Episode 33 – Memory Lane is Full of Old Computers

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I pushed a big, well it’s not even that big, I pushed a big green button.

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But did you start recording?

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Friends with Brews!

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I did start recording.

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Well good.

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That’s proof.

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That’s proof.

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That’s not proof.

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It’s just a sound.

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That’s not proof, but we will accept it as proof on this show.

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Okay.

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I have got a disappointment and a repeat in store for you today.

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Okay.

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I’m starting right off the bat with my beers.

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Here’s my disappointment.

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And the reason I’m drinking this is because it’s the only thing I have in my house that

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I haven’t had on this show before.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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People can’t see this, although Peter can, but what this is is it’s a 12 ounce can of

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Cascade Lakes Brewing Company, Pineapple IPA.

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And when I bought it, I was all excited because I saw the pineapple.

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I don’t know how I missed the IPA.

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It’s literally right there as big as day.

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All capitals.

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as big as IPA.

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And what I was excited by was it was

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Cascade Lakes Brewing Company.

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And I have had this on the show,

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the Cascade Lakes Brewing Company Salted Caramel Porter.

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And I really like this.

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And so what I’m going to do in order to both have a new beer

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while also not being sad and making myself want to barf is,

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I’m going to drink some of this Pineapple IPA for you.

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I’m going to review it.

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And then I’m going to switch to the porter

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and that’s going to be what I’m actually going to drink.

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To sort of cleanse the palate then.

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Yeah. So that I can enjoy myself while we podcast instead of wishing I was dead.

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See, this is where I, if I was you, you would make some kind of off color comment about

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enjoying yourself, but I’m going to let that one slide.

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Wow.

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Just going to pretend I didn’t hear a thing.

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Peter, I want to remind you that we have a camera on and you

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haven’t given me your credit card number. So nothing like that can happen.

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Touche, Scott. Touche. What are you drinking? Oh, we just talked about what you’re drinking.

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Yeah, we just talked about it. Oh my God.

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What am I drinking? What have you drunk? I guess should be the question.

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You want some juice? Well, I will tell you what I have drunk, but I’m not going to tell you now,

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because it’s not yet been on this podcast, so I’m going to save it for a later day.

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Okay, okay.

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But I will do spoiler, it was non-alcoholic.

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Oh, okay.

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Today, I am celebrating the return of Schöfferhofer Brewery, but it is not the grapefruit. You can

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can look closely, you can see this is their pomegranate hefeweisen bier.

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But how would Schöfferhofer pronounce the word pomegranate?

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Well I guess they would be like pomegranate, which sounds kind of Spanish, pomegranate

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or something. See I come off with like a Mediterranean accent when I say that word.

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I think what would be more likely is you would say how do you pronounce pomegranate and they

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would stand there and stare at you and then they would throw you in a prison cell.

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What is the German word for pomegranate?

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Granadapfel.

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Granadapfel. So it’s a kind of apple. Got it. Okay. Ground apple, I believe.

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Anyway, so here we go. Yeah. So this is, and I’m not pouring it. I’m drinking it right out of the

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bottle because Radler-style beers like those are often drunk right out of the bottle. At least

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they are today. Canister. What is German for Pineapple IPA?

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I’m having trouble understanding right now. Yeah.

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Wait a minute. You have a canister?

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[Laughter]

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Are we gonna do this again?

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Alright, I’m gonna open my IPA.

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It sounds good.

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I’ll give it that. That’s probably the best thing about it.

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So hoppy.

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So many hops. Oh my god.

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Like, why do people like IPA?

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I feel like

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you could make any beer

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and you could be totally off on the subtle

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nuances of your beer that you’re trying to make.

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And if you make it an IPA and you just

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overcome it with hops no one will ever notice. Like, I feel like that’s what IPAs are all

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about. They’re easy to make because you just overwhelm people with hops.

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Bingo. And I must say that is also the secret of a lot of the non-alcoholic beers I’m drinking.

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They just are hoppy. There’s even one now, it’s not a beer, it’s called Hop Water, but

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it’s spelled H-O-P-W-T-R. And it’s essentially like sparkling water with some, you know,

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maybe some juice extract or effervescence or, you know, whatever. And you know,

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I think the one that I got was like, I don’t even remember, they,

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they added some kind of like, you know, vitamins or something like that.

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So it’s like a vitamin water hoppy thing, but essentially that’s their secret.

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Now this has none of that. So I’m going to take the first sip.

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Oh, you’re drinking right out of the bottle.

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I just said that you didn’t pay any attention.

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You don’t listen to your own show. Yeah.

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I didn’t. I listen later when I edit. Peter, I want you to know that we missed the pouring sound, so can you please pour some of that on your computer?

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There you go!

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Just pour the full bottle right into your mouth.

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Okay, I gave my review of mine, which is, it has a pineapple flavor that I can barely taste because of the incredible overwhelming sensation of hops, which I do not enjoy.

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That’s my review. My review is I will never drink that again.

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What if you were desperate?

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Well, I might eat it. I told my wife, “Let’s just use the remainder of this six-pack for beer bread or something.”

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Because that probably would taste okay.

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Okay, I get that. I get that.

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So I’ll eat it, but I friggin’ won’t drink it.

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So what’s your review?

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I give this a thumbs up, although it is not as good as their Grapefruit Hefeweizen.

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That’s the flagship offering and still definitely superior to this one.

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The grapefruit hefeweizen is two, I believe 2.5% alcohol.

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This one is 3.2.

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Oh my God.

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I know, right?

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It’s almost noticeable.

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Mm hmm.

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Hmm.

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That’s good.

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I’m going to open my salted caramel porter already.

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I can have something good to drink.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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No, I told you, I’m just going to sample the IPA so that I can review it for the

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podcast.

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Okay.

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It’s been reviewed.

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But I want to actually drink.

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Talk about don’t call us.

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We’ll call you.

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This is the same company.

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These are two different beers from the same company.

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At least I’m liking one of them and I’m purposely drinking it.

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So they don’t, they can’t get too mad at me.

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They can be a half sponsor.

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We’ve got to get people to sponsors.

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Half sponsors.

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They can half sponsor us by sending each of us.

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Each of us gets one, you know, we each get a beer, but we don’t get the same beer.

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So that way, right.

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You know, if we each got a copy of, or, you know, copy if we each got a copy of the

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same beer. I’m just going to use that vernacular. That would be sponsoring the show. But if

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one of us gets one beer and then that’s a half sponsor, I like that. What we’re doing

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now I believe has been referred to as reverse sponsorship. We are sponsoring them.

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We are sponsoring them, albeit in a manner in which they probably don’t notice. Our overall

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contribution is probably so minor that they don’t even notice our sponsorship. But you

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You are true. You are true. So we have a main topic tonight, but before

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we get there, I wanted to ask you a couple of things real quick.

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Let’s talk about your haircut. Oh, okay. Well, we can do that too.

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Okay. First time I comment on your haircut. Yeah, you just did.

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I just want to say you look good. Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

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You look very nice. Yeah. I have been cutting my own hair now for

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years. Have you really?

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Oh yeah. For years and years. So even when it was longer than this, you’re

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… Years. Oh, you do a freaking good job, my friend.

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Years and years. I took a break for a while when I moved to this location and I went and

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And I tried, I don’t know if I tried all of the barber shops within like a mile of my

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place, but there are like a dozen, I’m not exaggerating, there are like a dozen barber

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shops within a mile of my place.

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Did you do it all in one day?

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You just had one barber did this.

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One day.

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I was like, just the side, just the side, just the top, right.

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But there was like a span of about a year when I just went around and I tried different

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ones.

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And I found one that I liked and I would go back there regularly.

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Sometimes I would do it myself, sometimes I’d just go there again.

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And then COVID.

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And I was like, well, I guess, you know, I don’t care.

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I can, it’s just, it’s back to me.

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So this time I decided I was just going to go

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a little shorter and a lot shorter on the sides.

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And so I’ve got a variable length clipper

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and I made this mistake once before.

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I had one that was adjustable.

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So it’s like, you can, you just,

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you just use your thumb to ratchet up and down.

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And there was one time I pushed it and I just, you know,

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pressed it against my skull and it went down

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to the lowest level.

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So when that one died, I replaced it and I got another one, which is fixed length.

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So I have like a dozen different lengths from like one millimeter up to whatever.

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Yep.

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Little guards.

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Right.

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So I was using that.

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However, if you have it positioned so that the teeth…

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Imagine that it’s a garden rake, right?

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And so you position it so that the teeth are perpendicular to your skull, right?

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And you rake it along the way, you’re at that right angle.

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But now, imagine that you’re tipping the rake forward so that the teeth are facing to you,

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and you’re putting the rake in the configuration as if someone just stepped on it and it hit

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them in the face, right?

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Well, if you turn it so it’s like that and the teeth are parallel to your head, it’s

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a lot shorter again, all of a sudden.

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Right.

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Even with a guard in place over the blades-

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Even with a guard.

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You can vary the length for a given guard-

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Bingo.

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… depending on how you angle the-

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Oh, and if you hear dogs barking in the background, that’s because my neighbors dogs are here

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visiting.

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So yeah, I ended up giving myself a little bit of a shorter bit than I intended to.

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And then I was just like, well, you know, let me even it out on both sides.

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Let me just keep going.

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Let me just get, you know what, screw it.

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And I just went short all the way.

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And you know, at first I was like, is it a little too short?

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And then by day two, I’m like, I like this.

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So I’m happy.

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So is that a one or two on top?

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It’s a two on top or two to two and a half to two or three millimeters on top and one

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on the one on the side.

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Well I gotta say I’m impressed because cutting your own hair is difficult unless you do it

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like I do.

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I just I’m balding so for my hair I just take the clippers without any guard.

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Yeah I just take the clippers without any guard and buzz it across my head each time

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yeah.

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That’s next.

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have normal hair like you do with varying lengths across the sides and back compared

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to the top.

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To blend that in can be difficult so I’m actually impressed because I never guessed before that

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you were cutting your own hair.

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Yep.

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Good job.

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Yep, done it before.

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We actually talked about that once on blurring the lines too.

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Adam was impressed at the fade that I got there or so.

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Blurring the fade.

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Blurring the fade.

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So two topics I wanted to cover, not my haircut, before we go into the main topic.

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That was the latest on GPT and my exploits on that and text editor/development environment

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that you’re using.

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So first off, AutoGPT is taking the world by storm.

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Everyone’s saying how it’s the best thing and it can automatically basically, you give

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GPT, it gives GPT a task and GPT itself decides how to pursue this task.

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What I managed to do, now I have both the $20 a month ChatGPT+ subscription, which is

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unlimited web interface access, GPT 3.5 or GPT 4.

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And I also have the API access, which is a fraction of a cent per query, depending on

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which model you’re using, etc, etc.

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My usage for the entire month of April had been around $3.60 or so.

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And the bulk of that was like the first day when I was learning the API and I was feeding

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it like one meg PDF files and stuff and saying, you know, parse these and summarize this and

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read this and blah, blah, blah.

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Time goes by and I’m at around, you know, like I said, I spent, I think maybe a dollar

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or two the first night setting up the API access.

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Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I started using AutoGPT and I gave it this very similar

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tasks that I had given ChatGPT that I had interactively worked with.

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And the task was, I want you to fetch my email, log in, download my emails, read

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them all, prioritize them, what’s urgent and important, give me those, you know,

00:12:19.840 —> 00:12:24.020
first give me the urgent, important ones, then the urgent ones and the important

00:12:24.020 —> 00:12:30.780
ones, then everything else and ignore advertising and promotional content

00:12:30.780 —> 00:12:31.980
within the messages.

00:12:31.980 —> 00:12:39.940
right? And then just, you know, like completely ignore spam and give it all to me like that.

00:12:39.940 —> 00:12:45.040
And AutoGPT started, it’s like, okay, well to do this, I’m going to research the best

00:12:45.040 —> 00:12:48.380
libraries for this and that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it started giving itself

00:12:48.380 —> 00:12:53.220
all these tasks and all it was doing was just generating more work for itself. And if I

00:12:53.220 —> 00:12:58.080
didn’t know better, I would swear that it was just, you know, like trying to keep itself

00:12:58.080 —> 00:13:00.000
busy to build more.

00:13:00.000 —> 00:13:01.000
Activities, not results.

00:13:01.000 —> 00:13:02.000
You know?

00:13:02.000 —> 00:13:03.000
Yes.

00:13:03.000 —> 00:13:06.480
Yeah, it’s like I pay for, you know, I’m not paying for results here.

00:13:06.480 —> 00:13:09.660
I’m paying for lines of code generated or something like that.

00:13:09.660 —> 00:13:16.760
So AutoGPT, essentially my first experiment with AutoGPT did not live up to expectations,

00:13:16.760 —> 00:13:17.800
nowhere near.

00:13:17.800 —> 00:13:24.860
So instead I went back to just working directly with ChatGPT again and having it, you know,

00:13:24.860 —> 00:13:29.960
do some, you know, write some Python code for this, that, and the other. But it didn’t

00:13:29.960 —> 00:13:34.420
take very long before I was going down a rabbit hole of Python troubleshooting where it just

00:13:34.420 —> 00:13:38.100
didn’t know what it was doing. And I’m like, “Okay, move over. I’ll take it from here.”

00:13:38.100 —> 00:13:42.780
You’re telling it what the problem is. You give it an error message and it’s like, “Here’s

00:13:42.780 —> 00:13:45.060
what your problem is.” And you’re like, “No, it’s not.”

00:13:45.060 —> 00:13:50.520
Well, for me, usually it tells -it does diagnose the problem, right, but it doesn’t

00:13:50.520 —> 00:13:52.580
fix it. That’s what I find.

