295: Hacker Tourism

Okay. I'm going to test your knowledge of material science and maybe physics. Oh yeah. Let's go. I love this. Getting excited. Yeah. Hit me. Now, of course, granted, I could have probably just Googled this in about five seconds, but what's the point of doing anything in a straightforward manner when you can turn it into content? Yeah, that's the meaning of my life. So with that said, does rust hinder conductivity? Oh, boy, that's a fun question. So rust is iron oxide, right?

This is hearkening back to the old Whiskey Media panel of experts days here. I'm just querying my personal Wikipedia here. I don't think that I think that Rust impacts connectivity. I don't think it completely removes it, but I think it definitely is more resistive than just a piece.

of iron interesting okay so i guess though i don't know for sure okay so what happened is we have we have a wall clock an analog wall clock in the bathroom it's just kind of a cheapo a ten dollar ikea special yep Perfect. And I noticed it had stopped and I thought, you know, we didn't change the battery that long ago in it. It's been maybe a small number of months and I pulled it off and it's in the bathroom. First of all.

San Francisco, like we're not far from the water here. There's fog constantly. Like it's just a humid area in general. Look, the like normal relative humidity here when it is like 60 percent, it's always humid. Also, that bathroom has no windows. Yep. So you have a fan in there? Yeah, there is a ventilation fan. Okay. Do you use it? Oh, yeah. Okay. All the time, like daily, every time we shower. But then we have a standing.

We have a floor standing dehumidifier, the wheels around as well. So I point the dehumidifier at the bathroom on a regular basis. Anyway, point is the clock had stopped. I pulled it off, pulled the battery out and the terminal on the positive end of the battery and also the positive. Part of the battery itself had both rusted. Was it rust? Was it like red rust or green corrosion? No, it was not corrosion. It was also doesn't doesn't the corrosion usually come out of the negative side.

I don't that. I don't know. Usually the corrosion is a bane. Yeah, no, it's awful. But no, I sadly have seen way more. alkaline battery corrosion in my time than I wish I had. And this was definitely not that. This was absolutely. This is rust. It was visually indistinguishable from rust. I'll say that. So unless batteries can corrode in a way that looks just like rust. No.

It was on there in a way that I could not just wipe off with alcohol, so I'm quite sure it was actual rust on the metal. Anyway, I was just curious. It's not that I care. It's just one AA battery. But I was just curious if the clock was not going because there was too much rust on the battery or because the battery is actually dead. Probably the rust is impeding the signal. And but but like I would guess the battery is also probably dead if it's.

rusty and corroding. I don't know. That's weird. I don't know why you would get rust instead of corrosion. I mean, I know there's moisture in the air because of the showering, but that's a weird one. Are you saying there's something untoward going on in our bathroom? I mean, what if it's a, what if it's a, what if you have a bathroom of null time and just time stops in there and that's why the clock stopped? Oh no. Wait.

What if my shower dispenses time fall and not rainfall? Look, hold on. No, no, let's not. Don't bring any of that stranding nonsense into this podcast, okay? Is this a strand podcast? No, it is not. I was referencing Cliff Simak, Clifford Simak's seminal book. I think it's The Way Station. Hold on. I'm looking. It's a it's a 1976 book. It's one of my favorite science fiction books of all time. And God, his Wikipedia page is so long. He wrote so many books. The Waystation. It's about.

A guy, a Civil War soldier who's recruited to maintain like an interstellar weigh station and inside his house, time stops. That's how they keep him there. That's how he keeps his job. Wait, that sounds like your bathroom. It sounds perfect.

Well, I mean, look, the good news, time stops in your bathroom. The bad news, it only stops while you're in your bathroom. So every minute you're out of your bathroom, you're closer to death. Does time freeze for all of existence while you're in the normal? No, just for you, just in the bathroom. Everybody else continues aging and moving forward.

You can move forward through time without aging yourself. But you have to stay in the bathroom. Do you have bodily functions that continue to function while you're in there? You're in the bathroom. You're good. It's covered. Do you have to eat?

Take some fish in there. Take some canned fish. You'll be fine. I don't know about this. Look, the trick is you just have to dip out for a minute, grab some stuff, and then go spend a couple of days in there. And each time you do that, you're adding days to your life.

And so I'm just going to have to like move all my computers into the bathroom so I can have as much time to tinker as I want. I mean, look, you need to take whatever you just have to do. It's got to be done, man. You got to get it, get in there. Just hunker down and don't think about it too much. If there's one room in the house where you have to do what has to be done, it's the null time bathroom. Yeah, the null time bathroom. Time slows down. Bye.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. So I have bad news for you, Brad. Oh. We and my family have been playing a lot of Peak over the last few days. Wait, what's bad news about that? That sounds fun. Well...

so you know how when we play peak we have conversations about what we're going to do and we talk about like what we're carrying and we converse and strategize a fair amount sure some people in the chat maybe thought too much when we were playing over the next lander streams My daughter's strategy is just go up and don't think about it too much. Okay. And she feels she does it with effectively one slot. She has two slots dedicated to Bing Bong and the beautiful.

And she just goes up the mountain and like she got to the to the ice planet. Yep. To the ice world almost immediately. I was just waiting for the part where this is a more effective strategy than what we did. We got to the we got to the fourth biome, like the first game that we played together last night. She's an absolute monster.

Yeah. It's incredible. You know, I tried a little bit of that, that one stream. Remember when you told me to go on my way and I did, and then I'd kind of gotten, I got to the top of the mountain, like 10 minutes faster than you guys. Uh-huh. Yeah. And then what happened? Your hubris.

The game has ideas about people who leave their party behind. Look, I appreciate that. But yeah, so anyway, I was angry spirits of the mountain claimed. Yeah, I was I was chagrined because all the advice I imparted upon her turned out to be.

bad and i should just use her strategy of just go up and don't think about it too much man i i gotta get in there eyes i'm about to leave town for like three weeks almost it runs great on the steam deck man well i'd have to get a steam deck hey brad but yes you should get a steam deck maybe

What if I got a Steam Deck 2 someday? There's not going to be a Steam Deck 2 until there's new consoles, man. That's fine with me. Anyway, I have to leave in like two days, so I'm going to be away from this PC, but now you are really making me want to play some Solo Peak. Yeah. I've been playing mostly Death Stranding, but I kind of actually do want to see how far I could get in peak by myself. I think it's harder with people than it is without.

That is 100% what my expectation was and was kind of borne out by that 10 minute interlude where you sent me off because you guys were stuck and I just kind of booked it up there. I mean, what do you lose? You lose the ability for somebody else to hoist you up when you're about to not make a climb. You lose slots. You lose food and you lose utility slots. But that's pretty much it. Well.

When you have extra people, there are an equal number of hunger timers added in proportion to the extra numbers of inventory slots. So you're burning resources just as much as you were adding resource capacity. Peak is an awesome game. It is really like I've.

Like I've I've been saying this for years, but I think Landfall is secretly doing the smartest thing, given the current nightmare situation in games where they like. They build a bunch of they do game jams. They do regular game jams. They take the most promising stuff out of there and then they ship a game based on those game jams that are like minimum viable.

With just enough stuff around them that they work and then they see how they go. And they've released like 15 games or something ridiculous. Some enormous number of games. Each one does a little bit better than the rest. And even ones that like don't land at first to find an audience eventually.

Like rounds was kind of a slow start and now it's got like 5,000 reviews. Oh, I didn't know they were the rounds people. They're rounds, they're stick fight. They're totally awesome. Battle simulator, totally accurate battle simulator. They did tabs as well. They did tabs. Wow. They did.

Like they have an archive. They have a landfall archive title. That's like a bunch of their prototypes and weird stuff that they've done over the years. That's cool as hell. I did not know they had that kind of a track record. They are incredibly prolific. Nobody realizes this. And they make their games are like universally awesome. And they they like just don't do the hard like this one has a generator for the world, which is a hard thing to do.

but they don't have any like AI or anything else that's hard to go with that. So they do like one hard thing a game at most and then go from there. So is it every 24 hours it generates a new set of mountains for, but for everybody, right? It's the same mountain for everybody every day. Yeah, so the thing that's happening now is that the speedrunners have gotten a hold of that game and are starting to do seeds so that they have the same one. Their content warning, Brad?

