How'd you get into computers? (Apple II, PC clones, BBSes, CYBERSPACE)

Hello. Are you creatively aware? Join me as I take you on a journey into your creativity. Close your eyes.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2018. I'm John Buda, a software engineer.

And I'm Justin Jackson. I'm a product and marketing guy and really a child of the Internet. Same. I think, we're gonna get into that today. Follow along as we build transistor dotfm.

And reflect on our childhoods.

Exactly. This is gonna be a nostalgia heavy episode.

Maybe a a palate cleanser maybe from the the usual talk we have. Not so much focused on transistor, but sort of how we got to where we are and, I guess, where we started with technology. And

Yeah. Yeah. A little bit of, going back, getting our tech origin stories.

Yeah.

Before we do that, do you wanna just give a shout out to our Patreon supporters?

Yeah. Yeah. We have a few. Darby Frey, who's in Chicago, good friend of mine. He runs leadhonestly.com. Thanks, Darby.

And then we've got Kevin Markham and Adam Duvander.

And Dave Junta, also another Chicago friend.

See how I lay I I left Dave Junta for you to say this time?

Yeah.

Good plan. Yeah. And if you, I think if you're just on the Internet and you're trying to find our Patreon, I believe it's just, Johnpatron.comjohnjustin. And, Yeah. This all our goal right now is we're at $84 a month, and that basically covers one episode's worth of editing. So when we edit this up, we get we hire, Chris Enns in Saskatchewan, Canada to edit these episodes, and that's what pays the bills. So, yeah, this was your idea. You thought, Justin, this time

Yeah.

I mean, I

think this is kind of based on a discussion we briefly had in Portland

Oh, that's right.

And we sort of went down this road of of, like, I don't know, BBS's and games we played, and I think we sort of had a similar introduction to technology and computers, I would say. Yeah. I mean, being being from the same time period

That's right.

Growing up.

Yeah. I was born in 1980. What what year are you again? Are you 81?

I'm 81. Yeah. 81. Yeah. So So right any pre anything, really. Yeah. And there was

Pre pre cell phones.

Pre cell phones? Pre I guess well, I don't know. It's Atari was out. Nintendo is 80 I don't know what year that was.

I mean, yeah, Atari was out, so I I don't remember like, older kids had Atari. I definitely remember when the NES came out. Yeah. That was like that was a huge, huge day.

It was. Yeah. That was a big deal.

This is fun to talk about old tech stuff.

It is. I'm sure this will bring up a lot of memories for other people too. But it's, yeah, it's interesting thinking back on it. I mean, I don't exactly know what year it was I got interested in that stuff. I mean, my I know my dad. So he was a he was a magazine editor, and so he always had to have desktop publishing software. Oh, yeah. And I know he he had brought home a one of the black and white Macintoshes, the sing you know, the tiny little ones that you could carry.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. With a little, little screen.

A little screen. He brought that home a few times, just and we played with it. I would go to his office sometimes and just play on that thing, and there wasn't even that much to do. It was like paint a little paint program maybe and some couple games.

Yeah. That one had a mouse, didn't it?

It did. Yeah.

So that that made it unique because

Yeah.

All the other computers that had come out to that point, like, the personal computers didn't have didn't have a mouse. We used to play this is a such a silly game, But remember it the there was a screensaver on that original Mac, but you could still move the mouse around. There's a a screensaver where it was like a rotating kind of star spiral thing. I'll see if I can find it. But we used to play the game we used to play is that we'd put our mouse on the screensaver, and we would just try to move the mouse around and avoid that swirling thing on the screen because there's no other games on it.

Simple simple pleasures.

Yeah. But it it was so it was so, like, there was nothing like it. So you kinda had to come up with your your own fun. Right? I I distinctly remember going to my friend Joshua's house, and they had a Mac. And and they and we were just they're like, oh, we can play this game where we just avoid the avoid the swirling thing.

Yeah. I mean, you know, in school, elementary school, there was a lot of, Apple twos, Apple twos, the Oregon Trail.

There was that turtle basic program. Do you remember that where you had the logo, where you had to make the turtle

Yeah.

Move around? Here's here's what's interesting. So that was so I would have been in grade 1 in, like, 80 how do ages even work? 87, 88? And we had every week, we had computer class. I think we had computer class, like, 2 or 3 times a week. There's, like, a computer lab.

Yeah.

And it had posters, like, all the things you weren't allowed to do around computers. Like, you were never allowed to drink a soda around Right. Around your computer. It was, like, a big deal. Like, don't even bring a soda next to a computer.

Yeah. I never I never had the programming classes growing up. I mean, I for 1, I think, yeah, it was more about, learning how to type, like, word processing, learning how to type. I don't think our teachers knew how to program either, so, like, they barely knew computers, I think. So, a lot of us would just screw around, and we'd learn faster than they would, and we'd just be, like, doing stupid things and, like, sending messages to people across the network. It was, like, a really old network.

They, like, on the Apple 2e's or on the Windows machines?

No. It was Windows or maybe I think we had I know what we had a computer lab that was just DOS for a while.

Okay. So you you must have been because I for a while, at least growing up in Alberta in the eighties, every school just had Apple. And then k. The library got one Macintosh that everyone could go and use, but the computer lab still had Apple twos. And then, there was that crazy multimedia Macintosh that had an optical like, a CD ROM drive.

Yep.

And, that was a big deal. Like, everyone was, like, going crazy over multimedia. Like, multimedia was a keyword that everyone knew.

Yes. It was.

With CD ROMs and and all that stuff.

Yeah. But I didn't I didn't have a personal computer at home until, like, 90 99 1990, 91.

Okay. And what was that? What was your first computer at home?

It was a 486, actually. So we my dad, went all in on a Compu ad. I had to look up the history of that company. They were, like, the biggest PC clone maker in Austin, Texas until Dell took over. CompuAd? Compu add.

What the heck? Okay. I gotta look these up.