00:13:52.580 —> 00:13:57.940
No, I’ve had it where it’s just completely wrong about the problem and I have to go and

00:13:57.940 —> 00:14:03.140
I can tell based on the error message that it’s barking up the wrong artificial tree.

00:14:03.140 —> 00:14:08.260
Again, it’s a tool. When it’s good, it’s good. And when it’s not, it’s a hammer. So there

00:14:08.260 —> 00:14:09.260
you go.

00:14:09.260 —> 00:14:11.140
When it’s not a good tool, it’s a bad tool.

00:14:11.140 —> 00:14:15.980
It’s a bad tool. So yeah, other than that, you know, I’m still using it. I used it last

00:14:15.980 —> 00:14:22.060
night during my superpowers campaign. Just someone of the, that we had a guy got struck

00:14:22.060 —> 00:14:27.380
by lightning became a super villain and the heroes were investigating what had happened.

00:14:27.380 —> 00:14:31.980
And they’re like, how much are those medical bills? And I was like, so GPT in my fictional

00:14:31.980 —> 00:14:36.720
universe, a guy got hit by lightning. He was hospitalized for several weeks before like

00:14:36.720 —> 00:14:41.040
being discharged and later developed superpowers. What could his medical bills look like? And

00:14:41.040 —> 00:14:44.280
it’s like, okay, let’s analyze this. So this guy gets hit by, you know, lightning. We’ll

00:14:44.280 —> 00:14:48.340
call him lightning bolt for reference. So lightning bolt gets hit and it goes in and

00:14:48.340 —> 00:14:52.100
starts making out this very plausible thing. Although I thought that the numbers were a

00:14:52.100 —> 00:14:57.740
little low. It felt to me like he was paying Canadian dollars or something. So subsidized

00:14:57.740 —> 00:15:01.660
full on healthcare or something, you know, did you ask GPT if it understands the American

00:15:01.660 —> 00:15:08.220
medical system? Scott come now. We know there are limitations to everything, including GPT.

00:15:08.220 —> 00:15:12.540
No one understands the American medical system. I’m sorry. That’s just setting it up for failure.

00:15:12.540 —> 00:15:14.940
I was just hoping, geez.

00:15:14.940 —> 00:15:20.380
So while I’ve been doing this, I sat down over the weekend to do a couple of like, you

00:15:20.380 —> 00:15:24.700
know, get started programming your own GPT stuff, just to see what other people are doing

00:15:24.700 —> 00:15:25.700
out there.

00:15:25.700 —> 00:15:26.700
One of them looked interesting.

00:15:26.700 —> 00:15:30.860
It was like a five hour course on GPT and, you know, writing your own programs for it.

00:15:30.860 —> 00:15:33.340
I was like, this is great, except it’s all in JavaScript.

00:15:33.340 —> 00:15:35.340
And I was like, this is crap.

00:15:35.340 —> 00:15:36.340
Give me one in Python.

00:15:36.340 —> 00:15:39.500
Of course, the first Python one I found was like 15 minute introduction.

00:15:39.500 —> 00:15:40.940
I was like, all right, what the heck?

00:15:40.940 —> 00:15:43.100
I’ll start here and just take a quick look at it.

00:15:43.100 —> 00:15:44.620
The reason I bring this up though,

00:15:44.620 —> 00:15:46.420
is the first thing the guy does

00:15:46.420 —> 00:15:51.200
is has you download Visual Studio Code Community Edition

00:15:51.200 —> 00:15:53.420
and install the Python modules for it.

00:15:53.420 —> 00:15:54.660
Yeah.

00:15:54.660 —> 00:15:59.260
And that got me thinking now on Linux,

00:15:59.260 —> 00:16:03.540
I don’t have like a Linux workstation right now.

00:16:03.540 —> 00:16:05.620
So when I’m using Linux,

00:16:05.620 —> 00:16:08.620
it’s usually by a terminal session SSH.

00:16:08.620 —> 00:16:10.940
and I use vi as my editor.

00:16:10.940 —> 00:16:11.780
Okay, fine.

00:16:11.780 —> 00:16:16.040
On Windows, it’s usually Notepad++,

00:16:16.040 —> 00:16:18.020
but sometimes if I’m going into PowerShell,

00:16:18.020 —> 00:16:21.380
I’ll use the built-in PowerShell IDE.

00:16:21.380 —> 00:16:26.380
On macOS lately, I’ve been using TextMate

00:16:26.380 —> 00:16:29.880
as my preferred editor.

00:16:29.880 —> 00:16:34.720
I’m curious, what are you using as your go-to text editor

00:16:34.720 —> 00:16:38.340
on Mac and your iPad, and at work if you use that at work?

00:16:38.340 —> 00:16:43.340
I have not used TextMate in decades, decades and decades.

00:16:43.340 —> 00:16:48.340
I do use VS Code, and the reason why is because

00:16:48.340 —> 00:16:52.440
it has overwhelming plugin support

00:16:52.440 —> 00:16:54.280
and language server support,

00:16:54.280 —> 00:16:57.280
and the frameworks that I like to develop in,

00:16:57.280 —> 00:16:59.220
the stuff that I’m using for my websites currently,

00:16:59.220 —> 00:17:02.300
which is Astro, the Astro people have amazing

00:17:02.300 —> 00:17:04.940
language server support for VS Code,

00:17:04.940 —> 00:17:07.700
and what that gives me is things like

00:17:07.700 —> 00:17:10.980
I can immediately see where my syntax issues are.

00:17:10.980 —> 00:17:14.300
I can see when I’m declaring stuff but never using it.

00:17:14.300 —> 00:17:16.280
I can see all kinds of stuff right off the bat

00:17:16.280 —> 00:17:19.140
that I might not in other editors.

00:17:19.140 —> 00:17:22.780
For example, the editor that I really like

00:17:22.780 —> 00:17:27.780
from a UI perspective and a user experience is Panic Nova.

00:17:27.780 —> 00:17:33.100
But Nova has not great language server support.

00:17:33.100 —> 00:17:35.080
It doesn’t support the latest language server.

00:17:35.080 —> 00:17:41.400
And even if it did, it would be a matter of translating what the Astro people have done

00:17:41.400 —> 00:17:46.080
for VS Code into a version that Nova could use.

00:17:46.080 —> 00:17:51.600
And frankly, I don’t want to spend time getting it to support the tool that I want to use.

00:17:51.600 —> 00:17:54.400
I just want to use the tool that I want to use.

00:17:54.400 —> 00:17:58.580
Also, language servers are confusing as hell, and I don’t even know how to do that.

00:17:58.580 —> 00:18:00.440
Like I started looking into it and I was like, “You know what?

00:18:00.440 —> 00:18:01.800
This is a waste of my time.”

00:18:01.800 —> 00:18:02.980
What is language?

00:18:02.980 —> 00:18:04.440
What’s a language server?

00:18:04.440 —> 00:18:09.240
A language server is a process that runs, that supports a given programming language

00:18:09.240 —> 00:18:16.140
in order to do things like tell you when you’re making syntax errors, do the autocomplete.

00:18:16.140 —> 00:18:18.160
So it’s like a real-time interpreter kind of thing.

00:18:18.160 —> 00:18:19.160
Yeah, basically.

00:18:19.160 —> 00:18:20.160
Okay.

00:18:20.160 —> 00:18:26.920
So if I used Panic Nova, I would be behind in terms of, it would be like more manual.

00:18:26.920 —> 00:18:29.580
It would be like the old days, it would be like, “Well, it’s not going to really show

00:18:29.580 —> 00:18:30.840
you the syntax stuff.

00:18:30.840 —> 00:18:32.720
You just have to know what you’re doing and blah, blah, blah.”

00:18:32.720 —> 00:18:33.720
And that’s fine.

00:18:33.720 —> 00:18:39.660
But the reason why these modern IDEs have developed these tools is because it does make

00:18:39.660 —> 00:18:41.260
things faster.

00:18:41.260 —> 00:18:45.000
And in the end, I don’t want to spend more time than I need to.

00:18:45.000 —> 00:18:47.240
That’s why even…

00:18:47.240 —> 00:18:51.240
First of all, I do all my stuff locally and then I move it to my Linux servers.

00:18:51.240 —> 00:18:55.740
And so far I’ve never done anything on my Mac that also won’t run on my Linux server.

00:18:55.740 —> 00:19:00.720
Even bash scripts, even Python scripts, even Node.js scripts, all that stuff runs without

00:19:00.720 —> 00:19:01.720
any issue.

00:19:01.720 —> 00:19:03.720
to get it to run on Linux.

00:19:03.720 —> 00:19:07.720
But besides that, with VS Code, you can connect to the server

00:19:07.720 —> 00:19:11.720
and just directly edit your files right on the server.

00:19:11.720 —> 00:19:15.720
And so, if you’re actually writing a lot of scripts,

00:19:15.720 —> 00:19:17.720
that would probably be the better way to do it,

00:19:17.720 —> 00:19:22.720
because then you’d get all the helpful hints and tools and plugins and stuff like that.

00:19:22.720 —> 00:19:29.720
Well, the thing I like about it is having the same editor on every machine I’m working on

00:19:29.720 —> 00:19:34.520
on and not having to do it. Because when I use the hospital, when I work for the hospital,

00:19:34.520 —> 00:19:40.200
I’m usually either using a VDI, which is Windows-based, so I’m not going to run TextMate in that,

00:19:40.200 —> 00:19:47.160
or I’m on their hardware and that’s Windows, so I’m not going to run TextMate on that.

00:19:47.160 —> 00:19:51.880
So I started playing with VS Code and right off the bat, I was like, “Okay, it’s not that bad.”

00:19:51.880 —> 00:19:55.800
It’s not that bad, yeah. It’s not the most beautiful user experience, but…

00:19:55.800 —> 00:20:02.600
No, but it was kind of nice that I was able to do it and I grabbed my Linux laptop and I was like,

00:20:02.600 —> 00:20:06.200
”Wait, they make this for Linux? Oh yeah, they do.” And I installed it and I was like, “Wow,

00:20:06.200 —> 00:20:11.720
it feels just like it does on the other places.” So that’s kind of cool. So I was just curious what

00:20:11.720 —> 00:20:18.600
you’re using there, but I might switch to it for a while just to see what it’s like, having the same

00:20:18.600 —> 00:20:24.760
tool everywhere and keeping the same keystrokes and menus, et cetera, et cetera.

00:20:24.760 —> 00:20:30.800
Yeah, and I was using Panic Nova for a while, and I finally just gave in and said, “Look,

00:20:30.800 —> 00:20:35.500
for the stuff that I’m doing right now, I’m not going to beat VS Code.

00:20:35.500 —> 00:20:39.840
I’m going to waste my time trying to duplicate that experience by manually writing my own

00:20:39.840 —> 00:20:45.640
integrations, even if I can, even if they would support the latest features, which they

00:20:45.640 —> 00:20:46.640
don’t.”

00:20:46.640 —> 00:20:50.640
And so I finally just said, “Look, the UI isn’t so precious to me that I’m going to

00:20:50.640 —> 00:20:52.040
give up functionality on this.”

00:20:52.040 —> 00:20:53.560
And so that’s what I used.

00:20:53.560 —> 00:20:58.600
Now of course when I’m playing with doing Mac-related stuff or iOS-related stuff I use

00:20:58.600 —> 00:20:59.640
Xcode.

00:20:59.640 —> 00:21:00.640
And I like Xcode.

00:21:00.640 —> 00:21:04.180
I don’t have any problems switching between Xcode for those things and using VS Code for

00:21:04.180 —> 00:21:08.220
everything else because the Mac and iOS-related stuff is stuff that’s only ever going to happen

00:21:08.220 —> 00:21:09.400
on a Mac anyway.

00:21:09.400 —> 00:21:10.400
So like who cares.

00:21:10.400 —> 00:21:11.400
Right.

00:21:11.400 —> 00:21:12.760
It’s kind of its own little world.

00:21:12.760 —> 00:21:16.100
So the fact that it’s segregated does not matter whatsoever.

00:21:16.100 —> 00:21:21.520
So I was wondering about that if you know developing for Mac like it seems like Xcode

00:21:21.520 —> 00:21:22.520
is the default.

00:21:22.520 —> 00:21:24.600
I mean, it’s a full featured platform.

00:21:24.600 —> 00:21:27.760
It’s what you do to use their built-in stuff.

00:21:27.760 —> 00:21:29.280
So, you know, but I was curious.

00:21:29.280 —> 00:21:31.200
Yeah, and even if you used a different editor

00:21:31.200 —> 00:21:32.240
to actually edit your files,

00:21:32.240 —> 00:21:33.640
you’re gonna have to be using Xcode

00:21:33.640 —> 00:21:34.920
to do a lot of this stuff anyway.

00:21:34.920 —> 00:21:36.440
So you might as well just use Xcode.

00:21:36.440 —> 00:21:37.580
The editor’s good enough.

00:21:37.580 —> 00:21:39.300
It understands all the stuff that’s going on there.

00:21:39.300 —> 00:21:40.140
And so why not?

00:21:40.140 —> 00:21:41.720
But yeah, for everything else,

00:21:41.720 —> 00:21:45.080
which is mostly what I do is everything else,

00:21:45.080 —> 00:21:46.960
I use VS Code at the moment.

00:21:46.960 —> 00:21:48.900
And I do use vi for editing stuff quickly.

00:21:48.900 —> 00:21:49.840
I do use Terminal,

00:21:49.840 —> 00:21:56.240
But when I am writing scripts where I want or working on web pages or something where I want,

00:21:56.240 —> 00:21:59.640
you know, it’s more than just fixing something up quickly.

