00:00SPEAKERmy wife and daughter got me a fancy griddle for for father's day it's like it's 22 pounds of steel
00:07SPEAKERand it sits on top of the burners on my stove and it takes about 20 minutes to heat up but i it's
00:12SPEAKERlike a flat top griddle from a diner in my kitchen do you do tricep lifts with it in between cooking
00:19SPEAKERthat seems 22 pounds seems like it's really heavy heavy duty kitchen equipment does that include the
00:24SPEAKERflapjacks look the flapjacks are extra um i the first thing i made on was pancakes and bacon
00:31SPEAKERthey were delicious and the pancakes like you know how when you make pancakes in like a non-stick pan
00:36SPEAKERthey take a while to get the right brown and you're like oh this is done or not is it is it
00:40SPEAKERno you just put that thing on there like 90 seconds later you flip it and you're done
00:44SPEAKERwhat kind of fat are we talking uh i use for flapjacks i use canola oil usually vegetable
00:50SPEAKERoil of some kind uh for bacon i use bacon grease uh the the real winner of this whole thing though
00:58SPEAKERis the sunny side up egg because like normally you know you make a sunny side up egg you got
01:02SPEAKERto put a cover on it on a normal stove because there's not enough heat coming through and then
01:06SPEAKERit's the bottom gets too crisp before the top gets cooked this you just put some butter down
01:10SPEAKERthere crack an egg and boom you're off to the races can you tell me the advantage of the sunny
01:14SPEAKERside up over the over easy what's wrong with just flipping the egg for a few seconds i like a clean
01:19SPEAKERtop okay yeah i like i like a untouched no grease on the top fluffy virgin unspoiled ben you're
01:26SPEAKERshot you're shaking your head no i like my my yolk sealed in there uh with a nice sear if there's a
01:33SPEAKERlittle bit of a gelatinous like white on the top even i'm okay with that i i like a loose sunny
01:38SPEAKERside no thank you no no crispy bits at all on my eggs please everybody's making faces now i'm gross
01:44SPEAKERi guess i like a runny yolk but uh it's still i like the experience of you know cracking and open
01:50SPEAKERand you know you get the like volcanic leak well yeah you gotta have the leak onto your toast yeah
01:55SPEAKERyou gotta have something to mop up with the toast and the other bits of egg but but like i don't
01:59SPEAKERmind a sunny side up is the thing about the sunny side up is if they properly execute a sunny side
02:04SPEAKERup at a diner whether it's whether you're talking about like you know your your nationwide your
02:08SPEAKERwaffle houses your denny's or like their mom and pop place down in the corner like if they can do
02:13SPEAKERa sunny side up and they do it right you know that you know that they know how to make an egg
02:17SPEAKERit's a hard egg to make you know they have food safety on the mind uh i think it's technique and
02:21SPEAKERexpertise i don't think i think if you go into a diner for food safety you're making mistakes
02:25SPEAKERalready. [Music]
02:55SPEAKERwelcome to brad and will made a tech pod i'm will i'm brad hey brad how you doing i'm doing
02:59SPEAKERwell what are we here to talk about today will today we're here to talk about old internet stuff
03:05SPEAKERwith you know uh uh our mutual friend veronica belmont once described uh people of our generation
03:11SPEAKERwho've been around on the internet for a while as internet olds oh boy and i think she said it as a
03:16SPEAKERas a she meant it as a kindness okay even though we were not old at the time well that was probably
03:21SPEAKER10 years ago now so maybe we are yes i have bad news for you oh crap we're there um but but we're
03:27SPEAKERhere with a with a with a uh our friend ben brown uh who he's he's been internetting for a long time
03:35SPEAKERan original internet raconteur i would say uh causing problems and making weird stuff for a
03:40SPEAKERvery long time now uh ben welcome to the show it's good to have you here hi thank you i'm glad to be
03:44SPEAKERhere okay well since since will put it that way i have to ask what is what is your day i mean you're
03:48SPEAKERnot going to know your exact date i'm sure that you got online for the first time but ballpark us
03:53SPEAKERyou're at least first time on the internet first time on the internet must would have been in the
03:59SPEAKERearly or in on the on the internet would have been on the early 90s i think uh when i uh started
04:06SPEAKERdialing in to the community access like library system to get uh go for access and things like
04:13SPEAKERthat but i was on prodigy and dial up bbs's and things like that even before um before the you
04:20SPEAKERknow true internet hit my my household where were you that you that you had like you you and i are
04:27SPEAKERabout the same age so like i didn't my my i didn't know anybody i knew one person who had bbs access
04:34SPEAKERbefore like 90 before i went to college basically 93 and i i'm curious like i don't know where i
04:41SPEAKERwould have even found out about internet access before much before that yeah well i was super
04:48SPEAKERlucky i guess that my um grandpa worked for ibm um and like because he worked for ibm and had retired
04:56SPEAKERhe wanted us to get prodigy from like the sears ibm like collaboration or whatever of the like
05:03SPEAKERmid 80s or late 80s i as i recall and then which prodigy for people who don't remember is like
05:10SPEAKERa dial-up like proto-internet dial-up service that had like rudimentary graphics and like chat
05:17SPEAKERmessage message boards and chat rooms and stuff like that and like subject matter portals or
05:23SPEAKERwhatever kind of america online but more for nerds i think yeah pre-proto america online
05:29SPEAKERbut it was a walled garden not not the internet and then how did i get into bbs dial-ups i have
05:36SPEAKERno idea but in the you know i grew up in like suburban maryland and there were dial-up bbs's
05:43SPEAKERthat we dialed into and and i hosted one on my own like 386 pc in my parents basement oh wow
05:52SPEAKERwhat was that like did you have multi was it a multi-line bbs did you have multiple phone lines
05:57SPEAKERi wish no no my parents let me turn it on at like 6 pm at night and like run it till
06:05SPEAKER7 am the next day i like shut it down during the day when i went to school but i would mostly just
06:10SPEAKERwait for people to dial in and then like chat them um you know because they would be like
06:15SPEAKERgoing through the menu system and i'd be like sis up like hello who are you
06:19SPEAKERhello user but how did people find did you post stuff on like flyers on screwdriver shops to let
06:25SPEAKERpeople know about it or just tell your friends like what was the i'm wow yeah i told my friends
06:30SPEAKERabout it and there you'd also like put your bbs in like a text file and then that bbs.text file
06:37SPEAKERwould get like uploaded to other bbs's or whatever so you know you would basically have your it would
06:42SPEAKERbe kind of like serving the internet now right you'd like go down your list of numbers and you
06:45SPEAKERlike dial into this one and like dial in and then be like oh no new text files hang up like dial the