Wait, cluster truck. Wait, they did content warning the lethal company like with cameras that we played that was hilarious. Yep. Yep. Is Landfall my new favorite developer? I'm telling you, nobody knows that Landfall is their favorite developer and Landfall kicks ass. That's really good. I got to look them up and read a little bit more about them after this. The story going around about Peak is that they only started development.

on it in february this is this is their way and it sold a million copies in a week it's they're like the anti and shitification because when you go look at the comments the people are like hey man why in the steam forms people like why are there why is there no new content plan for this why is this gonna stop here and they're like but we just make games and then release them we don't do live service nonsense

you can pay $8 for our game and then that's it forever. Also eight bucks, you know, like it's like my, my game group is slowly coming back together after some months apart. And I can't wait to tell them like, Hey, go get pee. Cause it's $8. Like. Even people who have families and don't want to like spend $70 every time we pick up a new game every two weeks, like who's, who's not going to spend eight bucks on something like that. Well, and the thing that they do is like,

They built a perk system for rounds and then that shows up in later games. They built the procedural stuff for content warning and that shows up in haste and peak. And like, I don't know, it's just super smart. They're really smart people.

When I said that they have 20 games, I meant that they have 17 games, and then they also have a whole bunch of games in that Landfall Archives thing, which is really cool. Cool. That's cool. Anyway, Landfall kicks ass. Agro Cab, also good. Yeah. What are we doing this week, Brad?

We're dipping back into the magazine archive, actually. I was kind of shocked to find that it's been just about a year since the last time we did an old issue of a magazine, which was a Next Generation at the time. Yeah, and in classic fashion, we're going back to December 1996, back when the internet was new. Windows 95 was a year old. Windows 98, just a glimmer in the eyes of Bill Gates. And Microsoft was the enemy. Open source was something that nobody was talking about.

really nobody worth talking about i mean it was nobody was talking about it it seems like from this magazine and i don't know if like the concept had even been coined at this point or is like probably just around the time i mean linux was like four years old at this point yeah open source was a like

knew was around at this point. Yes. I mean, to put things in perspective, this magazine's mention of Unix-like stuff is to talk about like Berkeley, like BSD. Yeah, BSD. Have we said what the magazine is? It's Wired. Yeah, it's it's it's pre Conde Nast wired, which is an important distinction, because after after Conde Nast bought wired 98, it became much more of a lifestyle magazine. And this was just.

This is just a weird mishmash of a magazine. It's fascinating. It's very representative of the early time. And then we picked this one because it has a cover picture of Neil Stevenson. standing on top of a big concrete plug in the middle of the ocean with a manhole cover on it. And the cover story is Neil Stevenson, the hacker tourist travels the world to bring back the epic story of wiring the planet.

Yeah, he basically this is like literally like a 50 page cover story almost about him going to Asia and kind of witnessing the laying of what at the time I think was the longest undersea communications cable in the world. Yeah, it was it was a it looks like it was about a 20,000 word article. Yes, I didn't count. I will say before we get into this. Yes, I was struck by the cover photo of him standing on this whatever this concrete pillar in the middle of the ocean is.

I will say this was the second episode of, or sorry, the second issue of wired that I pulled. The first one had the first one had a picture of Richard Dawkins on the front with the, with the header of bad boy evolutionist, Richard Dawkins. Selfish genes and hot memes are the nude mass. But yes. Decided to skip the one with the Richard Dawkins cover story. Yeah, we skipped that one. This is like someone instead. This is like a 280 page book.

I think by their page numbering, it's like 302 or something. I mean, it is the December issue, which I mean, I assume that's like a big, that's like an industry wide phenomenon, right? That your December issue is full of extra advertising. Yeah. December issues were usually bigger than the end of quarter. Everybody's spending their budgets for the end of the year. But it's it's weird. This is so this is an era when I was picking up wired at like the school bookstore sometimes.

Okay. But only if it was something interesting. And I like Neil Stephenson. I'd read Snow Crash and the Diamond Age probably by this point. But Cryptonomicon wasn't out yet. And Snow Crash was a thing that people were kind of super into. It was weird to me that Neil Stephenson was writing nonfiction for this, even though since then, obviously, he's written a bunch of essays over the years and Rose Zodiac and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, like I almost think of him as some kind of journalist.

I started to say like gonzo journalist. I don't think that's the right term, but like he is, he is as much a reporting and nonfiction kind of guy as a, as an author of novels to me, I feel like. Well, so, okay. I think we should just get into it. I don't.

Do we want to start with the Stevenson cover story? I mean, before we get into that, I mean, you mentioned that you bought Wired back in the day. I never really read much of it except, you know, if I came across it in like the lobby of the doctor's office or something like. Oh, you had a cool doctor.

Well, I mean, OK, I don't know that it was actually there, but that kind of place, you know, a place where periodicals might be out for perusal, you know, or maybe even at the bookstore. Like I picked it up occasionally and thumbed through it, but was not an avid reader. Granted, I was in high school at this time.

Well, this was this was a period of time when Wired was was like, if you didn't live here in California and didn't know people who did this kind of work, this was like the only glimpse you got into.

what working on the internet was like right yeah there's there is so much what feels like kind of like light sort of hacker ethos or there's like a bit of an electronic frontier foundation digital libertarian kind of vibe to a lot of the writing in this you know what i mean like a lot of it feels like it came straight out of like berkeley california there's a lot of digital libertarian bullshit there's a lot of like hints of the well in here

Yeah. To be clear, I'm not talking sort of latter day, like what you might think of as a libertarian. Now I'm talking more of the like information yearns to be free. And so do people kind of thing. You know, it's like, like, like privacy and freedom from corporate influence type, like that type of.

Yeah, it's it's the it's the pre neocon taking over the libertarians, meaning fuck the poors like versus like digital hippie type stuff, I guess is really what I mean. Yeah. So. But like, so flipping through this, the overarching vibe that I got is that they had a whole bunch of interesting people that they got together and gave them permission to write about things.

Since it's like a 300 page magazine, they clearly had a shitload of money coming in. So they were able to spend a ton of budget just getting weird, weird, interesting people and weird, interesting stories written. It's the kind of magazine that doesn't kind of exist anymore like this, this kind of publication. It's funny because like you see it a little bit in stuff like like like what Patrick is doing over at Remap sometimes. And.

What the aftermath folks are doing and like like reader funded publications now are picking up this kind of mantle where they're just writing about shit that they think is cool or interesting or important. And in corporate media, a lot of this stuff went away.

And like you wouldn't like this. So I think the initial pitch for this magazine, this is from a Wired article from 2013 celebrating the issue 0101 of Wired because they used to give it. wired version numbers back in the day. Of course. The people who wanted to do this, they invited Kevin Kelly, who was the first executive editor of the book.

And executive editor in wired terms was basically the person who decided what who led the editorial team. Basically, it's not like an editor in chief situation. And their pitch to him, their elevator pitch to him was like, we want to make a magazine. We're trying to make a magazine that feels as if it had been mailed back from the future. And then they pulled John Battelle, who was a Berkeley journalism grad.

Who proposed Rolling Stone for the digital age. Wait, did they click? Did they literally use the words Rolling Stone? Because I wrote in our notes document. I'm just going to read my note here. I didn't read much wired at all. What exactly was the intended tone and target audience?

I'm imagining the initial pitch was Rolling Stone, but for computers. So and in this context, I assume Rolling Stone is talking about like the Jan Wenner editorial years of Rolling Stone where they were where it was like the. The magazine that covered the counterculture and music and rock and roll, right? It's like a marriage of music and lifestyle and politics and culture and yeah.

So so, yeah, John John Mattel went on to do a bunch of other stuff. And Kevin Kelly has has a great. He has a great podcast and newsletter called Cool Tools and does like annual book reports where he writes about. Like the people come on and talk about recommend things that they like. I've been on it a couple of times. It's really fun. Kevin's great. That's cool. But yeah, so and they all felt like it was impossible was the thing that Kevin says in this article is that they felt like it was.

It had to be true believers and it had to be because because the thing that they were trying to do to make a new magazine in this time period in the 90s was felt impossible, which is really funny now because like now it's actually impossible. Whereas then it was just really hard. Anyway.

Also, like you talk about like getting people of some stature writing for it, obviously, like Stevenson doing the cover story here. Like I was not familiar with this name, but there's an article about digital surveillance in here by David Brin, who you seem to be familiar with. I think he's a science fiction author, right?

