Good Job, Brain! - 283: Gettin' Personal with the Computer

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

[TRIVIA HARD MODE] activated. Yes, for the first time in 12 years, we’re slapping on a difficulty disclaimer. Nothing sinister, just a coincidence that we all went a bit nerdier than usual. So why not listen to us flail at computer trivia? Take Karen's exhaustively comprehensive movie robot voice challenge and see if you can identify the actors behind those voices. Learn how the toy industry is to blame for the Worst Computer Ever Existed. And very aptly, Colin made his computer quiz while walking around in the heart of Silicon Valley. ALSO: the return of the off-topic Music Round, expertly crafted by Chris. There is no Fleetwood Mac. For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, chum chopping, chums listening to Chumbawamba on the Shamsalise. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offi trivia podcast. This is episode 283. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your complimentary but complicated, compatible companions compulsive about compotes. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris. Love a compote.

Absolutely. All right. We're going to start off with a bit of something wacky. This is from our good job brain community. Douglas today just wrote in. He said, how about having a little fun courtesy of my misery? We're happy to celebrate your misery He says

Apparently I have shingles And it sucks Oh no A friend of mine said she'd bring over a few things to help Included was a single can of sour cream And cheddar pringles Because she said How often do you get to eat something

That rhymes with your medical condition That's nice Pringles for shingles Pringles for shingles They should really embrace that as a, you know, I don't know how many people get shingles every year, but like, what, seriously, from like a marketing opportunity, you could corner this. Like, just, you know, we're the snack for when you have shingles. So Douglass says, here's a challenge. Complete the sentence.

I have medical condition and I'm eating rhyming edible item to the thing that rhymes with medical condition. Well, sure, we used to play this in the car on road trips. The good old, yeah, medical condition snack game. The community is spoken. I love it. Oh, boy. So I have some worthy entries from the comment section. Randall says, I have polio and I'm eating a tub of oleo.

Oh, my dear. That's just going to make it worse. Stephanie says, I have glaucoma and I'm eating Pavlova. Yeah, okay, no, that's good. This one. Trevor says, I have gonorrhea and I'm eating a cassidia. Andy says, I have bunions, so I'm eating funnions. That's good.

That's my favorite so far is bunions and funnies. I like putting in a brand, like a branded item, you know, like tringles. And lastly, Stacey says, I have Tourette's and I'm eating corgettes. Oh, that's good too. Thank you, Douglas. Next time you're on a road trip. next time you're on a car ride. Hey, families, play this game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Start with the diseases you already have. That's a good way to get it rolling. Yeah. Joke what you know. All right. Without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. Here I have a random trivial pursuit card.

Random from the box. You guys have your barnyard buzzers. Everybody, let's answer some questions. Here we go, Blue Wedge. The names of how many of the United States end in the letter O. Oh, man. Okay. I mean, we can also work together, too.

Yeah, we could. I was just going to go from the hip and just say, like, one, because I could just think of Ohio right off the bat. I can think of another one, which is Idaho. Ah, dang. Ohio, Idaho. Okay. Is that it?

I'm working. I'm trying to work from west to east. Yeah. I would say they're predominantly on the west. Okay. Okay. Oh, Colorado. Oh, yes, there you go.

And one more. And New Mexico. There you go. You got it. That is a tough one to just like answer in a game of trivial pursuit. Really, it's looking for a number answer, right? You didn't have to list out the states. Yeah.

All right, good to know. Next one, Pink Wedge for pop culture, which is Broadway and screen legends starred as Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp. Chris Julie Andrew The one and only Julie Andrews Yellow Wedge Which fashion designer is known

for making women's suits with colorless jackets and fitted skirts beginning in the 1920s Cocoa Chanel I have no idea It is Coco Chanel Purple Wedge

In the Aesop Fable Where slow And steady wins the race who came out the loser Who came I mean, come on Colin I believe it was the hair

Right properly Not a rabbit right It was a hair It's hair or rabbit Oh okay All right Tortoise and the hair Guess what

The hair lost Yeah Yeah Snooze you lose Green wedge What type of clothing Is J wear The letter J

J wear Which Koichi Wakata War continuously For one month on an international space station in 2009. I'll say it again. I'll say it again.

What type of clothing? So it's asking for what article of clothing. What type of clothing is J-wear? Capital J, capital W, which Coichi Wakata wore continuously for one month on the International Space Station in 2009. Colin. I'm going to guess it is an advanced type of long-term underwear.

And you are correct. It is underwear, says a new kind of antibacterial, odor eliminating undies. Yes. Hopefully. All right. Last question, Orange Wedge. Who is the first woman to become a full-time NBA All-Star Assistant Coach? Oh.

Boy, there are a lot of qualifiers in that question. First woman to become a full-time NBA All-Star Assistant coach. Colin? Boy, I'm trying to think like when this card was written to. Is it, and I hope I'm right here. Is it, is it, is it Becky Hammond? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Wow.

Okay, all right. Yeah, I think she was, I think she was like with the Spurs organization, San Antonio Spurs. You are our basketball MVP. All right, good job, brains. On with the show. Colin, topic picker, please let's intro this week's topic. I knew when we were choosing topics a couple weeks back, I was going to be heading down to Palo Alto, California for a week for a work offsite, if you will.

I mean, you know, it's 45 minutes away, but still an offsite. And I got to thinking about computers, and I had to actually check. I could not believe that we had not done an episode just on computers. Like, we've done a lot on technology and video games, and I thought, It was time that we'd do something all around the computer. So this week, we're getting personal with the computer. You know, I see the topic is going to be personal computers, and I'm just like hit with dread.