00:21:59.640 —> 00:22:02.040
Bash scripts I do tend to write in vi though?

00:22:02.040 —> 00:22:05.040
That’s interesting. I guess I do.

00:22:05.040 —> 00:22:08.540
Hmm. But everything else I tend to write in VS Code.

00:22:08.540 —> 00:22:12.340
Okay, cool. Well, thank you for that tip-down editor lane.

00:22:12.340 —> 00:22:14.740
Shall we move into our main topic?

00:22:14.740 —> 00:22:15.540
Yeah.

00:22:15.540 —> 00:22:19.040
Peter, when did you start getting into computers?

00:22:19.040 —> 00:22:24.240
what were your first—this I stole from ATP, by the way. I really enjoyed this week’s ATP because

00:22:24.240 —> 00:22:28.560
they talked about their formative computing experiences. And I got to thinking, my formative

00:22:28.560 —> 00:22:33.680
computer experiences are most like John’s Siracusa’s of the three of those people. And it made me

00:22:33.680 —> 00:22:38.160
wonder, I would think that you’re different, because if I had to guess—I’m just taking a guess

00:22:38.160 —> 00:22:42.720
here, and you tell me if I’m right or wrong—my guess is you did not use Macs or any Apple products

00:22:42.720 —> 00:22:44.760
at first you first used PC.

00:22:44.760 —> 00:22:45.660
Yep.

00:22:45.660 —> 00:22:46.500
Yep.

00:22:46.500 —> 00:22:49.220
I have not yet heard the latest episode of ATP.

00:22:49.220 —> 00:22:50.660
So no spoilers for me.

00:22:50.660 —> 00:22:51.540
You’ll enjoy it though.

00:22:51.540 —> 00:22:55.360
My first computing experience would probably be

00:22:55.360 —> 00:23:00.140
when my mom got a Timex Sinclair.

00:23:00.140 —> 00:23:01.280
Hmm.

00:23:01.280 —> 00:23:02.120
That’s interesting.

00:23:02.120 —> 00:23:05.300
I don’t remember much of anything about it.

00:23:05.300 —> 00:23:08.100
I remember it did have some games on it.

00:23:08.100 —> 00:23:09.940
That’s probably all I remember.

00:23:09.940 —> 00:23:11.220
My mom was interested in it

00:23:11.220 —> 00:23:15.780
And I think she was, I don’t honestly, I don’t remember what she did with it.

00:23:15.780 —> 00:23:25.540
At school, we had the Tandy color computers or the Coco’s as they were referred to from Radio Shack.

00:23:25.540 —> 00:23:39.180
And I don’t remember what operating system they ran, but like all they could do was basic and they had some games and these were the games that you would load off of cassette tape.

00:23:39.900 —> 00:23:44.780
So the storage was a cassette tape, like that kind of old cassette. And I was like, wow,

00:23:44.780 —> 00:23:49.220
okay, that’s interesting. Oh, they had Logo. That’s right. They had Basic, Logo, and some

00:23:49.220 —> 00:23:55.520
other games. And Logo was your first, my first introduction to programming, where you could

00:23:55.520 —> 00:24:05.220
just basically give the cursor commands. So like, pen down, write 50, turn 90 degrees,

00:24:05.220 —> 00:24:11.960
50, you know, and that would draw an L 50 characters, 50 pixels wide by 50 pixels tall,

00:24:11.960 —> 00:24:16.720
for instance. So it played around with logo a little bit and played around a little bit

00:24:16.720 —> 00:24:23.360
with basic. And then I don’t remember how old I was, but my parents bought me the Tandy

00:24:23.360 —> 00:24:34.400
1000 SX computer. And that did run MS-DOS. It had 384 kilobytes of memory and two, count

00:24:34.400 —> 00:24:41.240
them two five and a quarter inch double density floppy drives. There you go. So that was my

00:24:41.240 —> 00:24:46.480
first computer. And I do remember that’s probably where I got my always wanting to have the

00:24:46.480 —> 00:24:50.120
latest and greatest because I remember my mom was really disappointed that we bought

00:24:50.120 —> 00:24:55.040
that one. And then very shortly after that, they came out with one with like, I want to

00:24:55.040 —> 00:25:00.520
say a 10 megabyte hard drive. And you know, so I think ever since then, I’ve like, you

00:25:00.520 —> 00:25:03.620
know, had like upgrades Envy or whatever you want to call it. So

00:25:03.620 —> 00:25:09.140
Yeah, well as they pointed out on ATP, those were the years where you would buy a computer

00:25:09.140 —> 00:25:12.300
and it would be instantly obsolete because things were changing so fast.

00:25:12.300 —> 00:25:18.900
So yeah, times have changed, that’s for sure. But yeah, so I had that Tandy 1000 SX. I think

00:25:18.900 —> 00:25:25.560
that I’m pretty sure that stuck with me, I want to say through high school though.

00:25:25.560 —> 00:25:26.900
How old were you when you got that?

00:25:26.900 —> 00:25:31.940
I don’t recall, we’d have to see when it came out, I don’t remember. But I’m pretty sure

00:25:31.940 —> 00:25:36.460
was the first year that they released the Tandy 1000SX. Let’s take a little trip down

00:25:36.460 —> 00:25:43.960
Google lane. Tandy 1000SX. Tandy Corporation. Although the one that comes up on Wikipedia

00:25:43.960 —> 00:25:50.940
shows the black floppy drives. Mine was all white. Okay. 8088 processor, release date

00:25:50.940 —> 00:25:57.700 1984. Yep. 38 years ago. Holy cow. Oh my God. So think about that computer that came out

00:25:57.700 —> 00:26:03.460
the same year as the original Macintosh. >> Yeah. That was 1984. Yeah. Exactly. Just

00:26:03.460 —> 00:26:08.340
think what would have been different if my folks had gotten one of those instead, right?

00:26:08.340 —> 00:26:14.620
So I had that one. Yeah, ‘84. Yeah, that probably would have lasted me all through high school.

00:26:14.620 —> 00:26:20.700
And then when I went to college, so I skipped my last year of high school and went straight

00:26:20.700 —> 00:26:28.220
to college, I bought a leading edge brand computer and it had, if I recall, a 30 meg

00:26:28.220 —> 00:26:32.380
hard drive, I want to say 30 megabytes. And I always remember that because it had like

00:26:32.380 —> 00:26:38.780
a meg or so of bad sectors. And that was just something you lived with. You’re like,

00:26:38.780 —> 00:26:42.060
Oh yeah, it’s not, it’s yeah, it’s not that uncommon. You got some bad sectors, you know,

00:26:42.060 —> 00:26:47.340
what do you want? What do you want? Perfection? So yeah, I had my leading edge computer and that

00:26:47.340 —> 00:26:50.460
And that was the one I did, you know, I started to learn some programming.

00:26:50.460 —> 00:26:53.740
Well, I did some programming in basic in high school.

00:26:53.740 —> 00:26:57.500
And then I don’t know, are we, so do we have a format for this?

00:26:57.500 —> 00:27:01.540
Am I supposed to just take you up to present or do we take turns or how are we, what’s

00:27:01.540 —> 00:27:02.540
the format here?

00:27:02.540 —> 00:27:03.740
No, you do your entire thing now.

00:27:03.740 —> 00:27:04.740
That’s interesting.

00:27:04.740 —> 00:27:05.740
So, okay.

00:27:05.740 —> 00:27:06.740
Okay.

00:27:06.740 —> 00:27:11.820
Early on when you were using the color computer, which was also called TRS-80 color computer,

00:27:11.820 —> 00:27:17.220
although it wasn’t compatible with the TRS-80s that I used in school at my lab.

00:27:17.220 —> 00:27:19.500
AKA the trash 80s.

00:27:19.500 —> 00:27:22.060
Right. Were you getting into programming right away?

00:27:22.060 —> 00:27:24.900
Not in any significant way.

00:27:24.900 —> 00:27:27.020
Again, you know, very, very little.

00:27:27.020 —> 00:27:30.360
In like in ninth or tenth grade,

00:27:30.360 —> 00:27:33.300
I remember I was taking a programming course

00:27:33.300 —> 00:27:36.660
and I didn’t really get it, didn’t really understand it.

00:27:36.660 —> 00:27:39.780
I was paired with a senior who did most of the work

00:27:39.780 —> 00:27:41.820
in this class, ‘cause it was like anyone in high school

00:27:41.820 —> 00:27:44.740
could take this class grade nine, 10 or 11 or 12.

00:27:44.740 —> 00:27:46.420
And he was either 11th or 12th grade.

00:27:46.420 —> 00:27:50.860
now I forget. So, you know, I didn’t really, didn’t really get it all that much,

00:27:50.860 —> 00:27:55.200
but I knew how to use them and I knew how to troubleshoot them.

00:27:55.200 —> 00:27:59.080
And I was using, you know, like word processors.

00:27:59.080 —> 00:28:02.120
I knew how to move files around and save them.

00:28:02.120 —> 00:28:06.240
And I was able to sometimes recover data, just dumb luck. I mean,

00:28:06.240 —> 00:28:09.760
I didn’t have tools or anything like that, but, uh,

00:28:09.760 —> 00:28:14.320
essentially I was a kid who knew I could troubleshoot like printing problems.

00:28:14.760 —> 00:28:18.660
And again, you know, most of this was like unplug it, plug it in again, turn it off,

00:28:18.660 —> 00:28:21.960
turn it on again. Shocking how much has not changed in the years.

00:28:21.960 —> 00:28:25.960
Right. But this probably also came in handy in your household, I would imagine.

00:28:25.960 —> 00:28:28.200
Yeah. We had a printer at home. I remember that.

00:28:28.200 —> 00:28:32.900
Here’s something I don’t recall was when I first got online.

00:28:32.900 —> 00:28:38.760
I do remember getting a trial of America online because it was free at the time.

00:28:38.760 —> 00:28:44.120
They would give you 200 hours, 500 hours, 1,000 hours for free.

00:28:44.600 —> 00:28:52.280
And I do remember the first thing that I ever downloaded was a picture of Captain Marvel,

00:28:52.280 —> 00:28:57.400
the now known as Shazam Captain Marvel. So I remember that much. Yes, I remember, you know,

00:28:57.400 —> 00:29:01.400
searching online and I was like, wow, you can find comic books and pictures of comic book guys. This

00:29:01.400 —> 00:29:10.440
is so cool. That was, so that was dial up. Yeah, that was, it has to have been before I went to

00:29:10.440 —> 00:29:16.200
college, but I don’t know for sure. Because in college, my first three years were at Vermont

00:29:16.200 —> 00:29:20.400
Technical College, and we had the internet there. I do remember that. We had a whopping

00:29:20.400 —> 00:29:28.000
56 kilobit connection, fractional frame relay connection, fractionality or frame, I don’t

00:29:28.000 —> 00:29:35.920
remember, but it was 56k for the entire campus, which fed into the Vermont State College networks.

00:29:35.920 —> 00:29:39.540
Yes, the Vermont State College networks had an aggregated

00:29:39.540 —> 00:29:42.540
384k connection

00:29:42.540 —> 00:29:48.900
Yeah, so if you were at the state, you know the headquarters of the whole State College Network

00:29:48.900 —> 00:29:56.620
You had a full 384 which you then meter it out to you know, the little affiliates and that was you know

00:29:56.620 —> 00:30:03.240
Well, it was simultaneously amazing. Oh my god the internet just work you just sit down at a computer and you’re on the internet and

00:30:04.420 —> 00:30:09.300
insanely slow because you’re sharing it with, you know, sometimes a thousand people at a time.

00:30:09.300 —> 00:30:19.620
So that was interesting. It was sometime when I was there, I bought a Zeos brand computer.

00:30:19.620 —> 00:30:21.220
It’s funny, like none of these exist anymore.

00:30:21.220 —> 00:30:21.940
I remember that.

00:30:21.940 —> 00:30:26.100
Right? Yeah, that was a 486. That was a 486, if I recall.

00:30:26.100 —> 00:30:27.140
I liked those.

00:30:27.140 —> 00:30:35.020
So I had a Zeos and I remember that was the time when I was struggling against all odds

00:30:35.020 —> 00:30:42.980
to use OS/2 as my main operating system because I was firmly in my anti-Microsoft days and

00:30:42.980 —> 00:30:49.380
I recall getting a copy of OS/2 version 2.0 with program manager and that was the big

00:30:49.380 —> 00:30:55.900
thing and it’s like it’s all object oriented and yada yada and it doesn’t run any programs

00:30:55.900 —> 00:30:57.060
and that was a pain.

00:30:57.060 —> 00:31:04.240
So I had OS/2. I didn’t have 2.0 very long and then 2.1 came out, Borg. I used that and

00:31:04.240 —> 00:31:11.620
then I remember OS/2 3.0, Warp came out and I remember wanting to strangle the idiots

00:31:11.620 —> 00:31:16.820
behind the marketing campaign because they didn’t get that the whole thing was supposed

00:31:16.820 —> 00:31:22.620
to be a Star Trek theme. So 2.0 was Borg because that was supposed to be the one that was going

00:31:22.620 —> 00:31:26.540
to capture all the market share. Everyone was going to get assimilated.

00:31:26.540 —> 00:31:31.840
Warp version three, they addressed all of the crappy performance concerns and was supposed

00:31:31.840 —> 00:31:38.740
to be super fast, so like warp speed. And instead these idiots did this rainbow colored,

00:31:38.740 —> 00:31:47.180
tie dyed, blurry, weirdo, like, “Dude, this is totally warped, man,” advertising campaign,

00:31:47.180 —> 00:31:50.940
along with a slogan in the New York City subway

00:31:50.940 —> 00:31:54.220
where a guy is like a guy in a business suit.