Yeah. It was, like, you know, one of the early PC clone makers.

Just like a gray

It was a just a beige box with a beige monitor.

I'm looking to see if I can find any photos of CompuAd Computers.

I tried to find them too. I couldn't.

Oh, here's, like, a really old one on eBay. Should we buy this for you? No. Okay. Fans, John wants us to buy us this computer. It's it's only $99. Nice. It powers on. So did it have because this one here has the the 5 and a was it was 5 and a quarter. Right? Floppy thread.

I think I think we had the 5 and a quarter and the and the 3 and a half. Wow. I remember it had a 120 megabyte hard drive.

That's that's pretty that's pretty good for the time.

Yeah. I think it was 4 megabytes of RAM, I believe.

Wow. What

did you buy No CD ROM. $10,000? I don't remember. It was I think I think he recently I think I was back home a while ago. I think we found the bill for it, like, the original paper receipt that he bought at some store, and it was you know, looking back on it, it's a big investment.

It it's almost like if you could have told the parents back then, like, you know what? Just, like, wait 5 years and you Yeah. Your money's gonna go so much further.

I mean, you know, they they needed it too. My dad did a lot of work at home and taxes and all that stuff.

I think I just found your computer.

Look at

this one I just sent you. It has the 3a half and the 5a quarter.

That looks pretty similar.

It didn't have a turbo button, though.

Oh, the turbo button. Yeah. That looks that's the logo. And then we later on, we added a CD ROM and, like, a sound card to it so we could play games.

Oh, yeah. That was that was another thing. Like, our first, like, real family well, we had a Tandy 1,000. Well, before that, we had a Vic 20. Then we had a Tandy 1,000. But our first one that I got really excited about was our 386.

And Okay.

That one, you could we bought the sound card, and that was like it was always like an add on. Like, do you want the sound card? And I was like, oh, can we please get that? Because they had this little demo, and they were showing us, like, you can hook up a keyboard to it and play midi midi midi music. Like and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever, so I begged my parents for it.

It was great. I mean

You got the sound card. No CD ROM drive, though.

No. We got it was a CD ROM sound card combo with speakers so we could play games with, you know, better sound effects. I mean, we had came with, like, what, an encyclopedia on CD a PDF on CD ROM. You could watch videos, find, like, the first, like, color video you could watch on a computer. It was, like, horrible resolution.

Yeah. I remember when, Microsoft Encarta came out. It was at Yeah. The encyclopedia on CD ROM. Where has the enthusiasm for encyclopedias gone? Wikipedia kinda killed it.

I think it did.

But the thing is so, like, first of all, a lot of families used to invest in the actual books. Right? Like, you would have the whole, Time Time Warner encyclopedia or something?

Yeah. You'd have a wall of a wall of encyclopedia.

You would show it to your guests.

Yeah.

They would walk in the house. You would say, look at this. We have the full encyclopedia, a through z. And then Encarta came out, and the big sale I mean, the big selling feature was this is this entire thing all on this one disk. Yeah. But the cool part about it is you could watch these little postage stamp videos of, like, a killer whale.

Yeah. Or, like, a a rocket launch.

Rocket launch. That. Well, the, yeah, the the the moon landing was on there.

Yeah.

And it would be like it was it was kind of a family event, at least in our house. Like, we'd be like, woah. Everyone gather around. We're gonna look at Microsoft

Encarta. At a 2

inch video. Yeah. But it seems so crazy.

I know.

What about games? What games did you play on your original machine?

Man, I forget what we started out with. But, you know, the I guess I guess up until then, we didn't have a computer. So 46 was already there was already quite a bit out that it could play. So Oh, yeah. A lot a lot of that shareware stuff you'd get, you know, you get, like, a disc and a magazine or whatever.

Did you did you have a modem with that machine? I I I missed that.

We did. It came with a modem, we didn't use it for a while because there's really nothing we could do with it. Although, I don't remember when AOL I mean, there was there was, like, CompuServe and AOL and stuff, but we didn't hook into that for a while. So this modem just sat there. We didn't even use it.

Oh, what a shame.

I think my my brother and I finally, like, we're like, let's try this out. Got a AOL demo disc and signed up. We I think we downloaded shareware games through that.

Yeah. So That's how I got them because I was a country kid.

Yeah.

And so I couldn't get to town. Now we did have like, our town was, like, 5,000 people.

Uh-huh.

And we did have a RadioShack that would sell boxed software.

Okay.

And I remember, like, saving up. And it was it was kind of like, I wasn't allowed to have a Nintendo, and so the only games I could play were on this computer. And I remember sometimes I would save up, like, a lot of money, like, way more than you would pay for a console game on my computer. And often, like, you'd take it home, and you'd find out that it was, like, incompatible, wouldn't work with your hardware.

You didn't have enough memory. Yeah.

Didn't have enough memory, or sometimes it was just like, this sound card you have is not supported, or this video card you have is not supported, and you'd be, like, super disappointed. But when shareware came around, that was crazy because then as a kid out in the country, I could dial up these BBS's, and they would have a these bulletin board services. So this is pre Internet. And they would have a download section where you could, you know, download all sorts of stuff. But one of the things you could download were games and stuff.

Yeah. The the shareware like, basically, demo versions of these games, like the first level, and then you could you could mail you could, like, mail a check to the company, and they'd send you the full version, I think.

I actually did that with, with Commander Keen.

Okay.

I've used that as an example actually for in my my talks about SaaS software because I think that's crazy that we've lost some of that. We've had this model forever since the eighties nineties where you would download the first level for free. And if you liked it, you would write a check and send it to them, and then they would mail you back a license key. And then you would input the license key, and then it would open up the whole game. Yeah.

I think they did. I think they made a lot of money for a while.

Well, if kids like I mean, I was in a farm town in Stony Plain, Alberta, and I was I did it.

Right? Yeah. I mean, I I was in the similar town. We you know, there was a mall, like, 20, 30 minutes away, but we didn't go there that often.

