Tech History with Ming Johanson, 08 June 2025

On per six PR. This is remember when with Harvey Degan and ming.

Joe Hanson from a marketing Jumpstart is in the studio with me right now and she would love to have a chat to you. By the way, thank you for David in Morley who has sent us to email. I owed nothing to do per se with your segment, but he said please that we're back to normal show tonight.

Nice first time this show has been described as normal. And David says, go Cleamont and the Fred Dockers. Well, the Dockers didn't play, they got to buy.

But Clermont had a nice little win yesterday OVERSUBI, so I'm sure.

You'd be very happy about that, David. Right. So the history of what is Tetris.

So, Tetris is sort of one of the original video games really, and it came out originally it was built

Shake.

You've given me a very strange, perturbed look.

I'm trying to work out because I'm hopeless of those.

So I even I stress very seriously when I have to have my annual I examinations from the before homologist and because they sit in front of this video game thing. Yeah, and I don't like that sort of but I do have a pretty good beripheral vision, apparently with more good luck than good.

I don't like the eyeblowy thing thing that blows the air in your eye.

I love it.

That doesn't worry me.

It's just I don't like having to click on things when you see you know, the light click yep. And so apparently that was okay last time.

So you can still play this game for free on the Tetris dot com website.

What do you get if you get it?

If it happened to solve it? Do you win a prize or something?

I think it's just about getting to the highest level.

And yeah, I've wasted many hours in my playing this game. So they celebrated their forty first birthday this week on the sixth of June.

What's been going for forty one years? That same game?

Yes?

Real?

Yep, No, I was going to say one. I hadn't heard about it.

But it was a puzzle game.

Basically, it was about fitting pieces together and there were lots of different colored squares.

I must still keep doing the crossword in the west.

Yeah, okay, have you played mind Sweeper on your computer?

No?

All right, I don't play anything on the computer.

I don't think on the computer.

I'm on it fun.

No misspent youth for you.

Then I had a misspent youth, but there were no computers in those days to misspend it upon.

No.

I use the computers a hell of a lot for work, and I just can't be bothering. My eyes are usually dropping out by the time nighttime comes around and got to go to bed.

Had enough of the computer.

So if anybody is interested in playing it, it is available on tetris dot com for slash Tetris hyphen e sixty.

So can you join Tetris clubs and like you play against one another?

And do you have Tetris socials?

You know, you go to the pub and no, no, no, it's a bit of a bit of a lonesome game.

Really, it's very very popular.

Trying to find out something appealing about that.

My dead call is just to proof that it was popular and that they played.

The game, because my mum gave a very similar reaction to yours, like, what's Tetris with you?

We'll let these young kids play you and are go and have a nice quiet dinner together somewhere. Well, they're playing Tetris. Tetris.

So it ended up.

Reaching the masses when it joined the Nintendo Game Boy, and it was sold into the hands of impressionable young millennials around the world.

So I guess I fall.

So coming thinking about how Tetris didn't Well, it didn't invent user experience, which is a thing that we talk about a lot in the web industry and websites and app development as well. It embodies many of the modern UX principles, so it was minimalist. It was simple and

So it's the same thing for websites.

Like I think a lot of the time we talk about, you know, is it easy to navigate a website?

Why is it?

If we have a saying in our business where we talk about a Franken wife, is your website a Franken wife? Which is basically Frankenstein's wife, Where you know, the website has just sort of slowly evolved and you're like, oh, the website's missing this bolt that on, Oh it's missing this bolt, another thing on, and then you kind of get to this behemoth of a website that you can't find anything on because you kept bolting stuff on, and so that whole navigation he became a thing.

Foks, you want to talk to me? Now's the time? One, double three A to eighty two is the number? And I see Tetris was not a GUI application. I've heard of DUI. What's GUO?

Some n like d UI.

G UI is graphical user interface. So it was built in DOS for any of any of the nerds out there listening to this that are going yeah DOS yeah, before Windows, before Windows acronym for what that's good quick, Mom might know doctor Google, Doctor Google, Doctor Google knows. So it was a text character based platform and it wasn't like so nothing. You didn't have buttons or things to click on on the X to close the window. It was basically text based commands.

Disc operating system and there we go. Yeah, Matt came flying in with that, did he? Yep, you beat doctor Google by a short half head.