00:31:54.220 —> 00:31:58.940
He’s kind of like looking down and the quote was,

00:31:58.940 —> 00:32:03.060
”I think it obliterates the software I’m using.”

00:32:03.060 —> 00:32:06.660
And people thought that warp was a new virus.

00:32:06.660 —> 00:32:07.660
Oh my God.

00:32:07.660 —> 00:32:08.660
And I was like,

00:32:08.660 —> 00:32:10.180
You don’t wanna talk about your OS

00:32:10.180 —> 00:32:11.460
obliterating your computer.

00:32:11.460 —> 00:32:13.420
It obliterates the software I’m using.

00:32:13.420 —> 00:32:14.300
That was the quote.

00:32:14.300 —> 00:32:17.180
And I’m like, these people need to be fired.

00:32:17.180 —> 00:32:20.760
They need to be fired so hard and never work in this town again.

00:32:20.760 —> 00:32:22.360
I mean, this is just ridiculous.

00:32:22.360 —> 00:32:28.880
So I finally gave up on OS/2, tried for a long time.

00:32:28.880 —> 00:32:32.880
You know, I begrudgingly, I used windows 95.

00:32:32.880 —> 00:32:34.500
Uh, okay.

00:32:34.500 —> 00:32:36.280
You know, yeah, whatever.

00:32:36.280 —> 00:32:38.800
But you know, over the years I had tried everything.

00:32:38.800 —> 00:32:41.840
So my first computers, you know, they ran DOS.

00:32:42.140 —> 00:32:45.820
I ran Windows 3.0 very, very briefly,

00:32:45.820 —> 00:32:47.680
but I didn’t have a mouse.

00:32:47.680 —> 00:32:49.780
So I was like, I don’t understand

00:32:49.780 —> 00:32:51.620
what is so good about this?

00:32:51.620 —> 00:32:53.100
You know, I have to learn all these keystrokes

00:32:53.100 —> 00:32:55.420
to move around, but this is just bizarre.

00:32:55.420 —> 00:32:57.580
And then I got, you know, OS/2 at the mouse

00:32:57.580 —> 00:32:58.720
and I would say, okay, I get it.

00:32:58.720 —> 00:33:01.260
But OS/2, and again, OS/2’s big thing

00:33:01.260 —> 00:33:04.060
was it would run OS/2 programs, Windows programs,

00:33:04.060 —> 00:33:05.620
and DOS programs.

00:33:05.620 —> 00:33:06.820
Right.

00:33:06.820 —> 00:33:09.520
But it never lived up to its claim

00:33:09.520 —> 00:33:11.260
of being a better DOS than DOS

00:33:11.260 —> 00:33:13.000
and a better windows than windows.

00:33:13.000 —> 00:33:18.480
And when I had real native OS two software, they were terrible like Lotus.

00:33:18.480 —> 00:33:22.880
Eventually IBM bought Lotus. So, you know, Lotus, uh,

00:33:22.880 —> 00:33:26.840
Ami pro was the word processor and one, two, three, obviously people of our age,

00:33:26.840 —> 00:33:31.000
anyway, know what Lotus one, two, three was, but it was terrible. I mean,

00:33:31.000 —> 00:33:34.840
the performance on these things, it was just, uh, astonishingly bad.

00:33:34.840 —> 00:33:40.040
And apparently if you had a machine back then with like 32 megs of Ram,

00:33:40.420 —> 00:33:43.800
which back then that’s kind of like having a machine today

00:33:43.800 —> 00:33:46.880
with say 32 gigs of RAM,

00:33:46.880 —> 00:33:50.280
which I got to say most people don’t have, right?

00:33:50.280 —> 00:33:52.900
You know, most systems these days are probably eight or 16

00:33:52.900 —> 00:33:54.520
and they run just fine.

00:33:54.520 —> 00:33:55.800
But you had to have like,

00:33:55.800 —> 00:33:57.800
I guess it’s probably more like having the equivalent

00:33:57.800 —> 00:33:59.960
of like 64 gigs of RAM today.

00:33:59.960 —> 00:34:01.560
Yeah, or maybe 128.

00:34:01.560 —> 00:34:03.280
Yeah, and if you had that,

00:34:03.280 —> 00:34:05.360
oh my God, the computer runs amazingly.

00:34:05.360 —> 00:34:06.880
Well, no kidding.

00:34:08.040 —> 00:34:11.480
it sure as hell better with that much power on.

00:34:11.480 —> 00:34:13.740
So it sounds like maybe the issues weren’t so much

00:34:13.740 —> 00:34:15.120
the applications themselves,

00:34:15.120 —> 00:34:17.360
it’s just the OS bogging the system down

00:34:17.360 —> 00:34:19.120
and when you add the applications on top of that,

00:34:19.120 —> 00:34:19.960
it just doesn’t run.

00:34:19.960 —> 00:34:21.080
Yeah, it could have been.

00:34:21.080 —> 00:34:24.600
And so I went through my OS two phases

00:34:24.600 —> 00:34:29.160
and then went to Windows, used Windows a lot.

00:34:29.160 —> 00:34:30.740
A lot of the early days though,

00:34:30.740 —> 00:34:32.280
I basically just used it as a shell

00:34:32.280 —> 00:34:35.520
for running multiple DOS windows and DOS prompts.

00:34:35.520 —> 00:34:36.720
Yeah, but how did it feel going,

00:34:36.720 —> 00:34:39.540
Since you actually used OS/2 quite a bit,

00:34:39.540 —> 00:34:41.660
how did it feel going from OS/2 to Windows?

00:34:41.660 —> 00:34:43.320
Granted, everything functioned,

00:34:43.320 —> 00:34:46.200
but did it seem like a totally inferior operating system

00:34:46.200 —> 00:34:47.220
in a lot of ways?

00:34:47.220 —> 00:34:48.740
It really didn’t.

00:34:48.740 —> 00:34:52.920
It really wasn’t that big a deal for me, you know?

00:34:52.920 —> 00:34:55.260
Like it was just, it was an idealistic thing.

00:34:55.260 —> 00:34:57.020
I was pissed off ‘cause I, you know,

00:34:57.020 —> 00:35:00.620
I hated Microsoft’s monopolistic practices.

00:35:00.620 —> 00:35:03.840
You know, in hindsight, had IBM dominated the world,

00:35:03.840 —> 00:35:05.020
would we be any better?

00:35:05.020 —> 00:35:06.560
I don’t know, probably not.

00:35:06.560 —> 00:35:11.680
But still, I just didn’t like Microsoft for young, stupid, idealistic reasons.

00:35:11.680 —> 00:35:14.880
I think we all went through that phase.

00:35:14.880 —> 00:35:22.480
Yeah. So there was that. And I was firmly that Macs are for idiots, because they would say things

00:35:22.480 —> 00:35:27.040
like, “Oh, they’re better.” And I would say, “Okay, why?” And they’re like, “Because they’re

00:35:27.040 —> 00:35:34.080
better.” And I’m like, “You, sir, are an idiot.” So again, putting all the same logical thought

00:35:34.080 —> 00:35:39.800
that you would into an argument that you would today in a, I don’t know, political debate.

00:35:39.800 —> 00:35:46.700
So I didn’t really have anything to do with Max for the longest time. So that was that.

00:35:46.700 —> 00:35:52.680
And then I got into this thing called networking, which was kind of interesting. Networking,

00:35:52.680 —> 00:35:57.180
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but well, it’s pretty cool. It’s a technology

00:35:57.180 —> 00:36:04.780
allows a problem or a bug on one computer to cause a problem or a crash on another computer.

00:36:04.780 —> 00:36:09.580
It’s pretty cool. So what you’re saying is I need to hang up before you cause me any problems.

00:36:09.580 —> 00:36:15.500
No, it’s too late. You’re already infected. Damn it. In college, we had primarily DOS computers,

00:36:15.500 —> 00:36:25.420
my first few years there, and they did have an old AT&T MassComp Unix system. And it really wasn’t

00:36:26.140 —> 00:36:34.620
useful for much. It was networked, but very few people knew how to SSH, or no, sorry,

00:36:34.620 —> 00:36:35.740
we didn’t have SSH. It was Telnet.

00:36:35.740 —> 00:36:41.660
It was how to Telnet or RSH into it from another machine. So most of the time we’d have to walk

00:36:41.660 —> 00:36:47.660
up to it. It had these oldie schoolie keyboards. It had the green screens, which by the way,

00:36:47.660 —> 00:36:51.980
that’s still my default, my terminal setting. I still do green on black by default.

00:36:51.980 —> 00:36:52.940
Oh, interesting.

00:36:52.940 —> 00:36:58.780
Yep. You know, so I learned, you know, the basics of Unix there. After I graduated from Vermont

00:36:58.780 —> 00:37:05.260
Tech, I went on to pursue, but did not actually complete a bachelor’s of computer science at

00:37:05.260 —> 00:37:11.260
Clarkson University. And I get there and it was like, “Oh, this is what real internet is like.

00:37:11.260 —> 00:37:15.900
Oh, this is what a real computing center is like. Oh, this is what a real school is like.” Right?

00:37:15.900 —> 00:37:21.580
And, you know, they had everything. They had internet in the dorms. They had internet in all

00:37:21.580 —> 00:37:27.260
the buildings, all across campus. They had fast computers, they had a help desk, they had, you

00:37:27.260 —> 00:37:31.500
know, everything you could want. It was great. What’s that their marketing campaign? Clarkson,

00:37:31.500 —> 00:37:38.700
a real school. No, but it could have been as far as I was concerned. Right. And so I started in

00:37:38.700 —> 00:37:43.180
as a junior there. So they transferred, they took all my first two years, you know, credits and

00:37:43.180 —> 00:37:51.180
transferred in. But still, I was transferring into a comp sci major from computer engineering

00:37:51.180 —> 00:37:58.540
slash electrical engineering technologies. So it was different. Now, luckily I had had a brilliant

00:37:58.540 —> 00:38:06.780
programming teacher. So he had instilled in me all of the fundamentals, but there was still,

00:38:06.780 —> 00:38:14.620
like, I was the new guy there. You know, I was the transfer student and in all of my classes,

00:38:14.620 —> 00:38:18.220
whether it was the one on when there was one called programming languages,

00:38:18.860 —> 00:38:23.980
which really was just like a sample. There was like a part of the, you know, like the first

00:38:23.980 —> 00:38:30.060
quarter was going to be on functional programming with Lisp. The second quarter was on logical

00:38:30.060 —> 00:38:37.820
program with Prolog. And the third section was object-oriented programming with Smalltalk.

00:38:37.820 —> 00:38:41.820
And then another one, it was like, oh, you’re going to be in, you know, whatever,

00:38:41.820 —> 00:38:46.300
software development two or something, because you’ve had the equivalent of one.

00:38:46.300 —> 00:38:52.540
Well, they didn’t really have the equivalent of one, right? Because they assumed not that you were

00:38:52.540 —> 00:38:57.420
covered, you know, you covered all of the topics and the concepts and knew how to compile code and

00:38:57.420 —> 00:39:02.460
stuff. They assumed you were in last year, you know, last semester, you were in this very

00:39:02.460 —> 00:39:10.620
predecessor course, which I was not. And so that kind of was tricky for me to navigate.

00:39:11.180 —> 00:39:17.980
And halfway through the semester, I was failing half my classes. That was not a pleasant experience.

00:39:17.980 —> 00:39:24.140
I didn’t really care for that at all. And I did manage to turn it around. So I did come out with

00:39:24.140 —> 00:39:29.500
high Bs and As at the end of the semester. So, you know, coming from nosedive to pull it up to more

00:39:29.500 —> 00:39:35.180
than just level off and brushing the tips of that mountain, I was pretty happy with it. But I was

00:39:35.180 —> 00:39:40.620
unimpressed with the whole experience overall. So I was like, I’m going to take a semester off and

00:39:40.620 —> 00:39:44.060
think about this because I wasn’t liking it, you know, and I was like, I don’t know what

00:39:44.060 —> 00:39:51.820
I want to do with my life, but this is not fun. So I took a semester off and while I was there,

00:39:51.820 —> 00:39:59.900
the local vocational center said, “We need a substitute teacher.” And I was like, okay,

00:39:59.900 —> 00:40:04.940
sure. Like we have this. So the vocational centers are, you know, a lot more like hands-on,

00:40:04.940 —> 00:40:12.380
less theory, more practice stuff. So as it turns out, they had a network of DOS and Windows

00:40:12.380 —> 00:40:20.100
computers and a Novell NetWare server, which by the way, was the same exact setup as Vermont

00:40:20.100 —> 00:40:24.940
Technical College just up the street where I had been less than a year prior. So I was

00:40:24.940 —> 00:40:31.800
like, “Oh, okay.” So I spent three days there as a sub. And what had happened was the previous

00:40:31.800 —> 00:40:38.360
computer tech teacher was one year away from retirement. The teachers union had failed

00:40:38.360 —> 00:40:44.160
to negotiate an acceptable contract. So he just said, “Screw it,” and walked away.

00:40:44.160 —> 00:40:45.160
Bye-bye.

00:40:45.160 —> 00:40:49.760
This was like two weeks into the new school year that he left.

00:40:49.760 —> 00:40:50.760
Wow.

00:40:50.760 —> 00:40:55.920
So pretty much left these kids high and dry without a teacher, without a mentor, and they

00:40:55.920 —> 00:40:59.440
were not too thrilled about that. So it was a bit of an uphill battle.