Yeah. Oh, were you kinda out in the country too, like, on an acreage?

Yeah. Yeah. It was, like, 8,000 person town.

Okay.

Yeah.

So similar similar sized towns.

Games I mean, yeah, Apogee was the big shareware company at that point. They did, you know, Commander Keen and Wolfenstein and Yeah.

What did what did your parents think about Wolfenstein?

You know what? My dad actually got into games as well. Like, he started playing Wolfenstein. We got him into Doom. He played Quake.

Oh my god.

He played Half Life and Half Life 2. Like, he he got into it. So It's just like a thing he enjoyed to do, you know, like, in the winter when he couldn't work outside.

So you had, like, the ideal setup at home?

Yeah. It was it was good.

I just remember my parents coming in and going, what is this? Like, there's all those Nazis running around and

You're like, but it's just not it's Nazis. It's fine. You're killing Nazis.

And it but it's and it was so violent. Like, it was like It was.

Yeah. It was.

Did you ever get the did you ever buy the the mod? Like, not not buy, but did you ever download the mods where you would shoot Barney? That was a big one.

Yeah. I remember that. For Doom, I think.

No. Well, for Wolfenstein too. That was the first

one on

my side.

1? Okay. Yeah. There was a lot like that. No. We played, yeah, played those games. Doom, I remember we did, my friends and I would dial up each. You could, like, dial each other's modem directly

Oh, yeah.

And and play cooperatively, which was which was super fun. Although, you couldn't really talk to each other. You you could chat with people.

That's right.

Send them messages, but you couldn't talk. So you'd be, like, playing together.

The first time I ever did that was Duke Nukem 3 d.

Yeah.

And I remember it took us forever to get it set up. Uh-huh. Like, we were, like, calling back and forth, and then one of our moms would pick up the phone, and it would ruin everything.

Yeah. That that happened a lot.

And finally, we'd, like, we'd, like, screamed at the family, and I was like, dude, pick up the phone. And, like, okay. I'll call you. Okay. Okay. And then, you know, the the modem's negotiating. And then finally, they, like, locked in, and we're like, okay. We got it. And it was like, it worked. And I just remember playing for the first time, and kids today are gonna be like, this is this is not a big deal.

Yeah. It was it was pretty amazing once it once you got it to work. And then, you know, you do the, like, the network parties of people, and you have 4 people playing at the same time

in the same room. Were you did you ever do that? Bring your bring your tower over

to I did. No. I did. Yeah. Yeah. I we had I had friends. My brother had friends come over and play, you know, Warcraft and Doom and stuff. And I actually went I don't know what year this was. Middle school, high school, probably middle school. There was a Doom tournament at the local one of the local computer shops.

No way.

And I went to it. You know, I didn't everyone else who was really good was playing with, like, keyboard and mouse, you know? Yep. Because it's way easier. I had, like, this gamepad, but I went around, and the local one of the local radio stations, like, interviewed me. It was, like, the the alternative rock station. Oh my gosh. It was it was hilarious. And then, like, you know, you make it to the next round, and I got absolutely crushed. But

What town is this in?

It was that was in Lansing, East Lansing, Michigan.

Okay. Anyone in in Lansing that can find that video, I will pay anything.

No. Oh, well, it was it was a radio. It wasn't a video.

Okay. Audio.

I was on the radio.

I want I want young John Buddha.

God, it probably doesn't exist, but that'd be amazing if it did.

I it's probably somewhere. And and, actually, a little bit of a foreshadowing if you think about it because now esports is, like, a big thing.

Yeah. Yeah. That was not there was not a big crowd. There were no sponsors.

Except the local computer store.

Mhmm. I don't remember what the what the gifts were that you could win. It was, like, probably a sound card or, like, a yeah. I mean, those yeah. Those so those were the early games. I mean, there was certainly some before that, like, you know, like, I think you mentioned King's Quest and Police Quest and Space Quest.

Yeah. That whole Sierra

and The adventure. Yeah.

And, again, actually, to be honest, I think me getting interested in business started around this time because I could see that as a young kid, a few things were happening. 1, some BBSs were subscription based. So to dial up you you there's a member only number. So there's a free number that was usually busy, but you could call this other number. If you paid, you got access to this private number, and then you would almost get access all the time.

Okay.

And they were willing to pay me. So the I was, like, getting, like, little and it might have just been credits, like, for on the bulletin board, but I remember thinking, like, oh, I just got hired as this 12 year old kid to make art for this bulletin board.

Yeah.

There's, like, business happening here.

Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. We didn't I guess we didn't really talk about the PBS stuff yet. But

Yeah. I mean, that was that was a really interesting time. I actually miss it quite a bit.

Yeah. Yeah. Pre pre Internet. Although, I think a lot of them a lot of those BBS's could connect to Usenet. So you could actually, like, read. They would I think, daily, they would download, like, payloads of Usenet. So you could read Usenet messages across the Internet and then post, and then they would actually send those up to, like, the main for whatever servers wherever those live, probably university, I would guess. But

Yeah. Fidonet.

Mostly, yeah, Fidonet. Yeah. Mostly, I my brother and I played games and signed it. We would sign in and play games like Legend of the Red Dragon.

Oh, yeah.

And then there was trade wars where you'd have, like, it was, like, some interplanetary, like, space game where you would be trading, and you'd have to, like, collect resources and

Yeah.

And you'd be playing against other so it was like a massively multiplayer game. You'd be playing against other people, I think.

Because I I did you ever try to run your own bulletin board?

I might I I'm sure I installed the software, but, like, I could you know, one phone line. What are you gonna do?

Yeah. Yeah. That that's what I did too, but the to buy, like, those door games cost money. And so these early programmers were figuring out you know, this is why one of the reasons I find it funny that, you know, like, this conference talk I give called marketing for developers, the reason I give it is a lot of developers are intimidated by marketing. But I think if you go back into the history, these folks were like badass business people.

