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up on this week's show a long-lost Atari

0:17

game is brought back to life The

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coolest charity shop find this year a we

0:23

chat to Amiga legend Randall Jessam

0:36

And the retro our podcast is brought

0:38

to you each and every Friday with

0:40

our incredible friends a bit that books

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now One of my favorite books that

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they've done recently is the art of

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actually we've got you an exclusive offer

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That's valid until the end of June you can

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check that out on the rest of their retro

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gaming collection at bitmapbooks.com Hello

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and welcome to the retro our podcast

1:25

episode number 4 3 3

1:27

your weekly dose of retro gaming and Technology

1:29

news with me Dan would me ravi Appett

1:31

and me Joe Fox and a very warm

1:33

welcome to the podcast a show that comes

1:36

out every single Friday and celebrates

1:38

all things about the wonderful world

1:40

of retro gaming and technology brings

1:43

you up to speed on all the big happenings in the world

1:45

of retro from over the last week and We

1:47

welcome on a veteran of the industry

1:49

to tell us their story the companies

1:51

they worked on the software that they worked

1:53

on back in the day, that's what we do on the

1:55

podcast in the second half every single week and Hands

1:58

up. We make no apologies that you and I

2:01

are going to proper geek out on

2:03

the second half of this podcast, Ravi. Oh

2:05

yes, definitely. On this podcast,

2:07

we are Amiga fans. Me and

2:10

Dan, Joe doesn't know what an

2:12

Amiga is, but I think you would say that. But

2:14

he has to be the Amiga fan by default, because

2:16

we'll drag him around all the Amiga events we're talking

2:18

about. Through osmosis, he's kind of gone

2:21

into Joe's blood. But we've

2:23

got a member of the original

2:25

Amiga team here, the senior software

2:27

engineer of Commodore Amiga. Randall Jessup

2:29

coming on the show. Yeah,

2:32

now this is a really interesting chat, but we've

2:34

had other members of the Commodore

2:36

and original Amiga teams on. RJ Michael's

2:38

been on the podcast, Dave Haynie, David

2:41

Pleasance. We've had a lot of Amiga guests

2:43

on in the past. But this week,

2:45

I think it's quite interesting because Randall,

2:47

he was uniquely placed working at Commodore

2:49

from the late 80s to pretty

2:51

much the time of their demise. And

2:54

he worked on some really interesting products.

2:57

You know, stuff that we don't hear talked

2:59

about all that much anymore, including things like

3:01

the Amiga operating system development at the time.

3:03

And going from Amiga fans will know what

3:05

a big jump version 1.3 to 2.0 was.

3:07

And that came out in the early 90s.

3:12

Yeah, and stuff like the

3:14

Amiga exec design as well,

3:16

and multitasking, the structure,

3:18

the expandability with device drivers and

3:21

stuff. It's really, really interesting OS.

3:23

And, you know, we

3:25

talk about some of the

3:27

planned projects like the AAA chipset

3:30

that didn't happen. And the Pombray.

3:32

Yeah, amazingly, he's sitting there on

3:35

the interview with a AAA chip in his

3:37

room, which is just absolutely

3:39

mad. And we also go back in

3:42

the days as well, because we talk

3:44

about PlayNet, which was a gaming system

3:46

that was kind of before QuantumLink. If

3:50

anyone's ever seen the TV show Halt and Catch

3:52

Fire, the second series is kind of based upon

3:55

PlayNet that Randall was

3:57

working on back in the mid 80s. It's quite an

3:59

interesting story. It was like very early

4:01

online gaming, wasn't it? Yeah. And then it

4:03

morphed into AOL later on. And then after

4:06

Amiga as well, so of course, the

4:08

interview, the majority of it is Amiga. We go

4:11

on to Scala as well, which was

4:13

another company that was kind of in

4:16

the Amiga world, but Brandon moved on to

4:18

them. And then he moved on to Mozilla

4:20

as well. So he's the senior staff software

4:22

engineer at Mozilla at the moment. And

4:25

he tells you why you should be switching your

4:27

browser over to Firefox today. If

4:29

you haven't checked it out for a while, so we'll hear

4:31

about that. We talk about some great stuff in the Amiga

4:33

section as well. I mean, you know, CDTV, he actually worked

4:35

on the unreleased CDTV sequel

4:37

CDTV CR, I think it was called.

4:40

We hear all about that, you know, then obviously

4:42

CD32 coming along as well. And for

4:45

me, you know, I just love nerding out about all

4:47

this stuff. I think, you know, it's really interesting. So,

4:50

you know, we even talk about scuzzy devices

4:52

and you mentioned Scala as well, which for

4:54

people that might not remember Scala, that

4:57

was basically the, you could say the

4:59

early 90s version of PowerPoint, wasn't it?

5:01

It ran on Amigas. And I've actually

5:03

been playing around with it because obviously

5:05

your big Amiga event is coming up in a

5:07

couple of weeks, Ravi, that we'll talk more about in a

5:09

second. But we're selling some of our retro hour books on

5:12

one of the stands there. And I came up with

5:14

this idea the other day that it'd be great if I had a CD32

5:17

there with a CRT

5:19

monitor running basically a rolling

5:22

advert presentation for the

5:24

book made on the Amiga. So I've actually been

5:26

spending quite a bit of time in Scala over

5:28

the last couple of weeks. Yeah, you've been sending

5:30

me messages like, how do I do this effect?

5:33

And I'm trying to remember like 30 years ago.

5:35

But yeah, Scala is absolutely

5:37

amazing. Really, really great piece of

5:39

software. And yeah, I can't wait

5:41

to see your presentation there. Yeah, I've been

5:43

watching some of the included demos with Scala.

5:46

I wouldn't expect mine to be anywhere near that standard,

5:48

but I might rip off some of those templates. It

5:50

looks very powerful. So yeah, I mean, we make no

5:53

apologies. We know we talk about the Amiga a lot

5:55

on this podcast, but we love it. So at Randall

5:57

Jessup, our special guest, a little look inside that time.

6:00

Commodore and the Amiga and like I said after

6:02

we know into Mozilla and Quantum Link and all

6:04

that as well really interesting chat. He's going to

6:06

be our special guest on the show in around

6:08

half an hour from now. Now we did mention

6:11

obviously your big event's coming up for people that

6:13

don't know, maybe new listeners. Give us a little

6:15

reminder on what it is, Ravian, when it is.

6:17

It is the UK's Amiga show. So this is

6:19

the Commodore Amiga show, 29th and 30th of June,

6:25

2024. It's a really cool event. We have

6:28

like trader space, community space. We've got

6:30

talks from Revolution Software,

6:32

Sensible Software and

6:35

the demand's been really high. We've

6:37

actually hit like about 20

6:40

tickets are selling off. So I've held

6:42

some back on the Saturday and I'm

6:44

going to release some on Monday the

6:46

17th. So those last 20 tickets people

6:49

can get. But also Sunday

6:51

tickets, Sunday's always these

6:53

shows, you know, people are a bit hungover. They

6:56

sell a bit less. We have a massive rave

6:58

on the Saturday night, don't we? Yes, exactly. And

7:00

the tickets will be available on the door at

7:02

the rave, but also on

7:04

the Sunday as well. And yeah, we've already

7:07

sold like nearly 250 to 300 for the

7:09

after party. Nice.

7:13

Which is going to be huge. And we've

7:15

got five acts and that's going till 2am.

7:17

I've already had people like, I can't last

7:19

till 2am. Like, yeah, you know, grandpa in

7:22

the afternoon after the show. Yeah, you

7:24

can come and see a bit of it. But

7:26

no, I'm really excited. And yeah,

7:28

it's all kind of coming together. And it's just like the

7:31

nervous period now. Yeah,

7:33

until it happens. And then it's

7:35

like, oh, what we're going to do next year. So

7:37

if you want to come along, like I said, there are still a

7:39

few tickets available, some more for the Saturday, the final few coming out

7:41

on Monday happening in Nottingham, end

7:44

of the month, 29th and 30th of

7:46

June. What's the website again for tickets?

