I'll be right back.
Florida. Okay.
Alright, so the book end announcement for the front of the recording tonight. This is the monthly meeting of the St.
Louis Linux Users Group, which is part of SLU, St. Louis, Linux, users group.
It is, Thursday. May the 16.th Is that correct? Yes, 2024.
And, it's, our usual day for the, Linux meeting. And, tonight our main speaker is going to be Scott Brandon, who's going to be.
Belling us all about the history of computing from 1980 through 1990. And before we do that, we'll have, our usual announcements and then a short Q&A.
See next slide. Okay. Pardon me, I've got the wrong glasses tonight, so it may take me a second sometimes to make sure I'm reading the Bye.
Reading the. Slides correctly. But, Okay, as it says.
St. Louis log Linux group is part of Slug and it's been a SIG for a long time ever since the early days of Linux.
So our meetings are always the 8th day after the general meeting. Which usually makes it the 3rd sometimes the 4th Thursday of the month but that's, when you can find us.
Let's see, this loop general group, it's 5 0 1 c 3 corporation.
And so it provides services to to the lug and email, web services. Other services like that.
The meetings are free, open to the public. If you come to 2 of our meetings in the course of a calendar year, you're a voting member.
And so yeah, exercise your vote. Next slide.
Okay, meeting time and central daylight time are 6 o'clock. We open the room you can do testing of your microphone your sound your screen sharing camera also you can just check chat with other members just like the old days we met at a restaurant or bar and just do idle shoot you out whatever comes early 6 30 which is just what we just passed we start the meeting that's where we
are now announcements talking about number of things and then a brief call for help before the actual main talk starts.
And about 6 45 6 50. We actually start the main topic with our main speaker. And then after the meeting, the Q&A 1st devoted to kind of things.
The main speaker talked about. And then we'll broaden it out back to just general Q&A of whatever people want to chat about.
We record the actual meeting. And the slide work, the video. The meeting will go into our archives hopefully within a few days and anybody wants to can pick it up out of the archive and take a look at it.
Next.
Okay, chairman of the log is James Conroy who I don't think is with us yet this evening.
I'm Gary Meyer. I'm RMC tonight. Our host is Lee Lammert, one of the principals in Omni Tech Corporation and Omni Tech is a great benefactor of our group.
They're providing the hardware and the systems to provide our web services. Our mailing lists, them, there sorts of things.
Have been for a long time, have a big thanks to Lee and his company, Omni-tech.
Production is our vice president, Stan Ricard. Stan is the one who does a lot of work putting things into the archives, cleaning stuff up, making the slides that we're reading off of right now.
And isn't a wonderful job of that for a number of years. Chat monitor. Most of you know, in zoom there is a function called chat.
It's usually a button somewhere at the bottom of your screen or the side of your screen And that's where anybody in the meeting can type in questions, comments.
Things like that. And a lot of times the actual speaker doesn't really have time. You know, while he's doing his presentation to read that.
So anybody would care to volunteer, we'd love to have somebody who just when they're here at the meeting could you know keep an eye on chat see if anybody's posting a question or comment that perhaps needs to be interjected into the conversation while the main speaker is talking.
Sometimes it's something you don't even have to. Verbally. Sound wise state, but you can just, you know, type in an answer.
Sometimes you need to. Alert the speaker. Hey, there's a question here that somebody wants to know what you meant by and what you just said.
But yeah, if anybody who care to volunteer, we'd love to have you. Topic wrangling.
That's basically somebody to help find speakers. Just something that might be interesting to the group. Okay.
You can kind of coordinate with some of the old gray beards running this thing and see you know what things we might be looking for and then Go out there and beat the bushes and to see who you might find.
Sometimes I go out and I look at other user groups around the country and see who's speaking, there are things and unless I steal their speakers but sometimes an invite for a speaker from another group works very well.
And then anybody carries the be a speaker. There's something, some topic you've been working on for work or your own personal interest and, you can put it together with some slides and make it into a You can do a 1520 min tutorial topic on the general meetings.
Or you can do 90 min main presentation. Or anything in between. So, you got any?
Inkling that you like to be a speaker, we'd probably love to hear you. So let me know or Stan or Lee.
And or James and we'll get you scheduled set up and give you any help we can.
Next slide.
And, 12 days from now, the 4th Tuesday is our new Linux meeting. The new Linux or new log it's an interesting meeting in that the rule there is whoever considers themselves the most novice Linux user gets to answer ask the 1st question.
And then everybody else takes a stay of it coming up with the hanches to it. Sometimes it's simple, sometimes you get different answers from.
You know, more novice people. Sometimes for another novice what you want to hear sometimes the old gray beards in the group, can give you the long technical history of what's going on.
People want to hear it that way. So, it makes some real good interesting conversation. So, and then after that 1st person's question is dealt with, they go on to the next person who considers itself the second most novice in the group.
Oh and that's not to say that those of us who are been doing this for a while, as I say, the old gray beards, please come to the new Linux meeting.
It's actually a lot of fun to hear, both what you know maybe the more more new people have to say or ask.
Or how some of the new people view what's going on they may have a totally different take and a lot of times the other you know, old experience people.
You know, it's amazing sometimes the conversation you can get in between, you know, these different groups through different people.
So it makes for some really good discussions. Other groups, associated with us. The Slack meeting.
It follows on the 1st Thursday of each month. That's the St. Louis area Computer Club.
Which I think we're pretty sure has the credentials that that's the oldest or the longest running computer group in St.
Louis. And the thing there is it's really more of a hardware group. So we will even talk about Microsoft Windows.
And it's, you know, why does your hardware work or not work or what might you need your hardware.
And again, it's no formal presentation at either the new lug nor at the slack meeting it's all just whatever people come in and want to talk about, wanna ask about.
Still makes some real interesting meetings. This loop general meeting itself is the second Wednesday of each month. And we have been amazingly consistent even through the age of COVID.
We haven't missed a meeting. I don't think in years. Yeah. And, So thank you to.
Zoom, which Omni-tech been providing recently and other. Oh, others have provided before that and so we've been working out.
Anybody have any other announcements?
Something going on here in St. Louis or those of you who may be calling in from out of town.
Anything that you know of out on the net or just of interest in your neck of the woods?
Okay, anybody thinks of it later? You know, raise your meet hook or just say something and You can interject here.
Okay, now we'll do a call for help. So just anything you're working on that's been bothering you, intriguing you.
You found an amazing solution. Or, God, you hope somebody else has an amazing solution. Now is the time to bring it up.
And to start that off, I'm gonna throw it over to Lee here for a moment, because the server that our group runs on, we call it BAC.
Dot slu.org and it's running Debian 10. And we need to upgrade it.
At least through 11, maybe to 12. And, so basically we have a team of volunteers who are getting together to do that.
I throw it over to Lee and you can tell us more about it. Not much going on right now.
We're still kind of stuck in a holding pattern. The biggest issue we have. Is planning to migrate mail man.
Which is our list server. Currently we have a path from 10 to 11. But at that point it breaks because mailman 2 goes away.
In Debian 12. And there's all kinds of different versions of mailman 3 out there.
Along the way we've got some problems that we've identified on Bock now that we're looking at.
But, I think, I mean, is decide to pull the plug in the next week or so and upgrade back 2 to 11 and see what breaks.
If anybody's interested in watching or You know, even if you, have never done it before, sometimes it's nice to have a pair of eyes that can watch what you're doing.
And take notes. Because personally and one of one of my things I can I type fairly fast and I can do 10 things in 15 seconds.
And I don't remember what I did. And if it works, fine. If it doesn't, I try something else.
Yeah, yeah. Really sometimes that's a Very useful thing if somebody else taking the notes, it makes good material for both the person taking the notes to learn and also for other people.
When they're reading the notes to learn. And that's it It's also encouragement for any of you.
You don't think this is something you can't do. If you are more of a novice user or if you're a personal user, you know, you just Run your own computers at home and in the corporate world where there's multi-user systems There, you know, multiple people are coming in, which is what we're running.
And you know you can't be down for you know a day while you figure out how to do the upgrade and oops this didn't work I'll just have to reboot it rebuild it again and so you kind of sit down, plan it out, come up with some ideas.
Okay, here are the things you do and what order. So yeah, for the people at home.
This gives you a little bit more of a feeling of what you do need to do to take care of a multi-user system.
For the people in the carpet environment if it's not something you're doing every day but you want to tell the boss yeah you know I'm I'm ready to move over and work on the part of the CI admin team that's going to do.
Upgrades to the OS or upgrades to different software platforms. This is something you can stick on your resume.
And okay, I kind of, you know, are taking them doing this with a team of people before, so.
Yeah, just more encouragement to volunteer for that. Next slide. Oh, anywhere, where should people?
Volunteer, how do they volunteer?
I'm gonna. I guess poke chat, but I also had a request for people.
If anybody will deign to admit they know anything about LDAP or directory services. S.
I'd love to chat.
Oh, okay. Okay.
Okay, good. People answer in chat or you can Just voice it here.
The question in chat is wondering about putting a hypervisor under, they're presuming they're talking about Bach.
Bach is a virtual machine, running on a system with a hypervisor. Part of the current plan is to take a snapshot.
Do test upgrades. On a snapchat or clone. Document the process once everything is proven out.
Put a magic date on the calendar somewhere. Take a final snapshot. Clone and apply those procedures and hopefully everything goes well.
And we continue running on the updated one and if not we restore the snapshot look at the notes we took and go well huh Wonder why that broke.
Let's improve this process. Prince rather, lather and repeat. As necessary.
Nice. Alright. Thank you, sir. Okay.
Let's see, I think I've mentioned all those groups already, but there's the separate naming.
Conventions for them, the dot orgs. They basically come back to the usually the same server.
We've actually run it on different hardware at different times, but, right now, I think we're all, all ones on.
There's graphical calendar. There's the address for it. And it's basically a Google calendar and, we we definitely put our own meetings on there They show up in the one color.
Yeah.
Okay. And if I got something in the way there. Stand by.
There we go. Okay. So, our the meetings that we ourselves do, all the subgroups that I just mentioned are all in red.
There's 2 other divisions out there. One is the St. Louis. The groups that are physically located here in St.
Louis. And then there's also one that, is just talks that we think are interesting you know that would be interested to our people that may be in Dallas or Silicon Valley or London are Taipei so we'll put talks from around the world out there in that area.
We haven't quite got that working perfectly yet. We got to do a little bit of job at dividing it up.
And we also need to do a little bit of more work. You know as the age of COVID has ended here some groups have come back to life.
We tried to keep groups that were around before the age of COVID on the calendar hoping they would. Come back.
Some of them have, some of them haven't, so we're still kind of cleaning that up.
So, Okay, we'll get it all cleaned up soon. But, so yeah, and if anybody has any ideas or something that sounds interesting, and you think it'd be good to have on the calendar, send those suggestions to editor.
It's loop.org and we will put it out on the calendar. Next slide. Presentation archives.
I said earlier, we record or try to record all of our talk. We tried to get the presenters to give us their slide deck.
And we put those recordings slides out in the archive the archive is actually shown on the homepage slube.
Org our SEO linux.org and you can look them up by monthly subject and pull them up as you like.
And. Oh, and there's the URL. Right there. As I say, there also you can just find it by looking at the homepage.
Alright. Hey, getting some live demos of how to do. Slide editing.
What's your hourly rate for doing that?
Yeah.
And can we get a faster circuit? Complain to this technical people. They wake them up at 2 am.
Just make sure you're willing to answer their questions.
So. Okay. Yes, yes. Okay, and as far as the mail systems is Lee was mentioning before, the discuss.
Mailing list is basically there you can same type of questions. Points you make here. In the Q&A during these meetings, they go on all the time and they discuss list.
So, by all means, you're encouraged to, join that mailing list and you can.
Host your questions, comments. It's amazing sometimes the answers you can get there. The announced list the one right above that it's a very limited traffic basically rather than just anybody posting anything they want we kind of regulate what goes out there and it's usually just announcements of upcoming meetings or things that we think are important for everybody to know.
So again, probably. Most likely have to send something to editor or somebody else who's helping to run that list to get it out there.
But you can subscribe to it. So you will see it. So that could be important. The steering committee, we understand that some people don't like the sausage being made.
So we try and keep the the discussions of the group of people who run this thing. This group of meetings we do most of that work in the steering committee so we don't have to burden everybody here for the technical information tonight with how we got this pulled together for tonight.
So So that's that's that. Let's see next.
Okay, before we go. Our members ask and sometimes provide answers. From the novice to the graveyards.
All experiences valued and that really is true. It's amazing sometimes, like I say, somebody who's not been doing something for years, the fact that he finds it a new and useful thing.
A lot of times a great beards have forgotten that and so yeah it's good to have everybody here.
Various cases are interesting and instructive. If you don't ask a question, doesn't give us a chance to come up with answers.
So by all means, please ask questions. And, it's always just, if you don't make, if you want to make a comment, what did you break recently?
Sometimes it starts some really interesting discussions. And, what have you been trying to do? Came up with strange results.
And what was surprising and usual answers to your problem. Always will make good little topics to talk about.
So next.
Often focused on Linux. We have had talks about BSD, which is kind of the other major flavor of Unix.
We also talk about just about any sort of open source or open standards software. Sometimes we talk about hardware.
We also had what 2 presentations from Microsoft in the last 6 months. So, Yeah, we get all kinds of different speakers and top topics.
See.
Oh, and yeah, talks. Range from the simple to the more profound or significant. More timely.
So yeah, different things. We hope the presenters will come up with some slides in advance PDFs notes.
And we'll put them out the archives, people to pull down. Presenters. Their choice they can either ask the audience to be interactive and just constantly pepper them with questions during their talk.
I hold until the end, so we'll find out what Scott prefers tonight. For his talk and after the main speaker we'll have the general discussion of any other top but 1st who don't continue on with questions to our speaker.
And when that wraps up, we'll go back to this general Q&A. So. Let's see, with that.
Let's see. We can you, tell them a little bit more about what may be coming up with that Bach upgrade?
Oh.
Alright, it is. It is.
Well, we've got, Okay, we don't need another hypervisor because we already clone the machine so we've got a clone of Bach.
And they're both updated in parallel. So we can do anything we want to with Bach, we can snapshot it, we can.
Hello it away and restore a snapshot. If it breaks, we can roll it back. That's the whole starting point.
What we have in the shop here is A number of actual actually i 7 machines Good. I don't know, 32 giga memory in or something like that.
And basically you've got H CPUs hyperthreaded. Plus enough memory to run 4, 5, 6, 7 different Linux PMs.
Certainly you can't run a GUI without those few resources, but. We can run a number of, you know, server style VMs.
And that's what we got. We got a BACK and a BACK 2 on the same host.
If we if that if we figure out that's not gonna work. We can always spin up another host with, you know, for example.
Bach is on a machine with a Zen hypervisor. Actually, the last server I built, I used KVM, which was new for me.
But I ran into a couple of problems which I'm still working on solving on another host. So we got a lot of options here and.
You know, basically which need to decide what the path is and start down it and see if we break in.
Yeah, Okay, I'll do, Quick reference, just, as we were starting out this evening.
There's a little bit of chatter probably before we turned on the recording about rust versus, zig.
As languages and how useful they are to replace the C language or complement the C language. In systems development and I should have allowed more time here at the beginning to get back into that discussion.
But I'm sure. Hope the people who were talking about it will be available here at the end.
And we can pick up on that Russ versus SIG. Programming languages. Sounds like it could be an interesting little chat.
But first, st it's time for our main presentation of the night. Our presenter Scott Graneman.
Long time member of our group, former vice president. Scott is a principal with web sanity.
Was done with that company for quite some time. Scott is also a book author. My favorite book of course is the one he wrote called the Linux phrase book.
And Scott is also a faculty member. Who's been teaching at local university. Scott remind me, is it?
Which university is it?
Webster and St. Carl's Community College.
Okay, okay. Alright, so with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Scott.
Good, I forgot my clicker.
And he'll tell us all about the Okay. Yeah, back in 1980, would anybody have forgotten the clicker?
Back in 1980 would have anyone known what a clicker was.
Hmm.
Back in 1980, I'd be putting plastic. Sheets on a overhead projector, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, or it would be a hard wired quote unquote remote on the slide projector.
That's before my time.
Got. just a quick question, Scott. I think, you, did or did not want people to interrupt you during the talk with questions.
Well, I'm gonna talk I'm gonna say that thanks for interrupting me, Gary.
Okay.
Let me share my screen.
Real quick. Let me share sound because I want you guys to hear some stuff. Alrighty. Yeah, I am going to be talking this time about the 80, s last time I did 68 to 79.
This time I'm doing 1980 to 1989. We're going to be covering certain years, a lot more stuff than others happen.
Now, of course, this could be a 10 or 12 h presentation if we wanted. So I've had to leave some stuff out.
I've had to include other things in more detail than others. But as I go through here, I know I've got a bunch of people here that have lived through a lot of this and have strong memories about this.
Or, you know, I forgot something and they want to let me know or they want to talk about their experiences with it.
