Yeah. All right, going, going on record.
And Gary, this is. This is the monthly, slew general meeting. It is Wednesday, March the thirteenth.
2,024. And our basic intro tonight is going to be part 2. Of how we are going to implement the upgrade on Bach, our slug, email, web server.
And he is going to lead a conversation amongst a group of people who are working on it, a conversation amongst a group of people who are working on it.
And I'll point out at this point that the anyone would like to volunteer to be part of this upgrade crew I think they're still looking for more fingers to take part.
And the old story any hands make for light work so and you may learn something but How to play on this kind of an operation.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Lee. Oh, I should point out also our main talk this evening will be Scott Granlin he'll be doing the chronology of history of computing since 1968 And that'll be our main talk a little later.
That before he was born. Take it late. How do you talk about history? You have an experience.
That's interesting. Oh, anyway, I think everybody's heard about our BACK project here over the last few months.
And basically there is a wiki page out here.
Crap. I should have, I should have looked this up better.
And this is the upgrade block. You tabbing 11. Right now we are Debian 10.
I forget what the code name for that is. But the point is, when you go out on the wiki, this page has had was started a month ago.
And a bunch of folks on Sis-man, Kudos to Mike 90. He is very detailed oriented and he's responsible for a lot of these notes here.
Every technical detail. About the current Bach. Was laid out here in the. That comes load up a little for you guys.
As well as plans, what's there, what could may or may not migrate.
Yeah, I was very. Complete. Very complete.
If you have any interest in the project, I encourage you to jump out here and take a look at it.
And let's see, I can post the link in the chat here if anybody wants to jump in there real quick.
And then recently here. I added this section. Actually, this afternoon.
The point is as we work on it. We will create a new page, like to step one here, create block clock, which are.
What we're gonna talk about tonight.
Great. Talk about today.
And. After we get down with this, then step 2 will be another one, step 3, step 4, etc.
The point is The idea being that if you do anything on this project. You talk about it here. That way everybody else can go look and see what's what's been done so far.
So the documentation and the work layout here was the first step. Or was the first part of the project.
Yeah, actual work that I did a couple of weeks ago. Was create the clone of Bach.
Yeah. Yeah.
But everybody knows where clone is, right? I, okay, if. If I use if I use a term that you're not familiar with.
Let me know and, there's probably somebody else out there that could also use. A little bit excellent.
Thank you. You created that a couple weeks ago. You said isn't that already, outdated now?
Okay.
No. Luckily, I did, I did right after the last update a couple of weeks ago.
Well, I mean, there's gonna be, you know. What's called like logs and stuff that's gonna change, right?
Oh yeah, yeah, well, the point is As we upgrade. We can go back and repeat the steps that we have logged.
Here. On.
I'd say it's a process proving. And once we have the process nailed down, we'll do everything again.
Using that proven process. As a flag day right now it's just exercises on a throw away copy.
Right. Okay.
Okay. But, about the normal standard standard operating nature was to. And then update the clone and then switch to
How people did stuff. Maybe I'm wrong.
If you have, and more sophisticated system, hypervisor. For example, I haven't figured out how to pull snapshots on this and I'm not going to because we don't need it.
Basically, I just created a clone. We're going to develop the upgrade procedure on the clone and then repeat it on on.
So this is, this like a oppression small then the clader. Are you caught me? Happy to.
Not that
No. We, we started with, we started with a clone. And as we inventory and do whatever work we're doing.
If it's something we're going to do on Bach, we would record it here in the wiki.
And then when we're ready to, we can either clone back again for a backup. Well, what you're probably calling it again to get a current backup.
So we have a fall back if we blow it up. And then perform the update upgrade process.
And we have the backup if we need it. To fall back and then we still have Bach 2 out there and then yeah, we'll probably throw both of those away once we have the the the production machine running And then clone it again and start over the next part.
So the basic idea is to clone it. Develop a upgrade procedure. Then clone back again for a backup, do the upgrade if if it works.
Great, we throw away the other copies and make another one. If it doesn't work, we could fall back to that.
So to make a clone at least. The way I'm doing it here, I know some other systems are more sophisticated.
Especially the commercial ones. But I found out I had to quiesce Bach. In other words, pause it.
And then I wanted to clone only the primary partition. There's 3 partitions on BAC.
Which are shown back on the partitions. Originally we had planned for a separate home partition.
Sometime at some point we may do that. But there's a special or an extra third 20 gig partition out there.
Called home that we are not using we can use it if we want to. Once the clone was completed, restart B.
And then I added assist rescue image on the clone. Which I'll call box 2 at this point.
And boot back too. And that's where it stands today.
In this environment, it's on in node 2, back in Iraq.
Right now we have here's the regular BACK. Here's 2 of the VMs I have running for other projects.
So here's the. Clone machine. It is running.
And we have.
How does the clone? Deal with the file systems that you did not also clone.
Okay.
I at this point we're just gonna comment about So the first thing I have to do is gonna go in the FS have on .
To the clone root partition Comment amount. I didn't you know we have no need for those at this point if we get the service running on the clone.
Yeah, great.
Then we should have a procedure we can run on a live one. Yeah. In other words, there's no intent to have the clone one providing active services at this point, but.
If we run into any headaches as we get through it, you know, we can figure that out.
I just more asked as the. Variance from a one for one copy. What the talking point was and you've spoken to that.
So cool.
True, cool. Oh, we could you kick up the font? No, I can't at this point.
Okay. The reason being I haven't set up the network yet. So the first thing I have to do is go into Bach and change his IP.
And then I, and then we can actually start back the buck 2 on a different.
Everybody follow that?
Yeah, I think so. Can you hear me, Lee? Okay.
Yeah, yeah, you had some background noise or a while back. I, I muted you.
Yeah, no, that's fine.
You need to set co host.
Good point, Stan.
At you, who else?
Well, I got you, Stan. Yes. Okay, so. This is where it is today.
And.
We have.
Damn it. Sorry about that.
Here is YETZI directory on the back 2 on the
Someone wanna tell me how I go way to change the IP address for this guy?
And hint.
So if it's Debian, won't it be? At seeing network interfaces.
Good.
There are a couple different options here, but you are right. If you if you look at the folders in the network directory, we've got Let's see, I guess I can't point in there since this text only.
Yes, for you.
Yeah, there are some other dot D directories. IF up and down, free and post and interfaces dot D.
So sometimes. You would see it in. Some tools I should say.
Here they are. These antiques and collectors back to a time when Ben could work on their own machinery and actually fix it.
It's a matter of taking something in this old
How many mutes?
I did. You know, it is possible that some Debian tools will put. Interface is in interfaces.
Dot D. The old style. Interfaces file. At the in the network directory.
Works the same way, but it is. You know, it is sort of old style if you want.
Yeah, everything moved to IP route too.
Yeah.
That's the old net tools, the old. They still use it for. It's the one interface and it's also the auto configured through DHCP.
Yeah, and well, that's one of the things I hate. If there's anything DHCP on a server I rip it out because I've seen that on others.
Yeah, it's that first. That's usually that's what's in the interface.
Yeah.
The Ottawa LL and. I don't even think those second lines in there.
I think.
Moose posted a question why change IP addresses.
Because you can't run 2 machines on the same IP address.
In other words, Bach is running on 2 10. So if we want to bring up a copy of Bach that people can log in to and work on.
We have to give it a different IP address.
Yeah.
So this is specifically because We don't want to deny service to the regular membership and so we want the new BOC.
To answer to the same IP. P address as the old block did and that way it's seamless for the users.
Okay.
Yeah, you do that when you actually switch over. Do I miss something?
No, I think Gary got the car for the horse. You know, we're not switching it.
Well, no, we're not. So at this point, we need to run both at the same time.
Yeah, then you guys have 2 addresses.
Yeah. So that. Right, Bach can live on 2 10. So he's happy everybody else can use them and Those of us working on B 2, we can SSH into 2 11.
And not affect anything. Okay. Now, what else would we have to do here?
One of Start networking or restart networking and I'm if it's started I'm guessing you have the network connection.
Unplugged big air quotes there.
Well, no, remember I booted. Oh, hang on a second. Let me go back to settings here.
Right now. I'm booting from CD-ROM.
Which has the image of system rescue.
Yeah. I would go to the network card right there. Now down one section. And uncheck active.
And that way when you reboot off of the virtual hard drive. You can check to make sure it did apply the IP you wanted.
And presuming it is correct you can re-ad it. Or reacting. Basically unplug the cable so it doesn't
No.
Okay.
And.
Hey!
Okay. Anthony. I liked it. Good idea.
Okay.
So let's see what happened.
What's the worst that can happen, Lee?
Big shake down the network.
Yeah.
Okay, so.
The website crash?
Yeah. Well, why does this remind me of the Oppenheimer movie where the general Groves is asking him?
So how certain are you? This isn't going to ignite the atmosphere and burn up the entire planet.
Almost 0.
Hey, is that where is that movie worth spending money on?
No, I, I didn't like it for the reason that The series they had a couple of years ago.
Was a thousand times better from a technical standpoint. And it was much more enjoyable to somebody that knew the difference between a keyboard and a keyboard and a CPU.
Okay.
Yeah, the
Yeah, I didn't. I wasn't bad fond of the movie. I mean. So, automatically, cinematically was good, you know, the acting was great, but the story was a little like it was just so disjointed like it couldn't be been following.
Well, so the Hollywood writers got involved in it and they Juiced it up with all the gory details that nobody wants to see and left out all the important stuff.
Boy, that sounds familiar. Yeah.
Yeah.
Mostly just to play that was added. I will say that it did. I think it did a decent job of showing some of the human size and kind of emphasizing the fact that, hey, maybe none of us, you know, educated monkeys should really be in charge of weapons that have this much power because so much of that movie is between him and that senator and how much stuff they're doing and what the huge implications are just for
like their petty little grudge. You know, and I thought I thought that was a good part of it.
But yeah, I wasn't definitely wasn't my favorite movie.
Yeah.
Didn't they also have a sex scene in the middle of that damn thing? They just do that to keep it out of schools.
Yeah.
Like, come on, if I almost had to add a replacement for Fratman and little boy.
Yeah.
Replacement for who?
Batman and little.
No.
Oh!
Yeah, and that was the biggest problem with this piece of crap because the original movie you saw that man and little boy and this piece of crap because the original movie you saw the original movie you saw fat man and little boy and testing and what it looked like and what they had to do But in this movie, they just threw 2 bombs out there and made them go boom.
It was not impressive.
Typical Hollywood. Oh, you remember a hunt for Red October?
Oh yeah?
Yeah.
That was a fantastic movie. It really had you believe in it, you know? And they did one more of his.
Who wrote that? Was that Clancy's book?
Yep.
There's a early old documentary on slash movie on the atom bombs called. Yeah Come off all fears.
Yeah, they did another one. Pardon?
Some of all fears.
Oh, okay. Hold on, wait, wait, I'm gonna pull back to talking about the upgrade of the system.
Otherwise, we'll. Hey, burning a lot of time here. I'm presenter, yeah.
We got lots of time.
We don't show up eventually.
But that thing they did.
The the expert, the Pentagon expert on explosives absolutely declared it just wasn't not going to work.
Yeah
And he fought it. Tooth and nail. I mean, it was a lot of political infighting on that turf, turf spores.
Yep.
What's new with Washington, DC?
Okay.
Okay. Is it first Oppenheimer a series?
Okay, that's what I'm asking.
No. Oh no, the first show was a series. Okay, they didn't call to Oppenheimer.
I don't remember what was like. 2 or 3 years ago.
Yeah, okay.
It was like, at least. At least it doesn't segments.
Really?
Okay.
PBS or something Ken Burns or. How are you track it down?
I'm trying to remember.
7 episodes and
Off of BBC.
No. It wasn't BBC.
Here's one. Dated 1980. Good that be what you're thinking of?
But what was the name of the place after? Manhattan Project.
Is that the name of the, the series?
Yeah, 2022. Manhattan Project.
That's a good guy.
No, that's not it. You might find it yet.
So John, let's go one. It, it, it was like 2 or 3 years ago.
Are you sure? 2 or 3 years ago or back in 2014?
For Shawn, put in top of that. Yeah
What was in 2014?
Manhattan.
Off of
Yeah, there it is. That's it.
Oh, by the way, stand and face. Face to blast, get out of the trench. That actually happened.
Huh.
Where in which?
Okay. I should know because I did a I pulled all records at the record center for the guys that are on that.
That there were 2 companies they sent there. And they added Adam. Get out of the trenches and face the blast.
Cause years later they, Surgeon General, the, Did a medical research on who was left from didn't die from cancer.
How many of them didn't I?
I don't know. I, I pull about 450 records and it went to warn officer that ran the project and I never found out any of the results.
Yeah, this actually shows 2,
Hmm. Yeah, okay. You've got it on the screen, alright? Rachel Brazen.
Yeah. Yeah, is that thing still out there somewhere? Oh, is that available on freebie?
No clue.
Oh, they got it.
It does.
You looks like it. We can we can continue this as the post post game show but in the meantime we have a network interface that's down in that upgrade.
Picky PIN.
Oh, we saw it's just development. We don't care.
Okay.
We knock off production, then the users start screaming.
Yeah.
Yeah, tell me. Alright, Gary wants us to fix this. How do we do it? I'm not even sure what's going on at this point.
What happens if you come up and Like if you boot off the system drive, where does it end up?
I am in infinite loop.
You should. Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's not good.
That's more than a network.
Never.
And we we can do it again.
Hmm.
Her manager, wonderful interface, isn't it?
Yeah.
You gotta investigate. Get that boiled out. It's called gets should get the network interface running and shell in.
Right.
Part of it is your, manager is showing basically a VGA console. And manager as a viewer doesn't have many features.
Whereas once network is functional, you can actually SSH in from a terminal that has more features and you have actual.
This is the difference between copy paste versus a video camera of it.
Okay.
Oh, I, hang on.
Oh, so the last thing that showed on the screen was that, so does that mean that
Boot options and you can hit escape as it's booting and choose which one you want to boot.
So it was saying like XVDA 2. As where swap is. I would have thought it would be like XVD.
For the other disk
It, it was, that x, dB, one, b, one. dB one is the 200 gig media partition.
Right, but I so.
Yeah, XVDA. Is a disc and there's 2 partitions on it.
Right.
And it was trying to activate. XVDA 2 as a partition. For small. I would have thought your other discs would show up as like XVD Baker or XVD Charlie.
XVD. Alpha is the system partition. Baker is Baker is is media.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
The route is CXD 4. Media is one we don't need.
Right, but you see how it's trying to activate. Alpha partition alpha one for root partition alpha 2.
Those are on the same drive, Alpha
Okay.
Alright.
Did you clone this? Hot or did you shut down Bach when you Cloned it.
I, I,
Okay. Swap may be corrupt. You may have to come up in this. Limp and make swap.
Right.
I would based on what I'm seeing above, yes.
You're not on that machine. You're on the.
Yes.
Right, but he has access to that same device. Bro a different boot environment.
Let me know what's gonna get you.
I'd say. Boot off the hard drive and see what it's doing again.
Yes.
Aren't you gonna need to power off for it to? See the additional boot device.
Okay.
Hey, LEE.
Yeah.
I've been fairly preoccupied the last few months as you know. Anyway. What is?
Why are we rebuilding Bach at this time? Just to get the newer version of the operating system or is something failed or?
I have a lot of
No, So my, the upgrade is a lot, is a lot more complicated than we thought.
Oh.
David, and 10 is, losing sport on, in June.
No more security. No.
And go on. And going going to 11 is. Somewhat doable, but at at 11, mailman 2 goes away when we go to 12.
So we're trying to do easy steps and see how big a project is going to be. You go to mailman 3.
Okay. Now, Grant, here's a question. Here's.
Okay, the mailman server. Okay.
Here's the boot prompt.
Yeah, but.
I can't get back to boot the other partition.
It's set to boot existing OS on there.
Yeah. How old? How are the machine off?
And then power it back on. And try to boot existing OS if you want.
Well, this is fast to do that.
As it comes up, you can press the skate.
Now you can pick the. 2 for the first drive.
Instead of having to keep enabling disabling and powering off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can you move your mouse?
Thank you.
Maybe I missed it, but did we see a boot partition in the.
Okay.
No, it seemed to be consolidated as part of the root file system.
Okay, this is promising.
Maybe.
That looks promising.
It might have been getting hung on a corrupted swap.
Okay.
Or the other file systems not remarked and not playing gracefully.
Bingo.
I have a request based on having shot myself in the foot.
Okay.
Change the host name. Make it Bach clone or not Bach or something else.
You mean rather than
Bach 2 is fine, but right now it's just Bach. So.
Oh, that works. Holy cow. You just say host name and the new host name. Like I do is hosting CPL.
Okay.
Interesting.
Does that change between boots? Is it only? Or is that just change it? That just changes the session, right?
Just do host name.
I think.
The host name is non persistent.
Yeah, you can do a host name minus has to make it persistent, I think.
