Advent of Computing - Bonus Episode - Q&A

Episode Date: July 18, 2021

It's here! My celebratory question and answer episode! Contains ramblings on my checkered past, why computer history is important, and why FOIA is so cool.

Welcome to a very strange and very special episode of Advent of Computing. If you've been following along on the show recently or on my Twitter feed, you should know that the podcast just hit 50,000 downloads, which... at least to me, that's a really big deal. That's something that I never thought would happen when I started this little dinky computer history podcast. So first off, I want to thank everyone who listened, and I especially want to thank all of my supporters on Patreon. Y'all have made it really easy and really enjoyable to keep producing the podcast.

To celebrate this major milestone, I decided to put together a question and answer episode talking about the background of the podcast. To that end, I've been collecting questions from listeners over the past month or so, and here are going to be all of those questions and answers to all of them. Also, if you haven't noticed, this isn't going to be a scripted normal episode. So if that's not your digs, if you're just here for the essentially audio lectures, then just wait a week and I'll have a normally scheduled episode out then. But if you're still here, let's drop into Advent of Computing's Q&A episode.

To start things off, I have a question that I actually get asked quite a bit, and that's, what is your background? Is it computers, journalism, both or neither? The answer is kind of computers. It's a little complicated. So I have a really long background working in the computer industry, specifically programming. I started interning at IT companies in high school. So basically, my entire functional life, I've been programming for profit. I initially started programming in middle school on my dad's old AT clone. So programming and computers have been part of my life in a very deep and technical way, essentially forever.

But my educational background has nothing to do with computers and nothing to do with journalism. I actually have a bachelor's of science in astrophysics, if you can believe it. I actually have a bachelor's of science in astrophysics, if you can believe it. That's served me surprisingly well on the podcast because a lot of early computational stuff is very physics heavy. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. The next question that's following this similar line of interrogation is what motivated you to start the podcast? Now, this is where my background really matters a lot to my

story. So during undergrad, like I was saying, I studied astrophysics. I had a really heavy emphasis on computational astrophysics, so doing data analysis and simulation software. And I also had a really big focus on research because that's what's always interested me. I'm not very good in classrooms. I don't like being in classrooms, but I love doing academic research. A huge part of academics is being able to present what you're working on to a wider audience. That can be just a room of friends or colleagues, or in some cases,

that can just be an open lecture or a talk on campus or at a conference, really anywhere. The audiences can vary a lot. One thing that a lot of my professors always try to really hammer into us is that to be good at research, you also have to be good at communicating your work. And particularly, you have to be able to explain what you're working on to a very general audience, maybe someone that doesn't know anything about physics or anything about computers in this case. If you're not able to really explain to anyone, one, what you're doing and two, why it's important, then you're not going to be able to get very far outside of the lab. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes you never need

to leave the lab. But ideally, you want to be able to articulate what you're doing. That makes your work a lot more impactful and a lot more important. And I also found out in undergrad that I really like giving talks and lectures and writing about research. But there is a flaw to this life path for good old Sean. And that's that I really do not like being in a classroom environment. I like the research part of academics. I don't like the classroom or the formalized part of academics I just don't learn well in a classroom environment and I don't like all the finagling and stuff you have to do outside of just pure research to get ahead in academia so I was at a point at the end of grad school I'd

done a nice swanky internship. I had a relatively good GPA. I could have, in theory, gotten into a grad school. I could have gotten the letters of recommendation, followed the straight and narrow path and everything. And I was sitting down and I was doing the math. I realized, oh, yeah, by the time I finish getting a PhD and finish doing a postdoc, getting a PhD and finish doing a postdoc because if you don't know you kind of have to do a post doc project in order to get a job either in a research lab or at a university so I was looking at the math and it's like well I maybe I'll be about 30 by the time I can just work in research research um and i i just was not down for that i didn't want to devote that much of my life

to being in a classroom in a formalized environment that is something i could not do so i did not go to grad school but that kind of left me in these doldrums where i really liked doing research and i didn't have an outlet for that. Now, like I had mentioned, I had been working in IT initially as an intern part-time. And then once I graduated from college full-time as a software developer, specifically when I graduated, I had been working for this company that was a content delivery network. I was writing software for audio file delivery, live streaming, and statistics for both. Crucially to our story today, the company I worked for did