06:54SPEAKERnext one you know and like see play the door games for a while like you know legend of the red dragon
06:59SPEAKERor whatever like do a little bit of this a little bit of that some trade wars and then you know on
07:05SPEAKERto the next one but that and then that led me to the our library system in montgomery county
07:10SPEAKERmaryland or somewhere about to have this system called cap access capital area access that was
07:17SPEAKERa free dial-up service that got you that dropped you into a gopher powered menu and we quickly
07:24SPEAKERdiscovered and this was free but you had to like sort of apply for it but like me as like a 14 year
07:29SPEAKERold you know applied for it through the library or whatever and quickly discovered that you could
07:35SPEAKERlike crash out of the gopher system by hitting a bad telnet link and it would it would just land
07:42SPEAKERyou at a unix prompt and so it was like free root account on this system and so we use that to like
07:51SPEAKERget into the to other stuff get a real internet get up to no good you might say
07:57SPEAKERdo you know what kind of unix it was at that point golly no no no who knows right in the
08:05SPEAKERlike it would have been early 90s right it could have been anything yeah pre-lenix like kind of
08:10SPEAKERyeah it could be an att or something like that yeah yeah yeah weird uh but yeah we would like
08:17SPEAKERtelnet into like muds and stuff from there and like you know so so we're talking today though
08:24SPEAKERbecause you've been doing some really interesting stuff lately kind of delving back into the dawn of
08:29SPEAKERthe early internet protocols you know the stuff that the stuff that like when i went to college
08:33SPEAKERi was part of the the endless summer in 93. i started college in 1993 and ruined the internet
08:38SPEAKERthe first time thanks the first wave of internet ruiners and like i remember getting into gopher
08:44SPEAKERand usenet and irc and all that stuff but but do you want to talk about the name of this i don't
08:49SPEAKERwant to out the service if you don't want no people okay okay so you a friend of mine sent
08:55SPEAKERme a link to this thing mutual friend of ours sent me a link and he's like hey have you signed up for
08:58SPEAKERben's thing it's unhappy netbox yet and i was like no it's happy netbox that's a good name and and i
09:04SPEAKERwent and i looked i was like oh shit ben made finger but it lives on a web on a web server he
09:09SPEAKERresurrected finger yeah performed some dark rights and brought it back from the dead well it never
09:16SPEAKERdied yeah it's a weird thing really never really went away yes we are here to talk about finger
09:20SPEAKERlet's just say it we finger here i fingered i can't say it man i cannot say i know it's not a
09:28SPEAKERpleasant thing to say out to talk about it like what other verb is available you know it's like
09:32SPEAKERthis is literally the command i don't know how else to say that i fingered your address plan file i
09:37SPEAKERthink that your address right before this and i saw that you are updating your thing like daily
09:41SPEAKERi guess it's your plan file right that you're yes i do update my my happy netbox um plan um daily
09:47SPEAKERand um you literally updated your plan file today to say that you were going to be on this podcast
09:53SPEAKERi did i was like there's there is someone using finger as intended that's very exciting to me
09:57SPEAKERyep yesterday i had my my the list of comic books i was buying because yesterday was new comic book
10:02SPEAKERday um yeah i mean finger you know it started as like a cynical sort of joke about wanting a social
10:10SPEAKERnetwork that was on purpose hard to use and like maybe obscure like we joked about like you would
10:17SPEAKERhave to have my ssh key to like curl my profile down and then decrypt it with like my crypto
10:24SPEAKERsecret and that's the only way you'd be able to get my updates if you're not so we were joking
10:29SPEAKERabout that and then that's okay and then i realized that like that was basically what finger
10:34SPEAKERwas like if you're not if you're not piping your social media requests through like three different
10:39SPEAKERunix utilities you're not trying hard enough exactly exactly um and you know i've been around
10:45SPEAKERon this social network ride for a while and it's like not always fun um but yeah and then so i
10:51SPEAKERstarted thinking oh maybe oh finger that would be fun like how complicated is finger um and it turns
10:56SPEAKERout the protocol is trivially simple um literally you like connect to a specific port on a computer
11:07SPEAKERand uh send the username and then the server sends back whatever it wants well well and like the
11:14SPEAKERthing you said something to me when you're talking about this the other day but you're like yeah
11:17SPEAKEReverybody still has finger on their computers yeah i didn't realize it but fingers in windows yes i
11:23SPEAKERchecked right before this like you can go pull up a command prompt in windows right now and type
11:27SPEAKERfinger and it's there they they never stopped including it that was the magic moment for me
11:33SPEAKERlike i started tinkering and then i was like i wonder how hard it would be to get like you know
11:38SPEAKERhomebrew no no it's installed on my mac oh and it's installed on windows too so there's like the
11:44SPEAKERclient for this hidden you know social protocol already there it's been there since on almost
11:52SPEAKERevery computer since like the creation of the internet right it's like from the 70s something
11:59SPEAKERlike 77 i think i've read right before this yeah um and it's just dormant but what's what what what
12:06SPEAKERwas fascinating to me was like everybody has this like matrix like cybers cyberspace like experience
12:14SPEAKERlike lurking on the command line of their thing where they could like get information about people
12:21SPEAKERin this like weird but kind of cool format i thought wow maybe people will be super into this
12:27SPEAKERthere's something something kind of like elemental right or primordial about it because it's just a
12:30SPEAKERtext dump you know it's literally like your plan file is just an ascii or is it what is a utf now
12:35SPEAKERright not ascii it's just yeah gosh i don't know just pretty much ascii it's literally just a
12:40SPEAKERplain text file sitting in your home directory that somebody is like plucking information out
12:44SPEAKERof there's just there's something very like primitive about it in a really cool way well the
12:49SPEAKERthe the primordial thing is interesting because like for me the first useful thing i did on the
12:57SPEAKERinternet was read about quake development as posted through john karmak's plan files which
13:02SPEAKERwe just talked about a couple weeks ago yeah in like 1996 1995 and that was that was when i was
13:08SPEAKERlike oh i got to download a finger app for windows and at that point it wasn't built in because it
13:12SPEAKERwasn't it was pre you know it's windows 95 i guess or like all those websites sprung up to just
13:17SPEAKERserve those plan files in html form right because a lot of people didn't know what that stuff was
