, in fact, I asked him that exact thing.

18:51SPEAKERI was like, is this like a mock-up?

18:53SPEAKERLike you envisioned what AOL would have been like

18:56SPEAKERon the Apple two?

18:57SPEAKERAnd he was like, no, this is the actual client.

18:58SPEAKERI guess I think AOL launched way earlier than you think,

19:00SPEAKERprobably late eighties, if I had to guess.

19:03SPEAKER'Cause the client he has running on the Apple two

19:05SPEAKERis dated 1989.

19:07SPEAKERSo that maybe that was their first client for that matter.

19:09SPEAKERI actually don't know.

19:10SPEAKER- I wonder if they started as a BBS.

19:11SPEAKERI know that like CompuServe and Prodigy started in BBS land

19:15SPEAKERand then became something a little bit more.

19:17SPEAKER- It could have been something like that.

19:18SPEAKERBut anyway, the link for this is in the show notes

19:21SPEAKERand you can just go try all this stuff yourself.

19:22SPEAKERAnd it's kind of a trip if you spent time on AOL

19:25SPEAKERback in the day.

19:25SPEAKER- This is finalkeyframe.com?

19:27SPEAKER- Yes.

19:28SPEAKER- Very cool.

19:29SPEAKER- Another one was recreating the Canadian computer

19:32SPEAKERonline service Naboo in ABU.

19:36SPEAKERI'm sure you have not.

19:37SPEAKERI might've heard the name at one point,

19:39SPEAKERbut I barely knew what it was or had heard of it.

19:41SPEAKER- I feel like this is,

19:42SPEAKERI played Quake with a bunch of Canadians.

19:46SPEAKER- Okay.

19:47SPEAKER- 'Cause they had cable modems, but they were bad.

19:49SPEAKERThey only, they were one way.

19:51SPEAKERDo you remember one way cable modems

19:53SPEAKERwhere you had a modem for the upstream

19:54SPEAKERand you would get data down the pipe?

19:57SPEAKER- Oh.

19:57SPEAKER- Down the cable pipe?

19:58SPEAKERYeah.

19:59SPEAKERSo they had those, they were in the hyping leagues

20:00SPEAKERwith me on my SDN line.

20:02SPEAKER- Interesting.

20:04SPEAKERNow this was defunct in 1985.

20:06SPEAKERSo I don't know if they had.

20:07SPEAKER- Oh, so this was, this was, this was the,

20:09SPEAKERthey were mocking some other thing.

20:11SPEAKERThere was something specific to Canada

20:13SPEAKERthat they would mock when they were,

20:14SPEAKERwhen we were playing people that were zooping around a lot.

20:16SPEAKER- It definitely could have been this.

20:18SPEAKERIt only lasted like three years,

20:19SPEAKERbut it was, it was a self contained commercial.

20:21SPEAKERIt was, it was its own computer.

20:22SPEAKEROkay, so Naboo stands for

20:24SPEAKERnatural access to bi-directional utilities, of course.

20:28SPEAKER- I wonder if this is like the, like the, the French thing,

20:32SPEAKERthe God, what's it called?

20:36SPEAKERKeep, keep going and I'll, I'll find it.

20:37SPEAKER- Okay, I'm not sure who ran this.

20:39SPEAKERI don't think it was a government or public initiative.

20:42SPEAKERI think it was commercial, but Wikipedia,

20:44SPEAKERI don't actually think so.

20:46SPEAKER- Minitel is the thing I was thinking about.

20:48SPEAKER- Oh, that's, yeah, that's from France, right?

20:50SPEAKER- That's, that's, that was a French telecom thing, right?

20:52SPEAKERThey would put a little computer,

20:53SPEAKERlike a dumb terminal, basically in everybody's house.

20:56SPEAKER- Okay, yeah, Minitel is listed in the sea also

20:58SPEAKERon Wikipedia under Naboo.

21:00SPEAKERSo it's definitely that similar kind of

21:02SPEAKERearly, early online service vibe.

21:04SPEAKERBut so Naboo was its own computer system.

21:06SPEAKERLike it was, it was a Z80 based computer,

21:08SPEAKERkind of like an Apple II or, or an IBM PC.

21:11SPEAKERYou know, it was its own computer ecosystem.

21:13SPEAKERAnd according to the guy running this exhibit,

21:16SPEAKERyou could rent the computer.

21:18SPEAKER- Of course.

21:19SPEAKER- If you, if you couldn't afford to buy it.

21:21SPEAKERAnd then you were also, of course,

21:22SPEAKERsubscribing to this online service,

21:24SPEAKERbut it was using a cable, coax cable in 1982.

21:28SPEAKER- That's, that's crazy.

21:29SPEAKERAnd for like real, real bandwidth.

21:31SPEAKER- Like 6.5 megabits per second in 1982,

21:34SPEAKERwhich is completely insane.

21:35SPEAKERBut the way he described how this,

21:37SPEAKERlike it was just a,

21:38SPEAKERit was a menu system that would feed you content

21:40SPEAKERand you could download little games and play on it

21:42SPEAKERand do some other basic early online stuff,

21:44SPEAKERas you might imagine, pre-internet.

21:46SPEAKERThe way he described it was that it was effectively pulsing

21:49SPEAKERall the data out every like 20 seconds.

21:52SPEAKER- So it was just blasting the entire catalog?

21:55SPEAKER- Yes, the entire like menuing system

21:57SPEAKERand all the options for it.

21:59SPEAKERAnd he, in fact, he demonstrated how many,

22:01SPEAKERif I remember he demonstrated how many layers deep

22:04SPEAKERin the menu you could go in real time

22:05SPEAKERbefore you hit the point where it needed to pull more data.

22:08SPEAKERAnd then it would have to wait for it to request that data.

22:10SPEAKERBut so yeah,

22:11SPEAKERit was just kind of sending out the whole system

22:13SPEAKERevery 20 seconds until you made a request.

22:16SPEAKERBut anyway, Nabu Retronet, I believe is the name

22:21SPEAKERof the kind of resurrection effort for this,

22:24SPEAKERbut they have fully resurrected it

22:25SPEAKERand like let you access all the stuff on it.

22:28SPEAKERThey've also added a bunch of stuff to it.

22:29SPEAKERThey've added like video chat,

22:30SPEAKERlike very '80s rudimentary video chat

22:33SPEAKERand some other functionality like that.

22:35SPEAKER- I like that they're,

22:37SPEAKERthat the Nabu software naming scheme seems to be,

22:40SPEAKERhey, we're just gonna knock off a bunch of other games

22:43SPEAKERand we're gonna misspell the names.

22:45SPEAKER- Yeah, it's Asteroids.

22:46SPEAKER- Yeah, Asteroids, A-R-O-I-D-S.

22:51SPEAKER- Yep. - Yeah.

22:52SPEAKER- Adventire. - Uh-huh.

22:54SPEAKER- Yeah, this is remarkable. - Yes.

22:57SPEAKERSo that one's cool.

22:58SPEAKERAnd he had some of the,

22:59SPEAKERhe had actual Nabu computers there.

23:00SPEAKERSo some good looking chunky '80s all in one keyboard computer

23:05SPEAKERwith some like wood, faux wood kind of stuff.

23:08SPEAKER- So I assume though you can't connect the old computers

23:10SPEAKERto the do not real service.

23:12SPEAKER- No, I don't think so.

23:14SPEAKERI could be wrong.

23:15SPEAKERI didn't dig too deeply into the hardware compatibility,

23:17SPEAKERbut that seems like a very robust project.

23:20SPEAKER- That's pretty cool though.

23:21SPEAKER- Yeah, it's neat that, I mean,

23:22SPEAKERfor something that obscure

23:23SPEAKERto get that much work and attention.

23:26SPEAKERThe last one is, this one's weird.

23:30SPEAKERIt is a recreation of the Takeru.

23:32SPEAKERTakeru, I never knew how Japanese

23:35SPEAKERto pronounce Japanese words,

23:36SPEAKERbut the kiosk system from Japan in the '80s.

23:41SPEAKER- Okay, I don't know about this one either.

23:43SPEAKER- No, I'd never heard of it.

23:45SPEAKERI didn't know a thing about it.

23:46SPEAKERAnd what's crazy is the guy that was showing it off

23:49SPEAKERalso doesn't know that much about it

23:51SPEAKERbecause there is very little documentation.

23:53SPEAKERLike the system has been gone for years

23:56SPEAKERand there's like next to no documentation

23:57SPEAKERabout how it worked really,

24:00SPEAKERor even a lot of material reference material

24:02SPEAKERto base his recreation on.

24:05SPEAKERLike he basically, if I understood correctly,

24:07SPEAKERhe's like working from like videotape of this thing,

24:09SPEAKERlike video recordings of this menuing system.

24:12SPEAKERSo he has kind of re-implemented this kiosk system.

24:17SPEAKERSorry, I should back up and say what this thing is.

24:20SPEAKERIt was a kiosk system in Japan

24:21SPEAKERthat would let you buy software

24:23SPEAKERto transfer onto floppy disk or cartridge

24:25SPEAKERfor kind of a lot of the common Japanese computers

24:28SPEAKERof the time.

24:29SPEAKERSo like all the MSX computers, the Sharp, like X68000,

24:32SPEAKERlike it might've had compatibility with some others,

24:35SPEAKERbut those were some of the big computers

24:37SPEAKERin Japan at the time, but there were-

24:39SPEAKER- Some sick red PC, right?

24:41SPEAKERLike this is the era we're talking about.

24:43SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that era of like very cool looking

24:45SPEAKERblack and red computers in Japan.

24:47SPEAKER- God, Japanese PCs were so cool.

24:49SPEAKER- Yes, they definitely were.

24:50SPEAKERAnd there are plenty of those around at this thing too,

24:52SPEAKERif you haven't been and want to see stuff like that.

24:53SPEAKERBut yeah, it was this weird exercise in interpretation

24:58SPEAKERbecause again, he doesn't have like the original software

25:00SPEAKERto work off of, or even a lot of reference material

25:03SPEAKERfor what it looked like or how it worked.

25:05SPEAKERSo he's like kind of had to interpret what this thing was

25:07SPEAKERto kind of recreate a front end for it.

25:10SPEAKER- It's almost like he's making, it's like when you watch,

25:13SPEAKERwhen you see somebody using a computer interface

25:15SPEAKERin a movie and you're like,

25:16SPEAKERthis isn't really how computers work,

25:18SPEAKERbut it gives you the right vibe.

25:19SPEAKERIs that kind of where we're at with this?

25:20SPEAKER- Or, I mean, this is a weird leap,

25:21SPEAKERbut it kind of reminds me of what the creator

25:26SPEAKERof Dark Souls has said about how he approached Dark Souls.

25:29SPEAKERLike he's talked about, have you ever heard,

25:31SPEAKERyou've seen the whole spiel that he read

25:36SPEAKEREnglish fantasy novels?

25:37SPEAKERThis is my understanding.

25:38SPEAKERI think this is right, it's from like interviews.