a lot of podcast delivery, monetization, and statistics. So I had this background working kind of on the deep, hidden industry side of podcasting. And I also just really like listening to podcasts. I think you kind of need to enjoy listening to podcasts to produce one. It's like how authors usually enjoy reading books. But anyway, so I'm getting out of college. I'm kind of let loose into the world, trying to find some way to scratch that academic itch without getting too close to academics, because that's bad, bad territory for me. And I started thinking more and more about like, you know, I could produce a podcast that that couldn't be that hard, could it? That that couldn't be that hard, could it? And especially working in the industry, I knew like essentially all the technical stuff,

how to get it set up, how to distribute it, how to handle the administrivia side of things. Knew nothing about audio engineering. I still kind of know nothing about audio engineering or production. So after a while, I figured, yeah, I'll go for it. I'll try producing a podcast. And I started fleshing out the idea for Advent of Computing, and I haven't looked back. So the other corollary question to what motivated you to start a podcast, and this isn't one I was explicitly asked this round, but it's something that a lot of people ask me in general is why computer history? If you've been paying attention, that doesn't really seem like the most reasonable thing to pull out of my background. Why wouldn't it be about physics or programming? Well, for me, it was never a question on what the topic would be. I always knew I'd want it to be about computer history.

Part of that is just that I find computer history really fascinating. When I was a kid, I remember visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and that just blew me away as, you know, a young computer nerd starting to just realize that there's a lot more to computers than just something that sits on my desk at home. Another thing that really got me fascinated with the heritage of computing was reading the New Hackers Dictionary. That's the print edition of the jargon file, if you're familiar with that. I found a copy of that at a used bookstore in high school. And going through that really started to get me

thinking about like, oh, yeah, there's more people who program and are part of this community than just myself. I started realizing that there's this really rich historical context to computing. It's not just click clacking away at a keyboard the other reason that i was really drawn to doing a computer history podcast specifically was a little competitive market analysis that makes it sound more intelligent and like a better choice than it actually was so i really enjoy listening to podcasts mainly podcasts, but I also on and off listen to retrocomputing podcasts. And I have particular tastes.

I don't really like listening to interviews. And a lot of the podcasts that cover computer history are mainly interview driven. And that's no knock against them. That's really valuable work and a really good resource. I just don't like listening to interviews. I don't know why. There's just something about it that I can't get into. And the other thing is a lot of podcasts about retrocomputing are more about,

there's a whole lot about video games, which is fine. That's also really interesting, but that's not like computer science history. There's also a whole lot that are about nostalgia or collecting or just like computer science history. There's also a whole lot there about nostalgia or collecting or just like personal computer hardware. And once again, no knock against any of these categories or niches. I think it's great to see people putting out content of any kind, but there just wasn't a whole lot of narrative, like focused treatments in the podcasting space on the

history of computing at the time. So I thought that maybe that would be a good niche to go into. Now, maybe that's a little bit of rationalization. I think the bottom line is I just really wanted to talk about computer history because it fascinates me. So that leads us into the next question, which is what motivates you to keep putting in work for research slash production of each new episode? I think I kind of answered that in the last question. I find computer history really

fascinating. And every time I'm turning over stones, looking for new topics, or even just doing research on an existing episode, I invariably find more things I want to learn about. So producing the podcast, one is I enjoy teaching people and sharing new information with people, but also I just like learning. My favorite episodes to produce are the ones where there's not like a published book about the topic or there's not papers written about the history where I have to go through and by hand piece together stuff. I really enjoy that kind of work. Another reason that might sound a little bit grandiose but really keeps me pushing forward is I think what I'm doing is really important. Computer history is vitally, vitally important to understanding and making sense of the modern

day. I think I've said this on a few episodes now, but even if you're not using a computer or not sitting in front of a computer, you're very personally affected by just the fact that computers exist. I mean, just look as far as like a supply chain. Maybe you're in the middle of Antarctica and you don't know what a digit or binary is. But if you have any interaction with the outside world, if food shows up, if there's radio signals around you, if there's a boat nearby,