Because if it's a topic about something that I don't know anything about, I can be, I could just be like, I've wrote a quiz in every word has letters P and C in it or something like that. But, you know, oh, shit, I've done it. Oh, that's so good. I can't believe I didn't think of that. But for me, it's like, okay, I've, like, written multiple books on, like, video game and, you know, tech history and stuff like that.

I can't come to this. I got to have a good story. So I got a good story for everybody. It's from the early days of personal computers. And it is called the computer that took. down a toy giant. Oh. You've probably at least heard of if you're out there, the video game crash of 1983, right?

Video games had sold like gangbusters for, you know, good solid five years, like up through the 1982 Christmas season, doing incredibly well. Everybody's super hyped on video games. And then in 1983, video game sales in the United States take a massive nose down. Everybody loses a whole bunch of money in 1983. And a lot of people exit, you know, the market for video games. Now, there's a lot of different reasons why this happened. But one of the reasons was that suddenly there was a lot of competition in the space from personal computers.

Oh. So personal computers had been a thing since basically 1977. That's when the Commodore Pet, the TRS 80, the Apple 2 all came out that first, the Holy Trinity, they call it, like, kicking off the era of having a computer in your house. By 1982, you know, like five years later, they had several models of computer. Commodore 64 was available. IBM had introduced the IBM PC, which it would be a while before that became the standard, but like the first ones were out there.

And there were price wars happening with computers. Like, you could now just get a home computer for like a couple hundred dollars. and the thing with these early home computers is that a lot of them were like souped up video game systems they weren't really great yet at like functional kind of you know they sold them to moms with like you can do your taxes

it's like well yeah you know but it's like more convenient to just do it with paper you can put your recipes in the computer and it's like yeah but you know more convenient just have a little recipe card yeah right exactly oh they all they had advertisements and stuff with mom and the computer was sitting there in the kitchen and she was making escrow looking over at the green and the amber display and just like

squinting at it but they basically were just like video game machines that had keyboards in it and they had the ability to support printers and you know tape drives and things like that and really the other thing to remember is that most people just bought a computer and they didn't buy a monitor and they didn't put it on a desk. They just took the computer home and plugged it into the family TV set in the living room. And we're probably just playing games, but there was this thought of like, why would I buy a $200 video game system when I could just buy a $250 or $300 computer? And then our household gets to have a computer, you know, and it plays the same games and it probably takes the same joystick. So it's like, that

was causing a lot of consumer dollars to shift from games to computers. And people sort of saw video game systems as like, oh, this is going out because now it's just going to be computers in the home. This was like the first step towards having a real computer and we don't need this anymore. I remember that. I remember kind of that argument among like sort of my parents level. The home computer system was like, oh, such an obviously better investment in your family's future and well-being than this silly toy video game.

Right. So if you're a company that makes silly toy video games, you're thinking, oh, we got to get into making computers because that's where it's all going. So we just shift over into making computers. So again, Atari had already introduced computers. They were already there. Mattel, the toy company that made the Intellivision actually introduced a computer called the Aquarius in 1983. Oh. Yeah. And around the same time, Calico, maker of the Calico Vision gaming system, which had only come out in 82. In 83, they were like, we're going to release a computer. They called it the atom, the atom. Or A-D-A-M or A-T-O-M. A-D-A-M. Oh, oh. But maybe they were trying to get you to think of the A-T-O-M, too.

You know, it's like, it's that combination of, like, religiousness and technology that's still many of the, you know, yeah. So the atom absolutely was a souped-up Colico Vision. In fact, it was totally compatible with the Calico Vision, but it had just more processing power, stuff like that. in the box came with ColicoVision controllers, you put your ColicoVision games in it. Nice.

And you can either buy a standalone atom or you could buy one. It was an expansion module that was plugged into the Calico Vision you already had and it turned it into an atom computer. So you can do it that way too. The conceit of the atom, where they tried to outthink everybody else, is that how it was sold was that you got a complete computer system in the box. With the monitor.

With no monitor. No monitor. That would be a really big box. But, okay, so if you think about the Commodore 64, Commodore 64, probably like $200 at this point. It was just the Commodore 64, like where the computer was inside the keyboard. You know, it's all one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was just that and a power supply in the box. So you take that home and you don't, you can't, like, you can't save it. You have no way to save anything. You have no way to print anything. You can basically, you can program something in, basic, but then you turn it off and it's gone, you know? There's not even a joystick in the box. That's why it was so cheap.

The atom was going to be $700, which is like $2,000 today. But inside the box for the atom was the atom computer, dual tape drives, two tape drives that used essentially like cassette tapes, right? Two Kalee coefficient controllers, as I said, a fully separate keyboard. So unlike a lot of where the keyboard was built into the, to the computer like itself. This had an actual detachable professional keyboard and also

in the box was a printer. Oh. And the printer that was in this box is very interesting because it was a daisy wheel letter quality printer, right? I don't know what that is. Letter quality is you can use it to like write a letter

just like that would look as good as a good typewriter basically. Because at this point, computers could have printers, but they were like dot matrix printers and what they printed out was pretty chunky you know so what the the adam came with was a printer that had a daisy wheel it had a wheel that looked like a flower like the head of a flower with spokes coming off the wheel and every one of those spokes had a letter or a number on like a stamp yes oh so it was like a typewriter like a rotary yeah yeah okay yeah like a rotary

typewriter wheel got it what it could do would could only be text but it would look really good it would look like it was from a type wrap. Oh, okay. And you could take the atom printer and you could, you know, with computer paper with the holes down the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dot matrix. You could do that,

but you could also just feed it a regular sheet of paper and you could even use the atom like a typewriter if you wanted to. Like you just typed and it would just appear on the page. And people were excited about this. It's such a simple proposition too. You know what I mean? It's like, it feels futuristic, but also you can be like,

especially in the 80s, like, yes, I do need something that I can type up letters and stuff like that. This sounds great and attainable. Right. People were psyched about the Adam coming out. The issue in the beginning seemed to be that Colico couldn't make them enough or make enough of them to hit Christmas 83. They wanted to have half a million units on shelves for Christmas 83. And it turned out they really were having issues manufacturing the printers because a letter quality printer was something at that time that would be like in an office and be really expensive. But they were really trying to make a mass market one.