You might want to add the fully qualified. On there. I've had some weird things with email servers and I normally put fully qualified first, but your preference.
Of course, I won't validate because we haven't changed DNS, but
Right. I, you know, usually it's send mail or something else post fix sometimes. Trying to figure out its own name and You've got the short name, but it's like, what's the fully qualified?
Yeah.
I'd suggest a reboot to make sure it shows up. Well, Where's the persistent name change?
And then 6 now.
Do it the hard way.
Don't forget the table.
Come on.
Yeah, he's not running.
Or is it the viewer is not reconnecting? And it's in the boot menu thing again.
Yeah.
Did you do a 2 or 3?
I'm so I did too. Don't look like it though.
Okay. No.
There we go.
You're 2 finger was one too high.
Yeah. Hi, Typh. I never guarantee you to be accurate.
Okay.
Boy, I have noticed that.
Especially when I'm on a tablet. I hate that. It's my biggest.
Yes.
Bone to pick because I hate to have the keyboards or Junk, you know, and Android half are usual, but at Max, Apple drives me fruit because nothing on their keyboards or standard.
For key layouts and You know, they put question mark and bang right down there on the left hand, you know, bottom left to the keyboard instead of putting them in the right places.
Lee, you've got to understand that's Apple's standard. That's what the world works on.
That's well, that's true. That's what they're trying to sell you
Yeah.
Yes, that's what the world works on in the world going nuts.
Okay.
I really
How's your apples the reason the world's going nuts, but they're not helping.
Yeah, that, that's got nothing to do with it.
I will agree with that. Apple is definitely not helping.
They're also not all of the problem.
No. But they contribute.
Alright, we're up on 2 11.
It's interesting, it shows up.
Yeah, we've got a network.
Yeah.
You sound surprised.
Well, because it's off in, settings.
Maybe it's got an AI in it that automatically fixes it.
Huh.
Yeah.
Okay.
Alright, let's see.
Here we go.
I'm gonna say the UI is showing the wrong state.
I think so.
Be rather
Hello.
I'm ready. I'm just waiting for Scott. It could be.
We're in.
Yeah, Oh yeah. Okay.
Alright, I think this is a good stopping point here. You guys should all be able to log in to of course you're gonna have to You know, it's not set up in DNS, so.
If you notice, I just added the entry here in my SSH config. I use B+B 2.
You know, B for Bach and B 2 for Bach 2, so.
That's a good shortcut. I've always been a firm believer in the basic Unix preface.
The more keys you type, the dumber you are. The more letters you use. Okay. Yeah, you know, there's this big.
What is that say about Powershell? Users?
A magician up in Seattle or Redmond. That is forcing you down a path to do what they want you to do.
And they're stealing all your IQ.
I don't know if I want Say I'm offended by that or not.
Yeah.
Haven't you got any IQ to steal?
Oh, I do, but I don't want to pop into Python.
Well, that's, well, yeah. So, you repurpose it instead of letting them steal it.
Alright guys, I think that's a good stopping point. I will turn it back over to Gary for announcements and all that kind of good stuff.
Okay, you got a calendar there. You're gonna need to get, once again, that's Lee Lambert.
Who is the principal at Omni Tech. And, the, also, omniac is the.
Site which is hosting the virtual machine which is Bach. So, and thank Lee for all his efforts.
Announcement. Let's see. Last month was the elections. And, Stan.
Where is that Ken Johnson? And Sean Twyhouse.
Fantastic.
Not none of those guys sent me $10 bill, so they were on the valid
Yeah. And we thank both of them for their, service coming up here.
And, and their main duty is to kind of put the brakes on on us whenever we do something stupid.
Oh, yeah. As part as the Board of Governors, you know.
Well, I'd take all the fun out of it. Yeah, of course it would.
Well, I need, you know. That's what they're supposed to do.
Okay. So, yeah, I mean, most of the work that gets done is basically by a number of people who, Just doing the technical under this and the board or directory basically exist because the law says there has to be a board of directors and somebody has to okay signing the So anyway, let's see.
The, Next thing is, items on the calendar. Our next meeting of this organization comes up next Thursday.
It is the St. Louis Lug. And Sean, I believe you're going to be our speaker next Thursday.
Do we have a, title?
Okay.
How about using retrieval augmented generation with large, Locally hosted large language models.
Yeah.
You have to keep it down to 5 words or less, cause I, I, I have to take my shoes off whenever you start using that many words.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm gonna show I think I'm gonna I'm gonna keep it really relevant to the group.
I'm gonna show how I think we can use LLMs to. Makes loop better or at least easier or Easier to manage or something.
I'm gonna I'm gonna try to keep the real relevant
Oh yeah.
Yeah, using LLM, or practical LM, with examples or demonstration or whatever. You know, you can whatever, subtitle you want, you can make that as long as you want.
I'd like to keep it down to 5 words or less. Searching for it on our presentation archive and on YouTube and so forth.
The title should be a little bit shorter and more technical.
Yeah.
Are you just making one word?
Okay.
There you 2.
You know, G is the new open AI. That is open source. Okay.
Alright. Alright, so we'll be getting a. write up onto the, onto the calendar and the web page, meet up, so that people know what's coming up next week.
But you heard it here first first. So. See, some other items on the calendar.
We of course try and keep. Nice list of technical stuff which might interest our books. And I'm just gonna draw 2, 2 points coming up.
Next, Friday. March the 20 s. The audio engineering society. The Audio Engineering Society is a a national international engineering group does audio system so PA system, sound system, stereo systems, microphones, speakers, mixers, amplifiers, all that kind of stuff.
There is a central states chapter that has been running out of Webster University for probably 2 decades.
And they've been hosting, at least 18. I think this is the eighteenth of these central states conferences that they do and they bring in speakers from all across the country.
And, so the others, some of them are academics. Some of them are engineers who are working for professional sound companies, production houses.
So, there's some good technical talks. At least there have been in the past and, so I kind of lost track of it during the age of COVID.
I'm not sure if they. Did many of them in the last 4 years, but obviously they're coming back so the website isn't really very complete yet.
But, so there's no particular, at least I wasn't able to find any particular, titles of any of the talks.
But it goes from noon on Friday until 4 o'clock Sunday. I think it's free or at least in previous years it was a very reasonable charge.
And it can be a real interesting place to go. And just to, for those of you who are scratching your head and going.
Okay, audio engineering, but why are we talking about that? As a computer meeting. Interestingly, before COVID hit.
Oh, I was at. One of the previous conferences. And there was a couple of speakers up there in the day I said, basically everything in the audio world now has an IP address.
Speakers have an IP address. Microphones have an IP address. The amp system has an IP address.
And You know, the guys up at the dais were like, you know, hey, you old guys, you got to give up on the idea.
There's a wire going to all this stuff. No, it's all. All being done with TCP IP.
And, kind of point some of us in the room with a computing background and what these guys kind of know where how to get the things you guys got to learn from them so more reason Okay.
There's still gotta be a wire for power. You're not running off battery forever.
Good.
That's what those gerbils are for in that cage. Well, you know a lot of the most stuff runs.
Yeah. Yeah.
Right, but POE is over an internet wire. So even if it's a wireless connection.
Something for power.
Got his entered the room.
But it's just indicative of how much things are changing. More recently I was talking to an audio engineer and he was saying how amplifiers, mixer panels, are no longer analog.
They're a thing of a past, you know, you've got to learn to use the digital versions.
So, so anyway, put that on your calendar and look on this calendar and I think you can go out to the registration site.
I haven't done that myself yet. But. Hopefully we'll get a better description of what days and which comes.
Coming up also on the calendar, just thinking in terms of Scott's talk tonight. If, if you could go up to, I think it's smart just the fifth.
Yeah, March the fifth. Was the one hundredth anniversary. Of the name IBM coming into play.
It was all, Holler, Herman Holler's company, already existed.
It was called CTR at that point. And it merged with one or 2 other companies and they decided international business machines sounded like a good new name so So happy 100 birthday to the name of IBM.
So that takes us way back into the history of computers, but Scott's gonna give us some, some better new stuff here.
Let's see, we, and I, Got anything to add on any of our other meetings this month?
Well, see, we got a log next week. We talked about.
New on the week after that.
And, on the first. Oh. That means what do we we can't add on April first because then we can't believe anything we say right and that would be different how
And it's also at Hollins birthday too. You remember that.
Alright, think about it in recent hosts, Karen. Okay, well, let's see, we still got a couple of other items to cover here.
Let's see. First off any, any, there'll be probably be time after the talk for, you know, just general.
Be asking questions and you know what things went wrong in my life this week. Technically but if anybody has pressing problem they want to get off right now while we have a full group of people here.
Maybe you can't say late. Any quick questions for the group to answer technical?
No.
Got a quick about get, but I can save it till later.
Alrighty. Shoot.
Yeah, I got one. I can I cannot get our snapshot to work. It reads the input file.
And barfs on the very first line of non-commented code. I've tried this on 2 or 3 different machines.
Aunt to 18 and a bunch of 2422 excuse me
You see you have a corrupt or snapshot comp file. Cause member I tried on my machine and it blew up too.
Yeah, I
You need to start with a different one. I like to want to say you.
I tried it with Storm and had exactly the same problem.
Really?
Yes.
I would suggest, seriously. Going to chat GPT. And giving it the file and saying here's the error I'm getting, can you help me?
Really?
I've done that several times and it's really helped. Or various things.
Okay.
Be mindful of confidential information.
Good point.
I don't think there's any confidential information in there.
But it's helped me troubleshoot many things.
Well.
I would at least give it a try.
Yeah, well, it doesn't cost a whole lot, so.
And if GPT 3 5 is not doing it for you, send me an email and I'll try it with 4 and send you back the result.
Okay, I'll
Excellent.
Really trust or be confident idea of the private information then.
Yeah, you missed you missed out before because Sean had. Chat, GPT generated logos for St.
Louis.
No, nice.
Still working, still working project.
Nice.
Yeah, it's just like when Chat GPG generates code, it's like slightly off.
Like mostly fine but slightly off that's how the logos were too. So I'm having to like take them into G and clean them up a little bit.
But I'm trying to come up with a few different options and present them at the next meeting and see if we can maybe select a new logo or maybe not.
Okay.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about last month about. With AI, we're gonna get to the point where you would do something like, hey, I need a logo for the St.
Louis Unix users group. Create a variety with this sort of theme and then you'll you the human will look through the list and go I like that, take it, polish it, modify it, and then you're done.
Does everyone here know who this guy Scott happens to be?
I think everybody does.
Was he introduced by the anybody?
I think they are it.
You can actually. You actually go once that partner back. I ask.
Well, haven't gotten there yet. We haven't gotten there yet, but, we're getting there.
So any other, questions for the Q&A?
Okay, hearing none. For those of you who either are here for the first time, but one of our meetings are to.
Okay.
If you haven't been to one in a long time, we're always interested in how you came to know about tonight's meeting and why you came.
So if you just want a drop of, something in the chat group, Let everybody see it or if they want to send it to Gary Meyer, to me.
You can do that too, but we're just trying to figure out how we're getting the word out.
Who's knowing so With that, unless I've missed anything else I need to cover, I think I'll introduce our speaker.
And I've got a big thank you to Scott because we actually originally had something else planned for tonight and we're not sure.
If somebody life at work, drug him off to something else, he had to. Cancel out on us at the last minute and as usual Scott is always a font of wisdom information and he can he can come up with some really interesting topics.
Discussions. So Scott was good enough to sign up here. At the last minute and reprise.
Or do a rework of one of his previous talks.
And.
Well, he's coming back. I'll say that Scott Graneman and his normal life is a principal at web sanity and They more than happily will, document and do your, your websites and But when he's not doing that, he's also an adjunct professor.
Who teaches computer science topics. And Scott, you were going to say something.
Yeah.
Yes, I was gonna say Gary literally gave me 10 min for knowledge before this talk. He literally talked to me 10 min ago and said, we need a speaker.
Can you do it? And so I'm like, okay, Gary, but really. Give me at least 15 min knowledge next time, please.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he asked me last night. I'm always happy to do this, of course.
A long, long time ago, I gave you guys a talk called History of Computing.
I have been updating it constantly ever since then. So there's a ton of new stuff.
I think a lot of is presented better. I've looked up and gotten more of the truth behind certain legends, certain stories, things like that.
So I'll be going over that with you. Guys as well. So I think you're gonna enjoy this.
Now to be honest, this starts in 1968. And the reason I did that's because that's here I was born and nothing important ever happened before that of course.
But the other reason is you're gonna see the 1968 actually is a quite pivotal year.
It's a very reasonable. Date to start with and the fact that the world was blessed with my presence that years just a simple add-on on top of that.
But the other thing I want to say before I start is, please I'm with a bunch of old guys, some older than even me and I'm now an old guy.
Yeah.
And if every single person on this pipes up with, oh yeah, well, when I was a youngster, right, and we'll be here until one day.
M. In the morning. So hold it. Just don't pipe up constantly.
If I say something wrong, sure, say something. But if you simply want to add to the nostalgia, pulled it because otherwise we'll be here for ever and ever and ever.
And the other thing I wanted to say is I'm starting at 68. I hope to get through 89.
If we could go past that, great, but I'm planning on getting 89, which means you might have to have me come back to do the next couple of decades.
This is a very long series of presentations. I go decade by decade. So. You know, to be expected on that.
So we'll see. We'll see if you guys want me to keep doing it. And so on.
I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen right now. There we go. I'm gonna move everybody over here.
We see that. Thank you.
I'm going to move the share button over here. I will even put the chat here, but we'll see.
I really can't look at it. So. Don't expect me to be doing that. And the other thing I'm going to try and this may be really dumb.
I'm going to put my head in the bottom corner. So let's see how that goes.
If it doesn't, if it's distracting to you guys say something and I'll get rid of it.
The other option I could do is this. Where I'm like, today in the news, we had the history of computing. 19.
And so I thought about that, but that I think would make it kind of hard to read. So I'm gonna try the little small head and see if that works instead.
If it doesn't, like I said, you guys say something after a while and I'll get rid of it.
Little head is smoother video.
But What?
The when you were doing the over the shoulder. It was chopping jerky video. You're neither in better.
Down here in the circle.
Oh, I'm sure. Okay. Cool, cool, cool, cool. Well, let me know.
Like I said, I, I don't wanna be distracting or anything like that. So. The reason I've always loved history when I was a small child my parents and my grandparents always told me a lot about family history.
I read a lot of history. And as I started getting as well, even when I was an English grad student in seventeenth century Berlin, obviously there was a lot of history there.
And I always approached Everything in literature from an historical standpoint, in other words, how did the historical situation affect the literature?
How did the literature affect the historical situation? And I've often done that with other things as well.
And over time, I realized why I found that to be an important way to approach almost any topic. And I found a quote.
By James Scott and I really thought it encompassed exactly what I've been thinking for a long time and he said history at its best in my view is the most subversive discipline.
In as much as it can tell us how things we are likely to take for granted came to be. And what I always said to my students was, history is useful because it explains why things are the way they are.
To my students in college now that are maybe in their late teens, early twenties. They've always known an iPhone.
They've always known Android. They've always known mobile devices that are basically incredibly powerful computers in your pocket with always on network connectivity that they can use to talk to anybody in the world.
Right? But there's a reason that occurred like it did. They've always known about companies called Microsoft and Apple and there's a re and Google and there's a reason for those.
And so what I hope to do, part of what I hope to do besides tell some really great stories.
Is illuminate how the things we take for granted came to be. And so to me, that's one of the key things about this, because there's reasons.
Things just don't happen. Now sometimes acts of God occur, people die, accidents occur, coincidences occur, but oftentimes people made choices.
And those choices end up reverberating decades and decades down the road and we're going to see that happen several times tonight as I talk.
So as I said, let's start with 1968. Now, of course, when we start with 1,968, we have to face the fact that 2,968 we have to face the fact that 2,001 came out that year in April.
And you know, I know many of us have seen this. I've seen it a number of times.
Some of you might consider it one of your favorite movies, I would probably put it in that. Place for me.
The thing to remember is at the time it got very mixed reactions. But now it's regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made.
And one of the things is because Kubrick really kind of invented large aspects of the future. So when you watch the movie, people are walking around with things that look and act very much like iPads.
There's a concept of somebody making video calls. From a space station back to Earth. And there's many others like that as well.
So I thought that was a pretty good place to start for us all. That June fourth, a patent is awarded to a man who works at IBM for.
Dynamic RAM. So this is something obviously today, 55 years later, we are still enjoying the fruits of today dynamic RAM.
Now what's interesting is that that July, a company called Intel was formed by Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore.
They left another company and started up Intel and at the time Intel was going to produce RAM.
That was their vision for the company. We are going to produce. RAM memory chips. Not CPUs.
We're going to produce memory chips. And so we'll see how that goes in just a little bit.
Now that December, one of the most important most important events ever in the history of computing took place.