And if you do that, we're going to be here till tomorrow. So my advice is if I say something and it like sparks a memory or gets you a question or something like that, write it down.
Because any of you that have. Ever seen me talk? No, at the very end I'm gonna go I'll take questions.
And then I'm also gonna go around and ask you what you found most interesting. So be prepared for that as well.
So if you guys could just hold comments and questions. Until the end that would help us get through everything and that way we'll have hopefully more time to address everyone's thoughts.
And questions and and comments and so on. So anyway, I just wanted to get that out of the way, right out of the way.
Now last time I talked about why I think that it's important that I talked about why I think that it's important that we look at history.
So I'm repeating this slide from last time. And this quote, which I really love, history at its best is the most subversive discipline in as much as it can tell us how things we take for granted came to be.
And I've mentioned this. To you before, my students, they're all, you know, 18 through 2223 about that.
And they don't know any of this stuff. For them, Apple's always been one of the world's most popular biggest companies.
Microsoft's always been that operating system Windows that a lot of people use. The internet's always been there.
Smartphones have always been there. If you wanna see a video that somebody across the world published 5 min ago, no problem.
If you want to communicate with somebody across the globe, no problem. And so for them, oh, in video games, you know, video games, course, you play video, everybody plays video games, right?
We all play them on our computer. We all have these PlayStation consoles and so on to them.
It's just part of the air they breathe. They don't think about how Things came to be the way they are.
And so what I try to do in my classes, what I'm trying to do here is help kind of excavate that so that we do hopefully many of us remember what happened that got us to where we are and for those of you maybe you'll learn some new stuff that you didn't know that will why the world is the way it is, certainly technologically, but in other ways as well.
So that's hopefully those are some of my goals that I hopefully will be able to achieve for you guys tonight and why I'm always so excited.
To talk about history. I think it's completely fascinating. So with that said, let's start out in 1980.
This is a big year. This is a very, very, very big deal. A lot of stuff's gonna happen in 1980 that directly lead to 2024 today.
So. So start with the This isn't 1 of the big things, but I think it's great.
I know a lot of you guys will appreciate this and I wouldn't be surprised if some of you had this.
The Cassio C, 80 calculator watch goes on sale. Now there had been earlier calculator watches in the seventys, but this was the one that actually got to be and so became the most popular watch of its kind.
It became even briefly a status symbol. Believe it or not. And so I know some of you guys, I'm sure, had one of these or or wanted one.
On top of that. That January, the very 1st use Nix conference is held and 80 people they thought we're gonna get about 80 people to talk about Usenet this thing that's been out only a little while and instead 400 people show up.
Because Usenet was a big deal and got to be a really big deal. Really until the advent of the web.
So this is one of the earlier. Popular widely used internet services using it. I know some of you younger guys have probably never ever used it ever.
It kind of died in the ninetys got overrun by spam. We had the web build up and kind of cause it to go away.
It's still around today. I know some people that still use it, but it's nowhere near the as popular as it was once at one time.
Now, use that actually was a big deal, certainly in terms of language. So certain terms that we still use today originated on Usenet starting with in 19 8 90 well not starting with but internal September and the idea was that every fall in September all the new college kids would come to campus and they would get on the nascent internet.
Back then, the ARPANET and or the internet by 93 and they would flood Usenet and you get all these people that didn't know the rules, didn't know the etiquette, were asking the same questions over and over and over again.
And then that would just go on and on and on. And that became Eternal September. The terms flame, flame war, flaming, that's all earlier than 1984 thanks to Usenet.
Godwin's law, which we've actually discussed on the mailing list on the sloop mailing list a few times.
1st originated 91 on Usenet and Godwin's law is that the longer a discussion goes on the more and more likely it gets that somebody will get compared to Hitler or Nazis.
And that still goes on today. The problem is we are comparing people now to actual Nazis.
The kill file you know you tell oh that person's comment send them to the kill file so you don't have to look at them sock pocket puppet which is somebody that is acts like they're speaking for something but they're not.
They're in under the control. So somebody that seems to be saying why Exxon is a great company.
They've benefited everyone when in actuality it's an Exxon employee speaking as them, of course, spam, spam 1st originated on Usenet, not email, although now we pretty much only associated with email, but spam did originate on Usenet.
The whole idea of trolling people are being a troll and purposely saying things designed to get people upset and worked up is from 1,990 on usnet and finally the use net death penalty where people are banned.
1993. So that March of 1980. A word processing program comes out. Now last time I showed you guys a bunch of word processing programs and I talked about one called Wordstar that got to be really really popular among the different variable operating systems that were around then.
Well, now, and this comes out of Brigham Young University in Utah, that march, a word processing program called SSI star WP goes on sale for the data general mini computer system.
Which by now is completely obscure. No one really knows about that anymore. Well, this was way more advanced than Wordstar and it gained lots of praise because one of the things about Wordstar was that you saw all the key commands on screen and they basically took up the top half of the screen.
So all the key commands plus more that you could run were taking up the top half of the screen.
Well, this, SSI WP program got rid of that. And instead use key commands.
And so, and it came with a nice thick manual so you could learn all the key commands you were supposed to use and because it removed all of those menu, all of those.
Key commands that were displayed it had a much cleaner interface a sparser interface and people really like that because now they could focus on the words.
More easily. And so it started to get quite popular. Fortunately, the name SSI star WP doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, so it's a good thing that very soon after they decided to change it to Word Perfect.
So if any of you guys ever use Wordperfect, this started back in March of 1980. That April second, this is a big deal.
This one little decision. This one little decision right here is gonna have incredibly major consequences. On April second, Microsoft, which remember up till then, had sold programming languages.
That was it. So if you had a 1 of the 1st PCs Okay, like the Altair I talked about last time, the really 1st PC in 1975, you'll remember that the thing that got Bill Gates and and Paul Allen started as Microsoft was that Bill Gates and Paul Allen started as Microsoft was that they were managed to develop the 1st version of could run on the Altair and it was purchased and
they that's how Microsoft started and that really got them into the business of producing programming languages and compilers.
For different architectures, different mini computers and personal computers back then. So that was their business. So again, if you talk to a nerd in 1979 early, 1,980 and said if you heard of Microsoft.
They probably had and you'd say, okay, what are they known for? And they'd say, oh, they make compilers and programming languages. That's it.
That's what they're known for. Well, on April second of 1980, Microsoft decided for the very 1st time to get to the hardware business.
And they decided, and this is gonna sound kind of weird, crazy to people now, they created something they called the Z.
80 soft card. Okay. And the reason it was called the Z 80 is it was running the Zylog 80 chip.
Which had been around since the seventys and they finally about a month ago. Announced they were going to be discontinuing.
So that chip has been selling for over 50 years. It's a very low power chip and where we mostly saw it in the last many decades are on controller devices like, you know, sprinkler systems and things like that.
It's a very low-cost, low-power, simple chip that was perfect for things like that.
Well, remember Apple Twos back then were using MOSTECH processors. And the Apple 2 users were very, very limited.
You could only run software written for the Apple 2. But you'll hopefully also remember that there was an incredibly popular operating system by the late So, and these called CPM.
Originally written by a guy named Gary Kildall and his company Digital Research, which originally was called Intergalactic Digital Research, because it was the seventys.
But then later just digital research and CPM was widely widely popular. Not quite a standard, but.
Kind of close to it. And so there was a lot of software written for CPM. Well, Microsoft's realized that a lot of Apple 2 owners Like their Apple 2 software, but God should be really cool if they could also run software written for CPM as well.
And so Microsoft's soft card included the Z. 80 chip, the Zylog 80 chip as well as you can see other controllers and so on.
And that allowed Apple to users to plug it into their computer and now they could run CPM programs and CPM.
So they could run both Apple 2, the operating system, and the programs, and they could run CPM and those programs.
And it was popular. It was $350. Now back in 1980, that's a lot of money.
It's a lot of money now, but it's a lot of money in 1,980, but it was popular in Microsoft became known for that as well.
So now in addition to programming languages, now they're also getting known for the soft card as well.
Well, in order to create it they wanted to bundle CPM with the soft card and Gary Kildall and Bill Gates had known each other a while.
Even as a very very young man Gary Kildall was a few years older than Gates and Allen.
They had known each other. They were both in the business and in fact at 1 point Gates had asked Gary Kildall for advice and the 2 had hung out and they had dinner together at Gary's home with his wife and they'd even talked about merging their companies.
My God, think about what would happen then if Microsoft and digital research had merged, what would have what would have occurred.
But Gary Kildall said he always felt like Bill Gates had a smile on his face, but he was trying to pull something over.
That he was, you know, always looking out for himself and he was trying always to get the best deal he could get for himself.
So he said, you know, we were friends. But kind of friends, where you, you know, make sure your hands on your wallet the whole time.
And so, Gates said, we, we want to buy. Of CPM and Gary Kelldall they talked back and forth and they finally agreed that Microsoft could license 10,000 copies of CPM for $2 and 50 cents each.
And so that was the deal they finally read. So now CPM is bundled along with the Microsoft soft card.
So you don't have to buy it separately. When you buy the soft card it comes with CPM included.
Well, at the same time, there's a small company in Seattle where Microsoft is relocated called Seattle Computer Products and I'm talking based on what I've read, it was one guy Ron brought Rod Brock and then a few maybe one or 2 other people that's it and one of those people was Tim Patterson.
Who had recently graduated from college with a bachelor's in computer science. So Tim Patterson was now working.
He was like the employee at Seattle. Computer products basically. And when Microsoft was developing the soft card, They needed somebody to kind of, you know, write programs for it and test it and prototype it and things like that.
And so they turned to Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products to do that.
So now Microsoft had a relationship with Tim Patterson who works at Seattle Computer Products.
They've worked with them. They like him. They thought he did a pretty good job. So there's now a relationship there.
Well, Gary Kildall. Was by this point. You'll remember the one of the last things I talked about in the seventys was that Intel had finally released a CPU that was 16 bit.
And this was a big deal. We were finally going to be moving from 8 bit processors to 16 bit processors.
And Tim Patterson had actually gone to a presentation by Intel where they said, hey, we've got this 16 bit coming out and he got really excited about it and went to his boss Rod Brock at Seattle Computer Products and said, hey, there's this new 16 bit chip coming out.
We should put that on cards. And sell them to people so they can install them in their computer and now they'll be able to have a 16 bit chip installed.
And use that and Rod Brock thought that was a great idea. So Tim Patterson worked it up and they created the card and they had the Intel chip on it.
They had a 16 bit trip on the card. They made the cards they were trying to sell the cards and by the way the cards had Microsoft Basic included but the problem was There were no 16 bit CPUs.
I'm sorry. In operating systems available for the card. So they have a 16 bit CPU card, but there wasn't a version of CPM that ran on 16 bit cards.
Processors rather. Now Gary Kildall was supposed to have that done. He was working on what was going to be called CPM, 86 for the Intel 80 86 processor.
Well, Gary Kildall was an amazing programmer. This is all in assembly language, by the way.
Was supposed to be just an amazing programmer. He documented everything. He'd actually taught programming, before.
So he was really, really good, but he was also very methodical. And very careful and very slow.
And he had been promising CPM 86 for a while. But, he been working on The what was called by far the most sophisticated compiler ever built for an Intel chipset.
Because he had this idea that if they if they could create a compiler for The Intel chipset, then people would suddenly see these PCs as more than toys because they could actually write software on them.
And so he was hoping that this new compiler he was writing that would work with Intel chipsets would then help kind of get the market going and growing because now people could actually use these PCs to write software.
So he'd been working on that. Now originally he thought it was going to take him 9 months.
It took him 3 years. To do. It was a very difficult problem. He had to do a lot of work on it.
And again, he was careful. He was methodical. He wanted this code to be as good as possible.
So it took a long time. Well, he finally said CPM, 86 is going to be ready in November, 79.
It wasn't ready. He was just finishing up that compiler. He was getting close, but it wasn't ready.
Well, by this point, Seattle computer products has been trying to sell this 16 bit card without a 16 bit version of CPM working and they're really hurting sales obviously.
They're stuck with this product. They're having trouble selling because the operating system they're having trouble selling because the operating system they need isn't there.
So that April. Again, it was supposed to be out in November, 79. So, you know, 5 or 6 months later.
Finally, Rod Brock, at Seattle Computer Proxis, I want you, Tim Patterson, to write our own sixteen-bit operating system for the CPU cards we have and we'll use that instead of CPM, So Tim Patterson says, okay, no problem.
And he spends the next month or 2 crapping out what they called Q. DOS, which stood for quick and dirty operating system.
Okay, so Q does is what they what he creates. Now, it's not supposed to be that great.
They're like, look, we're just gonna have this. So this is here until CPM comes in that we'll switch over to CPM.
This is just a stopgap so we can sell these brick and cards that we've invested all this money in.
Well, Patterson decided to make it as close to . PM. As possible because that way software would more easily run on it meant for CPM and it would be similar to what people already knew, so would be more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, friendly to people used to CPM.
And he says, quote, I took a CPM manual that I'd gotten from the retail computer store for $5 or something.
And use that as a basis for what would be the application programming interface, the API of my operating system.
So he's not saying and I don't think he did I don't think Tim Patterson, you know decompiled CPM or looked at the source code of CPM.
That there seems to be absolutely no evidence for that whatsoever. But he has stated he got the manual. He sat there and he read through the manual.
He looked at CPM. And wrote an operating system that behaved as closely to CPM as he could get.
Now, there's some complications with this though. Excuse me, one second. Let me move this so I can see it.
That will help me. There's some complications with this, however. Okay, 1st of all, that manual that he bought, I have a copy of those manuals.
That CPM manual on every single page of that manual, it said all information contained here and is proprietary to digital research.
That is literally at the bottom of every single page. And then the title page. Of the manual says copyright 1979 all rights reserved no parts of this publication may be reproduced, no parts of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, stored in any retrieval system, transcribed, stored in any retrieval system, are translated into any language or computer language.
In any form, by any means, magnetic optical chemical. I like that one by the way. Manual, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the prior written permission of digital research and corporate.
So. The question comes down. How ethical was Tim Patterson? In his creation of the quick and dirty operating system.
Now he says, I never looked at the source code. I don't think he did. I don't think he looked at the source code at all.
But there is no doubt, and I'm going to show you more later, that he did as close of a clone as possible.
With one exception, he didn't like the disk file system. So he wrote Fat, the file allocation table.
To do that. That's pretty much the difference. But the interface as you'll see many many many things are extremely similar to what DRI and Gary Kildall were doing.
That might may, the Rubik's Cube was introduced. I had one, certainly back then.
It sparked a craze. People all over the world, Ruby's Kune became hugely popular, sold, I believe, a couple of 100 million in just a few years.
Now, this shocked me. There are 43 quintillion possible configurations. But only one solution.
And I read that if you took 43 quintillion Ruby's cubes and covered the entire surface of the earth, it would go 270 cubes high.
That's how many cubes we're talking. If you were doing 43 quintillion, one for each possible configuration.
And by the way, that's configuration just twisting it that is not counting prying the things off and putting them in places they otherwise couldn't have got.
Yeah.
That is legitimate twisting is 43 quintillion. But here's the thing. No matter which of those 43 quintillion you have.
Any of those can be solved in 20 moves or less. They've proved it. Originally they thought it was 26, then they lowered it to 22 and just recently they lowered it to 20.
They now can prove that you can solve any one of those 43 quintillion configurations. D moves or less.
Now back in the day being a young nerd, I of course had one and screwed around with it and I bought a book.
And actually, this is hilarious. I didn't have time to add this slide in, but the this book about solving the Rubik's Cube sold 6 million copies in one year and was the number one bestseller for the year because so many people bought the book to learn how to solve the Rubik's Cube and I bought the book and I learned how to do it and back in the day
I could get it done and easily less than a minute if not before. And of course my parents thought I was a super genius.
Actually, I read the book. It's something I people still today. I'll do you guys probably have heard this.
I'll sit down and help somebody with their computer and they'll be like, you guys probably have heard this.
I'll sit down and help somebody with their computer and they'll be like, you're a genius.
And I always say, actually, I just read the manual. That's really pretty much it. If you read the instructions, You could probably figure it out yourself.
So that's all I did. I was able to solve it. I read the book. Well, June 11th of 1980.
Bill Gates decides to hire Uncle Fester. I'm sorry, I mean Steve Bolver.
Okay.
He decides to hire Steve Ballmer who he'd met at Harvard. Steve had gone out to be a work at Proctor and Gamble.
So he, Gates drops out of Harvard. Bill, Steve Ballmer stays in school.
Graduates with a degree in business, goes to work at Proctor and Gamble and Microsoft is starting to get a little bigger.
It's still not a big company, but it's skating. And Bill says, you know, we need to hire somebody that really can just focus on business.
That's it. And so he thinks of his friend Steve Ballmer and he go and Steve Ballmer made one of the smartest decisions of his life.
You know, Bill Gates says, Hey, would you like to join my startup and leave your safe job at Procter and Gamble?
And Palmer says, absolutely, and he does it. And he becomes the 30th employee Microsoft, the 1st business manager, his yearly salary is 50 KA year.