Yeah, David Brin is like he's a science fiction author from the 80s, kind of that time between like the golden age where it's Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke and those folks and like the more modern stuff that came later. David Brin, one of my favorite David Brin stories is about a black hole, like a tiny microscopic black hole that falls into the center of the earth and just it's bad. Do you read that?

You have a look of revelation. The book is bad or the events of the book are bad. The book is great. The events of the book, it's not great for humanity. My jaw dropped open because I have, I have run that thought experiment in my head many times. What would happen? Like would. Would a microscopic black hole in the middle of a planet just begin accruing the matter and becoming less than microscopic? The book is called Earth.

And yeah, it's an artificially created black hole. It came up a lot when the Large Hadron Collider was coming online for weird reasons. That's 100% the reason that I have thought of that exact phenomenon. I have to read it. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's available. You can still get it. OK, I will look for that. But like there is a there is a post 1996 presidential election article in here by John Heileman, who is like all over politics and political.

coverage in the kind of later period like in the trump era like i've seen him all over the place for like he did he did like game change and and a lot of the oh yeah political like bigger political coverage of the last like 15 years anyway to your point you know there are a lot of like notable names in here in a much more 90s context which we'll get into there's a lot of people who were interesting then who ended up being kind of famous later on yeah um

So can we talk about ads first? Because 90s ads are wild. Yeah, as always. But not in a 90s video game magazine way, though. There are some 90s video game ads. There's a Duke Nukem 3D ad in here. Yeah. But I mean, they're not like extreme and in your face in the same way. In fact, actually, like that was I think the ads in this are what inspired me to write that note in our doc about like, who was the intended audience for this thing? Because.

There are ads in here for, I'm just going to look at the notes here, like Rockwell, the company Rockwell that made modem chipsets. Uh-huh. As an ad in here about their modem chipsets. The opening ad in the first page of the magazine is a Mercedes-Benz ad. Right. So they get as esoteric and technical as ads for modem chipsets right next to.

there is a shocking amount of liquor. Uh, there's cologne or like pieces, like, you know, like watches. Like it's, it's just, it's the weirdest mix of like super nerdy technology. And like, basically like Playboy or like GQ style, like men's lifestyle magazine kind of stuff in here. Like, like I had such a good time trying to imagine who the target was for all this stuff and kind of not be able to come up with an answer.

The liquor ads with a bunch of attractive women drinking martinis and smoking cigars is maybe the most 90s thing I've ever seen. Sure. Yeah. But I mean, it's like there's an absolute ad. Like there's, like I said, cologne ads. And then they're like. Packard Bell ads are like ads for video conferencing, like nascent, like primordial video conferencing hardware. It's just, it's such a weird mix of stuff. There's a Scrabble CD-ROM. Like who, who is?

Who was buying a Scrabble CD-ROM game and also like a $3,000 watch that reads this magazine? I don't know. It's really weird because the presentation of the ads is different. There's monitor ads that are just like a standard ViewSonic monitor ad back in the back that's like... hey, we have 16.7 million colors in a VGA port. And then there's a Samsung ad right in the beginning that has like a male model in a black turtleneck, a black mock turtleneck rather.

Holding up what looks like to be a 17 inch CRT monitor with one hand, which is impossible. Like there's no way he's actually doing that. Probably not. There's there's. This Vio ad that's this Sony Vio is a Sony PC desktop PC brand. And it's like got this weird. high concept shoot of a guy standing on something kind of floating over a sea of competitors or something. I don't understand what's going on in this picture, but it's weird. And then.

And then, like I said, it's like there's an ad for the Microsoft natural keyboard that's just a picture of a hand, a big giant picture of a hand and a little tiny picture of the keyboard. It's like these are made for each other. You'll if you like if you if you have hands, you're going to like this keyboard. It's it's weird. I I'm there's an SGI O2 ad in this magazine, Brad. Yes. What is that about? Like, who is buying an SGI-02? Who's buying a multiple tens of thousands of dollars workstation?

I assume that when they went to the advertising salespeople went out to the companies for this, they were like, hey, what's your ad strategy for magazines? We don't have an ad strategy for magazines. And then Wired just... took dump truck loads full of money to run these ads is my assumption. Yeah, that is a $7,500 workstation in 1996 dollars. Oh, okay. That's pretty cheap then by SGI standards.

Right next to two pages after, I'm sorry, one page after a compact ad, two pages after a micron ad, like your very standard beige box, like commodity PC is being advertised in here. literally one page before a $7,500 Unix workstation. Well, and it's really funny because like, and again, and I can't stress enough, there are Bacardi and absolute ads for this thing as well. Like it's so weird.

I was surprised that the booze ads were here because I thought that was a Condé Nast thing, and it seems to not be. There's a Glenfiddich ad. It is literally every 10 pages. There's another liquor ad. It's just such a strange mix. There's a Web TV ad.

There's an Apple. I think this is an Apple ad. I can't tell like early on on page like 10 or 12 or something that just has a bunch of what looks like PC games. Yeah, it is. It is an Apple ad. There's an extremely tiny fine print that does say copyright Apple computer. And there's like a little Apple logo, a little Mac OS logo. But it's just like, hey, we have games here. Zork Nemesis. You don't know Jack. Virtual Pool. Wing Commander 4. The Price of Freedom.

Yep. It's, it's, it's really bizarre. And then, and then the next page, I couldn't tell if this was an ad or it's just, it's just like some weird Kai's power tool art for this David Brent article that we'll talk about later. Yes, it is a strange mix. A couple more. I mean, we should get into the meat of the issue, but there's another Apple ad for a Performa in here as well. Oh, yeah. Like I think was that like pretty, pretty like lost in the woods era of Apple.

A Windows OS 8 or something, probably Mac, maybe OS 7. Might have been nine because this is remember, this is like a year before they brought jobs back. So this is like Apple kind of teetering on the edge. uh in here and last last ad i'll bring up i just landed on a windows nt workstation 4.0 ad now that is an ad that spoke to me uh-huh so my my favorite of the bad ads is the packard bell computer ad that's like hey

This computer is ready for video conferencing. If you bring your own camera and or camcorder, how would you hook that? It had a capture card. It had a TV tuner card with it. Oh, so was it like analog video in? it was probably analog video in or my guess is that you could buy so i had a hop hog card at that time that you could buy a special uh camera that you plugged like an s video thing into

I had a guy who was like, I want a TV tuner for my computer. I was like, okay, I got it. And then I got it. I built the computer for him with that in it. And he was like, this, this tuner card, I can't hook it. I can't change my cable channels with it. I can't get HBO on it. I was like, okay, well, give me.

the card back and I'll give you some of your money back. And so then I had a TV tuner card. Sure. It wasn't very good. I guess it had to be analog at that point. That was, that was pretty like widespread digital video acceleration. There was no USB at this point. Yeah. And also no USB.

Yeah. So anyway, I just, I am just, I am just so baffled that there is, there is a magazine that is advertising both Bacardi and windows NT workstation in the same practically one page to the next. This is a strange thing.

Here's just to give you a picture of the time. The first letter in the letters section, which is at the front of the book for some reason, is somebody saying. John Perry Barlow is right about one thing. The Washington's official Washington's cluelessness about cyberspace is definitely frightening. Some things never change. Yeah, certainly. I got a little nostalgic looking at the emails. Sorry.

Technically, it's a letters page, although basically all of them are emails because it's a wired audience. Yeah. I got a little nostalgic just going from person to person and noting that everybody had a different domain in their email address. Also, they published people's email addresses. Yes. Also, everybody who wrote in just had their their personal email address published along with their letter.

No, thank you. I mean, honestly, that really is kind of emblematic of the vibe of this whole magazine, which is that like. Well, it's two things. It's a little naive about the early internet. You know, it's a little, it's a little bit like, like ideologically, like information needs to be free. Like, like the internet is going to enable like a new era of human communication and liberty or whatever. And like.

Publishing all of these email addresses is part and parcel with that, right? Because of course, you're going to want all these people to be able to have a discourse with anybody who wants to talk to them about what they wrote, right? I can't imagine the kind of people that would send an email.

to the people who wrote into wire that was probably remarkable but like no thought at this point about like privacy and potential for abuse or spam or whatever um but uh you know netcom.com um coil.com here's a gmu.edu address ime.net odyssey.net here's a juno address like i just remember when everybody had different email providers and there were there were more than like three

We should send emails to all these people and see who still has this address. Yeah, we should. It's a bad idea. Hey, you know that you can schmooze globally 24 hours a day on www.talk.com, a part of the HotWired network. I wonder if talk.com is still part of the hot wire. It's probably a porn site now. If I had to guess, I don't actually know what this is. Oh, it's for sale. Inquire about this domain. It has a phone number on it. There you go. Anyway.