25:39SPEAKERHe basically like read English fantasy novels as a child,

25:42SPEAKERbut with only like somewhat limited English proficiency.

25:45SPEAKERSo he wasn't able to understand everything,

25:47SPEAKERwhich kind of helped give rise to Dark Souls,

25:52SPEAKERlike patchwork style of storytelling,

25:54SPEAKERwhere it kind of creates mystery

25:56SPEAKERby not telling you everything.

25:58SPEAKERIt kind of reminds me of that with this,

25:59SPEAKERwhere he's got like very limited reference material

26:02SPEAKERfor this kiosk system.

26:03SPEAKERAnd he's like trying to recreate it based on,

26:06SPEAKERon just this patchwork of like imagery and information

26:09SPEAKERhe's got.

26:10SPEAKER- This seems like an absolutely,

26:14SPEAKERlike I'm looking at these machines, the kiosks,

26:16SPEAKERand they look like enormous ATMs.

26:19SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, they look kind of rad and weird and imposing.

26:22SPEAKER- Yeah, like they look like a prop

26:24SPEAKERfrom like a Verhoeven '80s science fiction movie.

26:26SPEAKER- Extremely, extremely.

26:28SPEAKERThey almost do like kind of fake or movie-esque.

26:31SPEAKER- Yeah, but they like, we're not talking about,

26:34SPEAKERwe're talking about small, like floppy-sized software, right?

26:36SPEAKER'Cause it was ISDN lines and stuff like that.

26:38SPEAKER- Yeah, this is all mid-80s computing.

26:40SPEAKERSo like floppy disk-sized stuff for sure.

26:42SPEAKERBut, and just to add to the mystery of this project,

26:44SPEAKERhe didn't seem to have like a name for his recreation.

26:47SPEAKERLike the name of this exhibit was just Takeru Kiosk.

26:51SPEAKERAnd he also does not seem to have

26:53SPEAKERany kind of like online presence for it that I could find.

26:56SPEAKERLike there's no website for it.

26:57SPEAKERSo like, I don't know what this thing is called

27:00SPEAKERor how to access it or anything.

27:01SPEAKERIt was just like kind of elusive in a way.

27:04SPEAKER- I kind of wonder, like if you were interested

27:07SPEAKERin recreating this, but didn't know where to start it

27:09SPEAKERand have all the information you needed to start,

27:11SPEAKERit seems like setting up a booth at a VCF

27:13SPEAKERand then like, this might be a good way

27:16SPEAKERto find like-minded individuals.

27:18SPEAKER- Definitely, very much so.

27:20SPEAKERAnd last thing I'll say on this,

27:21SPEAKERthis is unrelated to this guy's effort entirely,

27:23SPEAKERbut this was actually not much more than a year ago.

27:27SPEAKERLast year, there were exclusive games on this kiosk system

27:31SPEAKERand somebody uncovered a game that had been lost a time

27:34SPEAKERthat was one of the exclusives.

27:36SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.

27:37SPEAKER- Last year, the game was just called Dark Castle.

27:39SPEAKERIt seems like a little first-person dungeon crawler.

27:42SPEAKER- Okay.

27:43SPEAKER- Pretty standard '80s stuff,

27:44SPEAKERbut somebody apparently just stumbled on a floppy disk

27:47SPEAKERin a secondhand like hobby shop in Japan

27:50SPEAKERthat happened to have this lost game on it

27:52SPEAKERthat they have now restored and put on the internet.

27:55SPEAKER- This is why when you buy a bunch of disks

27:57SPEAKERat a flea market, you always see what's on them

27:59SPEAKERbefore you wipe them and put your own crap on there.

28:01SPEAKER- Extremely, extremely, for sure.

28:03SPEAKERAnyway, there are a lot of little cool online service-y

28:05SPEAKERsorts of projects out there.

28:07SPEAKER- That's really cool.

28:08SPEAKER- Yeah, a couple other quick exhibits

28:10SPEAKERjust that caught my attention, the Agon Lite.

28:13SPEAKER- Okay.

28:14SPEAKER- A-G-O-N, I have not heard of.

28:16SPEAKERHave you heard of this thing?

28:17SPEAKER- No.

28:18SPEAKER- It's a single-board computer,

28:20SPEAKERlike Raspberry Pi style little computer.

28:24SPEAKERBut what it is is that it has a Z80 processor on it,

28:27SPEAKERor an EZ80, which I guess is like a modern version

28:30SPEAKERof the Z80.

28:31SPEAKERBut what it is is one of those era of 8-bit microcomputers

28:36SPEAKERlike the Apple II or the IBM PC or the Commodore 64.

28:41SPEAKERIt's one of those 8-bit, this guy described it,

28:44SPEAKERthe guy showing it off described it

28:45SPEAKERas a boot to basic computer, you know,

28:47SPEAKERlike how the Apple II would be straight

28:48SPEAKERinto a basic interface,

28:49SPEAKER'cause that's all you could do with it

28:50SPEAKERwas write your own software in basic.

28:53SPEAKERSo it is a single-board computer,

28:55SPEAKERbut acts like something like an Apple II

28:57SPEAKERor that era of computer where it just boosts

29:00SPEAKERto like a basic interface for you to program.

29:02SPEAKERIt has, it uses the Z80 as a processor,

29:06SPEAKERbut it has an ESP32 on it that kind of handles

29:09SPEAKERbasically all the other functionality,

29:10SPEAKERlike the video out, the audio, like I/O,

29:14SPEAKERall the other computery stuff, but.

29:16SPEAKER- So you're saying that like the daughter processor

29:19SPEAKERthat handles all the I/O is a thousand or a million times

29:23SPEAKERas fast as the actual, that's fantastic.

29:25SPEAKER- Basically, yes, but it is like for a hobbyist,

29:27SPEAKERif you want to try out programming, you know,

29:30SPEAKERthat style of old computer, it's just a neat little thing.

29:34SPEAKER- Is like, is it cheap?

29:36SPEAKERIs that why?

29:37SPEAKER- No, I don't know what it would cost actually.

29:39SPEAKERI Googled it and did not immediately find anybody selling it.

29:42SPEAKERSo I don't know where you would get it

29:46SPEAKERnow that you mention it.

29:48SPEAKERI linked a hands-on to it in the show notes though,

29:51SPEAKERso that might have information about how to get one.

29:54SPEAKERI can't imagine it's very expensive.

29:56SPEAKER- Oh, okay, so an Agon console, a full kit,

29:59SPEAKERwhich includes like a D pad, like a game pad and a keyboard

30:05SPEAKERand boxes and everything for it is 180 bucks.

30:08SPEAKER- Okay, that's not too bad. - 180 pounds rather.

30:10SPEAKER- I mean, that's definitely cheaper

30:11SPEAKERthan if you were like hunt down like real vintage hardware

30:14SPEAKERat this point, if you wanted to do this

30:15SPEAKERor something like this.

30:16SPEAKERSo the hands-on I linked to actually has an example

30:19SPEAKERof coding in C on it to make like a snake game

30:22SPEAKERor something like that.

30:23SPEAKERSo it's like that era of old,

30:25SPEAKERlike there's this like whole hobbyist community of people

30:29SPEAKERwho want to engage with that really elemental era

30:32SPEAKERof personal computing where you had

30:34SPEAKERto kind of do literally everything yourself.

30:36SPEAKER- Is it, does it do HDMI out as well or is it just VGA?

30:41SPEAKER- I don't know actually, I kind of saw it in passing.

30:44SPEAKERI don't, I'm not sure if it's got HDMI or not.

30:48SPEAKER- Looking at like the places that you go

30:50SPEAKERto get these kinds of boards,

30:52SPEAKERit seems like there's a bazillion variants of this thing.

30:55SPEAKER- Yeah, this is, I think it's,

30:56SPEAKERthis is actually like an open standard, if I'm not mistaken.

30:58SPEAKERI believe the design itself is open source

31:01SPEAKERand so people are probably putting out

31:02SPEAKERdifferent variants of it, if I had to guess.

31:06SPEAKER- It looks like there's, like PiHut in the UK

31:10SPEAKERis selling a bunch of them.

31:11SPEAKER- Yeah, for 50 pounds. - And they're like 60 bucks,

31:13SPEAKER60 pounds, yeah. - Yeah, yeah.

31:14SPEAKERAnd it looks like this one does not have an HDMI port,

31:17SPEAKERbut you can use an adapter from VGA.

31:19SPEAKER- Okay. - This one is USB-C powered,

31:21SPEAKERalthough I bet some others use like barrel plug

31:23SPEAKERor whatever, but. - Yeah.

31:25SPEAKER- Cool hobbyist stuff. - Yeah, that's neat.

31:27SPEAKER- Yeah, it really is.

31:28SPEAKERLast exhibit I'll mention real quick.

31:30SPEAKERI actually, I didn't take a picture of,

31:32SPEAKERI don't remember what the actual theme of this exhibit was.

31:36SPEAKERThe reason for that is because I saw,

31:37SPEAKERwhen I saw this particular feature of the exhibit,

31:39SPEAKEReverything else in my periphery fell away.

31:42SPEAKER- Like you've been, you tunneled in

31:44SPEAKERon whatever you were looking at?

31:45SPEAKER- I saw Quake Deathmatch running and locked in

31:48SPEAKERin a way that I have not in a very long time.

31:51SPEAKERWhat this, I think this was a larger Mac

31:54SPEAKERor maybe Apple exhibit,

31:55SPEAKERI think was probably the general theme of this thing,

31:57SPEAKERbut they had a little LAN of iBooks set up.

31:59SPEAKER- Oh, that's amazing.

32:00SPEAKER- Which, what era was the iBook?

32:03SPEAKER- Early 2000s. - 90s, early 2000s.

32:04SPEAKERIt was kind of like right after the iMac,

32:06SPEAKERright after Jobs came back, right?

32:07SPEAKER- Yeah, it was after the candy color iMacs

32:11SPEAKERand before like iPods or anything like that came out.

32:15SPEAKER- Looks like 99 was the first iBook for 2006.

32:18SPEAKERI always think of those things as like,

32:20SPEAKERthey just looked like a giant cartoon clam to me,

32:22SPEAKERlike from the Little Mermaid.

32:24SPEAKER- It looked like a toy computer.

32:25SPEAKER- Yes.

32:26SPEAKERAnyway, they had at least five or six

32:28SPEAKERof those networked together running just straight up

32:30SPEAKERlike Quake Deathmatch.

32:31SPEAKER- Were they on ethernet networks?

32:33SPEAKER- I don't know, actually.

32:34SPEAKERI don't know how they were.

32:35SPEAKERI should have asked them.

32:36SPEAKERI should have asked them. - Apple network adapter.

32:38SPEAKER- Could have been, would that work over app?

32:40SPEAKERIs Apple Talk a network protocol?

32:42SPEAKER- Apple Talk was a protocol, but I don't remember,

32:46SPEAKERI don't remember what the iBook,

32:47SPEAKERI don't remember how you connected those

32:48SPEAKER'cause it was pre-Wifi.