In 1980. 50 KA year is a damn good salary for 1980, but he gets 8% of Microsoft ownership.
Which is why he's 1 of the richest people now in the country because of those decisions right there.
And in fact, I read he sold 4% a number of years ago and that made him his 1 billion.
From that sale and he's held on to it ever since. So, Balmer is now working with Gates at Microsoft.
Well, now, probably the most important thing I want to talk about tonight is gonna happen in terms of the history and how we got here where we are and that is that July Ibm's corporate manage committee.
Turns to bill low that's who built that's billow right there Ibm's director of the generals systems division lab and they say we've been hearing a lot about these PCs that you know we don't do.
And these PCs though, there's a market there we think. And we want you to examine the idea of IBM building a PC.
We want it to top out at $1,500. And we're going to give you one month to create a proposal explaining how we could do that.
Go. And so low assembles a team of 12 people inside. IBM to work on this and he separates them.
The, Bill Lowe's office is down in Boca Verton, Florida.
You know, pretty far away from Armonk, New York, where IBM has its headquarters and he likes that.
He wants the people down there to be isolated so they can work on this with out, you know, layers of corporate manage management and interference.
Okay.
Where they can make decisions quickly and figure things out quickly. And so they task him, you have one month to create a detailed proposal explaining how IBM can build a PC for $100 go.
Oh and by the way after you do that if we like it you're gonna have one year to develop the computer so we can sell it.
So one month in a year from now. We want to sell an IBM PC, assuming your report makes sense.
So low goes down there. Well, the thing is almost immediately, L gets promoted. And so a guy named Don Estrich who've been working closely with Lowe is now appointed to lead what's called project chess.
Project Chess is the internal name for the IBM PC. And so there that's Bill.
That's Don Esteridge right there. He is now the leader and he's an excellent choice.
The other people respect him. He's smart. He's a good manager. And so he gets this little skunk works team going down in Boca Raton and he said when asked later why he did that he said if you're competing against people who started in a garage you have to start in a garage.
Well right there that tells you that this guy was not your average IBM or thinking, you know, we need the huge corporation and all the layers of bureaucracy to do anything.
And back in the day, when IBM developed any new thing, it took between 4 and 5 years.
To get this to market. Well, again, they're trying to do it in a year and a month.
So Estrich knows that we're gonna have to operate completely different than how we've always done things at IBM.
Well, in order to meet that deadline and the budget, Estrich and his team decide to reuse current IBM hardware where it makes sense.
They're gonna take this hardware from the then current system 32 data master that IBM is selling.
So the expansion bus, the display, the monitors, the floppy interface, the keyboard, that's all coming from current IBM hardware.
But they realize This is gonna they're gonna they're gonna have to look outside the company for these other pieces of the PC.
And so in particular, they decide we're going to go to Intel and we're going to use the 80 88 CPU.
So right there, totally different. Up till now, IBM had always done everything itself. They made all the hardware they made all the software they did the service contract.
Well, for this they decide we're going to go outside the company because we don't have time to develop this and we need to do this in a hurry so they decide to turn to Intel for the CPU.
And to help companies create software that will run on this. And peripherals. They just decide to go with a modular architecture where they're taking the IBM hardware, but they're using other off-the-shelf parts and kind of creating this Frankensteinian PC.
Which means that people will be able to replace different parts. There'll be a market for peripherals and add-ons and things like that.
And they decide to publish technical references and source code to help people work with this the PC as well, which again is a different sort of thing for IBM to use.
Well, one of Asperger's key lieutenants is a guy named Jack Sams. He's head of software development.
For project chess and they realize early on Sam certainly does we need a programming environment with basic basic is the one we have to have basic and we need an operating system.
We don't have an operating system. We're not going to use one of ours. And here's the other thing IBM thought.
We don't want to deal with the software. We want somebody else to deal with it so we don't have to because IBM is thinking the money is going to be in the hardware.
When the IBM PC comes out, we're gonna take over the market. Yeah, people will be able to do other things with the computer, but everybody's gonna want an IBM PC.
And so we're gonna make all the money in the world from the hardware. The software is a headache.
So we're gonna let somebody else deal with that. So we need to find somebody to do the programming languages and we need to find somebody to do the operating system.
So on July 21, st 1980, Sam's calls Bill Gates up. He's in Seattle and he calls Bill Gates up and says, can I stop by for a cat?
And he explicitly says to Gates, don't get too excited and don't think anything big is about to happen.
Okay.
So that day Sam's goes in and meets with Gates and Balmer and he's being burnt.
He makes them sign a nondisclosure, but he doesn't tell them about the IBM PC.
He keeps that quiet to the vest. Now, of course, there were rumors everywhere. That IBM one day was going to be coming out with the PC, but that wasn't what he was there to talk about.
He didn't mention that. He was very cagey. So they had to start a nondisclosure agreement, but what he was there for he said was, you know, I just want to find out information about the PC markets.
Not because we're interested in doing anything there, but I'd like to learn more about the PC market.
Can you tell me about it? And so Gates and and Balmer proceed to say, yeah, the PC market is growing here and it's doing this and it's doing that.
Now, the funny thing is when Sam showed up at Microsoft. Bill Gates came out to greet him.
And Sam's met him and then said, Where's Bill Gates? He thought he was the office boy.
Because he looks so young. He was only 24 but he looked like he was about 18 or 19.
So Sam's didn't think Gates was Gates. He didn't think Gates was the, you know, president of the company.
He thought he was the office boy, but he said by the end of the day, he knew he had met the most one of the most brilliant minds that he'd ever met and when he left by the end of the day after talking to Gates and Balmer and seeing Microsoft, he was extremely expressed, impressed with the company and Bill Gates in particular, and knew that he wanted to work more closely with Microsoft.
Well, Sam's quick, I'm sorry, Estridge quickly gets the report together. It's been a month and shows it to IBM, it's been a month, and shows it to IBM corporate, and they come back on August 8 to IBM corporate and they come back on August 8th and say do it.
We like it. We want you to proceed. You are now going to develop a PC. You have one year to do it.
So by August, 81, we wanna sell the IBM PC. So they're under a crunch.
So August 8, th they're ordered proceed on August 21.st Sam's goes back to Microsoft.
To talk to them about licensing basic. Because remember, that's what Microsoft was known for. So he goes back, I mean, he was already vastly impressed and knew we need to work with these guys.
So he shows up and this time he makes them sign another NDA. And says, okay, we're developing a PC.
And we are gonna need programming languages for that. We want to we want to license basic from you. Now some people within IBM and said we just need to buy it.
We want to buy it. And again, Estridge and Sam's and others in IBM like no we don't because that way the responsibilities on us.
So instead, we're gonna license it from somebody else. And that went over. Okay, fine, fine.
Do that. So he's meeting with Microsoft to talk to engage about licensing basic and of course they're thrilled.
Absolutely thrilled. Oh, absolutely will license basic to you. They think this is going to be a big deal.
But what's funny is, is remember that Microsoft soft card that included CPM on it? Sam's is confused.
And says, oh, by the way, can we also license your operating system CPM from you as well?
Because he assumed that Microsoft owned CPM because it was on the soft card they were selling. And Gates has to say, no, no, we don't own CPM.
My friend Gary Kildall, digital research does, and later Gates said IBM hadn't done their homework.
Cause he was like, that was that's a pretty, you know, they should have known this.
So. You know, and Sam says, oh, I'm sorry. How do I meet this Gary Kildall?
And Gates says, no problem. I know him. I'll call him. And in front of Sam's, he calls Gary Kildall and says, Gary, I'm referring someone big to you, treat them right, they're gonna be there soon.
And so Gary Kilda was like, no problem. And they set a date that IBM is going to show up to digital.
Research talk to them about licensing. CPM. Now, You might be thinking, wow, Jack Sam's, he was impressed with Microsoft.
That was really a big deal. Right? Until you find out things like this. So Ibm's new CEO, John Opel, when they told him and they reported back to him and said, oh, we're working with Microsoft.
We think they're going to be heavily involved. He responded, Oh, Mary Gates Boys Company?
So the CEO of IBM calls it Mary Gates Boys Company. Why? Because John Opal and Bill Gates mother Mary Head served together on the National Board of the United Way.
In other words, Bill Gates parents were pretty well off in Seattle. His dad was a well-off attorney.
His mother was on the National Board of the United Way. This is not a rags to Richards riches story for Bill Gates.
Okay, like it was for Steve Jobs for instance or Wozniak. Gates had started life out doing pretty well.
I'm not saying he was vastly wealthy, but he had all the advantages. He had wealthy parents, you know, that took care of him.
His mother's on the National Board of the United Way with IBM CEO. So I think that probably helped a little bit.
Well, August 21st is when they had met with Microsoft on August 23rd IBM shows up at digital researches business in Portland.
And to meet with him and they were supposed to meet later in the day, but IBM showed up at 10 am.
Several IBM guys. Now imagine these are got East Coast guys. That show up, they're wearing the IBM classic suit with tie, dark tie, dark suit.
Digital research, Gary Kildall, Gary Kildall was a West Coast guy. He liked to fly planes.
He liked to drive fast cars. He liked to have fun. He liked to drink beer and party and have a good time.
Yes!
Now he loved to program. But he thought, you know, life is about enjoying yourself when they were making money hand over fist.
And he was like, obviously that's great, but he was about, you know, life short, let's have a good time, you know, let's stop working and have a party, the people at the company here, let's have cookouts.
Let's go to the beach. You know, if you need to leave to take your kid to school or pick them up, go ahead, go, that's important.
So that's what he was like. So when these IBM guys show up at digital research, people are wearing genes.
You know, people are wearing sandals. They have long hair. I mean, this, they must have seen like other hippies to even though it was 1980 to the IBM as well Gary wasn't there because he wasn't planning to be there at that time.
Gary was a pilot and he would often use his plane to fly shipments of CPM and manuals and other things to people all up and down the West Coast.
Because he was like, it's quick, it's easy, I can meet the people that are buying it, get to know them, understand them, create a relationship.
And so we often did that. Well, he was gone that day. Now the thing is, I spent I have spent hours and hours and hours trying to get all this story nailed down for you guys.
Okay, there's a lot of different ways this story is told. So I've read all sorts of different accounts and tried to read things that seem real to me that make sense, that have a timeline that have people corroborating it.
And one unfortunately. If you look up Gary Kildall in this meeting. Bill Gates is quoted saying, I said IBM to Gary and Gary was off flying in his plane that day.
Making it sound like Gary blew them off. And said, you know, God, it's a beautiful day.
I'm gonna go flying screw. I screw these IBM guys and that's just not true.
That's simply not the truth. Now of course Bill Gates won and though history gets written by the winners, but that is just not a true story.
He was on a business trip. His wife knew that. His wife Dorothy, who was a lawyer and she took care of the business.
Gary Kildall wanted to program. He wanted to do the tech. He didn't want to deal with the business end.
He didn't want to deal with management. He hated when he had to do that. He wanted the business to be like a college where people were learning and writing and having a good time and helping each other and exploring ideas.
And not be run like a typical company where he had to constantly intervene with management and business and money and things like that.
That was what Dorothy did. Dorothy as the attorney handled the business end, the contracts, the money.
All that stuff. Well. He knew there was going to be business stuff, so he's like, well, my wife can take care of it until I get back from this business trip I'd already planned to do.
And so they walk in and Dorothy's there. And the very 1st thing IBM does is say you need to sign our NDA before we can do anything.
And the, it was later. Described as, quote, a ludicrously far-reaching non-disclosure agreement that basically said You can't tell anybody about anything we tell you at all.
And, you can't use anything we tell you. But we can do whatever the we want with whatever you tell us.
And I wouldn't sign that as a lawyer. She said, I'm not gonna sign that.
That's absolutely ridiculous. And so they went back and forth and back. Okay, back and forth.
And she consulted another attorney. And they were like going, we don't want to sign this.
This is extremely problematic. And so what happened as they said Harold Evans in this excellent has an excellent chapter on Gary Kildall.
Whole story in a book called They Made America. That's worth your time. Dorothy would not sign Ibm's broad agreement without knowing what IBM wanted.
IBM wouldn't reveal what it wanted unless they signed. Bill Gates signed that agreement because he had nothing to lose.
Because he didn't have an operating system. And so again, meanwhile the IBM guys are getting pissed off.
You know, why won't you sign this agreement? They signed the agreement. Why won't you sign our agreement?
And they're not doing it. Well, finally, Gary gets back about 3 in the afternoon. And Gary gets there.
And he signs the NDA. He's like, let's just sign it. Gary was very non-legious.
Gary did not want to do court stuff. He just wanted everybody to be friendly and again colleagues. And so Gary said, let's sign it.
Now the story that others say is that Jack Sam says, oh, he never showed up. We went ahead and had a meeting.
There's this guy, Gary Kildall, didn't even show up.
The thing is, Lots of other people at that meeting were like, yeah, Gary Kildall was at the meeting.
He, you know, you talk to him, he was there. Now others say, oh, he never signed it.
He refused to sign it. And so, IBM left and said, okay, never mind. It just differs.
Now, it seems very clear to me he did sign it. Because there are people who attest that Dorothy showed them the signed NDA 6 months later.
She showed it to people that worked at digital research and said, look, here's the endDA he signed, here's the date, April, the 23, rd 1,980.
So it seems very clear to me that Gary was there. He was in the meeting and he did sign the NDA, which is why the meeting occurred.
And so IBM sits there and says, tell you what, we're gonna buy, we'd like to buy CPM for you for $250,000.
Now that part doesn't make sense to me. Based on the fact that IBM in every other case said they wanted to license, they didn't want to buy.
So that could have been an exploratory offer or something. I don't know if they were serious about that.
Kildall countered with. I want to license it to you at $10 a copy. Now, what happened next?
Different stories disagree. Some people said IBM said, nope, buy. Other people, Gary Kildall said, we had a handshake deal.
They said, okay, that sounds good. We'll get back to you. They shook hands on it and they know they thought it was a done deal.
Others said IBM did not shake hands, but said we'll think about it.
Yeah, the other funny thing about this is that Gary and his wife and kids were leaving the next day to go on vacation to the Caribbean.
When they showed up at the airport.
A bunch of people that they had met the day before from IBM were in the airport because they were flying back to Florida.
And they were actually going to be flying on the same plane. And so Gary and Dorothy and others all say that they had a great time on the plane flight down.
There were no hard feelings. Everybody got along great. They discussed ways to get the CPM to work with IBM.
Gary says, well, I'm sorry, Dorothy says one of the IBM guys.
Even kissed her on the cheek. Now Jack Sam said that never happened. But then you find out, Jack Sam said, well, I actually, I wasn't on the flight.
Because I had flown elsewhere on the West Coast that day. So I actually wasn't on the flight.
So like I said, Jack Sam's. In his memory I take with a big grain of salt and if you've ever seen triumph of the nerds Jack Sam's is interviewed in that show.
And he says, I never met Gary Kildall. I didn't I know I never saw he goes if Gary killed that was in that meeting he didn't identify himself.
That's what he says in trying for the nerds. Later, much later, he said, well, maybe he was there.
And so what I think happened is Jack Sams is either extremely forgetful or thought it was better to spin things a certain way or is lying.
I don't think that his version of events when it comes to interactions with digital research and Gary Kildall are as accurate as other people who have multiple witnesses attesting to them and evidence.
At any rate. What we do know is, is that Jack Sam's wanted to work with Microsoft.
He liked Microsoft and he was very frustrated. By the whole non-disclosure agreement thing with digital research.
And regardless of whether there was a handshake deal or they said we'll think about it or whatever, he went back to Microsoft.
And said, look, I didn't enjoy that meeting. I'm not impressed. What can you guys do for us?
Do you know somebody else we can talk to? About an operating system? And Bill Gates said, oh, we'll provide you with an operating system.
We can do it. They didn't have an operating system. They didn't have an operating system at all.
He completely was just kind of like, we'll come up with one, we'll provide you with one.
They didn't have one at all. It was pure gambling. On his part that they could find something in time.
And remember, By this point, they have less than a year now. This is already late August. Right?
Time is ticking. And so Gates is just said, we can do the operating system. And IBM said, really?
Tell us more. So they continue working on their report about what can Microsoft provide to IBM. Well, around that same time, while all this is going on.
Tim Patterson finishes his work on Q. DOS. Point 1 1. And has it all ready to go to be shipped in September.
So Q DOS is done, ready to go. It's now finally going to be shipped in September and this is beautiful.
Tim Patterson, remember, knows the guys at Microsoft and he thought, you know, they were really cool how they had me work on the prototype of that with them for their soft card and we've been talking to them about this the the 80 86 card that we're selling because they're providing basic you thought you know what I'm gonna head over to Microsoft across town and show them Q.
DOS and see what if they have any opinions about it. And he shows it to Balmer.
And from what I read, Balmer almost craps his pants and says, Bill! Get in here now!
You need to see this. And they come in and see basically, oh look. Here's an operating system that runs on Intel 86.
And is written to be a near clone of CPM. The timing could not have been better. And like it was perfect timing that Patterson would show up.