It worked, but it was really hard to manufacture it and like get it really functional. So they only got 100,000 units out for Christmas 80. Oh, no. The few people who were able to get an atom and bring it home, probably very excited at that time. But the issue is a lot of that excitement kind of very quickly turned into frustration. First of all, there was a cost-saving measure because, again, they're doing a lot in this box

for $683. It's a lot of money, but it's also, people looked at it and was like, oh, that's cheap considering what you get because a printer usually costs $600. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was, again, to save money, there was one power plug, and it plugged into the printer.

So you plugged the power plug into the printer and then plugged the computer into the printer. I just passed me. that it was passed through so you had to turn the printer on all the time even if you did not want to use it just to power up the whole system it's also meant that if the printer broke which it turns out it did a lot entire computer as a brick until you get the printer repaired apparently the manuals they shipped with this thing really bad but that's not even the craziest thing none of that is even the craziest thing about the atom this blew me away

I didn't even know this. I knew about the funky, you know, the pass-through power on the printer and how that, I did not realize this. There were a lot of people who would bring their Adam home and try to get it going and just nothing would happen. Would not run, couldn't figure out what it was. Turns out, they found out, that when the atom is switched on, this is a big thing, by the way. It's a big machine with a big old printer next to it. And when you turn it on, it generates a massive electromagnetic surge that just blows out of the system. So if there is any magnetic media anywhere near the atom, when you turn it on, it immediately erases everything around.

Oh, my God. So people, and what do they have? What do they do? They just set up their computer. what's stacked right next to the computer is all the cassette things that came in with this thing containing the word processor

is on a cassette tape basic is on a cassette tape nothing's on the computer it's all on these tapes the game Buck Rogers which came to the atom is on a cassette so people are literally going up

and where the cassette tapes they're sitting right next to the system they're getting ready to load it in they turn on the power and it goes and it just wiped everything I mean if they had audio cassettes you know

if they had their cassette tapes by the stereo wipes all those so that they don't know so they put the blank you know totally de-house tapes and and they try to get it working and nothing happens and this is the age of you don't go on the internet yeah what do they do yeah you take the thing by the way the box for the atom is 10 inches by 20 inches by 40 inches so this box is as tall as one of my kids it's it's huge what do you do in 1983. You put it back in your car and go back to Sears or wherever you got it from. And you go back to Sears

and what do they do? They give you another Adam and then they take this Adam, take it home, plug it in, it races all your tapes. There are reviewers in magazines that are like, I am on my fifth Adam computer. Like

I can't get this thing to work. And the anecdotal stories that people do the same thing. So now the store is like, the store got five atoms, one person took them all home, blew them all up, brought them back, and they're all sitting there, and then early 1984, all this stuff goes back to Polico. Oh, no. So they're 100,000 units, but it's probably like 20,000 people, right? They're just burning through them. So they're just, so they are buried in returned hardware. Oh, no. They had to pay all of

that out to the stores and it's not like calico was actually really even doing that great so they end up losing tons of money in this now in 1985 they end up discontinuing the atom it makes it doesn't even make it two years they really try they try to fix the problems they put a sticker on the thing that says don't put do not put your atom tapes next to any piece of electronics like don't put it near TV. It's just such, just the amount of control that you need to have over the, like, the user of your product here for it to not go bad. It's terrible. So what else, who wants to answer this trivia question? What else was Colico selling a lot of in around 1985? They had a super hot product in 1985. It was not a video game. Was not electronic at all. Was it extremely low

technology toy. They were selling the heck out of this in 1885. One of the biggest toy fads. Teddy Ruckskin? Very close-ish. It's not a cabbage patch kid. It's a cabbage patch kid. Those were made by Colico.

85 turned out to be that was the peak of cabbage patch kids. And they started coming down, but even the money they were making off a cabbage patch kids was not enough to save them. No way. Essentially how bad the video game and then computer stuff got burned. They didn't have anything else. And so Calico went into Chapter 11

bankruptcy in 1988, even though they had, you know, even though they had cabbage patch kids. And then they sold off the assets. Imagine having a product so bad that the cabbage patch kids can't bail you out. So trying to make a computer was real bad for all Calico there. Wow. But like you said, Chris, we got a PC pretty early on. I was like a little kid. And this is like MS. DOS. So even before like Windows, you know, operating platform. And it was for games and printing. That's what it was. That's literally like why we got it was like, oh, the printer and we get to play some games. I feel like as a kid, at least for the families that I knew, the number one expense was probably printer ink and the paper from just us using print shop to make like

12 foot long, you know, happy birthday banners and like welcome home mom banners to the It takes, like, 18 minutes to print, and you, like, tearing the thing off, and I'm sure. Yeah, it's like, oh, thank you. And they're just like, yep, that costs $20. Yeah, you've got taped up in the kitchen. A baby pixel clip art. Do you have any birthday candles? Oh, yeah, we got that.

Yeah, we got that. Yeah, we got that. Oh, my God. Do you have any color? No, no, no, no, no. No, no. No, no. It's more gray.