13:22SPEAKEReven about oh you mean the stomped a plan file archive yes the blues news like so okay so you
13:30SPEAKERthis but this isn't the first time you've done this too ben because you did a chat client that
13:33SPEAKERwas it's not an irc protocol but it's like a web-based chat client a few months or years
13:39SPEAKERi guess before happy netbox yeah sure i mean i the i my perf my day job is working in the
13:46SPEAKERchat bot industry uh and so i'm fairly familiar with the like technologies that are responsible
13:53SPEAKERfor you know doing basic chat rooms and i sort of set myself a challenge to see if i could write
13:58SPEAKERum a chat server that would basically be like burner chat um the idea being like make it super
14:06SPEAKEReasy for almost anybody to set up a chat room on like nothing hardware like glitch um and like how
14:15SPEAKERsmall could it be to do that um and so it turns out super easy um something like less than a
14:24SPEAKERthousand lines of javascript code for the server and the client and then like a little best css
14:29SPEAKERsprinkled on top like gets you a chat room that like supports channels and hashtags and usernames
14:37SPEAKERand um crypto so like it was end-to-end encrypted uh so i started throwing it up on glitch like
14:46SPEAKERrandomly um at night when i would like want to chat with random people and tweeting the links
14:53SPEAKERout and yeah you just have a little chat room and then it would just go away at the end um and again
14:59SPEAKERlike i don't i think that there's like some like mild maybe not like well-developed desire i don't
15:04SPEAKERknow i'm like a bit of a cynical old school crusty internet nerd or whatever but like i don't really
15:10SPEAKERwant every chat or message that i send with my friends to be like searchable and archived and
15:17SPEAKERpublic or even kept at all things it's sometimes ephemeral the the ephemeral nature of the old like
15:25SPEAKERi miss the ephemeral nature of the old internet right like yes like i miss going on message boards
15:31SPEAKERand there's well there's this thing that's happened over the last 30 years where
15:37SPEAKEReverything started as centralized repositories that were like built on core protocols for the
15:41SPEAKERnight we had irc for live interaction we had usenet for archive stuff we had finger for like
15:46SPEAKERsocial status updates and telling people you're buying pants and comics and and like all of this
15:54SPEAKERstuff has then well first we privatized everything which turned out to be maybe not the best idea who
15:59SPEAKERknew um and now now like we're all looking at these privatized things like well this was maybe
16:05SPEAKERthis was a mistake i guess and and and i mean this comes up kind of all over the place right now but
16:11SPEAKERanyway anyway i'm rambling at this point no i mean like you know like you end up with all these
16:16SPEAKERsituations where it's like what do you mean i can't delete my messages from this corporate chat client
16:20SPEAKERi've been using for the last three years like i thought i'd you mean i can't just purge my entire
16:24SPEAKERaccount they're gonna keep this forever forever and like you know we especially not not that
16:31SPEAKERconcerning if you're talking about your company's intellectual property on the dime on the you know
16:35SPEAKERon the clock but if i'm like messaging my friend on the side or having a conversation you know like
16:41SPEAKERwhy is it all privy to the same rules so you know it turns out and one of the nice things about this
16:47SPEAKERkind of thing is like i built this chat service for that doesn't have user user authentication
16:52SPEAKERdoesn't have archives doesn't have like a system of you know archiving and searching and indexing
17:00SPEAKERdoesn't have any of that stuff so it runs without dependencies you when you delete it it goes away
17:05SPEAKERthere's no record of it ever existing which is which is awesome unless somebody took a screenshot
17:10SPEAKERwhich is always you know existential threat of the internet or whatever but well that's that kind of
17:14SPEAKERhighlights the the contrasts what will was talking about right of like you know i i spent years of my
17:19SPEAKERlife on irc and like you know people on the other end could be could be logging what i was saying
17:24SPEAKERlike obviously like anytime anytime your information hits another end point somebody
17:27SPEAKERcould be capturing it the difference is now there is this like everything rolls up into the central
17:32SPEAKERauthority that is always capturing everything right exactly always capturing everything so
17:38SPEAKERi just you know that's the kind of in the olden days of the internet it was much less about
17:46SPEAKERcreating the like you know you know um not obnoxious nomicron or whatever of everything
17:53SPEAKERever said on the internet um you you know and one of the interesting things i see with people
17:59SPEAKERon happy netbox and their finger profiles is that i mean they throw away everything every time it's
18:05SPEAKERnot like you build up this long finger history you know you use you erase it in the morning and you
18:14SPEAKERwrite some stuff and then the next day you erase it again um and not everybody's doing that some
18:19SPEAKERpeople are piling stuff on but um you can do it's not de facto an archive um i was gonna say when
18:29SPEAKERwhen so i started at ours technica when we were literally a front page site running in like the
18:34SPEAKERbasement at the harvard divinity school and the downside of not having a content management system
18:39SPEAKERthat automated moving everything down one post was that if two people were working on at the
18:44SPEAKERsame time whoever saved first their work just disappeared which is not a never never what you
18:51SPEAKERwanted really um but but like like sometimes sometimes ephemeral is good sometimes not having
18:58SPEAKERthat history is good sometimes it's bad i i really like the idea of like every tweet killing the next
19:04SPEAKERthe like each new tweet kills the one before it right so you're like you know one one there's
19:10SPEAKERone fewer thing that i thought about yesterday can you can you imagine how how much more tolerable
19:15SPEAKERtwitter would be if every person could only have one tweet at a time if every time you tweeted your
19:20SPEAKERprevious tweet disappeared how much better would that be yeah no i mean and it's liberating too
19:25SPEAKERbecause you're not like held to every last thing that you might have said and um not that i'm trying
19:32SPEAKERto like give people an out for saying bad things but not sometimes you're just being silly and
19:38SPEAKERsometimes you're just chat chit chatting with friends and so uh i think it's important that
19:42SPEAKERpeople have that that kind of venue to just kind of bullshit on the internet you know like you were
19:49SPEAKERmentioning too like irc in irc days like you go online you talk to people with their weird handles
19:54SPEAKERyou don't know exactly who they are sometimes they know what how to fix that like email config file
20:00SPEAKERproblem you're having and sometimes they were going to murder you or whatever so just keep going