there's going to be some connection to computing. The world's been entirely reshaped just because some dudes figured out that, hey, you can make this weird vacuum tube thing count in binary numbers. So on like a very philosophical level, learning about the heritage of computing systems is important. On a more visceral kind of feel, I really want people who listen to the podcast to get that same sense of excitement that I got the first time I started realizing that computing is a lot more than just what's sitting on my desk. It turns out it's a lot more than just Bill Gates and Steve Jobs involved with the history of computers. And

I like to think that in some small part, I'm helping people realize that. But yeah, that really, all of these factors really motivate me to keep going. Next question. How do you find your research material when I assume most of this information is found in old academic journals and out-of-print books. Well, it's a very good question, and it's something I lose sleep over sometimes. There's a whole lot of ways to approach doing this kind of historic research, and a lot of it comes down to archival research. It really depends on what kind of topic I'm dealing with. research. It really depends on what kind of topic I'm dealing with. So I guess let's jump into a crash course on how to find research materials. Also, I guess wrapped up in this, I'm going to be answering the second question in this list, which is what are some of the best online resources you

have found for research in computer history? The easiest source and the one that is up there with accessibility is, of course, books. I always try to get as close to primary sources as I can. Sometimes I can't. But in general, if you can find a book, either like a pop history, a biography, an autobiography, or some kind of in-the-time text written about the subject you're looking for that's usually pretty accessible. One option is using the Internet Archive, archive.org. They're probably one of the better resources for online research. They're a combination of archival materials that are scanned online and a public lending library they're technically incorporated as a library so you can borrow books from them

on the internet which makes a lot of things really easy to get a hold of so for instance one of my gold standard sources that is on archive.org is this book called The History of Programming Languages, which is a compendium of ACM lectures about computer programming history. I seem to reference it every time I talk about programming language history. So each chapter is a transcript of a talk plus some extra material that was presented by someone involved with the language the chapter is about so for instance they have this chapter on basic that was presented by thomas kurtz who was one of the original developers of basic so that's not 100% a primary source since it was presented a lot after BASIC was actually developed, but it was written by someone who was there. So it's a really, really good source to get an idea of the development of

the language and the mindset that they were in when they wrote it. If the Internet Archive doesn't have a scan of the book you want, which sometimes they don't, it's kind of a hit or miss with more esoteric texts that I'm always looking for. Then my second option is always more dubious quasi-legal means. You can fill in the blanks for that. Third on the list is actually spending money to acquire books. I have a big bookshelf in my office full of out-of-print and hard-to-find texts that are from the history of computing. eBay's an easy option. You can oftentimes find relatively cheap books. No one really cares about a lot of the texts that I care about. Once again, the history of the basic programming language is a great example. There's this book called Back to Basic that was written by Kimony and Kurtz, the co-developers

of the language. And I think I was able to find a copy of that on eBay for like $5. It's been out of print since the 70s. Incidentally, that's where a good deal of Patreon money goes. So if you support the show, thank you. I have a bookshelf full of your support. But going beyond books, there are academic journal papers, which are frustratingly hard to get a hold of. Depending on the journal it's in, you have to pay either a subscription or you have to buy articles like per page, which is awful.

And I hate it. There have been articles from like 1930 that are still behind a paywall for some. I don't understand reason. It's stupid, and I really dislike that. Also, a great example of why I don't like formal academia. But there are options around that. JSTOR, as evil of a company as they are, allows you 100 free articles a month, I think. So I have an account there that I don't pay for because I will never give JSTOR a cent of my money. You can look up more about JSTOR if you want. They're evil.

Don't want to dwell on that. This is a happy episode. Another great resource for finding academic journals, if you have the DOI number, which is like the Dewey decimal number for articles, is scihub.do. It's, once again, a dubiously legal source, but they have a whole lot of academic journal scans online. Once again, kind of like the Internet Archive, it can be hit or miss, but I found that like 80 or 90 percent of the time I can find a e-print copy of an article I'm looking for on there. Now, getting more esoteric and getting to what is one of my favorite resources. Whenever you're dealing with something that was done at a government agency, so not strictly everything government funded, because sometimes tax dollars go to places that don't have the same record keeping caveats.