The mother of all demos. And this took place December, the ninth, a guy named Doug Engelbart who was working at the Stanford Research Institute at the time gave this demonstration and There have obviously been demonstrations before that.
There have been demonstrations since that. But what Engelbart showed that day. I described to my students as being like if all of a sudden somebody gave a demo now and they demonstrated teleportation and faster than light travel and cryogenics, we'd be like, oh my God, this is the, this person is landed from the future to show us all this stuff.
And then, as you're going to see, after showing us all that stuff, that person leaves and we probably go, yeah, never mind, and forget about it for another decade or so.
So Doug Engelbart gave the mother of all demos to December ninth, 1968 at the fall joint computer conference in San Francisco was a 90 min presentation.
Fortunately, we have it on video and you're actually going to see some clips. Now, unfortunately, it's not that good a quality video, but it's better than nothing.
So here are some of the things he demonstrated. Now think about this, 1968 people are using mainframes, giant computers that take up rooms, punch cards, things like that.
If you have, you don't have a computer, you have a monitor at your desk with the keyboard connected back to a mainframe back in another room and only the high priest of the computer can can go into that room.
So Engelbart sits down, people sit there and over the next night minutes he generates the graphical user interface with Windows.
Hypertext for document linking, which again won't be popular or become a thing really until 1991 with the web.
Graphics. Efficient navigation and command input. Remote audio and video conferencing and that been kind of a dream for decades.
The mouse was first shown at this conference. Doug Engelbar invented the mouse and this was the first time it had been seen outside of his little group of people.
Wizzy wig document editing what you see is what you get so you highlight something you click a button it turns bold on screen.
Dynamic file linking, revision control. Now think about how many of us use get every day or some other lesser version control system.
Well, he was showing revision control 55 years ago and finally this is also amazing real-time remote document collaboration so Google Docs in other words all the way back in 1,968 so let's look at some of these and a little more closely that's the first mouse yep it was made out of wood.
And you'll notice it didn't have a ball. Like later mice did. Instead, it had 2 round pieces of metal, one going this way and the other going perpendicular to it.
And so you would kind of rub it over the surface and of course if you're rubbing the wheel one way the other wheel that's against the edge of the wheel so it's you know dragging so you got to be careful with it.
But this was completely built by hand. I mean, obviously nobody had ever done this before. So that's the first mouse made out of wood.
The other thing that he showed people and my students were always like, what? That is called a corded keyboard.
So number one, there's the mouse on the right. Notice it has 3 buttons.
People have been using Unix forever and ever and ever will be like, oh yeah, 3 buttons.
That is the way. But that is a normal ASCII type keyboard there. What's the thing on the right?
Those look like, you know, petals. Right? Like if you play piano. Those were the meta keys.
So keyboards back then didn't come with meta keys like the control alt. Command the Windows key, things like that.
There were some variants of those, but not like this. So they actually invented the chorded keyboard.
Notice there were 5 different keys you could play like a piano with different fingers on your hand and then you would punch the keys to get different combinations.
So this was the earliest kind of public demonstration of the concept that now we see on our keyboards with control alt command and so on.
So my students always find that fascinating. That's what that was. Well, as I said, he demonstrated the mouse and a lot more.
Let's take a look at a video. This is a short video and I'm going to jack up the audio.
As I said, there's a lot of beeping and extraneous noise. I apologize, but there's not much I can do about it.
So, okay, talk about control devices. We'll use this overhead camera shot.
You can see the devices and I'm using. I use 3 and they're not all standard.
You have a plane device called a mouse. A standard keyboard and a special key that we have here.
We're going to go for a picture down in our laboratory in Mineral Park and pipe it up.
It'll show you from another point of view more about how that mouse works. I'm in little part.
Okay, on Andrew's hand. Notice where the chord is and then the second will see the screen that he's working and the way the practice spot moves in conjunction.
Let's move on. I don't know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize.
It started that way and we never did change it. Right. And it goes up or down a sideway, so does the tracking spot.
And the The principles for this operation, you'll turn it over, Don.
Can you hear me, Don? If you turn it over, we'll see, right? Its principle is that there are 2 wheels that go along the surface.
But since the right angles can kind of sharp edges. One roll and a slide in one direction. Each of, each of these wheels control the potentiometer.
As a voltage output. Alright, there you go. So again, notice that He says, we called in a mouse.
I don't know why. We're kind of embarrassed by the name. Secondly, notice the chords coming off the bottom, not the top.
And third, notice what the cursor looked like. It was just a dot. Right? We hadn't gotten to the point where it was more sophisticated and to the various different styles of cursors like we might see today.
So I always found that pretty interesting. This in this case, he's going to show people hypertext.
Again, the wide use of hypertext wouldn't start until the nineties with the web, but he's showing an early progenitor of that.
So look what else we can do here. I got this file that's structured. If I want to see what's in there, I can walk down.
Hi. Okay. This root place that I found here.
So here, So here's what I do with a picture drawing capability. Here's a slight lap if I start from work.
And here's the group I seem to have to go to pick up all the materials. And that's my plan for getting home tonight.
But if I want to, I can say the library, one of my supposed to pick up there, I can just point to that.
And all I see over 2 personnel, while there was a statement there with that name, I go back.
What if I was supposed to pick up the drugstore? Hmm. Alright. Oh, I've already seen that.
There you go. Now that's pretty cool. Again, think about what it would like in 1968 to see this.
This was so far ahead of everything else. And he's demonstrating this to you. This would have been mind blowing.
In fact, this is considered to be the first personal computer. Because the entire computer and all its resources were devoted to Doug Engelbart.
And again, that had not been done before. So what was the effect of this? Well, I love this quote.
Paul Sappo, a director of the Instant for the Future and Menlo Park said it was like a UFO landing on the White House lawn.
Nothing in computing has been the same set. So again, this was a very, very big deal and it's really cool, 1,968.
1969. Okay, the Department of Defense, DARPA, the specific branch, the defense advanced research project agency.
Decided that it wanted to create a network for communication that could withstand the possibility of the Soviet Union bombing various parts of the US.
And they were worried that if one part was bombed the communication would stop. People couldn't get communication going at all.
So they wanted to figure out ways to route around that. And so they went to a company, put out a RFP looking for a company to build this thing.
And a bolt baroneck in Newman, Boston was hired to do this. And at the time it was called the ARPANET.
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. And this is going to become one day it's going to grow to become the internet we all know and love but in 69 at the very beginning of 69 they've hired this group of uber nerds to do this and I've always thought the guy on the left looks like Gary or like Gary's dad or something? I don't know.
Hey.
It looks like a, carry to me. I don't know. Now, that same year, 1969 that January.
This is gonna have very far-reaching consequences, reaching all the way to today. The US Justice Department files an anti-trust suit against IBM. Why?
Because IBM sold the hardware, the operating system, the software, the services, everything. You were not allowed to purchase anything except through IBM.
And so they were sued for anti trust because you can't you can't do that you can't force somebody when they buy hardware from you to be forced to buy everything else from it.
Well, IBM had a lot of money. And they have a lot of lawyers. And this turned it in turned into the longest anti-trust suit in US history and you're going to see how long it takes.
Just remember starting in 1,969. And as I said, it is going to have far-reaching consequences.
For instance. Previously Customers didn't pay for software or services separate from the hardware when you bought an IBM system, it came with the hardware.
And the software and the services. It was all wrapped together. And so therefore the software was provided for free, usually as source code.
Now, the services, education, training, system installation, so and modifying for each individual customer.
We're provided free free of charge at the discretion of each IBM branch. So that was the system then.
Well, what happened? This is one of the far reaching consequences that will happen as a result of this.
In order to head off further potential lawsuits, IBM said, okay, we're now unbundling software and services from hardware.
So you can buy our hardware. You do not have to necessarily use our software or our services. And what eventually resulted from that?
Well, that eventually resulted in the system we have today. The, you know, one of the largest industries in the world, the, the, the, sit the software service software industry and the services industry.
So that's a direct result of IBM and what happened in 1969. Of course.
I'd be kind of a remiss if I didn't mention that on July 20 first, Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon one of the key technological innovations and ever since then most nerds really enjoy learning about space.
I know this one does. And for this group, maybe somebody can put an emoji of a birthday cake in the chat that August.
Unix is created. All hail, eunuchs. At AT and T's Bell Labs.
For a DECK PDP 7. Those were considered smaller computers. By Ken Thompson and Dennis Ricky.
And so these are the 2 great men that invented the operating system that our group is named after that many of us are using today.
I'm using the per the descendant of that right now on my Mac. We use that on our mobile devices.
It's everywhere now. And what I find amazing about these guys, not just, I always tell people, you know, most of the time when humans do things.
It takes several tries until we get even close to being right. And Unix is one of those things they kind of did right right from the start.
They made a lot of smart decisions from the beginning that turned out to be very, very, very good choices that we still had the benefits from today.
So not only these guys make excellent choices, not only were they obviously amazing programmers, but the thing that blows me away is can Thompson's wife went to California with her family for a month?
Because back then, you know, tickets were expensive. You would go and you'd stay for a while.
And so during the vacation he had At home, he was able to spend one week on the Colonel, one week on the shell, one week on the assembler and one week on the editor.
And that again just blows me away with how good these guys work. Turning to something a little more perhaps, more for the body than the mind that August of course we had the aquarium exposition 3 days of peace in music better known as Woodstock held at Max Gazgar's Dairy Farm, 40 miles southwest of Woodstock, still called Woodstock.
They did not expect 400,000 people to show up. 400,000 people did show up.
They did not expect rain. It rained torrentially. It turned into a gigantic mud pit.
It turned out to be far bigger and more complicated than anybody ever expected. And I very much encourage you to watch the Woodstock documentary.
It's really, really excellent. Well, the thing I want to focus on for a minute because I'm that old and many of you are too, is there were 32 acts that played at Woodstock for those 3 days.
Alright, now the very first thing that happened, Swami, such a denanda, gave the opening invocation.
There you are. You can see the people that see of human beings. As he's giving this in.
Again, remember Indian religion was very much a thing then the Beatles were had sitars on albums and so on.
So after that though, I wanted to show you the lineup, the partial lineup because oh my gosh I mean I would not have wanted to be there because of the mud.
But man, what an excellent group. A set of groups to have seen. I mean, Ravi Shankar, okay, but Arlo Guthrie started it up, zone bias, and then Saturday gets cooking.
You got Santana, the Grateful Dead, Credence, Janice Doplin, Sly in the Family Stone, The Who and Jefferson Airplane.
Now, again, I know some of you really young guys are going, who's that? Maybe you know a couple of them.
But trust me, that is an amazing lineup. Sunday to Monday. We had Joe Cocker and then there was a terrible thunderstorm.
Then we had the band. Johnny Winter, Blood Sweat and Tears, Crosby stills Nash and Young, and finally, Jimi Hendrix, who was supposed to go on much earlier and pretty much everybody was gone by that point.
They started leaving and pouring out of there. So not that many people got to see Hendrix play the Star Spangled Banner for the first time at Woodstock from 9 to 1110 am.
So again, it's amazing what happened. Now, that September. The bolt baronneck in Newman has created the first piece of key hardware they're going to need to create the ARPANET and that's called the imp.
The interface message processor and this will eventually become today's routers. Okay, and this has been connected the first host at UCLA and that's what it looked like very simple.
Again there's that plaque there telling you about it but that was it. That's the ancestor today's routers.
Now. October 20 ninth. They can finally test the ARPANET. So we've got systems set up.
One, a UCLA, one at Stanford Research Institute. We've got imps at each location.
And so they're gonna log in. And so the way you start is you type LG in and hit enter.
They tie Bell, they type oh BAM the machine crashes at SRI when it gets to the G.
Complete crash, you know, embarrassed muttering. They fix the bug because there are people that can do that that quick.
A few minutes later, bug fixed. They type in login, it works. Very first time the ArPANET is now connected one machine to the other.
So that December, there are 4 nodes. On the ARPANET. Now I'm not talking data centers.
I'm talking basically machines. So there are 4 machines on the ARPANET. One at UCLA, one at SRI, one at UCSB and one at the University of Utah.
And there they are. There's the diagram and you can even see PDP 10 and so on.
But that was the initial. ARPANET. Now again, I love reading history. I would highly recommend this book.
It's not a difficult read at all. It's very, it's, non technical.
It's not going to get too hairy ever, but it does bring up and explain things very well, but it does bring up and explain things very well where wizards stay up late and explain things very well where wizards stay up late and it's basically about BBN and it's basically about BBN and the ARPANET and it's basically about BBN and the ARPANET and the creation and the people and
I honestly just cannot recommend it. As enough. It's a very like one of those books you just want to keep reading because it's so good and tells the story so well.
What?
So, the internet, the ancestor of the internet is Alive! That's not where you CSB is.
Okay. Maybe the drawing wasn't right or maybe the map was don't know that's that's an official map I got from, ARPA.
So. You know, blame the government. That December 20 eighth, the man we all know and love is born, is born in Helsinki Finland.
We'll see what happens to him a little further down the road. That brings us to 1970.
1970 deck begins shipping the widely influential PDP 11. There you can see it.
Now again, when I show my students this, I'm like, and that was a small computer.
They're just completely blown away by this because you know again we walk around with these things in our in our hands.
Pockets and that blows the power that the power in our pockets blows that thing away. They just can't believe it.
It was a sixteen-bit mini computer. Again, those were called mini computers and it was used for all sorts of purposes.
Accounting, payroll, science, education, time sharing or multiple people and I know many of you guys experience this, multiple people would be connected to the computer using it at the same time.
Now, that June. Another one of those things that is still playing out today occurs. And to understand that, we have to understand the position of Xerox.
In 1970. Okay, because Xerox at that time and funny if I ask my students today like, hey, what do you think of when you think of Xerox?
The answer for most of them is nothing. They don't know what Xerox is. Maybe one every once in a while we like copiers but most of them have no idea and of course I have to explain to them that Xerox sold copy machines and every business bought a copy machine.
They were that important and that useful. So I tell them basically Xerox had far more money than they knew what to do with.
They honestly had so much money they did not know what to do with it and someone said Hey, you know what?
We're over in New York. That's where our corporate offices are. Why don't we create the most attractive place in the world?
For the most cutting edge computer scientist to work. Out in Palo Alto. And we're going to basically go through the US and try to hire the 50 plus top minds in computer science and tell them we're gonna pay you, you go create.
You know, just, we, it doesn't have to be about copiers at all. Just go create.
Figure stuff out. Come up with new technologies that we can use down the road. And so as a result, the Palo Alto Research Center Park is born.
Now this picture from 75 but it gives you the vibe of the place right? I mean a lot of these guys are hippies.
They're, you know, the kind of got their tech nerds, but a lot of them are countercultural, you know, substances are used definitely by many of them.
You know, your bike don't work, you eat health food, I mean, all sorts of this stereotypes, some of these guys definitely do adhere to those stereotypes.
Well, the person that was the founding director of Park until 1,978.
And the guy that selected Palo Alto is a guy named George Pake. George Pake is really important for us.
Because he graduated Harvard at 24 with a doctorate in physics that shows you how smart he was. However, he joined Washington University prior to this with Park.
In the physics department. So he is a physicist teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. And in 1,948 He that the claim to fame before Park was he published an article in 1,948 that was the cornerstone that led to the MRI machine.
And I know some of us have had to sit in that thing for various reasons. We all know how important the MRI is to diagnosing all sorts of ills.
Well, George Pikes research led to that at 28, 4 years after he's gotten his doctorate and wash you, he's the chairman of the physics department.
So, 28 years old, chairman of the physics department at Washington University in St. Louis. Nineteen-six in 1,962 he was executive vice chancellor and the very first provost of Washington University in St. Louis.
So this was a top guy. That Xerox turned to to lead Park. So I thought that was a kind of a cool, connection here with us.
Now, again, if you want to learn about Park, I'm going to recommend another book to you.
This book is called Dealers of Lightning. It is an excellent, again, non-technical history of park.
I cannot recommend it highly enough. I sat down one day to read a chapter and ended up just reading the whole thing and of DAY and a half.
It's that good. So I highly recommend it check it out if you want to learn more about Park, how it was started, how it was run, the people there, what they invented, what the repercussions were and so on.
That brings us. To 1971. Actually, I think he was longer at Washing than he was at Park.
So, 1971, well, remember how
What was the book again, please?
Thank you.
Dealers of lightning. Hmm. And remember how I said Intel was formed to sell memory? And that didn't quite work out because the market very quickly got flooded with cheap memory from Asia.
And they realized this was not going to sustain them at all. They were going to be in deep trouble as a company.
And so they pivoted. Andy Grove was one of the key people to convince them to pivot later CEO of Intel.
And they decided to go into the very, very, very new market for CPUs. Microprocessors.
And so Intel manufactured the very first CPU. The Intel, 4004 and this is going to become quite important down the road obviously but it all started here in 1,971 with the Intel 404.