Yeah.

Both were programming and but they were also incredible marketers, incredible business people. I think, eventually, it all came crashing down. The story, that's like a documentary I would love to see, is the the Sierra story. The I think it was Ken Williams Ken Williams or I can't remember the name.

The will something William.

Yeah. Roberta Williams was the wife. I just think that's fascinating that all of that stuff was going on early on.

And, like, without and without the Internet, like, I just without stripe do it with yeah. These people are doing this with it in isolation to some extent. I mean, it's Yeah. You know, you have BBS's and there was AOL, but, like, I yeah. It's it's a such a it was such a small like, it felt so much smaller back then.

Oh, yeah. People who

are on these systems, like, knew each other. It was smaller. You could, like, it was like an actual community.

Yeah. And they were started like, Sierra online. I'm I'm just looking at this now. Sierra online was an online a a place to play games like your Sierra games online, I think. I can't remember how Right.

I probably went to my dad's office and, like, fixed some stuff or, like, got some viruses off a computer or fixed a printer or hooked a modem up. I was probably, like, 13, maybe.

Can we stop and just comment about how crazy is this? Yeah. In in the nineties, this was a common occurrence. Yeah. Is you know, dad would be at the office, and and they'd go, come on, Frank. These dang computers aren't working. And then Frank would go, well, my son seems to be pretty into computers. And Yeah. And it they'd be like, well, bring him in, Frank. We gotta get this fixed.

We're gonna we're gonna trust you. Like, what? Yeah. And it

was and it was, like, the first step for me anyway, my dad was a principal. And so they brought me to the office, and I'm they want me to network all these machines. But the first step was I met the I the the IT guy

who Yeah.

Whose office was literally in the broom closet.

Oh, no.

And there's just, like, discs everywhere and cables. And he's like, okay. This works

in the dark.

And he's like, have you ever have you ever networked with Windows NT before? I'm like, no. I I could probably figure it out.

Yeah.

And literally just left me in the computer lab for, like, hours, and I just figured it out somehow.

Yeah. I don't know what I don't know what it was about that. We just had I could just fiddle with that stuff forever until it worked. Like, I'm editing, like, configuration files to get more memory to play a game or, like Yeah. Flipping switches on a modem to get it to work right Yeah. To opening the computer up and replacing a part or, like, you know, I I I think I fried a couple computers. I remember distinctly, I remember one time I lost everything on my home computer hard drive

Oh, no.

Including all of, you know, parents' financial stuff and just, like, I was just like, oh, no. This is not good. I have

a lot of fond memories from back then, but I also do have memories like that where I was like, they were just so unstable, and you could lose stuff so easy. And it was just a nightmare to rebuild it.

It was. Like, floppy disk would just fail all the time.

See, Justin Bellavita here in the in the chat saying, you know, these were good times. And I'm actually thinking because now, you know, I have a 15 year old daughter and a 13 year old son, and my son is super into computers. And I've hired him to do little things here and there, but I think the difference now is that so many of the parents are computer people. Like, we grew up with computers. But back then, you know, for the baby boomers, they had no idea what like, they were going back to school to figure out these computers.

It's crazy. It's like I you probably had the same thing where you'd go to, like, a a friend's a friend's house or, like, a relatives over the holidays, and they'd be like, oh, I hear you're into computers or, like, you're a computer guy. And you're like, yeah. I guess. Like

Yeah. And then they'd asked me to fix their computer. Yeah. That still happens, to be honest.

Yeah.

Like, especially in a small town, I still get a lot of, so what do you do? I'm like, well, I I work with software, and and and they're like, oh, you fix computers? Like, I I guess. Not

I guess. Yeah.

I think, actually, this is interesting looking at my 13 year old because he, his rebellion is that he does not like Apple stuff. And he's really into Linux, and I think it's that same kind of thing. Like, you wanna hack around. You wanna, you know Yeah. Be able to mess around with what's going on. And the the beauty and the downside of PCs that you could do all that stuff. There was no security. There's none. Do you remember Trumpet Winsock?

This is

something else that Yes.

Justin just opened. Trumpet Winsock.

It enabled connectivity between computers and the network on the Internet.

And Yeah. Well, I use that all the time.

Oh, yeah. And in in computer labs, like, they would have no security. You would just

Yeah.

You would just, like okay. We're downloading this, and then you're chatting with your friends and stuff.

I think that's the that's honestly why I got interested in computers, though, because I could just you could screw around and and, like, you might be doing things that aren't necessarily you know, they're they're like jokes sometimes and pranks, but, like, you're learning you're learning something.

So much.

You could break things. You can just, like then you gotta learn how to fix it, and it just sort of, like it it made you less afraid of the machine.

Yeah. And, also, I think was very empowering because Yeah. Like, my wife didn't grow up with computers as much and at home, and it took her a long time to get comfortable. But for me, it's almost like there's not very many computer problems that I don't feel like I could tackle. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so it it kinda had this feeling of, you know, our parents do not understand this at all, and we can explore this. We can, like, we can mess around on this. I mean, they're gonna be upset if we delete their financials, but everything up to that line is basically okay.

And most you know, for the most part, like, my friends and I weren't doing anything nefarious. We weren't, like, you know, learning how to hack or, like, do anything like that. I, you know, I have no idea how to do that stuff, but, like, you know, occasionally, we'd, like, download pirated music and burn a CD and sell it Yeah. At school, which I I, you know, made a few bucks doing that, but who hasn't?

Yeah. Do do you want me to tell my almost got arrested story? Absolutely. Alt 26100. Do you remember this?

Yeah.

Uh-huh. 26100 was a magazine, hackers quarterly magazine, but it was also a news group. So before the web, there were news groups, alt26100, altrec, altpix, altbinaries. Uh-huh. And these were places that you could go.

Oh, no.

Dan's mom calls the school. The school calls the police. Police swoop in, set up a classroom, and just start interviewing kids, bringing in kids, going, where did you get the plans? The police have never seen anything like this. Like, they Oh my god. They're like,

how Like, what is going on in this town?