7:48

amigashow.com. Cool. So stick that in the

7:50

show notes as well. And I know there are quite a few

7:52

patrons coming along. So we'll be nice to meet a few people.

7:54

Like we said, we'll have a few of our books available for

7:56

sale there as well. So if you want one of those, definitely

7:59

look out for us. at the event, Kickstarter coming up

8:01

in Nottingham in a couple of weeks. Right

8:03

then, stories time, been a busy

8:05

week in retro again. And

8:08

I always like it when long

8:10

lost games make an appearance, particularly

8:13

something as famous as Tarzan.

8:16

As it turns out, there was a version of

8:19

Tarzan that was meant to be released on the Atari 2600 that

8:22

was a casualty of the North

8:25

America game crash in the mid 80s and

8:27

then was kind of considered lost.

8:29

But it turns out now, anybody

8:31

can play it. Yeah, this

8:33

is actually been happening for two

8:36

years, this story. It's only kind of come

8:38

to light now. So the game

8:40

Tarzan was made

8:42

by Coleco, which is quite funny

8:44

because it's become full circle because only last

8:46

week we're talking about how Atari has just

8:49

bought Coleco. And

8:51

for various reasons, the game never came out

8:53

on the Atari 2600 back in the 80s. And

8:56

as you say, considered a lost game. And

8:58

those interested in what the game is, very

9:01

much like Pitfall. What do you think of it? Let's talk

9:03

a bit about the game because I watched this video and

9:05

I've seen a lot of the comments saying, thank

9:07

God this never came out. It looks dreadful. Personally,

9:09

I think it looks really good. I think it

9:11

looks all right for me. Like I

9:13

say, it reminds me of Pitfall, swinging

9:17

across the holes and. It's

9:19

got those like platforming elements as well.

9:21

Yeah, yeah, platforming elements into it and

9:24

everything. But I think, graphically, for the

9:26

Atari 2600, this

9:28

looks pretty like up there. You

9:31

know, like the graphics, I think it looks really nice

9:33

and bright and colorful. Lots of colors,

9:35

lots of sprites going on. And

9:37

it isn't just swinging across holes. You know, there's

9:39

other levels like where you've got to climb up

9:41

a cliff side, mountain side, dodge boulders and stuff

9:43

like that. You know, all stuff

9:46

Tarzan would probably do in the jungle.

9:49

So I think it looks quite an interesting game. I

9:51

think it sounds great as well for the Atari 2600. Yeah,

9:53

yeah, exactly. Although there is one bit, if you

9:56

watch the video, the crocodile on the second level.

9:58

The guy dies about 20 times. times. That's

10:01

probably why people are saying

10:03

this. It looks difficult. But

10:07

yeah, so a private collector

10:09

actually bought the demo

10:11

cartridge off an

10:13

ex-employee of Coleco in 2022.

10:18

And this private collector is Rob, AKA

10:21

Atari Spark, who's the

10:23

collector. And he's reached

10:25

out to the Atari homebrew community and

10:28

a programmer who I don't want to ruin this.

10:31

Thomas Genzic, I think it's pronounced,

10:34

he has got the game running on emulation and they've

10:36

finally been able to dump the game for everybody to play.

10:39

So two years it's taken for this to happen. But

10:42

as you say, it's always nice to see

10:44

these long lost games, whether we've

10:46

heard of them or not. I think

10:48

it was such a big franchise. I mean, Tarzan was massive

10:50

back in the day, a huge franchise. I

10:53

think it would have been popular. I mean, you

10:55

know, it looks, you can tell it's a Tarzan game. You've got obviously

10:57

the swinging across ropes. The

10:59

combat mechanics were pretty good as well. You know,

11:01

his little fist punch. Well, just the underpants as

11:03

well. Just the underpants and his little toga. So

11:08

yeah, it's interesting to hear that story. And I

11:10

mean, there is a really long article that I'll

11:12

link up in the show notes as well. If

11:14

you want to like real dissection of exactly how

11:16

they got this working. There's some technical kind of

11:18

firsts on it as well, including it had a

11:21

bank switching and to

11:23

overcome the limitations of the 4K

11:25

Atari cartridges. And if I look at

11:27

this article, it was kind of one of the first games

11:29

that did that. And they kind of had to figure out

11:31

how that would work back then.

11:33

So that does sound quite interesting. So

11:35

it is a quite a long article

11:38

on gamehistory.org all about the other games

11:40

being preserved and recovered as well. So

11:43

if you want to check that out, I'll link that in the show notes. And

11:45

the ROMs are available now to play on your

11:47

original hardware or emulation. So

11:50

welcome back to our ZAN. Now,

11:53

speaking of Atari, a studio that

11:55

were acquired by Atari about this time last year, Night

11:58

Dive Studios are back in the studio. the news this week.

12:01

Night Dye Studios are just killing it

12:03

at the moment with all their, you know,

12:05

the different remakes and remasters they've been doing.

12:08

A lot of first-person shooters over the last couple of

12:10

years, but this is one I'm really excited to see.

12:13

And I actually sent you guys the trailer when I saw

12:15

this earlier this week. Send a load

12:17

of my old school friends. And this is actually,

12:19

if you ever want to check out our other

12:22

show, The After Hours, I actually talk about this

12:24

on an underrated games episode

12:27

we once did. This is the remaster

12:29

of The Thing. So, the

12:31

John Carpenter's The Thing, the

12:34

1982 film. In 2002,

12:37

they made a prequel, not

12:39

prequel, they made a sequel video

12:41

game to that for the PlayStation

12:43

2, which did sell a

12:45

million copies. But I don't see

12:47

a lot of people talking about it. It's

12:50

going to be remastered and be coming out later

12:52

this year. Don't think it's your guy's

12:54

cup of tea, because it is

12:56

a very hard, scary horror

12:58

game with lots of blood and guts. Too

13:00

scary for Ravi, too tough for me. Exactly.

13:05

I quite like the look of it, you

13:07

know, in this kind of form. It

13:10

reminds me of Half-Life, actually. I don't know

13:12

why. Yeah. Yeah. I

13:14

mean, like I say, I'm really excited

13:16

for it. I think Night Dye, everything they

13:18

touch at the moment just turns to gold. You

13:21

know, usually, they've not really said

13:23

a lot about it so far, other

13:25

than, you know, it's going to be on all modern

13:27

systems and computer, you know,

13:29

and it'll be in 4K, 120 frames per

13:32

second, etc. I will admit, it is

13:36

a little bit of a clunky game if you go back

13:38

and play it. And it's not a game I completed, because

13:41

it was very difficult, and sometimes

13:44

a little bit confusing in

13:47

terms of how to... Because it's a third-person

13:49

shooter, but it's also a

13:51

survival horror, and there's a whole

13:53

kind of like trust meter with it, kind of

13:55

like based off the game, because based off the

13:57

film, because in the films, if

13:59

you haven't seen this... thing. It's about an alien

14:01

life form that mimics other people and

14:03

you don't know if that person's an

14:05

alien or not. And you have the

14:07

same thing in the game. So as well as

14:10

running around on this Antarctic base, where

14:12

you've got to worry about ammo and you've got to

14:14

worry about freezing to death and you've also

14:16

got to worry about if any of your teammates have

14:18

been infected and have become the thing. And

14:21

it was always a bit difficult to understand how

14:23

that worked. And even to a point where I've

14:25

seen people on Imonoretro selling

14:27

page on Facebook and I've seen people trying

14:29

to buy this game now, but they

14:31

want to make sure the original comes

14:34

complete with the game's manual. Right.

14:36

So they know what they're doing.