Yeah. So, okay. Ads, ads are weird. There's an ad for 50 millimeter, like full format film at the back of this magazine. I don't understand it. And they talk about point cast. Oh, that's not it. That shouldn't be an ads. That's a, that's actually a. That's actually a story to talk about. Anyway. Hold on. Can we talk about that Domino, the Lotus ad calling Domino wacky a site? You can build a bunch of wacky websites with Domino, Lotus Domino, the thing that made notes work.

Not a wacky piece of software by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah, I'll I'll publish our Google Doc. Along with this episode, which I haven't done in a while, but we have page numbers called out for basically every ad and thing that we have just discussed and will continue to discuss. I guess we should say this is the December 1996 issue of Wired. Or in the numbering parlance, it's 04.12. Yes, I will link to the archive.org page with this magazine and a downloadable PDF and also...

Like I said, post those notes. If you want to follow along on specific stuff we're talking about, those will both be in the show notes for this. Here we go. Where do you want to start? Do you want to start with the Stevenson cover story about the flag fiber? What does flag stand for? The fiber optic link around the globe. It's like weirdly colloquial. You would expect it to have like a much more, I don't know, technical.

wordy kind of meaning but also that sounds like something named by exactly the types of people who were writing for and reading this magazine at the time well okay so the the whole premise of this story is they sent neil stevenson noted cyberpunk author yeah on a hacker tourist is how he describes himself in this yeah around the world he kind of goes out of his way to like coin the term hacker tourism he's there trying like

There's nothing that Wired is more famous for than trying to coin new terms. Do you remember podjacking, Brad? I'm sorry, what jacking? Podjacking. Podjacking? Yeah, you lived in San Francisco in the early 2000s when iPods were all the rage. Podjacking was the act of walking up to somebody on the train and... unplugging their headphones and plugging your headphones or plugging their headphones into your iPod and you plug your headphones into their iPod. Oh, man.

It was like pre-Zune squirting, but, you know, with physical contact that feels vaguely abusive. This is so painfully twee that we need to just move on. Yeah, they that. Yeah. Here's the Stevenson quote, though. Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense, but what might be thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker tourism. Travel to exotic locations in search of sights and sensations that would only be of interest to a geek.

Yeah. Like, look, there's some real Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolf. Yes. New journalism business in here. Gonzo journalism, whatever. I mentioned Gonzo journalism earlier. I guess that is actually appropriate here. But I mean.

Like he dug pretty deep, like he went to Thailand and observed a lot of the actual workers doing a lot of this work, which sounded incredibly gruelingly backbreaking. This feels a little bit like Ford Prefect work, though, right? Like, hey, I wanted to go to Thailand for a few days.

I got wired to pay me to write a 20,000 word piece about it. And also it's kind of interesting. Not even a few days. I think he describes what is it? This was like, this was a two month trip that took him to six continents. That's a long trip. That's a pretty good trip.

Four, six countries in four continents, I believe is what it was. Yeah. No reason to go to Australia with fiber. Yes. Nobody in Australia. I mean, Antarctica rather with fiber. Yes. But, but the flag, the, sorry, what was it? The fiber link around the globe. Fiber optic link around the globe, I guess, which would technically be to to flow ag to full lag. The story describes it as being scheduled for.

full deployment in september 1997 and the second i read that i was like oh this thing never got finished did it or like i'm just i was just bracing for something to have gone wrong here but i looked it up and sure enough like this thing came online by the end of 1997 and at the time at the time was like I think this story says it in a somewhat pithy way that like, oh, it's the longest engineering project in human history, but I think it actually did set some records for cable length at the time.

It was what, 28,000 miles long? Something like that. I don't have all the numbers in front of you. Yeah, I didn't write down all the numbers. I do have the speed in front of me, though, which was the most eye-opening part to me. So there's two ways to rate the speed. They talk about it in the article, actually. Okay. Because for telecoms back then, you considered speed as the number of analog phone calls a wire could carry. And in this case...

The flag could carry 120,000 phone calls circuits at 64 kilobits per second per circuit, which seems like a lot of phone calls. How much data is that in modern terms, Brad? I think we had slight or this article uses slightly different math than what I found on Wikipedia about the flag, but they both they both are roughly in the same ballpark, which was 10 gigabits per second.

Yeah, so there's a fair amount of overhead for signal boosts and for like making sure there's error correction and stuff like that. The practical terms is a little bit under eight gigabits per second is what this article says. That's what the article said. And who knows? Maybe I wonder if there were maybe like signal standard upgrades over the years that maybe led to some of that overhead being reduced. I don't know if that might be.

Why the Wikipedia article cites a slightly faster speed. Anyway, I mean, the thing that blows my mind is obviously 10 gigabits was insanely fast, especially for a global undersea cable in 1996. Mm hmm. I can now schedule installation of 10 gigabit service into my apartment like tomorrow. Why haven't you done that, Brad? Look, we've been over it, man. Yeah, I know. I'd have to replace all of my gear. I don't know what I would actually use it for.

Also, I metric in Imperial. I did. I pulled a Beagle on this. It's 28,000 kilometers long, not 28,000 miles long. So a little bit shorter. Okay. Still, I mean, you know, like I know it's maybe a little trite to be like, look how far we've come. But like, seriously, like hitting on that exact number, the 10 gigabit number when I saw that is just so crazy to me. It's a lot.

That was 30 years ago. That wasn't like a massive engineering project under C cable. And now that's just like granted a relatively advanced residential connection, but still a residential connection.

well okay so there's two things that i thought were really interesting about this article one is one is the jump in technology the other is like how much time they let Neal Stephenson go off onto Neal Stephenson tangents. Yes. Because there's like a whole big section in here about how important rubber is to modern economies. This whole thing, this whole article just reads like a Neal Stephenson novel in microcosm, doesn't it?

It kind of foreshadows a lot of the maybe not the actual stuff, but like you see a lot of Cryptonomicon in this because like this trip, I think I. I'd be curious to see if this trip represents the kickoff for Cryptonomicon for him in some way or some part of research or something. You think he was doing some stealth novel research on in line with this article? I think.

people like Neil Stevenson probably are always thinking about stuff like that. Fair. That's fair. I haven't, I haven't read cryptonomicon in like 20 years, probably, but I remember thinking it was incredible. It's, it's right. I remember thinking it was remarkable and it's been since like 2005, since I read it probably. I mean, there's, there's some like, it's very specific undersea cable stuff in that or no, I remember some like mobile stuff at least. And then a lot of like cryptographic stuff.

there's undersea cable stuff there's a lot of stuff about the philippines oddly there's a lot of stuff about other parts of southeast asia because remember it takes place in both world war ii and like modern day 90s right

The other thing that was interesting about this is there's an infographic map of all of the existing undersea fiber optic cables in 1996, which is. kind of hilarious by today's standards because like i can actually count the number of lines that go between new york and like the and western europe right sure it's like nine maybe eight or nine yeah and

Yeah, it's wild thinking about that. So anyway, can I should I assume? I mean, I don't know if you've seen a current map, but can I assume that that number has increased exponentially? Just assume that everywhere that there's one line here, there's a giant thick band that you can't count now.

Sure. Yeah, we've run a lot of fiber over the last 20 years. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, the crazy thing about the flag run is that it's still in use, or at least that's how Wikipedia describes it as in the present tense as still being used today. Interesting. But I don't know at a speed like that. I don't know actually what it would be good for. I mean, I guess you can still lease that capacity to other people that might be able to make use of it.

10 gigabits, 10 gigabits, man. Yeah, I mean, 10 gigabits is still not nothing when you're talking like international communication. I mean, I was thinking of it in terms of like. How many times could you subdivide that for customers? Not that many at this point, but if, you know, maybe if it has like some dedicated or specialized use, it's still worth selling that capacity. Well, so this was.