But usually if something's like part of a dod project especially you can find government archives that have that information that's one of the things that i think is exceptional about america is the transparency of some government funded works and the freedom of information act now for your freedom of information act is this american legislature that established a system where if your tax money paid for it which is everything really you can submit a request through the proper channels and ask to get scans of some information. As long as it's not classified or a state secret, then you can usually get it. Adding to that, which is something that's really convenient for me, is if something has been a FOIA target. So if someone's asked for disclosure, the document's been disclosed, then it'll get posted on some website. It depends on

which agency. And there's this thing called the FOIA search where you can look through past FOIA request data. So that's convenient for me producing the podcast on the timelines I do because a FOIA request can take forever. Like I submitted one in March that I'm still waiting to get information from. It got accepted, but it just takes time. So that's FOIA. Government archives are also really good in the States. In Canada, they're also pretty good. Those are the only ones I've dealt with personally. But usually you can find a whole lot of information about any government-funded project. So you get stuff like progress reports, proposals, funding paperwork, you can get a really good picture of the story just from the National Archives.

Talking on archives, another great resource if you're dealing with something that was done at a university are university archives it's the same kind of deal universities usually keep entire wings of libraries if they're big enough full of just paperwork about the university or about alumni so for instance once, Basic is a great example because I really had to beat feet on that episode. Dartmouth University, which is where Basic was developed, has a really good archive, an easy-to-access system, but they have this collection called the John Kimony Collection,

which is just a bunch of papers that were donated by John Kimony's family after he died. And that has a whole lot of really juicy bits about the development of BASIC in it. That's if you've read the article I wrote for Vice earlier this year about the dope programming language, that's where I got all the information for that piece. the information for that piece. So I guess to summarize how I find research material, it's a whole lot of work. And you just kind of have to know where to go for certain topics. And once again, with archives, sometimes they're hard to navigate, they're hard to get through, you have to occasionally submit requests to get scans. That costs money, which once again, if you're a patron, thank you very much. That is where a lot of your money goes. All right. Next question. Approximately how long does it take you to

research and write a script? Answer. A lot. So in my head, it's always or i always approximate it to about 14 hours per script because so my production schedule i allocate two weeks to do the research and outlining and script each episode and then i usually allocate like a long morning to actually record and do production. So for every hour recorded audio, it's about three hours of cuts and production. So just estimate 20 hours per episode. It's probably more because I'm not that good at stopping myself once I get down a rabbit hole. Next question. What topic have you had to give up on because of too little information? Which of those is most intriguing and why? Dear listener, I give up on very few topics. I'm a man of determination. The only topic that I've kind of fully given up on was for a while I wanted to do a mini episode on

the Balmer peak which is this joke that supposedly at Microsoft Steve Balmer had a policy of drinking to a certain amount of inebriation which would then increase your programming productivity um there's no truth to that I actually a while back when i did an interview with a former microsoft employee who worked with balmer i asked him off mic about that and he's like i've never heard of that in my life so that kind of killed any possibility of doing that episode just because it's fake and i fell for an internet joke. But besides that, I actually haven't dropped anything. I keep a separate spreadsheet, so I organize the podcast using a wide array of spreadsheets, but I have one that's just titled Computer Mysteries. That's exactly what this question

states. It's all the topics that I've wanted to do episodes on, but I just don't have enough information to do episodes on. So I'll routinely go through that and start plugging in bits of information. And eventually some of these are going to show up in actual episodes. One of those that I find the most interesting is Project Lightning, which I talked a little bit about on my transistor episodes where I addressed cryotons. So essentially, Project Lightning was this NSA-funded supercomputer project in the 60s to build an ultra-fast cryonic-based computer. to build an ultra-fast cryonic-based computer. To explain how little information there is about Project Lightning, there are two or three documents that were released via Freedom of Information Act that mention it.