00:40:59.440 —> 00:41:02.720
Presumably they’re paying money to learn something.

00:41:02.720 —> 00:41:08.960
Well, the taxpayers were paying money, but yeah, the kids weren’t paying a damn thing.

00:41:08.960 —> 00:41:17.740
So yeah, so I took that and then that’s when I really started to learn more about networking

00:41:17.740 —> 00:41:21.520
and applying a lot of stuff that I had learned in theory.

00:41:21.520 —> 00:41:29.800
And this is where I realized that I was much happier actually doing and applying knowledge

00:41:29.800 —> 00:41:34.400
rather than just all this theoretical mumbo jumbo. That was just not my thing. So I was

00:41:34.400 —> 00:41:38.000
a lot happier actually putting stuff into production. And I learned that, oh wow, I

00:41:38.000 —> 00:41:43.120
really do learn well by teaching and demonstrating, you know, so I made up a curriculum like on

00:41:43.120 —> 00:41:47.920
the fly, started teaching these kids basic, the ones who were really picking it up fast.

00:41:47.920 —> 00:41:54.540
I would start teaching C. I didn’t talk about this, but C and C++ was really my default

00:41:54.540 —> 00:42:00.240
language. That was the one I learned because I was like, “Oh, braces are cool. I like these.

00:42:00.240 —> 00:42:03.080
So much more powerful than basic. Okay, cool. I’m going to do this.”

00:42:03.080 —> 00:42:04.080
I did like C.

00:42:04.080 —> 00:42:09.120
Yeah. So I did that for a couple of years teaching there, understood, learned things.

00:42:09.120 —> 00:42:14.680
I still had a lot of growing up to do though because I was only 21 and I was teaching kids

00:42:14.680 —> 00:42:18.280
who were literally like four years younger than me in some cases.

00:42:18.280 —> 00:42:19.280
Yeah.

00:42:19.280 —> 00:42:25.400
So that was also a difficult, you know, environment and I didn’t want to be there all that long.

00:42:25.400 —> 00:42:26.400
What do you mean?

00:42:26.400 —> 00:42:27.400
Why was it difficult?

00:42:27.400 —> 00:42:29.320
You do mean in terms of commanding their respect?

00:42:29.320 —> 00:42:30.480
Yeah, exactly.

00:42:30.480 —> 00:42:33.280
Try teaching a bunch of 18 year olds when you’re 21.

00:42:33.280 —> 00:42:35.400
Yeah, that’s true.

00:42:35.400 —> 00:42:38.200
If they were a couple years younger, it might be better, but.

00:42:38.200 —> 00:42:39.200
Yeah.

00:42:39.200 —> 00:42:40.860
So, you know, I was like, okay.

00:42:40.860 —> 00:42:46.180
So at that point, then shortly after that, the network administrator at my alma mater,

00:42:46.180 —> 00:42:48.920
right back up the street at Vermont Technical College, quit.

00:42:48.920 —> 00:42:52.100
An opening was there, and I applied and I got that job.

00:42:52.100 —> 00:42:55.540
So I came back to Vermont Tech, this time as an employee.

00:42:55.540 —> 00:42:56.660
Not a real school.

00:42:56.660 —> 00:42:58.860
Not a real school, and not a real network.

00:42:58.860 —> 00:43:00.860
But I ran that not real network.

00:43:00.860 —> 00:43:02.780
So I ran the Novell NetWare.

00:43:02.780 —> 00:43:04.820
Novell NetWare, not a real network.

00:43:04.820 —> 00:43:06.140
Not a real network.

00:43:06.140 —> 00:43:12.180
So I ran that for a couple of years, and then I started moving on to my own consulting business,

00:43:12.180 —> 00:43:13.180
et cetera, et cetera.

00:43:13.180 —> 00:43:14.240
And the rest is history.

00:43:14.240 —> 00:43:17.140
But that’s my early computing years.

00:43:17.140 —> 00:43:21.380
I am actually fascinated that you spent so much time trying to make OS/2 work.

00:43:21.380 —> 00:43:22.380
Yeah.

00:43:22.380 —> 00:43:28.840
Obviously I know of OS/2, and I’ve known people that have played with OS/2, but most people,

00:43:28.840 —> 00:43:31.760
it was kind of a tangential thing that nobody really got into.

00:43:31.760 —> 00:43:33.180
So that’s pretty cool.

00:43:33.180 —> 00:43:37.780
And the funny thing about it is, OS/2, I believe, is now still…

00:43:37.780 —> 00:43:40.200
Oh no, no, okay.

00:43:40.200 —> 00:43:41.420
It’s not still a thing.

00:43:41.420 —> 00:43:44.340
The latest release was over 10 years ago.

00:43:44.340 —> 00:43:45.700
So never mind.

00:43:45.700 —> 00:43:48.620
It was rebranded as EcomStation.

00:43:48.620 —> 00:43:51.380
Oh, really?

00:43:51.380 —> 00:43:53.300
Yes.

00:43:53.300 —> 00:43:56.160
So yeah, that’s interesting.

00:43:56.160 —> 00:43:58.460
I never had anything to do with EcomStation.

00:43:58.460 —> 00:44:03.780
I heard about it once and by that time I was so over it I had moved on.

00:44:03.780 —> 00:44:06.220
I did too but I didn’t realize that that was OS/2.

00:44:06.220 —> 00:44:07.220
Huh.

00:44:07.220 —> 00:44:08.620
Well, anyway, what about you?

00:44:08.620 —> 00:44:10.780
Well, I was a little bit different.

00:44:10.780 —> 00:44:16.940
I did start on the Apple path early because when we lived in Japan my brother started

00:44:16.940 —> 00:44:21.700
getting into computers and at first it was kind of a generic computing experience.

00:44:21.700 —> 00:44:25.420
Of course, the Japanese had all their own brands computers and I couldn’t begin to tell

00:44:25.420 —> 00:44:31.020
you what they were now, but they—I don’t even know what OSes they ran, but they ran

00:44:31.020 —> 00:44:35.380
some—as far as I know, most of them ran some proprietary OSes, but anyway, we would go

00:44:35.380 —> 00:44:39.760
to like computer stores and play games on those and stuff, and then my brother made

00:44:39.760 —> 00:44:44.360
friends, I think through a church or something?

00:44:44.360 —> 00:44:47.660
My brother made friends with a guy who worked at IBM.

00:44:47.660 —> 00:44:52.060
And this guy and my brother—he was older than my brother by far, but he was a nice

00:44:52.060 —> 00:44:57.340
guy and he was probably bored as hell with both church and job, whatever he was doing.

00:44:57.340 —> 00:45:02.780
So he started bringing parts to my brother and talking to him about how they worked. And my

00:45:02.780 —> 00:45:07.500
brother would scrounge stuff from him and build these like homebrew computers that he would then

00:45:07.500 —> 00:45:13.580
program in, you know, basically in binary and hex, you know, machine language, that type of stuff.

00:45:13.580 —> 00:45:15.180
Real hacking stuff, man.

00:45:15.180 —> 00:45:19.580
Yeah. I remember one computer my brother made where you had to program it by pushing buttons,

00:45:19.580 —> 00:45:24.460
literally entering ones and zeros. It was crazy. That was just an experiment. That wasn’t meant to be

00:45:24.460 —> 00:45:29.820
more than just an experiment. But anyway, my brother started really getting into it,

00:45:29.820 —> 00:45:36.540
and then at some point he got an Apple II clone. That was when Apple II clones were a thing.

00:45:36.540 —> 00:45:37.500
Yes.

00:45:37.500 —> 00:45:43.180
And we played a lot with that, and that’s really where I started getting into it,

00:45:43.180 —> 00:45:48.460
because we had all the computer magazines with all the code listings and stuff. And so what he

00:45:48.460 —> 00:45:53.700
would do is he would let me play with his computer if I would take the magazines and

00:45:53.700 —> 00:45:56.820
I would start typing in code from your games.

00:45:56.820 —> 00:45:57.820
Coder.

00:45:57.820 —> 00:46:02.460
I was his game entry machine. That’s right. I was his game input device.

00:46:02.460 —> 00:46:06.820
Someone else has mentioned something like this before. I’ve heard other people talking

00:46:06.820 —> 00:46:08.620
about it. Was it you? Maybe it was…

00:46:08.620 —> 00:46:10.380
I’ve talked about it before, yeah.

00:46:10.380 —> 00:46:11.720
…on another podcast?

00:46:11.720 —> 00:46:15.500
Or this one, I don’t remember, yeah. Because I was telling you that’s where I actually

00:46:15.500 —> 00:46:17.500
really learned how to type.

00:46:17.500 —> 00:46:24.700
it. I’m amazed today at… well, I shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t be at all. People don’t know how to type.

00:46:24.700 —> 00:46:27.980
No, they don’t. That’s very true. They don’t know how to touch type.

00:46:27.980 —> 00:46:33.660
Yeah. And that is… anyway, I don’t want to derail. But anyway, continue, please.

00:46:33.660 —> 00:46:38.620
Without denigrating this person, I’m just using it as an example because you brought it up,

00:46:38.620 —> 00:46:41.980
but I actually know somebody who’s written apps and done programming who doesn’t know how to

00:46:41.980 —> 00:46:47.340
touch type, and I just find that mind-boggling. But anyway, then when we came back to United

00:46:47.340 —> 00:46:52.460
States an unfortunate thing happened. We went through customs, as one is wont to do when

00:46:52.460 —> 00:46:57.460
one comes from one country to another and lands at the airport and they have customs,

00:46:57.460 —> 00:47:02.940
and Apple II clones are illegal. And Apple wasn’t happy about Apple II clones, and so

00:47:02.940 —> 00:47:06.580
customs took his computer away.

00:47:06.580 —> 00:47:14.220
So we started using computers at the library a lot. The library had different Apple IIs

00:47:14.220 —> 00:47:19.420
So my bmps, but I ignored those and used the Apple twos. I played a lot of Sierra games

00:47:19.420 —> 00:47:23.180
I played a lot of oh gosh, the name just went out of my head

00:47:23.180 —> 00:47:28.760
I remembered the name of this earlier, but what was the command line once all the command line once was it Broderbund Broderbund?

00:47:28.760 —> 00:47:30.760
I think I don’t know

00:47:30.760 —> 00:47:32.580
Are you thinking Zork or something else?

00:47:32.580 —> 00:47:37.340
I don’t know there were a whole bunch of command line games from this one company and I’m trying to Zork and

00:47:37.340 —> 00:47:43.120
Rogue are the ones that come to mind Rogue was a command line as much as it was ASCII graphics

00:47:43.420 —> 00:47:50.200
Yeah, oh, oh interesting. I’ve not tried this but apparently if you want to play Zork you can tell GPT to let’s play Zork

00:47:50.200 —> 00:47:52.860
And it’ll be Zork for you. Infocom

00:47:52.860 —> 00:47:56.580
Infocom did a lot of those I did a lot of Infocom games too, yeah

00:47:56.580 —> 00:48:02.760
So then at some point the Mac came out in 1984 and I would go to first of all

00:48:02.760 —> 00:48:06.380
I would read all the brochures and everything I had Mac brochures

00:48:06.380 —> 00:48:12.140
I had the first edition of Mac world I had all this stuff and I was just infatuated with the Mac

00:48:12.640 —> 00:48:17.280
because I could see that that UI was so superior to anything that currently existed.

00:48:17.280 —> 00:48:20.920
I wasn’t thinking about the fact that those computers

00:48:20.920 —> 00:48:27.120
didn’t really provide you with a way to program right out of the box, that they were kind of a closed system in that way.

00:48:27.120 —> 00:48:27.620
Mm-hmm.

00:48:27.620 —> 00:48:33.300
Anyway, I just wanted one of those and at some point, somehow, my dad managed to scrape together enough money

00:48:33.300 —> 00:48:39.900
to buy me the original 128K Mac and he bought himself one as well. Those computers were like

00:48:40.180 —> 00:48:46.760
Three two thousand three thousand dollars. I don’t remember two thousand dollars. I think in 1984 maybe more twenty five hundred

00:48:46.760 —> 00:48:53.000
I don’t remember a lot of money a lot. I mean mine. I forget I think the the 1000s X was was 1200

00:48:53.000 —> 00:48:55.000
I think that’s what the website said

00:48:55.000 —> 00:49:01.380
Which is still a lot of money and so we got those and we did the traditional Macintosh

00:49:01.380 —> 00:49:05.460
128k experience where all they had was a single floppy

00:49:06.460 —> 00:49:10.660
Which was not the type of floppies that you were talking about the five and a quarter

00:49:10.660 —> 00:49:14.300
These were the three and a half or the three and a quarter five and a half three and a quarter anyway

00:49:14.300 —> 00:49:17.060
Whatever you you remember three and a half five and a quarter

00:49:17.060 —> 00:49:22.200
Yeah, and so I think it was a 400k floppy that later became 800k with the Fat Mac

00:49:22.200 —> 00:49:26.140
I remember that the max had different capacities because yeah on

00:49:26.140 —> 00:49:32.080
so the the three and a half’s on PCs were 720 if they were double density and

00:49:32.080 —> 00:49:35.380
1.4 megs if they were high density and

00:49:36.140 —> 00:49:39.580
And the others, the little guys were,

00:49:39.580 —> 00:49:43.240
what were they 128 and 256K, I think?

00:49:43.240 —> 00:49:44.900
I don’t remember, the five and a quarters.

00:49:44.900 —> 00:49:49.040
Storage, it was the single sided three and a half,

00:49:49.040 —> 00:49:51.640
yes, it was a single sided three and a half inch floppy

00:49:51.640 —> 00:49:52.880
of 400K.