32:49SPEAKER- Could it have been IPX?

32:52SPEAKERQuite didn't even work over IPX.

32:54SPEAKER- I'm asking about the physical layer.

32:55SPEAKERI don't know. - The physical, okay.

32:57SPEAKERAre we getting into the OSI layer model here?

32:59SPEAKER- Well, yeah, but everybody knows that's problematic.

33:01SPEAKERYou don't need to write in.

33:03SPEAKER- Fair.

33:04SPEAKER- Yeah, it looks like he probably was using

33:07SPEAKERFirewire adapters, actually, is what I would guess.

33:09SPEAKERIt has ethernet, though.

33:11SPEAKER- Okay.

33:12SPEAKER- This was the first of the no legacy internet laptops.

33:15SPEAKERSo it was USB ethernet modem ports and an optical drive.

33:18SPEAKER- So there was no Apple network ADP

33:21SPEAKERor whatever their weird networking standard was.

33:23SPEAKER- Oh, did Apple have their own network connector?

33:26SPEAKER- Did they ever, good God, man.

33:28SPEAKER- Of course, of course. - Of course they did.

33:30SPEAKER- I didn't think I asked,

33:31SPEAKERbut I bet it was just ethernet if those things had that.

33:34SPEAKER- That makes sense.

33:34SPEAKER- Yeah, but all I cared about was there were a couple of,

33:38SPEAKERthere were at least a couple, maybe three small children

33:41SPEAKERplaying Quake and Steve and Wes and I sauntered up

33:45SPEAKERand I could not help myself, I had to jump on there.

33:47SPEAKER- Oh no, did you wreck the kids, Brad?

33:49SPEAKER- We started on DM3 and then it went straight to DM6

33:52SPEAKERand that was all I needed in the world.

33:54SPEAKER- Look, at some point, okay, we have a couple of rankings

33:58SPEAKERin the queue, in the hopper,

33:59SPEAKERbut I'm gonna add best all-time multiplayer maps

34:02SPEAKERto the ranking queue.

34:03SPEAKER- That's probably worth doing.

34:05SPEAKER- I think we might have to get a guest to help with that.

34:08SPEAKER- I think you're probably right, but.

34:10SPEAKER- But yeah, DM3 is an all-time, like DM3 set the stage

34:14SPEAKERfor everything that came after, as far as I'm concerned.

34:16SPEAKER- Sure, yes, look.

34:18SPEAKER- Weak side, strong side.

34:20SPEAKER- I determined that those kids needed a lesson

34:23SPEAKERfrom the School of Hard Knocks, okay.

34:25SPEAKER- Okay, so the real question is,

34:27SPEAKERwas it running the Quake test that only ran on Macs

34:30SPEAKERor was it running?

34:31SPEAKER- It seemed like retail.

34:32SPEAKER- Retail, okay.

34:33SPEAKER- I couldn't say for, well, yeah,

34:34SPEAKER'cause you mean like queue test, queue test?

34:35SPEAKER- Queue test had that weird map, yeah.

34:37SPEAKER- Yeah, that did not have the final maps in it.

34:39SPEAKERYeah, this was definitely full Quake.

34:42SPEAKER- Well, it was running DM or Quake World?

34:45SPEAKER- Probably just LandQuake, if I had to guess.

34:48SPEAKER- LandQuake, okay.

34:50SPEAKER- Some beat downs were distributed.

34:52SPEAKER- Wow. - Some, look.

34:54SPEAKER- Wow. - One of the kids.

34:55SPEAKER- How old were these, were they like in their 20s

34:57SPEAKERor were they--

34:58SPEAKER- No, no, no, no, like probably, I'd say,

35:00SPEAKERlike between like 10 and 14 or something.

35:03SPEAKEROne of them at one point was like, who keeps killing me?

35:06SPEAKER- Oh no, what was the, were you using the trackpad

35:09SPEAKERor was there a mouse there?

35:11SPEAKER- There were mice.

35:12SPEAKERI think it was the little circular, little puck,

35:15SPEAKERmulticolored iMac or iBook mouse.

35:18SPEAKER- Truly abysmal mice, those.

35:21SPEAKER- They kept calling the lightning gun a laser gun

35:24SPEAKERand I just could not abide it.

35:25SPEAKER- Did you jump in the water and zap 'em with it?

35:28SPEAKER- No, I didn't, but I just had to.

35:29SPEAKERIt was mostly a lot of quad rocket.

35:31SPEAKER- Okay.

35:32SPEAKER- It was the go-to for easy fragging.

35:36SPEAKER- Look, now you know, once upon a time,

35:41SPEAKERFatality came to the PC Gamer offices.

35:44SPEAKER- Oh boy.

35:45SPEAKER- To play Quake and promote his Creative Labs stuff.

35:49SPEAKERAnd the PC Gamer guys called us at Maggordon and iMacs from PC

35:54SPEAKER'cause they were like, you guys can,

35:56SPEAKERyou're gonna have a better chance of hanging

35:58SPEAKERthan any of us who mostly play real-time strategy games

36:00SPEAKERand other games for, you know, weenies.

36:04SPEAKERAnd I hit him one time and I was like,

36:07SPEAKERthis is the best I've ever done in a video game.

36:09SPEAKER- Hit him, not killed?

36:11SPEAKER- Oh no, it didn't come close.

36:12SPEAKERI think we were playing Quake 2,

36:13SPEAKERwhich was kind of bullshit, but you know, whatever.

36:16SPEAKER- I don't disagree.

36:18SPEAKER- But yeah, no, it was like one of those ones

36:21SPEAKERwhere the moment an arm was visible,

36:24SPEAKERlike the tiniest bit of your hitbox was visible,

36:26SPEAKERyou were already dead.

36:27SPEAKER- Sure, so he's actually good, huh?

36:29SPEAKER- Like, it's the thing that when people,

36:34SPEAKERit's like the equivalent is like going to a fighting game,

36:36SPEAKERlike going to Evo as the guy in your neighborhood

36:39SPEAKERwho's real good at Mortal Kombat,

36:41SPEAKERand then you actually play somebody

36:43SPEAKERwho's actually good at Mortal Kombat

36:44SPEAKERand you like don't get a single hit in.

36:46SPEAKERIt felt like, I assume that this is what that feels like.

36:50SPEAKER- I know the feeling.

36:51SPEAKER- Like people who are legit good at this,

36:53SPEAKERlike playing PUBG, we used to occasionally run into a pro,

36:57SPEAKERand that game is a little different

36:59SPEAKER'cause there's outside pressures that can kind of hose them,

37:02SPEAKERbut if it's a one-on-one fight

37:03SPEAKERwith somebody who was like an ex-Counter-Strike pro,

37:05SPEAKEReven if they haven't been a Counter-Strike pro

37:07SPEAKERin 10 or 12 years, there's nothing you can do

37:09SPEAKERbut lay down and die.

37:10SPEAKER- Sure, sure.

37:13SPEAKERAnyway, that was just a fun little line of stuff

37:15SPEAKERfrom the exhibit hall.

37:16SPEAKERThere was a ton of other stuff in there to be fair,

37:18SPEAKERbut I also went to a couple of talks

37:20SPEAKERthat I will discuss briefly here.

37:23SPEAKERI went to one given by a guy

37:25SPEAKERfrom Digital Equipment Corporation

37:27SPEAKERwho worked on the original ethernet.

37:29SPEAKER- Ooh.

37:30SPEAKER- Like he was part of the team

37:31SPEAKERthat brought ethernet 1.0 to market.

37:35SPEAKER- That would have been coax, right?

37:37SPEAKER- Yes, so his name is Rich Seifert.

37:39SPEAKERI think that's how you pronounce his name.

37:41SPEAKERI guess he's given this talk before,

37:42SPEAKERand there is a PC Gamer.

37:44SPEAKERWes was there and wrote this up,

37:45SPEAKERand he found a 2013 version of the same talk

37:50SPEAKERthat this guy gave, so you can actually go watch.

37:52SPEAKERI have to imagine it's roughly the same talk

37:54SPEAKER'cause I can't imagine much has changed

37:56SPEAKERabout early ethernet since then.

37:59SPEAKER- His name is super familiar to me,

38:00SPEAKERand I can't figure out why.

38:01SPEAKER- So he worked closely with the guy,

38:03SPEAKERBob Metcalf, I wanna say,

38:05SPEAKERis the guy who defined the ethernet standard,

38:07SPEAKERand he was a contemporary of him

38:09SPEAKERand worked on the same team.

38:10SPEAKER- Okay.

38:11SPEAKER- This guy, do you know what a vampire tap is?

38:13SPEAKER- No.

38:14SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

38:15SPEAKERWell, this guy designed the vampire tap board

38:17SPEAKERfor just to establish his credibility here.

38:20SPEAKER- What's a vampire tap board?

38:21SPEAKER- I believe it bit into the original coax cable,

38:25SPEAKERif I'm not mistaken.

38:26SPEAKER- Oh, it's that thing.

38:28SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, maybe you do know what that is.

38:30SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, it's like a--

38:31SPEAKER- It's part of the controller setup

38:33SPEAKERthat the original coax cable would run into.

38:35SPEAKERI was not quite clear how it worked,

38:36SPEAKER'cause I've never seen any of that hardware.

38:38SPEAKER- Yeah, so the way, prior to 10Base-T,

38:43SPEAKERwhich was the 10 megabit one,

38:45SPEAKERwhich had barrel connectors,

38:47SPEAKERso you had basically, you had a T thing

38:50SPEAKERthat you'd plug into the coax

38:52SPEAKERon the back of your network card,

38:53SPEAKERand then you'd plug either two ends of cable

38:56SPEAKERinto the other sides of the T,

38:58SPEAKERor you'd put one cable and a terminator on there.

39:02SPEAKERAnd the terminator was just a resistor

39:03SPEAKERat the right frequency.

39:08SPEAKERBut yeah, so the vampire tap was the thing that snapped,

39:12SPEAKERyou know how when you make an ethernet cable

39:15SPEAKERand you push on a punch-down 10Base gigabit ethernet cable,

39:21SPEAKER10Base-T?

39:22SPEAKERNo, I'm getting confused here.

39:25SPEAKER- Oh, the gigabit cable, what is that?

39:27SPEAKER1GBase-T, I think is the name of that?

39:29SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.

39:30SPEAKER- Yeah, like where you're crimping.

39:32SPEAKER- Well, but basically you're pushing the cable down into,

39:35SPEAKERlike the shielded cable,

39:38SPEAKERyou're just pushing it down in between two blades

39:41SPEAKERthat basically pierce the cable, the sheathing, right?

39:44SPEAKERSo this worked like that,

39:45SPEAKERexcept for it would hit the multiple layers of the coax,

39:48SPEAKER'cause the coax has a braided sheath

39:50SPEAKERand then it has a center core

39:51SPEAKERand you needed to get both of those,

39:53SPEAKERbut they needed to not short each other out.

39:54SPEAKER- Sure.