They're like, what the heck? Like, Amanda said, I don't know if anyone ratted you out because they have literally had every kid in there. They all come out crying. And I'm like, oh my god. And I was I packed my bag. Like, I just packed my bag, and I was just waiting to hear police sirens come. And I was like, just gonna book it into the forest behind my house. I was a kid. I was scared.

Yeah. I mean, what man, if that happened these days, like, you'd be screwed. Yeah. But back then, you're probably like, wow. This thing this is a power this is powerful.

I was like, this is crazy. And then Wow. It just kinda died down. Like, nobody ratted me out. And, I mean, to be fair, like, these pipe bombs were probably not hugely destructive. I know I heard some kids made them, and they did blow up a little bit. Like, if you ever played with gunpowder and you were a kid, it's probably the equivalent of

Yeah.

I mean, not safe. But, anyway, in the newspaper, 2 weeks later, the local the local newspaper, there was an article about how these bomb plans had gone around, and we were worried about it. And I was like, oh my god. Like, what have I done?

That's incredible. That

was my story of of being bad on the early Internet. It was so new. Like, that would have been 91 probably. And then Yep. The the web came out Mosaic came out in 93, and then it was all about about the web.

Yeah.

What about, early websites?

What was

did you make any websites?

I made some websites. Yeah. I mean, I I don't know when I finally got web access. It was I mean, obviously, it was first through AOL. Like, they had their walled garden, but then they eventually had a web browser that you could get to the Internet from.

Yeah. Yeah. That

So, you know, I just get I I just kept signing up for, like, trials demos. Just getting free hours.

Wow. See, because we we paid for CompuServe, and, that was you you only had x number of hours you could use per month.

Yeah. Right. Right.

And I remember We

have yeah. I eventually paid.

But That was so frustrating.

It was.

Because my parents just wanted to check their email. They didn't understand what was going on. And they're like, how did you burn through 29 hours? Like, we have 30 hours. You burn through 29 hours, and it's, like, one week into the month. You know? I was like, see, they didn't even understand. Like, there's a because there's that whole menu of everything you could access.

Yeah.

And Usenet Groups is one of them. And then they had their own, like, games and what classifieds. But then there was, like, one little icon that said, like, the web or whatever, and you would click on that. And then you're out into this whole crazy world.

I know. I mean, it, early websites, a lot of them were gaming websites. Like, there were, you know, websites about news news for games, and, I mean, you would just, like, surf the web and end up in weird places.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and especially back then, there was some there were some weird, weird sites. Yeah. But what was the first site you made? Do you think it was a gaming website, like, for

Oh, no. Well no. I mean, that was some of the first I went to. I think I probably tried to start, like, a fan site for doom or some I don't know. Something like that.

Oh, doom had some amazing animated gifts back then, though.

Yeah.

Like, there's a whole animated GIF pack that was all from Doom.

You could trade, like, levels and levels and maps people made. Yeah. Say, like, a level editors.

Geocities or Angel Fire?

Let's see. I think I did GeoCities, but I also this is the this is the cool thing. So I got through my high school or, like, freshman year, we got I somehow got dial up access. I think you could just, like, apply for it, but no one else did.

Okay.

So I had, like, an email address that was, like, you know, mason.k12.mi.us was the domain name, which was really hard to type. Yeah. But you could sign up for dial up access and you'd get access to dial into somewhere in East Lansing, Michigan, which was like, you know, 20 miles away, but it was the same area code. And it was this partnership through Michigan State University. So, they had you they had these banks of modems you could dial into, and they had like a like a T3 connection to the Internet.

So that would have been huge.

I also had FTP access where you could dump HTML files and have your own website.

Oh, okay.

So, I would just have these websites, like, in subfolders on this really random random domain name. I think the first big one I made was a a website for my high school swim team

Okay.

That I was on, and I was like, you know, it was like, who's on the team? What are the records? Yeah. What were the results of the meets? We had some pictures and stuff.

What year would have been?

That was probably, like, 95 or 96. Do you

still have a copy of that?

I I don't. I For there was a long time where you could search on Google for it and it would show up really don't I don't know if like maybe it's in the archive dot org or the wayback machine or something But Oh, yeah. We I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to look it up. It was, you know, it was tables tables and a bunch of cut up images to form, like, menus. It wasn't I mean, there was no CSS at that point even.

I mean, another benefit of the web, at least for me, is I had tried programming before. I asked for a copy of Turbo Pascal for my 12th birthday or something like that and tried, like, to figure it out on my own, And I just couldn't. As a kid, like and there was I mean, there was resources on Usenet, but it was just way harder than it is now to find any sort of community or instruction online.

Yeah.

And I remember just being like, okay. I can't I can't figure this out. It's just too difficult. And the web comes along, and almost instantly I mean, you could download those HTML files and look inside of them in any text editor and be like, oh, I can figure this out.

Mhmm.

And it

was all about I was always really into writing and publishing. And so the idea that with these real this really simple markup, you could create something and put it online. That that was that just blew my mind.

Yeah. And it was, you know, really not programming per se, but it was you're building something from scratch. You get immediate feedback. Other people can see it. Like, it was Yeah.

Exactly. It was And for me, it had the same, it gave me the same kind of sense of fulfillment that I had with the stuff I'd really enjoyed making with computers before. And so, you know, I always really liked HyperCard, and the the web felt like that. Like, oh, I can link pages to pages to pages and create interactivity and, you know, get people you know, and I can put this all on the web, and people can use it. And, I had a guest book. I had a snowboarding website, and I had a guest

book. Yeah.

And the guest book like, a guest book was just you you would show up, and you would say, hey. It's, you know, it's Anita from Germany. I really like snowboarding too. And that that was what it but it was back then, it was just exciting to meet anyone else that was on the Internet that had the same interest as you and somehow had found your thing.