00:49:52.880 —> 00:49:55.060
I think when the Fat Mac came out,

00:49:55.060 —> 00:49:59.060
the Fat Mac went from 128K of RAM to 512K of RAM.

00:49:59.060 —> 00:50:00.340
That was a later upgrade.

00:50:00.340 —> 00:50:03.220
And we did get that upgrade as soon as it came out.

00:50:03.220 —> 00:50:05.820
And that gave us the 800K drive.

00:50:05.820 —> 00:50:09.540
But originally with the 128K Mac, there was no hard drives.

00:50:09.540 —> 00:50:13.220
All there was was one floppy drive, which was 400K.

00:50:13.220 —> 00:50:16.660
And so you did a lot of disk shuffling.

00:50:16.660 —> 00:50:17.500
It was crazy.

00:50:17.500 —> 00:50:19.820
It was insane because the application and the data

00:50:19.820 —> 00:50:21.400
both wanted the disk drive at the same time.

00:50:21.400 —> 00:50:22.700
So you’d just be swapping things.

00:50:22.700 —> 00:50:24.580
Speaking of disk shuffling,

00:50:24.580 —> 00:50:28.160
when I first installed OS/2 version 2.1,

00:50:28.160 —> 00:50:32.300
it shipped on, I believe, 19 or 20 floppy disks.

00:50:32.300 —> 00:50:33.260
That’s insane.

00:50:33.260 —> 00:50:36.300
What was the capacity of those five and a quarter inch?

00:50:36.300 —> 00:50:38.280
I think those were 1.4 megs.

00:50:38.280 —> 00:50:39.780
Already, oh, okay.

00:50:39.780 —> 00:50:42.600
So that’s way better than what the Mac came with originally.

00:50:42.600 —> 00:50:43.980
Well, you gotta remember,

00:50:43.980 —> 00:50:46.100
well, obviously just by saying the fact

00:50:46.100 —> 00:50:48.100
that it was three and a half versus five and a quarter,

00:50:48.100 —> 00:50:49.400
they were smaller disks.

00:50:49.400 —> 00:50:51.780
And the fact that they were only using one side initially

00:50:51.780 —> 00:50:53.300
meant they were 400K.

00:50:53.300 —> 00:50:54.980
But yeah, so we did the Fat Mac upgrades,

00:50:54.980 —> 00:50:56.700
which were expensive when that came out.

00:50:56.700 —> 00:50:58.680
And then we finally did the Mac Plus upgrade,

00:50:58.680 —> 00:51:01.700
and the Mac Plus upgrade gave us the ability

00:51:01.700 —> 00:51:03.720
to put hard drives on our Macs, Peter,

00:51:03.720 —> 00:51:06.640
and these were SCSI hard drives, because this is Apple.

00:51:06.640 —> 00:51:07.560
Oh.

00:51:07.560 —> 00:51:12.500
So a 20 megabyte hard drive costs $800.

00:51:12.500 —> 00:51:14.520
And again, somehow my dad managed to find money

00:51:14.520 —> 00:51:16.680
to buy two of those things.

00:51:16.680 —> 00:51:18.080
Crazy.

00:51:18.080 —> 00:51:21.840
You know, I appreciated what he was doing at the time,

00:51:21.840 —> 00:51:23.680
but not nearly as much as I appreciate it now,

00:51:23.680 —> 00:51:24.520
looking back at it.

00:51:24.520 —> 00:51:26.140
That’s a lot of fricking money.

00:51:26.140 —> 00:51:30.360
But on that Mac, with its black and white screen,

00:51:30.360 —> 00:51:32.080
I played things like Lode Runner.

00:51:32.080 —> 00:51:34.540
I think my dad got into Prince of Persia at some point.

00:51:34.540 —> 00:51:36.020
I can’t remember when that came out.

00:51:36.020 —> 00:51:38.000
Oh my God, there were lots of other games I played

00:51:38.000 —> 00:51:39.960
that I don’t remember now, but let’s see.

00:51:39.960 —> 00:51:42.100
So that was after high school for me.

00:51:42.100 —> 00:51:46.920
And then at some point I, well, I kept using that Mac

00:51:46.920 —> 00:51:49.280
’cause I couldn’t really afford another computer.

00:51:49.280 —> 00:51:51.480
So the Mac Plus upgrade was the last thing

00:51:51.480 —> 00:51:54.960
that ever happened, and I think that was a megabyte of RAM

00:51:54.960 —> 00:51:59.760
and a 20 megabyte hard drive and the 800K floppy.

00:51:59.760 —> 00:52:02.460
and whatever operating system it was running at the time,

00:52:02.460 —> 00:52:04.860
and that was all the upgrades that computer ever got.

00:52:04.860 —> 00:52:08.140
And I did not get another computer for myself

00:52:08.140 —> 00:52:14.200
until 1994, when I got my first PC,

00:52:14.200 —> 00:52:17.020
and that was a Pentium 60.

00:52:17.020 —> 00:52:21.520
And that was, I think it was a Packard Bell-labeled thing,

00:52:21.520 —> 00:52:22.880
I’m not sure what it was.

00:52:22.880 —> 00:52:25.720
I got it at a discount through my job, anyway.

00:52:25.720 —> 00:52:29.280
And that was my introduction,

00:52:29.280 —> 00:52:35.920
That was my introduction to DOS and Windows 3.11 for workgroups.

00:52:35.920 —> 00:52:41.260
And I found a friend who had a lot of software and I copied a lot of software and that’s…

00:52:41.260 —> 00:52:45.660
And I had been on America Online on the Mac previously and I had an America Online account,

00:52:45.660 —> 00:52:50.460
but once I got my PC, my brother was like, “Look, forget about America Online, get on

00:52:50.460 —> 00:52:51.460
the internet.”

00:52:51.460 —> 00:52:56.140
So I got on NetCruiser, Netcom NetCruiser.

00:52:56.140 —> 00:52:57.140
And that was a big…

00:52:57.140 —> 00:52:58.140
Netcom.

00:52:58.140 —> 00:53:04.020
Yeah, that was a big, easy to use, integrated internet experience.

00:53:04.020 —> 00:53:07.740
It kind of had an integrated piece of software where all your email browsing and all that

00:53:07.740 —> 00:53:12.120
was kind of in one application, kind of, with different functionality.

00:53:12.120 —> 00:53:15.500
And so NetCruiser was my first internet experience.

00:53:15.500 —> 00:53:20.520
And then from there, I started using local ISPs.

00:53:20.520 —> 00:53:21.520
There were so many of them.

00:53:21.520 —> 00:53:23.220
I can’t even remember the names of all of them.

00:53:23.220 —> 00:53:27.060
One of them was Easy Street, but I can’t remember a lot of my local ISPs.

00:53:27.060 —> 00:53:32.920
So after that PC, I started building my own PCs.

00:53:32.920 —> 00:53:38.300
And I could get certain computer parts cheaper through work, and then I would buy.

00:53:38.300 —> 00:53:41.160
Somehow my PCs always wound up costing about $3,000.

00:53:41.160 —> 00:53:42.280
Don’t ask me how.

00:53:42.280 —> 00:53:44.140
Which is a lot of money for a PC.

00:53:44.140 —> 00:53:46.220
That’s how much computers cost.

00:53:46.220 —> 00:53:49.600
And so I would build my own PCs, and then I went through the various Windows versions

00:53:49.600 —> 00:53:50.600
as time went on.

00:53:50.600 —> 00:53:51.900
Windows 95 was a big one.

00:53:51.900 —> 00:53:59.380
I think I was 95 for me was interesting because I also still had the Mac.

00:53:59.380 —> 00:54:03.160
I think I was still playing with the Mac at the time, but that was when I completely gave

00:54:03.160 —> 00:54:04.160
up the Mac.

00:54:04.160 —> 00:54:08.180
And that was when my brother gave up the Mac for a while too, because the Mac operating

00:54:08.180 —> 00:54:11.540
system at that time was stuck in limbo.

00:54:11.540 —> 00:54:13.260
They were trying to come up with Copland.

00:54:13.260 —> 00:54:14.260
They were failing.

00:54:14.260 —> 00:54:16.660
They hadn’t purchased Next yet.

00:54:16.660 —> 00:54:20.300
They did not have a multitasking operating system.

00:54:20.300 —> 00:54:23.860
They had an old, creaky thing with lots of weird extensions that was falling apart, and

00:54:23.860 —> 00:54:29.620
then Windows 95 came out, and by comparison, Windows 95 was so much better.

00:54:29.620 —> 00:54:34.540
And that’s when my brother threw away his Mac and got into PCs, and that’s when I really

00:54:34.540 —> 00:54:39.540
got into PCs as well, when I really started using them more than just goofing or dinking

00:54:39.540 —> 00:54:41.340
around on them.

00:54:41.340 —> 00:54:42.740
And I would build my own PCs.

00:54:42.740 —> 00:54:48.100
I went through Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000, all the different Windows.

00:54:48.100 —> 00:54:52.020
well, of course, Windows 2000 before Windows XP, but I went through all the different versions

00:54:52.020 —> 00:54:57.800
of Windows, and I played around with ASP.NET programming and all that.

00:54:57.800 —> 00:54:59.280
I’m not saying I was any good at it.

00:54:59.280 —> 00:55:00.280
I wasn’t.

00:55:00.280 —> 00:55:02.100
But I ran a Windows server.

00:55:02.100 —> 00:55:04.840
I played with them.

00:55:04.840 —> 00:55:09.380
I could do passable, slow programming in ASP.NET.

00:55:09.380 —> 00:55:16.260
And then at some point, I became curious about the Mac again.

00:55:16.260 —> 00:55:21.580
And in 2004 or so, the Mac Mini came out or I don’t remember what year it came out.

00:55:21.580 —> 00:55:23.380
But anyway, there was a PowerPC Mac Mini.

00:55:23.380 —> 00:55:25.460
It was a G4.

00:55:25.460 —> 00:55:32.800
That was my first return to the Macintosh was a PowerPC G4 Mac Mini.

00:55:32.800 —> 00:55:36.700
Because I could hook that up to my existing monitors, keyboards, mice, all that other

00:55:36.700 —> 00:55:37.700
stuff.

00:55:37.700 —> 00:55:39.500
And I thought, I’m just going to play around with this.

00:55:39.500 —> 00:55:41.340
But I liked it so much.

00:55:41.340 —> 00:55:45.260
So the Mac Mini was introduced apparently in 2005.

00:55:45.260 —> 00:55:50.540
it? Yeah. That can’t be right. The original Mac mini. I thought it was sooner than that. I thought

00:55:50.540 —> 00:55:57.260
it was 2004. I thought it was 2004. It must have been 2005. Wikipedia says it was January 22nd,

00:55:57.260 —> 00:56:05.900
2005 with a power PC G4 CPU. Oh, early 2005. Okay. Yeah. Coincidentally, that was around the time

00:56:05.900 —> 00:56:10.860
when you and I met. Yeah, because that’s when that’s immediately that’s when I started dual

00:56:10.860 —> 00:56:16.020
radio podcast almost immediately very shortly after that which was a terrible

00:56:16.020 —> 00:56:19.460
podcast and thankfully it doesn’t exist anymore but but it brought us together

00:56:19.460 —> 00:56:24.940
it sure did and for that I’m thankful I’ll take the shame of that podcast if

00:56:24.940 —> 00:56:29.780
it if it brought Peter Nicolei to send to my life so anyway at that point I

00:56:29.780 —> 00:56:33.100
started kind of getting back into the back I liked it I think it was tiger at

00:56:33.100 —> 00:56:38.260
that point I do I believe that tiger was the first version of Mac OS I used I

00:56:38.260 —> 00:56:42.260
I can’t remember, maybe it was Panther, but I thought it was Tiger.

00:56:42.260 —> 00:56:44.820
Anyway, I started getting into it, I really liked it.

00:56:44.820 —> 00:56:48.260
I said, “You know what, I want to get my wife a Mac because I’m tired of supporting Windows

00:56:48.260 —> 00:56:49.260
for her.”

00:56:49.260 —> 00:56:51.860
And so we switched to Mac.

00:56:51.860 —> 00:56:55.020
I don’t remember what Mac I got her to begin with.

00:56:55.020 —> 00:56:58.460
It must have been a Mac Mini or maybe it was a laptop, I don’t even remember anymore.

00:56:58.460 —> 00:57:08.660
At some point I got, oh, when the, my first Apple laptop was I believe a MacBook Pro.

00:57:08.660 —> 00:57:15.300
I don’t think I ever had a PowerPC Mac laptop, so I never had any PowerBooks, but I had a

00:57:15.300 —> 00:57:18.300
MacBook Pro and I don’t remember if it was the first version or the second version of

00:57:18.300 —> 00:57:19.660
the MacBook Pro that I had.

00:57:19.660 —> 00:57:24.100
After that I went through several MacBook Pros, then I’ve had several Mac Minis, I’ve

00:57:24.100 —> 00:57:32.420
had a couple of different iMacs. I had one Nehalem Mac Pro, a giant cheese grater thing

00:57:32.420 —> 00:57:37.680
that my brother gave me. And, but yeah, basically for my own personal use, I’ve been on Mac

00:57:37.680 —> 00:57:43.260
ever since, but I do work with Windows computers at work. I help install servers. I help image

00:57:43.260 —> 00:57:48.620
them. I help do some other, some server related stuff. I’m not the genius of the group, but

00:57:48.620 —> 00:57:53.240
I do get to work on those things. And of course my PC that I use for work is 100% Windows

00:57:53.240 —> 00:57:59.240
and Microsoft. But that’s basically it. For many years, I went away from Apple completely and was

00:57:59.240 —> 00:58:04.120
100% PC and Windows. And then once I started getting back into the Mac, I realized, wow,

00:58:04.120 —> 00:58:08.360
OS X really did change things quite a bit. And to be honest, I think I got back into it at the

00:58:08.360 —> 00:58:13.400
right time because I think that’s when, around the Tiger time is when OS X really started

00:58:13.400 —> 00:58:18.360
picking up Steam, I think. Yes. Yep. OS X, no, 10.2 was Jaguar?