14:39

And when I played this as a teenager, I obviously

14:41

didn't read the manual. I had time for that when

14:43

you were a teenager. Yeah, exactly. And I'd get so

14:45

far in it and then just get killed by one

14:47

of my teammates who transformed into the thing. So

14:50

what I'm getting around to is Night

14:52

Dive. They do usually kind of put

14:54

some kind of quality of life improvements

14:56

into the games. They play

14:58

around with them enough because

15:01

they're remasters, they're not remakes. So you know, they

15:03

upscale the graphics and everything. And

15:05

they usually modernize the controls, so the

15:07

triggers of the shooting buttons and the aiming

15:10

buttons and stuff like that. But often they will put something

15:13

in there just to make the game a little

15:15

bit more modern and playable. They might add a

15:17

meter to the game, like a trust meter or

15:19

something like that. Obviously they've not made any announcements

15:21

of that so far, but I

15:23

would quite like to see something like that. So

15:25

it's a little bit easier to pick up on.

15:27

Like it looks like there's a lot of snow

15:30

effects in it as well. And yeah, you know,

15:32

the kind of original had snow, but it's moved

15:34

on a lot now. It has

15:36

moved on very, very, very atmospheric. I think weathering

15:38

games is one thing and water as well that,

15:40

you know, really improved over the last couple of

15:43

decades. When you get back to 90s games, that's

15:45

one thing that always stands out to be just

15:47

have a chance to improve. But

15:49

you're right. I mean, from what I've seen of the moment,

15:51

we talked about that 3D O remaster that did that PO

15:53

game. Yeah. A while ago. I haven't played that

15:55

the remaster they did, but I've seen a lot

15:58

of reviews saying that basically they really. improve

16:00

that game and actually for the first time ever it

16:03

is actually a playable game now. That's good.

16:05

And speaking of which I've also announced I'm

16:07

going to be remastering another 3DO game, the

16:10

first person shooter game Killing Time. Yeah,

16:12

sort of. I don't know anything about

16:14

Killing Time though. Yeah, I mean it's

16:17

kind of one of the, I mean, I haven't played many

16:19

FPS games on the 3DO, but

16:22

that I think is up there, you know, it's

16:24

considered one of the, again, it's a horror themed

16:26

kind of, you know, early 90s FPS game. Yeah.

16:31

I think it came out around 94ish, 95. I've

16:34

only played it briefly, but in terms of, you know,

16:36

3DO FPS games, that's generally the one that most people

16:38

talk about. It had a lot of FMV in it

16:41

and it's like, you

16:44

know, where they had a PO'd. Yeah.

16:46

They're kind of redoing stuff and

16:48

making it a bit more playable, which are like,

16:50

you know, exciting in these titles. And

16:53

especially it seems to be the case with

16:55

FPS as well. Yeah, I love kind

16:58

of seeing, you know, remastering, like you said, the

17:00

FMV era games, you know, always amusing to see

17:02

them coming back. So that's

17:04

just been announced. We haven't got a release date on that

17:06

from what I've seen, have we? Just says 2024

17:08

at the moment. So, you know,

17:10

she's only six months left of it now. So

17:12

I imagine probably towards Christmas time,

17:14

I imagine. Just announcing that, Joe. Just

17:16

give me a heart palpitations. Any six months left of it. Anyway,

17:19

while we're talking about the 3DO, we continue. It's

17:22

been a bit of a week for 3DO news this week.

17:25

If you have got an original system,

17:27

this is quite cool because a lot

17:29

of consoles that used optical drives back

17:31

in the day, that is often the point

17:33

of failure. And I've had a

17:36

few, not many, I think my CD32, the

17:39

laser on that started to get a bit weak a while ago, which

17:42

fortunately turns out that the CD32 uses

17:44

like a standard part that

17:46

I think Sony used in HiFi. It was a bank

17:48

together system, wasn't it? Yes. I

17:50

mean, I picked up a new laser of eBay for a fiver. Swapped

17:53

it over. Good as new. I'm not exactly sure what the

17:55

score is with the 3DO's drive, but I mean, you bear

17:57

in mind that era. I mean, the 3DO

17:59

came out in one. what, 93? So imagine

18:01

it was designed in 91, 92. I mean, you know,

18:04

a lot of the time back then you had very custom CD-ROM

18:07

drives in that kind of single speed era. But

18:10

it turns out if you have got an original 3DO,

18:12

the FZ1 model, the Panasonic, you know, the one that

18:14

we, the one that I've got in my collection, that

18:16

for me, when you say 3DO, that's the one I

18:18

picture. If you've got one of those

18:20

with a failing CD-ROM drive, there is now a rather

18:23

affordable solution to replace it.

18:25

This is really good because of the price

18:27

as well. I think I've seen these ODEs

18:29

on other devices.

18:32

These are optical drive emulators, aren't they?

18:35

Yeah. And that's kind of put me off some of

18:37

them, you know. I saw there

18:39

were some good ones on the Dreamcast as well. Lots

18:41

of people were doing that. And they were also doing

18:43

mounts so you could kind of mount the

18:45

card in as well. I didn't

18:47

know if they were quite soldering and stuff like

18:49

this, but this one doesn't seem to require soldering

18:51

over. Yeah, this one looks

18:54

very cool. I mean, it's just a small, basically

18:56

a little circuit board that you put inside. You

18:58

have some ribbon cables that would have previously connected

19:00

to the CD-ROM drive. The good thing

19:02

about this is, like you said, a lot of those

19:04

kind of ODEs require you to take the optical drive

19:07

out of like whatever system you put in them in.