Oh my gosh. Well, we're going to travel from the past to our present, maybe a little bit of our future. I have a quiz here, an audio quiz, not a music quiz, but an audio quiz. I have assembled a few key scenes from movies featuring an AI character, featuring a computer program and or computer program that lives inside a frame of a robot. And so each clip will have a scene from a movie and you will have to identify what movie. And who is voicing this computer AI character? And in this quiz, they're all voices. It's not Michael Fastbender in like, you know, Prometheus where he plays a robot. Okay. It's animated or CG or a puppet or something. Yeah, I'd like a puppet. Okay. All right. Okay. Let's test your movie smarts.

And the first batch, kind of recognizable and probably easier to get. And then towards the end is, man, S-level, super tier, kind of hard. So welcome to this AI voice quiz. Here we go. Clip number one. Who can you stay? I go. No following

Oh Sounds familiar Yes Oh man This is really Childhood favorite It's So it's gonna be

Oh I didn't know I was gonna stump you guys with the first one It's in the punch bowl Yeah And I'll tell you what He kind of sounds like Groot Oh, okay. It's what's his face? Vin Diesel.

Yeah, Vin Diesel. The movie is the Iron Giant. Oh, the animated film Iron Giant. Part to believe. Late 90s, right? Yep, that was a big Vin Diesel. That's right. Should have gotten that one.

No, that one's on us. It's not on you, Karen. We're family, Dom. All right. Family. Here. Clip. Number two.

Well, basically, I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me, me, is my ability to grow through my experiences. So basically, in every moment I'm evolving, just like you. Wow. That's really weird. Is that weird? Do you think I'm weird? This is a story.

Is it Scarjo from? Yes. From her. Scarletor Hanson. Knew that one was coming. Quite an obvious choice. But I love this passage because back then we're like, oh, yeah, whoa, this is high-tech future stuff, man. Like robots AI can sound like a real person instead of being this as my robot voice.

And it's like, here we are now, living in this age. It's so insane that like what she described was completely like normal now. You know, back then you're like, whoa, this is a cyph. movie yeah all right here we go next clip attention people of earth bow before the power

of your new digital overlord oh my god he's doing it he's actually doing it that oh you might not know the movie I'm trying to go on the voice yeah I'm trying to go on the voice

that's a tough one Chris you got anything I do not have any I'm sorry. He's British. Yeah, actually British. Yeah, he's, yeah, real British, not fake British. He hosts a show in America. Oh, is it, um, James Corden?

Yep, James Corden. James Corden. All right. In the Melissa McCarthy film Super Intelligence. Oh. Wow. I did not see that one. Pretty weird.

I think it's within the last three years. Okay. But yes, Melissa McCarthy and Bobby Caneval. And the reason why it's James Corden is because, Melissa McCarthy's character was like, oh, I love James Corden. And so the AI becomes James. Yeah, no, that totally, that totally kept the voice to keep it non-threatening. Should have placed that.

Until the end, yeah. All right. Wow, man, I'm like, oh, I'm going to put these in the front because they're a little bit easier to recognize. Oh, I apologize for being hard. That's all right. You know what, Karen? As I like to say, sometimes trivia is hard. Here we go.

Clip number four. Here I am Brain the size of a planet And they ask me to take you up to the bridge Call that job satisfaction Because I don't You can thank the serious Cybernetics Corporation

For building robots with GPP What's GPP? Genuine people personalities I'm a personality prototype You can tell, can't you? Uh-oh Oh Colin decisively That one I'm pretty sure is

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the voice by the inimitable Alan Rickman. Yes. Yes. I knew who the voice was for sure, but I didn't know it was hitchhiker. Professor Snape, also Galaxy Quest. Yes, here he is. Marvin, the paranoid android,

beloved, depressed robot. A character from hitchhikers. Good one. All right, here we go. Clip number five. See if you know this voice. I lost track of them. in the North Atlantic, but the people who took her spoke Yucatec Mayan. Oh.

Interesting. Here, let's let's let's, let's, let's run it again. Yeah, let's play it back. I lost track of them in the North Atlantic, but the people who took her spoke Yucatec Mayan. If you don't know the voice, helps if you, there's an accent, but also a little bit of information about the plot. about the plot of the movie. Right, right, right. Yeah.

I lost track of them in the ocean. Mm, Yucatan. Yucatan Mayan. Wow. Iron Man had Jarvis. Uh-huh. And Friday. Uh-huh.

And Wakanda had. Black Panthers, you know, AI assistant, right? Or... This is Guri, uh, which means storyteller, voiced by Trevor Noah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Here we go. Number six. If you find out what is wrong with me, can you fix me? Maybe. I think it would be better not to die. Don't you, doctor?

Oh, Chris. Is it Robin Williams? No. Are you thinking of Bicentennial Man? Yes. That's a good guess, but it's not. But you're in the same era of movies. I'll tell you, this guy has voiced Duke of Wesselton.

Oh, Alan Tudick. Candy King and Hay Hay from Moana. Yes, it is Alan Tudic. Oh, yeah. So it's, is it the movie? Was it Rogue One? Oh, he was also K2SO. Yes, correct, but it's not. This is I-Robot.

Oh, okay. Who knew? Yes, he, Alan Tudek already lending his voice talents back then to, yes, Sonny, who is the robot. Have not seen that one in a long time. I don't think I've seen that one at all. Very different, not the same as the book, but yes. No, not not really in any meaningful way at all. Now we're entering the hard zone. Like, this is, where, where I'm like, oh, now we're in it.