Now I decided to compare it. To an Intel core i 7 and remember the i 7 is good but there's a 99 nowadays so you know that could address 4 bits of memory obviously the new ones do 1 64 bits It ran at 100 208 kilohertz.
Now, 3.5 gigahertz. In add 2,300 transistors you could actually count them all you took enough time Now, 1.4 billion transistors.
And there's processors now with even more. It could do 92,000 operations a second, obviously why CPUs are great.
Well now, 125 billion operations a second. So yeah, this was amazing in 1,971 but you know looking at what it did versus now you can see the enormous changes.
That we've had. That January, the first portable electronic calculator ship, it's only 3 pounds.
That's portable. 6 and a half inches by 4 inches by 2 and 3 quarter inches. 345 bucks, you know, a bargain for a portable electronic calculator.
The sharp EL 6. By the way, notice the keys. Pretty basic. Pretty basic, but this was quite the thing.
That's September, there are now 15 nodes. On the ARPANET. So we've got the West Coast covered now and now on the East Coast we've got BBN, Harvard, Boroughs, MIT, Carnegie, and Illinois.
And I always ask my students, first of all, just Illinois, thanks. The state but i always ask my students what is that What was in Illinois at that location?
Hmm.
And I cannot tell you, shockingly, how many of them say, Chicago? I think, yes, schools are not teaching geography anymore, are they?
Because no, Chicago is on the lake. Not in the middle of Illinois. And of course, Can anybody tell me what that what college is at that location?
Oh, Urbana.
Yep, that can.
It's the birthplace of Hal from 2,001.
That's right, that champagne, Urbana. And yes, Hal was created there.
That's correct. And so yeah, that's champagne or banning. I point out, you know, even then champagne or banner was a very well known technical school.
Of course, later the mosaic web browser is going to be invented there, which really kicks off the growth of the web.
So it's got, you know, some pretty good bonafides there. Late in 1971 email is invented by Ray Tomlinson.
Nobody really told him what to do. He just kind of did it on his own and he's the reason we use the ad sign.
He was thinking he was he said and interviews I've read with him. He was looking at the keyboard going, okay, what can I use to separate the username from the rest of it?
And he was looking at the keyboard and he thought, oh, at like that's used for you know, 20 bananas at 10 cents each but it really wasn't used for a lot else and he thought oh not only is it not used for a lot of other stuff, but it's kind of perfect.
It's username at and then the rest. And so that's why we have that.
And that's why we have email because of Ray Tomlinson. That November. Youix version one is released.
10,000 lines of code for the kernel. That's it. 60 plus commands. And if you guys look at that list.
I bet there are some that you use today. I know I did. I used LS today. I used Chema just the other day.
RM I've used all the time. Do you I was using a lot on Tuesday find I was using a lot on Tuesday move of course link Copy.
So, you know, it's amazing if you look at this. Yes.
I have a question. So nowadays that's user space, right? So was that all built in at 1 point, probably, right?
I don't know. That's a really good question. I just don't know the answer.
Okay.
That's a good question. And the other thing that look to end, 1,971 that December, Michael Hart.
Starts up project Gutenberg. He invented basically the concept of ebooks and the idea was he said, look, now we have this ARPANET people are just starting to use it.
There's still not a lot of people on this. Obviously you pretty much know everybody on it. But why don't we make copyright free works available electronically to everybody using the ARPANET and hopefully eventually the world.
And so Project Gutenberg is very much a going concern to this day. They've done so much good for the world.
It's it's a wonderful organization and of course Since he's doing this, he starts the very first book.
Project Gutenberg number one is the declaration of independence. Very appropriate. Now we get to 1972.
Well, Intel has been working on the CPU. Quite a lot. And they now introduced the 88 CPU.
We're now up to 200 kilohertz. 8 bits instead of 4 bits and 8 bits we're gonna have for quite a while.
16 kB. Of addressable memory access and 3,500 transistors now.
So again, you can still count them. You might get bored. You might get tired, but you can still count that many transistors.
At first
That June, I know this is gonna be very dear to some of you. That The HP, 35, the first pocket calculator.
No, this doesn't weigh 3 pounds. The first pocket calculator and also first scientific handheld calculator is released.
It used, however, reverse Polish notation, which my students are all like, why? I'm like, that's just what people did back then.
That's how they were trained. So you would type 8 enter 5 plus to add a plus 5 again they're just like why did they do that I don't have an answer
You know, at that time I'd never heard of reverse Polish. It was only on the Hewlett-packard calculator.
Well, apparently it was widely used. $395. So the price has not gone down.
Also note that it has a cable So you have a cable there, but it is port. It is pocket.
I guess you could, I don't know if you could unplug it. Or had to have that?
I'm not sure.
Yeah, that's just a charging cable.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, lots of people had those things.
Okay.
Heard that, RPN, it was easier to implement in hardware than in fix notation.
Is standard what we use most of the time now.
Got it. Got it. That makes. That makes sense.
Yeah, that was a that was a big deal.
Data.
Yeah. Okay, that's summer. Hey, very young looking, 15 year old Bill Gates.
And his friend, older friend by a few years but not that much older but looks a ton older friend Paul Allen up in Seattle form a company called Trapo Data.
And that records automobile traffic flow and then they turn around and have the city buy to record automobile flow.
Well, it sounded like a really good idea. The problem was they ended up losing $3,500.
On the thing. Now, don't worry though, Bill's parents were wealthy. His dad was a very powerful, well-connected lawyer in Seattle.
His mother had wealth also. So we don't worry that Bill is going to suffer as a result of him and Paul losing 3,500 bucks which was a ton of money in 1,972.
That here. Sure. That year, the C programming language is invented by Dennis Richie and Brian Cardigan and it's still taught today although in my opinion it should not be the very first the language taught to incoming computer science students.
So at Webster for instance They use C plus and what happens about a third of the students drop out, which is really depressing to me.
And I tell students, you know, it's too bad they do that. Because a much more welcoming language that would teach core concepts would be something like Python, which many, many universities have now adopted.
Or rust. I, I still think C should be taught. Maybe as an elective, but I don't think it should be the first teaching language used in colleges, but it still is.
And then my students always say, well, why do professors make us do that? And I said, because that's what they had to learn.
And they want to punish other people like they were punished. So. That November, Atari ships pong.
The first successful coin OP video game, 10,000 machines sold. And my students, again, they're like, That was a big deal.
I'm like, oh my god, the fact that you could go.
Hmm. On a quarter that was fun as hell. They have no idea. That year also.
The very first LED digital whist wristwatch was sold, the pulsar sold by the Hamilton Watch Company.
It was in gold. Which was 2,100 bucks, which is equivalent to $13,000 today or steel 275.
It only displayed the time when the button was pushed on the side because otherwise it couldn't handle it.
Right? And the funny thing is this came out in 72. There was no versions made for women until 74.
But the real claim to fame on this was if you've ever seen Living Let Die, the James Bond movie, one of the Roger Moore, what I think it might be the one of the first Roger Moore James Bond movies.
He's wearing that. In the movie. So that's how cool Bond is and how cool that walk is.
James Bond is wearing it. In Live and Let Die. That brings us to 1973.
Well, the ARPANET has been growing. We're now up to 36 nodes.
St. Louis is still being skipped. But we're now up to 36 nodes on the ARPANET.
Notice we're now at Hawaii and Florida, all sorts of other locations. Of course California is growing like crazy.
Now that May. Go back to Xerox Park for a minute. A young man has been working at Xerox Park named Bob Metcalfe.
And his, yes.
Question. Is 18 to your own yet? Are they doing? Long distance yet or?
Oh my gosh, long distance was around in 1973. It was around before that.
That would, Oh yeah.
Cause that's where, that's where everything moved on, right? Was the ATT lines or small distance lines or something?
Yeah, nothing else.
Yeah. Yeah. They use.
Thanks.
That was the problem. The government was worried if like a city was bombed and the phone lines went down.
They can't, they, at that point they couldn't route things around that. It would just be die.
And so that's one of the reasons they created this. So the idea being, hey, if.
You know, LA gets bombed. The smithereens, we can still route messages around that people will get.
That was the concept. So.
The ARPANET started using the reserved lines that the defense department had available.
Did they use general phone lines too at the time or just?
No, no, they were they were dedicated hardwired lines that AT and T provided.
Cool. Thanks. So Bob Metcalfe at Park decides to invent basically. A method for networking computers.
Because the other mess of the time just didn't work very well and he comes up with the concept of ethernet.
And what's interesting is that the key thing he figures out. That makes Ethernet work. Is he looks back at something called a Loahan Net, which was developed in Hawaii in the islands.
And the problem with other networking protocols up to that point have been that you could easily saturate the network.
And if every, I, if every node on the network is talking, They're all going to be bouncing and having collisions all over the place and the network is going to grind to a halt.
So. His idea based on a low on that was that if a collisions detected. Noodes will detect there's a collision and then they will wait different random times before starting again.
The idea being that if this one's waiting this much and this one's waiting a different amount of time that will drastically reduce the idea.
The problem of a collision and we still have this today back when I was teaching in the ninetys at Crossroads School and I set up the very first network there and did not know what I was doing.
I bought a hub and things were cool when there were 5 computers on the Crossroads network with the hub.
Things were cool when there were 10. But one day we had just one computer too many and the entire network ground down to a halt.
And that's when I learned the value of a switch. So I had to learn that the hard way.
Well, they used ethernet both the cabling and the protocol at park and then eventually Bob Metcap left.
And turn this into a commercial product and retired a very, very wealthy man and we're still using it today.
In fact, I tell my students. You know, we're in classrooms. I say the ethernet is plugged into the back of the classroom computers.
It's these thick cables. But I said Wi-Fi is using the Ethernet is based on the Ethernet protocol as well.
So basically, pretty much the entire world of networking now is based on Bob Metcalfe and his inventions.
That November. Xerox PARC creates a computer for internal use called the Alto. Okay, and the alto is amazing.
Nobody else in the world has anything like this. Okay. And truly revolutionary for the time.
They have a monochrome monitor that's 606 by 8. Now, if you look at that resolution, you're like, that is, and look at the picture.
Right? You'll notice that's a lot narrower. It's a lot taller than it is wide.
Hmm.
Right? And why is that? Can anybody tell me why did the monitors? Go that perspective and not landscape.
They were copying a piece of paper.
Yep.
Yup, that's exactly right. That's what they're thinking these are office machines the offices run on paper therefore the monitor should be like paper and have the same basic aspect ratio as paper.
And so that's why. It took a while for people to realize landscape might be a better orientation.
2 and a half megabyte removable disk, 16 bit CPU and yes, 64 kB of RAM, which I noticed somebody in the chat was like, oh my god, that's a mate, that's an amazing amount, which yes.
That's a crazy amount. You also see a mouse. On that person's desk.
There. So again, nobody else in the world had these. They had a 3 button mouse and the optional 5 key corded keyboard, although it looks a little again more like a piano.
So this was available to everybody inside part. This is what they were all using. Again. Nobody else in the world has anything like this at all.
The operating system they were using on the Alto was a graphical user interface. It featured the classic use GUI paradigm that we still use today.
The Wimp Interface Windows icons menus and a pointer. And so you can see this here and in fact when I look at this I think that actually looks like something in early days of Windows I could see it being used.
You could generate computer graphics with this thing. Now again, nobody was doing anything like this.
The time. This was amazing. That they could do this sort of thing. Prude though it may look to us now.
And in fact, This is so funny. 75% of all traffic on the ARPANET by this point.
Email. That's how popular email became. 75% of traffic on the. Now, part of that's because you can't do a lot else.
You can do a few things. But email, it's we've always as human beings search for ways to communicate more effectively.
And email is still, it's such a powerful way to communicate. That is easy to see why that became so dominant so quickly Okay, 1974.
Unix gets installed at Berkeley. On a PDP 11 and this is incredibly important because what we're going to see in a few years is AT and T at this point is basically sharing Unix with people.
They don't see it as a business. In fact, I was reading earlier that as a result of a of the consent decree they have with the Justice Department.
Prior to being broken up, they were not allowed to enter into other businesses except the phone lines and phones.
And so consequently, they legally were not able to sell or start a Unix business. Now later they would develop licenses when things were relaxed.
And certainly after the baby bells and the divest sure of the bell company, at that point they went hog wild and started trying to sell it.
The But at this point, they're still sending it out all over the place. And one of the places it goes is.
At the University of California at Berkeley. Why is that important? Because once AT and T later in the decade and in the eighties starts trying to nail things down with Unix.
Yeah.
This is still freely available and this basically becomes one of the most important unixes going forward. We'll talk more about that down the road, but this is a lot of the most important features we now think of as Unix.
Were developed at, Berkeley.
Scott, it's important to point out that this they sent out source code. Extremely important because
Yes, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. That's all they could send out.
Well, you you'd have to do a physical port to every different machine you couldn't send out Hey, standard thing.
Right.
I've got a question. Can you pop back a couple of slides to that? Xerox PARC.
Graphical user, that one.
Oh, you might know.
That or that?
It doesn't matter. I've heard a story that Xerox had no clue.
Of the value of this.
Yeah, I'm getting to that. I'm getting to that.
Oh, you gonna, okay, you're gonna do the famous demo. Okay, cool.
Okay. Of course, how can I leave that out?
Okay.
Well, you never know.
No, you know. I'm not gonna leave that out. So, anyway.
Well, Intel releases the 88. 2 megahertz, 8 bit. 64 kB memory access.
We're getting there. 6,000 transistors still accountable. Well, May fifteenth. And I put a screenshot of slug.
For this, of course, May fifteenth, the very first Unix users group occurs. May fifteenth, 1974, around 20 bearded Unix users meet in a small room at Columbia University, New York to talk about their favorite operating system, share tips, tricks, software and so on and that obviously leads to the growth of many many many other Unix users groups, Linux users groups and all the other types of
technical user groups we've seen spread out. So, you know, maybe Slug should celebrate May fifteenth.
It's kind of like Independence Day. That may. The internet is invented. On paper.
Then serve and Bob Kahn publish The very first paper describing TCP IP. A protocol for packing network inter communication.
And this is obviously TCP transmission control protocol, IP. Internet protocol. So this will eventually replace the ARPANET.
It's going to take a while. This does not happen overnight by any means. But as that's why I said it's invented on paper.
Because we have the first descriptions of what will become the the protocol that we all use. You know, the world uses billions of minutes every single day.
That may, a very young Steve Jobs. Gets tired as employee number 40 edatari. After answering an ad that said have fun and make money.
Now of course Who wouldn't answer that ad? Who doesn't want to have fun and make money?
By the way, that's his high school yearbook photo. By the way, Wally's there.
Unfortunately, he quickly pisses off a tremendous number of people. One of the things he does that pisses everybody off is being a kind of a hippie, he decides he doesn't need to bathe very often and so he's really stinky.
Apparently. Apparently part of his diet wasn't helping that issue either. And so as a result, so many people complained that Nolan Bush Nell, founder of Atari, put him on the night shift so he was working pretty much by himself and wasn't bothering anybody else with his funk.
That June, 62 nodes are now on the internet. It's growing and growing as you can see.
No St. Louis. That September? The world's first Whizzy Wig word processor, what you see is what you get.
Is developed at Xerox Alto Park. For the alto at park by a guy named Charles Simonei and it's called bravo And that's what it looked like.
Like Bob Metcalfe, Charles Simone thinks he has a really good idea here and he should commercialize it.
Well, he gets hired away in a few years by another company. That you know and while he's there he develops the word processor that company starts selling and it becomes very, very popular and he becomes very, very rich and retires young to be a philanthropist and so on.
Can anybody tell me what word processor, Charles Simone went on, can anybody tell me what word processor Charles Simone went on to invent and develop?
Oh god.
You all know. You've all used it or most of you.
It wasn't, was it?
Good morning. Yup, Microsoft Word. Microsoft tires Carl Simone and he creates Microsoft Word. So like I said, he did pretty good for himself from this kind of humble idea that he started at at at Park.
Well, again, one of the most important people in our entire story, although we only plays a small part briefly.
That September. A man named Ed Roberts. Is $300,000 in debt. And he goes to the bank to talk about this.
And, you know, up to now we tried to make calculators that failed. He's tried to do other things.
They haven't worked out. And so he's talking to the banker about what they're gonna do about the 300, again in 1,974.
That's an enormous amount of money. And he's talking to the banker about, you know, about the debt that he owes the bank.
And he's talking to the banker and he says, you know, I have an idea.
I have an idea to develop and sell computers for people to run in their homes. What do you think of that?
And I actually read a little interview with the banker and the banker said at the time he was like, you know what?
You're already in for 300,000. We'll give you another 35 because you know, you're already in and that's and he also said in the interview I thought that was the craziest idea in the world but I thought what the hell he seems pretty sure about it.
We'll go ahead and give him the money. So somehow this apparently is one of the most convincing men in the history of the world because nowadays I guarantee you if you go to the bank and you owe $300,000 in debt, they're not going to give you 35,000.
I guarantee you. But they gave Ed Roberts $35,000 and let's see what he creates with it.