20:08SPEAKERyeah well well so okay so there's there's a lot of stuff about finger this is interesting i can't
20:16SPEAKERbelieve we're going to talk about finger for for we're going to keep going on finger but i i like
20:20SPEAKERit's such a weird like it's a weird important part of internet history and i was that's why i was
20:27SPEAKERstoked when you when i when when our friend told us about it told me about happy netbox like like
20:33SPEAKERyou talked a little bit about the history before it it started out as a kind of one-off right like
20:37SPEAKERit was a thing that like you would so to do happy netbox you went back and looked at the actual code
20:42SPEAKERi guess is where to start like literally the 70s code like the original yeah oh wow c code yeah
20:48SPEAKERand and there's all sorts of there was there was you learned stuff as a result of this i guess
20:53SPEAKERis the next not i did yeah well i mean the the the finger i looked at a lot of code bases
21:00SPEAKERfor um in the course of this kind of project and because i because like i said finger is a is sort
21:06SPEAKERof a in the family of these old school protocols like http finger runs on port 79 web runs on port
21:15SPEAKER80 right and then there's a gopher which runs on port 78 not not by coincidence right these things
21:21SPEAKERwere all developed like one after another and like in coordination and in use with each other
21:25SPEAKERso people were like oh what's next i don't know finger so um there's a lot of yeah like assumptions
21:32SPEAKERabout who the users are of these things like there's a lot of gendered comments in the uh
21:38SPEAKERin the source code you know don't mess up his screen with your annoying notification banners
21:45SPEAKERhe's working on something important at the university system or whatever you know because
21:50SPEAKERthe assumption is the user on the other end is a computer science professor logged into like the
21:56SPEAKERwork the workstation um and like that was that kind of slipped out onto the public internet
22:02SPEAKERthough because like the problem was it was built by these gray hairs back then right who were like
22:08SPEAKERi'm designing the unix um plan system or whatever and they wrote this thing and it's like i said
22:16SPEAKERsuper trivial it doesn't really have much sophistication to it at all there's no
22:21SPEAKERauthentication there's no user stuff you don't know who's requesting your finger you can't
22:26SPEAKERblock somebody on finger or anything like that and it's attached to your unix account so if
22:31SPEAKERyou're at university and you have a unix account then somebody can finger your account and in the
22:38SPEAKERold the original implementation would show like are you logged in what to what terminal are you
22:43SPEAKERlogged in how long have you been logged in and what program are you running i wanted to bring
22:46SPEAKERthat up i've got a i've got a bsd a free bsd machine running under my desk and i
22:50SPEAKERjumped in there and fingered my account i did a finger dash s and it's telling me which teletype
22:57SPEAKERi'm logged into it's got columns for office and phone which of course i didn't fill out but like
23:01SPEAKERi love that throwback to the to the original use of this stuff which was like academic institutions
23:05SPEAKERright and like yeah absolutely and time shared like networked you know like central mainframe
23:11SPEAKERtype stuff like i love this throwback to like oh you would you would want to know which office each
23:15SPEAKERperson was in because you might have to walk down the hall and find them right and then like a in
23:20SPEAKERlike a glowing like reminiscent way when you think back on those days it would be great that you can
23:26SPEAKERsee like what your fellow students or your ta or your professor is up to and they're like posting
23:32SPEAKERuseful stuff in their thing and in the dark cynical reality you know people were like being
23:39SPEAKERyou know you could stalk people and like find out personal information about people
23:42SPEAKERall across the internet without any kind of you know restriction put on so i mean it would like
23:48SPEAKERit died like a sort of un unglorious death because people were like this is creepy
23:54SPEAKERwhen i went to do it again you know i was like we'll just skip the part where it says what your
24:00SPEAKERphone number is and when you last logged in like because i said there's that's not in the protocol
24:05SPEAKERthat was a design decision by the people who built finger to include those fields in the
24:10SPEAKERdefault output right into so i just like skipped that part made it about posting ascii art so so is
24:17SPEAKERwhat you've done like kind of would you would you call that like a reimplementation of the protocol
24:20SPEAKERlike you've kind of modified and i mean i just implemented the protocol okay the traditional
24:29SPEAKERdisplayed material in the output of a finger from like your your your linux or whatever is just
24:37SPEAKERjust the text that they decided to return so so they chose so so what you're saying is the bsd
24:45SPEAKERwhoever implemented the finger protocol and bsd said oh we should put this other stuff in because
24:50SPEAKERit'll be useful and convenient not necessarily that it was part of whatever were there are there
24:54SPEAKERlike i triple e's for for these protocols dude i've got the rfc for the finger protocol right from
25:00SPEAKERof course of course of course there are yeah i should have known uh from 19 let's see december
25:06SPEAKER30th 1977 yes in fact yeah well it's fascinating the those code bases are out there and there's
25:15SPEAKERmultiple like competing code bases for some of these things another one is is the unix talk
25:20SPEAKERcommand which is like fascinating to look at because there was multiple generations of this
25:24SPEAKERthing and again is installed on many people's computers but doesn't really exist as a service
25:30SPEAKERanymore in the cloud which due to vagaries of the protocol is required how i'm curious like since
25:37SPEAKERyou mentioned code bases how hard was it to track down that original 1977 implementation like because
25:42SPEAKERlike if you google you know finger protocol source code it's not that like it's not that it's obscure
25:48SPEAKERit's just that there are so many other versions out there like like the new finger is the first
25:51SPEAKERthing that comes up which is a later implementation done for linux right um and there's like all these
25:58SPEAKERlike here is the second match is a github repo of like finger written at go like how hard is it to
26:03SPEAKERfind like you just want like unix ass unix finger like it seems like it's kind of gotten buried by
26:08SPEAKERall this newer stuff yeah well luckily the like core unix packages are the source code of those
26:17SPEAKERthings are all like available forever right like it's been all available on usenet and or not usenet
26:23SPEAKERbut like on various weird things for a long time i remember i can't remember exactly what i you know
26:28SPEAKERdid to search but i was going through and i would look for things that were like on google code
26:33SPEAKERarchive or whatever you know like things that are no longer in active use it's not on github that's