It's still within the realm of trivia. Next clip. Rapid Fire is the default for enhanced combat mode. Would you like to see more options? You have 576 possible web shooter combinations. Great choice. Would you like me to set this as your new default? Okay, so that's got to be Spider-Man's like AI voice, right?

Web shooter options, the animated ones, the new ones. Correct. It is Tom Holland. Dang it. Okay. So where he's got Tony Stark outfitting him with all his gear, right? Okay.

All right. All right. Okay. Who does that voice of his little AI assistant? And it has a very interesting connection. Kirsten Dunst. Oh, nice guess. Good guess.

Very good guess. Good guess. Oh, but a good guess. Yeah. It is Jennifer Connolly. Oh, okay. Okay. Labyrinth.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. A beautiful mind. Jennifer Connolly in real life is married to Paul Bettney. Why does Paul Bettney sound familiar? He is the voice of Jarvis

and is vision. Yeah, and vision, right. So it's cute that they're a real life actor couple. We got a few more. Okay, next clip. Clip number seven. How did you find this place? Where am I?

daughter. You had the coordinates for this facility marked on your map. Where did you get those coordinates? Where's my daughter? Don't make me take you down again. Sit down. Are you still thinking of Marine, pal? Marines don't exist anymore. Well, that's definitely Matthew McConaughey's

voice. Yes, he is not the guy. I'm just trying to help just narrow down the movie, though. I'm just like bringing into what I can identify. What kind of movie would have a robot? What kind of futuristic movie? would Matthew McConaughey be in? How to lose a man in 40 space days? He talks about his daughter.

Oh, is it interstellar? It is interstellar. Oh, of course. All right. With Tars. One of the truly great movie robots. I love Taurus. Yes.

Yeah. And you're like, wow, in the future, they must be sophisticated. No, they look like refrigerators. It's fantastic. Just a giant, like, slab of, like, charcoal. great. So silly, but in a Christopher Nola movie, you're like, oh, yeah, of course. I would pay a lot of money for a cool Tars figure. I'll be honest with you. Yeah. And then when you start running and swimming. Yeah, it's great. It's such a strange concept for a robot. But yes. I love it. Which makes me all the more embarrassed, Karen, to say that despite as much I love Tars, I don't know who voices Tars. Or I had forgotten. Oh, it is a name, I think, a movie files, no. It is Bill. Irwin. Bill Irwin, if you have a kid and your kid watches Elmo, he is Mr. Noodle.

He's Mr. No known for a lot of clown work, vaudeville, but he's also like an actor for a lot of things. He was in, of course, Queen of Nepo Babies, Liza Minnellys stepping out. He was a dancer in that movie. That's kind of my first memory of him. He not only provided the voice, but he actually, Tars in the movie was a practical effect. It literally was like slabs of metal, like a box. And Bill Irwin, who voiced it also controlled and puppeted with hydraulics. It's very Sesame Street-like.

Here we go. Final boss, guys. Final scary Android overlord. All right. Last clip. Okay. Identify the film and the voice. Here we go.

Nowhere to go but up, Chris. Here we go. Scan complete. You have a slight. epidermal abrasion on your forearm. I suggest an antibacterial spray. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What's in the spray specifically?

The primary ingredient is Bassetreson. It's a bummer. I'm actually allergic to that. Well, actually, I don't know the actor. Oh, yeah. We all know the movie. Who's the actor? Do we? It's Big Hero 6, but I do not know who played Baymax. I'm sorry.

It is Big Hero 6. It's Baymax. Colin. It was, yeah, it's, it's Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete, uh, what is his name. Scott, Scott. Scott, am I on the right track? Is it Scott, is it Scott? AdSit. Scott adds it. Yes, okay. Pete from 30 Rock, Liz Lemon's a trusty, yeah, right-hand man. Thank you, everybody, for my AI robot voice quiz. hopefully you guys at home had fun with it. Let's take a break, and we'll be right back.

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And we're back. week we're timeout computers while you school us on some computer stuff, Colin, with your quiz. Yeah. So as I mentioned, I was down in Palo Alto, California this past week. Many great technology companies based there over the last almost 100 years were coming up. One of the earliest successes was the Hewlett-Packard Corporation. In Hewlett-Packard or HP company history, there's lore about that they were literally started in a garage can, in fact, still go to the actual site of the actual garage where Hewlett and Packard started their company, yeah, you know, back in the 1930s. I was inspired to put together a quiz for you to about early computer history, mid-computer history,

maybe a little bit of later computer technology. It's a grab-bag quiz. It is a stew and melange of some trivia questions, some fill-in-the-blanks, some know-it-or-you-don't questions. Karen, I'm very glad that you have set the bar now. I was a little worried some of these questions. This quiz might be too hard, but I'm not so worried now that Chris and I just went, you know, I think, you know, two for nine on that last quiz. So, so we're in great shape here. I was inspired in particular to read a little bit more about the HP garage story. I learned a couple interesting things. I'm sorry. I only know HP as printers. They made Karen so much money

from printers that yeah a lot of printer well they they were a computer company primarily at one point then started making printers in their very early days they were just sort of an electronics company you know it was founded by bill hewlett david packard they had both had degrees in electrical engineering from stanford which is right there in palo alto california in 1938 part time eased into their electronics company out of a rented garage you know they were at such a inflection point in technology history like in the late 1930s of what was available as far as materials science and what were they making in the 30s well karen that's a great question oh oh okay so but first i'll show this little nugget which i learned about them when they decided to get

serious they flipped a coin to decide whether the company would be called hulet packard or packard Hewlett. It was not like in any way that Hewlett did more or brought more to the table. Yeah, but I thought that was pretty cool. So their first big contract was to provide the HP 200B, which was a frequency oscillator. All right. Oh. They sold a bunch of these to what big American company? 1938 1938 General Electric Great guess I'll give you another clue here This was

for the entertainment industry Oh These were used These were used in the production of a very famous 1940 film Chris's eyes You can pop out of your head