39:55SPEAKEROkay, so he designed that hardware.

39:57SPEAKER- That's wild.

39:58SPEAKER- He was absolutely, he contributed

39:59SPEAKERto like the kind of original slide lash design

40:02SPEAKERand all kinds of stuff.

40:03SPEAKERLike he very much was on the team

40:05SPEAKERthat brought ethernet to market.

40:07SPEAKERBut he did defer to, I believe Metcalf was the guy's name

40:11SPEAKERwho did the actual like design,

40:12SPEAKERthe topology of what the network frames looked like

40:15SPEAKERand the hardware loop and all that stuff,

40:17SPEAKERbut he was still very much involved.

40:20SPEAKERI didn't realize ethernet was defined

40:22SPEAKERby digital Intel and Xerox.

40:24SPEAKERIt was like a big three-way corporate collaboration.

40:27SPEAKER- That makes sense.

40:28SPEAKER- And he talked a lot about,

40:29SPEAKERand a lot of this was kind of over my head

40:30SPEAKERor before my time,

40:32SPEAKERbut like he talked about token ring

40:34SPEAKERand other styles of network.

40:35SPEAKERYou know, like ethernet was by no means like the default.

40:38SPEAKERIt was an entrance in the market,

40:41SPEAKERjust like all these other types of network designs

40:43SPEAKERthat in some cases work very differently.

40:45SPEAKERAnd so like, you know, one of the themes of this talk

40:47SPEAKERwas like there was no guarantee

40:50SPEAKERthat ethernet was gonna become the networking standard

40:52SPEAKERthat it became.

40:53SPEAKERIt was just one of many competitors.

40:54SPEAKERAnd like, you know, he thinks, you know,

40:56SPEAKERthey kept it simple and cheap

40:57SPEAKERand that's why it won because-

41:00SPEAKER- Not encumbered.

41:01SPEAKER- Yes, exactly.

41:03SPEAKER- Again, the token ring stuff,

41:05SPEAKERevery time those adapters were really expensive

41:07SPEAKER'cause IBM got a fairly substantial payout

41:10SPEAKERon every one that they sold and made.

41:13SPEAKER- Yeah, he talked about that.

41:14SPEAKERAnd also the other thing is he said

41:15SPEAKERthat it was laden with features.

41:16SPEAKERLike that was kind of his point was like,

41:19SPEAKERthey had, he got, it was really interesting talk.

41:21SPEAKERI would recommend watching it.

41:23SPEAKERIt was like kind of half humorous

41:25SPEAKERand half very factual and opinionated,

41:27SPEAKERbut like he talked about the philosophical split

41:31SPEAKERbetween they made the network dumb,

41:33SPEAKERlike for ethernet, they made the ethernet design

41:35SPEAKERdo as little as it needed to do

41:37SPEAKERto get the data back and forth

41:38SPEAKERand put all the smarts in the end clients.

41:41SPEAKERLike you relied on the computer

41:43SPEAKERto do all the heavy lifting for this thing.

41:44SPEAKERAnd that's why they could ship ethernet cheaply

41:47SPEAKERversus the IBM token ring philosophy

41:49SPEAKERwas to make the network part do everything,

41:52SPEAKERwhich led to way more complexity and manufacturing cost.

41:55SPEAKER- Well, and it also meant like the IBM stuff,

41:57SPEAKERas I recall, just from a boots on the ground perspective,

42:01SPEAKERworked really well when there were a relatively small number

42:03SPEAKERof computers on the network.

42:04SPEAKERAnd then the moment, if you were building a LAN,

42:07SPEAKERit was great.

42:08SPEAKERAnd if you wanted to connect to a larger WAN,

42:10SPEAKERthen you had all sorts of weird collisions

42:11SPEAKERjust because of the way it worked

42:13SPEAKERand performance went to hell.

42:14SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

42:15SPEAKERSo it was a fun time.

42:16SPEAKERHe got into like some of the corporate politics

42:18SPEAKERand how they got all three companies to get along

42:19SPEAKERand stuff like that.

42:20SPEAKERBut when you talk about collisions,

42:22SPEAKERhe did a big things we got right, things we got wrong.

42:25SPEAKERAnd a couple of the things they got wrong

42:27SPEAKERthat really stood out to me,

42:28SPEAKERhe really rused the fact that they defined

42:31SPEAKERthe term collision.

42:32SPEAKERI don't know if you're,

42:33SPEAKERdo you remember that from your networking days?

42:34SPEAKERLike, I don't think people think about it these days,

42:37SPEAKERbut like, I guess probably it was more of a topic

42:39SPEAKERof concern back then that you could track the number

42:41SPEAKERof quote, like sort of packet collisions,

42:43SPEAKERI guess is the term.

42:44SPEAKER- It's when you have multiple things vying for time

42:48SPEAKERon the network at the same time, basically.

42:50SPEAKER- That's all it is.

42:51SPEAKERAnd he said that was by design because like otherwise

42:53SPEAKERyou would have needed some more complex message

42:56SPEAKERpassing system to, you poll clients to say,

42:59SPEAKERhey, does anybody need to talk right now?

43:01SPEAKERAnd anybody that said yes, then you would wait.

43:03SPEAKERIt was way more network chatter versus just

43:05SPEAKERhave everybody talk at once.

43:06SPEAKERAnd if two people talk at the same time,

43:08SPEAKERthey just stop and wait a random amount of time

43:11SPEAKERand try again.

43:12SPEAKERIt was a simplification mechanism,

43:13SPEAKERbut he said what that led to using the word collision

43:16SPEAKERled to a lot of people misunderstanding

43:18SPEAKERand thinking that was a problem with their network

43:20SPEAKERand getting super obsessive about how many collisions

43:23SPEAKERthey were tracking on their network

43:24SPEAKERand thinking they needed to optimize to fix that.

43:26SPEAKERAnd that it was like, no, that's just part of the design.

43:29SPEAKERYou should just forget about that.

43:31SPEAKER- Yeah.

43:32SPEAKERI mean, there's a lot of stuff like that in computers,

43:33SPEAKERit turns out.

43:34SPEAKER- For sure, for sure.

43:35SPEAKERAnother one is that he, this is for the real networking

43:37SPEAKERheads out there.

43:38SPEAKERHe wished they had not had a broadcast mode in ethernet.

43:41SPEAKERHe wished they had dropped that

43:43SPEAKERand only shipped unicast and multicast.

43:47SPEAKERSo unicast is like, if I've got my ethernet,

43:51SPEAKERmy layer two or whatever knowledge straight here,

43:54SPEAKERunicast is just two computers talking to each other.

43:57SPEAKERBroadcast is a computer talking to the whole network,

44:00SPEAKERsending the packet or the data to every other.

44:02SPEAKER- Yeah. - Right, yes.

44:04SPEAKERMulticast is like broadcast except sending the data out

44:08SPEAKERand only the computers that care about that type of data

44:11SPEAKERactually pay attention to it.

44:12SPEAKER- It's sending the data to specific computers.

44:14SPEAKER- Yeah, well, it's sending it to everybody,

44:16SPEAKERbut each computer is able to basically just ignore it

44:21SPEAKERif it's not something they care about.

44:23SPEAKERVersus broadcast, every other client on the network

44:25SPEAKERis forced to intercept and evaluate

44:28SPEAKERwhether it cares about it or not.

44:30SPEAKERSo anyway, that was just another, he wished,

44:32SPEAKERbasically he said like multicast is just a better broadcast

44:35SPEAKERand we should have just not,

44:36SPEAKERwe should have dropped broadcast from the spec

44:38SPEAKERto begin with.

44:39SPEAKER- I can see that.

44:40SPEAKER- Yeah.

44:41SPEAKERLast real in the weeds thing here,

44:44SPEAKERand I'm simplifying this a little bit

44:45SPEAKERso that I can understand it.

44:47SPEAKERHe threw some shade at IPv4 internet protocol,

44:50SPEAKERor he just called it IP.

44:51SPEAKER'Cause of course in his day it was just IP

44:54SPEAKER'cause there was no V4.

44:54SPEAKER- Yeah, there was no V6, yeah, yeah.

44:56SPEAKER- Or V6 back then.

44:57SPEAKER- Yeah.

44:58SPEAKER- But ethernet uses 48-bit addressing.

45:02SPEAKERAnd he threw shade at IP for going with 32-bit addressing

45:05SPEAKERbecause basically he was like,

45:07SPEAKERif you'd used the same size addresses as us,

45:10SPEAKEReverything would have just lined up very nicely

45:12SPEAKERand there would have been no need for things like ARP,

45:15SPEAKERwhich is a whole extra protocol that exists purely

45:17SPEAKERto help translate IP and ethernet addresses.

45:21SPEAKERAnd it was just, it was a fun,

45:22SPEAKERlike extremely Kragenard '70s networking guide example

45:27SPEAKERof like, this guy,

45:29SPEAKERI'm not gonna get into what his politics may or may not be,

45:32SPEAKERbut he definitely denigrated the standards body,

45:37SPEAKERthe consortium numerous times in this thing of just like,

45:40SPEAKERhey, like we were just making

45:41SPEAKERsimple straightforward decisions.

45:43SPEAKERAnd then the IEEE came in and screwed everything up.

45:46SPEAKERYou know, like there was a lot of that over and over, so.

45:49SPEAKER- Look.

45:50SPEAKER- It was a fun talk.

45:51SPEAKER- In the same way that the electronics flea market

45:54SPEAKERis people cleaning out the stuff they stole

45:56SPEAKERfrom their office 20 years ago from their garage.

45:58SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

45:59SPEAKER- I feel like this is him marrying the grievances

46:02SPEAKERhe's held on for the last 40 years.

46:04SPEAKER- Extremely, just some like corporate

46:06SPEAKERversus like standards body conflicts

46:08SPEAKERand strife spilling over from that time.

46:12SPEAKERAnd he had his original like printout copy,

46:15SPEAKERthe first ever runoff from the Xerox laser printer

46:18SPEAKERof the ethernet 1.0 spec, like the.

46:21SPEAKER- That's really cool.

46:22SPEAKER- The book, the big thick, you know,

46:24SPEAKERjust stack of white paper that defined the spec

46:27SPEAKERfor ethernet, the first one they ever printed out at Xerox.

46:29SPEAKERAnd he's gonna donate that to the museum there.

46:31SPEAKER- Oh, that's awesome.

46:32SPEAKER- And he apparently, he also has a big spool

46:34SPEAKERof what he claims is the very first ethernet cable

46:37SPEAKERin his garage still.

46:38SPEAKER- That's amazing.

46:39SPEAKER- Had a little segment of that with him as well.

46:41SPEAKER- It was a fun talk.

46:42SPEAKERI haven't watched this 2013 version of it yet,

46:44SPEAKERbut if you're into networking, you should go watch it.

46:47SPEAKER- Did he talk any smack about 3Com network cards?

46:52SPEAKER- Oh yeah, there was some more.

46:53SPEAKERYeah, so he didn't talk smack about them,

46:55SPEAKERbut this is another detail I forgot.