26:38SPEAKERnot what you want you want the like subversion repo from like something so you know from from
26:44SPEAKERwhen the you know slack where linux was being district so that's where i would find these things
26:49SPEAKERand then there would be like weird comments and stuff in there and like the old code you know
26:54SPEAKERproject maintenance history that like ended in 2002 with the guy being like i'm sick of doing this
27:00SPEAKERit's been 20 years somebody's been maintaining finger for 20 years good god oh wow well the
27:08SPEAKERtalk unix talk thing had like multiple schisms and everything you know it's like whoa well there's
27:13SPEAKERalways seen drama ben that's that's the one the one i don't i didn't use unix talk ever i don't
27:19SPEAKERknow what unix talk is can you explain it so it was the same kind of thing you would you would say
27:24SPEAKERlike talk uh will at you know domain.com and that would from a command line tool and that would send
27:32SPEAKERa ping out to like your server and then you would get a thing that said like ben at ben brown.com
27:36SPEAKERwants to chat do you want to chat you would say chat or talk ben at ben brown.com then this like
27:42SPEAKERyou intermediary service would connect the two of us via our command lines and then i would get like
27:47SPEAKERyour line of text my line of text your line of text my line of text so it was like one on one to
27:51SPEAKERone um like i you know irc style chat kind of so it was like terminal based wow so okay so hold on
28:00SPEAKERdoes that mean does that mean that we spent the first five six years of the web 10 years of the
28:04SPEAKERweb rebuilding all the unix tools in dedicated services and then we spent the next 10 years
28:11SPEAKERdoing it again with ajax and tags and then the third one is probably adding like crypto crypto
28:20SPEAKERlike blockchain to it now is that is this what we doomed to repeat this forever and ever and ever
28:25SPEAKERwe're just going to keep rebuilding talk and and yes oh god well particularly because people
28:31SPEAKERnever look back at these things and with with interest uh to understand what they were how they
28:38SPEAKERwere used i mean the the time we've spent this is something i say to my peers all the time they're
28:47SPEAKERlike okay old man brown i used to be the kid so listen to me the curse of every kid is that you
28:56SPEAKERgo transition straight from being the kid to being the gray beard right exactly like around
29:00SPEAKERthe time your kid turns six is my experience exactly exactly uh but you know we've spent
29:07SPEAKERyou know how many what the last 20 years like redesigning buttons on websites like good for us
29:13SPEAKERlike what did the web really add over gopher besides like ads well i mean the people who
29:19SPEAKERsell the ads probably feel pretty strongly about the value of the ads but the rest of us are less
29:23SPEAKERenthusiastic i guess yeah i mean we you know like you were saying earlier you know it likes
29:28SPEAKERthe we used to talk about the commercial web and the non-commercial web
29:34SPEAKERhas separate things yeah there's a non-commercial web at one point that's funny yeah and then that
29:39SPEAKERjust went away um but and i don't think that it has to necessarily be commercial or non-commercial
29:44SPEAKERbut you know people the commercial web means that stuff must constantly be created and layered on
29:52SPEAKERtop of stuff and that pushes some of the good stuff down and away and so if we pause and look
29:59SPEAKERback at these things every once in a while we find the things that's like oh why do we build
30:04SPEAKERwhy do we build you know irc if we had this if why do we build uh aa aim if we had irc why do we
30:11SPEAKERbuild you know all these things it's like well because people are egotistical and like greedy
30:18SPEAKERand well and nobody wanted to use the command line in 1996 because that was hard right graphics are
30:24SPEAKERcool yeah look you just double click the icon and then you type in your your you type in oscar.aol.com
30:32SPEAKERaim.com and then you put in your password you put your icq number which is one one two nine six four
30:38SPEAKERfive oh my gosh and uh yeah yeah yeah um it's it's so i like what so i mean you've been doing this
30:47SPEAKERyou've been doing this for a long time and you talked about glitch for people who don't know
30:50SPEAKERglitches is a is a neat kind of it's like an app bucket for web apps that means you don't have to
30:56SPEAKERfool with installing web servers and all that stuff but you've been doing this for long enough
31:00SPEAKERthat like like it used to be that getting a web stack running on a machine was hard
31:05SPEAKERcan you can you can we can we get into talk about that a little bit because i think people don't
31:08SPEAKERreally appreciate that now are we talking about lamp here or what are we doing maybe pre-lamp
31:13SPEAKEReven maybe i don't know yeah i don't know dude well look when we when i moved to austin in 2000
31:19SPEAKERto do to form my first startup with my four three co-founders we were like okay we're gonna need
31:25SPEAKERsome um computers for this uh whole internet business and so we ordered them on the internet
31:31SPEAKERand the rack mounted cases that were like for you rack mounts which means like for the big big ass
31:38SPEAKERhonking like rack mount server uh and they arrived at our house where we put hard drives in them and
31:44SPEAKERthen drove them up installed uh probably free bsd on them and then on top of that would install
31:53SPEAKERapache and uh name service daemons and things like that so you could like actually route your
32:00SPEAKERtraffic between the between the servers then we drove them up to the isp and like screwed them in
32:08SPEAKERand then when they crashed i would drive up to the sp and like hit the power button
32:15SPEAKERyeah it was crazy dude when i was a kid we would go to best buy or whatever and buy the slackware
32:19SPEAKERlinux distro on cds oh i yeah i bought this i bought secrets of the doom masters and slack
32:26SPEAKERa learn how to use linux book that had like slackware 1.2 or something on or debian
32:32SPEAKERwhatever i can't remember what the first debian was but yeah ancient ancient anteater or something
32:38SPEAKERprobably my limited experience at that time slackware was possibly the hardest way to learn
32:42SPEAKERlinux but a lot has changed i mean does even still exist i can't imagine yes like where slackware is
32:49SPEAKERalive and well i guess well is the right word to use there i mean they're still going they put out
32:54SPEAKERthis is how i spend my free time they put out a new version oh i'm sorry five years ago okay
33:01SPEAKERthis is the newest version alive but maybe not so well yeah not yes it's not not actively uh
33:06SPEAKERbeing updated but anyway so i mean it's it's it's a little bit of a bummer like this is happening in
33:14SPEAKERpodcasting right now um mike masnick of tech dirt posted a thread about this earlier this week um
33:20SPEAKERand it's it's a weird it's a weird time because like spotify is spending money buying up podcasts