This was Oscillators Oscillators This is sound Yeah right Your frequency the oscillator, sound equipment for a 1940 animated film

by the name of Fantasia. Their early sale was eight of these to be used in animating and producing the audio for Fantasia. So that they were like, all right, we got this big sale to Disney. We can do this and that gave them, yeah, enough confidence

to move on. Apparently I don't know what an oscillator does, but that's okay. And then of course, you know, flash forward over the course of many, many decades. and they got into computers and other kinds of technology. And yes, of course, printers. In 2015, they split into two companies, actually. So all of the sort of the business products and the high-level enterprise stuff

was spun off into one division. And all of the printer core printer and PC business became sort of the HP Inc, which is what we think of when we think of HP today. Yeah. So as I'm assembling this quiz, I'm walking around on my first. phone and thinking to myself how great, like how truly, truly great wireless internet is. I mean, no, no question. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic.

Like, it's, it's one of the greatest inventions of our lifetime. It's magic. And then I was flashing back to my very first, my own internet connection. I don't mean like my family shared connection. I mean, like my own internet connection. They're just laughing. So this was like, this was back after I had my first department. after college, I felt like such a big man.

I was living by myself, and I bought myself my very own, cutting edge, state of the art, 56K modem. Modem. Yes. Blazing fast. To get on, to get on the internet. What did the K in the 56K modem stand for? I believe it's kilobytes per second.

You got it. That's right. It's for KBPS. Technically, kilobits per second. But yes, you got it. Oh, is bits? Oh, geez. Kilo bits per second. Roughly, roughly equivalent to a kilobite. This is the whole 1000 versus 1024 difference. But yeah, we're going to hand wave that once and just not come back to that again. Right. Yeah, KPBS. That's right. Keebit per second. So just for comparison, for you kids out there, there listening, all right? I know this means nothing to you. It barely means anything to me at this at this remove of this many years. So 56K modem, 56,000 bits per second, okay? So a kilo bit is 1,000 bits. You could send like a 100kb JPEG, let's say, all right? And that's like, you know, a decent, medium, smaller size JPEG image. That would take you roughly two seconds, okay,

on the mode of it was like okay all right you know reading reading a web page was actually somewhat tolerable if there weren't too many images but you know two seconds per image let's say okay now today you can pretty easily in many places sign up for now gigabit internet okay gigabit ethernet internet which is one billion bits per second one gigabit per second so one billion bits per second so one billion bits per second compared to 56,000 bits per second in that same two seconds that you could have downloaded one smallish medium size image JPEG you could download you know a shade under a 250 megabyte video file in that same two seconds oh yeah on gigabit connection all right uh you know you can also like buy gigabyte drives now gigabyte hard drives the next level you can also buy terabyte drives night yeah and i i have seen i don't have one yet myself but you can get consumer level now petabyte drives pb what is the next level when we finally get there after petabyte yes so from megabyte to gigabyte to terabyte to petabyte there are no consumer grade

level this next level but but they they they they does it exist it there From what I understand, it is available, but you have to be institutional level. It's not like, you're not going to be yet. It does exist. Okay. Yes, but you're doing like fractional shares from what it sounds like. So what is the next level? What's the next unit after PETA bite?

There is a very, very oblique pattern to these names that I learned. I'm not promising that you're going to intuit it. I'm not going to apologize for this being hard. but there is somewhat of a pattern after. So, all right, so here's the naming. All right. So they all come from Greek, okay? Kilobyte comes from the word meaning thousand.

Megabyte comes from the word meaning great. Gigabyte comes from the word meaning giant. Gigabyte. So from there, once we get into terabyte, petabyte, and this next one, there's a little bit of a pattern. How do you spell petabite? P-E-T-A. What's the-hexabyte? Hexabyte?

X-a-byte. It's E-X-A-E-A-X-A-Bite. Oh, Tara, Tetra, Peta, Penta. Well, you take out a letter. Yesterday. Yes, Tetra, Terra, Pita, Penta, hexa, yeah. It's, they're a little bit of cheeky there in the naming. But I totally, this kind of in a very nerdy way, blew my mind a little bit when I realized, yeah, that there's. Let's predict the next one. Well, I have it here in front of me. Yeah, I can tell you. But what would you guess? Well, it's SEPTA. It's Zeta byte.

Zeta byte. Just such a ridiculously large number. We're never going to see that in our lifetime. I mean, maybe even, yeah, it's just not even worth talking about, really. As I sit here right now, I'm recording. And I am using one, two, three USB connections to this computer. And that includes a USB, to USB dongle.

Dongle. What is dongle it's always fun to stand for? It's always fun to say dongle. What does USB stand for? I guarantee you all have 50 USB cords or cables in your house. Karen. Universal. Yes. One third of the way there.

Serial. Two thirds of the way there. Yeah. Universal. Serial bus. Right. Why a bus? That's kind of just the sort of the catch-all term for the mechanism or the protocol for sending information back and forth between different parts of the system. Oh, like you're busing it back from, okay.

If every household in the U.S., which is roughly 130 million households, had just a single three foot long USB cable, that would be laid end to end approximately 74,000 miles long. Wow. Now, converting that to our, for our metric friends, 118,000. That's enough to wrap around the earth, and help you visualize this. Okay, that's enough to wrap around the earth about three times.