19:09

Because this one's so small and the

19:11

3DO case is quite big, it actually fits

19:13

in there and you can keep the original

19:15

CD-ROM drive in there. You just re-clipping the

19:17

cables. Yeah. Yeah, just re-rooting

19:19

them. But also, I think, you

19:21

know, you're loading it off a solid state

19:24

drive. It's probably going to be a bit faster,

19:26

isn't it, than like one of the older CD

19:28

drives? Yeah, that's a single speed. I imagine it

19:30

probably would be. Yeah, I think I've got a

19:32

feeling the 3DO CD-ROM drive was, you know, a

19:34

single speed. What are they, like 150 kbps? I

19:39

don't think they're not very much. It might

19:41

speed up, you know, gameplay time. Yeah, I mean,

19:43

yeah, stuff like FMVs and that could definitely help

19:45

with that, I imagine. But

19:47

I mean, the big news about this is there was

19:50

already an ODE for the 3DO

19:52

by a guy called Fixel who

19:54

made one called the 3DO ODE. They've got really good reviews,

19:56

but that cost $250. So

19:59

this is basically a guy called Fixel. called fcare, who's

20:01

basically made an open source

20:03

board that uses fix or

20:05

software. And from what I've seen,

20:07

Fixles actually worked with him on this as well. And

20:10

he's completely happy with it from the comments I've

20:12

read online. But it really means that

20:15

he was planning on open sourcing that software anyway,

20:17

apparently. But this is a lot

20:19

cheaper than the 3D ODE. That

20:22

was $250. So the software is kind of the

20:24

front end of it as well. Yeah. And

20:26

then you have the hardware. Yeah, from what I've seen,

20:29

it's basically the same software. It should run exactly

20:31

the same as the more expensive one. But I mean, they're selling these

20:33

for $59.99. And

20:36

I don't know if the 3D O had

20:38

any copy protection, but I don't think you'd

20:40

be able to load a lot of the

20:42

games from

20:45

the collection and probably some weird stuff as

20:47

well. And like, you know, Homebrew

20:49

on there as well. Yeah, well, I mean,

20:51

that's the thing, 3D O had no protection whatsoever, which

20:53

for me, I mean, I

20:55

haven't used mine for a while, but the

20:58

failure of mine was the power supply, the caps in

21:00

that kind of broke and it kept just rebooting. So

21:02

I recapped it, it's all like through-hole stuff. It was

21:04

quite easy to do. But the optical drive still worked

21:06

on mine last time. So for now, because

21:09

like I said, the 3D O has got no

21:11

copy protection, it's easy enough for me to burn

21:13

CDs for it. But I think if it ever

21:15

did get to the day where, and you know,

21:17

probably one day when the CD drive starts to

21:19

fail, something like this will be quite handy. And

21:21

actually seeing the price of CDs

21:23

now as well. I saw like,

21:25

you know, the CD towers that you could get with like

21:28

100 CDs in. Then we're going for like

21:30

30 quid in Asda. Oh

21:32

my God. I remember there were like a fiver like 10 years

21:34

ago. Still in some charity shops,

21:36

you can walk around and find them. Yeah,

21:38

I saw a load of Blu-rays burnable

21:40

discs in one recently, but I thought, yeah, what the

21:42

hell am I gonna use them for? So I resisted,

21:45

might regret that one day. But there you go. So if you don't

21:48

wanna burn optical discs and you just want a nice way of having

21:50

all your 3D O titles playable on your

21:52

original hardware, there is one slight annoyance about

21:54

it that this is internal and it requires

21:56

use of a USB stick. And

21:59

that means... Basically, if you want to set the USB

22:01

stick out, you've got to open the 3D and pull

22:03

it out. Okay, yeah. Which I'm sure someone will. The

22:05

next thing will be some extension where you can mount

22:07

it on the front or something. Yeah, I mean, there

22:09

will be people who will just mod the system and

22:11

use an extender, put it in the outside of the

22:13

case. But it's a good thing that it

22:15

doesn't require that because some of us do like to not

22:18

mod the hardware cases and stuff. So yeah,

22:20

that is available now. I will link that in the show

22:22

notes too. Now, I was on

22:24

holiday last week, went to

22:26

lovely Cine Santorini for a week and took

22:28

my switch with me. I did

22:30

send you guys some pictures of me hooking

22:32

my switch up to the hotel TV. Well,

22:35

whilst we were at work. We got a

22:37

picture pretty much every day, just like, how's

22:39

your afternoon boys? How's the

22:41

weather? How's the weather? We're like, yes, we know

22:44

Dan, you're on holiday. I

22:46

mean, it was very nice out there. It was very nice. But

22:49

the picture I was talking about is what I sent you

22:51

to me playing final vendetta in the hotel room. Yes. Hooked

22:54

up to the TV. Because I do love it when

22:56

you go to a hotel room and they've got like

22:58

accessible HDMI ports. Oh my God. Years ago, I used

23:00

to try and get onto those hotel TVs and it'd

23:02

be like, how to hack the hotel

23:04

TV to unlock the USB port and like,

23:06

you know, yeah. Really tough. But now they

23:08

seem to be accepting of you

23:10

putting your own stuff on. Well, I left it plugged in

23:13

and this is like, take that out, the cleaners come in,

23:15

they'll go mad at you. They'll be all right. Don't worry

23:17

about it. But yeah, I mean, I had

23:19

a bit of a, cause obviously there was a four and a half hour flight over

23:21

there and I was playing, you know, turtles on there,

23:23

a total collection on my switch. I spent a bit of final

23:25

vendetta street to age four as well. I had a bit of

23:27

the beat them up stage last week, which

23:29

was great fun, actually funny to get some time to

23:31

play these games. But if you are a fan of

23:34

these kind of belt scrollers, I believe you call them,

23:36

Joe. Yeah. There is a new

23:38

one on the way. Now this is a game called

23:41

Deadly Metropolis. There's

23:45

definitely been since, I

23:47

want to say since streets of rage four came out in 2020, there's

23:50

definitely been a big resurgence. I mean, you just listed off

23:52

a bunch of games there. So I'm not going to sit

23:54

here and say all the same ones, but

23:56

they've all come out in the last three or four years and

23:58

they've all come out to. praise, you

24:00

know, high praise. And it's

24:02

excellent just seeing more of these games coming

24:05

out, because obviously they just died off in

24:07

the mid 90s when we

24:09

went into the 3D era, which kind of

24:11

segues quite nicely into this game, because I really

24:14

like the look of this. So we've not got

24:16

much on this Deadly Metropolis yet, other

24:18

than some artwork, which does look very

24:21

Streets of Rage-esque. And

24:24

then we have got a 10 second clip

24:26

of some of the gameplay, which I'll get onto in a minute. But

24:29

the person behind this

24:31

game is Din the Abare,

24:34

who actually did work on Streets of Rage

24:36

4, as a

24:38

consultant. So that would make sense that the game

24:41

will have a similar vibe to Streets

24:43

of Rage, and it is going

24:45

to be launching on Kickstarter soon. So

24:47

hopefully in the next couple of months. But

24:50

gameplay wise, you know, obviously so

24:52

far, we're just seeing,

24:54

I say just, but we're seeing a beat em up. Lots

24:57

of lovely sprites on the screen and stuff. But for

24:59

me, graphically, I don't know if you guys agree, but

25:02

this to me looks like a really

25:04

nice Sega Saturn or PS1 kind

25:07

of beat em up. So not so much 16 bit,

25:10

but more towards the 32 bit beat

25:12

em up. So you'd sometimes see where you've got your

25:14

2D sprites, which look beautiful pixel art, but then you've

25:17

got a 3D background, you know, we've got buildings in

25:19

the background and you're on a fridge and I really

25:21

like the look of this. Do you remember when I

25:23

think it was called tech and tag? Yes.

25:26

Where it was tech and force for tech

25:28

and free. It was kind of

25:30

on an angle. Yeah, like a beat

25:32

em up. But yeah, it reminds

25:34

me of that. Just the angle of where the

25:36

camera is, you know, yeah, high up, isn't it?

25:38

Kind of looking down on on the characters from

25:40

like an angle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now you know

25:42

what, you've just unlocked some memories there, have you?