33:27SPEAKERjust as always happens when there's some sort of it's not like podcasting is a new medium at this
33:31SPEAKERpoint it's 20 years old uh 15 years old but there's always got to be something that's hot
33:36SPEAKERthough like in that world right and yeah celebrity podcasts are exciting sorry brad like on the
33:42SPEAKERcommercial internet you know in the commercial space on the internet there's always something
33:46SPEAKERthat is sought after right and it just happens to be podcasts right now yeah so so but but as a
33:53SPEAKERresult of these exclusivity deals they're pulling off pulling the old shows off of the rss feeds so
33:58SPEAKERso like all of a sudden your podcast that once existed in in in the podcast app with all your
34:02SPEAKERother podcasts is now only available on spotify and and it just seems like we're doomed to repeat
34:09SPEAKERthe same things over and over and over and over again and i mean maybe this is just what getting
34:14SPEAKERold is is seeing seeing us make the seeing the jeans go from flared to boot to narrow to skinny
34:21SPEAKERto flared again uh i i don't know yeah you gotta have space for the punk rock podcast revolution to
34:30SPEAKERyou know rebel against the corporate podcast osphere um look man we're listener supported
34:37SPEAKERwe're we're coming to you we're the it's the realest podcast yes this is the pirate radio of
34:42SPEAKERpodcasts we're here to talk about the real shit that nobody else wants you to know about like
34:47SPEAKERfinger man do you ever hear about gopher kid uh donate to my patreon and you will go for was the
34:57SPEAKERfirst was my first time like i i that was the first time i looked something up on the internet
35:01SPEAKERwas using gopher and connecting to like the university of illinois' library system to to
35:05SPEAKERdownload because they posted full full like i was able to use it to i didn't have to go to the
35:10SPEAKERlibrary to do my research for papers i could just pull the whole thing from well i could pull the
35:15SPEAKERextract from gopher and get enough of what i needed from there it's like to get the fake
35:19SPEAKERcitation for my bullshit yeah i mean one of the things that not i want to go back to your podcast
35:24SPEAKERthing but um the i one of the things i like about chat bots and one of the things that was appealing
35:29SPEAKERto me about the um ir um sorry the irc style chat and like gopher and all of these things is that
35:37SPEAKERum they they're they're just pure they're just the text right like it's just information
35:44SPEAKERand whatever however good that information is it's just the it's just that there's not like an
35:49SPEAKERaesthetic or a very light aesthetic right there might be a little bit of like a fig what are they
35:56SPEAKERfiglet fonts or whatever you might get a little ascii art in there but um you know the they're
36:01SPEAKERpretty much just straight text and i it was appealing to me to think about like what it would
36:07SPEAKERwhat the internet would be like if it was like designed by like you know information architects
36:11SPEAKERand librarians or whatever like only like it didn't and nothing against visual designers or
36:16SPEAKERwhatever but i love a good movie poster as anybody else but maybe we didn't have to spend so much
36:22SPEAKERtime again i spent like 20 years like building commercial websites for people like adware and
36:27SPEAKERjunk and like e-commerce sites so it's like yeah i spent a lot of time deciding if the pixel
36:31SPEAKERbackground is going to stretch or like not stretch or if the button was going to be blue or yellow
36:35SPEAKERit's like millions of dollars millions of dollars like what if it was just like simple like text
36:41SPEAKERmenus that just said what you wanted and you clicked on them you know like the more insidious
36:46SPEAKERversion of what you're talking about is like you know what form of like user tracking and telemetry
36:50SPEAKERis behind that message you're sending you know like what data is being harvested here you know
36:53SPEAKERwhat what yeah what things are lurking under the surface of the surface that you're not aware of
36:58SPEAKERthat's kind of what i was getting at with the plan file right it's just text like it's only what you
37:01SPEAKERput in there and nothing else it's just very raw does happy netbox have a privacy policy ben no
37:08SPEAKERno happy netbox is doesn't even have css files i mean it's just uh we uh i my dad has asked me
37:17SPEAKERseveral times to reset his password i'm like dad there's no way i just delete the text file i guess
37:21SPEAKERbecause actually it is just text files being written behind the scenes so like i guess i'll
37:25SPEAKERdo that like it just has your like encrypted password in it so i don't know how to change it
37:30SPEAKERunless i create a new account and like copy paste the encrypt i don't know i'll just delete your
37:34SPEAKERtext file make a new account for somebody else grabs it yeah didn't put didn't put uh google
37:40SPEAKERanalytics on there because i didn't didn't care to know and i mean the whole file the whole page is
37:47SPEAKERlike it's 1.86 megabytes that's a that's oh that's memory used never mind sorry yeah it's like very
37:54SPEAKERsmall 2k yeah i mean the one of the things i wanted to see was like how little could i do
38:01SPEAKERto like launch a sort of quasi social network and like how far would i go you know i have
38:06SPEAKERentrepreneurial friends who are like dude this is incredible you're like reinventing this whole
38:10SPEAKERthing it's gonna be huge oh my god get ready it's gonna explode i'm like dude i don't know it like
38:14SPEAKERinvolves a command line tool and it's text only and like i didn't put any css on the website
38:19SPEAKERhe's like no no it's gonna be huge it's gonna be huge and then that takes is that all it
38:24SPEAKERtakes just turns out put a put a 40 year old protocol in front of people the right people
38:28SPEAKERwith the right amount of money and that's it well they're like they're hungry for the alternative
38:33SPEAKERsocial no no no they're not like it capped out at 400 people on the first like weekend and then
38:38SPEAKERit's been like three months and there's like 402 now will thanks for joining by the way number 402
38:46SPEAKERi was on on day three or four i got i got will at i'm early man i have brad ad i showed up a
38:51SPEAKERlittle later but i'm not we're all there it's still i've never really got a first name before
38:56SPEAKERbecause it's a four letter first name nobody does those so uh uh it's it was really exciting i was
39:01SPEAKERglad to get into the ground floor on this one ben um you're good you locked it in there until i
39:06SPEAKERdecide that it's boring and i'm going to delete it eventually because it'll just disappear and
39:10SPEAKERthen i'll find another use for happy netbox.com in the future perhaps a corporate podcast network
39:15SPEAKERoh perfect like a punk rock podcast network how about that you're talking i'll be better okay so
39:19SPEAKERwhat what's the defining characteristic of the punk rock podcast network is that you don't care
39:23SPEAKERcare about uh money and you just want to burn the whole thing burn down the the establishment is that