46:57SPEAKERHe went through what an original ethernet controller

46:59SPEAKERwas back in the day and how many,

47:00SPEAKERlike how big the boards were.

47:01SPEAKERAnd there were multiple circuit boards involved

47:04SPEAKERand like cables hanging from the ceiling

47:06SPEAKERand boards bolted to the wall.

47:07SPEAKER- Well, like the old, old ones were like full length cards

47:10SPEAKERbefore we had cards, yeah.

47:11SPEAKER- And so an original ethernet controller used 60 watts,

47:15SPEAKERjust the ethernet controller.

47:16SPEAKER- For two megabit probably, right?

47:18SPEAKER- It was 10.

47:19SPEAKERSo actually he got into that.

47:20SPEAKERThey actually, the original spec shipped at 10

47:21SPEAKERand he said they took a lot of criticism for that

47:23SPEAKERfrom people going, what are you doing?

47:25SPEAKERThis is so excessive, 'cause this was 82,

47:28SPEAKERvery early 80s when they shipped ethernet.

47:31SPEAKER- What could you feed 10 megabits with in 1982, nothing?

47:34SPEAKER- That's exactly it.

47:35SPEAKERHe said it was a decade before CPUs were fast enough

47:37SPEAKERto saturate 10 megabits,

47:39SPEAKERbut they wanted, they knew that they should future proof

47:43SPEAKERvery heavily ahead of time

47:46SPEAKERbecause they needed the standard to last,

47:47SPEAKERlike to win as a standard,

47:49SPEAKERit needed to be viable for a very long time.

47:51SPEAKERAnd so it was 10 or 15 years before there were machines

47:55SPEAKERthat needed faster than 10 megabits.

47:57SPEAKER- It's really funny 'cause I came in just at the transition

48:00SPEAKERfrom the coaxial 10 base two,

48:03SPEAKERwhich is what I was trying to get to before

48:04SPEAKERto the twisted pair.

48:07SPEAKERAnd like that, they're absolutely right.

48:11SPEAKER'Cause like most of our servers were wired in

48:13SPEAKERwith 10 megabit coaxial in the 96, 97, 98 timeframe.

48:18SPEAKER- Yeah, like that lasted forever.

48:20SPEAKER- Yeah, and then we switched to the twisted pair

48:25SPEAKERand they just ran cat five at that point,

48:27SPEAKERwhich was good up to a gigabit.

48:29SPEAKERAnd like, it's been another 25 years,

48:32SPEAKER30 years almost since then.

48:33SPEAKERSo yeah, good on them.

48:35SPEAKER- Yeah, he got into some other stuff.

48:37SPEAKERI shouldn't get into too much about the,

48:39SPEAKERlike the ethernet frame and how much of it is the payload

48:41SPEAKERand how much they should have reserved

48:43SPEAKERfor like addressing space

48:44SPEAKERand all this like really technical stuff.

48:45SPEAKERBut that's the thing you just described

48:47SPEAKERas the last point I'll make here,

48:49SPEAKERwhich he sounded both proud

48:51SPEAKERand kind of wistful when he said this,

48:53SPEAKERlike he was talking about how ethernet at the beginning

48:55SPEAKERwas a physical medium.

48:56SPEAKERIt was specific coax, it was specific hardware,

49:00SPEAKERspecific controllers and stuff,

49:02SPEAKERbut over time it has now drifted into,

49:04SPEAKERnow it's just a generic data frame

49:05SPEAKERbecause now, like you just said, it goes over fiber,

49:08SPEAKERit goes over cat, or twisted pair, it goes over wifi.

49:13SPEAKERLike ethernet is just a network data standard now,

49:16SPEAKERbut that standard has carried it directly over

49:18SPEAKERfrom their original design 45 years ago.

49:22SPEAKERAnd that's really cool.

49:24SPEAKER- Look, I think that's one of the fundamental,

49:28SPEAKERit's one of the foundational technologies

49:32SPEAKERof computing at this point, right?

49:34SPEAKERAnd like the thing we were talking about

49:35SPEAKERwhere you played Quake on an iBook

49:38SPEAKERand it has the same ethernet port that my computer

49:40SPEAKERthat I built last year has on it is wild.

49:43SPEAKER- It's really cool.

49:45SPEAKEROne last, sorry, one last detail I forgot to mention

49:48SPEAKERabout the, you know, he was talking about the 60 watts

49:49SPEAKERused by the original controller.

49:51SPEAKERHe contrasted that with, you know,

49:53SPEAKERan ethernet controller at this point

49:54SPEAKERis a very tiny bit of real estate on an SOC or a CPU,

49:58SPEAKERyou know, like an ethernet controller is absolutely nothing.

50:01SPEAKERIt uses like negligible almost undetectable amounts

50:05SPEAKERof power now compared to where this was, so yeah.

50:08SPEAKER- You can power a lot of the devices over ether right now,

50:10SPEAKERtoo, like it's expanded dramatically.

50:12SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a fun talk.

50:14SPEAKERI highly recommend it.

50:15SPEAKERAnd then the other talk I went to was a pair

50:17SPEAKERof what I would describe as heroes of the Atari 2600.

50:20SPEAKER- Okay.

50:21SPEAKER- Who were none other than David Crane,

50:23SPEAKERthe developer of Pitfall and co-founder of Activision.

50:26SPEAKER- Wow.

50:27SPEAKER- And Gary Kitchen, who I think ended up working

50:30SPEAKERat Activision, I was not clear on that,

50:31SPEAKERbut the work he was here to talk about was prior to that,

50:34SPEAKERit was done for Coleco.

50:37SPEAKERBut it was, this was a like very technical talk.

50:39SPEAKERI know they've talked about these things

50:42SPEAKERin like interviews and stuff before.

50:43SPEAKERI don't know if they've ever given these exact talks

50:45SPEAKERin this form.

50:46SPEAKERI couldn't find like videos of these talks prior,

50:48SPEAKERbut the information is definitely out there.

50:50SPEAKERAnd you might be able to find talk versions

50:51SPEAKERof these out there, but they both were there

50:54SPEAKERto basically really get into the weeds about how insane

50:57SPEAKERand difficult and esoteric 2600 development was

51:00SPEAKERat the time.

51:01SPEAKER- Yeah, it was a really limited piece of hardware, right?

51:03SPEAKER- Extremely.

51:04SPEAKERSo like just a real quick preamble here

51:06SPEAKERand I'll try to summarize the tricks

51:08SPEAKERthey talked about very quickly here.

51:10SPEAKERThe cartridges on the 2600 were four kilobytes

51:14SPEAKERand that thing had 128 bytes of RAM.

51:18SPEAKER- Like it's like a pocket calculator.

51:20SPEAKER- Bytes of RAM.

51:21SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:22SPEAKER- What is that a 10th of a kilobyte or something or less?

51:25SPEAKERAn eighth of a kilobyte of RAM.

51:27SPEAKER- Anyway.

51:28SPEAKER- Yeah, it's an eighth of a kilobyte, right?

51:30SPEAKER- What does that thing have in it?

51:31SPEAKERA 6502 I think is the CPU in that thing,

51:33SPEAKERbut I didn't know this.

51:35SPEAKERRoughly a third or sorry, three quarters of the CPU time

51:38SPEAKERon the 2600 is just devoted to,

51:41SPEAKERit had no dedicated video output hardware.

51:43SPEAKERSo the CPU spent three quarters of its entire life

51:46SPEAKERdoing nothing but driving the video signal to the CRT

51:49SPEAKERand making that work.

51:51SPEAKERSo every single other thing you did for your game

51:53SPEAKERhad to fit into one fourth of the available CPU time,

51:56SPEAKERwhich yeah.

51:57SPEAKER- That's insane.

51:58SPEAKER- Yep, and this is even crazier to me.

52:01SPEAKERYou had to sync your code because of that,

52:03SPEAKERyou had to sync your code to the scan rate

52:06SPEAKERof the electron beam drawing to the CRT

52:10SPEAKERfrom left to right, top to bottom.

52:12SPEAKERLike your code had to be aware of when the draws

52:14SPEAKERacross the screen were happening

52:16SPEAKERand line up with that for the graphics to display properly.

52:18SPEAKER- So there's no frame buffer at all.

52:20SPEAKERIt's just all straight out to the, that's bonkers.

52:23SPEAKER- And the point that Kitchen made there

52:24SPEAKERthat really drove home how insane that was

52:26SPEAKERis that because you have to have your code

52:28SPEAKERdeterministically syncing up to the clock rate of the CPU

52:31SPEAKERand the scan rate of the CRT,

52:35SPEAKERif you do any branching, any logic branching,

52:37SPEAKERlike an if then, if you have multiple paths

52:38SPEAKERthrough a specific section of your game

52:42SPEAKERwhere you could have one thing happen

52:43SPEAKERor another thing happen,

52:44SPEAKERyou're branching through different possible out,

52:46SPEAKERall of those branches have to be tuned

52:50SPEAKERto occupy exactly the same number of CPU cycles.

52:53SPEAKERLike you can't have one if, one branch of an if then

52:56SPEAKERtake a bunch more CPU time than another.

52:58SPEAKERThey all have to finish at exactly the same time

53:00SPEAKERso that the program stays on the sync

53:03SPEAKERwith the screen being drawn.

53:05SPEAKER- How did PAL work for the 2600 though?

53:09SPEAKER- I have no idea.

53:10SPEAKER- Did they just clock it down?

53:11SPEAKER- I don't know.

53:12SPEAKERLike they, I guess the games could have just run slower.

53:15SPEAKERI mean, that was always the reputation for like NES games.

53:18SPEAKER- Well yeah, it was easy mode.

53:19SPEAKER- PAL ran slower, right?

53:20SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:21SPEAKER- So maybe it was the same thing.

53:22SPEAKERThat's way over my head, so I'm not sure.

53:24SPEAKER- I bet we'll get answers to this in the questions.

53:26SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

53:27SPEAKER- Tech party content out of town.

53:29SPEAKER- Anyway, so like there's some real insane limitations

53:31SPEAKERdeveloping on this thing,

53:32SPEAKERbut I'll just briefly mention kind of their specific examples

53:37SPEAKERthat for stuff they did here.

53:38SPEAKERKitchen was the guy who ported Donkey Kong to the 2600.

53:43SPEAKER- Yeah, I played that port, it was okay I guess.

53:45SPEAKER- Which I guess he had 90 days to do.

53:48SPEAKER- That's insane.

53:48SPEAKER- He basically had, they came to him in February

53:50SPEAKERand the port needed to be done by May

53:52SPEAKERin order to ship for Christmas basically.

53:58SPEAKER- Folks should go look at video of this port

53:59SPEAKER'cause like it captures the essence of the game,

54:02SPEAKERbut it is not.

54:04SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:05SPEAKER- It looks hinky, but it was an Atari 2600 game.

54:07SPEAKERSo what do you expect?

54:08SPEAKER- He did what he could.