Well, it proves the old adage. If you borrow a lot of money from the bank, you don't have a debt or you have a partner.
Bye. Right, or as somebody else once said, if you owe the bank a million dollars, that's your problem.
If you know the bank a hundred 1 million dollars, that's their problem.
That's right, exactly.
Oh, I remember that.
Exactly. So, that year. And who will be important. Named Gary Kildall.
Now, what I have to tell my students is, guys, Nowadays, when you think of computers, you know, you think a Mac OS Windows, some of the more nerdy of you may think a Linux.
Mobile devices we think Android or iOS. And that's it. And I have to explain to them in the seventys there was no like choice of one or 2 things as you mentioned earlier Steve every time you ported it to a different hardware device you had to customize the operating system.
Yep.
Now there were dreams at this time, even even into the eightys that Unix would become the one true operating system and ironically enough eventually it did except for Windows.
But at this time there were all sorts of different competing operating systems going on. There was no dominant one or 2.
And so Gary Kildall. This brilliant programmer comes out with an operating system called CPM. Control Program Monitor.
And later, name, meant control program for microcomputers. And it's the first operating system for micro computers.
And to sell this, I love this. This is so early seventys. He bet his company is called Intergalactic Digital Research, which I love.
Later they toned it down a bit and just went with digital research incorporated, but he goes on to write CPM, which is going to become one of the most important operating systems, but not for the reason you might think.
So that's what it looks like. That's it running an emulation there, version 2 dot 2.
They might look a little familiar to some of you. Now, over the rest of the seventies, CPM becomes very, very widely used.
It's never the dominant operating system, but it is very, very widely used. A lot of people use it.
It does in some circles become expected. Like, oh, you bought a micro computer or a PC, you're gonna wanna run CPM on it.
Well, going back to part. Larry Tessler, very important computer scientist. And a guy named Tim Mott are working a park and they're like, you know what?
The successor to Bravo had modes. Now, if any of you have ever asked VI or Vim, you know what I'm talking about with modes, editing mode, what's the other mode, editing mode, command mode, right?
And they decided that why don't we make a simpler modern word processor. And by the way, I love how modern means like, you know, more than 3 years old.
Why do we make one that doesn't use modes because Tesla always hated modes.
In fact, he famously had a license plate on his car that said, no modes. And so they decide to create an operating, oh excuse me, a Wizzy Wig word processor called Gypsy.
Now, I'm a nowadays it's not the right word to use we would call them Roma but it was 19 seventies nobody thought about this stuff so there you are Gypsy did a bunch of crazily innovative stuff that now we just take for granted.
For instance, in Bravo, you would click at the beginning of some text you wanted to select with one button, then you would click at the end while holding down another button to select.
Well, Tesla was like, that's silly. We don't need to do that.
And so instead, he said, why don't you just click and drag to select the text? Well, again, we all do this every day.
Right? But this was the first time that had been done. Larry Tessler invented the idea of clicking and dragging to select text.
But that was not all. Okay, this is gonna blow you guys away when I learned about this He introduced the methods and the terms cut copy paste. Okay.
So the terms we all use, Kakapi paste are thanks to Larry Tessler who by the way is their programming his computer at his alto at Xerox Park.
So he also invented the concept of double clicking to select the word. And actually, I think that wasn't him.
He noticed users trying to do that and he talked to them and said, would be easier and somebody said, why can't I double click to select the word he went?
Brilliant, let's do it. So that was the first word processor. To allow you to double click to select the word.
He also, Larry Tessler embedded the concept of hitting control B for bald control lie for italic and control you for underlying.
So again, simple stuff that we all take for granted today, but was invented by Larry Tessler in 1,974 at Xerox Park along with Selma Cuts.
Well, 1975 is gonna become one of the most important years. Affecting us still today. Bill Gates by this point was had been accepted to Harvard University and Paul Allen was in Boston as well.
And Bill really was not that enthused about being at Harvard. He mostly spent his time playing bridge, which apparently is an excellent player.
And you know, did the bare minimum you needed to do to succeed and since he was so smart he got very good grades.
Okay.
But he and Paul Allen have been talking for years. About the idea that one day individuals are going to have computers.
One day, you're not going to have many computers. You're gonna have a computer that individuals will own in their homes and in fact later but not much later when they form Microsoft.
They came up with the concept the early vision for Microsoft was a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. And so they know that's the idea.
But they don't know how to get there. And then one day. Paul Allen is walking through Harvard Yard.
Harvard Yard and he stops at the newsstand. And there's a brand new issue of popular electronics.
Okay.
And he sees the cover. Pages through it, buys it immediately and runs off into Bill Gates dorm room waving the magazine saying they're gonna do it, they're gonna do it.
We need to get on board and Gates immediately says, yes. We need to get on board right now.
Well, what was on the cover? The Alter. So Ed Roberts vision had actually. Turned into something real.
And he created as the cover of Popular Electronics says the world's first mini computer kit to rival computer MoD models, the Altair, 800.
Okay, and that's what it looks like. And so that's what inspired Allen and Gates and said, okay, there finally there's going to be a personal computer, although they didn't use that term.
How do we get in on it? Well, all you older guys are gonna know and certainly nod your heads.
That. When you bought a computer, it didn't come with software. Okay, this wasn't gonna come with programs pre-installed.
That's not how this is 1975. We're a long way from that. And so you need a program language you can run on here so you can write your own programs.
Now again, my students are horrified by this. It's so alien to their understanding. But they recognized that and the language they knew they were going to need was basic.
And so Gates and Allen realized. So. Somebody is gonna have to write the basic interpreter that's gonna run on the Altair so people can write their own programs.
And so what happens? Is they realize this is going to lead to more software. And so they called Ed Roberts who lived in Albuquerque at the time and they got him on the phone and they said, we're really excited about the Altair.
Has anybody, are you having anybody or has anybody written the basic interpreter yet? And Ed Roberts laughed and said, 20 people have told me they've got one.
Nobody shown me one yet. If you guys get to here first. I'll give the deal to you.
They hang up and that's all they needed to hear. So they began developing the basic interpreter for altar.
Keep in mind. They did not have an all terror. No one had an altar at this point except Ed Roberts.
They were going off of what was written in magazines. What specifications were and so on. So they start coding like mad.
Right, right, right, right, right. And they're finally done in March. So 3 months they write a basic interpreter again without the computer.
That it's going to be running on. And that march, they call Ed Roberts and say, we've got it.
We've got the basic interpreter. We're gonna do, you know, can we still fly out and see you and he's like, absolutely come out.
Nobody's, nobody's showed up. So. Paul Allen flies to Albuquerque.
Okay, with that paper tape. That's where it was, was on that paper tape. This is how brilliant Paul Allen.
The plane is starting to land and he's going to get a cab to go. To MITS Ed Roberts Company.
When he realizes holy crap we never wrote a routine to load this onto the altar. He writes that in the car.
The taxi on the way to see Ed Roberts.
Puts it on, it worked on the very first try. Is the program he wrote on the fly to load.
And the basic interpretive they wrote loaded and ran on the very first try and again they had not had an altar to test this with.
So needless to say. That's July second and Roberts is like, you're hired.
I'm gonna buy your basic interpreter. And that July, MITS his company signs a contract with Alan and Gates to supply the basic interpreter for the altar, thus beginning Microsoft.
The deal was they got $3,000 at signing in a 30 to $60 royalty for each copy of Basic sold up to a max of a hundred $80,000.
And and MITS got a worldwide exclusive license to the program for 10 years. Now as you're going to see.
That 10 years was extremely optimistic. But, that's what happened. And so again, this shows you back in the day, what good programmers, Allen and Gates were and the success.
Now by the way, as I showed you just a few minutes ago, That computer is called the Alter.
Okay, the MI MITS is the company the computer that he's going to sell is called the Alter.
Nope.
Now does anybody know that why it's called the Alter. Does anybody know this? Anybody?
Gary, do you know?
No, no.
Star Trek.
Oh, you're gonna love this then. Here, that's right. Because that night When Ed Roberts in 75 was trying to think of a name for the computer, he walks through the living room going, what are we going to name it, what are we going to name it.
His daughter was laying on the floor watching reruns. Of a show that had been canceled 6 years ago but was starting to get you know more famous in reruns.
Of course, that was Star Trek, the original series. And guess what? The daughter turns around and goes, Alta, and, and Roberts goes, great, that's why they named it Alter.
Why? Because the the Enterprise that night was visiting the planet Alter. So that's why it's named the MITS Alter.
And thus began the inextricable bond between Star Trek nerds and computer nerds.
No.
That goes on today. I count myself along. I'm a Star Trek nerd. I know Gary's like if you look up Star Trek nerd there's Gary in the dictionary but there you go it all had to do with Star Trek with this computer.
Well, that march. The first meeting of what will become known as the Homebrew Computer Club in California occurs.
Steve Wozniak, a very young, brilliant engineer working at HP, attends and immediately goes, these are my people.
And gets very involved. Homebrew Computer Club as your C is going to be extremely important.
A lot of cool people attended that you know. A lot of really cool things were demonstrated at there. I think it was Wozniak.
I think it was Wozniak. One of the things that happened was he brings his altar to the front of the room and hook speakers up and remember he had to do that all himself.
There was no speaker holes to plug things in. He turns it on and loads a program and the fool on the hill by the Beatles started playing.
Generated by the Altaire. And again, people just lost their minds because no one else had figured out a way to get music to play on the altar but Steve Wozniak did.
That's just one of the many many many signs of his brilliance. Well, that April?
Oh, by the way, I love this. I love this ad for the Homebrew Computer Club, are you building your own computer?
Terminal, TV typewriter, I/O device, or some other digital black magic box? Are you buying time on a time sharing service?
If so, you might like to come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests. I just love that.
So that April, finally the MITS Alter, 8,800, starts shipping.
$439 equivalent to 2,100 today. It is an Assembly yourself kit.
And again, my students are like, what? You know, they don't, nobody buys these nowadays.
Obviously, I'm like, no, you don't understand. That you don't buy that.
You buy pieces of that in an instruction manual. You have a soldering iron. You have screwdrivers.
Yeah.
You put that together using a very thick detailed instruction manual and that's fun. There were the people buying this, they don't want to buy a our pre built computer.
They wanted part of the fun is assembling it yourself from all the pieces. That's part of what you're getting.
Now you're also getting your own computer. And again, I'm like, guys, you don't understand.
These people are buying their own computer that they have in their house. Nobody had this at the time. This was science fiction.
Now, you guys will appreciate this. It came with 1 kB of RAM. Right?
But hey, you can do a lot with a kilobyte of RAM. This is part of the ad.
And again, I know this is still going to appeal to some of you guys. I can see why it would.
Building your own computer won't be a piece of cake, but it will make it a rewarding experience.
And I love this. Chances are you won't be able to assemble the altar 8 800 computer in an hour or 2.
And again, some people reading this are going, oh, tell me more. Not an hour or 2, tell me more.
But that's only because the altar is a real full-blown computer. It's not a demonstration.
The Alter is fast, powerful, and flexible. Its basic instruction cycle time is 2 microseconds.
It can directly address 256 input and 256 output devices. And up to 6,500 words of memory.
The altar requires almost no design changes to connect with most external devices, up to 15 additional cards can be added inside the main case.
But you don't see that nowadays. And I love this last line. Might be easier to read.
Nope, at the bottom of this, you guys are gonna love this. The altar computer is about as difficult to assemble as a desktop calculator.
That's nothing. We all know that. If you can handle a soldering iron and follow directions, you can do it.
Well, I mean, I always tell my students come on all of you guys. You've built your own desktop calculator.
You all use soldering irons. You can follow directions. Piece of cake. They say it won't be a piece cake, but obviously it's going to be a piece cake.
And then as you keep going down, they give manuals, double sided boards. And then this is the thing where my students kind of drop the jaws drop.
The basic Alter includes the CPU from panel control board, front panel lights, switches, power supply, and expander board, all enclosed in a handsome aluminum case.
And I'm like, do you guys notice anything that's left out? And eventually they're like.
Where's the keyboard? Where's the mouse? Where's the screen? And I'm like, oh, you poor sweet summer children.
You have no idea what you're talking about. There is no mouse. There is no keyboard.
There is no monitor. Oh, no, no, no, no. This is the front of the computer.
You program this by flipping switches. And then the output are flashing lights. And that's the coolest thing in the world.
You've used the switches, you get the output with lights. Now you know what the lights mean in the order they're flashing in, but that's what it's doing and my students are like what were people like in 1975 this is an alien breed of human being that does not exist anymore today.
Unfortunately, sadly they're mostly right. Well that February. They received orders for a thousand Altares.
By May, they delivered 2,500 all terrors. By August, they had delivered 5,000. This thing was doing far better than Ed Roberts ever thought it would.
Well of course This was the first machine that helped popularize the term personal computer and this is recognized as the first PC because it was your computer you had to yourself.
Now, as I said that April, Microsoft had been founded in Gates and Allen moved to lovely Albuquerque so they could be close to MITS.
That was the original logo and I always explain it was 1975, man. That was the height of typographic fashion.
To have that back then. That April, the Sony Betamax is announced the first standalone BCR.
Unfortunately for the movie industry, it killed the motion picture industry. It's sad we don't have a motion picture industry anymore.
Of course the motion picture industry freaked out and said this will kill the movies no one will ever go to movies ever again or watch movies they'll just take stuff for free and sadly they were correct there is no motion picture industry.
We haven't had movies produced in this country in over 40 years. So it's too bad.
That May, was released. This was the first version of Unix to see wide release. Outside of Bell Labs.
Now, it was still free to universities, but commercial users could now buy it for $20,000. And it added support now for more commands we've all used.
BC to group, Chron, TB table, units, wall, and it was still, and this blows my mind.
Still, the Colonel was less than 10,000 Still. That September, the unfortunately gone before it should have bite magazine publishes its first issue.
I have mentioned this to you guys before. You can see all issues of bite on the internet. They've done a brilliant job gathering almost all issues I'd say.
I don't know if they have all issues I'd say. I don't know if they have all I think they got pretty darn close to all of them.
They're in great scams. I go through them all. I think they got pretty darn close to all of them. They're in great scans.
I go through them all the time. They're in great scans. I go through them all the time, looking up historical stuff, looking at the ads, totally worth your time.
Lots of fun information 1976. America's bicentennial. Well, somebody else.
So Americans celebrated their freedom from Great Britain. Well, somebody else had something to say about freedom that year and that somebody was Bill Gates.
And that January, he published of famous letter called open letter to hobbyists and that's what computer users back then were called.
And what's Bill complaining about? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware most of you steal your software.
Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people worked on it get paid?
Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? One hobbyist can put 3 man years into programming, finding all bugs to talk documenting his product and distribute it for free.
Most directly, the thing you do is theft. Now, I see aspects of what he's saying definitely.
A lot of you would say, but open source, but there is a place for commercial software where people get paid.
We all know why. We've all got lots of reasons we could look at in the news about where open source hasn't always worked as well as we wanted.
As awesome as it is and there's often a really good argument to be made that if you actually pay people to do stuff they'll do it.
And they'll do a good job and they'll do the stuff that isn't fun. Like right, good documentation and so on.
But you can also see Bill Gates attitude that will lead to him being the world's richest man.
That's January. The first issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Tiny Basic Calisthenics in Orthodontia.
The very first Periodical focused on software instead of hardware makes itself known and later it became Dr. Dobbs journal they got rid of the of tiny basic calisthenics in North Dakota because that was incredibly of its time.
And so again, I know many of you read these issues over the years. That march. Steve Wozniak.
For fun. Create what will become the Apple one. And I highly recommend his autobiography.
I was I WOZ as nicknames WAS. It is like, it is so good.
And he is such an admirable man in so many ways. He is really a good person, a good heart.
And brilliant engineer and I really urge you guys to read his autobiography. You'll learn a lot.
He's a cool guy. You will, you know, your job will drop at some of the stuff.
I think you'll be extremely impressed with him and his capabilities. He decided while working at HP that it would be kind of fun to make my own computer.
But This altar thing's really awesome, but I'm gonna make my own just kind of for fun and learn and figure stuff out.
And so he does it. Everything you see here except the wooden board. Was designed by one man, Steve Wozniak.
Okay? Everything on that board. He made it as beautiful as he could. He made it, you know, as tightly focused in terms of the code and the hardware as he could.
He said he wanted it to look as beautiful as it was going to run. Now, since he did not have a lot of money, he could not afford, yeah, it does look really nice, doesn't it?
He could not afford an Intel CPU, so he went with the far cheaper MOSTECH, 6,500, and 2 CPU, which was also less powerful.
But again, he didn't have a ton of money to be spending on on the hardware here. Now it did have 4 kB of RAM.
Right? But here's the thing. Wozniak said it is autobiography and he goes into detail about this.
He was the first person to figure out a way to link a motherboard like this. A computer to a TV.
Nobody had ever done that before and here's the thing. TVs weren't made to have input at that time like this.