25:44

Yeah, definitely. It does have that kind

25:47

of, it was tech and force, which was a mode

25:49

on some of the, I think it was on tech and free and tech and

25:51

tag. Where it was like, you know,

25:53

like you said, I started along beat em up. I

25:56

really like the look of this and just, you know,

25:58

like I say, absolutely. love beat him

26:00

up so bring him on you know more than area

26:02

for me. Yeah I mean it's a

26:04

very short trailer like you said it's like 11 seconds

26:06

long and it's got some nice very

26:09

nice artwork I imagine from the intro or you know

26:11

some cut scenes but yeah then you get into like

26:13

the gameplay again you've got those really satisfying

26:15

thuds and punches that you know that's I mean

26:18

when I was playing Final Vendetta on the plane

26:20

I had my headphones in it was like just

26:22

amazing you know the sound effects on that the

26:24

crunches and stuff. You're tough and the music as

26:27

well obviously yeah I mean yeah just for the

26:29

sound effects. It's a hard game though that. I

26:32

did actually put it down to the easiest

26:35

casual level. Yeah no I'm

26:37

you know what I usually take the mick out of you down

26:39

for this stuff but I don't

26:41

even think I completed it on casual I think I

26:44

got to like the second to last level and I

26:46

was like that was on like my fourth try and I was

26:48

like yo this is hard yeah that was when I was on

26:50

holiday last year so I need to

26:52

go back to it as well. I was on

26:54

the plane like Samantha was just watching something on

26:56

her iPad and I was like move it around the

26:58

car just like taps it calm down. It reminds me

27:00

a bit of Metro Siege as well which is

27:02

the one that's you know coming out for the

27:04

Amiga. Yes it looks quite good yeah it's got

27:06

that kind of same style but it's

27:09

a bit more like 3D and less less

27:12

kind of 2D. Yeah bring on my

27:14

man. A new golden age of beat-em-up games

27:16

is upon us. Like I said launching on

27:18

Kickstarter soon the page is live but there

27:20

is no release date so far just

27:22

coming soon so if you want to check that out I'll put

27:24

that in the show notes too. Now

27:27

you guys you always have one thing that you do

27:29

better than me that is finding good

27:31

scores in charity shops. I never get lucky at

27:34

this. The other day you were posting a few

27:36

pictures of some games that you found in a

27:38

charity shop Joe that were pretty decent for

27:40

that. I think Ravi's pretty good at charity

27:42

shops. I was building up to Ravi. I

27:44

messed up the other day so this is

27:46

a rare limited edition Hulk

27:48

Xbox which we'll talk about in a

27:51

minute. I was in a charity shop

27:53

and there was a 360 you know

27:55

elite one like

27:57

the black ones really nice and it's

27:59

like 20 quid and it was all

28:01

working and everything and I was like oh I might I might

28:04

pick that up I don't know why I didn't pick it up

28:06

at the time and of course I went the next day and

28:08

it was gone. Yeah

28:11

I'm not amazingly good but this guy seems

28:13

to have really scored

28:15

with this I've never seen one of these

28:17

Xboxes before. Yeah well this

28:19

this story then is so yeah there is

28:21

a very rare limited edition Hulk

28:24

Xbox now we're talking about the original you

28:26

know OG Xbox here that was donated to

28:28

a branch of the British Heart

28:30

Foundation that they've now put on their on their

28:32

eBay account and I'm with Uravi I

28:34

looked at this originally and I thought do you remember the

28:37

Mountain Dew Xbox they were green

28:39

weren't they and I thought it's just one of them oh hang on and

28:41

this was for the

28:44

the 2003 movie Hulk that

28:46

came out in association with Pepsi this is a promotional item

28:48

where I think the only way we could get this was

28:50

to win it wasn't there and the only made about 50

28:52

of them they're very rare they're

28:54

really rare so the Mountain Dew one you

28:56

just mentioned was in America and

28:58

they made 5 000 of them

29:00

yeah which makes it super rare because

29:02

obviously I don't know how many units

29:04

the Xbox sold but I want

29:07

to say it was what it was in the tens

29:09

of millions original Xbox I know that much 24 million

29:12

there you go 24 million there you go but

29:14

yeah this Hulk Xbox

29:16

yeah bright line green one

29:19

came out in the UK and there

29:21

was 50 of them made and

29:24

you had to win a scratch card from

29:26

going to the cinema to see this film

29:28

and it was when you bought Pepsi

29:31

in a popcorn like deal and then you would get

29:33

the scratch card with it which would

29:35

have been awesome facing like going to

29:37

a movie and then winning like the

29:39

latest games console in

29:41

a disgusting green color yeah and

29:44

only 36 of them were

29:46

apparently actually claimed and won during

29:49

the run of the Hulk film

29:52

at the cinema and 14 of them have

29:54

gone unclaimed and then they said there's about

29:56

20 of them known in

29:59

people's private collections. There

30:01

isn't really a lot about where this one came from.

30:03

It was just it was donated to the British Heart

30:05

Foundation by somebody. I imagine

30:08

I could be wrong. I imagine they didn't really

30:10

know what they had. Can you imagine

30:12

if it was your mum and she's cleaning out the attic

30:14

like, oh, I'll just turn that is else. Yeah, that's the

30:16

thing. And like, you know, someone

30:19

could go and just like make a load of

30:21

money and be like, I bought it in the

30:23

charity shop in there. But really nicely, they're doing

30:25

all the proceeds going to the British Heart Foundation.

30:27

So, you know, out of this auction, which I

30:30

think is nice, I once went to a charity

30:33

shop and there was these two lovely

30:35

old ladies and they were selling loads of like

30:37

Apple gear. And they're like,

30:39

you know, like, oh,

30:41

Apple keyboard for two pounds.

30:43

And it was like, so

30:46

I bought it and then I like gave them

30:48

a load of money afterwards. And I was like, have

30:50

this. Yeah, I love it. It's worth a pound. I

30:55

gave them a lot more than that. And I

30:57

was like, this is worth a lot more. And

30:59

I told them how much it was worth. And

31:01

they were like, oh, thank you, love. You know,

31:03

yeah, I think that's good to do. Well,

31:06

it's currently on nine

31:08

thousand pounds at the

31:10

point of recording this on bed. And

31:12

that I want to

31:15

say it surprises me because I

31:17

just don't feel like, like,

31:19

yes, it's very sought after there was only ever 50

31:21

made and there's only like 20 of them out there

31:23

in people's collections, as far as we know, is probably

31:25

another 20 in people's attics or

31:27

something. But nine thousand pound,

31:29

like I didn't quite realise there was that

31:32

much love for the original Xbox.

31:34

I don't know. I just don't feel like the

31:37

original Xbox has like got the legacy

31:39

of like, you know, a limited edition

31:41

PS one or something. You know, I

31:43

mean, you expect it more on like

31:45

the Dreamcast. Yeah. You know, like that,

31:47

even the Xbox sold one and stuff.

31:49

I know what you're saying, though, I

31:51

kind of feel like the Xbox wasn't

31:53

all that special. It's just like it's

31:55

just basically a Pentium three PC

31:57

in a special guy. I

32:00

mean, don't get me wrong, I love the original

32:02

Xbox, but maybe it's the time thing as well.

32:04

Maybe it's starting to come into that now because,

32:06

you know, original Xbox games, last time I bought

32:08

them, they were like, got dirty pound to pound.

32:10

And I saw them in shops. Maybe

32:13

it's just the BZ. I've seen them going up. Yeah.

32:15

Yeah. I love recently. generation

32:19

that are like, you know, in their twenties now

32:21

where this was their childhood system. Yeah.

32:24

Well, it was kind of choose camp, wasn't it? You know,

32:27

it's like PlayStation or Xbox. And if

32:29

you're in that Xbox camp, they

32:31

were big, chunky, noisy things. But

32:34

they were awesome. Yeah. A

32:36

lot of powerhouse. I love my original Xbox, but

32:39

it's, yeah, I think this, I mean, if you're going to pay 9,000

32:41

quid for this, it's going to

32:43

be like some hardcore collectors, isn't it? Or just

32:45

want rare gaming things. Yeah. And it

32:47

looks in great condition, you know, it does. I mean, it looks ugly

32:49

as sin, but. No, very ugly.

32:52

But there's like no huge scratches

32:54

or anything like that. Broken bits.

32:56

It's weird, though, it's kind of like a like

32:59

snot green. It's kind

33:02

of rave green as well. It doesn't look like

33:04

the Hulk. The Hulk is much darker green than

33:06

that. Yeah. Because it's got the sticker on

33:08

of the Hulk on the top where the Xbox logo is apart from

33:10

that. Maybe when the Hulk blushes, he

33:12

goes this kind of green. Yeah. When

33:15

he sees a price for this system. Yeah. But

33:18

if you do want to get a very

33:20

rare original Xbox, you still got

33:22

a bit of time in the show comes out finishes at

33:24

9 p.m. on Saturday. So already 61 bids

33:26

on that will be interesting to see where that ends up. I've

33:28

got a feeling it might be. What

33:30

do you think, Joe? 15K? I'm

33:33

going to say 11000. OK.

33:36

Place your bets. So if

33:38

you have the spare money for that, I definitely

33:40

haven't. But I'll link it up in this

33:42

week's show notes along with everything else we talk about as

33:44

well. Now, we are going

33:46

to be doing our patrons hang out a little

33:48

bit later this month because we'll mention we have

33:50

got your massive kickstart event coming

33:52

up at the end of the month. I imagine by Sunday evening,

33:54

you're probably not going to be in any condition to talk.

33:57

I've taken one day off work as well. surprised.

34:01

So we're gonna be doing our next one on the

34:03

first Sunday of June, that will be June the 7th.

34:06

So for people that haven't been on a Hangout before, Joe,

34:08

give us the sizzle. Joe The sizzle

34:10

on the Hangout? Oh, wow. It is

34:12

just it's a Hangout. We all hang

34:14

out together. It's a funny

34:17

one because it started as like a, you

34:19

know, kind of like a big Google Meets

34:21

Teams meeting where we all were getting

34:23

together in COVID. And now we're

34:25

like four years into it. And I just look forward

34:27

to every month and just, you know, everybody comes on

34:29

and we just have a laugh. And you

34:31

know, we mostly start

34:34

the conversation talking about retro, talking

34:37

about games, tech, films, but

34:39

it always goes off on a tangent. Last

34:41

month we were talking about all different board

34:43

games, which was really fun. Yeah,

34:45

sometimes we just end up talking about our favorite

34:47

films, what we've all just been up to and

34:49

stuff like that. And it's just it's just really,

34:51

really nice. And we've made so

34:54

many friends on that as

34:56

well. We're all into the

34:58

same kind of stuff. And like, yes,

35:00

there's also help us like shape the

35:02

show, actually. So yeah, you know, we

35:04

had our orbital interview recently with Pete

35:06

on is one of our patrons who's always

35:09

on the Hangout as well. He's just been moving house. So

35:11

he was going and unpacking all his

35:13

boxes, kind of showing stuff there. And

35:16

it's just fantastic to have that like

35:18

connection, but also how it molds the

35:20

podcasts and you know, turns

35:22

it into different stuff that we might not

35:24

be able to explore ourselves. Yeah,

35:27

100%. You know, we've got a wonderful community around

35:29

the show. And obviously supporting us on Patreon really helps out

35:31

the podcast as well, you know, helps us cover all our

35:33

bills and running costs and everything too. So we really appreciate

35:35

that. Like I said, we are going to be having, you

35:37

know, a bunch of patrons meeting up a kickstart as well.