How many people worldwide or just U.S.? This is one cable per U.S. household would be enough to wrap around the earth three times. That's just the U.S. I am not wanting. That's not North America. That's just the U.S. And like, I know I've got at least, like I say, like eight or ten of these, easy, easy. The late 90s was a high watermark for me in personal technology.

I also had a palm pilot, a fancy palm. I was so in love with this thing. I absolutely, I loved it. I didn't do anything with it, but play games. What'd you do with it? That's a good question. I spent so much time, like, putting all my contacts in there. I used it as, like, a note-taking device.

I had a really rudimentary art program on there. Like, I remember it came with the stylus, right? So I would sketch on there, but it was, I don't know if you remember, one of the really cool things that it did have cross-device communication it wasn't Bluetooth it wasn't Wi-Fi it was an infrared

sensor and you had to literally point it at the other device you know like you know remote control style you know and send information it was exceedingly slow but it was cool and I you know I could stand on the subway and like send like oh let me send you my contact card like to you know my friend

and it would you know take 20 seconds or whatever part of their big success was their writing system okay they succeeded where the Newton Apple's Newton failed originally in its handwriting recognition system oh what was the name of the palm writing system it was breakthrough at the time and I'll give you a hint it's an Italian word oh Michelangelo not a person's name Graffito. Oh, I'm going to give it to you. You got it.

It's graffiti. Graffiti. Every letter was basically a single stroke. Put the stylus down and the A kind of looked like an A just without the little crossbar. And the C, the C was easy. The C looked like a C and the O was easy. But the letters that had multiple lines to it, they simplified. Like the F was basically just a right angle starting at the top just to the left and down.

But it was great. I spent a fair amount of times. I'm learning graffiti, and I got pretty good at it. On your resume. Yeah, exactly. Graffiti expert. Special skills, yeah. In 1947 at Harvard University,

Grace Hopper, famous name in computing science. Grace Hopper and her team entered in their logbooks this quote, and I'm going to leave out a word. You tell me what word is missing. Quote, first actual case of blank being found. What was the blank? Chris. Bug.

That's right. First actual case of bug being found. And very famously, Chris, what else did they add into the logbook along with this note? The bug. A bug. A moth, to be precise. Yes. Taped into the book, a moth along with the note.

Oh, ew. Yeah, it is a little bit of you. But, yeah, so they, you know, again, 1947, this is early, early, early days. of computers where you had physical parts moving all over the place. And there was a bug physically trapped in a piece preventing information from moving through the computer. So they had to, when they're trying to figure out what's going on, to debug the system, they had to literally go in and retrieve this moth from the system.

This poor, poor moth. This log sheet remains preserved today in the Smithsonian National museum. With the moth there. With the moth in there. Not disintegrated. No. Well, you know, I mean, a little worse for wear. But, you know, if you were, if you were taped onto a piece of paper in 1947, Karen, you would probably look a lot worse than this moth. Yeah. Sometimes you'll hear this story told as the origin of the term bugs in software or bugs and computers. And, and it's not people were using the term bugs for problems with machinery and technology before this. Going back as far as Edison even, you know, Gremlins or bugs. in the machine. So there was some precedent for the term, yeah, bugs, especially in technology. And with that, I will bring to a close. My journey assembled over many days wandering the streets of Palo Alto, California, of computers and computer history and peripherals and three-foot USB cables enough to choke the earth with. You guys did good. Good job. Thank you for indulging me on this somewhat nerdy venture here.

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It is the, I'm bringing, I'm bringing. it back. It's the off-topic music round. We got a music round for everybody and it has nothing to do with computers whatsoever. Yay. Love it. Love it. So there is a theme. So

try to figure out the theme as we're going along. These are all artists that you have 100% heard of. Some of the songs might not be songs that you know. But hopefully

you should be able to define the artists for some of these by the by the stylings right okay and perhaps the theme as we move along but con let's we should work together yeah yeah on a meta level i think it's weird that chris is like oh i have an off topic surprise music no there's no no no it's no off topic surprise music round i guarantee you there's no okay okay i it is it is straight up just, I thought of a fun idea. I love it. Okay. I think we should absolutely do this as a team, Karen.

Okay, great. Let's do it. Let's rock it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can do it as a team. Okay, here we go. We cover a lot of ground here. All right, here we go. Clip number one. No false on earth could stop your eye when your heart burst like the sun

Never Never give up on a dream All right, team Okay It kind of sounds like Like Rod Stewart I was gonna say Oh yeah

I don't know At first I was like Oh Brian Adams Oh okay yeah A little bit of the Raspi Yeah It's Rod Stewart It's Rod Stewart yeah

I didn't recognize the track, though, Karen, but it felt very, like, kind of soundtrack-y to me. I don't know about you. I'll incidentally tell you the names of these tracks. It's probably not. It doesn't really mean anything. Okay. That was called Never Give Up on a Dream. Okay.

All right. Should we pay attention to the lyrics? Nope. Okay. Okay. Click number two. Take a turn for the shifting light. You'll see my shadow.

Lost. I'm so familiar I want to say either Chicago and or Peter Satera solo It's Peter Satera solo Okay, all right It's the Peter Satera solo That's very I'm so impressed

If you know, the voice is very, I'm so impressed. Very, very pickable as Colin did. Yeah, Peter's Tera. Peter's Tera? Pete singer of Chicago at that time. Oh, wow. Oh, my God, you nailed it. Yeah.

Yeah. A song was called, Dip Your Wings. Just like that. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay, clip number three. This is a sad hand that reached across and touch you.