Yeah. There was no Google.

No. There was Yahoo.

Come along till 99, I think. Yahoo. There was a couple other ones.

Altavista. Yeah. Ask Jeeves.

Ask Jeeves.

I I can't believe GeoCities because, Yahoo bought GeoCities for a billion or something and shut it down. But if you go to geocities.com, it still re it still forwards to Yahoo hosting.

Uh-huh.

And I think that's just a travesty of that's just a travesty. Like, there's there's folks that have tried to rehost old Geocities content. I think if you go to oocities, you can, like, find your it's o o, yeah, o o cities. You can find, maybe if you're lucky, your old GeoCities website. But shame on you, Yahoo.

I mean, it's it's like a time capsule of the Internet.

The the the SpaceGM website hasn't changed since Yeah. 92 or something like that.

Yeah.

And, like, Yahoo, you're you're basically done as a company. Just make geo restore GeoCities to its former glory. People would probably pay. I would pay if I could unlock, like I'm they probably don't have it anymore. They've I think that was the reason behind Oocities is that Yahoo started deleting that stuff.

Yeah. They have it somewhere. I'm sure.

Oh, yeah. In October 2009, we archived our olden cities of the web. Because I noticed that some of my sites are here, but some of mine are not here and Yeah, I just think that That's silly. Like, why not

I kept doing that stuff throughout high school. Like, I would, you know, build websites and things like that. I think I I'm sure I helped some other people build websites for random things.

Did you get paid for any of it?

Oh, man. I don't I don't think I did because I because at that point, like, I still didn't know I I didn't know how to put a website on the Internet with, like, a custom domain name. It was just like I had a folder on a FTP site, and you could go to it, but it wasn't like a domain. Like, I didn't that part I didn't know about yet. Yeah.

Yeah. You didn't think you were gonna get into web stuff.

Not really. I mean, I I was obviously I knew I was interested in computers and loved building websites, but I didn't really even at that point, I didn't really know how to program. I mean, I I wasn't programming logic in any of this stuff, really. It was like it was more design focused, really. It was like

Yeah.

Got my I had my pirated copy of Photoshop, which I'm sure I've like, everyone my age, designers have that's how they got started. Like, if you couldn't pirate Photoshop, you would You're done. So many so many people would not be designers today.

Yet another thing, another characteristic of our generation that feels like this next generation is maybe missing. Because that that it's true, though. Like, if if pirating is harder now than it was back then, and if you and you're right. Like, you ask any designer, hey. So did you pirate Photoshop? It's like, yeah. Like, how else were we gonna do it?

It was like $1,000. Why how could you afford that? Mhmm. And there were no other there weren't free alternatives. I mean, there are now, like, you can I think now there's more tools available that are free or cheap Yeah? Kinda App Store or iPad apps or whatever, but, like, that was the only option, and it was 100 of dollars.

Yeah. I was a fire guy. I wasn't a Photoshop guy.

Okay. But I but, like, all you wanted to do was, like, make a dumb logo with and then, like, emboss it or put some put some drop shadow in it. That's it.

Heavy on the drop shadow. I still have my copy. This is I've mentioned this multiple times, but I still have my copy of Adobe Fireworks CS 5 that I still use. Yeah.

They don't really make it anymore, do they?

They I think these do, but I just haven't I just haven't wanted to pay a subscription to Adobe.

Yeah.

Yeah. I just I keep holding on to this old copy of CS 5.

It's Yeah.

It's pretty haggard now.

Yeah. I I never really I never really I never saw it as a career, really. I mean, that was, like, you know, ended high school at the beginning of the end of the dotcom boom. Yeah. And I went to school in the middle of it and ended up studying computer science, but, like, the stuff I was learning in class was programming, but it wasn't web, and I would be doing that after hours.

Crazy.

So that was all just like me, like, buying a couple books, like, using whatever Google had at that point. There was no Stack Overflow. There was just like you kinda hack this stuff together and make it work Yeah. And keep keep going from there and learn CSS finally once that got a little bit a little bit better. Yeah.

It's weird. Like, I had, here. I'll put my I'm gonna put my business card. This must have been from clearly, I was into business from an early age, but in retrospect, I wish I'd gone and done some programming. But my company was called Mediahead Productions.

Nice.

And I started this in college. So my 1st year of college, I worked as a bellboy. And my, 2nd year of college, I got a business loan and started this company. Oh, and look at this. Here's my

Nice.

Look at my original ad. Put your business online. Web page hosting. At some point, I was like, I gotta I gotta save all this stuff.

Lightning fast t three connection.

Oh, yeah. Look at this. What were my prices? $250 per month. That was pretty good money. Yeah. I I don't know if I ever sold any of those.

You know what? I I did the some similar stuff where you're, like, managing other people's websites and hosting them, and it was a pain in the ass.

Oh, it's so bad. Yeah. I think I sold I had one customer that paid $350 per month. That was my dad's work. And then I had a few other customers that I put on the basic package, but they paid me, like, not a 150. It was, like, way less.

Yeah. I I did some similar stuff like that. Like, I started a company out of after college because it was 2003. There was no opportune like, that was not a good time to start working as a web designer.

Oh, yeah. That's the other yeah. Like, that's there's some other stuff going on at the time.

The web like, I don't think the web and the Internet and, like, .com stuff had really recovered yet, and no one really trusted it necessarily. Yeah. It was starting to. The web standards movement had been starting. And so I would just, like, go around to local businesses and, like, see if they would pay me, you know, whatever they could to build a website.

Wow. Yeah. We haven't even hired an accountant yet for this. I know. You were better back then than you are now.

I know. Yeah. That was a that was an interesting time.

I sometimes, I feel like I didn't do enough. Like, I could have bought so many domain names back then. And I remember at the time, like, clearly, I was advertising for other people to buy domain names. But if you look at like, my website was at incenter.net/media hd. So I didn't even have a domain name for my own business because they were expensive.