So the history of UX design, like the first ever website was actually which I was surprised about this.

I actually thought this happened a lot, a lot earlier.

It was nineteen ninety one, so Tim Berner Lee Berners Lee launches the first ever website text only know him, no CSS, which is sure for cascading script. It was purely informational and coded and basic HTML. So which hypertext markup language?

So what do you do with.

Sorry?

So he was the only one that had that.

I remember the first website I looked at was the Star Wars website and it took forever to load because obviously we had dial up internet back then.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

What I would have probably the Hawthorne homepage.

So Mosaic, which was the first graphical web browser was released in nineteen ninety three, and this allowed for the display of images in line with text, and it was hugely for visual design. If you have a look if you look up Amazon in the nineties and what their website looks like comparatively to what it looks like now, it's a thousand times easier to navigate and not eleven billion links to click on to.

Find your thing.

So we're looking at the birth of visual design in the nineties where we started to have tables. And this was when I built my first website to impress a boy because it was the only way I could think about how to talk to him. No, not at all. I mean I managed to talk to him, but yeah, no, I don't think.

I impressed much. Next time, I was a strange kid. Next no, he was.

He was a bit of a computer WHI is that kid anyway? And so we like we've kind of progressed from there. We had flash for a moment that obviously we don't have that anymore on websites, but that allowed for animation and graphics and effects to happen on websites where things sort of slide from the left.

All right, James has got a question for you. Go on, I got a question for the lovely lady that will be you.

Thanks James.

Yes, yeah, I mean you're making a lot of assumptions about me being lovely.

I will endorse what you have said as one hundred percent correct.

James. Okay, and I should know. Do you think NBN will bring back dial up? Is it being funny?

Yes? I think so.

NBN was was promised to be this wonderful well wind of fast internet, and unfortunately we have slower, slower internet than some third world countries. Part of that is because we are, especially in Western Australia, we have quite a lot of urban sprawl and we're sprawled out quite far and a lot of the infrastructure and I only know this because I used to work for Telstra in my lifetime.

Ago was was the infrastructure.

It wasn't built properly in a lot of suburbs in Western Australia because it was subcontracted and you had one phone line that was servicing a whole area instead of a singular house. And so when the NBN rolled out, this was a bit of a problem for certain areas and we still have.

Like when it was originally being brought out.

It was about having fiber to the direct to the home, and then they were like no, no to the node, which is the box before you get.

To the home, and then it's split out to all the homes.

So all the wiring that's still going to your home is copperwerring and isn't very particularly faster for anything.

So I'm just speed. I'm looking for speed man NBN.

I'm still on one of.

Those tell on the eighty of cells and.

It seems to work most of the time. We got to let you go soon, but I just do want to comment on this. I can't believe, but I do know how time is flying by twenty four years since when he started using mobiles. And they were those big bricks.

Weren't they.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had My first mobile was a motoroller and it had a bloody big battery and then it had a bloody big charger that you had to slide it in in order to charge it, and you charge it for it.

But mind you, it lasted forever because it didn't do anything. It didn't have any apps.

You can only make phone calls, which you know, shocking a phone making phone call.

I was going to say, fancy inventing a device to make phone calls. The worst thing that ever happened was just directing people to text at all costs.

Yes, that's start me.

Now you must tell us about marketing, jumpstart, because you've had some magnificent successes lately, and I refer usually to the one I know about, and that's Jeffrey Thomas, of course, with his aviation not only his YouTube channel which you've set up, but also he's got a fantastic website forty two k.

Is it forty two kft dot com, which is all about airline new news and aviation news and M three P seventy and all of that, all that sort of ref rauff and we have been helping him and he is our greatest advocate, well, one of our greatest advocates, runs around telling everybody how wonderful I am, you are.

You are quite seriously, you do a fantastic Here's.

YouTube has absolutely done tremendously and I cannot tell people enough about it because it's one of the most underutilized tools in Australia in terms of marketing or even like creating an income for yourself. And they're doing great guns they're doing really, really wonderful. So what marketing job Start does is about removing barriers to technology and making it easier for your business to succeed online and also translate

Fantastic, alright, fantastic, And we'll reconvene this meeting in a few weeks.

All right, I'll see you then.

Jolly good, We're

Going to take a break and then Matt Woods will see stars.