I think I'm not. It's funny. We should do a fiber optic episode at some point because it's kind of interesting or worldwide fiber network. I've been I've really been fascinated by undersea cables for a long time. Like it kind of combines my.

fascination with telecommunications with that of like shipwrecks like the haunting quality of the seafloor well and there's a whole my my gut if i remember right is this is before the huge boom of fiber laying because it was viewed as kind of a like building the infrastructure of the railroads or the phone network again type gold rush.

That then resulted in an incredible amount of oversupply. So the prices tanked. So there was a lot of dark fiber for a long time. Interesting. And I think that this is before that happened, but I'm not a hundred percent. Oh yeah. It would have to be, I would think. Well, in 96.

I don't know. It was happening around this time. I think it was I think that was like 98, 99, 2000. It took a while to do these projects is the thing. So like this was a multi-year project. This was an enormous undertaking. He talks about them like he spends a lot of time talking about how long it took the people in.

thailand i think to make manhole covers yeah for the for the different like node stations where the fibers would terminate and then you'd have access points for routers and stuff like that i guess i don't know yeah there's a Fascinating. Fair amount of good photography in this piece as well about some of the stuff we're talking about. Yeah. And such big equipments. Again, I don't know if I think we've said this, but this is literally like a 50 page magazine story.

It is it is incredibly long. And there's like pictures of divers like it's it's worth reading. If you're into this stuff, it's it's a it's a strange. It's it's not a piece that you would ever see put in.

like a commercial published magazine right like the atlantic wouldn't run a 50 page thing about no all the stuff that goes into making fiber i don't know i don't know there are many print publications that have that kind of space or would dedicate that much space these days i mean it just keeps going and going and going and going and going uh it's like a novella basically but you know non-fiction yeah anyway

Yes. If we're ready to move on, I mean, there's a whole battery of shorter pieces in this issue that I feel like kind of presage a lot of... what we're seeing in modern times in terms of the way that the development of technology has gone. Like you can see, you can see a lot of the seeds of our modern ills sown here.

I thought when you put the section header in here, I thought I thought this is like, oh, this is the this is the fuck around phase of the of the Internet. And, you know, now we're finding out. Yes. I mean.

Here's a piece about AI, but I mean, they use obviously AI means something very different now. Well, I mean, it does and it doesn't, right? I mean, back then it was algorithmically driven. Now it's machine learning driven. But still, I mean, they still both are referring to autonomous computerized systems. But there's a piece in here about about one of the early AI based financial trading systems is how they refer to it.

So this is the neural network one, right? Yes. This is, this has got a weird, like quasi sci-fi lead in on it because they're talking about a, um, There's a woman in here who, Christine Downton, a star analyst at the British investment house, Pareto Partners Limited is how they describe it.

There's a lot of flowery sci-fi language in here about them effectively uploading her mind into the machine kind of thing, which is not very instructive as to what they were actually doing here, because that's obviously not literally what happened.

Okay, so there's two things to note here. One is that the lead for this is maybe the most sexist thing I read in this whole issue. The other is that... yeah this is the beginning of agentic trading where they the machine started doing the trading because the people couldn't go fast enough anymore right right yes uh but yes they mentioned um trying to find the the there it is uh

Lots of money in most of the contents of the AI toolbox. Expert systems, case-based reasoning, neural networks, genetic algorithms have been thrown at this problem. So, you know. So these are all new. cs concepts back then neural networks were like we had we had modeled the behavior of neurons and petri dishes to build uh neural network models that ran on silicon very slowly and you would use those

To do to deduce patterns from things to sort as like a sieve, basically. Right. Elsewhere on page 252, there is a short interview with a quote neuro philosopher. I mean, I guess that's a real. This one, not a real thing. No, his name is Paul Churchland, but they opened the inner interview. How close are we to machines with human level intelligence? Like, again, I feel like a lot of this stuff here we are just exactly almost 30 years later.

uh, has become, it's, it's all gone from, from highly theoretical and like good fodder for interviews and magazines like this to all sort of like pressingly real. Well, kind of not real. And the sense that it works the way that it was envisioned to work, but real in the sense that it has, it is, it is having like massive outsized influence on the development and direction of society. Right. That's true. Yeah. And, and like the answer, his answer, 50 years at least.

Sure. From 1996. Yeah. Probably not wrong. Yeah. Okay. So we've got about another 20 years by his reckoning. I think some people would probably disagree with you on that. Yes. There is a piece in here that already in 1996, I mean, how old is the World Wide Web at this point? Like three years old? Wasn't it 93? Three years old, 93. Yeah. But in reality, like really two is before people started using it.

I mean, 96 is the year that we got internet access at my house, so pretty early for a lot of people here. But here's a piece already proclaiming effectively the death of the banner ad, or at least the uselessness of the banner ad. on in web advertising and basically talking about people looking to find more ways to extract money from the web. And again, landing on some nascent concepts that you might think sound very familiar. Well, I was going to say.

like the banner ad was invented theoretically. Well, there's some controversy around it now is my understanding in 1994. So the banner ad is two years old at this point. Sure. Right. By Hal Reine in San Francisco, that big blue building up on the corner of Greenwich at Fisherman's Wharf. They were a head agency up here. Sure.

Well, this article is basically talking about companies desperately frantically trying to find ways to move beyond the display ad. Sponsorships is one thing they land on, you know, like companies buying out.

websites and informing specific brand deals and that kind of thing. The much more salient part of this is the description of DoubleClick, which I think was probably pretty new at this point. Brand new, yeah. And in fact, this article was probably the first time a lot of people had heard of DoubleClick, I would guess. I don't actually know that much about them, but I thought that it jarred a memory when I saw the name. And sure enough.

This description of what's here. I'll just read this. Advertisers want to know about the age, income and interests of individual users. This allows them to make the perfect offer, quote unquote, to promising customers. One way to hone their attack is through DoubleClick, a New York advertising network that serves both websites and advertisers looking to reach web walkers. How does it work? Let's say the last time you went online, you clicked on pages about travel, surfboards, and Hawaii.

The sites alert DoubleClick software, which notes that those packets of data went to your internet address. The software begins to build a profile of your characteristics, including email address, location, and consumer interests. After DoubleClick software has scanned your profile and gathered enough clues, To guess that you might be interested in a Pacific cruise, it instantly uploads a customized ad all within milliseconds of your signing on.

So they hadn't gone to the point yet where they made the ad sales auctions yet, which then was like the other side of the race to the bottom for advertising. Well, there was still time. ended up getting bought by Google and became the backbone of their advertising network. Oh, really? Yeah. I thought they were a competitor. I thought that Google developed its own form of this type of tracking. I did not realize that...

This is literally where it all started. Yeah. Double click. Double click got bought by Google for what seemed like a ridiculous amount of money at the time. But now is probably one of the all time great value buys. Yeah. Yeah, there's language elsewhere in here about, which feels very quaint, I feel like at this point, about the need for, I'm trying to find it. It's a quote from somebody at the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about effectively the need for privacy.

consumer rights to be informed about the usage of all this data that's being collected, which just feels noble but hopelessly naive by today's standards. And then the other the other side of it is they talked about the rise of what we now know of as influencer culture, where, you know, they were talking about building what at the time we probably would have called advertorial.

sites that weren't that had were unfettered by editorial concerns uh where sponsors could interact directly with the editorial content and get their message directly to consumers in the you know best possible way and they had examples of that stuff

Kind of grim. Yeah, it sure is. The last piece I've got in this little subheading of, oh God, help us, they saw it coming, is that David Brin piece about surveillance. Yes. So about about the rapidly miniaturizing cameras that were about to be installed on every street corner and in every building and what would be used with all of that footage and like which which authorities would have access to it and how.

How oppressive would the surveillance state be and so forth? Well, so it's actually so I think the impetus for this was a couple of cities in the UK aimed surveillance cameras at places that that were. like troublemaker hotspots. Okay. Uh, did that make the news? Why do I feel like I remember?

It was the beginning of the UK surveillance state as, you know, the most surveilled island in the world at this point, I think. Yeah, I mean, obviously also, I mean, yes, like, you know, in the wake of like 1984 and Brazil and stuff like that, I'm sure that the news media of the 90s.

blew this up well so the david thought experiment is imagine two societies one where cameras are ubiquitous and control but both where cameras are ubiquitous rather yes one where they're controlled by secret police You know, the 1984 view and the other where everything, all the footage from everything is accessible to everyone all the time.