They don't go into super fine detail. There's also some rumors that there may have been a prototype delivered, but it's just mentioned in passing in some documents. So there's not enough information to do an episode on it yet. I mentioned earlier that I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this year. That was to the NSA for all documents detailing Project Lightning. It's been accepted. I have a case number. i just haven't heard anything since

march i think so look for that in the future i i don't give up on ideas that don't have enough information other things on that spreadsheet just for some fun the bosch fgs 4000. It was a, at least I think it was a computer that was used for 3D rendering and modeling. It was used in the Money for Nothing music video and to animate the images used in the BBC Doomsday Project. So it has some information about it online, but just like advertisements, I haven't even been able to find a manual for it. Another one that I am constantly trying to find more information about is PickOS. It's this database-oriented operating system. You can find a whole lot of stuff like reference manuals and books about using the system.

And you can find a little bit about its history but can't find any interviews can't find any like books talking about the history any articles it's it exists there's some information about it just not enough and that also goes for um apollo workstation computers Those were really early workstations that weren't Unix-based, but they were Unix-compatible. It was its own operating system, its own hardware. They're really fascinating

and have a really interesting graphical interface, but it's the same as PicOS. There's reference manuals, but there's not much history. And I think that those two especially I could one day build an episode about, but I just need to find the right people to talk to for that, which is a lot of work. I'm not good at organizing with other people.

The next question is also one that I've been asked a number of times. The history of digital computing is quite recent. Do you ever worry about running out of topics? No, I do not. Initially, I did. I was a little bit concerned that I might get to a point where I've just covered too much stuff and every new episode I want to produce is just rehashing old topics. so I started out being very cognizant of that if you'll notice in the archive I don't talk about very popular things very often it took me 51 episodes until I addressed the IBM PC proper just to give you an idea I have I think episode, not tangentially, but it talks a little bit about the Macintosh. It doesn't really get into the deep history and lore of the Macintosh. So I've been trying to shy away from big, well-known topics because I feel like if I just hit like, oh, we'll talk about the Mac, the PC, the Commodore 64, the Amiga. I could run out of steam for like popular,

well-known computers. But the thing is, if you scratch at all below the surface of that, there's just so much to talk about that people know nothing about or very few people know much about. And the other thing is I keep running into things that I've never heard anything about. So for instance, I recently did an episode on AlohaNet. I didn't know that existed until like a week before I started researching the topic. I ran into it in a book I was reading and just saw a passing mention of AlohaNet. And I'm like, what is that? So I looked it up and it's turned out that it's something very integral to the history of the Internet that I had no idea was a thing. I guess that goes back to one of the reasons I like producing this show is I love to learn the stuff. So, no, I'm not afraid of running out of topics, especially with the other big backlog of things that I keep

avoiding and I keep touching on occasionally are analog computer systems. I've done one episode explicitly on analog computing, the automatic totalizator episode, which I really like producing because once again, there's not that much collected information about the topic. And that was fascinating. And it's an entire world of computing that I know almost nothing about. So I'm going to periodically dig more into that era. But yeah, there's no way I'm going to run out of topics. There is a lot of breadth and depth to the field. All right,

moving on. What are your three most favorite books about the history of computing and why? This is a bit of a tricky question for me because I'm not that good at reading, believe it or not. I have a little bit of dyslexia and it it gets worse with stress. So especially if I'm trying to read a book really quickly for an episode or back when I was in college trying to read a textbook, I I just get lost and don't finish it. So I haven't read a whole lot of books specifically for the podcast from cover to cover. When I do read books, I'll read them piecemeal over time. It'll take me months. So I'm not really a huge lover of books, but I do have a few that I can recommend that I have read completely. I will stand by that and that I really enjoyed. One of those and a book that was formative in my early years in high school is called The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. It's a pop history treatment about kind of the history of personal computing, but it's more

expansive than that. It's specifically about J.C.R. Licklider, the tagline is actually JCR Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal. Licklider was due to work for the government in primarily funding and administrative works. And he really believed in computing as a force for progress, essentially. So the book covers a lot of the projects that he strategically funded and helped keep going in order to work towards this larger narrative of personal computing. I haven't read it for years, so my recollection may be a little fuzzy, but I remember in high school going through it, it's a really accessible text. And I just enjoy that it has a really large scope. It starts out talking about really early computing, talking about like the first digital adding circuits,