When they most needed it after they committed to providing an operating system to IBM. And so September 30.th
Gates and Balmer fly to IBM in Boca Raton and officially deliver their proposal for how Microsoft is going to provide software for the IBM PC and they say we will provide you with an operating system.
Keep in mind. Patterson and SCP didn't know anything about this. They hadn't talked to them at all about it.
Okay.
Okay, they just filed it away. So they're like, okay, IBM, we are going to provide you with an operating system for programming languages.
Basic will be banked into the ROM of the machine. So it's built in so people can write programs in basic, but we're also going to provide not in ROM, COBOL, Fortran and Pascal, and we're going to provide other software, Microsoft Plan, and Microsoft Adventure.
There's going to be a game included with this. And IBM says. Okay. They look at this proposal.
It makes good sense to them. They like it. So it seems they're on their way, but they have a problem.
They don't have an operating system officially. Now that's September, 10 megabit per second ethernet 10 base T is finally ratified as a public standard.
And now Ethernet can begin really taking off at this point. And eventually displacing Ibm's token ring and other networking technologies.
That October, Pacman is released.
Oh Thank you.
Because I got
And for the arcade. Within one year there are a hundred 1,000 machines around the world 1 million dollars in quarters have been spent, many of them by mean.
He's driving me crazy We will.
Yeah, come on. Okay.
This song is in the top 40. Packman fever is a top 40 some. I bought the 45.
Happy.
Oh, I hear.
Whoa!
And I became an excellent Pac-man player. I eventually, with one quarter, sat in Walmart, in Marshall, Missouri, my hometown, taking, I took a bench from my mom's kitchen with me to sit on.
And I put a quarter in and I played for over an hour and I got a score of 1,125,000.
Before my hand was so cramped and tired I died. And had to die. And, I was pretty impressed and proud of myself.
That's still like my greatest video game achievement ever. So I basically hit my high point about 1,980 81 when it comes to video games with that high score.
What?
Okay, so. That November, so in September, IBM has delivered, sorry, Microsoft has delivered their proposal that November, IBM says, okay, we are officially hiring you.
You need to provide basic and languages and software and this operating system. Now keep in mind, it's now November.
This PC is going to be sold in August. They have about 9, a 10 months to get all of this together and they don't have an operating system.
Okay, on top of that IBM agrees, will license it because remember they don't want to deal with this.
And Gates presses them and they agree to let Microsoft sell their operating system to other manufacturers. Because IBM thought the money was going to be in the hardware.
Bill Gates thought the money's going to be in the software. And that's why he wanted to retain the rights to sell license rather DOS to other companies out there.
Well that November, Apple releases the Apple 3, that's how they stylized it. The Apple 3 was released for businesses.
Now, The thing is, and Steve Wozniak has a wonderful 10 page discussion about this in his autobiography I was.
He said that was the 1st computer at Apple that had not been desired by engineers. It was instead designed by marketers.
Yes.
And they decided that this Apple to yeah businesses are buying it but it's really a lot of hobbyists.
We need to target the business market which is 90% of the market. So we're gonna make an Apple computer for the business market.
And so they released the Apple 3. It's $4,340. Which is equivalent to 13,013.5,000 in 2,019.
You get a 2 megahertz CPU, 128 kB of RAM expandable up and a 5 and a quarter inch floppy built in which you can see there you could go all the way up to $7,800 if you really speced out the machine.
If you want it. Now I said it was designed to be a attractive to business users. So The Apple 2 had only supported uppercase letters.
Well, this now supported upper and lowercase. The Apple II and most other devices had only a 40 column width.
This had 80. It included as you can see on the right there a numeric keypad. It included that built in 5 and a quarter and floppy drive and I thought this was pretty crazy.
The user could select a screen font and a layout either Courtney or Devourjock. So you could change the layout of the keys.
Now you'd have to move the keys around. But that wasn't that big a deal, but you could choose a layout for your keyboard and your own screen font.
That was a big deal. Now, as I said, it was 80 by 24 lines of text.
Now what was interesting was, that you could run this in different graphics modes. So if you wanted the maximum resolution, you could run it in 560 by 192 if it was in black and what.
That's the side.
If it was 2 80 by 1 92, you got 16 color graphics mode. And if you ran it with 16 color graphics mode with no limitations, you got 1 40 by 1 92.
But the thing is the graphics capabilities of this were very advanced for the time. And so I managed to find there was actually a demo video that Apple would include with the Apple 3 and I found that video and I.
Took a few excerpts out that I wanted to show you guys so you get an idea how advanced it was.
Now again, to us now, we're gonna be like, really? But for the time for 1,980, this was really, really advanced for a computer people could buy.
So, for instance, this.
That was very advanced for the time. Okay, animation, charts, all that stuff. Now to understand the next thing I'm going to show you guys, I got to go back to the 18 seventies.
So on June 19, th 1878. A guy with an interest in photography in science named Edward Mooie Bridge.
That's how he spelled it. Eat Wired, Muybridge. Took a series of photographs.
At Leland Stanford's farm and yes, it's that Stanford, Leland Stanford would go on to found Stanford University and give them the land and so on.
Well, he was a very wealthy landowner and loved horses and had bunches of horses. And he was very interested.
There was a debate at the time and it been going on for a while. And that was, are all 4 portal feet of a horse are all 4 hooves ever off the ground at the same time.
And people said, if they are. It's going to happen when the horses legs are spread out.
But it been impossible to tell. Because there was no way to really capture it and see it. And so Leland Stanford said to Edward Muybridge, Is there any way you can figure out to settle this debate?
And after a lot of experimentation and work, Movie Bridge figured out a way to trigger cameras.
In a row like that. And so on June 19, th 1878, Leland Stanford's mayor, Sally Gardner, is red and a gallop.
Along and passes those cameras 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011. 12 is stationary.
And the resulting photographs you can see right there. And they were therefore able to prove, yes. A horse when it is galloping does take all 4 whose off the ground at the same time, except it wasn't when they're spread, it's when they're in.
And you can see that in the 3rd photo. The second and 3.rd Okay? And this shocked people.
The other thing that shocked people was the horse had always been described as the most graceful of animals. And it's, you know, the way it gallops is truly amazing and beautiful and exquisite and it's incredibly graceful.
And then they looked at these pictures and were like, That's not always that graceful like that 4th picture not graceful not graceful looking And so they were also shocked by that and instantly these pictures became a big deal.
And he actually took several and started selling them and they were printed in books and this was like a big deal.
Well.
Back in 1865 a guy named William Lincoln had invented the zoo. And the zoetrope was before film.
Okay, before movies, rather. And so this created the illusion of animation. Because you would line the inside of the zoetrope.
With images kind of like you would with a flip book. And then you would spin it and you'd look in through the groove through the groove there and you'd look in through that narrow groove and it would look like it was animating as things went by.
So you can see there in that one a lion is jumping on top of a horse or over a horse.
It's unclear. And so you would spin it and look through that. Little groove and you would see it moving like you would with a flip book.
And so that's the Zoe Troll. By the way, the, Francis Ford Coppola later named his studio Zoetrope Studios after this device.
Well, Mooybridge takes the photos and he puts them into a zootrope. And people can see animation of horses moving.
And you could, so here are the photos numbered. And so people are able to see what looks like these horses.
Galloping and these then are not only does he carry it in zootrope, he then publishes the zoetrope strip in the 18 eightys and sells it so people can see this stuff.
So that's as close as we can get to what happened in 1878. When that horse went by.
Now, I think that's all very fascinating. Why am I telling you this? Because the Apple 3 system demo contained a tribute to that technology a hundred years earlier.
And in fact, Andy Hertzfeld, who's 1 of the best programmers Apple ever had and was instrumental in the Macintosh wrote this and actually used Mui Bridges, original images as an inspiration.
And so there you go. So this was explicitly calling back to that technology from a hundred years earlier.
Again, Apple linking the liberal arts and technology as they always have.
There you go. I thought that was really cool. Now, this sounds great. The Apple 3, I mean, it's expensive, but man, this computer sounds like a real cool thing to get in 1980.
The problem is Steve Jobs hated noise and computers. Always did. And he insisted on there being no fans or vents.
In the device. And instead to help with the heat they had an aluminum bottom. And they were they thought the engineers thought, oh, that will act as a heat sink and dissipate the heat.
No. It did not. And so what happened was the machine would overheat constantly. In addition, they'd used a new form of wiring for the motherboard and hadn't had time really to test it and use it.
And so consequently, that would overheat. As a result of the computer running hot, And it was so bad that chips would actually work their way out of their sockets.
Sure.
When the machines overheated. And it was so bad that this was literally what happened, literally true, when people called Apple and said I have an Apple 3, it's not turning on, the graphics aren't showing up, the advice, this is real, the advice was pick it up by the back, lift it up 3 inches, and drop it.
Because that would cause the chips to go back into the machine, hopefully. That was tech supports advice, official tech support advice.
Drop your $4,000 computer so the chips get reseeded again. Well, it didn't work.
Okay.
And in fact, Steve Wozniak and his autobiography talks about the fact that his brother owned a computer store.
And they never once got an Apple 3 that worked. They would call people at Apple, engineers would come over, work on the machines, and they still never got them to work.
The 1st 14,000 machines were lemons. Utter complete lemons and so bad that Apple replaced them all free of charge.
That's how bad this was. Well, the problem was by then they letter, they later improved it.
2 years later, they really are 1 2 years later, they released the Apple 3 Plus and it actually fixed a lot of these problems.
But by then, everybody heard what a lemon the Apple 3 was and nobody touched it and so They in the entire lifetime of this machine.
They only made, there was only created less than 50 Apple 3 specific software programs. That's awful.
In 4 years before they finally discontinued it. They only sold between 65 and 70,000 Apple threes.
That's it. So this was an utter bomb. And what's even more ironic about this was that Apple's management was convinced the Apple 3 would completely blow away the Apple II.
And the Apple 2 was good. They were just like, we're not going to do any more on the Apple 2.
We're just gonna let it wither away. And you know just let it die slowly because everybody's going to move to the Apple 3 well you know in a way to target people who had Apple twos and it invested in Apple 2 software.
They said, okay, the Apple III does have the capability to run Apple 2 software. So if you on Apple 2 software, don't you worry, you buy an Apple 3, you'll be able to run all your software, no problem, except that management had the engineers at special circuitry to block any of the advanced features the Apple II had.
For instance, this is mind-blowingly awful. The added, they purposely crippled the Apple 3.
So if you ran it. In Apple 2 mode, the most RAM you could access was 48 kB.
Even though the machine had far more than that. So if you ran it in Apple 2 mode, at that point, no matter if you had a hundred 28 K RAM, 2 56 K RAM, the most RAM you could access in Apple 2 Move was 48 K which Made no sense because most Apple II programs required 64.
Which meant none of the software you purchased early would run on this device. And so it was an utter complete failure and really just a disaster for Apple, but it was of their own making.
So that's the story, the, the sad story of the, of the rotten to the core, Apple 3.
That December Apple goes public. They sell 4 and remember they'd only been a company since 1976.
They were founded in 1976. 4 years later, Apple goes public. They sell 4.6 million shares at $22 a share.
The company is therefore valued at 1.8 billion dollars. By the end of December 12.th
As a result, It generated a hundred 1 million dollars. More money than any IPO since Ford in 1956 and instantly within the company and without it created 300 millionaires more than any company and without it created 300 millionaires more than any company in without, it created 300 millionaires more than any company in history at that time.
Now, that's amazing. Steve Jobs was 25 years old. He is now worth 217 million dollars.
Now. I always like point this out. You know, Steve Jobs was a brilliant person. He knew it from a young ache.
He was often the smartest person in the room. Not always, but very often. And he knew it.
He was very sure of himself. As you all know. Very young. And you guys all know when you're you've read about this certainly in history and by celebrities now when people are young and they get really successful really fast it's very easy for them to go to their heads.
So Steve Jobs was also pretty, already pretty arrogant and sure of himself. Now he's a 25 year old, we're 217 million dollars in 1980.
So you can imagine the size of the ego at this point. Well, this is something that's kind of surprising to people nowadays because all of you guys know.
And if you get hired by Facebook or Apple or Netflix or Google or Microsoft or even smaller companies.
One of the things you're gonna get is an employee stock options. That's expected nowadays.
If I get hired at a public company. There as part of my employment, they're going to grant me stock options.
That's 1 of the things all pretty much all public companies do. Well, back in 1,980, that wasn't the case.
Back in 1,980, stock was reserved for founders and executives. Regular employees did not get stock.
Well, again, I encourage all of you guys, even if you're not an Apple guy, you really should read Steve Wozniak's autobiography, I was.
It's really worth your time and you guys love it. It's just fun. He's a good guy.
Now, one of the things I did when I talked about the 70, Si talked about people that were good guys.
That did good things. And I talked about Ed Roberts, the founder of Alt, the Alter, who went on to be a country doctor.
And one of the other best guys. In this entire history of the technology industry is Steve Wozniak.
He is a good guy. I don't know. I've never read anybody that has a negative thing to say about the guy.
Well, in his biography, I was, I want to quote a little bit at length because this tells you the kind of guy he is.
And I think what he did was amazing. So let me quote What Wozniak said.
I came up with something I called the WAS plan. Any engineer or marketing person could buy 2,000 shares from me at a really low price of $5.
Please remember it went on sale that day at $22 a share A share. Wozniak was said, I'll sell anybody 2,000 shares for $5.
Oh!
Almost everybody who participated in the WASP plan, which was about only 40 people. Only 40 people took him up on the offer, ended up being able to buy a house and became relatively comfortable.
I'm glad of that. Then there was the matter of some of our earliest employees who didn't get stock at all.
Randy Wigginton, who'd helped me do the floppy disk, had been there before we started Apple even.
Chris says Benoza, Don Cocky, and my old name are Bill Fernandez, were other examples.
These employees weren't just around. They offer the inspiration that allowed me to do great stuff. I thought of them as part of the family.
Part of the family that helped me design the app on an Apple 2. I gave each of them stock worth about a million dollars.
And so that's WAS. That's why I think, you know, he's 1 of the good guys because he was like, I'm getting enough money.
I've got more money that I'm gonna know what to do with. We should reward the regular people that are part of this company and again remember nobody else thought like that time Steve Jobs when he told him about it thought he was crazy.
And ask him why are you doing this and he said because I want to help people and jobs is like okay.
I mean, they thought it was a crazy thing that he was doing. I think it's just like I said, one of the beautiful things.
He's done a lot of really cool things, but that's 1 of the most beautiful thoughtful things to do that and buck the trend at a time when that just wasn't the case.
Well, that December, Seattle computer. Renames Q DOS to 86 DOS and Microsoft knocks on their door and says, hey.
We heard about this really cool 86 DOS you got. Can we buy a non-exclusive license from you for $25,000.
Which by the way gives us the right to market it to other companies that we don't know of yet.
But we'll think of maybe, possibly. And Rod Brock and Patterson were like, you want to license?
No.
This quick and dirty operating system for 25 grand. Okay, great. And so they absolutely sold a non-exclusive license to Microsoft for that.
They didn't know it was gonna go to IBM that they were gonna turn around and take their $25,000 investment and license that to IBM and make money off that they had no idea.
Well, 1981 rolls around. At this point, Gary Kildall has licensed CPM to between 100 200 companies including MSI, digital microsystems, Hewlett-packard and Xerox, as well as many, many, many, many other companies that have since disappeared.
Yeah.
It's doing very, very well. That April, haze, and I'm sure that name rings a bell for some of you guys like me, Hayes micro computer introduces the smart modem.
This ran at a whopping 300 It was the 1st external modem. Motives had always been built internally before, which meant it can now be used with any computer.
No.
With the right software. Well, when they introduced that. This sound all of a sudden starts appearing.
Yeah.
Oh
You
I figured that would bring, some memories back for some of you guys who hadn't heard that in quite a way.
At least I hope you haven't. Heard it in quite a while. And you young guys, yeah, that's what we all had to list till we wanted to get on line back then sucked.
So, here's the thing. Hobbyist soon figured out, hey, if we use some software we've written and combine it with this smart modem, we can create these things called bulletin board systems.
And those become the 1st place people can get online. Really and chat with each other and create relationships online and share information and software and code and things like that.
So this really launched the start of Bbs's, which one of the primary means of communication online for decades.
And in fact, by 1982, Hayes is selling a hundred 40,000 of these a year.
So it ended up being a great business until it wasn't. That April, Adam Osborne introduces the Osbourne one, the 1st portable PC.
For $1,800. And that's it right there. Now what you see is the keyboard.
That goes on top when you close it and that's where the handle is. So that's the lid.
So this had a 60, 64 kB of RAM. A 4 megahertz Zylog Z.
80 CPU. It came with CPM 2 dot 2 built in. It came with a modem, a 5 inch display, which you can see right in the middle.
And when I show that to my college students, I, I'm not kidding you, I literally hear a couple of them go like that when they see that's how big the screen was.
Black and white of course and 2 count them 2 5 and a quarter inch floppy drives that each stored 90 kB.