35:39

That's going to be awesome. Looking forward to that. And

35:42

really, if you want to join the patrons community, now's

35:44

a very good time to do it because you'll get

35:46

invited to the Hangout that's coming up in a couple

35:48

of weeks. We're going to be dropping at some point

35:50

this month, another episode of our bonus patrons only podcast

35:52

for the gold members and above the retro hour after

35:55

hours, which if you join now, you'll unlock 42 previous

35:58

episodes of that. We're going

36:00

to be recording a new one before the end

36:02

of the month. I think the subject first suggestions

36:05

are always welcome. You get access to our exclusive

36:07

Discord area. You get the normal podcast early some

36:09

weeks. Patreon's actually got on a Tuesday last week.

36:11

Wow. I think that's it. And

36:14

also we remove all the adverts as well. So you

36:17

also get an extra 10 minutes of news in every

36:19

single episode. So if you want to join us on

36:21

Patreon, all the details are signed up right now or

36:23

on the website at theretrorower.com. Okay.

36:25

Then this week's special guest, we're going to be

36:27

joined by Commodore Amiga legend, Randall

36:30

Jessup on the show in just a minute.

36:32

Before that, let's just take a quick second

36:35

to give a massive thank you to our

36:37

lovely friends at Shopify. Now, you know, Shopify,

36:40

they're the ones with this sound. They

36:43

are the platform which if you sell

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anything online or in person, they're

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the all in one commerce to run, start

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and grow your business. We've been spending a

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lot of time on Shopify over the

36:55

last couple of days, aren't we, Revy? Yeah, I've been

36:57

setting up Shopify because, you know, we want

36:59

to sell our books digitally and we also

37:01

want to sell it online. And Shopify's

37:04

got the whole platform now that

37:06

we can, you know, integrate with our

37:08

website and you can even just do

37:10

it on an app. You can even

37:12

do all those social media things like

37:14

TikTok and all the modern stuff like

37:16

Instagram. Because it feels like at the

37:18

moment, you know, everyone's got a little side hustle going

37:20

on, you know, maybe you're selling games at your local

37:22

car boot or in the retro markets or anything like

37:24

that. I mean, the good thing about Shopify is, you

37:26

know, we all know that when we go

37:29

to these events, nobody carries cash. If you haven't got

37:31

a card reader or any way to do that, you're going to miss out on a

37:33

load of sales. So if you're selling anything,

37:35

they're really good because to give you those, you can

37:37

get those shop ready point of sale systems, you can

37:39

do them in person, take card payments on them. And

37:41

like you said, Revy, you know, when you're selling online,

37:44

they've got an incredible e-commerce platform, even

37:46

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37:48

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37:50

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37:54

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37:56

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37:58

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38:01

involved. It's very easy and you

38:03

know that you can select your items. It

38:05

has a pre-made way

38:08

of doing it, but also it has 24 hour

38:10

support as well, which is really

38:13

important when you're kind of selling something.

38:15

Yeah, and we've got a really extensive course

38:17

library as well. Award-winning help is available. And

38:20

really Shopify is there to support your success

38:22

every step of the way. So if you

38:24

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38:26

it's time to get serious about selling and

38:28

get Shopify today. Now we'd love to give

38:30

you a trial, and this is great

38:32

value as well. If you

38:34

head to this link right now,

38:36

obviously using these links, supporting our

38:38

sponsors, helps out the podcast massively,

38:41

head to shopify.co.uk slash retro

38:43

hour, or lowercase or one

38:45

word, shopify.co.uk slash retro hour.

38:48

And I'll put that in this week's show notes as well.

38:50

And get ready to take your business to the next level

38:53

today and you will get a one

38:55

pound a month trial period by

38:57

using that link. So you can check it

38:59

out for just a quid a month. shopify.co.uk

39:01

slash retro hour. And a massive thank you

39:03

to our friends at Shopify for their continued

39:05

support of our show. And get ready

39:07

to hear a lot of this. All

39:11

right then, well, thank you for checking out the news this

39:13

week. We'll bring you to speed on what's been happening again

39:15

next Friday. And get ready for

39:17

the main event. We're going to be

39:19

joined by Amiga legend, Randall Jessup. He's

39:22

next on the Retro Hour podcast. Father's

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or more. That's

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10% off with code PODCAST. You're

41:02

listening to The Retro Hour Podcast,

41:04

and we're here today with Randall

41:06

Jessup. And Randall, you

41:09

know, he was the OS Group

41:11

Lead for Commodore Amiga and Senior

41:13

Software Engineer. So we're going to

41:16

get some amazing stories about Amiga,

41:18

but also Playnet as well. And

41:20

Scala, what a legendary company Scala

41:23

was. Randall's now

41:25

working as a Senior Staff Software

41:27

Engineer at Mozilla as well. So we'll

41:29

have a bit of a Firefox talk at the

41:31

end. But first, how are you doing, Randall?

41:34

OK, how are you? Oh, great.

41:36

It's excellent to have you here. And

41:39

we have a question that we always

41:41

ask our guests, like, what

41:43

was your first computer memory that

41:45

you ever had, or first time

41:47

you ever played on

41:49

a computer and had a bit of a

41:51

gaming experience? OK. So my first

41:54

time I used a

41:57

computer that I remember.

42:00

was I had, so this

42:02

is back in the 1970s in New York City, and

42:06

it was probably

42:08

either at my

42:11

school when I was in seventh grade at collegiate,

42:15

where we had a time-sharing

42:17

system terminal into

42:19

something, or it

42:21

was at another private school that my

42:23

uncle worked at, Dalton,

42:27

which had a larger computer

42:29

center with a dozen

42:31

or more thermal paper

42:34

terminals where you could log in, and I remember

42:36

playing games like the old

42:39

Star Trek thing and so forth, bring

42:42

out on rolls of curling paper.

42:45

So that's where it started. And it

42:47

must have been quite a slow game

42:49

experience, but quite fun. Yeah,

42:51

very turn-based back then, and for

42:53

quite a while afterwards. Would you

42:55

remember when you first got a

42:57

home system? So the first personal

43:00

system I had, I had lots of access

43:02

to, in high school, I had lots of

43:04

access to a PDP-8E

43:08

with teletype terminals, where

43:11

you had to toggle the boot sequence into the

43:13

front panel to boot it. Lots

43:15

of fun. 12K in memory. And

43:17

that was my first programming experience, but

43:19

my first personal system I owned

43:22

was in college when I

43:25

bought a TRS-80 Model 1

43:28

from a friend of mine for about

43:30

$1,000 in 1982, one,

43:34

something like that, I don't know what it was, which

43:36

I still have. It's in my basement. I have not

43:38

pulled that one out to try to fix it yet.

43:41

But did you think of the TRS-80s?

43:43

And that was often nicknamed the Trash

43:45

80 by common good friends. Yeah, I

43:48

thought it was great. I did all

43:50

sorts of stuff on it. Played lots

43:52

of games, wrote software to analyze stock

43:55

options, used it to

43:57

log into the mainframe.

44:00

with an acoustic coupled modem, 300 baud,

44:04

had two drives on it,

44:06

including a flippy drive for

44:08

extra storage. Nice.

44:11

So, you mentioned then that you went to

44:13

college. So, you studied computer science. What made

44:15

you want to go and study that then?