They were. I forget. I bought one. This was 2003. Yeah. I think it was called creatively aware.com. Creatively Really didn't roll off the

song. Creatively aware. Hello? Oh,

like, what does that mean?

Are you creatively aware? Join me as I take you on a journey into your creativity. Close your eyes.

Do you still have that?

No. I don't have the domain.

I better see where that hopefully, that doesn't It

doesn't go anywhere. I mean, I could scoop it back up.

Creatively aware.com. Dude, we gotta get that, man. By the way, Wayback Machine, I've donated some money to them in the past. I should donate some more. What they do is a big deal. Yeah. Like, the fact that this is a thing, and you can go back so far and okay. I'm see I'm seeing some results here.

Oh, shit. You're right.

Creatively oh, wow. This was actually this was a good looking site, man.

How do I use this website?

Is this so this is yours, like the blue with the eyeball?

Yeah. That's mine. Gosh.

Now you must have built

a specializing in website design.

This is a really nice looking site. You were good at design back then.

Yeah.

Now for sure

crib some stuff from other people. Oh, yeah. This is when I was living in Miami.

Oh, and this is built with divs. Like, this isn't even a table layout.

Yeah. This was, yeah, this was like, I got I got big into it with the web standard stuff.

Yeah. This this looks good. So this was, like, your your web hosting company.

Uh-huh.

By the way, I just loaded Adobe Flash, and that animation, it like, websites come in from the left. So good. I went to, I went to portfolio. Folks, this is definitely going in the show notes.

What wait. Where?

This is incredible. Oh, yeah. But I it's it's actually really well designed, though. Yeah. It still looks good.

I haven't thought about this in so long. It's amazing.

There is

Yeah. That's

There is no shame in this site here. This is this is a good looking website.

Like, it still works. How is that possible?

Yep. You but did you you must've hand drawn that. It's got kind of a 8 bit look.

And you see the logo embossed, drop shadow?

That that's worth the whole show right there just to see this old website. At this point, it's interesting because we kinda diverged here. I went into business, and you went into programming.

Uh-huh.

And so when you graduated, you were just doing freelance stuff?

Yeah. I just did freelance. Like, I I really couldn't find a job in South Florida that I wanted. Like, yeah, not not exactly Miami, not the mecca of tech jobs at that point, I don't think. Yeah.

I think that was one of the hard things about back then is if you were in the right place at the right time, like, if you were Michael Dell and he just had a bunch of kinda fortunate events that happened.

Yeah.

He was in a big market. There's a big computer show. But in retrospect, when I think back to that time, the one disadvantage was there just wasn't a market. Like, there was no Yeah. You know, we'd had the dotcomboomandbust, and then it was like things kinda people were slowly coming online.

Yeah. I don't I don't think people really knew the value of yet or didn't there there wasn't a huge value to it yet. Yeah. It was it was getting there.

I almost felt like the the the future at the time was in, you know, entertainment because, you know, 3 d animation was coming out at that time. There was, a show in Canada called Reboot.

Mhmm.

And I remember thinking, oh, if you wanna be in computers, that's kinda where you gotta go. Jurassic Park came out and had all that crazy special facts, but I didn't think there was much, like, there was gonna be, like, a I knew that the web was gonna be a thing and that people were probably gonna make, you know, some money doing it, but it never felt like, oh, this is gonna be awesome.

Right. The one yeah. The one thing I always like, speaking of being in the right time, the right place, like, I never I never made it out to San Francisco to to to work, and I don't really regret that particularly. Like but it's I feel like that's a that's a thing I sort of missed out on is, like, that. Yeah. That that experience from, like, a historical perspective.

I kinda wish I I I kinda wish I had built one of those, like, early Internet startups. Like, if I'd been a part of it somehow

So this is this is making me think, like, our this whole conversation.

Yeah.

Did you ever did you ever watch Halton Catch Fire? No. Okay. Have you heard of it? No. Oh, god. You have to watch it. So it was not a popular super popular show. It won a bunch of awards. They did 4 seasons of it. It's on Netflix, if you have that.

Okay. Yeah. I've got Netflix.

So there's 4 season.

It's the early 19 eighties and the spirit of innovation and personal personal computing is about to catch fire.

So each like, it follows the same group of people through the rise of the personal computer. Season 2 is basically the rise of, like, bulletin boards. Season 3 is essentially

Oh my gosh.

Season 3 was they were building a search engine for the Internet, and then season 4 was maybe that was season 4. I don't know. Basically, it it goes through the early eighties to, like, the mid nineties. It was it's probably one of my favorite shows of the last, like, few years.

This is this is a show, like, made for me.

It is so so well done and like it got better and better and fewer and fewer people were watching it and somehow they managed to get 4 seasons out of it but like the cast is great The music is great. Like, it it it it they're all fictional companies, but surrounding them are, like, the real companies that you know of. Right? And, like, part of it takes place in Texas. Some of it is in San Francisco and, like, it it you've gotta like, you've you should watch it. Anyone listening

Okay.

If they haven't even haven't seen it, you should watch it it's great

I'm gonna I'm totally gonna watch this

very made me very nostalgic for all the stuff that we just talked about

I'm gonna watch this with my son.

Yeah. You should. It's really, really well done from a historical perspective.

I showed, all my kids hackers.

Yeah.

And they loved it. I was like, I wonder how this is gonna play. But they were like, oh, this is so good.

Yeah.

By the way, if you want that should be a bonus episode for a Patreon sometime is you and I watch hackers, together live because my commentary on hackers is the best. You have not watched that movie until you've seen me do the play by play. And when I get excited, like

It's like a riff tracks for the movie.

Oh my gosh. I there's so many things about that movie that I just love so much. Like, I don't like rollerblading, but I love the rollerblading in that movie.

That's awesome.

Just the fact that it's like, okay. We gotta go somewhere, and we all get rollerblades on. And then we all zip across town with our laptops on our backs. It's like, that Yeah.

I've never done that once. Sounds great.