Computers weren't made to do that. He had to figure it all out himself. And he goes through in the book the, you know, the ways in which he figured it out and what he tried and failed.
And he said, finally one night he got it to work and he just felt this indescribable joy because he had figured out remember can't invent the hardware, the I/O, the software, everything from scratch.
He had to basically take the back of the TV off and figure out how to patch into the TV to get the Apple One to appear on the TV.
So again, genius. Now what he could get on that TV was 40 by 24 characters. But still, that was really impressive.
Now, Wozni, I just made this for fun. He was he wanted to show it off at the homebrew computer club.
And show because he thought it was cool and he wanted people to see it. Well, I haven't mentioned who was the ex best friend was.
That was a young guy named Steve Cobbs. And so they were best buds. And remember, Gobs is working at Atari, although we took a long vacation to go to India.
Yes, Nolan Bush, now that you could go on a pilgrimage to India. And, and Bush now said, that'd be great.
Get your stinky ass out of here. That'd be wonderful. And so he going off and did that, dropped acid, had a great time said it was very enlightening, which I believe.
Well, he's Wozniak shows his best friend what he's done here.
And jobs is blown away. Steve Jobs could not believe, yes, he did talk to HP about this and they were like, you're a lowly engineer.
We don't see a market for this by. And so yeah, he did show HP this and they were completely totally uninterested in this.
So He shows it to jobs and after jobs, you know, picks his job off the floor.
Wanna show everybody and Job says no. We need to sell this. And thus was born Apple Computer.
So that April, Apple Computer, Incorporated. Was founded who sell the Apple One motherboard.
There was no box around it. That wooden box you saw, somebody else made that. People made really intricately carved wooden boxes to put the Apple One motherboard inside and so on.
There and some of them are gorgeous. You can see by the way that WAS signed that one.
Which is very, very cool. So, that April, Apple Computer Incorporated is founded by Steve Jobs.
Steve Bosniak and Ron Wayne? Who the hell is Ron Wayne? Well, Ron Wayne also worked at HP.
It was about, I think, a decade older than Jobs and Wozniak.
And they invited him for 2 reasons. One. He had a little money. They each had to get rid of something.
So Steve Wozniak sold his HP calculator to put money in to start Apple.
Steve Jobs sold his VW bus. To get money and Ron Wayne had a little money that he put in.
Also, now Wayne had actually had some small businesses before that. That was one of the reasons they wanted him involved.
So like, he's got business experience. The other reason was they were worried that the 2 of them might disagree and have a tie and they thought if we have went Ron Wayne in as a third party, we'll be able to break any tie if we disagree.
So, Apple computers started up. That is the original logo, also created by Ron Wayne.
That is yes, Newton with an apple over his head and it may be difficult to read but around the edges is a quote from William Wordsworth and it says Newton a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought.
Alone, man, because again it was 1976 in California. Now obviously they're going to get rid of that logo. It's a little busy.
It's a little hard to reproduce on a business card but seem good at the time. Well, They formed Apple Computer 2 weeks later, Ron Wayne gets nervous.
He's like, I don't think this is going to work. I want my 10% state back.
I want my 800 bucks back. So, there you go. Ron Wayne gets his 800 bucks back.
As it's gonna turn out. And I read articles later interviews in life with Ron Wayne and basically after this he went on and started a business repairing slot machines.
He moved to Vegas and started a business repairing slot machines. And, you know, did okay.
Okay, you know, I write interviews people would interview him later in life and be like, hey, do you regret, you know, not being a multi billionaire and his answer is always no.
I do not! Now leave! I'm exaggerating, but unfortunate decision by Ron Wayne.
That July the Apple One goes on sale. It's a kit computer in that you're getting a motherboard.
For $666 and 66 cents. Now, within a few years.
People start going, it's satanic. It's the mark of the Antichrist 6 6 6.
It's an apple like the Garden of Eden. It has a bite out of it. That's after they've gained the knowledge.
This shows it's fallen. Apple's a satanic company. And I've write interviews with both Wozniak and Jobs and they're like, why did you guys do that?
And both of them were like, we just thought it was a cool number. We weren't religious.
We had no idea. Some people thought this was a bad number. We just thought it was cool. 6, 6, 6, 6.
And Wozniak in particular said I like repeating digits so this was more my idea to repeat the digits all the way down because I like repeating digit.
So that's why. Well, that's what the Apple One look like. That's the various pieces of it.
Again, beautifully put together by one man. Designed and put together by Wozniak, they sold a hundred 50 of these.
They made $95,000 in 1,976. Again, that's pretty amazing money for 1,976 for 2 very young men.
That's a lie. The, and this is not an Intel CPU. Other companies by now were selling CPUs.
These Zylog Z. 80 was released. It was used in Radio Shack TRS 80 computers which are coming up.
Printers, facts and answering machines obviously later down the road photocopiers TTI graphic calculators Pac-man and Gallagher arcade machines, the Nintendo Game Boy.
This dialogue is has sold over a billion Z. And it's still going. It's used in sprinkler systems and all over the place.
The Z 80 is everywhere that you don't know where it is. That's September, Unix by now.
Have been licensed by a hundred 38 organizations from 18 D. Now some of these were educational, some of these were businesses.
And that December. The electric pencil gets embedded. I never got a chance to use this. This is way before my time, but Michael Schreyer convinced for his own purpose for his own needs.
A word processing program for micro computers and he calls it the electric pencil. And starts making available. People start finding out about this and they love it.
Now remember. Nobody knows about the Alto. The Alto is only known about by a few people that work at Xerox Park or in Silicon Valley.
Most people have no idea about this. Michael Schreyer creates the Electric Pencil, the first popular word processing program for microcomputers and it's really incredibly popular.
And what's funny though, it's very popular but this next quote I found today I was very struck by.
It said the popularity of electric pencil was so great it created a buyer demand that it be on all micro computers then available.
Schreyer spent much of his time rewriting the program for different systems. Not only did these kind of computer require a different version, but so did each kind of printer or terminal.
Moreover, Schroyer was constantly upgrading electric pencils capabilities. In all, he wrote 78 different versions of electric pencil.
Because of all the different hardware devices out there. And operating systems. Here's the funny thing, not one computer maker ever thought to pay him to adapt electric pencil their system.
Nobody paid him. He just chose to do it by whim or people would ask. And he would go, okay, I'll rewrite it for this operating system or this hardware.
And would do it. And of course, he was the only one doing it. Now, eventually he hired a few other developers, but this was taking all of his time and you can see again by the lack of standardization causing issues.
I mean, 78 different versions over the life of this program. It's insane.
Now, that year, some of you are going to be very happy about this. Bill Joy creates the EX text editor, which in 3 years he renames the VI.
Bill Joy is one of the key people that was using BSD Unix and really added a tremendous amount to BSD later went on to found Sun Microsystems.
Well to this day BI is found on every Unix system today including Mac OS. And it's still widely used.
I know many of the people listening to me here use it, although we probably don't use VI anymore.
You probably use them, the young hip guys use Neo Vim. Nowadays, on most Unix systems, if you type VI, it loads VIM instead.
The thing about VI that that's confusing to new people and them is the modes. And this is one of the things that Tesla was was reacting against although this was after Tessler's work.
3 modes, command mode, insert mode, and command line mode. And so you shipped into the different modes depending on what you're doing.
And again, to people used to modern word processors, this is really odd. To those you use them, you know how this can actually be extremely powerful.
Yes, VI is visual editor, I believe. For instance, these are some of the commands.
Now, most of the people watching this, you guys are going to be going, yeah, okay. You know, Colin W, yeah, colon WQ, you know, totally easy.
I get it. But when I show my students this their minds are blown. They cannot imagine much less that people used to use this, but that people still use today.
And when I tell, I know people that are experts at this, like, guy named Bill Odin, most many of us know.
That does all their writing encoding in this program they just can't believe it but it's it's still great.
Well, Emacs came out the same year. Working with Guy Steel Jr. Richard Stallman creates Emacs.
Extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display text editor.
But I like what other people have to say about it. It's a great operating system if only it had a decent editor.
Yeah.
1977. The famous Lions commentary book is published. Bell was selling. The, Unix, but they weren't providing kernel documentation or code at this point.
They were trying to avoid that. And so the Lions book was incredibly popular because that actually had the source code.
In it. So a commentary on Unix sixth edition. This is still the sixth edition with source code.
And so this was enormously popular because A, it actually documented the system, but also provided the complete source code.
Well, 2 years after the Alter comes out. And Ed Roberts has done very well for himself.
He sells MIT S to protect computer corporation for 6 million dollars. So, and Roberts does really good for himself.
He gets out and Pertec takes over. Well, the thing is, within one year, protect ceases production of the Alter because it's getting lapped.
By so many other computers by this point that it's not going to work. And so they let it die.
So again, Ed Roberts got out good. He made good amount of money, especially for the time period.
And I want to tell you what happened at Roberts, cause he's not one of those people I think is a good person.
When there's so many greedy you know, horrible people in the industry. And so I think it's important to call out the people that are good genuine human beings and do a good thing.
So Ed Roberts had always had a dream and that is he wanted to be a doctor. And so even though he was older than your average student.
He went, he found a small college that had medical degrees and he went back to school and he became a country doctor.
In Cochrane, Georgia. And was very well respected by patients and his peers. He won an award from the Medical Association because of how respected he was as a doctor.
And also the his startup, jump starting the computer industry. And people really talked about him for a long time as how good a doctor he was, how he was very patient with people that couldn't pay and gave them credit.
And again, he was a good man. He genuinely was interested in the health care of people living in a rural community.
Well, fast forward and Roberts died in Macon, Georgia in on April, the first, 2,010 after fighting pneumonia at the age of 1968.
The thing I think is hilarious is imagine you're a nurse or a doctor. In Macon, Georgia at the hospital where this guy Ed Roberts is dying.
And all of a sudden one day Bill Gates walks in the door completely unannounced. Nobody knew he was coming.
He just shows up at the hospital, walks to the desk and goes, where's that Roberts?
They tell him and he walks into his room because he said he wanted to pay his last respects to the man that basically dumped started Microsoft.
So I always thought that was pretty cool and I would have loved its film people's faces as they were like, in our hospital, in our little hospital here in Macon, Georgia.
The other important thing that happened that year. Was the 1977 Trinity is byte called it.
1977 Byte that was the year of the Trinity. The 3 companies who bought it brought out ready to run PCs and I bet a lot of you had at least one of these.
The Commodore pet Apple 2 and the Radio Shack TRS. 80. And you'll notice these are complete computers.
These are not kits. These are, you know, already put together with monitors and keyboards. No mice.
We, we aren't 30 yet. We don't have a GUI. These are all command line driven programs, but we do have these.
Well, the first one is the Apple 2. The Apple II is released for $1,300. This is called the last PC where the motherboard was designed by one man.
And again, it was Steve Wozniak. This is the last time that happens because after this they're just too complex.
So Wozniak designs, just like you did with the one, the entire motherboard for the Apple II.
And it is released for $1,300. Now this is of the Trinity the first PC to be released with a plastic case.
Color graphics, now not a lot of colors, but I believe it was 4 colors. A keyboard and a display came with 4 kB of RAM and a one megahertz CPU.
And this is what it looked like and my students again are like, what? And most of you guys, yeah, green on black, of course.
Now, that year, they sold 4,000 amplitudes. It was this is what it blew me away.
It wasn't until 1993. 16 years later that Apple discontinued the Apple II after selling 6 million units.
Hmm.
Okay. In the early nineties. I went to a conference at Stanford. Where I was speaking.
And one day there was a luncheon for the people at the conference and Steve Wozniak was the guest speaker.
And during his talk. Somebody mentioned the Apple 2 and he said and I bet all your schools still have them running inside the schools don't they?
And everybody was like, yes, they're still there. Well, the funny thing about this was I had an Apple mouse pad.
Okay, I had an Apple computer incorporated mouse pad that I bought at the campus store once I learned Lozniak was going to be there.
And before the luncheon started, I walked up to Wozniak who's sitting in his chair and I bent down and I said, hi Steve, I just want to let you know I really am always really impressed me and I really appreciate all the work you've done in the world.
I really, you know, think you're amazing. I love the Apple stuff. I said, would you mind signing my mouse pad and I'll never forget what he did.
He looks up at me and his hands are shaking and he goes, I will later I get really nervous before I talk so if you could kind of leave me alone right now so I can get ready.
I appreciate it but come back up afterward. I was like, oh absolutely, I'm sorry, absolutely.
So I back off. He gives a great talk. Very self assured, great talk. Afterward I come up to him.
With a, with a, Sharpie. I give him the Sharpie in the iPad.
It's a grey iPad, a great mouse pad, and he signs was on it, really big, really cool.
And at that time, even if some of you guys know Jan's cart and my business partner, I was working with Dance and a few other people.
And Kansas was at that point I was using Windows. I'd gone from Mac to Windows for a brief period of time and that was during that time for a few years.
And so I gave the mouse pad to jans because I knew he was really into max and Apple and I said, you know, hey, here's a really good present for you.
I brought you an Apple computer mouse pad signed by Steve Wozniak and he's like oh man this is so cool you know I was like you know you're welcome 5 years later, I happened to be talking to Jan.
I'm like, hey, where's that mouse pet I give you? Because I lost it.
I don't know where it is. I was like. Why did I give it to you if I got Steve Wozniak to signed an Apple Computer Mouse pad and you lose it.
So I've always regretted that. And if you ever see Jan's, tell him he sucks.
No. That year, 1977, $200,000 revenue. That gym, the Commodore pet.
Is released. $600. Very, you know, used in sci-fi movies at the time.
I love that shape of that monitor and how it looks. Notice the tic keyboard, really tiny square keys.
That at a 65, point 2 moss CPU, fourk of RAM, a monochrome monitor and a cassette tape drive which you can see there on the left.
Now of course any of you that ever had to use that know they were slow as all get out. And it included Commodore Basic in ROM.
Now, here's the question, and I never knew this till I started researching for this talk.
I was always like, why was it called the pet? Like, I never understood. I assume PET, those were like initials.
Well, later on, they claimed it had a meaning. We're each letter meant something. That's called a background.
They did that after the fact. That's not what PET was originally called. So here's the deal.
Some of you guys that are old enough are gonna be like, oh my God, you're gonna remember this clearly.
The younger people are gonna be like, again, people in the seventies were weird. Yes, they were.
Because in order to understand why it was called the Commodore PET, I have to talk about the pet rock.
Oh.
So in 1975, I remember that as a little kid, there was a fad for pet rocks.
So for 4 bucks. You got a rock, just a rock. On some straw in a pep carrier, you can see it there along with an owner's manual titled The Care and Training of your Pet Rock.
And it went through, you know, how to feed it, hardly ever. The tricks that the rock could do like sit, it was great at sit.
And it was great at stay, but it sucked it roll over. They also said that you could do a run, but you needed to help it along to get it to do that.
And so this was incredibly popular. In fact, Gary D, the guy that invented this, he sold this was only a fad for 6 months.
He sold a million pet rocks during that time. And made enough money basically to go, well, I'm done.
So that's how big of a deal this is. Well, okay. Andre Sussan, the VP of Engineering and Commodore, saw a pet rock.
And was talking to the other people at Commodore and said, oh, we're going to create the PEC computer.
And that's why it's called the pet because of the pet rock. So again, amazing the the linkages we have between stuff at the time.
Well, again, that was sold for the next 5 years. That was not discontinued until 1,982 after about 220,000 of these machines were sold.
And that brings me to the last part of the Trinity, the Radio Shack TRS, 80, which was released for $600.
That used the Zylog Z. 80 CPU, 4 K of RAM, expandable up to a whopping 48 kB of RAM.
64 characters per line on a black and white screen. Oh, also cassette tape drive and it included level one basic which was created by Radio Shack built into ROM so they could use it.
Well, I, I always wonder what was TRSCD short for? Well, I found that out too for you guys.
It was an abbreviation of Tandy, which was the corporation that owned Radio Shack, Tandy Radio Shack Z.
80, which was the CPU. Now, something else I found, this computer did not support lowercase letters on the screen until 1981.
And of the 3 in the Trinity, it was the best selling. In fact, it out sold the Apple 2 5 to one.
That's how successful it was. So being cheap definitely has a big advantage. Then October, yeah, Atari 2,600 was released. $190.
This is what made consoles with cartridges available. A popular I mean. So if you have or know people that have Xboxes with cartridges available a popular I mean so if you have or no people that have Xboxes and PlayStations, so if you have or know people that have Xboxes and PlayStations, they can thank the Atari 2,600 for that This thing sold over 40
1 million units. I got one. I'll tell you that later. And that year, hey, there's Bob Metcalfe receiving the patent for Ethanet.
So he's now on his way to riches. I'm almost done with the seventies. I will stop there.
That's okay. 1978 first computerized bulletin board systems created. You know, some of you guys definitely spent your time on bulletin board systems.