39:29SPEAKERthe and every you're the you delete every episode at the end of recording it oh no man it's only up
39:37SPEAKERfor a week you got to listen to it that week and then it just gone goes away yeah yeah i had a uh
39:43SPEAKERsorry this is just another random ben story here but this is what you invited me on for right look
39:47SPEAKERthis is what i i know i knew what we were getting into there was a website back 20 years ago that
39:53SPEAKERyou're not allowed to talk about which one files on it that we're in i'm not allowed to say it but
40:02SPEAKERthere was a it was like fun community website that many people were a member of
40:07SPEAKERit's not illegal in any way but it was sort of secret and we're not supposed to talk about it
40:10SPEAKERyeah and on that website you could upload files and people could download them and see them and
40:14SPEAKERpeople would like to upload and make their own like pictures or whatever but this was in the
40:18SPEAKERday back in like 2000 when it was like expensive to upload and store files and share them with
40:24SPEAKERyour friends so anyways i had a video podcast show that i would like record in my house back in when
40:32SPEAKERi was like 20 20 years old and it was like 600 megabytes you know an issue an episode it was a
40:36SPEAKERfive minutes long or whatever but these were like a little quick time file yeah so i would upload
40:40SPEAKERthem to this thing and it could we could only ever have them up for the one episode because it would
40:43SPEAKERbe it would like bankrupt somebody to serve off their personal website like terabytes of you know
40:50SPEAKERor gigabytes of or even megabytes of video you know it'd be crazy because back then you were
40:55SPEAKERlike metered on the internet use right i i remember i remember like when you were paying
41:01SPEAKERfor upstream i remember having really serious questions with the conversation with the business
41:05SPEAKERpeople and we launched a podcast for maximum pc in like 2005 about what the lowest possible bit
41:11SPEAKERrate we could do for an audio podcast was without blowing out our hosting budget for unlike the first
41:17SPEAKERepisode and now you pay 20 bucks a month or something and you can it does they don't care
41:22SPEAKERthey're just like unlimited storage it's free at this point so i know i mean i guess what the next
41:27SPEAKERquestion is the business question is what's what's finger in a world where compute online is free
41:33SPEAKERthink about it yeah it could be huge it could be huge are there so like like you talk about you
41:42SPEAKERknow putting old command line utilities in front of entrepreneurs and them getting very excited
41:46SPEAKERlike you talk about people having rebuilt the same tools every decade for the last 40 years and all
41:52SPEAKERthat stuff and then that makes me think of things like you know like there's an irc interface for
41:56SPEAKERtwitch chat for example like i feel this like snide sense of satisfaction every time i see
42:01SPEAKERsomething like that of like yeah you're twitch and you're a billion dollar entity but underneath all
42:06SPEAKERthat there's like a there's some obscure ass protocol from the late 80s that is that is backing
42:12SPEAKERa bunch of this stuff like do you know of any other examples of stuff like that where they're
42:15SPEAKERlike like these massive platforms out there that are like quietly relying on like this very old
42:19SPEAKERlike primitive you know stuff that came out of academia the stuff that was was developed by like
42:24SPEAKERa dude in college or whatever yeah i mean look at jquery like that was like remember how jquery like
42:31SPEAKERran the entire front-end internet for like 10 years as like the number one development tool
42:36SPEAKERand that was just like some random dude in his like volunteer time i mean yeah like i would say
42:43SPEAKERlike broadly the entire internet is what you just described sure like things are run on the crustiest
42:49SPEAKERof like old weird protocols and like weird stuff so i think that that basically is the internet
42:57SPEAKERwrit large i i once did a project for a fortune 500 company that i can't talk about who it was
43:04SPEAKERbut we got to the point where we were doing the the the the kind of due diligence before the final
43:10SPEAKERdeal was signed and their lawyer was like we need to know everything about every dependency in this
43:16SPEAKERin your tool chain and i was like well fuck this isn't gonna happen now there's no chance because
43:23SPEAKERi was like i started looking at what we were using and it was just a whole series it's it's like the
43:27SPEAKERwhole thing is built on top of the like stacks of eggshells where the dome is heaped up and you put
43:32SPEAKERthe you put them on top of each other and then it kind of works until the one on the bottom the guy
43:37SPEAKERin the bottom is like you know he's just like i don't want to deal with the scene drama anymore
43:41SPEAKERand backs out of the whole thing and uh and uh yeah it's it's it's a it's a little worrisome
43:47SPEAKERexcept for it hasn't blown up yet yeah i mean that's the amazing thing is that like it think
43:52SPEAKERlike finger right it's been around on our computers for this whole time and it hasn't
43:58SPEAKERlike caused any sort of major internet scandal there was a worm way back in the 80s or something
44:04SPEAKERbut it hasn't caused any like major you know just sitting there cruising and still works it's fine
44:09SPEAKERand so so does the like you know left pad node mod oh i know that one's broken but uh
44:15SPEAKERyeah you know um but yeah it's like just a pile of like other people's code that we all like
44:20SPEAKERsort of hope that will still work and we should all probably just throw it away and start from
44:25SPEAKERscratch but shared illusion pay you pay your pay your maintainers that's the takeaway yeah that's
44:31SPEAKERright donate to your open source projects um ben thank you oh i'm sorry i'm gonna ask one more
44:35SPEAKERquestion you wrote telnet in here any fun thoughts on telnet oh get good good call i mean there i
44:40SPEAKERwould just point out that there was a really great um telnet zine that came out called a new session
44:46SPEAKERdot com that was basically you telnet to this uh domain and telnet is another one of these like
44:52SPEAKERsuper arcane protocols that died for good reason because it's completely insecure it's like a plain
44:57SPEAKERtext protocol where like hey lib can i send some text to you on your other server sure okay yeah
45:03SPEAKERthanks for the text oh everybody can see this text oh that's fine let me send what's your password
45:08SPEAKERanyways but they've created the zine that you can explore over telnet which is super cool talent
45:13SPEAKERa new session dot com which i think yeah there's a bunch of things like that but people are out
45:18SPEAKERthere experimenting and finding with these finding these things um there's a guy i know who who who is
45:25SPEAKERlike setting up a gopher server and and you know publishing stuff and gopher like we're probably
45:30SPEAKERgoing to do a gopher happy netbox thing eventually too like just because it's kind of fun and quirky