So there's your computer right there. Now the thing was, right, my Mac that my MacBook Pro is 4 and a half pounds.
I'm like, oh my god, this is so heavy. Right? Airs, you MacBook errors get down less than that, right?
This Osbourne, the portable PC was 24 pounds. 24 pounds and people back then jokingly said well that's not portable that's lugable So you could lug it around with you.
And in fact, you can see how big it was compared to a briefcase there. The guy on the on the right is holding the Osbourne one.
Right? 24 pounds. I also love the fact it's got that little bit the plastic handle.
Thank you.
That would have felt great after a few minutes holding 24 pounds of computer with that little bitty bitty handle like that.
So, yeah, it sold really well. It was a big deal. Osborne made a lot of money.
In fact, it was began something that None of us think about anymore. The Osbourne one.
Was the 1st machine that actually bundled software along with the hardware. When you bought an Osborne one, it had programs pre included.
Including Wordstar at that time still the most popular word processor, super cow, D base 2 for databases, nominal ledger, M basic, their version of basic, and 2 games, Colossal Cave and Deadline.
And here's the thing, the software was worth $1,500. Almost as much as the hardware.
That's why when you get a Windows computer nowadays it comes with a bunch of pre installed software when you buy a Mac, when you download Linux, they come with a bunch of software pre installed bundled along with the operating system and the Osborne One is what started that.
That April, if you guys remember back in the seventies, Xerox started Xerox PARC.
The Palo Alto Research Center. And it became probably one of the most important if not the most important research facilities and birthplace of so many of the technologies that we still use today.
And that Xerox PARC They, they basically invented the PC. So they were the 1st ones to have Ethernet to have computers on everybody's desk.
They had the 1st gooey. Remember, Bill, Steve Jobs saw the GUI with his engineers and that's going to lead to the Macintosh.
They had the 1st gooey they had the 1st whizzy wig word processor and so on and This started in 1970.
For 10 years. Xerox management out in New York, we could periodically look at what the amazing people at Park were doing and be like, that's nice.
And pat him on the head. Well finally after 10 years, piece somebody at Xerox goes We need to sell this stuff.
PCs are getting to be a big business. We have the original. We need to sell this.
This we will own the market. This thing is amazing. And so they introduced the Xerox Star, also called the 8,100.
Notice it came with Ethernet. It came with a 2 button mouse that you can see there.
It had a gooey. This thing came with a GUI in one. You had a desktop, you had clickable icons for the desk for documents and folders you had clickable icons for the desk for documents and folders you had clickable icons for the desk for documents and folders.
You had windows that you can see there. You had scroll bars, you had right click contextual menus, you had a visual interface for options.
384 kibabytes of RAM. It was expandable up to one and a half megabytes of RAM.
That's a lot. You could get a hard drive with this thing. A 1029 or 40 MB hard drive and an 8 inch floppy drive.
You could get a 17 inch monitor in 81. When I bought a 17 inch monitor in the late 90, s it was $900.
You can't you could get a seventeen-ish monitor at 1024 by 800 resolution.
This thing was so far ahead of its time. And it had advanced graphics capability. I mean, look right there.
Look, and that's a whizzy wig. What you see is what you get. What you saw on the screen, that's what you get when you print.
That's what they're demonstrating right there. That's what the GUI looked like.
So you can see files, folders, you can see an image. You get an idea of the interface from this.
This is what the property sheets look like. Well, that's pretty close to what you're gonna see soon afterward.
Right? So, man, there's this amazing device way ahead of everybody else. Curly this thing was successful in the marketplace.
Well, okay, I love it. This sounds awesome. How much does a star cost? I want to get one for my business now.
It's 1981. It's the eighties. The technological revolution. I need this Xerox star. How much is it?
And they said, $16,000. For one. Back then, a secretary made $12,000 a year.
Your computer was gonna cost more than the woman running.
It did not sell well. At all. And in fact, it failed in the marketplace. They were way too late and way, way, way, way, way too expensive.
So they finally got there, but by then the world had passed them by and It didn't succeed in the slides.
That may Microsoft hires Tim Patterson away from Seattle computer. And says, hey, we'd like you to finish up the DOS you wrote, which is now Ben renamed by IBM to PC DOS.
And so he does that. Now, he stays at Microsoft to Lady 2, then he leaves, then he comes back, then he leaves, then he comes back, then he leaves, and then he comes back and finally left for Good in 1998.
So he was involved with Microsoft for quite a while. So Paterson works on PC DOS getting it up to shape.
And that July. Microsoft just before the IBM PC comes out. Now, Patterson knows what's going on.
Seattle computer doesn't. Rod Brock doesn't know. And so Microsoft goes back to see how a computer said, hey, you know what?
You remember that DOS operating system you got, you know, remember the one we paid you 25,000 to license it, can you just go, can we just go ahead and buy it from you for $50,000?
And Rod Brock, remember it's like a 1 man show there is like 50,000? Absolutely!
And so he sells DOS to Microsoft for $50,000 and the thing he gets is he retains a license to DOS.
And so does 10 pounds. So Rod Brock. In return for $50,000 gives Microsoft all complete total rights to 86 DOS, but he retains a license to sell it to others.
As does Tim Patterson. Well, when he finally does not, when Rod Brock of Seattle Computer, a few years later when he realizes what Microsoft did to him.
And realizes, hey, I have a license to sell to us and starts doing it. Microsoft sues him.
It says, no, you can't do that. And takes into court. And this goes on for quite a while.
And finally, Rod Brock turns around and sues Microsoft for 60 million dollars, 86 for violation of contract.
And eventually they settle out of court for a million dollars. So is it worth it? Well? He got $75,000 and later a million.
But he did get tricked by Microsoft. So, you know, well, I don't know how you feel about it.
I think this is another good example of Bill Gates pulling a fast one on people. That July night, Donkey Kong is released.
This was the 1st platform game to feature jumping. And there were 4 unique stages to it. This was easily the most complicated video game at the time.
And I hated. I could barely get, I got past the 1st screen I was amazed. I found this game so difficult to do.
Hello.
But you know who this started? Hey, there's a me, it's a Mario down there in the bottom and there you go.
By the way, why did Mario have a hat and a mustache? Because they said that's easier to animate and that way we don't have to worry about the faces much or the hair, it'd be easier to do.
So that's why they went ahead and went with that. That July 21st By this point, everybody knows the IBM PC is coming.
Remember, IBM has been publishing information. About the upcoming IBM PC and PC DOS so people can start writing software for it ahead of time.
And Gary Kildall finally sees the APIs for PC DOS and suddenly realizes This heavily, heavily copies CPM.
Is it a clone of CPM? Again, that's debatable. But he is livid.
Infuriated by this. And in fact, he later wrote the 1st 26 function calls of the API and Gates PC DOS are identical to and taken directly from CPM proprietary documents.
But there's even more similarities. Patterson's Q. DOS originally began each line with A colon.
After Microsoft acquired it. It got changed to a greater than, which was exactly what CPM used as well.
But there's more. Kildall in his memoir. Contained an appendix that compares the sequence and language of CPM and DOS.
Here are a few examples. CPM referred to Reid sequential. They sequential read. CPM, write sequential.
Tim Patterson, Sequential Right. Cute at CPM, read random. Tim Patterson, random read and on and on and on.
Further, PC DOS included the Edlin Text Editor. Well, that was very, very, very similar to the Ed text editor.
No relation to the Unix ad that CPM included as well. In fact, as Harold Evans said, even if Q.
DOS and CPM were 80% different as Patterson is insisted. He took almost unaltered, killed all's interrupt mechanism, interrupt mechanism, the key innovation.
So, Gary Kildall is and he wasn't normally not a guy that got angry. He was furious.
It.
He calls Jack Sams and others to digital research. And start showing them all of these similarities and Jack Sam's and I do believe him on this and others said they were horrified.
They had no idea. How similar this was to CPM. No idea. And Kildall says, I'm going to sue you.
And that was a big thing for Kildog, cause he did not like, he did not like litigation, he did not like doing that.
But he said, you have copied my operating system. I'm gonna have to take you to court.
And IBM said, Let's reach an agreement. We had no idea about this. Here's what we're gonna do.
Would this satisfy you when people buy an IBM PC, we will offer PC DOS and CPM and let them pick.
Okay.
And Gary Kildall says, That fun because Gary killed all things. Everybody's going to want CPM.
Everybody's going to want the operating system that everybody already knows. So when they get a choice between this new operating system, that's a knock off.
And CPM, the original, they're gonna pick CPM. I'm in great shape.
Well, meanwhile, Microsoft and IBM have been working to make sure everything runs great on PC.
Ibm's in bed with Microsoft. So they're making sure everything runs with with PC dogs, but they're gonna support CPM.
Sure. Well, August 12.th A year after they said they were gonna do it. The IBM PC is rolled out.
$1,565 they pretty much hit their target. In terms of time and budget. Get to a 4.7 megahertz and tell 80 88 CPU.
An open bus structure so you can plug peripherals in. 16 kB of RAM expandable all the way up to 256.
Cassette storage, there was no hard drive. And an optional 5 and a quarter inch floppy drive.
And. Not. Not
Along with it. It came with Microsoft Basic in ROM. Coball, Fortran and Pascal.
An accounting system by P 3 software. Visac, which remember was the killer app for the Apple 2.
That was the spreadsheet program of the day. And so that was a big deal. That made it really attractive to a lot of business people.
Easy writer for Word processing and Microsoft Adventure the Game and Microsoft Multiplant.
And of course! You go into, and by the way, this was the 1st time ever that IBM sold its computers through retail.
They've never done that before. So they made deals with Sears. And other companies like that to sell the IBM PC.
This was a big transition for. So it's August 12, th 1981. You need to buy some of these for your business.
This sounds great. You trust IBM. Everybody trusts IBM. You decide I'm gonna buy a PC for my business.
I'm gonna buy a couple of PCs for my business. You walk into Sears. Or wherever you need to go and you see this and you're like sold.
I want and I'm gonna I want 3 of these IBM PCs. 1,565 bucks each.
Maybe you get a little extra RAM. Who knows? Maybe it bumps up a little bit and you're like ready to do it and the salesman says, oh by the way, sir.
You need to choose your operating system. Do you want to go with this new operating system that's never been seen before, PC DOS, but has the support of Microsoft and IBM or do you want to go with the one everybody knows CPM?
And of course you go, well that's very interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Should I use the one I'm actually familiar with and no or should I try this new one that's backed by a Microsoft?
And then you say, well, what do I, what about these? How, what's the difference?
And the salesperson says, oh, it's very simple. PC DOS is $40 and CPMs $240.
Which one do you want?
What?
And that's because The agreement that Gary Kildall have with IBM didn't say a damn thing about price.
It said they would sell it. Didn't say a thing about price. And so IBM and Bill Gates got together and said, Well, he didn't say anything about price.
So we'll charge one for 40, the one we want people to buy. And this other one's only $200 more.
Now what do you think everybody did? Of course. Everybody said, well, I'll pay the $40.
I'll go with the one from Microsoft and IBM, especially when the clerk probably said, and it's a lot like CPM.
So, Gary Kildall, always felt completely screwed by that. The rest of his life.
Yeah, he was unhappy about that because he felt like that he had gone into this collegially. He had gone into this making wanting to make great software and work together.
And he said this was like big business heartless big business that did this.
Your eyes, we're an hour and a half, 80, year. Okay.
It's, I know, I know, I know. So I love this quote from ours, Technica that explains the difference.
And that is Gary Kildall cared about software. Gates cared about the software business.
Let's see.
And the me, that encapsulates it all right there. Gary Kildall was the kind of person that wanted to make great software, to learn to help other people learn.
Let's explore. Let's make everything better. Let's do the best job we can.
Bill Gates was about using software to make as much money as you possibly could. And you saw and that's why we are where we are right now.
That August MTV debut.
The very 1st video on there is of course video killed the radio star by the bugles.
And
Like to play the whole video in we might know this song Very appropriate video. For a video service.
Very new wave, you know that back then.
You I heard you were more wireless back into the door Staying awake at the tuning in on you If I was young it can stop you coming Oh
Love the fashion. Gotta love the clothes.
I'll get to the chorus and I'll stop.
They do the credit for your second simple need. Machina, You can see I'm And, Lady a star
There you go. That's September. Intel engineer John Warton visits Microsoft to look over MS DOS.
And this is what he later wrote back at Intel. The strong impression I drew was that Microsoft programmers were untrained, undisciplined, and content merely to replicate other people's ideas and that they did not seem to appreciate the importance of defining operating systems and user interfaces with an eye to the future.
How are you? . One that was already the knock on Microsoft That's September. Here are the IBM PCs out, but CPM still selling great.
Info world rights, digital research is verifiable licenses for over 250,000 CPM users.
If anything, this number appears under stated. CPM is well on the way to establishing itself as the Small computer operating system.
And as we will know, all of us know that exactly did not happen and CPM would fade away over time.
Apple share the personal computer sales that year. 29%. 1982. We're finally to the 3rd year.
Hey, IBM fine the justice department finally drops the longest running anti-trust suit in American history.
In 1969. The US Justice Department ensued IBM for antitrust and they've been fighting it for 13 years and they finally settled.
No. Why is that important? Because I would contend the IBM PC would never have done what they did if that in a trust suit had not been going on because that had been a headache with IBM for over a decade when it came time for them to make the PC that is one of the reasons IBM said we are not going to do everything ourselves.
We've gotten in trouble for that. We, we have been sued because we insisted on providing the whole enchilada software hardware services and limiting it to us.
We're not gonna make that mistake. And so if that lawsuit had never happened, I would contend the IBM PC would not have happened like it did.
Microsoft would not have become the company it is. And we would not have our situation today. Sometime that January, Elk Cloner, the 1st computer virus to escape into the wild runs through Apple II systems.
It was written by a high school student as a joke as a prank. Every 50th boot. This poem will be displayed.
It will get on all your disc, it will inflate your chips. Yes, it's clowner.
It will stick to you like glue. It will modify RAM to send in the cloner and that was it.
You.
So again, High school. That February, 24 sun microsystems is founded. That will go on to become one of the most important Unix companies out there.
Of course, someone on to sell computers, components, software, services, contributes to the bit the growth of Unix risk CPUs, which is what we use now with ARM, which is in every mobile device out there.
Thin client computing. In fact, Sun goes on to create Sun OS based on BSD, the network file system, which many of us still use.
So Spark microprocessors, the Solaris OS, Java, and the ZFS file system, which is in wide use on Linux.
Today at this time. So this was a very important company. Of course, you all know what happened to it.
I'll get to it down the way. Oracle ingested it. That February, Intel introduces the 2 86.
The 16 bit processor. This is almost funny nowadays. A 134,000 transistors.
We're up to billions now and it can handle although nobody has this up to 16 MB of memory.
Hey, 15, th Steve Jobs is on the cover of time. As they not just applaud Apple and Steve Jobs, but also this whole computer industry and it's growing and people are making money.
That Mark? The internet's born. So that marks the Department of Defense says TCP IP is now the standard for all military computer networking.
If you are a vendor who sells or communicates with the Defense Department, you need to adopt TCP IP as well, or we will not do business with you.
Once that happens, of course, those vendors want to use TCP IP with others. And so that decision by the Department of Defense cascades out and TCP becomes the most widely used internet working protocol out there till today.
And in fact, they started it March by January, less than a year later, they'd completely done the migration.
If only we could do that with IPv 6. That April BSD Unix 4 dot one A.
The 1st to incorporate TCP and sockets is released by Bill Joy and it becomes widely but widely like and used.
That June. Less than a year after the IBM PC has appeared. Columbia Data Products introduces the 1st IBM clone.
The MPC 1,600. Now, IBM thought people would supply components.
Yeah.
They never thought people would clone the whole damn computer. Right? And remember, Microsoft is more than happy to say, and he will sell you licenses for Microsoft.
Here you go. And so that starts getting sold. $3,000. But what was funny was you got better stuff than what you got with the IBM PC.
You got a 4.7 80 88 processor that's similar but you got a hundred 28 K RAM base 2 floppy drives and one LPT and 2 serial ports built in.
And so again, IBM was surprised. They didn't expect that this was going to happen.
Like, well, we wanted some of it, but we didn't want all of it. And of course, Bill Gates is happy to ride it along.
June and I had to throw this in there because of the strong bond between Star Wars and computer nerds and because Gary's watching this and I love Star Trek myself.
That June, probably I would say most people would say it's probably the best Star Trek movie.
Star Trek 2, the wrath of Khan is released. And what's important about it is it contained the 1st entirely computed.
Computer generated sequence in a film. The 1st entirely computerated computer generated sequence of the movie and it was created by a group with Lucasfilm.
That will later split off and decide to name their company Pixar. And here's the scene.
And again, now looking at it, you're like, that is so lame. But back then, this was amazing.
So in the movie, there's this this device called the Genesis device. And Con wants to get it and he and Kirk go back and forth about it.
And the Genesis device does something amazing. And so here you go. The woman speaking, it turns out, was one of Kirk's lovers and is the mother to Kirk's son.