00:58:18.360 —> 00:58:22.760
10.4. Yeah, I think so. 10.4, I think was… Jaguar.

00:58:22.760 —> 00:58:27.320
Yeah. 10.4 I think was tiger. So I don’t remember what 10.3 was.

00:58:27.320 —> 00:58:30.840
Lion. No.

00:58:30.840 —> 00:58:36.840
Was lion because 10 point panther? No, it was panther. Lion came after tiger.

00:58:36.840 —> 00:58:39.560
Okay, lions, tigers, bears. They never had bears though, huh?

00:58:39.560 —> 00:58:44.360
No, they’ve never had a bear. So I bought my first Mac in 1996,

00:58:44.360 —> 00:58:48.200
and it was an iMac, because when it dropped under a thousand dollars, I was like,

00:58:48.200 —> 00:58:50.840
”Okay, I’ll check these things out.” Was that one of the white ones?

00:58:50.840 —> 00:58:56.280
Bondi blue my friend. Oh that kind of iMac. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

00:58:56.280 —> 00:59:01.520
That’s right, cuz that’s when Steve Jobs came back. That was the first iMac. Yeah bingo

00:59:01.520 —> 00:59:08.400
Yeah, so I was using that for a while and I actually started to like it and I started to make it my primary

00:59:08.400 —> 00:59:13.940
Computer that was the old Mac operating system oh, yeah, I was Mac OS

00:59:13.940 —> 00:59:19.180
I started on I want to say eight point something. I don’t remember. I think it was eight point six

00:59:19.560 —> 00:59:20.560
Yeah.

00:59:20.560 —> 00:59:23.880
And then I had a mishap.

00:59:23.880 —> 00:59:31.020
I fell in aikido class and shattered my collarbone and was laid up on the couch, but I could

00:59:31.020 —> 00:59:36.120
still do consulting work as long as I had a laptop, so I bought myself a power book.

00:59:36.120 —> 00:59:38.840
So I had a power book for a long time.

00:59:38.840 —> 00:59:41.220
And what CPU was in that at the time?

00:59:41.220 —> 00:59:48.760
I believe the first one I had was a G3, and I had so many problems with it that after

00:59:48.760 —> 00:59:52.360
After months and months and months, they replaced it with a G4.

00:59:52.360 —> 00:59:53.760
Oh, wow.

00:59:53.760 —> 00:59:54.760
Yeah.

00:59:54.760 —> 00:59:56.360
So I was pretty happy with that.

00:59:56.360 —> 01:00:00.720
I was like, okay, I wish I hadn’t had to go through all this crap, but I was happy with

01:00:00.720 —> 01:00:01.720
the replacement.

01:00:01.720 —> 01:00:06.040
I do remember the transition to Mac OS X being…

01:00:06.040 —> 01:00:07.040
Bumpy.

01:00:07.040 —> 01:00:08.040
Yeah.

01:00:08.040 —> 01:00:09.040
Not smooth.

01:00:09.040 —> 01:00:11.220
OS X, right?

01:00:11.220 —> 01:00:14.440
It wasn’t smooth, but it sure saved the Macintosh.

01:00:14.440 —> 01:00:15.440
Yeah.

01:00:15.440 —> 01:00:18.360
I mean, the first version, though, was like, it was horrible.

01:00:18.360 —> 01:00:19.720
Pretty limited.

01:00:19.720 —> 01:00:24.200
Yeah, and apparently I guess the first version, when it first came out, was like,

01:00:24.200 —> 01:00:28.680
I guess the reason it was so damn slow was it had just tons and tons of debugging code,

01:00:28.680 —> 01:00:36.120
which they refactored and pulled that out, and that’s why 10.1 was so much faster than 10.0.

01:00:36.120 —> 01:00:39.960
Oh, wow. I didn’t realize they left that in for the production release of 10.0.

01:00:39.960 —> 01:00:45.480
That’s the story I heard. So, and this is back then, I was reading trade rags constantly,

01:00:46.920 —> 01:00:53.320
PC Magazine, PC World, and Info World. There was another one too. There was another big

01:00:53.320 —> 01:00:57.000
like newspaper style that was Info World. Yeah, yeah. I remember that.

01:00:57.000 —> 01:01:02.840
And there was another one that I got every week. And that’s how I kept up with… I was hearing

01:01:02.840 —> 01:01:08.280
about all these terms and stuff, but not actually using them. But I knew there’s a thing out there

01:01:08.280 —> 01:01:12.520
called XML and people are using it for standardizing documents.

01:01:12.520 —> 01:01:14.600
Same here, same here. And it was so mysterious.

01:01:15.320 —> 01:01:19.880
middleware and hearing about all kinds of different things. There’s this thing called

01:01:19.880 —> 01:01:27.320
Banyan Vines, and when I first stumbled across a client who had Banyan Vines, I was like, “Oh, yes,

01:01:27.320 —> 01:01:31.800
I know we can migrate you to NetWare from this,” for example.

01:01:31.800 —> 01:01:35.720
By the way, one of the things that I didn’t talk about I somehow skipped over was that when I was

01:01:35.720 —> 01:01:41.480
in college, I was actually taking electronics at the time, but the electronics lab actually had a

01:01:41.480 —> 01:01:48.400
NetWare network set up and the teacher taught me how to do a complete NetWare install and

01:01:48.400 —> 01:01:53.380
how to manage it and all that. So I actually did play with NetWare somewhat. Yeah. I don’t

01:01:53.380 —> 01:01:57.960
remember any of it now, but at the time I did and I thought that was interesting. But

01:01:57.960 —> 01:02:01.000
yeah, that was hilarious to me when you were talking about NetWare. I was like, yeah, I

01:02:01.000 —> 01:02:02.000
remember that.

01:02:02.000 —> 01:02:07.320
Oh, I went through the whole CNE, certified NetWare engineer training back before it was

01:02:07.320 —> 01:02:12.000
a certified Novell engineer. They changed it, you know, because it was like, “Oh, there’s

01:02:12.000 —> 01:02:17.760
a certified NetWare engineer,” and then it became a certified Novell engineer on NetWare.

01:02:17.760 —> 01:02:24.280
So that was back in the NetWare three days, and then I got certified in NetWare four,

01:02:24.280 —> 01:02:29.480
and then Microsoft Windows NT just came along and just ate its lunch.

01:02:29.480 —> 01:02:34.200
It’s kind of funny because back in those days, knowledge was so much more hidden, and sometimes

01:02:34.200 —> 01:02:38.160
on purpose, sometimes not, but you just didn’t have the internet to go just do data dumps

01:02:38.160 —> 01:02:40.520
into your brain with.

01:02:40.520 —> 01:02:42.500
And so learning stuff was a lot harder.

01:02:42.500 —> 01:02:44.360
And now when I think about it, it’s just hilarious.

01:02:44.360 —> 01:02:49.960
It’s like the rate of learning stuff has just increased exponentially.

01:02:49.960 —> 01:02:54.000
For all of its faults, the internet did give us that.

01:02:54.000 —> 01:02:56.880
And you can just learn so much faster now.

01:02:56.880 —> 01:02:57.880
It’s just unbelievable.

01:02:57.880 —> 01:03:02.780
It’s weird to think back on, even though most of my life was without internet.

01:03:02.780 —> 01:03:03.780
Is that true anymore?

01:03:03.780 —> 01:03:10.740
But anyway, even though a lot of my life was without internet, I still forget how inconvenient

01:03:10.740 —> 01:03:15.620
and how slow and how tedious it was to learn things, get drivers, get software, all those

01:03:15.620 —> 01:03:21.020
things that we totally take for granted now without any, without even thinking about it.

01:03:21.020 —> 01:03:23.220
Those were all major operations at that time.

01:03:23.220 —> 01:03:24.220
Yeah.

01:03:24.220 —> 01:03:29.860
Having to get a, you know, getting a software update was like, oh yeah, you can contact

01:03:29.860 —> 01:03:31.700
them, you know, contact the manufacturer.

01:03:31.700 —> 01:03:33.220
They can mail you disks.

01:03:33.220 —> 01:03:37.300
Right. You had to find out, somehow you had to find out that there was an update available.

01:03:37.300 —> 01:03:44.420
Right. Yeah. I mean, it was amazing. And sometimes, oh yeah, you could download stuff

01:03:44.420 —> 01:03:50.100
via bulletin board systems. Oh yeah, dial into our BBS and you can download. And like the big

01:03:50.100 —> 01:03:54.660
companies, you could always dial in and get through. And that was amazing. But most BBSs

01:03:54.660 —> 01:04:00.980
were busy all the time. Right. And I remember local BBSs were a thing. We did those. And then

01:04:00.980 —> 01:04:05.400
when we started trying to use the services, then you could rack up bills big time because

01:04:05.400 —> 01:04:11.220
not only did the services charge a lot of money, but if they didn’t have a local number,

01:04:11.220 —> 01:04:16.580
that would cost you. So then you’d be paying long distance fees. It was infinitely more

01:04:16.580 —> 01:04:21.220
difficult and more expensive to be online at that time in ways that you can’t even think

01:04:21.220 —> 01:04:26.140
of. What was your first actual high-speed internet? Because I had my first one was when

01:04:26.140 —> 01:04:31.180
When I came back to Oregon, I got an ISDN line and I managed to bond two channels to

01:04:31.180 —> 01:04:32.180
get 128k.

01:04:32.180 —> 01:04:34.100
And I was paying a fortune for that.

01:04:34.100 —> 01:04:36.160
Oh my God, that was so expensive.

01:04:36.160 —> 01:04:40.480
And then at some point we got, and then finally Comcast Cable was my first one.

01:04:40.480 —> 01:04:43.140
I always was trying to get at home, but they never came here.

01:04:43.140 —> 01:04:46.360
But then Comcast finally brought cable to this area.

01:04:46.360 —> 01:04:49.820
So we had these things.

01:04:49.820 —> 01:04:52.380
Let me see if they’re still around.

01:04:52.380 —> 01:05:02.940
I am pretty sure they were called a net ramp, but now that is an ISP in Australia.

01:05:02.940 —> 01:05:11.620
But I had these things called net ramps, which supported two or three dial-up connections

01:05:11.620 —> 01:05:19.100
and they couldn’t really bond them like an ISDN line, but they faked it so that you could

01:05:19.100 —> 01:05:29.180
have these two simultaneous 56k dial-ups and say half a dozen computers behind them on Ethernet.

01:05:29.180 —> 01:05:38.220
When I wanted to go online, I would. They were set to dial on demand. You could tell when things

01:05:38.220 —> 01:05:43.180
were getting a little slow because the second line, you hear the second modem dial up. For a

01:05:43.180 —> 01:05:49.820
small office of like four people or so back in the early 2000s. This was great. But my first,

01:05:49.820 —> 01:05:58.220
I don’t remember the exact time, I believe Comcast back then knows Adelphia cable before they went

01:05:58.220 —> 01:06:06.540
bankrupt and got gobbled up. Adelphia came to town and I think that was after, yeah, I think prior

01:06:06.540 —> 01:06:13.420
Prior to that, though, I was trying to lobby, so the local internet provider, it’s now First

01:06:13.420 —> 01:06:19.540
Light Communications, it used to be Sovernet, which was originally the Southern Vermont

01:06:19.540 —> 01:06:22.540
network.

01:06:22.540 —> 01:06:27.380
When they had established, basically when they covered the entire state, and then in

01:06:27.380 —> 01:06:34.080
other adjacent states, they renamed it to Vermont’s sovereign internet connection.

01:06:34.080 —> 01:06:36.600
what I thought it meant when you first said that I was like, Oh, brother,

01:06:36.600 —> 01:06:40.960
I know, but this is kind of stupid, you know, stuff that matters in Vermont, you

01:06:40.960 —> 01:06:48.560
know? So, um, I remember working with a guy who just could not sell, like he

01:06:48.560 —> 01:06:54.420
said, for instance, you know, if you could get X bandwidth committed from

01:06:54.420 —> 01:07:00.960
businesses in town, we will bring a T one line into town and then we will resell

01:07:01.160 —> 01:07:10.600
a DSL connection. And back then, there was ADSL and there was also SDSL. Now, they didn’t have

01:07:10.600 —> 01:07:23.160
the equipment to do ADSL, but what they could do was drop a switch and a bank of SDLC modems

01:07:23.160 —> 01:07:30.040
into someone’s basement, and that would become their local point of presence, their local pop.

01:07:30.920 —> 01:07:37.080
yours truly was the basement, the host of that point of present. I provided the basement.

01:07:37.080 —> 01:07:42.440
And so I remember though, like saying they needed to get, I want to say like,

01:07:42.440 —> 01:07:48.200
I don’t remember, four clients, you know, committing to, you know, ex bandwidth.