and then works up to systems like Sage, which was an early missile defense network developed in the US, and goes on up to around Xerox-y kind of era. So it's a really good read. I enjoyed it a lot when I read it years ago. Another one that I can't recommend enough is The Cryotron Files, The Strange Death of a Pioneering Cold War Computer Scientist by Douglas Buck and Ian Day. So if you've listened to my episodes on transistors i talked a lot about cryotrons they're these really fascinating devices well they're they're fascinating to me as someone with a physics degree it essentially uses dissimilar metals and superconductors to

create something like a transistor that only works if it's immersed in liquid helium. So it's a really weird technology. They were developed before practical transistors hit the scene, and they were able to switch faster than transistors at the time. That, once again, connects up to Project Lightning. One of the reasons I really like this book is it was co-written by the son of Dudley Allen Buck, the developer of the Cryotron. And the larger narrative gets to this weird event where Dudley Allen Buck, the inventor, ends up dying really young, possibly from a lab accident, possibly from someone intentionally exposing him to a corrosive agent, or I think it was a poisonous agent that induced pneumonia. So there's this weird question about his death.

And what makes it all the more strange is Buck worked for and contracted with the DOD and the NSA type of agencies. and contracted with the DOD and the NSA type of agencies. And on the same day that he died, a colleague from, I forget if it was the NSA or the DOD, but from one of those government spook organizations, also died in a hotel room hundreds of miles away from an apparent abrupt illness. So it's just a really fascinating book for the narrative and the technology.

Cryotrons are really, really cool technology, pun intended. For a third book, I can't recommend enough The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Deer. It's really the only book about the history of Play-Doh computer terminals, which are, once again, it's a really fascinating technology. They were some of the first graphic terminals. They were some of the first time-shared machines. They were developed at the University of Illinois in the 60s and on through the 70s. It's really interesting technology,

Um, it's really interesting technology. And the author, Brian Deer, is probably the only expert about Plato in the world. There's not a whole lot of archival material about Plato. So a lot of his book was constructed through interviews and just narrative work with people who were there. It's a breathtaking labor of love as far as I'm concerned, and it really shows. It's a fantastic text, and I can't recommend it enough. Now, a corollary question. In the same vein, what are your three most favorite podcasts? Any kind of podcast does not need to be about technology or history. Well, like I said, I think at the beginning of this, I don't listen to a whole lot of retrocomputing or tech podcasts.

Part of that, I think, is now that I'm producing Advent of Computing, I just don't want to listen to more about computer history. Sometimes I usually listen to podcasts when I'm like riding a bike or working in the garden so it's a recreational activity um and i'm always cognizant of burning myself out on the topic which i don't think i could do but i want to be careful about that i'm also i know it probably won't be a problem because i'm straight with my sources and i'm careful with stuff but i really don't want to plagiarize from someone's show. I feel so bad about that. So I try to shy away from any podcasts that are on a really similar topic to my show unless I've produced an episode about the topic before. In general, I really like listening to history podcasts.

The obvious favorite and what anyone who likes history podcasts always goes for is hardcore history. I just like hardcore history. I know it's once again, it's kind of a popular history treatment, so it's not always the most rigorous. But I really like how Dan Carlin puts together stories. It's fun, enjoyable, and it's really immersive, I think, which is important when it comes to learning about history. The other one that I really like is Our Fake History by Sebastian Major. I've actually talked to Sebastian a couple of times, and he's a really cool dude. He did a clip for my Hacker Folklore episode that I did at the beginning of the year. He did the reading on the magic switch.