Who appears in the movie as well. So here is the minute long 1st entirely computer generated sequence in a
The Genesis device into a pre selected area of a lifeless space body, a moon or other dead form.
The device is delivered, instantaneously causing what we call the Genesis effect. Matter is reorganized with life-generating results.
Instead of a dead man. Living breathing planet capable of sustaining whatever life forms we see fit to deposit on it.
Fascinating. The reformed moon simulated here represents the merest fraction of the genesis potential.
Should the Federation wish to fund these experiments to their logical conclusion? When we consider the cosmic problems of population and food supply, the usefulness of this process becomes clear.
This concludes our proposal.
There you go. I love that. We instantaneously turn matter into living things and water and plant life.
And oxygen, no problem. So anyway, there you go. 1st computer generated sequence in a movie.
That's July, another important sci-fi movie that I'm sure many of you, if not all of you've seen, is released, Tron.
And this has a mixture of live-action footage, backlit animation, and computer generated visuals.
And in fact, this is one of the 1st films to make extensive use of computer animation. Most famously in the sequence I know everybody that's seen this movie remembers the Tron light cycle race.
I saw this in the movies. I thought this was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
And I bet you did too.
This is Blue Leader to Blue Bikes. Run these guys into your jet balls.
And 3, split it up, take one.
Oh
Of the
This The
This is a
Out here right now and you guys are invited.
There you go, stop. So that's great. That August the Commodore, 64 is released.
The best selling PC of all time telling 22 million. Copies or devices included for 600 bucks, which was cheap compared to the other stuff we've been looking at.
You got 64 K around, 16 color graphics, and it was the 1st computer to have integrated sound directly in it.
That August, Microsoft, I love this. A year after the IBM PC has come out.
Microsoft has already licensed MS DOS to 70 other companies. So again, they took it and completely ran with it.
Poor IBM. Totally bet on the wrong horse there. That September, Scott Folkman, a Falman rather on a BBS at Carnegie Mellon develops the very 1st digital.
He suggests that we use the following sequence for jokes and for things that are not jokes, the one on the bottom.
Notice he has the nose in. We got rid of that pretty soon. That's September 3rd to 5.th
Again, this is Steve Wozniak being cool. The very 1st us festival. So Wozniak has a ton of money.
He loves music. And he decides, you know, it was called the Meat, the seventys were called the Me decade.
And he decides, you know, instead of me, we need to celebrate us. Now, of course, he didn't know about the yuppie decade and you know making money and all that stuff being the main concern of everybody.
So at the dawn of the decade he's saying we need to have an us festival. And plus US us.
So he decides to do it. He's gonna bankroll. And so it's 3 days, 20 bands, 34 h of music.
400,000 people attended. Way more than they thought was gonna be there. $17 and 50 cents for one day ticket or $37 and 50 cents for 3 days.
The only problem was it was a hundred 10 degrees. And during that time there were 36 arrests and 12 drug overdoses.
But Wozniak is very big on technology. Obviously. So it's not just about the music.
He wants to showcase the best technology as well. So they introduced at this concert, ing stations for cooling people.
Water spray canons for cooling the cloud. This was the very 1st time Diamond Vision video displays were introduced in the US so anybody could see the show.
I mean now that's standard. But, and back then they had some of them, but you couldn't see them during the day.
They were so washed out. The diamond visions were big enough and bright enough that they were visible even during the day.
And this was the very 1st time they'd introduce digital sound delay. So the fans at the back.
Could hear the music in real time. So they would they strung the speakers but introduced the digital sound delay to the sound.
So everybody was hearing the same thing at the same time. And finally, they created what they called a satellite space bridge connection between the Us Festival and Russia so people in Russia could watch the Us festival and they could watch the Russians.
So this was a this was I mean this sounds pretty cool. This is the flyer from it that shows you a map.
There was a technology tent that was air conditioned that proved to be air-conditioned that was air-conditioned that proved to be very popular on days where it was 110 degrees, as you can imagine.
But he basically had this . So everything you see on here was built for the Us Festival And I wanted to show you guys the band, cause man.
So, the 3rd Friday was New Wave Day. Which was a style of rock I like popular at the time.
Saturday was rock day and then Sunday was Country Rock Day. You know, country rock, mellow rocks, stuff like that.
And my god, if you look at this and this is in order from 1st left, so the police.
Headline Friday, Tom Petty ended the show Saturday and Fleetwood Mac ended it on Sunday.
I mean, if you look at these bands. That's a great show. Okay, so WAS, sells tickets.
He hired a firm. He does the show. If you know 400,000 people attend was lost 12 million dollars.
So many people showed up that they didn't have tickets for and then just came on in. And lost 12 million bucks.
That November, Compact announces the Compact portable. The 1st portable compatible with the IBM PC and the funny story about Compact and this is a hundred percent true.
The 3 guys that form decided they wanted to go in business together because they all liked each other. And they sat there and were like, okay, we all like each other.
We don't know what business we want to form. Let's brainstorm ideas for a business and I am not joking you.
The guys that form Compact after several hours came down to 2 choices. This is real. They said, okay, we are either going to make a computer IBM PC clone or we're gonna open a Mexican restaurant.
Yeah.
And I think compact Mexican would not have done very well. The name alone and they went to the computer business and the rest is history.
But they were literally, that was their other idea was a Mexican restaurant.
I had one of them.
What you got for it for 3,600 bucks. Was a hundred 28 up to 256 kB of RAM and 9 in screen 25 by 80.
Cool.
2 5 and a quarter inch floppy drives, 28 pounds. They sold 53,000 the 1st year generating a hundred 11 million total for them.
That November? Word perfect 2 goes on sale for the IBM PC. Not the data general and quickly becomes the dominant word processor for DOS.
And lasted basically until word came out in the nineties. That November also the Atari 5,200 goes on sale.
This was their successor to the earlier Atari that had been wildly popular. The earlier Atari had sold, which came out in 1,977.
It was still being sold. Had sold. 30 million units. The Atari 5,200 did so poorly that it only sold 1 million and they stopped selling it after 2 years.
At the same time, they rebranded the 1977 Atari video computer system to the Atari 2,600.
And it continued selling for another 10 years. So this system sold from 1977 it was rebranded in 82 and sold for another 10 years.
And in fact I told you guys how good I was a Pacman. This is my greatest moment.
There was a Pac-man contest at an arcade in Marshall, my little hometown.
And the the winner one and Atari 2,600. And so I entered. And back then I was about as tall as I am now.
I had pimples. I had a bowl cut, you know, anybody that was alive in the eighties, your shorts went barely below your scrotum basically.
That's how short they were. I had knee socks all the way up to my knees and you know white knee socks all the way up.
I looked like a kid from 1982 total dork. I sat there, 9 other people went before me and they sucked.
And I waited. And finally, I said, am I the last contestant? And they said yes.
And I walked up there and I did it until I thought I'd beaten the high score and I looked at the people running and I said, did I just beat the high score so far?
And they go, yeah. And I go, am I the last person for sure? And they go, yeah.
And I went and just killed myself. And said, okay, I'll take the Atari 2,600.
Whoa!
So there you go. Video game arrogance at its worst. And you know what? I still have that Atari 2,600.
It's in my basement and the cartridges. Well, funnily enough, That same time, they released ET, the extraterrestrial for the Tari 2,600.
It is now considered one of the absolute worst video games of all time. And one of the biggest commercial failures in video game history.
Now the movie of course had been wildly popular. They thought they had a sure thing on their hands.
However, they waited and waited to negotiate the deal. And by the time they were done, Imagine you guys that are developers here. Imagine this.
They gave the programmers 5 weeks to develop the game to meet the Christmas season. 5 weeks to develop the entire game.
And what resulted was absolute total garbage. It looked like that.
Eat those are pits. Okay, and, ET was supposed to collect Reese's pieces and 3 pieces, parts of a phone that he would put together so he could call home.
The controls were horrible. ET would constantly go into pits, would constantly go into stuff, the gameplay sucked, the story sucked, and it got horrible reviews.
And as I said, was so bad, there was an urban legend, but it was proved to be true.
Actually took all the unsold ET cartridges and buried them in a landfill and somebody discovered them a few years ago.
Hmm.
That was how bad it was That December Adobe is founded. By John Warnock and Charles Geshe.
They had worked at Xerox Park. And they had come up with this brilliant idea for a language called Postscript.
That would let you describe what you wanted to print in remarkable detail. And Xerox was like, We whatever.
And so they left park and said, we're going to develop and sell postscript. Well, to this day, Postscript is what is behind PDFs.
So and you all know Adobe so they ended up doing quite well. Now the funny thing is Steve Jobs tried to buy it.
For 5 million dollars. Now again, think how history would have been different there. Steve Jobs tried to buy Adobe for 5 million bucks and they said no, but we will sell you shares worth 19% of the company and a 5 year license for postscript which they would then go on to use of course with the next because the next is based on postscript which so is the mac OS.
And by that year, Apple becomes the 1st computer company, personal computer company to reach 1 billion dollars in annual sales.
1983. Apple releases the Lisa. This is what could have popularized the GUI.
It did introduce the 1st Apple mouse, notice it only have one button. Why only one button? Because Apple said most people have never heard of a mouse.
Most people have never used a mouse. If we have more than one button, people are going to be confused about whether to click the right or left button.
In fact, those of you who help people with their computers, I know some people that I used to help that got confused between left clicking and right clicking all the time.
There's far less now, but imagine how bad it was back then and Apple said there's only one button.
Thank you.
We're not going to get confusion and tech support calls. So they released the Lisa. Now, this was designed to be a professional computer.
Look at that. That looks so different than other computers that were out at the time. A color screen.
1 MB of RAM, a 5 MB hard drive. And that was $10,000.
That was the problem. It did not sell well because it was extremely, technically advanced much more than the star.
But it was too expensive. Now it came with a full suite of programs. Lisa Wright, Lisa Kow, Lisa List, Lisa Project, Lisa Draw, Lisa Graf, Least Eternal, they overuse the word Lisa.
Clearly, and but here's the funny thing. When the Mac came out, you couldn't write programs for the Mac on the Mac.
Until several years later when the Mac came with 512 KA memory. So if you wanted to write programs for the Macintosh, to do that.
Now if you look though at the menus, file print edit. Right? And if you look at that, you can see the trash can in the bottom right.
You're seeing what the Macintosh is going to become. Here's another view of the Windows, right?
This was a Wimp interface. Windows icons menu pointer and you can see it in action right there.
So you can see how it's related to the Macintosh, but it's not. And Steve Jobs will have nothing to do with the Lisa.
By this point, Jobs is working on the Macintosh. He says Lisa's old technology.
We're going to do something better. We're going to make something better and cheaper and, you know, disparages the Lisa team.
That January, Richard Stallman resigns from the MITAA Lab. But he is still allowed to keep an office and lab space there and did as far as I know until very, very, very recently.
In fact, he would sleep there a lot from what I read. That January Lotus 1 2 3 is released this becomes the killer app for the IBM PC this at the time is the most sophisticated spreadsheet program and this is what people then go, I gotta get the IBM PC.
If they hadn't before, they definitely were gonna know. That April, it's 1 of my favorite stories.
Steve Jobs decides we need a, we need a new CEO. He was not CEO.
He had never been CEO. They had a CEO named Scottie Moore, but he they got rid of him.
And decided they needed somebody else and they decided we need somebody experienced in business. And Steve Jobs decided to recruit the president of Pepsi.
John Skull to become CEO of Apple. And the story goes that Jobs met Scully and they went for a walk and on the walk, Jobs is trying to convince him to leave his safe job as the president of Pepsi and join Apple and Scully's going, I don't know, I'm not sure.
And Jobs looks him in the eye and said, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?
Now, I don't know how you'd respond to that with sugar water. And so it worked.
And Scully goings Apple. And at first, st Scully and and jobs are like best buds.
They get along great, but over time. Job starts to feel like he made a mistake because Scully is not a technologist.
He's a marketer. He doesn't know anything about technology at all. He enows marketing.
That May, 7 years after its founding. Apple joins the Fortune 500 at number 4, 11 with revenues of 583 million, the fastest growing company in history.
Steve Jobs is now 28. And by the way, Apple entered the top 10 in 2013 and has been there ever since.
That may second, Microsoft releases its 1st mouse. It was called the green eyed mouse.
It was bundled with Word and other software. So when you bought the mouse, you got what was then their their word processing program, $195.
Well, Steve, Civozniak tries to have a second as best. This time I'm gonna make money.
He hired a bunch of, you know, financial firms and they analyzed it and said yes this time you're going to make money we know what to do and so us 83 happened they had 670,000 people come over 4 days.
Okay, now fortunately this time it was only 95 degrees, not a hundred 10, but it did have the worst smog since 1979.
And he agreed to pay Van Halen 1 million dollars to perform. That was the most any band had ever made.
However, a couple of weeks before the concert, David Bowie was really big at the time. The Modern Love album was out.
He was on World Tour and Wozniak in his autobiography. He said, man, I love David Bowie.
And he said, I'd like to have David Bowie there too. And he said, I agree.
To pet David Bowie said, look, I'm on tour in Europe. I'm gonna have to drop what I'm doing.
Fly back to the US with my band and my equipment and then fly back to Europe to do this show, I'll do it for a million dollars.
And Wozniak says, no problem. Well, the problem is the contract he'd signed.
I'm sorry, he agreed to pay David Boy 1.5 million dollars. To do it.
Well, the problem was when Van Halen heard that they were pissed. Because the contract Wozniak could sign with them said nobody could be paid more than them.
So what happened was Wozniak had to turn around and say, okay, fine, I'll pay you 1.5 million too.
So he ended up paying Van Halen. And David Bowie 3 million dollars total for 1 h and a half concert from each one.
And that's a million an hour. And, David Lee Roth was wasted the whole time and did a horrible show.
Van Halen said it was one of their worst shows ever. David Lee Roth was drunk and stumbling around and forgot the lyrics and it was terrible.
Now I wanted to show you the bands again. Again, Monday was new wave day. Again, the clash.
The stray cats? That's all great stuff. The English beat. Sunday was heavy metal day.
That was the biggest attended day. Now, I don't know if you like, Mill or not, but even so, Motley Crew, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, that's supposed to be triumph, not triumph.
And Van Halen. Monday was rock day and that was, I mean, look at that.
Yeah.
Lobos. You too. By the way, this is one of the 1st times you 2 had ever played and they blew everybody away.
The pretenders Stevie Nicks and David Bowie and then he had a 4th day the following Saturday and that was country day.
Cause WAS really like country. And so he's like, look, I want country. So 670,000 people.
Huge show massive attendance was lost 12 million dollars
And he decided that's the last us festival. I lost 24 million dollars. Yeah, it was fun.
I had a blast but I've lost too much money.
I'm gonna get through 84 and I'm gonna have to stop. That September, Richard Stallman announces the GANU project to create a free operating system.
All of us are the beneficiaries of that of course. That's September, the Motorola, Diane Attack, 8,000 necks receives an okay from the FCC.
It is the 1st mobile phone mobile cell phone rather. Notice how big it is. It is one foot long.
It weighs almost 2 pounds. It has a 10 h charge time. You can talk on it for 30 min and you can store 30 numbers in it.
It was $4,000 done this thing. And that was a big deal. Now, of course, that was everybody knew.
My God, that's expensive. That's why. Any of you guys that later saw the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas playing the evil Raider corporate radar Gordon Gekko there's a scene where he's talking 2, Mark, Charlie Sheen's character on the beach carrying that phone and that's a signifier of just how wealthy his character is that he has that phone with
him. That October? Microsoft announces a piece of software called the Multi Tool Word.
Later shortened this word for Zenix, which was their version of Unix. They license from ATT and DOS.
By 85 it had been ported to the Mac what was interesting was is unlike most all DOS programs at the time, Word was designed to be used with a mouse and was described as whizzy wig.
What you see is what you get. And in fact, here's the ad for it. Well, look at that.
Look at the second paragraph. With Microsoft Word, what you see on the screens what you get on the paper.
So it's easy to spot mistakes. Both face, underlined, and italics look like this, not, and there's a bust at Wordstar and other programs like that with those characters.
And when you make changes, paragraphs are automatically reformed. Flush right flush, left, senator justified.
There I love this too. There's another command called undo. Make a mistake. Just one experiment.
Okay.
Hit undo. We're done does your last change and remembers things the way they were.
And then I love their description here. Word has a mouse. A handy little critter that lets you copy, select commands, then it faster, then you can say cheese.
So there you go. I thought that was hilarious. How they were having describe the mouse undo like it's this amazing technology.
That November, Microsoft announces, hey, we're gonna make something that runs on top of DOS.
It's gonna have a GUI. And we're going to call it Windows and it's going to come out next year early. Well, no, they were off.
It actually took 2 more years. Thus beginning the Microsoft habit of pre announcing stuff and then not as vaporware until it finally comes out.
At the end of the year, IBM has already passed that. Apple share of the PC market is 23%.
IBM is at 28%. Now, at this time, I'm gonna skip this.
Now let's get t019-84-1984. You are watching the Super Bowl on January 20 second.