54:08SPEAKERHe had a little preamble about how he had a BSE

54:11SPEAKERand had been working on,

54:12SPEAKERhe had been like doing development for toys.

54:14SPEAKERI forget which company he worked for,

54:16SPEAKERbut he had worked on some like toys

54:17SPEAKERwith some very, very limited computing stuff in them.

54:20SPEAKERIf I'm not mistaken.

54:21SPEAKERAnd at some point he saved up for an Apple II

54:24SPEAKERand hooked an Atari 2600 up to an Apple II

54:27SPEAKERand reverse engineered how to make games for it

54:30SPEAKERover a period of like six months.

54:32SPEAKERAnd he had that expertise.

54:33SPEAKERAnd he basically said,

54:34SPEAKEReverybody who could develop for the Atari 2600

54:36SPEAKERwas working for either Atari or Activision at this time.

54:40SPEAKERSo when Coleco wanted to do this Donkey Kong port,

54:42SPEAKERhe was like the guy available.

54:44SPEAKERHe was like the one guy that anybody knew of

54:46SPEAKERwho was not already making games

54:47SPEAKERfor one of those two companies.

54:50SPEAKERThe big, he got into a lot of stuff.

54:52SPEAKERHe showed off his original graph paper

54:54SPEAKERwhere he specked out the by pixel by pixel,

54:56SPEAKERwhat the sprites would look like

54:57SPEAKERand how he did like a hex color table to give them color

55:01SPEAKERand all kinds of crazy stuff.

55:02SPEAKERBut the big trick from his part of the presentation

55:06SPEAKERthat really stuck with me is

55:08SPEAKERDonkey Kong has asymmetric backgrounds, right?

55:10SPEAKERIt has like slanting platforms that go from sides

55:13SPEAKERto side of the screen, right?

55:15SPEAKERApparently one trick of the 2600 or rather limitation

55:18SPEAKERis it can only store half of a background in memory.

55:22SPEAKERSo if you look at tons of Atari games,

55:24SPEAKERlike combat or whatever.

55:25SPEAKER- Oh, they're mirrored.

55:26SPEAKER- They can make the backgrounds can one half the background

55:29SPEAKERcan only either be mirrored or replicated.

55:31SPEAKERYou can either replicate it as is,

55:33SPEAKERor you can flip it and mirror it.

55:35SPEAKERSo there's no way to do side to side diagonal platforms

55:38SPEAKERwith a setup like that.

55:40SPEAKER- That's insane.

55:41SPEAKER- And he got into this whole fun thing where he talked to,

55:43SPEAKERI think an engineer from Activision,

55:46SPEAKERor maybe it was from Atari

55:46SPEAKERwho was like kind of giving him shit over the phone

55:48SPEAKERabout this of like,

55:50SPEAKERwell, if you work at Activision,

55:51SPEAKERthose platforms would be diagonal.

55:53SPEAKERLike it kind of was like,

55:54SPEAKERlike we're the best of the best over here.

55:56SPEAKERWe would figure this out.

55:57SPEAKERAnd so he was like, okay, fine, I'm not dropping this.

55:59SPEAKERI'm going to figure this out.

56:01SPEAKERHe basically came up with the solution he landed on was

56:04SPEAKERagain, remember I said,

56:05SPEAKERthe code has to match the scan of the CRT

56:08SPEAKERfrom left to right.

56:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:09SPEAKER- He basically, if I understood the trick correctly,

56:11SPEAKERlanded on rewriting the contents

56:14SPEAKERof the background section of memory

56:15SPEAKERat exactly the moment that the scan

56:17SPEAKERgot to the halfway point across the screen

56:19SPEAKERwith the other half of the background.

56:21SPEAKER(laughs)

56:22SPEAKER- That's insane.

56:23SPEAKER- So the program is basically kind of recalculate

56:27SPEAKERor not calculate.

56:28SPEAKERIt's like rereading and rewriting into memory

56:31SPEAKERthe other half of the background

56:32SPEAKERevery time the beam goes across the screen.

56:34SPEAKER- Every half frame.

56:34SPEAKER- Yes, yeah.

56:35SPEAKEROr not even half frame,

56:36SPEAKERevery half scan, right, per line, I would think, I guess.

56:40SPEAKERIs how I understood it.

56:41SPEAKERI could be wrong, but it's complete insanity.

56:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:44SPEAKERI mean, look, anytime I read stories

56:46SPEAKERabout the way they made ancient hardware work,

56:49SPEAKERI'm always blown away.

56:50SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it was really neat.

56:53SPEAKERCrane's portion was about Pitfall, unsurprisingly,

56:56SPEAKERalthough he made tons of games.

56:58SPEAKERI forgot he made like a boy in his blob.

56:59SPEAKERLike he's made a lot of very legendary games.

57:03SPEAKER- A lot of these guys carried forward into the NES era.

57:05SPEAKERSo did Gary Kitchen as well.

57:07SPEAKER- Yeah, they made the point.

57:10SPEAKERAnd you know what, I'll just spoil the end here.

57:12SPEAKERThey have a new company now, Audacity Games.

57:14SPEAKER- Oh, that's fun.

57:15SPEAKER- And they're making new Atari 2600 games now.

57:17SPEAKER- I'm less excited about that if I'm being real,

57:19SPEAKERbut you know, whatever.

57:21SPEAKER- It seems like they talked so passionately about this.

57:24SPEAKERAnd they made the point they have collectively been involved

57:27SPEAKERin shipping hundreds of video games in their life.

57:28SPEAKERSo they made plenty of games past the Atari era,

57:31SPEAKERbut this is clearly the era of game development

57:34SPEAKERthey're very passionate about.

57:35SPEAKERAnd so they are back to their roots

57:38SPEAKERand making new Atari games.

57:39SPEAKERThe only difference is the carts they are working with

57:42SPEAKERare now, I believe 128 kilobytes,

57:45SPEAKERbecause those are the smallest ROMs you can get now.

57:48SPEAKER(laughing)

57:49SPEAKERSo I haven't looked up their new games yet,

57:53SPEAKERbut that's the only difference.

57:54SPEAKERThey still run on original hardware.

57:55SPEAKERThe carts are just bigger,

57:56SPEAKERbut apparently just that extra storage

57:58SPEAKERmakes a huge difference in what you're able to do.

58:00SPEAKERSo I'd like to go look at their new games

58:03SPEAKER'cause it sounds like they are dramatically more elaborate.

58:05SPEAKER- Four kilobytes is like-

58:08SPEAKER- Really not much.

58:09SPEAKER- No.

58:09SPEAKER- So in fact, that's exactly what the Pitfall portion

58:12SPEAKERwas about.

58:13SPEAKERBoth the cart size and the RAM size on the system

58:16SPEAKERwere so small that Pitfall has 255 levels.

58:21SPEAKERAnd he said, you know, forget it in four kilobytes,

58:25SPEAKERlike just, I think he like did the math

58:28SPEAKERand like just with storing statically each level design

58:32SPEAKERon disc or on, you know, on ROM or whatever,

58:35SPEAKERlike that alone would go way past four kilobytes

58:37SPEAKERjust storing 255 levels, forget any graphics

58:40SPEAKERor game code and logic or whatever.

58:42SPEAKER- Animation, yeah, yeah.

58:43SPEAKER- So he conceived what he described

58:46SPEAKERas the first procedure level

58:47SPEAKERand procedurally generated level system

58:49SPEAKERfor Pitfall on the 2600,

58:52SPEAKERwhich was to basically define each level

58:55SPEAKERcould be defined by a single byte, which is eight bits, right?

58:58SPEAKERAnd you would basically read the bits

59:01SPEAKERand he had a table of elements like number of alligators,

59:05SPEAKERnumber of logs and whether they're rolling

59:07SPEAKERor stationary, like swinging rope or not,

59:10SPEAKERyou know, stuff like that.

59:11SPEAKERAnd basically from any eight bit number

59:15SPEAKERcould generate a level based on those values.

59:19SPEAKER- That's, so that eight bit number was the seed

59:25SPEAKERin a roguelike kind of situation.

59:28SPEAKER- Each screen in Pitfall basically has an eight bit

59:31SPEAKERone or one byte seed that the level,

59:34SPEAKERthe characteristics of the level are being hashed from.

59:37SPEAKERAnd we're getting real computer science-y here.

59:41SPEAKERHe used what is called a linear feedback shift register,

59:44SPEAKERwhich is a, as I could understand it,

59:47SPEAKERit's basically like a bit shifting technique

59:49SPEAKERthat was conceived in the 1940s.

59:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

59:52SPEAKER- Straight, and this led to a real weird offshoot

59:54SPEAKERfor like, I feel like somebody could write a book

59:56SPEAKERor at least like a long article on all the cool stuff

59:59SPEAKERin video games that has been taken from academic research

1:00:02SPEAKERover the years.

1:00:03SPEAKERLike, I don't know if this has been kind of lost to time,

1:00:06SPEAKERbut like so much of what, for example,

1:00:08SPEAKERJohn Carmack was putting in his software games in the 90s.

1:00:11SPEAKERIf you read his plan files, he was just out there

1:00:14SPEAKERreading all kinds of computer science white papers

1:00:16SPEAKERand textbooks.

1:00:17SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:00:18SPEAKER- And adapting a lot of those techniques to stuff

1:00:21SPEAKERthat it was now possible to do in real time

1:00:23SPEAKERbecause the hardware had caught up.

1:00:24SPEAKER- Well, that's where the BSP tree stuff came from.

1:00:26SPEAKER- Right. - Yeah.

1:00:27SPEAKER- Totally like, or, you know, Pixar was the same way.

1:00:29SPEAKERLike a lot of the, you know, all the early like CG movie

1:00:33SPEAKERgraphics and lighting techniques just came out of research

1:00:35SPEAKERthat had been done 15 to 20 years earlier.

1:00:37SPEAKER- Well, and work that they did while they were at MIT.

1:00:40SPEAKER- Yeah, sure, right.

1:00:40SPEAKERSo anyway, yeah.

1:00:41SPEAKERSo an LFSR, Linear Feedback Shift Register,

1:00:44SPEAKERit's basically just a way of taking eight bits

1:00:46SPEAKERand like feeding them like through an algorithm

1:00:48SPEAKERthat shifts it.

1:00:50SPEAKERAnd I don't fully understand the kind of binary math

1:00:54SPEAKERor whatever, but you get a new byte

1:00:57SPEAKERor a new set of eight bits out of the old one

1:01:00SPEAKERbased on what the input was.

1:01:01SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

1:01:02SPEAKER- And so I think that that allowed him to work backwards.

1:01:05SPEAKERSo you could, 'cause Pitfall lets you go back

1:01:07SPEAKERto the previous screen again,

1:01:08SPEAKERand you needed that to be the same screen

1:01:10SPEAKERit was when you came from it.

1:01:11SPEAKER- Well, and you needed the whole thing to be deterministic

1:01:13SPEAKER'cause people couldn't cope with the levels

1:01:14SPEAKERchanging every time back then.