Well, that started in February, the nineteenth 78. It was 1 173 kB 8 inch floppy for storage an 8 bit one megahertz CPU, 64 KRAM and got to love it a 300 bod mode.
And I always tell my students, you know, the fastest we got with modems were, 64 bud.
64,000. Correct, am I right? It was 64, wasn't it?
There was they were 1,200 blood.
Yep. 53 is 53. Right. Well, then there was 16 and
I remember 56.
Well, the faster was didn't really work.
I think it was. 56.
64 minus some for reasons, Craig said. So I always tell my students, if you if I had to sit you down today.
In front of the fastest modems we had, you would kill yourselves. Because routinely you would wait for web pages to load for over a minute or 2.
Especially if there were images. You just sit there watching the images come in line by line. I said the idea of watching a video.
You're insane. If you guys had to use a 64 bod modem, you would literally kill yourself.
Well, the fact that this is 300 And that was state of the art at the time. Again, even worse, they have no concept of what that would have been like.
And thankfully, neither do I. That made the first documented spam message was sent by a guy named Gary Therk to 393 recipients, which that number is hilarious to me.
On the ARPANET, out of the 2,600 people totally using it. Advertising a new model of computer by deck and he got a lot of trouble for that.
Now, nobody called it spam at the time. That wasn't used until, 1,993 when a guy named Joel Ferr came up with the term spam, but that's what it was.
That June, Intel introduces the 80 86 which introduced the x 86 architecture which is still used on probably billions of desktops and laptops today.
But of course, not on any smartphones or tablets, those are all arm-based, which we'll talk about much, much further down the road.
The first IBM PC used a variant of the X of the 80 86 to 80 88.
If featured 16 bit memory addressing, 29,000 transistors, now I'm at the point where I'm not gonna count.
I'm sorry. 4.7 megahertz clock speed and it could access a whopping 1 MB of RAM.
Well, that's Zoom, a young man named 22 year old man named Tim Patterson is hired by Seattle computer products up in Seattle.
And their whole thing was they made micro memory. My, excuse me, memory boards for micro computers. So Tim Patterson gets hired, that's what he's going to be doing.
He's going to be writing software and hardware for memory boards for micro computers. That's the business they're in.
Well, that summer. Patterson went to a seminar. Add and tell about the new Intel, 80 86 and he thought man these CPUs are going to be amazing.
This would be a good business to get into. So in addition to memory boards, we should sell CPU boards as well.
So we goes back and talks to the owner of SCP Rod Brock and says we need to start designing and selling a CPU board for this new Intel chip and Brock signs off on it.
So now Seattle Computer is in a new industry which is going to change everything. As you're going to see in just a little bit.
That's a temper. I know some of you guys probably use this. A micro pro's word star was released for CPM.
Later ported to DOS. At the time, it was considered the most feature rich, easy to use word processor of its day.
It's been long, long eclipsed. However, famously, one very famous novelist still uses it to write all of his novels.
Some of his novels have been turned into a very famous TV series. They're sold their they've sold millions of copies around the world.
Does anybody know who that novelist is? That to this day uses an ancient DOS machine. I think it's Dawson, might be CPM.
So he can run Wordstar. Say if I know who that guy is.
But Stephen King.
No, that's a good one. He stays far more up to date, but that's a good guess.
No, it's George RR. Martin, we're up to date, but that's a good guess. No, it's George RR.
Martin, creator of Game of Thrones. This is what he still writes on. He refuses to write on anything else except Wordstar because he says he knows it completely intimately and he doesn't want to have to learn anything else.
That October, Space Invaders comes out the highest grossing video game of all time and I remember playing this and it was hard as hell and I sucked but still I put the quarters in the machine.
Bye, 1,979 within a year, there were 750,000 installations around the world of space invaders.
They made by 1,982 within 4 years they made 3.8 billion dollars in grosses and remember that was quarter by quarter at least in the US So that's an enormous amount of money thanks to people feeding in coins.
Into these machines. Well, it was ported later to consoles, handhelds, computers, and they figure that it's estimated that as 2,016 they've earned 13 billion dollars in revenue.
Yeah.
Wow.
Just have you heard. All the time as you died because this game was extremely difficult. That December, Microsoft doing pretty good.
They're up to a million dollars in sales. Now they're still in Albuquerque.
But they're now doing a million dollars in sales and if you've gone up to anybody at that time.
And said, there was a nerd and said, hey, do you know you heard a company called Microsoft?
Only the nerds would go. Yeah, sure. And you would have said, what do they do?
And they would have said, oh, they sell a programming interpreters. Like basic and other languages.
That's it. That's what they did. That's what they were known for. They weren't known for anything else.
Okay, last year then I'm stopping. Hi, Well, that January. Microsoft decides, you know what, Albuquerque kind of sucks.
And why don't we go back home to Seattle, Washington, where our families are and we like the weather, it's not in the middle of the desert.
And you know, everything we know and love is up there. And so they relocate to Bellevue, Washington near Seattle.
And I'm about to show you a picture of Microsoft. At this time. And I always warm people.
If you are, if I have anybody that's pregnant. Are subject to spasms when they are disturbed or frightened, you probably want to look away and not look at this photo to the younger people.
Yes, this is what people look like in 1,979. So I hope you guys prepared.
Here it is the famous 1979 photo of Microsoft and its employees.
Okay.
Wow. I think the guy on the left in the brown, I have one exactly like that. It belonged to my dad roughly from this time period.
I still wear it. The child in the bottom left that looks to be all of 14 that's Bill Gates.
The child molester on the bottom right that looks like he's pulled up in a van with no windows and said your parents called get in the van I'm going to take you to them that's Paul Allen.
So notice the radical difference between Bill Gates and Paul Allen merely in terms of looks and then look at the rest of the people.
Now I don't know about you guys, but the dude wearing the sunglasses with the blonde hair looks serial killer to me.
If I saw that guy be like a serial killer. The guy on the right looks like Obama.
I'm sorry, he looks like a bomber. If the Unabomber did not, they didn't find him.
I would accuse that guy of doing it. My favorite, however, my favorite hairstyle is the dude in the top left with the mutton chops going down like that.
That's pretty nice. You gotta love that. Well, here's the deal. Virtually every single person on this list ended up retiring really wealthy.
Because they were the first people to work in Microsoft and they got lots of stock options and made out like bandits.
And many of them retired early, became philanthropists, traveled around the world, started up a couple of other businesses, but these guys did pretty good for themselves.
That January, Unix B 7 AKA the seventh edition of Unix is released. Called by some the first truly portable Unix and called by others the last true Unix.
400 page manual. That's back in the day by God when they made manuals with 2 400 page supplements.
The Colonel was just 40. Kilobytes. And this is the thing. There were only 50 system calls included in this thing.
I'm talking things like open read, close X to kill. I looked it up today, Linux today has over 300.
This was the last bell labs release to see widespread distribution before Bell Labs said, we're locking this up.
We're going to commercialize this. No more free copies. You need to pay us and we're gonna jack the price way up on this.
Well, the thing is, all modern Unix is not Linux because that's Unix-like, not an actual Unix.
All modern Unix is derived from the seventh edition. What about the others? Because once this started getting closed down, people started getting far more interested in BSD.
And I know I know Lee runs BSD on a lot of stuff. If I'm correct and so there you go that one of the reasons BSD took off was not only because of the innovation but because the other ability to run Unix's was shut down.
Here's the thing I thought you guys would enjoy. V, version 7 in 1979 introduced the following and this to me is amazing.
Again, At Auck, banner, the Born Shell. Calendar, Sharut, DIF, environment variables had not been in Unix until version 7.
False, Fortune, Genev, join, lint, make, said, tail, tar, test, touch, turn, through you mask, you time, and you UCP.
Again. I know some of you guys have used these recently. I was using tail today. On stuff.
You said every day in a bunch of scripts I've written. That take care of a lot of different things for me that I've written.
I use AK, Diff. I mean, I know you got TAR. I know you guys use some of these.
Some of you guys use make. And so on. Touch I use and test all the time I use test.
Bye.
Again, it's amazing to me that 1979, we have this stuff that again is still being used today.
That February. That February, Steve Jobs is 24 and worth 10 million dollars.
So Steve's doing pretty well for himself. That may, Visicalc, I know some of you guys use Biz account, short for visible calculator, was the very first spreadsheet program created by a man named Dan Brooklyn.
It went on sale for the Apple 2. And this was a very, very big deal. Think about it.
The think about how many people use spreadsheets every day. I use spread sheets. I know a lot of you guys use them. Some of you a lot more than others.
Some people's jobs, that's all they do is work in spreadsheets. And so the spreadsheet was invented by Dan Brickland in 1,979 to run on the Apple 2.
It sold over 700,000 copies in 6 years and as well as middle and as many as 1 million.
Over its lifetime. It was only available for the Apple 2 for the first year. And here's the thing.
25% of Apple twos. Which will remember 2,000 bucks. Were bought so people could run Viscount.
In other words, that was the first pillar app. A killer app is a program that is so valuable to people that is so useful that they will buy the computer or platform it runs on just to run the app.
And what happened as a result of this was It showed that computers were business tools. These were just toys.
These weren't just for hobbyists having fun. You are for people writing, right? I mean, writing, we got secretaries for that.
Why don't we need to worry about writing, right? But this showed, hey, this was an actual valuable.
Business tool and that's one of the reasons IBM said we need to maybe get into this market these these little tiny computers are selling and if we got into the market we could corner it.
That's a lie. The walkb was introduced. The world's first. Portable cassette player and perhaps more importantly and this this I didn't know this at the time the world's first lightweight headphones.
If you remember prior to this, you had the cans that went over your ear. This was the first time they sat on top of your ear and that was introduced with the Walkman. 200 bucks.
I have a very funny story to tell. In 1,981 or so I decided I wanted a Walkman too.
And I convinced my dad to buy one for me because I'd been very good. And I was living in Marshall, Missouri, a small town.
We had to drive an hour and a half to Kansas City. We went in the mall in Kansas City.
My dad bought me a Walkman too. I ripped it open, shoved batteries inside.
I'm doing all this is we're walking toward the, we left. I mean, we walked in, bought the walk in the left.
At the time, I didn't have any cassette. I didn't think to bring any cassettes.
I didn't think to buy any cassettes because I was young and stupid. However, The Walkman came with a pre-installed cassette.
One side was jazz, one side was classical, and it was like one song. One jazz song, one class.
So I shove the batteries into the Walkman too. I throw the plastic in the garbage as we're walking out the door.
I put the headphones on and I hit play.
All of a sudden, I take 2 steps outside and all of a sudden there is thunder booming on top of me so close that I ducked down like that like where's the thunderstorm it's right over my head And then I realized what had happened was The classical music had started and it started with a kettle drum.
Like that. It scared the crap out of me. My dad must have thought I was on drugs because I'm like, I read and I'm walking, all of a sudden I'm ducking down going like killer backs like that.
And the reason that story is struck me is because why did I do that? Because I'd never heard portable music before directly in my ear.
That was what was new about this. Even though I put the headphones on even though I hit play I hadn't yet really experienced what it was like to hear portable music.
Anywhere playing directly into my ears and that's what freaked me out. And that to me is very indicative of the power of devices such as this.
And now again, we don't think about it. We all walk around with a hair pod. Hey, our Android or iPhones listening music or podcasts.
Or whatever, it's no big deal. But for me and 1991, that ultimately taught me quite a bit.
That November asteroids comes out. The first game to allow players to record their initials. In the list of high scores.
That November. They see Seattle computer start shipping a CPU board. And on that board is a 16 bit Intel 80 86 CPU.
Great. Sounds great. They only have one problem. There's no operating systems that can work with that.
There's no operating system that can work yet with the 16 bit Intel 80 86. So they're shipping a CPU board but nobody's buying it because there's no operating system for it.
Now, Gary Kildall was supposed to have released a version of CPM for 16 bit Intel CPUs.
Called CPM, 86 in November of 1979. However, it was delayed for 2 reasons.
Number one, Gary Kilda was a perfectionist. And number 2, he was, it was delayed because he was working for almost 3 years on by far the most sophisticated compiler ever built for the Intel chipset.
So he kept putting off the 16 of the 16 bit version of CPM over and over and over. In fact, it wasn't released until November of 91 over a year later.
Why is that important? You're going to see why. That December. You guys okay with me going a little longer?
They're okay. I'm almost done. I'm just gonna get the that December probably.
Again, one of the most important demos, maybe second only to the mother of all demos occurred.
Steve Dobbs. Was going to, Apple was going to be going public.
And Xerox and many other companies do it was going to be a big deal. And Xerox said, we would like to buy some stock before it goes public.
From Apple. We would like to invest in the company and buy stock. And Steve Jobs said, we'll do that.
No problem. However, We want you guys to give us a demo of what's going on in Xerox PARC.
We want you to show us. All the cool technology inside. Well, the brass back in New York went okay.
Cause it's one of you mentioned earlier the people in New York running the company they had no idea periodically the people from Park would go fly to New York and demonstrate products that they'd invented and they were all kind of like Okay, like is it a copier?
No. Okay. And just they had this stuff in front of them and they didn't know what they had.
They didn't know what to do with it. And so, that's why the brass back in East Coast, we're like, yeah, go ahead.
You can see it. So they told the people there. Jobs and his people want a demo, give it to them.
Well, here's a short video talking about what happened. At the height of Apple's early success in December, 1979 jobs then all of 24 had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox Park.
And they showed me really 3 things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other 2.
One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn't even see that.
The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over 100 alto computers all network using email.
Etc, etc. I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by The first thing that showed me, which was the graphical user interface.
Okay. Yeah.
I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed.
What we saw was incomplete. They'd done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn't know that at the time.
And still though, they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well.
And within. You know, 10 min. It was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.
It was a turning point. Jobs decided this was the way forward for Apple. He came back and I will said ask, but the truth is demanded.
That his entire programming team Get a demo, this will talk system. And the then head of the Science Center.
Asked me to give the devil because Steve specifically asked for me to get the demo. And I said, no way, I had a big argument with these Xerox executives telling them that they were about to give away.
The kitchen sink. And I said I would only do it if I were ordered to do it. Because then it of course would be their responsibility and that's what they did.
The mouse. Is a pointing device that moves a cursor around the display screen. Adele and her colleagues showed the ample programmers an alto machine running a graphical user interface.
A selected window displays above other windows, much like placing a piece of paper on top of a stack on a desk.
The visitors from Apple saw a computer that was designed to be easy to use. I think most of what we got in that hour and a half.
It was inspiration. And basically just sort of a bolstering of our convictions that that I'm more graphical way to do things.
One would make the business computer more accessible. Then any Xerox executive understood it after years of showing it to them.
Basically, cop your hands. Just had no clue about a computer, what it could do. And so they just grabbed, grab defeat from the greatest.
Own our computer.
Actually, had the first GUI. In production. It's called GYM. Yeah.
How many times brilliant executive.
Well, I'm coming. I'm very good. You can hear you. Could have been the IBM in the nineties.
Could have been the Microsoft in the nineties.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
Yes, Scott, I remember it back then. I was doing training programs and we had. A Xerox computer with a gulian called gem.
Right. Yep.
GE. And word processor spreadsheet, whole 9 yards.
Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Yeah, I thought about putting Jim in, but I left it out.
But so what's gonna happen is result is, you guys all know what's gonna happen as a result of this, right?
The Macintosh is gonna happen as a result of this. And then Windows and then getting us to where we are today.
That's why I said it's probably one of the most important demos. Of all time.
Last thing, using it. Most people don't know about using that today. It's still around.
It's still there. Usenet was conceived by Duke University graduate students as a way to chat, share information, share files, and what happened was in the greatest Unix tradition, they realized, hey, There's all these pieces of Unix we can put together and create a brand new communication system.
Let's combine shell scripts plus the UUCP you needs to unit copy command and the fine command and we've got modems and those computer bulletin boards and discussion groups and you put it all together and you have Unix and for a while it was easily one of the most popular things to do on the ARPANET and the internet.
In fact, I remember it distinctly using a lot. Of course, it faded away with the growth of the web.
But as I said, it's still around. There are still people that use it. But there you go.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the sixties and seventies. It took that long to get through all that.
So that means I'll be speaking, for the next 4 months. About the eighties in the nineties and the 2 thousands in the 2,000 to I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Then the 2020. So you basically book me for the 6 month thing here.
Yeah.
That's fine.
I'll do it, but, you might wanna have other people in between.
Okay.
So. There you go. That's it.
That's the sixtys. I thought we might get through the eighties, but clearly that was insane.
Very good presentation.
I added a bunch of stuff in this. If I'm giving this to college students. Well over half of this is removed because it's either too technical form or it's just not relevant.
But with you guys, I not only left a bunch of stuff in, I added a bunch of stuff because you're a more technical audience, so you are older.
I know you guys would appreciate more of the history because many of you have lived it or have heard about it.
Yeah.
Seen it and so that's why it went on so long and there's just a lot of stuff to cover but you know I hope you guys enjoyed that.