45:36SPEAKERand like maybe somebody will do something fun with it maybe not there's we talked about a gopher
45:41SPEAKERthere's a gopher project that lets you basically convert i think it's nested it's a folder structure
45:46SPEAKERwith flat text files in it into basically a gopher server really really easily um the gopher clients
45:53SPEAKERaren't as robust these days as the finger client as it turns out who knew no i know they're and
45:57SPEAKERthey're not installed yeah weird weird um ben thank you thank you so much for coming by it's
46:03SPEAKERgreat great to have a chance to chat uh where can people find out more about happy netbox and ben
46:08SPEAKERbrown if they would like to know more about either of those subjects uh you can find me on twitter
46:14SPEAKERi'm at ben brown and then happy netbox.com i think accounts are still open so uh yeah yeah
46:20SPEAKERyou can be 403. thank you so much for coming by ben it's awesome to catch up thanks so much
46:27SPEAKERand as always we are incredibly appreciative of our beautiful thoughtful kind
46:33SPEAKERamount of adjectives generous um thoughtful patience uh intelligence informative handsome
46:41SPEAKERbeautiful lovely uh you're probably good indomitable of spirit oh that's a good one
46:48SPEAKERuh if you would like to help support this 100 listener supported podcast you can by going to
46:53SPEAKERpatreon.com slash tech bod again that's patreon.com slash tech pod for two bucks a month you gain
47:00SPEAKERaccess to the fabulous uh tech pod discord where this morning yes i will tell you what happened
47:06SPEAKERi learned something new i learned something new almost every day in the in the tech pod
47:10SPEAKERpatreon discord right however it's not hard no it is not it's not difficult but this morning
47:15SPEAKERuh i learned the origin of the dancing parrot dancing parrot the dancing parrot dancing parrot
47:23SPEAKERi saw a dancing parrot in there but i didn't the party parrot there's a lot of party parrots i'd
47:27SPEAKERnever seen it before is this like it's like an old internet meme or something what are we it's
47:31SPEAKERit's a it's a it's steven fry was in a jungle with someone who's taking pictures of this incredibly
47:39SPEAKERrare parrot that then mounted his head and humped him okay that's not the type of dance i thought we
47:46SPEAKERwere talking about but i mean it's a bit you know the no pants dance brad parrots don't wear pants
47:52SPEAKERlike the romance dance yeah the romance dance uh i learned about this for the first time i'd never
47:56SPEAKERseen it before i'd seen the party pair before i did not know the origin of the meme today i learned
48:01SPEAKERi have i have ended up in the parrot conversation now yeah you're part of the parrot party now with
48:07SPEAKERwith a bbc youtube video entitled shagged by a rare parrot that is the one that i watched
48:12SPEAKERand now i understand the party parrot and i will laugh a little bit more every time i see it from
48:16SPEAKERnow on uh the video is eminently worth watching uh and if you would like to be part of that you
48:22SPEAKERcan go to patreon.com slash tech pod find out how to sign up uh as always thank you to all of our
48:28SPEAKERpatrons you guys are awesome you all are awesome and we really appreciate the support again it
48:32SPEAKERmakes the show possible every week uh a special special very special thanks to our executive
48:38SPEAKERproducer to your patrons andrew slosky the bunny fiend jacob chapel joe krauska joel krauska twinkle
48:44SPEAKERtwinkie david allen and james kamek thank you all so much yes uh on that note i guess we should uh
48:51SPEAKERwrap it out i'm gonna go update my happy netbox plan file i haven't updated i updated it the first
48:56SPEAKERtime i like the day i registered the account and i don't know if i'll ever change it because i think
48:59SPEAKERit's probably perfect as is are you just brad at i'm gonna finger you right now okay well i don't
49:06SPEAKERwant to feel like i'm beating a dead horse we're talking we've talked about this topic a lot over
49:09SPEAKERthe last few weeks but i want to see if you can figure out or how long it takes you to figure out
49:13SPEAKERwhat it is you have a blank stare on your face is this is this a task list for quake vsync on high
49:20SPEAKERframe rates jib death grenade tweaking brightened alias models this is a this is a uh this is a
49:28SPEAKERkarmak update from it's just the first planned update about quake ever that's all it is interesting
49:34SPEAKERi just i had to put something in there vid mode 15 crap there you go um i wanted to bring up real
49:39SPEAKERfast i've seen some people asking on uh various discord servers yes uh about us talking about
49:46SPEAKERretooling our patron tiers yes i think we're not there yet we've both been busy it turns out
49:52SPEAKERi think we should just say for people who are wondering we're not quite there or ready for that
49:57SPEAKERso don't worry not if you're trying to get in under the gun or curious about when that stuff's
50:02SPEAKERgoing to change we're trying to figure out a way to do it right and that's the yeah the point is
50:06SPEAKERwe're talking about it we want to make it make it good and we don't want to um look the two dollar
50:11SPEAKERtier is probably going to go away but the people who are on the two dollar tier now will have
50:16SPEAKERaccess to the discord forever as long as you continue being a part of the patron patreon um
50:22SPEAKERbut yeah there's there's we want to change the tiers once and then not have to mess with them
50:26SPEAKERfor a long time is the goal i think yes and not do a bad job of it so which is why we haven't
50:31SPEAKERquite gotten there yet so if there's stuff you all would like to see i guess post in the discord let
50:36SPEAKERus know in the this week's episode part of the discord i'd be curious to see what people think
50:40SPEAKERand what they would they would like we should run another survey but um i guess that'll do it for us
50:45SPEAKERthis week i'm gonna get like i said i'm gonna go update my uh plan file i've been sitting here in
50:49SPEAKERthe shell the entire time that we were talking to ben just ready to ready to go i was messing with
50:53SPEAKERunix talk as he was talking about talk i i am currently checking out uh that telnet zine he
50:59SPEAKERtalked about on a new session.com by telnetting to a new session.com yeah command lines are fun
51:05SPEAKERi didn't know they were telling have you read the bruce bruce the in the beginning there was
51:08SPEAKERthe command line book no you should read that you would enjoy that book i believe
51:13SPEAKERis he primarily he's a fiction author right he writes both i think that's a bruce sterling does
51:18SPEAKERhe do tech writing as well he he he started out as a huge nerd yeah i think he started out writing
51:23SPEAKERdocs maybe i can't remember i'm i will look it up i enjoy the command line quite a bit yeah it's
51:29SPEAKERit's very much your jam it's neil stevenson not bruce stirling sorry okay yeah who also is a noted
51:34SPEAKERfiction author oh yes you don't say yes uh that'll do it for us this week see you all next week
51:39SPEAKERthanks for listening everyone uh have a good week