Anyway, Our Fake History is about historical myths and misconceptions and kind of going in, sometimes busting them, sometimes trying to figure out why we believe something is the way it is. One of my favorite series that he did, if you want to get into something that's just fun is the history of rock and roll which the main thesis for that was like oh people believe that rock and roll came from elvis but it's a lot more complicated than that uh i just enjoy it then a third one another history podcast is fall of civilizations which it's hard to describe compactly so the show's about the fall of civilizations the host and production team is really good they use so usually i don't like

background music and podcasts but they do really good soundscapes they usually when they're talking about civilization have the music be like traditional folkloric music from that specific civilization or a close approximation so once again there's a lot of immersion to it which i think is important for understanding history the show tries to explain what it would feel like to be in a civilization during its rise and its eventual demise so it it's fascinating and really well produced it's something that if i was better at production i aspire to reach those levels then just some more quick shout outs because like i was saying i listen to a lot of podcasts. If you like the source heavy stuff like I do, I'd highly recommend checking out the Poison Room

podcast. It's about dangerous texts throughout history. I just like it. There's a lot of episodes that are just about debunking forgeries or fakes or bizarre misconceptions that academics have about certain texts. I enjoy it. It's fun. And then another one, if so, one tech podcast that I do listen to religiously is the Multimedia Hyper Guide. It's a podcast about Windows 3.1 software, and I just enjoy it. It's funny. I've been a PC kind of guy my whole life, and I never really used Windows 3.1, but I used DOS a whole lot in my early days.

So it's very relatable, and it just has kind of a cozy feel. Anyway, moving on to the next question. Video games have come up in episodes. Do you have any modern favorites? Not really. I don't play a whole lot of video games anymore. Partly I've kind of found that as I grow older, I get motion sick from 3D games. One of my favorite modern games, though I guess modern, is is skyrim i played that a whole lot when it came out and about once a year i'll sit down and play some of it usually play just little spurts of it over a few weeks since i can't do very long gaming sessions anymore i get too motion sick

um another modern game i like is the persona series i've been playing a lot of persona 4 on and off um it's the kind of thing where i have a free night i'll turn on my old playstation 2 and play a few hours of it i guess that's about as modern as i get all right next question in the same vein do you have any opinions on any particular modern programming language? Yes, I have many divisive opinions about programming languages, and especially modern ones. So my favorite programming language that I recommend every person uses Pearl. No one else I know likes Pearl. In my work, I've done a lot of text processing specifically for analyzing log files for podcast downloads and whatnot. And Pearl's really good at text processing. It's not good at a whole lot else. But if you're doing text

processing, that's the way to go. More and more, I've realized that I kind of prescribe to the Grace Hopper's school of thought, where I don't think you should really use any one programming language, you need to use a language that's best suited for the job. So when I do text processing, I use Perl, when I'm doing something more low level where I do hardware interfacing, I'll use like C or C++. I have a lot of negative opinions about modern programming languages. All of my friends will tell you that if you get me on the topic, I won't stop complaining about Python and JavaScript being kind of awful general purpose languages sometimes, but this is a positive episode. I don't want to get super negative about anything today. So I'll move on before I start bashing

snakes too much. Next question. If you could change one thing in the history of computing, what would it be and why? So we're getting into the more technical esoteric ones now. So we're getting into the more technical, esoteric ones now. I've thought a lot about this, actually. And I think the most interesting would be if Xerox had actually been able to come to the consumer market in a big way. So for those of you not familiar, which actually could be any of my listeners, since I don't talk about Xerox a lot, that's one of those things I've been saving until I have more research done on that.

In the 70s, Xerox built the first basically mass-producible graphical user operating system and computer. It was called the Alto. And then a few years later, they produced another machine called the Xerox Star, which was supposed to be a consumer grades like an office consumer grade graphical workstation. We're talking like a decade before the Macintosh, essentially. It was very powerful and more technically important. It was very powerful and more technically important. It was built using a lot of object oriented programming. So we're dealing with something that's totally different from the home microcomputers that start popping up in the latter half of the 70s and into the 80s. and into the 80s.

Comparing it to even a Macintosh, there's no apples to apples comparison there. The computers Xerox was making were way, way ahead of their time for consumer hardware, but they weren't good at marketing it. They weren't good at selling it. Management was working across purposes with development,

so it didn't really go anywhere in a big way. And I think it'll be interesting to examine a history of computing where the Xerox Star did end up being the same kind of hit as, let's say, an Apple II or an IBM PC, and it showed up on every desktop across America. and it showed up on every desktop across America because we'd run into a situation where microprocessors, or the same cast of microprocessors, so like Z80s, 8080s, 8086s, never rise to prominence because those are lame.