1:01:16SPEAKER- So like basically that allowed him

1:01:17SPEAKERto keep the level straight if you were to go backwards

1:01:19SPEAKERto a previous level and generate the same level again.

1:01:22SPEAKERBut it's basically every, long story short,

1:01:24SPEAKERevery screen of Pitfall is being generated

1:01:26SPEAKERby the Atari in real time as you enter it.

1:01:29SPEAKER- That's bonkers.

1:01:29SPEAKER- And it was a really neat thing.

1:01:32SPEAKERAnyway, those were fascinating talks.

1:01:33SPEAKER- Was it, was this, Pitfall was before Yars' Revenge, right?

1:01:37SPEAKER- Ooh, I don't know about that actually.

1:01:41SPEAKER- Yars' Revenge was 1982.

1:01:44SPEAKER- Pitfall, I'm not sure actually.

1:01:48SPEAKERThink Yars' Revenge is a Howard Scott Warshaw joints, right?

1:01:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I think so.

1:01:54SPEAKER- I'm not mistaken, they both came out the same year.

1:01:56SPEAKER- Okay.

1:01:57SPEAKER- Actually.

1:01:58SPEAKER'Cause Yars was, the levels were different every time too,

1:02:02SPEAKERI think, or it was generated levels as well.

1:02:05SPEAKER- That's very possible.

1:02:06SPEAKER- But they were different every time, not deterministic.

1:02:08SPEAKER- That's very possible.

1:02:08SPEAKERSo anyway, like some really wild programming tricks

1:02:12SPEAKERbeing employed on that stuff that were fun to hear about.

1:02:15SPEAKER- Pitfall, Pitfall was the first game.

1:02:17SPEAKERI went over to a friend's house for his birthday

1:02:19SPEAKERand had a sleepover and I was completely

1:02:21SPEAKERjust transfixed by it.

1:02:22SPEAKERLike it was the first video game I looked at

1:02:24SPEAKERand I was like, more than anything in arcades,

1:02:27SPEAKERmore than anything else, I was like, "Oh, this is a thing.

1:02:31SPEAKER"This is like, I want to understand everything

1:02:34SPEAKER"about how this game works."

1:02:35SPEAKERAnd like, yeah.

1:02:36SPEAKER- He described it, Crane described it

1:02:38SPEAKERas the first platformer.

1:02:39SPEAKERI mean, it doesn't have like floating platforms as such,

1:02:41SPEAKERlike we would expect, but it was probably-

1:02:43SPEAKER- It's about jumping and grabbing things and yeah.

1:02:46SPEAKER- It's about jumping and running to the right.

1:02:49SPEAKER- Or left.

1:02:49SPEAKER- Or left, yeah.

1:02:50SPEAKERBut you know, it's like kind of,

1:02:52SPEAKERwhat if Pitfall had run to the left?

1:02:54SPEAKERMaybe the entire history of video games

1:02:56SPEAKERwould have been different.

1:02:57SPEAKER- You could run to the left in Pitfall.

1:02:58SPEAKER- No, I mean by default, like you progress to the right,

1:03:01SPEAKERbut you can run backwards.

1:03:02SPEAKERWell, maybe you're right actually.

1:03:02SPEAKER- No, you can go either way.

1:03:03SPEAKER- Oh, could you?

1:03:04SPEAKER- From the beginning, I think.

1:03:05SPEAKERI definitely prepped the mystery to see.

1:03:07SPEAKER- What do I know?

1:03:08SPEAKERMaybe that is actually true.

1:03:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:03:10SPEAKER- Fun talks though.

1:03:12SPEAKER- Okay, I'm going to tell you,

1:03:13SPEAKERat least when we played at that sleepover,

1:03:16SPEAKEReverybody always went left.

1:03:17SPEAKERI have no idea why.

1:03:18SPEAKER- Interesting.

1:03:18SPEAKER- I think, I could be remembering wrong.

1:03:21SPEAKERIt's been 50 years almost.

1:03:23SPEAKER- Going left feels like nails on a chalkboard to me now, but.

1:03:26SPEAKER- You always go left to see it,

1:03:27SPEAKER'cause that's where the secrets are, Brad.

1:03:28SPEAKER- Yeah, that's true.

1:03:29SPEAKERThat is very true.

1:03:30SPEAKERLast thing real quick, just a couple of very quick tidbits.

1:03:33SPEAKERThey have a consignment area at this thing.

1:03:36SPEAKERAnd we went there first just to see what it had

1:03:38SPEAKERbefore it got picked over.

1:03:39SPEAKERAnd it got picked over very fast

1:03:40SPEAKER'cause we went back midday

1:03:42SPEAKERand it was just like bare tables in a lot of cases.

1:03:46SPEAKERAnd there were people really coveting some stuff in there.

1:03:51SPEAKERLike some people were getting a little territorial

1:03:53SPEAKERaround some of the rare computers that were back there,

1:03:55SPEAKERwhere like people were like walking out of there,

1:03:57SPEAKERlike clutching an iMac to them in a way

1:04:00SPEAKERlike they were worried somebody was gonna take it.

1:04:02SPEAKERI don't think that's actually true.

1:04:03SPEAKER- You'd get jumped outside the vintage computer festival?

1:04:06SPEAKER- Like 10 minutes into this thing,

1:04:07SPEAKERthere were people in line to buy whole computers

1:04:10SPEAKERfrom that consignment area.

1:04:11SPEAKERLike clearly some collectors there

1:04:13SPEAKERthat were really looking for some stuff and getting it.

1:04:17SPEAKERBut a couple of tidbits in the consignment area.

1:04:20SPEAKERThey had the ADM3A is a serial terminal

1:04:24SPEAKERI've mentioned before.

1:04:25SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:04:25SPEAKER- It's very space age looking.

1:04:27SPEAKERIf you Google that thing,

1:04:28SPEAKERit's in this like space age,

1:04:29SPEAKERlike mid-century teal blue color that I associated

1:04:33SPEAKERwith like sixties space exploration sort of.

1:04:37SPEAKERThey had one of those there for a thousand dollars,

1:04:40SPEAKERwhich I'm pretty sure last year

1:04:43SPEAKERthere was one there for like 300.

1:04:46SPEAKERSo I don't know if that's like,

1:04:47SPEAKERI don't know if like the price inflation

1:04:49SPEAKERis creeping into even the serial terminal space.

1:04:52SPEAKER- I mean, RAM is RAM man.

1:04:54SPEAKER- That's true, yeah.

1:04:55SPEAKERBut I looked around online

1:04:57SPEAKERand that terminal also goes for similar amounts online now.

1:05:00SPEAKERSo maybe that's just the price.

1:05:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I wonder if it's like the collectors woke up to it.

1:05:05SPEAKERWe talked about this with last week with Steve.

1:05:06SPEAKERI talked about this with Steve last week

1:05:08SPEAKERwhere sometimes like you get in before the market realizes

1:05:11SPEAKERthat there's a market for a thing.

1:05:12SPEAKERAnd all of a sudden you're getting incredible deals

1:05:16SPEAKERbefore anybody realizes that people might want this thing.

1:05:19SPEAKER- Yeah, well, here is an unexplored market

1:05:22SPEAKERfor you to get in on the ground floor of,

1:05:24SPEAKER'cause somehow I seem to have eaten this entire episode,

1:05:27SPEAKERbut this is my last thing.

1:05:30SPEAKERRandomly in the assignment area for $20,

1:05:32SPEAKERthere was a backer 32.

1:05:34SPEAKER- I remember those.

1:05:35SPEAKER- You do?

1:05:36SPEAKER- Yeah, you used to put it, yeah.

1:05:37SPEAKER- I had no idea this existed, it's so bizarre.

1:05:39SPEAKERI really kind of, I almost wish I had bought it for $20,

1:05:43SPEAKERbut also I need to not turn into somebody

1:05:45SPEAKERwho is just buying retro computing gear

1:05:48SPEAKERevery time it looks cool,

1:05:49SPEAKER'cause that's a bad road to go down

1:05:52SPEAKERwhen you live in an apartment.

1:05:53SPEAKER- This was the thing that I saw advertised

1:05:55SPEAKERin the back of like PC Mag and PC World.

1:05:58SPEAKERThat was a, it was a cheap tape storage system

1:06:02SPEAKERusing a VHS tape, basically.

1:06:04SPEAKER- It was basically a little box

1:06:06SPEAKERthat would hook up to your computer,

1:06:07SPEAKEReither through a parallel port,

1:06:08SPEAKERor I guess it also had an ISA card

1:06:09SPEAKERyou could use as an interface.

1:06:11SPEAKER- That makes sense.

1:06:12SPEAKER- And then you would hook a VCR up to it.

1:06:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:06:15SPEAKER- And then you could store four gigabytes of data

1:06:17SPEAKERon a standard off the shelf VHS tape.

1:06:19SPEAKER- It was a BYOV though, you had to bring your own VCR.

1:06:22SPEAKER- Yeah, yep, yep, yep.

1:06:23SPEAKERAnd I can't imagine, I found LGR did a video

1:06:27SPEAKERon what looked like the prior version of this,

1:06:30SPEAKERlike the regular backer, not the backer.

1:06:32SPEAKERHe may have had both models in this video,

1:06:34SPEAKERbut I wanna go watch this video

1:06:36SPEAKERand see how it actually worked.

1:06:38SPEAKER- It was bad, I'm sure.

1:06:39SPEAKERLike anything, having grown up in the bad old days

1:06:43SPEAKERof software on audio cassette tapes

1:06:46SPEAKERand how unreasonably wobbly that whole system was,

1:06:50SPEAKERI can't imagine that the backer,

1:06:52SPEAKERthe recording it on a VHS tape

1:06:54SPEAKERwas a super reliable way to do this.

1:06:57SPEAKER- Probably not, probably not.

1:06:58SPEAKERThey claimed speeds of up to nine megabytes per minute.

1:07:02SPEAKERSo do the math, I guess on that.

1:07:04SPEAKERBut my question is data retrieval

1:07:06SPEAKERoff of one of these things.

1:07:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:07:09SPEAKER- Like how do you get a specific file

1:07:11SPEAKERif it's in the middle of the tape?

1:07:12SPEAKER- Bet you have to do the whole thing.

1:07:15SPEAKERI bet there's no way to get to the specific file.

1:07:17SPEAKERI never actually had a hands-on with any of them

1:07:18SPEAKER'cause I thought it looked like,

1:07:21SPEAKERI was still shook enough from trying to play Pirate Adventure

1:07:24SPEAKERon the TI-99 4A and it taking three tries

1:07:26SPEAKERevery time you wanted to load that game

1:07:27SPEAKER'cause it was on a tape

1:07:29SPEAKERthat I never would have engaged with the backer 32.

1:07:33SPEAKERI was even skeptical of Colorado Systems backup tapes

1:07:36SPEAKERback in the day.

1:07:37SPEAKER- Oh sure.

1:07:38SPEAKER- Although those were rock solid in my experience.