44:17

And what was it course like at the

44:19

time? Well, so I went to RPI, Rensselaer

44:22

Polytechnic Institute. And yeah,

44:24

I studied computer science there. I mean, I

44:26

got very interested in computers back when I

44:29

was in high school. I was

44:31

working on the PDP aid.

44:33

I was reading

44:35

Byte magazine, all that sort of stuff.

44:38

And so, science

44:40

in general interests me, but computer science

44:42

was definitely my main interest.

44:46

That was one of the first big

44:48

surge of computer science majors.

44:51

It was still part of the math department there, but

44:54

I was in the RPI chapter

44:56

of the ACM working

45:01

on chess

45:03

programs and designing

45:06

chess programs in my spare time, helping

45:10

get some ancient hardware up that

45:12

had been donated to the ACM,

45:15

working on the mainframe, writing

45:17

an implementation of the

45:20

language forth for the IBM 370, which

45:22

didn't exist

45:25

at the time, all sorts of stuff. Well,

45:28

were you using BBS as then as

45:30

well? And what was your kind of

45:32

online world? There were no real BBSs

45:34

then that I know of. They

45:37

came along not that long thereafter, but

45:40

I was never really into the

45:43

BBS scene at all. I logged

45:45

into one or two here or there.

45:47

Well, I was wondering then how you

45:49

went and got involved with Planet as

45:51

well. Okay, so Planet

45:54

was started by a few people.

46:00

And almost a majority of

46:03

the people who were hired by PlayNet, at

46:05

least for the microcomputer side,

46:08

were RPI grad

46:11

students and students. And

46:13

that's what I was. I

46:15

got hired by them when

46:17

I was still about a year short of my degree.

46:20

And they were in an incubator center

46:22

at RPI, some cheap

46:25

space that they, you know, to incubate

46:27

companies. And they also had

46:29

a bunch of, some of the mini computer side

46:31

of people were hired, former,

46:34

I don't know, spare

46:36

univac people, somewhat older than

46:38

the rest of us working on the microcomputers,

46:41

so on the C64s. And

46:43

what was PlayNet then, so people are not familiar

46:45

with it? So, PlayNet was

46:47

one of the early

46:49

online services, Dialup, which

46:53

was designed, you know, from

46:55

the name, obviously, around games, but

46:58

it was also designed around chat

47:00

rooms and message boards

47:03

and shopping and all

47:06

those sorts of things. It was for the C64, and you

47:08

had to get a bunch of disks, most

47:12

of which held the other games, but, you know, each different module,

47:15

they would load, whether chat or

47:17

the messaging or whatever. And

47:20

you dial into a local

47:22

dial-up number, tell another TimeNet,

47:25

and get connected to us at 300 Baud, and

47:28

you could stare in rooms and chat with people,

47:30

which was by far one of the most popular

47:33

things, or you could play

47:35

games while still chatting with people. We

47:37

had a, we built

47:40

an entire finite state machine language that

47:42

ran underneath everything, while the

47:44

games typically ran in BASIC or Assembler. And

47:47

so, you know, it was pretty polished. You

47:50

know, we did all sorts of tricks to,

47:52

like, be able to switch screen modes

47:54

on the fly with vertical,

47:56

with horizontal screen

47:58

interrupts and so forth. And

48:02

so it was very nice. And we

48:05

charged like by the hour for

48:07

it, because that's how you charged,

48:10

like several bucks an hour. And

48:12

we were trying

48:15

to find the best and we're trying to get included

48:17

in, when

48:21

Comlder would sell modems, we're

48:24

trying to get included in the box there. And

48:27

after a bunch of negotiations, we were

48:30

running short on money. We

48:32

were competing with a control video

48:34

corporation, who had an online service. It

48:36

was nowhere near as nice as ours. And

48:39

the understanding is that Comlder

48:41

basically told them, we like

48:44

your management team, but we like their

48:46

software. And they told us no

48:48

deal. And we had

48:50

no money. So the other CVC came to us

48:52

and said, we would license your software and we'll

48:54

give you a small cut of the profits and

48:57

some cash. We had very little choice but

49:00

to say yes. And we

49:02

got some cash and some runway. And

49:05

eventually like a year-ish or

49:07

so later, we

49:09

folded because we had fully run out of cash.

49:12

It was the company sort of semi existed

49:14

after that to collect royalties, so the CVC

49:16

eventually got out of them. A

49:20

few years later, a couple of

49:22

years later, CVC ported

49:25

our software to the

49:27

IBM PC and renamed it America

49:29

Online. Yeah, I

49:31

was gonna say, it

49:34

must have been quite difficult like maintaining

49:36

an online system back then just with

49:38

the amount of numbers of people and

49:41

also all that functionality you had

49:43

going on there. How long did

49:45

it take to develop? And what was it like the

49:48

actual running of PlayNet? So it

49:50

was developed in a, from

49:53

the time we started, it was started

49:55

to the time it launched was, you

49:58

know, like a year and a half. half-ish, okay?

50:03

The mainframe side was running

50:05

on Stratis mini-computers, which were

50:07

fault-tolerant machines. I could literally pull

50:09

one of the CPU cards while I was running and it

50:12

would say, please put it back. It was

50:16

a lot of long nights eating

50:18

hot dogs in the break room because when

50:20

we were on half salary and had no

50:22

other choice, we shouldn't have been

50:25

going out for lunch. I'm still in contact

50:27

with a number of the people who worked there. I

50:29

was wondering, did you ever see the

50:31

TV series halt and catch fire? Apparently

50:34

the second season of that was loosely

50:36

based on playing it. I wonder how

50:38

accurate that was. I watched a little

50:40

bit of it. I've been meaning to

50:42

watch the whole thing because it would

50:45

be very interesting to see how horribly

50:48

wrong it is. I wouldn't

50:51

be surprised if they've caught

50:54

some of the overall gist

50:57

of how it all went. Tell

51:00

us about playing it, moving on to Quantum Link

51:02

then. How did that development happen? When

51:05

CBC licensed our software, we

51:07

provided some support to them to help them. I

51:09

went down there a few times and

51:12

they did some minor changes like

51:16

how the menu system works slightly.

51:18

They relabeled it as Quantum

51:20

Link. Quantum Link

51:23

basically is PlayNet. The

51:25

differences between Quantum Link

51:28

and PlayNet are small, other

51:30

than they did add some

51:32

more games and so forth on top of

51:36

what we'd already had. At least to

51:38

start with. They made a few more

51:40

changes along the way while it was

51:43

still Quantum Link.

51:48

I believe they ran Bix for

51:50

Byte as well, which was not

51:52

based on C64s and so on. I

51:56

was wondering as well, you mentioned that it then

51:58

went into AOL. kind

52:02

of a modified version of it. What did

52:04

you think of this idea of having a

52:07

closed-off internet? Well,

52:10

I mean, the internet

52:12

wasn't the thing it is today

52:14

back then. When they created AOL, this

52:17

was long before the first web browser existed.

52:19

I'd had some internet access

52:22

when I

52:26

was at General Electric working on

52:28

processor design after Planet. But

52:30

yeah, so when it was

52:35

first created, all the

52:37

online systems pretty much

52:39

were monolithic. So

52:42

that wasn't a surprise back then. One

52:45

thing that did surprise me about AOL was in about 2005 when AOL was

52:48

mostly being accessed over

52:54

the internet, though some people probably still did

52:56

dial up. After someone posted

52:58

that they were trying to figure out

53:00

how the AOL protocols worked on

53:03

Slashdot, I went and they

53:05

were confused by why certain values

53:08

and the login messages would

53:10

sort of increase and then reset and

53:12

so forth. And I looked at it

53:14

and said, oh yeah, that's the error

53:16

correcting protocol I wrote for handling 300

53:18

baud modems with

53:20

sliding windows and so

53:22

forth for doing –

53:24

because 300 baud modems weren't error corrected

53:26

and so you had to deal with

53:29

lost – modified bits and so

53:31

forth. I'd written all that

53:34

for Playnet and they were still using

53:36

it to do the login protocol, just

53:38

the login protocol I believe, for AOL

53:40

in 2005, but they were

53:43

using it over TCP, over an

53:45

error corrected channel. So

53:48

they had running an error correction over an error correction

53:50

channel. It was kind of hilarious.