01:07:48.200 —> 01:07:55.400
And I made, like, I said, okay. So I told the guy, I was like, well, I just made two phone calls

01:07:55.400 —> 01:08:00.680
and I now have three clients. And the guy’s response was, well, that’s good, but we need

01:08:00.680 —> 01:08:06.920
at least four clients. And I was like, “You son of a bitch. I literally just picked up the phone in

01:08:06.920 —> 01:08:13.080
the span of 10 minutes, have done 75% of your job for you, and you won’t make the effort to bring

01:08:13.080 —> 01:08:19.160
your internet into my hometown.” Find one more guy. The next day, I got a groveling apology,

01:08:19.160 —> 01:08:25.800
and I was informed they were going to commit to bringing it to my hometown, even only on three.

01:08:25.800 —> 01:08:30.600
And within the span of a week, they had way exceeded their requirements.

01:08:30.600 —> 01:08:32.840
But I remember being so livid.

01:08:32.840 —> 01:08:36.840
I was like, “You just, you can’t even like, dude, literally in 10 minutes,

01:08:36.840 —> 01:08:39.320
I’ve done your job for you.”

01:08:39.320 —> 01:08:42.040
As a result, though, I had a T1 line to my basement.

01:08:42.040 —> 01:08:44.440
How many people were you sharing that T1 with?

01:08:44.440 —> 01:08:45.400
It wasn’t a ton.

01:08:45.400 —> 01:08:49.320
And we never had bandwidth problems as a result.

01:08:49.320 —> 01:08:52.200
So it was pretty handy.

01:08:52.200 —> 01:08:55.400
That was some pretty crafty entrepreneurship on your part there, Peter.

01:08:55.400 —> 01:09:00.760
Yeah, I mean, that’s about as crafty as I get, unfortunately. But as a result, you know,

01:09:00.760 —> 01:09:07.960
I had that there and I also made my own little hosting business as a result there. That’s how

01:09:07.960 —> 01:09:15.960
I got into hosting. Boy, do I regret that. Because I’m pretty sure I’m probably still hosting some

01:09:15.960 —> 01:09:21.240
websites that I was hosting back then. Yeah, but they’re paying for themselves,

01:09:21.240 —> 01:09:27.080
Yeah. Oh no, they’re paying for themselves. But like back, this was back in the day, like, okay,

01:09:27.080 —> 01:09:34.760
remember this was in little old Bethel, Vermont, very rural, not the most reliable power situation.

01:09:34.760 —> 01:09:35.560
Oh, sure.

01:09:35.560 —> 01:09:39.960
Power outages were a regular thing and all you could do is sit there and hope that the

01:09:39.960 —> 01:09:46.040
batteries would hold up because I didn’t have any space to put a generator. Not the wisest choice,

01:09:46.040 —> 01:09:52.520
But hey, I did that for a long time and the hosting division of Paradigm still exists

01:09:52.520 —> 01:09:53.520
today.

01:09:53.520 —> 01:09:55.160
It’s just not in my basement anymore.

01:09:55.160 —> 01:09:56.880
No, it’s in someone else’s basement.

01:09:56.880 —> 01:09:58.680
It’s in a lot of basements.

01:09:58.680 —> 01:09:59.680
I don’t remember.

01:09:59.680 —> 01:10:06.120
See, I never used any hosting services for a long time.

01:10:06.120 —> 01:10:12.160
And I don’t really remember in those early days what outsourcing hosting looked like.

01:10:12.160 —> 01:10:19.760
Well, I remember using some terrible hosts. I don’t remember. There was one that was pretty

01:10:19.760 —> 01:10:24.960
good. The bandwidth was always good and their servers were solid, but they had no process for

01:10:24.960 —> 01:10:30.240
things. And so not unlike my hosting attempts, like all of the updates, when you go to add a

01:10:30.240 —> 01:10:36.080
new website and stuff, we’re all done by like some dude logging in and modifying an Apache config file.

01:10:36.080 —> 01:10:36.960
Yeah.

01:10:36.960 —> 01:10:40.400
And it’s like every time I would add a new domain, the sites would all go down

01:10:41.680 —> 01:10:46.960
because these numbnuts didn’t check to make sure the web server restarted properly, you know.

01:10:46.960 —> 01:10:54.560
So I eventually gave up on these guys. And then I found out like, there was this one called 9Net

01:10:54.560 —> 01:10:58.720
Avenue out of New York, right down somewhere in the city, probably New Jersey, but they said

01:10:58.720 —> 01:11:05.760
they were in New York City. And they were like $9 a month unlimited hosting. And or maybe it was $99.

01:11:05.760 —> 01:11:10.400
I don’t remember, but it was amazing, right? And I remember signing up for them. And they were the

01:11:10.400 —> 01:11:16.720
absolute worst, the worst. And I remember, I am not making this up, one night, it was

01:11:16.720 —> 01:11:23.400
on a weekend, like a Friday night, my websites were down. I called tech support. The phone

01:11:23.400 —> 01:11:28.080
just rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang and rang. And then I heard them,

01:11:28.080 —> 01:11:33.040
I heard the phone get picked up. I heard the sounds of video games in the background, like

01:11:33.040 —> 01:11:39.640
Galaga or Galaxian. And they hung up the phone. Oh my God. And I was just livid. This company

01:11:39.640 —> 01:11:44.720
also, I don’t remember, they got bought out by someone else and they went away. But they

01:11:44.720 —> 01:11:51.400
also, I remember, it was unlimited hosting. You could have as many domains as you wanted,

01:11:51.400 —> 01:11:55.300
but you had a fixed storage space. So it was like a hundred megs of storage or something

01:11:55.300 —> 01:12:02.860
like that, except your log quota counted against that too. So your hosting was in one space

01:12:02.860 —> 01:12:08.160
and your logs was in the same partition. So that would fill up. They wouldn’t let you

01:12:08.160 —> 01:12:09.520
delete your own logs.

01:12:09.520 —> 01:12:10.520
You’re kidding.

01:12:10.520 —> 01:12:11.520
Right.

01:12:11.520 —> 01:12:16.360
So my available space got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller over time.

01:12:16.360 —> 01:12:20.980
So I remember going through a ton of lousy ones.

01:12:20.980 —> 01:12:27.040
And now my hosting is all scattered across Linode and AWS, depending on the application.

01:12:27.040 —> 01:12:33.020
I do remember when I was in my ASP.NET phase doing that kind of stuff, I was using a web

01:12:33.020 —> 01:12:34.240
host that was in Florida.

01:12:34.240 —> 01:12:35.940
I can’t remember the name of them.

01:12:35.940 —> 01:12:37.960
I loved them so much.

01:12:37.960 —> 01:12:40.760
I can’t remember their name to this date, but they had ASP.NET hosting.

01:12:40.760 —> 01:12:45.800
There weren’t very many at the time that would do ASP and ASP.NET hosting.

01:12:45.800 —> 01:12:48.900
And I loved these guys. I can’t remember.

01:12:48.900 —> 01:12:52.840
I don’t remember anymore. I can’t believe I forgot their name.

01:12:52.840 —> 01:12:56.680
And then at one point I thought I wanted to do Ruby on Rails

01:12:56.680 —> 01:12:58.280
for some stupid reason because it was…

01:12:58.280 —> 01:12:59.980
I remember those days.

01:12:59.980 —> 01:13:04.220
Yeah, it was the thing Dejour, and I looked for different Unix hosts for that.

01:13:04.220 —> 01:13:07.160
And I found one that was basically what you described.

01:13:07.380 —> 01:13:10.000
They were more friendly than that and they didn’t hang up on you and they weren’t playing

01:13:10.000 —> 01:13:12.840
games as far as I knew, but they would take forever to get back to you on anything, and

01:13:12.840 —> 01:13:15.000
I realized I don’t want these guys.

01:13:15.000 —> 01:13:18.700
At that point, I didn’t care about Ruby on Rails anymore, and I went through using a

01:13:18.700 —> 01:13:27.280
lot of different WordPress things on different web hosts, and now I’m out of that, and I

01:13:27.280 —> 01:13:30.640
have a couple of Linode servers, which, by the way, Linode just increased their prices

01:13:30.640 —> 01:13:31.640
20%.

01:13:31.640 —> 01:13:32.920
They got taken over by who?

01:13:32.920 —> 01:13:33.920
Upcoming.

01:13:33.920 —> 01:13:36.200
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

01:13:36.200 —> 01:13:38.080
which might be good, it might be bad, I don’t know.

01:13:38.080 —> 01:13:42.760
The one thing I like about Linode is it’s one of the few old school,

01:13:42.760 —> 01:13:45.600
”here’s your Linux server, put whatever you want on it” type things.

01:13:45.600 —> 01:13:49.120
They’re not trying to be an edge, they’re not trying to do things like Netlify

01:13:49.120 —> 01:13:52.480
and some of the others that have these weird services that can get in your way,

01:13:52.480 —> 01:13:54.960
even though they can make things really fast.

01:13:54.960 —> 01:13:57.800
And I just want to set everything up myself and do it my way,

01:13:57.800 —> 01:14:00.320
and it’s part of the enjoyment for me.

01:14:00.320 —> 01:14:04.200
And anyway, I hope Linode doesn’t price itself out of existence for me,

01:14:04.200 —> 01:14:06.320
’cause I kind of like it, but.

01:14:06.320 —> 01:14:07.160
Yep.

01:14:07.160 —> 01:14:09.520
They’re, for getting started,

01:14:09.520 —> 01:14:13.680
they’re so much easier than AWS, you know, they just,

01:14:13.680 —> 01:14:17.040
they’re, it’s, and it’s a good product.

01:14:17.040 —> 01:14:19.160
It is absolutely a good product.

01:14:19.160 —> 01:14:23.080
So, you know, their offering is nowhere near the same as AWS,

01:14:23.080 —> 01:14:27.600
but if you compare Linode to EC2 direct comparison,

01:14:27.600 —> 01:14:29.660
you know, it’s a fairly good comparison.

01:14:29.660 —> 01:14:32.200
And, you know, you may be paying a little more,

01:14:32.200 —> 01:14:33.360
but that’s the convenience,

01:14:33.360 —> 01:14:35.840
Because AWS is not for beginners.

01:14:35.840 —> 01:14:39.000
You know, you’ve got to invest some serious time

01:14:39.000 —> 01:14:41.160
to really understand it and dig into it.

01:14:41.160 —> 01:14:43.120
Now, if you do, there’s huge trade-offs,

01:14:43.120 —> 01:14:45.300
but not everybody needs those.

01:14:45.300 —> 01:14:48.480
How many times have people had data on AWS

01:14:48.480 —> 01:14:49.840
and left it exposed to the internet?

01:14:49.840 —> 01:14:51.040
It seems like it happens all the time.

01:14:51.040 —> 01:14:52.560
S3 buckets, man.

01:14:52.560 —> 01:14:54.400
That’s finally not the default though.

01:14:54.400 —> 01:14:56.720
They finally, well, they changed that

01:14:56.720 —> 01:14:57.720
so it’s not the default.

01:14:57.720 —> 01:14:59.320
And I think if I remember correctly,

01:14:59.320 —> 01:15:01.240
they’re going through like proactively

01:15:01.240 —> 01:15:03.280
and locking them down, I want to say.

01:15:03.280 —> 01:15:05.920
I don’t remember now. I could be just imagining that part.

01:15:05.920 —> 01:15:11.880
Way better for people to suddenly find out they can’t access something that they should than to have it the other way around.

01:15:11.880 —> 01:15:14.160
Yep. Because they can fix that problem.

01:15:14.160 —> 01:15:23.360
Anyway, I’m sure there’s so much stuff, Peter, that I used to do and used to like and was part of my computing experience that I just can’t even remember anymore.

01:15:23.360 —> 01:15:27.520
I don’t know why. I’m not a person that remembers the past very much or thinks about the past very much.

01:15:27.520 —> 01:15:32.560
But when ATP was talking about this topic, I thought, “My experience is quite a bit like

01:15:32.560 —> 01:15:34.040
John Siracusa’s.”

01:15:34.040 —> 01:15:36.960
And so I thought it’d be fun to talk about.

01:15:36.960 —> 01:15:39.120
You’ll like that episode when you listen to it, by the way.

01:15:39.120 —> 01:15:41.960
They spend almost an hour on that one topic alone.

01:15:41.960 —> 01:15:43.080
We spent more than an hour.

01:15:43.080 —> 01:15:44.600
This is a long one.

01:15:44.600 —> 01:15:47.080
So I think we should stop while we’re ahead.

01:15:47.080 —> 01:15:50.580
I think we should stop while we’re ahead before the listeners get completely tired of us.

01:15:50.580 —> 01:15:53.800
So dear listeners, if you want to find us, well, let’s be honest.

01:15:53.800 —> 01:15:57.080
You know how to because you’re listening to the freaking podcast.

01:15:57.080 —> 01:16:01.780
But in case you’ve forgotten, you can find us at friendswithbrews.com.

01:16:01.780 —> 01:16:16.040
That’s B-R-E-W-S. Scott is on Mastodon at appdot.net.net/@ help me here a-p-p-d-o-t and then a literal

01:16:16.040 —> 01:16:18.140
dot, and then n-e-t.

01:16:18.140 —> 01:16:19.660
—slash at—

01:16:19.660 —> 01:16:21.300
scottaw.

01:16:21.300 —> 01:16:22.300
Scott-ah.

01:16:22.300 —> 01:16:23.300
Yes.

01:16:23.300 —> 01:16:24.300
Okay.

01:16:24.300 —> 01:16:25.300
Got it.

01:16:25.300 —> 01:16:31.060
it’s easy to just find me at pn72.com there. That way you don’t have to spell “Nikolaidis”

01:16:31.060 —> 01:16:36.260
because people have hurt themselves trying to do that. And with that, Scott, I think it is time,

01:16:36.260 —> 01:16:41.300
I think it is past time that we push the big red button. Tell your friends.