And Super Bowl is playing. And it cuts to commercial. And all of a sudden. You see the ad I'm about to show you.
It later became called the 1984. That add only runs once nationally. During the Super Bowl to introduce the Macintosh.
But I want you to notice. You never know what a Macintosh is. The ad never tells you what a Macintosh is.
Not even that it's a computer. You have no idea. You never know what the Macintosh is, you never see what the Macintosh is and it only aired once.
And cost Apple 800,000 and they almost didn't air it except they were like well we already paid for it we don't have anything else let's just go ahead and run it They didn't think it was going to be that successful.
So I want to show you guys this ad. So imagine your Joe blow watching football in the Super Bowl and it cuts to commercial and this is what you see.
6 32 left to play in Super Bowl 18 Raiders 28 to 9.
The day we celebrate the 1st glorious anniversary of the
For the your ideology. And secure off in the Okay.
This is more And, We are wonderful. And one was only one cause. Talk to We
Right.
On January, the 24, th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1,984 won't be like 1,984.
And right back to CBS Sports Sunday. I love it. I love the ducks position of that.
Magic of CBS Sports Sunday is the Wbc's Super Lightweight Championship World Cup scheme and the World Speed Skating Championships next weekend on CBS Sports.
Okay.
Now, I said that night back to football and I said to you guys that was the 1st that was the only time internationally in actuality, Apple aired it in Twin Falls, Idaho on December, the 31, st 1,983 at the last possible commercial break before midnight because it that way it could qualify for the 1,984 advertising awards called the Cleos and it
Okay.
cost them $10 to air that ad that time in that market. Now as a result of that ad, they only ran at once.
I don't know if you guys remember that was all they talked about on the news for a week.
What is this ad? What is a Macintosh? And they replayed it over and over and over on the news and Apple got millions and millions of free advertising.
Now what's funny is they did this ad. For for the 1984 Cleo lords it didn't win.
Oh!
That ad did not win. You know what? Add one that year? For people my age and older, you all know the ad and I bet you're gonna be like, really?
The ad that won the 1984 Cleo Awards was where's the beat?
For. It certainly is a big one. It's a very big fun. Big fluffy bone.
It's a very big fluffy, fun. Why's the beef? Some handbacker places give you a lot less beef on a lot of bum.
Where's the be? At Wendy's we serve a hamburger we modestly call the single and Wendy's single has more beef than the whoper or Big Mac.
At Wendy you get more be and less bun. Hey! You want something better, your Wendy's kind of people.
And anybody that's my age and are older, you guys know that was such a catch for me.
People said that the president said it. That's what beat the Apple app. Now here's what's really funny.
That ad has a very distinct aesthetic to it. Very distinct. The director of that ad.
Was then A sort of well-known director, but not as well known as he is now. You might have heard of him.
His name is Ridley Scott. So Ridley Scott directed that ad. Now now that you know that think about how close that ad was to alien and Blade Runner, right?
In terms of the aesthetic, the grungy, the dark, you know, the smoke, all of that.
So all of a sudden, hopefully that makes sense like, oh yeah, of course, that makes total sense that that ad was directed by Really Scott.
Well, the thing is that Started the tradition of companies rolling out big splashy Super Bowl lads.
That's why we have all the big deal about Super Bowl ads now. And it's now considered a masterpiece.
Advertising A said it was the best commercial, the eightys, TV Guide said it was the greatest commercial of all time.
CNN said it was unexpectedly shockingly uniquely distinctive. And in fact, 20 Super Bowls later, many tech industry leaders said that that ad and the 1st Mac played an inspiring role in their except career paths and what's really funny is if you in fact have watched that entire game and it watched all those ads in addition to that ad for Macintosh, you would have seen Bill Bixby who played the Hulk on
TV speaking for Radio Shack computers and all and Alan Alda for mash hawking Atari computers.
You know, both of which we still use today, clearly. So can you imagine the Mac ad compared to Bill Bixby for Radio Shack and Alan Alda for Atari.
Well, a few days later. Welcome to Macintosh. On January 24, th Apple released the Macintosh with a 20 million dollar ad campaign.
2,500 bucks. 128 kB of RAM. A 400 K floppy and that's the 1st time that size floppy was used.
The 3 and a quarter inch floppy. 3 and a half inch floppy, I mean. a 1-button mouse and a handle in the top so you could pick it up and move it.
And this is the video. Of of Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh. And the thing I want you to notice is how good of a showman is, what a good job he does, playing the audience and letting them be excited about what they're about to see and what he picks to show them.
And then finally, I want you to look at his face when he's done. He is so proud.
What they've accomplished. So here's the video from 1984, Steve Jobs introducing the Mackintosh.
You've just seen some pictures of Macintosh. Now I'd like to show you Macintosh in person.
All of the images you are about to see on the large screen. Will be generated by what's in that bag.
That showmanship right there. That bag over there, that's got something in it amazing.
Yes, that is the theme from Chariots of Fire.
Oh
Also.
The
You
And we've done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently. But today, for the 1st time ever.
I'd like to let Mcintosh speak for itself.
Oh, I imagine. It sure is great to get out of that bad. And and to public beating.
I'd like to share with you, imagine I'd like to share with you, imagine I for the 1st time I made an IBM mainstream.
Bad food.
Right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So it is Mr. Slitter of both pride that I introduce a man who's been like a father through Meet me
Again, knows how to sell some for sure. And then it was an amazing demo. A talking computer in 1984.
That's amazing. As well as all the graphics letters.
Now, here's the thing, as I said, it included a mouse. Well, they had to explain what a mouse was.
Remember, most people never even seen or used a mouse ever. So I love this. Okay. And remember, most people never seen a gooey.
So Newsweek. When they reviewed the Macintosh, the Macintosh uses icons, little graphic images, and a mouse.
A tethered box the size of a cigarette pack. That is used to move the cursor and enter commands.
Now I love that right there because who today would try to explain anything as being the size of a cigarette pack.
Right. The fact that they're doing that like, oh everybody knows what a cigarette pack looks like.
But number 2, it's not the size of a cigarette pack. Not really. And I love how they have mouse and quotes.
I love how they have to explain what Icons are, little graphic images. Right? And then I love how they say you use the mouse to enter commands.
Yeah.
Now, I didn't get Newsweek at my house, my parents house. We got Time Magazine and I have I know I remember exactly where I was sitting.
Because I was not into computers. I was not a computer nerd at all. I was a book nerd and a you know, history nerd and a sci fi nerd, but I was not a computer nerd.
And so I remember distinctly I would read Time Magazine cover to cover every week and I remember the issue from January 31,984.
Were they? D the Macintosh. And I distinctly have this memory of reading the text on the right.
It uses a mouse, a pointing device the size of a stick of butter. That permits users to give commands to the computer with just a push of a button.
Here's the deal. They'd included no pictures of the mouse. I remember reading that and going, what the hell is a mouse?
The size of a stick of butter again. It wasn't the size of a stick of butter. To give commands to a computer.
Okay.
How do you give commands to a computer? With a push of a button and it just I could not groc what I was reading until months and months later when I finally saw one because they didn't include a picture of a mouse.
Duterte.
But I think that's hilarious how difficult it was for people to understand that. Well, When you turned on the computer, one of the very 1st things they did was show you how to use a mouse.
And they had to explain as you move the mouse the pointer moves with it. And they included this to play a note in the piano, move the pointer over a key, and press and release.
This is clicking. When you're ready to go on, click on the work continue below. So they have to define what clicking is.
Then, See what the magician has in his hat by pointing to one and holding down the mouse button.
Move the pointer over successive hats without releasing the button. Then to move an object around, point to it, press the mouse button and while keeping it pressed, move the pointer.
This is dragging.
You can lift the mouse and reposition it when you need more room to which to move it around.
I remember distinctly the 1st time I ever used someone's Macintosh that was the 1st time I never used a mouse.
I moved it to the right. I got to the edge of the desk and I was like, oh.
What do I do now? And then the guy showing it to me says, pick it up and move it back to the left.
And I went, oh, that's easy. A few months later, my mom comes to visit.
I'm showing her this computer. She did the same thing. I'm showing her this computer.
She did the same thing. And I wonder how many other people when they got, yeah, get another desk on the right.
When they got to the edge, that's why that's here because people didn't realize I can lift it and continue moving it to the right and it will stay where it was.
The Macintosh included a 9 inch display at 5 12 by 3 42. And the thing was.
That it had personality When you booted up the computer, you saw a happy Mac if things were okay.
So this is the 1st time computers were really made to be friendly. Kind of a personality. When you finally got into there, that's what it looked like.
Now notice, anybody in here that's seen a Macintosh, well hell, if you look at mine right here, you see Apple file edit view special.
Well, there's the Apple menu. File, edit, view. So the thing, and there's the trash, here's the folders, right?
And so my point is that a lot of the things Apple did in 1984 the Mac is still doing 40 years later.
Here's another view showing you the control panel at the time. Where it was all in one little window and there's a close-up of it.
So you could adjust how fast double-clicking was, how tight the grid was, how loud the sound was, again, using a GUI.
Compare this to the Xerox Star GUI that I showed you guys from 81 right this has clearly been refined and improved and is much more clear, much more user friendly.
But the Mac came with its own. Killer apps. Number one, it included Mac right that came with every Macintosh.
That was one of the 2 killer apps that made people wanna Mac. And in fact, it established many conventions for GUI word processors that we use today.
I wrote every paper for 4 years at college using that program. It also included Mac paint. That was the other killer app.
And this taught users how to use a GUI to create digital images. And in fact, it could generate images that you could then use in other apps.
That was new. It also included intuitive icons drawn by Susan Kerr. Who Microsoft later hired to create some icons.
So the bomb showed up if you had a problem booting. The floppy disk, the Happy Mac.
May have messages writing trash fonts on the right the command icon the printer icon and here are more by Susan care.
The watch showed up while you were waiting. Now what's funny is this was totally new to so many people.
People were just did not know how to take this and again that time magazine review mac relies heavily on symbols and pictures on the screen to help people conquer computer phobia.
But this is what I find hilarious. The Newsweek review and I want you guys think about your use of computers now.
View said this at the time. While the iconography is easy to learn, some users may find their patients wearing thin at the relentlessly cute symbols.
Moreover, the heavy reliance on graphics and the need to position the cursor very precisely demands close visual attention.
Some may find the machine visually tiring to use. And I'm like, you are looking for complaints.
Right? All of us do this every day. None of us go, oh cute icons. Oh my god, I am so visually tired from having to use the cursor.
Okay.
In addition, this was one of the very 1st computers to include fonts. So you could actually choose from one of 9 different fonts all created by Susan Kerr and all named after World Cities.
So. Steve Jobs biography has this quote in it. On the day unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked jobs what type of market research he had done.
Jobs are applied by scoffing. Did Alexander Graham Bell do any research before he invented the telephone?
And again, and I know some people this drives them crazy, but this is Apple saying We know what people want.
We are going to give people what they want. We don't need to do market testing and all that stuff.
We're going to create the best thing we can and put it out there because people are going to want it.
Well, there always has to be one negative guy. And that was John C. Dorg who's made a career at being a contrarian.
And he said the Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a mouse. There is no evidence people want to use those things.
I don't want one of these new fangled devices. Okay. That April, Bill Gates was on the cover of Time.
Yeah, okay.
And that December, Bill Gates, for, did Apple's revenue was 1.4 billion dollars.
Finally enough, the Macintosh did not sell well for a year or 2. Took a while for it to get popular and get widely used, partly due to the price and partly due to the fact it was new and different.
Okay. It's 9 30. 40.
I'm only in 1985. Now, fortunately.
Okay.
The rest of it. He's only Really? 50 slides, but I'm not gonna do that to you.
Yeah.
The rest of it is much quicker. Unix version 8 released February 85. Lot of commands we still use.
Jobs gets kicked out of apple Jobs forms next. Sexiest picture of Bill Gates ever thought you guys would enjoy that.
Hope you haven't been eating. Windows one comes out in 1985 for a hundred bucks.
No programs have been written for it in the hardware is extremely intensive. Here's what it looks like.
Compare that to the Mac. Please. That is garbage. Okay, that is so crude compared to what Apple had out at the time.
And what's really funny is it was a tiling operating system. What you're seeing is later that you could not overlap Windows.
The windows had to tile.
86 calendar explosion, the 1st PC compatible virus. Pixar, Microsoft goes public, Bill Gates becomes the world's youngest billionaire.
Unix version 9 is released. The last research version.
Let's see 1st ISP. In 87. OS 2, Windows 2 is released.
Windows finally sells the 1 million copy. 88. GPL one comes out, obviously very important to all of us.
Irc is embedded. Steve Jobs unveils the next computer, his new computer does not do well.
The 1st in-clap mark in 1st March marketing cap. And finally, 89. Tim Berners Lee begins working on the World Wide Web.
I love that chart by the way that that description that's real. Tim Berners Lee, web developer like that can be taken 2 different ways.
He is a web developer and he did develop the web. But he began working on, the World Wide Web.
He proposed it. The proposal in 89 did not get accepted. I love this. His boss wrote on it vague but exciting.
So I've told him to go back to the drawing board. Which he eventually did and keep working on this idea.
The 4 86 comes out that was pretty standard for a while. The Mac portable comes out.
The last Bell, the last of the early Unix's is released Unix version 10 in October of 89.
And finally the Berlin Wall Falls. That's how I ended. There you go.
I got through the rest. I got through 5 years and 5 min. Hello. I know I spent a lot of time on those early years, but Those are absolutely pivotal.
Important years for the hobby and industry that we all care about so much. And that's why I wanted to spend all that time on there because and the other reason is There's a lot of stories and misinformation about what happened.
And like I said, I did a lot of research because I wanted you guys to try to get as near as possible.
The correct story about what actually happened. Whether good or ill to the people involved. So I appreciate your patience on that.
So, does anybody got any questions?
Or by beating you all into submission.
What was the last? Xerox unit. I remember using one. It was a heck of a lot.
Later in the eighties and 1982.
I will tell you exactly what that is. That was the, hold on a moment.
That was
I don't know.
The. Xerox, 60, 85, was that it? Like that.
Yeah, that could have been it.
Yeah, cause we.
Like that. They released 3. They released the note taker and does the alto and 73 at park.
No.
The Notetaker in 78 which was That. And then the star. In 90 81 and the 60 85 in 87.
That's all I have. I could have missed something. But to mine knowledge, that's what
Yeah, that might. But, if I It's hard to remember, but I know a Xerox and the form factor is very similar to the Macintosh, portable.
Would surprise me. Yeah. I don't know if you find out, let me know. I'd love to add it to my little collection here, you know.
Anybody else got a question?
During the video for when he launched the Macintosh,
Was there a programming language in there that was looked like it was?
Yeah, and what's funny is you couldn't program on the Mac. Right? I noticed that too.
I'm like, oh, you're showing code, but you can't do anything with it except read it.
You know, so I saw that too. That was probably, I think Apple was really heavily into Pascal at the time.
I think an assembly language, of course, but that didn't look like assembly language to me. I think that might have been what that was, but that certainly was not code someone was writing and running on the Macintosh because you couldn't do it.
For a couple of years. Yeah, good catch. That was a very good catch.
Oh, and, you said everything that's gonna happen on the screen is in the box and he took the blobby disk out of his pocket.
So that wasn't in the box.
Well, yeah, but he met the device.
Okay.
Hey, anybody else?
Yeah, the, April, 81, the Xerox star. So that was the 1st GUI.
Yes.
No, does the, yeah, yeah, yeah, the, the Xerox star at at a park was considered is considered the 1st GUI computer.
Now If you remember in 1968 Engelbart had the mother of all demos and he was showing like.
Dots on the screen and you could click on stuff and it would show but that was That was leading to a GUI, but it wasn't there yet.
The part the star is the 1st real GUI. That. I'm sorry, the Alto is the 1st GUI.
The Alto is the GUI. That people had at the time. That device that had that on there.
It looked like that. Okay, the star was the 1st publicly available one. Where they were selling it to the public.
Remember the only people that had Alto's in the entire world in 73 through 80 were people that worked at Xerox PARC.
And finally, in 81, that's when they released the star and it completely bombs.
Because it's 2 ahead of its time and ridiculously way too expensive.
Okay.
And by then, Apple had already seen it. And was already working on the Lisa and the Macintosh.
So their days were numbered anyway. Right. Anyone else before I go around? All right, Carrie.
Is no one, is no one recording this?
Yeah, that's recorded.
Oh good, woof, okay good. Kerry, Shug, what did you find most interesting?
Can't hear you.
I like to hear earlier stuff more than later stuff, but.
We are good.
No problem. What?
Did you give a presentation? The seventys per year prior to this presentation.
No, the seventies I delivered a month or 2 ago to slug. It's on it's archived on the website.
That was good too.
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Okay, cause I like to see that also because just the week before I showed up for this, which I think I discovered on the discuss this because I've been subscribed to it for quite some time.
There's a presentation where they have Ricky is now dead, but. Cunningham and who's the 3? rd
Dennis Ricky and who's the other guy that developed it with him? Cernican. Is it?