So everything becomes reality TV, which hadn't been invented yet at this point, really. I guess real world was around, but we hadn't hit Survivor and all that stuff yet. Correct. Yeah, everything's everything's the citizens are watching each other and keeping everybody nice and honest. Now, we've managed to make a reality that was much worse than either. Well, maybe not worse than the police state one, although maybe.

The surveillance capitalism model that we've embraced as a society is is almost as bad as the hey, we have the secret police watching us all the time. One. My favorite quote from this is.

the cameras are getting smaller and cheaper is the gist and then he says can civilian models be far enough can civilian models be far behind and yeah like people put nest cameras and and even worse cameras in their homes and the kids everywhere all the time 15 15 years after this issue pretty much 25 30 years after this issue almost no no i mean like 15 years after this oh yeah you were starting to see things like nest proliferate

Yeah, I this this issue is making me feel like an old man yelling at clouds, Brad. Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't know. Like, I'll give them credit for writing about what we're about. Like I said, what we're about to be a lot of like relatively pressing intersections between. uh technology and society right oh look if the goal was to make a magazine that felt like it was shipped from the mailed to you from the future nice job i guess they did it yeah good job guys

Yes, there's a short piece in here about John Gage that I thought was pretty interesting. I mean, of course I would. He's a former founder of Sun Microsystems. Yeah. But it sounds like I just, first of all, I don't think I realized that some of the founders of Sun were like quite literally people who helped create BSD at Berkeley.

This guy's role at Sun later on was director of the science office is how it's described. I mean, again, he was like the fifth employee, so he could kind of write his own job description at this point. But the story is full of him like interfacing with world leaders like the.

The president of Egypt, for example, and like, you know, like there's there's just kind of an anecdote in here about the reporter hanging out with this guy and he's getting calls from the offices of multiple countries, prime ministers or presidents or whatever, because he's like. involved in like information and green policy around the world well this this has got to be this is during the time when everybody's like hey we got to get on the internet right it's it's literally

It's literally when that episode of The Simpsons aired where Homer is like, I made an internet company and then Bill Gates came to my house and beat me up as a result of starting an internet company that nobody understood. Right. Right. Yeah. All these politicians have no idea what the hell this thing is, and they just know they have to call somebody. And at the time, if you wanted a web server, this is before Apache and LAMP took off. You probably called Sun because that's what Sun sold. Right.

or or next or sgi i mean maybe not an sgi for a web server but you know the point is you were probably calling one of these big iron workstation and server companies because that's kind of all there was you're buying a fifty thousand dollar machine from sun most likely right right you were serious

Yeah, like the deck of this article is why is John Gage a bearded old Berkeley troublemaker carrying the corporate flag for the Pentagon's favorite computer maker? Like, it's just an interesting look at this guy. Being that style of, I mean, Berkeley troublemaker, I feel like is about as evocative a phrase as you can come up with or what this guy's politics probably were. Paints a picture.

And then there's the quote from Paul Saffo that this is the thing that leapt out at me, who is the director of the Institute for the Future, which was a whole kind of Berkeley hippie think tank at the time. John's what anthropologists would call a shaman. And there's more quote, but I just stopped there. That tells you the whole thing. It's not good. That's like some preaching kind of stuff. Well, but they were always there were always these people around at that time. Yeah.

Look, he's a nice guy. Be nice to Shingy. That's fine. I know absolutely nothing about him other than the kind of caricature that grew up around him online. Let's be real. The phrase digital profit maybe does not do itself any favors. It's not.

It doesn't help. But like the thing you have to remember is at this time in the Internet, people didn't understand this thing. They needed people who could explain it to them. They wanted friendly, likable people to do that, which is how you ended up with the shaman and digital profits and all that nonsense.

Totally. But, you know, again, I found this interesting, like I said, with the general tone of this magazine, like this type of guy is very consistent with what it seems like the politics of Wired. Probably were at this time. It was kind of an optimistic libertarianism that doesn't really exist in the modern.

modern context. Yeah, but I mean, that was the predominant vibe about the internet through pretty much all of the 90s, right up until like the dot-com explosion and everybody started making a lot of money on it, right? It was like, this is going to free human consciousness. You're going to have access to the sum total of knowledge.

in your house at all times the people involved in like john gage made a buttload of money on son unless unless he held the stock too long right um talked about java a little bit which was funny because like java this was this was in the decline for java this is when sun was talking about doing uh dumb terminal like uh sorry thin clients yeah um

It would be the future of computing. And then it turned out to not so much be the future of computing. But anyway, but, but it sounds like, it sounds like he was one of the big backers of Java at the company. Yeah. Which sounds. The little I know about Java and its kind of portability and kind of run anywhere ethos, like that seems consistent with something that a guy like this would probably be behind.

Well, they just needed 10 more years of hardware advancement and just-in-time compilers for Java to really be good. At this time, Java was pretty bad, kind of a punchline. Yeah, I mean, yes, I remember exactly how reviled Java was for a long time at this point. Oof. Uh, do you want to go like, there's some random small stuff we can hit? Sure. Uh, there's upon page 54, there's a Seymour Cray, the founder of Cray computer supercomputers. Oh, bit. Yes. That full on.

Full on white shirt and tie with not a pocket protector, but a pen clipped into his rest pocket. It might as well be a pocket protector standing in front of a very large computer. Yeah. Talking about. submerging them in in coolant and stuff like that uh their gadgets section was called fetish which continued for the next i think it probably is still called that i don't know for sure uh it's a cool lamp on page uh 85 or 65 rather sorry fetish um fetish yeah um

Let's see. Do you want to talk about Jargon Watch, which is another classic wired segment section that continued for a long time? Yeah, most of these I thought were a little bit eye rolling, but one of them really jumped out at me, which was port per pillow. It's always eye rolling.

I my theory on these is that they would have one thing that was real and then they just made up a bunch of shit in the office that they thought was funny. Yes. Some of these. OK, well, you worked at a magazine. You would know better than anybody how much of the content is just fabricated. We did not fabricate content at maximum PC. Sometimes we would put stuff in because we thought it was funny and very stupid. Yeah. And somebody would say it to somebody, but we did not just make like.

I don't want to name any games magazines, but there were games magazines that had columnists that weren't real. Oh, well, hold on. We did have Dick Matthews, who wrote the Windows Tips for Idiots column, who was a fabrication, but the tips were real. I see. Sometimes you just need a pseudonym. Nobody wanted to put their name on that one because it was mean. Well, I mean, OK, like, do I actually think there were people in 1986 going around and using the term asmosis?

No, which which is the process through which some people achieve career success by sucking up to the boss. Probably not. But I mean, maybe port per pillow jumped out at me, though. I would believe that somebody in like university it actually used this phrase at the time. A goal set by universities seeking to install network connections in the bedrooms of every student on campus. Like that one to me is actually like an interesting inflection point, like sign of.

the increasing ubiquity of network access and internet access, right? Because, like, when did you get to college? I mean, there was no need for residential networking ports prior to, what, 1994-ish, let's say? 95 is really when it most like MIT and technical schools had in dorms before that. But like network cards were really expensive when I went to college. Right. So even so, I went to NC State, which is an engineering school, like it's quite.

For the time, it was probably more connected than most universities in the country. I still ended up in there were like three dorms on campus in 98 when I moved into a dorm there that. Did not have wired internet yet. And I would have not moved into that dorm. I didn't have a choice. It turned out that's just where I got stuck. I got out of there after one semester. I found it. I knew somebody in a dorm that had.

wired internet access that was moving out and like did everything I could with like university residential services to make sure I was able to take his spot. It's funny. Yes. No, I never had dorm internet. I, when I went to work at the university, we had, we'd just gotten on the internet too. And, uh, you know, the, the gigabit backbone basically for research institutions and universities.

and uh it was that was fast but we were still connecting to the main network with like 10 base to 10 10 megabit connections so it wasn't like we didn't like the world on fire

I mean, 10 megabits in the late 90s was still pretty goddamn fast. That's true. OK, so the wired and tired is still is in here, but they hadn't added the expired yet, which is really funny because that's another classic wired segment. They have a page is that. This is on page 47, I think, for the magazine print, not the PDF. The PDF, it's 53. Ah, yes. And it's things that are wired, the onion.