We have Xerox hardware that's way better. Something like DOS wouldn't exist. BASIC might not have even been as prevalent because a Xerox Star, you don't need BASIC. You have a mouse and a keyboard. You have a really surprisingly modern computer system. We could have skipped a whole lot of steps to get to modern computers.

And I think that'd be really, really interesting to up the ante to see if that meant that today we'd have more advanced systems. I don't know if we would. I don't know how this could shake out. But it's just an interesting thought experiment to imagine, like, if we had skipped 10 years in the development cycle of personal computers, just jumped forward to something beyond a graphical system, beyond a Macintosh right away, what we'd be working with today. Would it be that much better, or would we have just kind of stuck around with a computer with a graphical system? I don't know, but that would be my choice. Now, one more esoteric technical question. Adam Osborne described the Signetix 2650 as, quote, the most minicomputer-like, end quote, of the microprocessors available at the time. What features make it architecturally similar? A very fine question, listener. I did a little homework on this. I'd never heard of Signetics, and especially the 2650, and once again, great example of how I will never run out of topics. IBM 1130 minicomputer, I think. So it's like a minicomputer because it was based off an existing minicomputer. That's a boring answer to the question.

More interestingly, I was reading more on the architecture. It had vectored interrupts, which is something that doesn't show up in microprocessors for quite a while still. And once again, from my limited understanding, it had some hardware support for context switching, which means it was built to be able to do multitasking, which,

you know, microprocessors didn't really do that until the late eighties. If you discount things like the venerable TMS 9900 chip. Yeah, it's honestly a very interesting chip, and I have now put this in my spreadsheet of future topics because it's a weird one, and I want to talk about it more. All right, moving on to the last question. What advice would you give to someone pursuing a creative endeavor like podcasting, writing, or programming? A note here, I appreciate calling programming a creative endeavor. That is very flattering and accurate. So I would say the best advice I could give

is to practice as much as you can. At first, you're not going to be an expert at something unless you're very talented or very lucky. And as someone who I firmly believe I am neither, practice is my best friend. When I first started developing the idea for Advent of Computing, I had no idea how to do the microphone side of podcasting. Like I said at the beginning of this, I knew all the fun technical distribution stuff, but I didn't know how to make a podcast. It took me a long time to hit my stride.

I still cringe to think about some of my early episodes and just know that I could have done them a lot better I've avoided the urge of redoing them because I think that's an awful cycle of cannibalism but practice really does make perfect well not perfect but it makes better you're not going to be the best the first time around, so just keep going. All right, that brings us to the end of the Adren of Computing 5,000 download extravaganza question and answer episode. This went a lot longer than I thought, so I apologize if I was a little too rambly, but I really enjoyed answering these questions. I don't really talk about myself a lot on the podcast. That's by design. It's not a show about me. It's a show about computers,

so I enjoyed having the opportunity to share my story and more information about the podcast background with all of you. So I'll be back next week with a new episode. I'm excited for this upcoming one, and I think y'all are going to like it. I'm getting back to the hypertext stuff. But for now, that's it. So thanks for listening. And most importantly, thank all of you. Adren of Computing is fully sponsored by listener donations it pays for hosting everything all of the books i have to buy all the archival scans i have to pay

for for the last few months that's been all paid for by listener donations So a huge thanks to everyone who makes Advent of Computing possible. If you too want to be a patron, you do get stuff back in the offer. I have about four bonus episodes now. I do polls every few months for new bonus episodes, and you get early access to normal episodes that are released.

You can find links to everything over on my website, adventofcomputing.com. And if you know anyone else who'd be interested in the history of computing, then why not take a minute to share the podcast with them? If you want to talk to me, give me any feedback, recommendations for new episodes, then go ahead and shoot me a tweet. I'm at adventofcomp on Twitter. And as always, have a great rest of your day.