1:07:40SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

1:07:41SPEAKEROne other quick exhibit I'll just mention

1:07:42SPEAKER'cause it ties into this.

1:07:43SPEAKERLike this is a good example of just the random stuff

1:07:45SPEAKERyou find at this show.

1:07:47SPEAKERThere was a guy there who has kind of documenting

1:07:49SPEAKERthe early history of removable storage

1:07:51SPEAKERand I don't mean floppy disk, I mean like the big ones.

1:07:53SPEAKER- Oh yeah.

1:07:54SPEAKER- Really what I'm saying,

1:07:55SPEAKERit was just an exhibit of Iomega and CyQuest boxes.

1:07:59SPEAKERHe had what seemed like the entire lineup

1:08:01SPEAKERof Iomega products there.

1:08:03SPEAKER- I can see that.

1:08:04SPEAKER- Including some really weird ones I had never heard of.

1:08:07SPEAKER- They have click disks.

1:08:08SPEAKER- Yes, he had the click there.

1:08:10SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:11SPEAKER- He had everything you could think of for Iomega

1:08:12SPEAKERand a bunch of CyQuest stuff too.

1:08:15SPEAKERAnd I think he was doing that great public service

1:08:19SPEAKERof he had the signup that was like,

1:08:21SPEAKERhey, if you have an old thing, bring it here

1:08:22SPEAKERand I'll try to help you get the data off of it.

1:08:24SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.

1:08:24SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:25SPEAKERAnd there was a guy doing on demand circuit board repair.

1:08:28SPEAKERThere's always somebody doing that as well.

1:08:30SPEAKERSo like this thing is just a fun community event.

1:08:34SPEAKER- I love that.

1:08:34SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:08:36SPEAKER- Was that to get a lot of fun?

1:08:37SPEAKER- It was, yeah, it was good.

1:08:39SPEAKERIt was, there was a lot of fun stuff to see there.

1:08:41SPEAKER- How long were you all there?

1:08:42SPEAKER- Pretty long this time.

1:08:44SPEAKERLike the talks definitely added to it and we got there,

1:08:46SPEAKERit opened at 11, I want to say, or was it 10?

1:08:50SPEAKERIt might've been 10.

1:08:51SPEAKERAnyway, we didn't leave until like four or something.

1:08:53SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

1:08:54SPEAKERThat's a day well spent, it sounds like.

1:08:56SPEAKER- Yeah, it was most of a day.

1:08:57SPEAKERIt was a lot of fun and it was a two day event

1:08:59SPEAKERand there was like all different talks

1:09:01SPEAKERand some different exhibits the next day.

1:09:03SPEAKERWas was there the next day.

1:09:05SPEAKER- He's often there, yeah.

1:09:06SPEAKER- Yeah, he shows up, but there was a thing going on.

1:09:08SPEAKERThere was an Apple One replica board being sold

1:09:12SPEAKERand that whole thing was being run

1:09:14SPEAKERby Paul Terrell or Terrell of Byte Shop.

1:09:17SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

1:09:18SPEAKER- Do you know who I'm talking about?

1:09:19SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:09:20SPEAKER- Like I guess Byte Shop is the first Silicon Valley store

1:09:22SPEAKERthat sold Apple Ones in the '70s.

1:09:25SPEAKERAnd so he was kind of like emceeing a talk

1:09:28SPEAKERthat Woz was gonna be at that they were gonna be talking

1:09:30SPEAKERabout that replica and stuff.

1:09:31SPEAKERSo there was like all different stuff on the next day.

1:09:34SPEAKER- That's cool.

1:09:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, it's a fun event.

1:09:37SPEAKER- Well, I'll do a quick 10 minutes on Disney

1:09:40SPEAKERon what we saw in LA.

1:09:41SPEAKER- No, no, no, this is good.

1:09:42SPEAKER- I did not mean to consume the whole show.

1:09:47SPEAKER- So we were going down to LA

1:09:49SPEAKER'cause my daughter loves this YouTube animation object shows

1:09:54SPEAKERso like "Battle for Dream Island" and "Animate Insanity"

1:09:57SPEAKERare like, we've talked about it a little bit before,

1:10:00SPEAKERbut they're basically homebrew animation

1:10:02SPEAKERthat started out as by kids in like 2010, 2012.

1:10:06SPEAKERAnd now those kids are out of college

1:10:08SPEAKERand they're actively making these Israel shows.

1:10:11SPEAKERI feel like they're adjacent to the "Pomney" thing,

1:10:15SPEAKERthe "Amazing Digital Circus" that was on YouTube,

1:10:19SPEAKERI mean, on Netflix.

1:10:20SPEAKER- I have heard of that name before.

1:10:22SPEAKERIs this like machinima?

1:10:23SPEAKERIs this modern machinima?

1:10:24SPEAKER- So I don't, these aren't machinima.

1:10:26SPEAKERThese are more, these are, there's a through line

1:10:28SPEAKERfrom like "Home Star Runner"

1:10:29SPEAKERand early flash animation at this.

1:10:31SPEAKERI don't know what they used to animate these originally,

1:10:32SPEAKERbut it looks very flashy to me.

1:10:34SPEAKER- I see, when you say object,

1:10:36SPEAKERI was thinking like existing assets

1:10:38SPEAKERthat were being repurposed, but this is all from scratch.

1:10:40SPEAKER- Yeah, no, this is all like, this is all like,

1:10:45SPEAKERthe objects in this case are like pencils

1:10:47SPEAKERand teardrops and suitcases.

1:10:49SPEAKERAnd the characters are all things.

1:10:52SPEAKER- Real world object.

1:10:53SPEAKER- Yeah. - Got it, got it.

1:10:54SPEAKER- And like the animation, especially when it started,

1:10:56SPEAKERit was very much like just the mouths

1:10:58SPEAKERand eyes and hands and legs.

1:11:01SPEAKERAnd then the objects would just kind of bop along

1:11:02SPEAKERand they'd put the feet and the arms and stuff on it

1:11:05SPEAKERto make them look like they were moving.

1:11:07SPEAKERBut it's very much about like, there's very little,

1:11:09SPEAKERit's funny 'cause there's not a lot of plot.

1:11:11SPEAKERIt's very much just about characters expressing feelings

1:11:15SPEAKERand having relationships with each other.

1:11:17SPEAKERAnd like, it's very, I don't know.

1:11:22SPEAKERIt's, there were a lot of like, the audience is great.

1:11:25SPEAKERIt was really fun.

1:11:26SPEAKERIt was the loudest show I've been to in years.

1:11:27SPEAKER'Cause like the moment they started talking,

1:11:29SPEAKERit was so loud that I couldn't hear

1:11:31SPEAKERwhat the characters were saying on the screen,

1:11:32SPEAKEReven though the, you know, we were in a theater

1:11:34SPEAKERand theater volume was in full effect.

1:11:37SPEAKERBut what was funny to me was we saw this,

1:11:39SPEAKERthis was at the Alex, which is like an old movie palace

1:11:42SPEAKERtype situation in Glendale.

1:11:44SPEAKERAnd it was sandwiched between screenings

1:11:46SPEAKERof the Odyssey and 70 mil.

1:11:48SPEAKERSo it's like two YouTube, janky YouTube animation

1:11:52SPEAKERmade by kids, the sold out, completely sold out,

1:11:56SPEAKERthe 600 seat theater.

1:11:58SPEAKERAnd then Odyssey screenings every night after that,

1:12:02SPEAKERwhich was really funny.

1:12:03SPEAKERAnd then Gina, my wife found tickets,

1:12:08SPEAKERlike found out that they do nighttime tickets

1:12:10SPEAKERto Disneyland sometimes.

1:12:12SPEAKERSo like, she was like, what if we,

1:12:15SPEAKERlet's see what it would cost to go to Disneyland.

1:12:16SPEAKERShe's like, oh, they're doing night only tickets.

1:12:18SPEAKERThat sounds great.

1:12:18SPEAKERWe don't have to be there when it's a hundred degrees out.

1:12:20SPEAKER- Is that not an everyday thing?

1:12:22SPEAKER- No, they don't do it every day.

1:12:23SPEAKERI think, well, it's always open at night,

1:12:26SPEAKERbut you can't buy, like, these are like admission

1:12:28SPEAKERafter 5 p.m. tickets.

1:12:28SPEAKER- Oh, I see, I see, okay.

1:12:30SPEAKER- Which is great 'cause we didn't have to be there

1:12:32SPEAKERwhen it was 103 degrees outside.

1:12:33SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:12:35SPEAKER- So we bought night tickets to California Adventure

1:12:37SPEAKERin Disneyland and went back and rode

1:12:40SPEAKERsome of the other rides.

1:12:41SPEAKERWe accidentally went on a special day,

1:12:43SPEAKERwhich was the last not school night of the summer

1:12:45SPEAKERfor LA public schools.

1:12:48SPEAKERAnd it was the fullest I've ever seen a theme park.

1:12:51SPEAKERIt was kind of intense.

1:12:54SPEAKERBut we got to ride some new rides

1:12:56SPEAKERand I came back kind of stoked about dark rides.

1:12:59SPEAKERLike we talked about rides when we went a few years ago

1:13:01SPEAKERin 2022, 'cause it was kind of the first

1:13:05SPEAKERof those trackless, you know, the 3D spatially tracked,

1:13:09SPEAKERtrackless cars riding around the world.

1:13:13SPEAKERAnd they've done another one of those rides now,

1:13:16SPEAKERthe Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway,

1:13:17SPEAKERwhich we talked about at the start of the show,

1:13:21SPEAKERis a similar kind of situation.

1:13:23SPEAKERYou get into a people mover, you move around,

1:13:26SPEAKERyou're like a cart on a factory floor, basically,

1:13:29SPEAKERmoving parts from one part of the room to the other,

1:13:31SPEAKERone part of the factory to the other.

1:13:34SPEAKERBut it made the dark rides,

1:13:36SPEAKERlike that plus the other technology that they've added,

1:13:39SPEAKERmade the dark rides compelling in a way

1:13:41SPEAKERthat they haven't been, I mean,

1:13:43SPEAKERlike I have deep love for the old '50s and '60s era

1:13:47SPEAKERand even '70s era dark rides.

1:13:48SPEAKERLike, you know, everything from like Peter Pan

1:13:51SPEAKERand Alice in Wonderland and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

1:13:56SPEAKERthrough to like, I don't know,

1:13:58SPEAKERPirates of the Caribbean is a dark ride, right?

1:14:01SPEAKERA haunted mansion is a dark ride,

1:14:03SPEAKERthose kinds of situations.

1:14:04SPEAKER- Is a dark ride literally just defined

1:14:06SPEAKERby being in the dark or is there more to it than that?

1:14:08SPEAKER- I think it's just that you're riding on a track

1:14:11SPEAKERthrough a room that's dark through an enclosed space,

1:14:14SPEAKERas opposed to like the storybook canal boats,

1:14:18SPEAKERwhich is a boat ride that's all outside

1:14:20SPEAKERand there's like models outside on the shore