Millennium, the TV show with Lance Henriksen, I believe. Wow. The Onion in 1996. Uh-huh. Those are two real things. Now, Satan's Punch. That's not a real thing. Never heard of that before. Peak bagging. I don't know what that is. Medical marijuana. I've heard of that. And Windows on the World, which is, I believe, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. Okay.

sure vt100 also on the wired category vt100s are always wired in my book mario mario on the on the thing personal marimba transmitters that's a wireless radio standard if i recall Uh, tired, the baby bells, cheap airlines, home pages, Sonic. Sorry, Brad. What kind of Sonic? I believe it's a hedgehog of the hedgehog variety, I guess. Plugging.

Don't know what that means. Cigars. A lot of ads for cigars in this in this magazine or featuring cigars. Wait, network computing architecture. What? Look, I'm just reading it. I'm not I'm not writing it. Millennialism. Which I guess is being worried about the end of the century, the upcoming end of the century. That's what that would have meant at that time, yes. Oh, Gatorade. Satan's Punch must be some sort of exercise beverage because Gatorade is lined up with it, kind of.

These, I think, are supposed to go together. Marinol versus medical marijuana. Windows CE versus Windows on the World. Yeah, this is a weird layout for this. What else we got? Can we talk about the, well, there's a story about Romero leaving id on page 92. I swear we did not engineer this to yet again, talk about Romero leaving id, which I think is like the third or fourth time it's come up on this podcast.

It has a pretty good quote for what it's worth. After Romero, they attribute Romero's exited id to... exhausting job of creating quake one of the design mavens mind-bending medieval romps uh and then he says carmack repeatedly rebuilt the engine because he was unsatisfied with it and the mike wilson quote says John Carmack won't put out anything that's less than the best. It can be frustrating writing art in that situation. Okay. So there you go.

I mean, we talked about the Romero book last year, but that is kind of the story that that book tells as well, right? That engine was... I mean, even Carmack I have seen in recent... Last couple of years saying that like he actually bit off more than he could chew with the quake engine. And yes, it did delay the project getting out because they didn't have a finished engine to build a game on. But anyway, here's another, here's another good quote.

No sooner were the last few bugs worked out on its hot August release, Quake, than Romero announced he was leaving to launch his own company, tentatively called Ion. Romero's exuberant personality sometimes clashed with Carmack's more introverted style and all-out emphasis on tech. Even so, the decision stunned colleagues. It was a surprise, says Tim Willits, an id designer who worked closely with Romero. He talked about it, but leaving it is a big deal.

I thought they, I think they probably knew, Brad. Probably. I think we know now. I just appreciate that they went and by they, I mean, Wired went and talked to some Quake clan people. Mm-hmm. Romero's abrupt exit worried Quake addicts, an increasing number of whom are joining multiplayer clans or teams, which stage deathmatches and trash talk via elaborate webpages. Already, there are more than 200 clans with names like Dark Requiem.

Damage incorporated and the revolting Cox. Yep. Who I think, I think the revolting Cox went by Revco or at least that was the clan. Yeah. That was the clan tag, right? That was it. Remember that? Like, did you ever.

see clan people i mean anybody could name themselves whatever they wanted on a quake server like you could change your name at will but did you ever see on like pub did you play all the pub deathmatch did you ever just see random people with clan tags on pub dm servers Oh, so I played on there were a couple of Rocket Arena servers that you knew that if you went on, you'd see people that were people like like famous people.

Yeah. Like people from, uh, yeah. Like famous, famous, famous, famous in the Quake clan world. I should, I should be a specific or explicit here. I'm trying to think like. Most of those names are lost to time for me at this point. I mean, Scary comes to mind. Steve Gibson, who now was at Gearbox for a long time, founded Shack News before that. But there were a lot of people who you knew in the clan scene if you followed.

wake and played a lot of it back then yeah exactly um there were a lot of there were there were famous there were popular servers that were kind of hard to get into or that were private and you had to know people to get in yeah i was never that connected i just pretty much like server browsed and

hopped on whatever looked good i just pub stomped and moved on there were there were there were also a lot of scrim servers that you would like if you had a five player team or six player team or whatever you'd jump into um scrim pages on uh on fnet

Or under that and set up scrims with other teams. So, yeah. One other quick gaming hit real quick before we wrap this thing up here. Probably the last ad for me. This just jumped out at me in an ad for a game called ZPC. You ever heard of this? What was the game?

ZPC. No, I've never heard of this. I don't know what it stands for. I assume that stood for something. Apparently it was a, it was a first person shooter apparently built on the marathon two engine. There was a marathon. I guess there was a marathon too. Oh yeah.

Wow. Which actually, does that mean that was a Mac only game? No, it came out on Windows, actually. So I guess they I don't think I realized that they ported Marathon based games to Windows at any point. I thought Marathon didn't Marathon come out for Windows. I don't think so. Did it?

I don't remember. I always thought the first two marathon games were Mac only. No, it totally did come out. Wow. Wow, man. I don't know how I missed that. Well, the studio that made this game made a bunch of games. They made Zork Nemesis. Spec Ops Rangers Lead the Way. Spec Ops Ranger Team Bravo. Oh, is that? Oh, my God. That's Zombie Studios. It's Zombie. Yeah. Oh, I had no idea. Rainbow Six Covert Operations Essentials. There's a bunch of Spec Ops games in here.

I think I might have been to the studio at least once, actually. They were active. They did Blacklight Retribution, Blackwater. That's a... Saw two and saw classic like 360 era games. If I haven't been to the studio, I've at least met with developers from the studio on different. Well, different games of some sort. Gotcha. And they did.

they did america's army the u.s army funded game i did not know this they were the developer of america's army co-developer commissioned it says by the united states armed forces Wild somewhere somewhere co-developed with the U.S. Army development team and others were made with other game developers. Yeah, that's crazy. I didn't even I didn't even notice that connection. The reason I brought this ad up.

outside the fact that this was a marathon-based game. And I thought that was crazy. And again, I'd never realized the marathon eventually came to Windows. The ad has pictures of Lenin, Hitler, and Jesus Christ in it. Yeah, it's a wild ad. What a choice. It feels very wired, like feels very targeted at this type of audience. Yeah, it's...

Like, look, it was a simpler time. I don't think they really thought what they were doing, putting pictures of Hitler and ads, but maybe who knows. Yeah. Anyway, real quick before we go. Yeah. Early ball.

I know you've been bursting to talk about whirly ball. Look, there's, like I said, there's a history of. finding a stupid story and then acting like it's a real trend. And this is this feels like one of those to me. And does this just by coincidence give the editors of the magazine an excuse to go partake in the thing that they want to go write about? I would say probably that's true. So.

Whirly ball is a sport that uses what look like bumper cars and like a highlight whack mallet or scooper thing. And you drive around in the bumper cars in teams of. five or six people, I think, up to five players per side. And you try to wang the ball that's bouncing around the bumper car floor. into a tiny hole on one end or the other of the whirly ball field mallet arena. I don't know what it's called. I've literally never heard of this.

I don't think that it is a thing that people at more than one location ever engaged with. Oh my God. I was sitting here looking at these photos and listening to you describe this. I was envisioning this as like, I was like, it sounds like a real life fusion frenzy mini game. That sounds great. And then I skimmed halfway down. The Edmonds, Washington, whirly ball facility attracts a fair amount of its clientele from Microsoft's nearby office campus. What a weird coincidence. There you go. Yeah.

This is Bill Gates' favorite bumper car game. Well, it's, I mean, look, it's halfway between Fusion Frenzy and halfway between Hyper Blade. Do you remember Hyper Blade? Not. Especially. hyperblade was cyberpunk rollerblading where you had to like death sport where you had to huck a ball into a little hole off of your rollerblades so all right uh

Anyway, Whirly Ball. Sadly, I would play Whirly Ball right now. That looks pretty good, if I'm being honest. Look, I can see the appeal. Last thing I've got, I don't know if you've got anything else, but this Nicholas Negroponte kind of...

What's the magazine term for the like final page editorial column? The back page. The back page. That's what we always called it. Yeah. He writes about laptops in here. Yeah. Mobile computers were novel at this time. Like where laptops have been and what he wants out of them in the future that I thought had some interesting historical factoids in them. He talks about his...

He's a writer, so this is more of a word processor really than a laptop, but he does describe it as his first portable computer, which was a Sony type quarter in 1980, which ran on AA batteries. Those things were cool. These were like journalists use those. Yeah, they were really neat. So a one line, it's a one line word processor. So you had to type a keyboard with a little tiny screen above it that was like one. 80 column probably width wide yeah sure and you you could if you were a reporter

You could sit down, you could write your thing, and then you go to a pay phone and you could fax it or modem it to your assigning editor. That was the part that really blew my mind. I mean, it's like he said, it ran endlessly on four AA batteries. It had the one line screen.