Okay. Okay.
No, not, Richie and who developed Unix? It was current. It was routine.
Pretty good and Richie.
Current again in Richie.
Was it Kernigan?
But there's 3 guys.
Yes!
I don't think so.
What?
Currently, in Richie, we're see.
No, see
Unix was.
Right.
Yeah, Kernigan was C. He wasn't involved with Unix.
Hello. Yeah, that's true. I don't see Bible.
Because originally it was written. In assembler, probably Mac. I mean, macro 8, cause it was, or macro 7.
Here it is. Ken Thompson. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ridley.
My beginning and computer career. This is Yeah, So Thompson is talking in a video that was done about 4 years ago.
At one of the museums up in the Northeast somewhere. I do not remember the name of the group.
They've been putting together more and more museums. Trying to rescue some of this hardware. Yeah, and.
Basically, I knew it before, but hearing Thompson say it directly. Develop of Unix was an unauthorized project that Thompson and one of the other guys had worked on Maltics and that left a very sour taste in.
Bye.
Bell Labs. Manning. So they end up buying a computer.
Over I think 4 guys suggestion because the employee could request resources for a project. These are just engineers, not merely techs.
Okay.
David, I went over all that in the seventies one and in the interest of time, I'm trying to move us along, but yeah, that your.
Very right on that. I would suggest looking at the video on that. And you'll get the seventies.
Okay.
Hopefully I'll be doing the nineties coming up in a month or 2 or 3 down the road.
We're slowly working our way up to today. Go ahead.
So.
Bye. Thank you. Eighty's time period my 1st computer would cost me a little over 4 grand I saved it while I was money in the Navy while stationed overseas and it was a. D.
Nice.
Source and it ran CPM 1.4. And it was not a legible computer, but I weighed about a hundred pounds in between the main unit and display.
Sure.
And I played with it for about 4 or 5 years.
Nice, David.
Nice. Nice. Very cool. Somewhere, somewhere Gary Kildall is happy.
Okay.
Well, I would. I agree that Kindle got screwed over in the deal, but there was some weirdness with CPM that would have had been clean up to come forward.
There was no copy command. Kildall had borrowed from the deck PDP operating system. Pip so to do a copy it was Pip space.
Ease.
Okay.
Wow.
Destination colon equals source, plus some sort of. File match rep pattern or, gobble pattern from, A lot of things were just awkward.
Cool.
I did not ever legally own a copy of CPM, 2.2, but I did own a copy of CPM 1.4.
The license was very strict. Said I could only make a total of 5 backups legally. There was no hard drive with my 1st computer, so that means I could have only legally owned 4, but 5 bootable floppies.
And the other thing I noticed about it when he finally goes to CPM. 3, which I bought from Radio Shack.
A lot of things had changed and I don't think it had gotten better. A lot of more functionality.
But there was no, it was sort of. Getting cluttered like everything else was an afterthought, right?
Right.
It wasn't You need to design. There's only bound about 3 things in my career that I've been highly surprised.
The 1st one was to find a computer that was complete that broke the $1,000 barrier because I didn't think that would happen for a decade and was only about 3 years or 4 years after I bought mine.
I'd see an Atari 800 then another sailor had bought. I looked at 1st computer I think I ever seen was a Radio check model one that I could actually reach over and touch.
And, just how more useful Unix was, cause I ran Zenx for 10 years as a BBS.
In the 4 0 7 area code which I didn't mention I'm in central Florida I'm in the greater Orlando area.
Oh, nice.
We have a Golug meeting that meets on Jitzy not Zoom. And everybody that likes your type of presentations in this.
We have ad hoc, meetings once a month, but about 4 times a year. We have a presentation worth watching.
S
We have a membership that extends into Canada. So, oh, things I've been really impressed with.
Cool. Cool. Alright.
During the 35 years I've been computers. That would be the raspberry pi and the Raspberry Pi 0 for how much cost?
David? I gotta, I gotta wind you up, man. I'm sorry, but I, I gotta get the other people.
Okay. Okay.
I'm sorry. I appreciate all that. That's very interesting.
Hey Scott, let me say to Jack, hey, David, If you don't mind putting your email out publicly, you can just post it in chat or if you want to send it just me privately.
Send it to Gary Meyer there in chat. I'll be back in
Okay.
Yeah, and tell us how to get on this lug you're on. Let us know that too.
Okay.
Appreciate it. Rich, what did you find most interesting out of all that?
Well, actually I found almost all of it interesting, believe it or not. It was it was a trip through history that I very much enjoyed.
And I remember a lot about the, Microsoft deals in there, but you filled in a lot of the details and I really appreciate that.
Good.
Cause I knew Microsoft had gotten The operating system from another company and screwed over some people in there, but I just didn't know all the details.
Yep.
And I really like that. And the other thing I want to compliment, John, this is a very, very well put together presentation.
I really enjoyed that.
Oh, thank you. Thank you. I spend a long time on it, definitely. I spend a lot of time on these, but that's because I like it.
And I, want, you know, I wanted you guys to enjoy it as much as possible. Thank you.
Well, we did. Thank you.
Thank you very much. That means a lot to me. Tony, how about you? What do you find most interesting?
I was thinking of something and I just, I forgot what it was. I'm just trying to think of it again.
Okay.
I mean the, 84 add, you know, that of course gives you chills, 84 from the book, so.
I don't know, I'll think about it. Thanks.
Okay, say something when I come back. I'll come back to you. Robert Levitt.
How are you doing? What's up? What did you find most interesting?
Hi, found all of it interesting. Very interesting, to say the least.
Good. Anything take on that really struck you?
Oh boy, that's hard for me to say. I mean, it was all just very interesting.
I'm sorry.
That's okay. No, don't be sorry. I'm not. How dare you find it all interesting.
Yeah.
What?
That's fine. That's fine. How about you, Lee? What, what did you find most interesting?
I know you live through almost all that stuff.
Well, what's interesting to me is comparing the PC. Evolution with mainstream business at the time because we were selling 1216 Multi-user Unix machines with 68,000 chips based on 68,000 chips.
In that same early 80 period.
Yeah. Yeah. That put the PCs to shame.
Yeah.
Yeah. And until until until by end of their end of the eighties the GUI was winning.
Right. Cause Unix, there was no GUI for Unix at that time, right? Or they were.
Text-based.
Well, and there was a G, yeah, it was a GUI, but it was text based.
Yeah.
I mean, I would do word processing documents on a text base screen, character based screen.
Yeah.
Yeah
Sure, of course. And I bet you were pretty fast at it. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because I didn't have time to include it, but I was gonna include.
The fact that Gary killed all. Was working on a multi-user version of CPM. And he was going to, if IBM had chosen him, it not only had multi-user, it had networking already built in and he was like, The we would have had this stuff so much earlier if CPM had been chosen instead of MS.
Because as you guys know, it took forever to add multi-user capability to us. I don't think it ever got there really.
And networking. So again, another missed opportunity. Overall. Anything else, Lee?
I remember back in that timeframe trying to add a TCP IP stack. To a DOS machine with 20 floppies.
Oh. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. It was, I got paid to install Windows for work groups. On a bunch of PCs and that was like 20 floppies as well.
So I got paid. A ton of money to sit there and babysit all these computers and show floppies in and out for several hours.
It's ridiculous. Tony, do you figure it out? If you remember it.
Yeah i think it was the modem thing we're That sound was like, when the modem didn't work when they didn't connect.
I remember, I remember more fondly. More of a I mean it was you know all this clicks and scratches and all that stuff but I remember the you know remember that sound more finally calling BBS is because it was you know it meant that I finally connected it after calling for 3 h.
Yup, yup. Yeah, that sound definitely brought me back. But it's also one of those.
I'm like, I'm glad I don't hear it every day. Gary, how about you?
I really, really liked. And I know you spend a lot of time on both of, like you said, that 1st year.
Yeah.
But, the Gary Kendall story, I mean, yes, I've heard the short version of that, you know, they just decided to go out flying his plane one day and blew it off.
Right.
Good.
And so I really appreciated the much more detailed and nuanced. Version you brought in and then also the goodies about the early days of Apple and Wozniak taking such a, a new approach to his fellow employees and for benefiting them with the stock and stuff.
That was great. Very good.
Yeah, and hardly anybody knows that. I like I said, that's something I, I want more people to know about.
You know, cause there's not a lot of people as generous as he is. And, that should be celebrated.
Oh yeah.
No? As much as technical achievement, being a human being. And helping others and thinking about the people that helped build the company.
Oh yeah.
At a time when others didn't, that's pretty damn impressive as a human being. You know, so I want you guys to know about that.
Cool. Anybody else?
Anybody else? Oh, yes, Kerry.
The company at the bottom PMMI just wanted their patents and as soon as they bought them out they set down the company.
I was always curious if PM might have been given the option to lease or to license their patents.
Do I think it was Hayes? In which case it would not have been shut down because they would have continued to be a company.
Right. Who's PMMI?
You know? But come like Micromagic. They have one of them that did 600 bar over the 300 miles, sounds.
Oh really?
And that was the very 1st time I was at a computer meeting and they were pre offering a discount price for pre-order.
So I signed up for that before I had a computer. What's that thing? She shipped, I had to go out and buy a computer.
To use it. I'm actually about a tier, one, and a natural 100 adapters so I could use it.
Oh. That was the modem. So that's an
You know, I want to see what's with an Sphere 100 modem. For that did 600 bot over the 300 Tones.
Right, but that was an internal modem.
Correct, there was not there was no Yeah, those before before. Sure, I'm already existed, I think.
That's weird when I search for PMMI. Wikipedia. It takes me to the packaging machinery manufacturers.
Tropotomic, that may help. I don't know.
Potomac.
Micro magic. Incorporated.
How did I?
Hey, see.
It is A/CPOT OM a/C.
Nope. That's weird.
Probably too obscure to get included in that.
But you think Wikipedia would have something.
Yeah, and anything over 25 years old, you know. In many cases, doesn't have anybody that's going to submit it.
Yeah, I guess that surprises me. Butotomic Micro Magic. What? What was the last what is the 4 incorporated.
Incorporated.
I think they're above by Hayes. It might be in Hayes history.
Here it is. There's a web page about it.
Interesting.
Hey, and PMMI. Both produced excellent S. 100. That's about it.
Not a lot of other information out there. Okay, I'm gonna research this more.
That's interesting. I will do some research. See what I can find.
Okay.
Alright, well gentlemen, thank you.
Oh, well, let me interject. I think, Scott, I think you sent me a couple of direct messages.
In reply to you.
The CPM one?
About where I could run. Okay.
Oh hell, I didn't mean to do that. I'm sorry guys. I have a URL, the people that were wondering about running CPM now.
Huh.
Yeah, let me put that in there. That's 1 of them and the other. Is a GitHub page.
There you go. So somebody was asking about running CPM now and I just gave you 2 links about that.
Yeah. Yeah. I figured you wanted that to go out there everybody.
Thank you, Gary.
What was the other one?
Alright. And, let's see the other one. Okay, if you didn't send it, if you did intend to send one to me privately.
I'm not sure I got that one.
Was that the one about how cute your beard was?
Oh.
I think you're turning red, Gary. My goodness.
Oh!
I was just thinking back to one of our members from, some years ago who, at that time I was clean shaven and he he had a beard he was telling me how much the women loved it and of course the end of the meetings we frequently were founded in bars in those days and so he went over Bellied up to the bar and he's sitting there talking to a gal at the bar who he had never met
before at least that's what he tells me and I look over a little while later and she's got her pictures running through his beard just twirling.
There you go, now the truth comes out.
He looks over, winks out me. So yes, that's why I have this full beard now is.
Oh my gosh.
Oh.
Anyway, of course he was probably bald, Oh. I would, I would still have your
Robin in Lee, rub it in.
Oh god. Anyway, let's see. Okay, so I'm not sure what message you sent me in, in private
You said you should I tell them about the one you're doing about? It's, and I said, sure.
Yes. Okay, good, good, good, okay. Which brings me to the, quasi announcement thing I'll make here.
And that is our next meeting that has presentations in it is the Second Wednesday in June. It's the general meeting for the month of June for the slew group.
And the main presentation, once again, be Scott Graneman. And it's a talk we wanted for a while and talked about for a while.
And Scott, you want to give us the name? You just want me to fill in here.
I don't think I came up with the name.
Okay, the idea was social media for the techie. So, rather than just, overview of all the social media.
It's like what should us techies be aware of as far as you know what what attack is used slack being one of them so Why why should we use different social media things?
And is it helping or just? Splitting us up into smaller groups. And
Sure. Is anyone on here on Mastodon besides me?
You are?
I am. It cost it up.
Okay, cool. You're on foster, that makes sense. So it's just Lee and I, that's it.
Well, hopefully after I'm done next time, more you'll be on Mastodon because It's the, it's the nerdiest of the social media's and it's awesome, I think.
So I'll talk a lot about that.
So all of you. All of you come next month on the second Wednesday.
I have a master account but it just
What's that?
I have a mask down account but just parts there. With my amateurial call, sign on it and some pictures.
I don't actively use it, but I get I mark my space there.
But you don't use it to follow anybody either. In other words, I'm not asking if you're posting, but you don't use it at all to follow people either.
Well, I started a Orlando BSD group that had a max of 4 people, but it burned out quickly.
Oh.
Through COVID. But it was just a continuation of Go Lug for people that wanted to talk about.
DSD as opposed to just Linux.
Sure. Okay. Well, anyway, I'll be talking about that and the other slack and I'll talk about TikTok even though I'll have to shower when I'm done.
And well, I'll have to shower when I get done talking about Twitter. I refuse to call X.
Yeah.
So yeah, it should be pretty interesting. I think you guys will find something useful out of it.
Great, great. Looking forward to it. Let's see also on that same meeting the tutorial on the front of it will be part 2 of sniffing.
It'll be, and, and, they'll be picking up where they left off, 2 weeks ago.
And last week, that last week, that last week, that last week, that last week, and you know.
Where you go with the next steps of sniffing the network. So that should be very instructional.
With that, let's see. Any other questions specifically for, Scott in our presentation this evening.
David when I try to go to that link you just posted. I think you've got a broken certificate.
I probably do.
Yep, we're using HTTPS, but your certificates not. Not valid, so.
Yeah. It's a it's a rust problem and a VPS problem. Under Freebsd if you try to.
Yeah.
Rebuild all your packages like if you got. Sir, bot running, it tries to build rust and on a minimum instance of.
Of diesel ocean or let's see what's the other one I have, I know, digital ocean and vulture.
Yeah, basically when it tries to build Russ, you'll run out of this space, you know, crash.
So I need to figure out acne. Dot shell or something else other than
I recommend acme.sh. That's what we use now. We used to use SERP.
Acme SSH is much easier and works great. So. I would recommend that.
I like 15 min presentation on it there.
Alright guys, well thanks. It's fun.
Thank you very much, Scott. Anybody have any other general QA they'd like to throw out at this point?
I'll run kind of late this evening, but if anybody needs to or wants to let me know.
Or speak up now.
I have a question. It's not to be debated or whatever, but just think over. Are some of the legacy languages?
One.
Still relevant today, even if you use it as a hobbyist. Just to strengthen your tech skills.
Hmm. Go, go ahead, Karen. You got some.
I have no, I have another comment. I'm not answering that one.
Oh, okay.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Is, can I start something new? What I really like something I forgot that I made I think it was a high point for me is mentioned an early Apple 2 virus
L Koner.
My friends, my friends, were mostly up with 2 people back, I think in that time frame. And they were hit by it.
Oh really?
And it was, and I assume it's the same one after double check the time. With them.
But it was was they thought it was by one of their group created by and never got outside their group and I've looked for I look for a.
I've never got outside their group and I've looked for, and never got outside their group.
And I've looked for, I look for information, I've never been able to find information on the internet about that.
Yeah.
But you know about it, so that's. So that's probably the same thing. 1, 1, one might be the precursor or the other, but
Yeah, good.
You call, because the disease does.
Huh. Yeah, this was this one was El Koner with that little
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't remember if he had a poem or not. Kind of thinking not because I'm kind of thinking that it's just, did the poor, the, the thing, erased their disc?
Oh, that's bad. No, that this one was not that. This was just a prank one.
Okay, now this one, this one, this one, well I don't want to race this, but it made it unusable.
Oh, yeah, that's bad, no.
Iperature did not see him. You just quietly made this bad.
No, that was not this.
After so many reboots, every, everybody discuss that put in was made bad.
Jeez. Not so good.
Oh.
So my guess my guess would be that Your thing was the actual regional and somebody that took that and made it into the destructive thing.
Or learn from it, did it? Yeah. No, that sucks. Alright guys, I'm going. I'm tired.
I'm hungry.
Thanks, Kat.
Okay, I'll talk to you.
Very well, it's good to hanging out. Talk to you all soon.
See you soon.
Bye.
How do you have.
Anything else?
Oh, Yes. That Johnson, some that are in their former employees. Okay.
Alright folks, this was the St. Louis Units group, main presentation May 16.th
And the speaker was Scott Graneman on computer history in the nineties.