Oh yeah, that was fantastic.
Yeah.
Well, cool.
Yeah, it's called walk down memory lane, Scott.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, and also helping understand what's going on today. That's also part of it.
Yeah.
Definitely nostalgia. But also, again, a lot of this explains. Why so many things happen today the way they do.
So now I will go around and see what you guys thought. Please try to keep it short. There are so many people so don't ramble for longer than like A 90 s or 2 min at the most, I will cut you off.
But we have so many people. I don't want to hear what you guys find interesting. Out of what we talked about tonight.
So I'll start with Wayne. Wayne, I'm going through the list of people here.
Wayne, what did you find, useful or interesting tonight in what we talked about?
Well, thank you, Scott. That was a great presentation. And it did bring me back, to a lot of history.
I live in the Bay Area. And, I have never met, some of these leaders, first hand, but I'm old enough to have, but, I I still have it in storage right now.
Nice.
Oh my god.
I have a couple of or one at least one bare Apple 2 motherboard. I built 5 of them at one time.
This was a collection of bare motherboards that had nothing on them. They were unpopulated that I got back in the early eightys.
Mid eighties, I guess it was, and, and dumped your diving and I took the motherboards and spent 2 weeks with a friend of mine going around the Bay Area picking up components that I needed to stuff in that board and built the board up.
Soldered to 2,000 solder joints built a power supply and fired it up plugged it in and it ran.
Nice.
And, so I was, ended up using that to design bicycle frames and I was doing circuit.
Cool.
Simulation on it and stuff. Would and. Yeah, so anyway, it's a, a great time and I'm really, really happy to have been a part of it at an early time.
And if you ever see Wozniak, I would tell them what you did. He probably.
Yeah.
Well, I think it was extremely cool. Cool, thanks Wayne. Greg, how about you?
Yeah. Huh.
Well, certainly I was in junior high school when I was first saw one of those home built. 80 80 computers with a 5 MB disk and it just absolutely fascinated me and started me in the whole industry.
So that's where I started.
Cool. Very cool. Alright, thanks. Appreciate it.
Kerry, What about you?
Kerry Shug. Hope I'm pronouncing that.
I think he left his monitor.
Oh.
Okay, Craig, how about you?
You say correct?
Yeah, correct.
Okay. So the funny thing is, The mother of all demos came up just last week.
And, so you see this was. I know you start with that. So, yeah, it was good.
Like fill in some gaps and what I've known of the history and you know, the 1984 so is where I kinda hit the with the story and got really involved.
Yeah. Me too.
Yes, they were.
For many.
But yeah, I wish I could have been there like those. The seventys were an amazing time in Just our industry and it's created everything we have here.
Cool. Excellent. Excellent. Kerry, you said you can't turn on the video, but can you turn on audio?
You don't need to be on video.
Yeah, the same has her own open headphone, preated walking by 11 years.
Huh.
You had open headphones? 11 years before the Walkman? Interesting.
I had one in college. Yeah, No. I'm probably better for that one because it was the first highsabel, the headphones.
I was open.
What were they called?
I have the 4 1 4 I think.
Sennheiser, okay, I'll look that up.
Right. I'll look up that and if I'm wrong, I'll change it, but thank you for that.
I thought we didn't have the, I probably hit the second, I said, No.
Cool. Anything else, Kerry? Okay, thanks. Robert Levin, what about you?
Well, I started with computers back in 1977 one was about roughly I'd say 1718 years old.
Huh. Great.
And basically I was playing games on her for a while. The next year of all things I took a programming course basic.
Huh.
And you know, my last year in high school. I love programming and I switch from mechanical engineering over to programming because I thought it was a cool field.
Huh.
My father, of all things, about
Roughly, I'd say about the last year I was in college getting my masters.
He actually last year high school based my father's building a computer, a Southwest technical products. 6,800.
It wasn't a bad machine. It was Again, primitive. Compared to what we have now.
But the thing was honestly that he kept insisting that machine language was the way to go. And basically I'm telling him several times.
High level languages of what you're gonna need because number one, you wanna move it from machine to machine to machine.
Right.
And basically that's what I tried to tell him and he couldn't get it. Years later, all things my last year in college, we got a PRCD color computer.
Hmm.
Not bad, but again.
Good for the time.
Yeah, sure.
Yes, it was primitive. And the next thing of all things I think about the first year, I work year after I got my first job of all things I bought myself a PC.
And I had that thing per 7 years.
Yep.
But all things are 2 86 later on later got up upgraded to a 3D 6 Labor of 46.
And finally, of all things roughly about I'd say, 2,002, I just simply realized I'm fighting now where I have to stop this.
That's why I switched over to Apple.
Right. Okay, stop. That's your minute. That's your 2 min.
Okay.
Oh, that was time and stuff. That was good. Nice little history. You never answered one question I had.
What's that?
When you start in 77, was that you said was at the radio check TRSA that you were talking about.
That was roughly about 1983.
What were you using in 77? The pet or the apple?
I was, no, no, I was using the software. I was not using anything in 77.
I was using time sharing system.
That's fine. I'm sorry to make that clear.
Oh. Okay, thanks. Okay, cool. Thanks, Robert.
How about you, Lee?
Talk about memory lane. I remember back in the seventies we were go every Saturday we go to the computer store down in Dallas and play with the Altares and all that.
Oh really?
But I got lucky. I was working for Ti at the time and we had Ti, many computers to play with.
Oh nice.
Oh gosh!
Okay.
Yeah. Then.
I don't think T is still the market anymore, is it?
Okay.
Not the computers. That was equipment. Yeah, they're they're more into chips and I don't know what they're doing nowadays.
Right.
Yeah, they've got a lot of analog chip business. And then, you know, right when I moved to St.
Okay.
Louis, I bought my, Heath Kit. A. I forget what it's called.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
It was the 80 machine. You all little monolithic And I had that for a few years.
Cool.
I looked at Zenas, I looked at Cape Bro, when I bought my first PC.
Sure.
I chose K pro because of all things. I thought it was a little bit better and was a little bit more compact.
Well, it was certainly well known.
Yeah.
Yeah, but the, had better keyboard.
Cool. Didn't know that. Never used one. Thanks, Lee.
Appreciate it. That's cool. Steve Stegman, how about you?
Well.
The story about Apple and Xerox PARC that down the famous demo That reminds me of something that happened a number of years later.
Windows Microsoft was building Windows. And of course it had all the same stick that, Apple did.
And Apple decided they were gonna soothe it shit out of them. Part and. Some people from Xerox called him up on the phone and says, are you sure you want to do that?
No, that's not correct.
We've still got platoons of lawyers. Is that not a correct story?
No, the famous story about that is, Apple had given Microsoft, I'll talk about this in the eightys if we get to it.
Apple had given Microsoft one of the very first Macintoshes because they wanted Microsoft software to run the Mac.
And wall, while Microsoft was looking at it, they obviously got a really close look at everything and how it worked.
And they had already started a partnership with IBM on to develop OS 2. Which are going to be the successor to DOS with the GUI.
Right.
And that had definite pieces. Of it in there, but not a lot. It was still very much closer to DOS than Max.
Right.
And then started working on Windows and when at when Jobs found out about that he went ballistic on Bill Gates.
Oh boy.
Okay.
You know how dare you copies and they did they sued them in court they've ultimately lost because the court said you can't copyright an interface but the famous statement Bill Gates said is, when Gates said you stole From us, he said, well, Steve, I see it like this.
You and I both had a rich neighbor down the street named Xerox. And I went to break in and steal the TV and found out you'd already done.
Yeah.
Okay. That was the, that's the story. About Nope.
Yeah, but Scott, one thing you really can't denigrate OS 2. For instance, it was the best OS author.
Oh no! No, I've been.
It was a good OS. I had of all things OS to warp.
Yeah, I've been reading a lot about it and you actually I added a bunch of stuff in in the appropriate places later.
Right.
About that how sophisticated it was but also what the business mistakes were that IBM made. It's getting stabbed in the back by Microsoft didn't help either.
But they also made plenty of mistakes on their own.
Of course, of course the fun point, what the fun part was when you're writing code, if you have a reference a null pointer across the whole operating system.
Nice, nice. Alright, thanks Steve. Appreciate bringing that up. Tony, how about you?
Okay.
I could.
Member berries. Okay. Did, I put stuff in the comments. You said that the thing about IBM, It wasn't, no, wasn't an idea.
Yeah.
18, they couldn't, they had to sell everything like, from. The full stack.
That was IBM. That was IBM. I was like.
Was IVM? Okay. So that, Isn't that Apple now?
Hmm.
Everything's vertically integrated. Yeah, you know, you buy.
Well, yes, yeah, I mean.
Well, Well, yes and no. Obviously you can run third party software.
Yeah.
I mean, There's other choices now. The only difference. They're not they'll only get them a block.
Yeah.
You know, Microsoft sells Mac software. And I mean, make sure there are number of companies that do sell, you know, Mac software.
So.
Okay. I mean, certainly we don't have the, we don't have the tight integration that IBM had.
That's pretty much it. Yeah.
At the late. You know, but yeah, Apple always saw it as, you know, there's a saying I'll quote later on by Allen K who worked at part people that are serious about software need to write their own hardware.
Yeah.
Or need to create their own hardware. Well, and even Microsoft took that to heart because they'd started the surface.
Obviously Google started that with the Pixel. And so on, so Alan Kay, like in many things, was proven.
About what he said Tyler, how about you?
Right.
Can't hear you.
Tyler can't hear you.
Mike's not working.
How about now?
No, it's working.
Yeah.
Well.
Wrong button. Oh, we didn't even get to the year that I was born. I grew up in the eighties.
That'll be the next one.
Right.
Of course.
Plain Oregon Trail and the Appalaches and the computer lab. I also remember, wasn't the Apple 3.
Or the IC. It was the IC. I have a teacher or 2 that actually had built a.
Small network within the system so we didn't have to play with floppy disguets. Does that crash the network?
Ouch.
Is that I turned off the server and turned it back on and wondered why it didn't work.
Lovely.
Hey. An idiot back then. Course.
Yeah.
Nice. I'm making a note to add Oregon Trail. To I'm adding Oregon Trail to the slides.
So thank you for bringing that up.
That's good. Thanks, Tyler. Young man? Okay, Gary.
And.
Well, my first.
How about you? And that was you in that bolt baronet in Newman picture, right?
Yeah, Gary's still muted.
Yeah.
That was Okay.
You're still muted.
Yeah.
Computer was this abacus and then ate a introduced me to her boss Babbage and he finally got me on something.
No, I've got a warm mind. We all know that. And so would always kind of fast at me through your stories.
Always kind of faceted me through your stories were the the The also rams, the failures.
And the guys we don't remember, but in a way we're great successes. And Roberts who sold out the company and then became an MD and obviously had a very fulfilling career after that.
Xerox who should have been the top of the world. Adele was a god boss, you're giving away the store here.
Okay.
Thanks for much what happened.
Yep.
Hello.
Yeah. So it would almost make it a great book. Maybe even just a semester long class of Yeah.
I want to see one. I'd love to.
Yeah, those that could have been, but, but didn't make it so.
Yeah.
There's one computer I thought that was very interesting at the time that I saw it, an ex the sorcerer.
Okay.
I remember that one.
Basically used cartridges to have of all things the basic. As well as other get in as well as games.
Huh?
I thought a nice idea. They did that with the KRI, say the color computer.
Wasn't that called the Atari 2,600?
Not quite.
No, I know. Okay, Stan. You're up. Stay in the.
Tell us what you.
Okay. Since I don't, I don't remember exact days for the most part, but however, 1948 when I was born.
Huh.
Dr. Wang, his college thesis was on core magnetic core. And I believe it's the same time the Atlantic magazine published an article talking about hyperlinks.
Are you talking about the Vannevar Bush as we may think?
Article that was in the Atlantic.
Oh boy.
Yeah. So I'm freezing up.
Oh boy.
Well, I think we lost. You there. Oh. Were you talking about the Van of our Bush article as we may think?
Okay.
Yes, I believe that was it. I think it was. I think it was in 48 also.
It was.
Okay. Yeah, if If I That's another place you could have started with that article because that was so pressing and also.
About summer. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I actually looked that up today and find a PDF so I can post that in the panel.
Oh nice, good, please do. Anyway, Steve, go ahead. What were you saying?
Yeah, later on. I don't remember exact year. 70 might have been 74, 76 somewhere in there.
I went back to my first. Computer convention out in California I flew out there and I think it was they said it was a fourth computer convention I'm not sure what you want what But I had gone there because at the time there was a heath kit.
Store in Hazelwood that and they were demonstrating computers with CPM. And I was interested in, but and I didn't know any this one computer I was interested in was ran either CPM or there was a different operating system and I wanted to go out and see what that operating system, how it functioned compared to CPM because I found CPM rather difficult.
And I went out there. What amazed me was I, well, the thing that amazed me that there was a lot of discussion I had overheard people were extremely interested in.
Text processing. There was a couple, they were court stenographers. And they wanted to do the recording with with a computer of some kind.
The other thing was I went to the booth for the computer that I was interested in. And stood in line behind the sky arguing with the guy behind the counter.
So wondering why the $3,000 he had paid them for 4 months earlier, he hadn't got a computer yet.
You know what it was?
So I didn't buy that computer. Bye. I don't remember the name, but anyway, I came back to St.
Louis. I bought a Heath Kit H. 89. And I would, and a printer.
And the printer weighed like 50 pounds himself. I did all the soldering on it first to practice.
I wasn't that good at soldering, so I did the printer first. Then I did the H.
89 computer. And I turned it on and let the smoke out.
Oh my god.
Oh.
Oh my god.
Yeah. And the good thing was it, offset the One of the connections instead of like this. I had it like that and consequently something else.
Active as a fuse instead of the CPU at the time the CPU was like almost $400
Oh.
Good Lord.
So rather I, so I burn up a like a 25 cent fuse instead of the CPU.
Oh, you're lucky. Oh yeah.
Yeah. And after I put it all together. I put it aside. I played with it for about a week and then a week later I went to Europe for 30 days.
Left it all behind.
Oh, that's funny.
This is why you're still the service.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And.
Oh boy.
We paid off for ya.
And, it's been kinda. Yeah, well I was very fortunate the the military paid for me to do my hobby the last 10 years I was on active duty So that was great.
You were fortunate. You were very fortunate.
Nice. That's right. Yeah. Well.
Yes. Yeah. And I, I can go, I can rattle on on about other things, but I only got 2 min, right?
Oh, I bet I bet you could.
Okay.
Yeah. No, that's great. Well, guys, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it.
Like I said, I'd be happy to come back and do the next decades. Let me know when.
I can do it.
I like a plan, Scott. We appreciate it.
Thank you. It's been a great presentation.
Absolutely. I love talking about the history and stuff with you guys because I know you're interested. And like I said, a lot of you guys lived it and can add stuff.
You ought to write a book on this.
Yeah.
I'm gonna There's a lot of really good books. I'd rather create a course.
Okay. I'm just throwing it out, man.
Oh, I know. I appreciate it. I really do.
I, I have attended some of Scott's courses at the university that you just, you know, to be there to help.
I took one course. I took, yeah.
Huh? Yeah.
And some additional information. I think Craig and I went to one. And he throw some really good information to the novices that absolutely know nothing about what they're doing.
Perfect. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I learned of all things, CSS first from Scott. A little bit.
And after that, I bought a couple of books that I learned CSS from.
Okay.
Very cool.
So I mean, they say I gotta go back to CSS because of all things I wanna do websites.
That's kind of retirement hobby.
Right. Right. Okay, I'm gonna stop you cause we gotta go it is
Okay. Yeah, it's 1010.
So I wanna thank you guys again. You guys are great, of course. Loved it and any time Gary like I said try to give me 15 min next time before I
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
We'll work on that guy.
Maybe you'll make like a you can make a smooth signal. Like the and I'll see it in the sky.
Okay, okay, Gary, do a book in.
I'm like, oh, Flu needs me. I'll get them too.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right. Thank you all for coming tonight. Thank you very, very much, Scott. As always, this was a fantastic talk.
We really loved it. So,
We, we got, we got to bring Scott back at least. A couple more times to go over the history.
Yep, yep, definitely, definitely. This was the monthly, slew general meeting. Today's date is Wednesday, May the thirteenth, 2,024.
Our main presenter tonight was Scott Graneman. March thirteenth. March thirteenth, excuse me, 2024.
Scott Grinnamon from Web sanity. He's also an adjunct professor at. He's also an adjunct professor at, very well, were you teaching semester?
Just get your muted Scott.
No, you're muted. Yeah. Oh, Lindenwood?
Webster and St. Charles, you always say, Linda, what I have never taught there, but I'd like to.
Okay, because you didn't know and I figured okay
I was saying you're a loser. No, I was just making
Yeah.
I was just making a pressure.
Okay.
Yeah. Okay. Alright, thank you very much. Thank you all for coming.
Good night.
Good to see youAlright