It was one of those like eight way LCD screens. Yes. And only one, or sorry, it only weighed like three pounds. He says three, three and a quarter pounds or something. But the thing that blew my mind was like you said, it has what I guess would have been like half of an acoustic coupler. Right. Because it could only upload, it could not download, it could not receive information. It could only transmit information. Oh, that's, that's interesting. I didn't, I missed that part.

The type quarter expected a market with journalists, and for this reason, the modem only uploaded. It literally had just one suction cup for attaching to a telephone mouthpiece. That's wild. Yeah, so it could only send, which I thought was really cool.

I mean, he goes on to talk about, you know, laptop form factors and what different companies have been doing with them. Another interesting factoid that came out of this that I've found interesting, though, is that he said today flight attendants don't ask me what's on my lap. referring to, you know, the ubiquity of laptops. They asked me if it has a CD-ROM, in which case the FAA says I can't use it in flight.

Wait, why couldn't you use a CD ramen flight, I wonder? Presumably the same reason they made you turn your phone off for so many years, which was just concern about interference with instruments, I guess. Or maybe the disc exploded and sent shrapnel flying through the cabin. I guess. I don't know. I mean...

He mentions in the same paragraph, he says, forbid that laptops should be fully prohibited as they were for a while on Korean Air. So apparently there was a time when at least one airline literally wouldn't let you use a laptop. It's funny because I think the first time I saw a laptop was when I was a freshman in college. One of the kids on my floor had a what was probably a $6,000 Toshiba black and white laptop in 1993.

um, instead of the desktop computers that everybody else had. So interesting. Yeah. Uh, the last thing I want to say is that on page two 16, there's a mention of point cast, which is my favorite Dobie, uh, nineties internet thing, which was push. It was, it was. imagine if the internet but it could push stuff to you instead of you having to go to a web page to find it so point pointcast used i think v uh space in the v blank

Part of the TV signal to send little bits of data over the air and you could get like alerts when news happened. Huh? So it went away almost immediately because. And then we replaced it all with phone notifications 10 years, 15 years later.

Last little thing. I mean, it's the very end of this last laptop column that I was just talking about to wrap things up here. I mean, you know, again, I'll kind of give this magazine credit. Like they saw a fair amount of stuff coming here. Like he's talking about what he wants out of new laptops and that, you know, says like. They should not get too thin, etc., etc. I do have one new requirement, something that planes and boats have and cars soon will. I want my laptop to know where it is.

At a basic level, this means knowing about time and time zones. However, I mean something much more refined, including the ability to correlate longitude and latitude with cities so that my laptop will know what town it's in, what language to use, what local telephone numbers to dial. And what protocols to use for net access? We kind of got there, right? Not necessarily, maybe not necessarily triangulating the same data that he's talking about necessarily. It's a lot more like.

geolocating by IP and stuff like that. But like you kind of take it for granted that your devices are going to know where they are now. Right. One of the things that I thought was funny about this whole issue is that. The idea of GPS as a tool for nerds pops up multiple times. Like Neil Stevenson talks about putting GPS coordinates in for each of the stops on his on his hacker tourism tour.

In the John Gage article, they talk about giving him a laptop with a GPS receiver and a cellular modem so they can know where he is.

for a conference so they had a map on the wall that had where is john gage and it would show where he was at any given moment and then he lost the laptop three days after he got it so it stopped updating right um like it's it's i remember i remember probably not it was probably in 97 or 98 even much later than this i got a gps uh a serial port gps adapter that you put some like double a batteries in and you could hook it up to a laptop or a palm pilot

and grab your GPS coordinates from wherever you were. You didn't have a map. You just got latitude and longitude. You had to then take a paper map and look at the latitudes and longitudes to figure out where you actually were with a ruler usually. But you could tell. And this was even before GPS. This is when it was still artificially inaccurate and they were still making it wobbly for military purposes. Oh, wild. I forgot about that. Yeah.

So anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's weird. We, I enjoyed this one. I, I enjoyed going back and I am reasonably sure that I bought this magazine when I was in college and I think, yeah, this exact issue. Cause I really liked Neil Stevenson after reading the diamond age. Sure. And I also think that I cited the neural network article, or if not this one, then another one.

In my senior thesis, which was about the rise of digital of the transition from biological neural networks, which we were using to model artificial neural networks that ran on silicon. Wild. Do you still have that thesis? I don't want to talk about it. It's not available. It's not available for reading in 2025. Do you still have it, though? It's not available for reading in 2025, Brad.

Yes, I'm not asking to read it. I just want to know if it still exists. I'm not. If people know that it's there, then it'll come out. I don't want that. It's not good. There's an extended section about commander data in there. It's bad. It's a bad, it's bad writing. Now I have to read this. Well, you're never going to find it. Maybe we should do an episode about some of our former work sometime. Never going to talk about this one again, man. I know. I mean.

I brought it up and now it's out there. Yep. Um, yeah, I, I also really enjoyed going through this issue. This, this one was like nostalgic is not the right word, but this, this evokes this issue evoked a time and place for me in a way that even some of those older like gaming magazines did not. Because it taps into so many more real world currents about what was going on around technology, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, this is a lifestyle piece more than anything, right? Yeah. It's weird.

I don't understand why. Like, I don't. There's a lot of stuff about this that I don't understand. Right. It's a weird it's a weird place in a time. And I can't get in the headspace to figure out why. Things were like that. And I don't remember why we used to do that. My camera's all fucked up. Sorry. I don't know if we can. I think we have to end this episode. Your camera has been panning around your room for the last like 30 seconds.

Yeah, I'm testing a new camera and it's it has a gimbal on it and I don't think I like it. I think I'm actually going to send it back because is it one of those is it one of those like supposed to be motion tracking your face kind of thing? So the lights were off and it was unable to tell where your face was. What was going on there?

It's a little dim. Yeah. But it keeps zooming in on weird places when I have a preset. Maybe it got twisted. I don't know. This is terrible audio content. It's trying to paint a word picture here. Yeah. Look, when the robots take over the world, the world gets weird. This seems like as good a place as any to wrap it up, right? I think so.

So yeah, December 1996 issue of Wired Magazine 04.12 in the versioning scheme. The link to the PDF and our show notes that have page numbers for all of the different things we talked about will be in the show notes of this episode. It really, really feels like a journey back in time. And there's like you can see the forks on the road of the Internet that came later from from where we're sitting right here. You sure can. It's still.

Like, I'm going to say that I've said it before. In retrospect, trading free hot takes for letting people run arbitrary code on your computers. Probably a mistake. I think you're probably right. But you know, it's not a mistake is supporting. publications that you like. That's right. So if you if you like this podcast and you want to support it, that's the only way we make money on this. It's a listener supportive endeavor.

And we appreciate each and every person who supports the show. We sure do. These hot takes are free, but we will not arbitrarily run code on your yet. If you give me an opportunity to run some arbitrary code on your computer, I might take it. But as long as the listeners keep supporting the podcast, we don't have to do that. That's right. You can go to patreon.com slash tech pod. Again, that's patreon.com slash tech pod, where for five bucks a month, US dollars, you get access to.

our monthly patron exclusive episodes and the fabulous tech pod discord, which is full of beautiful nerds, just like you. That's right. Yeah. I witnessed someone in the network channel just today. Installing log to RAM on their Raspberry Pis and getting a nice crash course from some people and how to do that correctly. And I saw that to watch. I was in there too. I see people learning and helping each other.

It's it's users helping users. It's the part of the internet that seemed like it was going to be a good thing in the nineties. And it still is in the 2025. So yes, we, we have the last good corner of the internet right here.

So you can go to patreon.com slash chat pod, find out how to join there. We appreciate each and every person's support, but we especially appreciate our executive producer to patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippett, Bunny, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen, James Kamek, and Pantheon makers of the HS3 high-speed 3D printer. Thank you also so much. Thank you. And on that note...

We will see you next week with another edition of the TechPod. That's right. I'll be out of town, so I can't promise what the TechPod will be, but we'll figure something out. I'm excited that I might get to see the duck again. But until then... Please consider the environment before printing this podcast.