When all we'd build around us came crashing to the crowd. There was a tight turn and somewhere deep inside us When all these years together I've seen a loss here high in my tears I think that is rest in power Olivia Newton-John You are correct Yes

John again a placeable Yes very much so It's called the rumor Maybe you don't know the track, it's called the rumor We will move right along to clip number four Stick your move you're living in a quick world Got a heavy life for such a tiny girl Born into it that's for show

That is red hot chili peppers. Very good. Yes, it's red hot chili peppers. The song's called Sick Love is what it's called. Okay. That's a more recent one. So sometimes these Chris music rounds get a little old, but that's a little more recent. I like that.

Okay, so it's not soloists, Karen, that breaks a streak. No, it's not soloists from bands. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Okay, track number five. Every second of the night I live another life These dreams that see when it's cold outside

What a great song Let's just listen to that song She still sounds like that Well this is Hart, Nancy and Anne Wilson And Nancy Wilson These dreams All right halfway mark Let's try track number six

How you gonna see me now? Please don't see me ugly, babe. Because I know I let you down in all so many ways. Are you gonna see me now since we've been on our own? Man, I first thought it kind of felt very like Paul McCartney to me was my first thought. I'm baffled that you don't know, Colin. If you need a hint, I would say that we're not worthy to be listening to this artist.

We're not worthy. Alice Cooper. It's Alice Cooper. Oh. No, oh my God, I called it. Yeah. Good one. Yeah.

How are you going to see me now? Nice. Yep, yep. We're rolling. We have just four more left. Let's check out track number seven. Because I know a love that will never grow old. And I know I love that will never grow old.

This one won the 2006 Golden Globe for Best Original Song, appearing in a ocean picture. Karen, come on, this is your wheelhouse. It's in Brokeback Mountain. Oh, this is Jewel? Okay. Not Jewel. Not Jewel.

No. 2006. Go back Mountain. Emmilu. No. What is it? It's Emmylou Harris. Oh, Karen.

Yeah, that's Emmylou Harris. Wow. Oh, man. You have censored yourself. You got half of it out. Yeah, I'm going to give you the point, Karen, even if Chris doesn't. So here we go. It's clip number eight.

I was born in the north of Bingwood. I was raised in a working town. I broke all the rules when I went to school, but the teachers couldn't pin me. I try to make my parents proud by adapting to the social hilarious all right well I feel like I got my Beatles dose eventually here that has got to be I don't know the song Chris but that's got to be Richard Starkey aka Ringo Star it is indeed Sir Richard Starkey the title of song was Snookeroo but yes Ringo Star you got your did not get your

McCartney, but you did get your Ringo Star. Too funny. Bless him. Okay. Ringo Star. Just two more tracks left to go. We're barreling towards the end of this. Let's check out clip number nine. I recognize my face. Say you don't care who goes

to that kind of place. Knee deep in the hoopla. Seeking in your fight. Too many runaways Eating up the night My Tony plays the bomb All right Now you have one chance

To get it exactly right The name of this group Starship Yes Oh who No thinking I would have slended it out Jefferson Starship

Jefferson Airplane Are they the same band? Yeah I mean more or less Yes, yeah, the same band, yeah. Okay, okay. This, in this iteration, it's Starship. We built this city.

All right, just one more clip left. What is this? What is this nonsense? Let's go ahead and let's see if you can listen to clip 10. All right. Things will come into focus. I don't know. Maybe they won't, but here is clip.

Tie it all together, number 10. Number 10, save me. Can you see this scare call? you still be free for all you're not a scarecrow And will you still be there tomorrow? And will you still be there tomorrow? Like moth round a light bow

Is that Sir Elton John? That is Sir Elton John. Okay. Early piano demo of a song called. scarecrow. Oh. No, that's a stretch. I don't know what the...

No, I don't know what you're thinking. All right. I was not what you're thinking, but no. I don't know. I was like, oh, you know, Wicked, the movie's coming out. There's like Scarecrow and I see like heart.

Like, you know, the Tin Man needs a heart. So it's not the titles of the songs. It's not, it's no, no, it's not wicked. It's not based on that. Oh, man. Put this together. I thought of this because I learned. this about these dreams. I learned something about the song These Dreams. It was very interesting.

Are they all written by Elton John? Oh, good. Yeah, good yes. Or by Bernie Toppen maybe, right? All written by Bernie Toppin? Yes. Oh my goodness. Wow. Bernie Toppen is the lyricist who wrote all of the famous Elton John suit. They were very close collaborative partners. But he also wrote songs that were, you know, for other artists or ended up being performed by other artists. And so that is the team of this round. Every song in this had lyrics written by Bernie Topin. That is pretty cool. Which I found this out because he apparently, he originally wrote the song, These Dreams, for Stevie Nix. Ah.

And she turned it down. She did not want it. And it ended up getting recorded. It all comes down. And we built, and we built this city also. Some pretty nice royalty checks, at least coming in, is what, is what you're saying here. And, of course, Elton John Scarecrow, as you maybe can figure out why I used that one when I could have used hundreds of them, you know? Why? Because that was the first song. They worked on together.

That they did together. Nice. Who played him in Rocket Man? Oh, that's a great. Yeah. I know my history from biopics. From biopics, right. Hey, you know what?

You're not the only one. I love it. So nerdy. Jamie Bell. Jamie Bell. Oh. Billy Elliott. Oh, okay.

He was Bernie in Rocket Man. Okay. That was a very cholerian, colerian music quiz. For sure. For sure. You reveal at the end, I think, yes. But you were so like, oh, it's going to be. going to be a huge puzzle.

And that's our show. Thank you all for joining me. Thank you listeners for listening in. Hope you learn stuff about a really bad computer. Hope you learn stuff about AI voices and movies, about the Palm Pilot and other older tech. You can find us on all major podcast apps and on our website, good job brain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like

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