We need to do this next time we go to Chicago. Hack the planet. Exactly. Exactly.

Nice.

I think, that would be hilarious if we did it, like, a a hacker's roller blade run, and you have to show up. You have to be wearing a spandex. Like, they all had those their their kinda outfit, like leather jackets Mhmm. Laptop on your back.

Someone told me in the office the nineties is coming back, like, style wise.

Oh, yeah. Well, you

know, might be the right time.

I think it is. I think it's the right time.

What city did that movie take place in?

I thought it was New York. There's so much about that movie I love. I love that hacker hangout place that they go to.

It's

like a a club, a nightclub just for hackers. I thought that that would be, like, a great business to open now in, like, San Francisco.

Yeah.

Well, think that's good. That's good for the nostalgia folks. If you, are listening to the podcast right now, hit us up on Twitter at transistorfm. Tell us about your first computer, your favorite old computer games. I've got George 11 best here in the chat saying Commodore 64. That was his.

Send us links to your first websites on archive on the Wayback Machine.

Yeah. Send us links to your first website on Wayback Machine. Check out the show notes to see John's creatively aware. So good. Oh. And we might have to do another one of these. I think this is actually a perfect live show format just to talk about old stuff because, you could almost just pick a topic. This would actually be a great podcast. Every week, you just pick one of those topics, and you just go real deep.

Yeah. Let's do it.

Let's do it. Let's quit doing this show. Alright. Let's let's get into some app updates. Let's Yeah.

If you if you've made it this far

If you made it this far, congratulations.

And we do have a few small app updates. A lot of it was tweaking and fixing a bunch of stuff with YouTube and our YouTube uploader, which actually still need to finish a few things. Some of you, if you've used it, have noticed that if you publish your entire archive to YouTube, it will stall out occasionally. That's because converting your audio into videos destroys our servers, but I I know I know how to fix it. I just haven't done it yet.

I it's good for people to hear that stuff, though, because

Yeah.

You know, that was a a feature that we knew people wanted, and we added it. And

didn't really test it all that much.

Sometimes you just gotta go live.

Yeah. Exactly. Justin programmed some stuff. There's 2 pull requests sitting in GitHub

Yes.

Right now.

This was huge for me. I so I've said this before. I've been forcing myself to learn some programming, and you just heard my story. I I've been a geek my whole life but was just never able to grasp programming. And I've done a little bit here and there, but now that we have this app, the the benefit I have now is that because Transistor is this fully functional product that John's built, When a customer, like, for example, Travis Northcutt, had some just little bits of feedback about the screen settings page, And I can say, okay.

Yeah. That's a good way to do it if you don't know file names.

But he just had for example, in our show settings, we ask what type of show is this, and you can choose episodic or serial. And he just said, this makes me so nervous. Like, can I change this later? What does this mean? And so I just submitted a a pull request that all it does is in in brackets underneath, it just says, don't worry. You can change this later.

Yeah. You just added some some help text help text.

Just some help text. I've I've added tooltips as well. Yeah. And, again, the nice thing about working with a partner is I can submit that as a PR as a PR. Yeah. And you can, you know, decide to accept it. You can decide to tweak it, improve it. But it it is a it's allowing me to explore some programming stuff.

Mhmm.

The one that was way more difficult for me is, if you go to your if you're a Transistor customer, one of the problems a lot of our customers are having on the dashboard is we have a link to your RSS feed. But if you click that RSS feed button, especially in Safari and Firefox Yeah. It won't do anything. It just it just says, well, this is a feed. We're not going to show any of the XML or anything.

Yeah. I looked at it. I I do have some feedback. So we I could either submit it or we could try to pair on that, and I can show you how I would have done it. Yeah. I mean, it like, the end result, I think, is the same. Like, I I actually had this similar idea. I told you I was like Yeah. Yeah. That's not ideal where you just can't even see your feed URL.

Yeah. But, again, that's the the excitement is that for me is, first of all, just getting anything to work is super, super crazy.

Yeah.

But the fact that I've had all of these people helping me live like, Holger from Germany is, like, up I I think he was trying to get his daughter to bed. He has a little baby, and he saw I was live. And then I said, can I just call you on Skype? And so I don't know what time it was his time. It was probably, like, late at night, but he just talked me through on Skype how to do this thing.

I mean, it's almost like you're you're building a fully functional prototype.

Exactly. Yeah. So I

just I think it's great that you can even dive in there and do that.

I'm coming for your job, John Buddha.

Yeah. Let's do it.

And, how how are we doing on SSL? We're we're getting close.

SSL's close. Yeah. I, I'm gonna try to finish that up today and at least get it tested. So, I got the the basics in place. It's gonna kind of change how our how our app is hosted and deployed a little bit. But that that's essentially gonna allow anyone who wants to use a custom domain on their their transistor website to get automatic free SSL certificates.

Nice.

So that'll be pretty sweet.

I'll tell you one thing I did learn live the other day is I because I I call these segments dumb programming questions because I just wanna be able to ask things with no ego. And so I said, okay. I'm looking at John's instructions. And the way I would do it every single time I would program something new is I would bundle install. I would run cpconfigsecretsyml, all that stuff.

Yeah. And

I would run bin setup. And they said, you don't have to do that every time. And I think that's why I'm my like, we have those s three settings, like like the the, you know, like, locally, like, here's my API key or whatever it is. Those would keep getting overwritten. I think it's because of CP config. Right? That Google writes it.

Yep. Yeah. I should change those instructions. There's only yeah. You only only have to do that only have to do it the first time. I

should change those instructions.

Oh, yeah. You could too.

I'll I'll issue, I'll issue PR for that too. Cool. Well, I think that's it. Anything else we wanna talk about this week?

No. I don't think so. That was a good deep dive into the history books.

Yeah. Yeah. I hope you enjoyed this episode, folks. Thanks for sticking with us. We know we missed last week. We just do the best we can when we can, and, we will see you next week.