53:53

Must have been good code to last that long,

53:55

though. Yeah. I'm shocked

53:57

they were still using it. It was like… Okay,

54:00

it's like one of the things that works, so why change

54:02

it? So

54:05

how did working at General Electric help

54:08

build your hardware and chip knowledge, then?

54:10

That's quite an interesting study. But

54:12

some of my friends who worked

54:15

at Planet with

54:17

me ended up at General Electric. There

54:20

were a lot of people from

54:22

RPI who worked at

54:24

General Electric via,

54:26

quote unquote, body shops who would,

54:29

we weren't direct employees at

54:31

General Electric, we were contractors

54:33

employed through a consulting

54:35

firm. And so I ended up on

54:38

a risk processor design team, you

54:40

know, doing cutting edge 40 megahertz

54:43

risk processors and like 86, 87.

54:47

Yeah, and you were like

54:49

also working with Vax

54:51

machines as well. Yeah, I

54:53

had a son one on my desk and there was a big Vax that

54:55

I would log into at GE. So

55:04

when did you kind of hear

55:06

about Commodore and like the

55:08

Amiga and how did you get

55:10

involved with those? So I had heard

55:13

about the Amiga in the press

55:15

and when I was still

55:17

at Planet

55:20

and I was down visiting CVC

55:23

to give them some support, one

55:25

of the programmers there showed me

55:27

a preliminary set

55:29

of manuals for programming the Amiga, which

55:32

was going to be introduced later that

55:34

year. This was like

55:36

early 85 and I carefully

55:39

went over to the copy machine

55:41

and copied the entirety of

55:43

the intuition manual and so forth to

55:46

take home with me. You know, shortly

55:48

after it was introduced in 85, I bought an Amiga 1000

55:50

and the rest is

55:56

history. So did you meet

55:58

Jay Miner? I

56:01

met Jay later on. I only met

56:04

him once that I remember and

56:06

that was at the 1990 DevCon in

56:10

Paris. He was there.

56:12

That was the first DevCon after we introduced

56:15

the 3000, I believe. And

56:18

I'm already hanging around the hotel bar

56:20

with him chatting along with

56:22

some other people while we watched the Berlin Wall

56:25

get torn down. Oh, wow. So

56:27

when you first got to Commodore then, what were

56:29

you initially working on? So after

56:33

GE, I did a small stint where

56:35

I ported a game

56:37

for Epyx to the Amiga from

56:39

the Mac. But in the

56:42

process, I was doing a lot of work on the

56:44

Amiga and talking a lot on Bix and

56:46

so forth. And both

56:49

I and Bryce Nesbitt got hired about the

56:51

same time into Commodore in

56:53

early 88. So

56:56

when I first started there, I was working

56:58

on hard disk

57:00

partitioning and other stuff like that,

57:02

working on drivers for the A2091,

57:05

various stuff. The

57:08

Amiga OS really made the Amiga shine and

57:10

I was wondering what the key points were

57:13

in your memory. Oh,

57:15

there's so many. I mean,

57:17

the OS, I mean, I love

57:19

the OS because it was multitasking. When

57:22

I first got it, I

57:24

was looking to do fancy networking

57:26

on the Amiga. I wanted to

57:28

do... I ported Force to the

57:31

Amiga. I was playing around with

57:33

NetHack. Of course, I love games.

57:36

But it was like so

57:38

head and shoulders above everything

57:40

else, technically. And

57:44

now that was what I loved about it. Working

57:46

at Commodore was quite a trip

57:48

and interesting. And the

57:51

friendships and such we made there

57:53

are very strong and still

57:56

strong today. There's so many events

57:58

there. It's hard to... give

58:00

a list. Well how

58:03

did the exact design and an

58:05

approach to design allow multitasking and

58:07

did you feel it was like

58:09

something that hadn't been done on

58:11

a home system before and you

58:14

were on the edge of something

58:16

revolutionary there? It was

58:18

something that really had not been done before in a lot

58:21

in very many systems at all.

58:23

The decisions to make things to

58:26

not have hard limits on things to

58:29

use what effectively was what we called now

58:31

a microkernel you know

58:33

made huge differences and having

58:35

the the flexibility

58:37

that gave you to program

58:40

stuff was you know

58:43

impressive. A lot

58:46

of systems would have hard limits on all sorts of things

58:48

you could only do stuff that was

58:51

anticipated by the operating system etc.

58:54

The microkernel with devices and drivers

58:56

and file systems and everything else

58:59

being basically sort of

59:01

arbitrary objects made things

59:04

exceedingly flexible. Even

59:06

the way we use doubly linked lists

59:09

for everything so that you were encouraged

59:11

not to put in arrays that would

59:13

then you know you'd end up overflowing

59:15

and adding

59:18

limitations. So

59:21

I know when the Amiga OS

59:23

2 was released it was you

59:25

know really different to version 1.3

59:28

and you know I know a lot of it

59:30

kind of got completely rewritten at that stage and

59:32

modernized. What memories have you got of that time

59:35

then and updating the Amiga OS 2 version 2?

59:38

One of the big things that happened so

59:41

the OS 2 was a was a big

59:43

update and I'll

59:45

give you one little story about how a part of

59:47

it happened. We'd have meetings in

59:50

the software group at

59:53

the time run by Andy Finkel about

59:55

every like two weeks and

59:57

just sort of go around the table say we've been working on

1:00:00

it. and et cetera. And so it

1:00:02

came around to me at one point when we were

1:00:04

heading towards OS2. And

1:00:08

I said, well, I did this

1:00:10

stuff with the two toolbox and so

1:00:12

on. Oh, and yes, I ported the

1:00:14

entire DOS library to C and assembler

1:00:16

from BCPL. And

1:00:19

it's up and booting. There

1:00:22

was still some more work to do. And

1:00:26

no one had asked me to do this. I just did it.

1:00:30

It's just like I was really annoyed

1:00:33

at the DOS library because I'd written

1:00:36

a shell before I

1:00:38

joined Commodore, a

1:00:40

Unix seashell type shell. And

1:00:43

the fact that there was all these stupid

1:00:45

things due to BCPL in there made

1:00:48

it really painful. So I said, could

1:00:51

I possibly just remove this? And I started

1:00:53

trying. Like, oh, maybe I can. And

1:00:57

so I ripped out every piece

1:00:59

of BCPL in the core OS.

1:01:02

I never once ran the BCPL compiler

1:01:05

and got that all up and working

1:01:07

for 2.0 and

1:01:09

still compatible with all the old

1:01:12

BCPL programs. Because all the

1:01:14

old disks had all these command

1:01:16

line utilities were all written in BCPL. And

1:01:19

so I had to maintain all the APIs

1:01:21

they needed with a funny upside down stack

1:01:24

and everything. And I managed to

1:01:26

make all that work. That's pretty

1:01:28

incredible thinking about that. Yeah, you

1:01:30

maintain that compatibility. And

1:01:32

so to remember at the time, my first Amiga was

1:01:34

a 500 plus. And

1:01:37

that shipped with a Kickstarter and Webbench 2.0. And

1:01:41

here in the UK, I don't know how much you know about this

1:01:43

story. But I think basically they ran out of Amiga 500s and

1:01:46

just kind of put Amiga 500 plus in the box. So

1:01:49

you didn't really know what you got until you

1:01:51

opened the box at home. I had not heard

1:01:53

that. Yeah, so it was you had no idea

1:01:55

which machine you're going to get. But I actually

1:01:57

loved Workbench 2.0, although I know that it did

1:01:59

break. some compatibility with games.

1:02:02

I mean, was there, was it much of

1:02:04

a backlash about that then? Do you remember

1:02:06

much about the compatibility? Oh, so I

1:02:09

was on the forefront of some pieces of that,

1:02:11

of that issue. So there's

1:02:14

one story of when

1:02:17

we were releasing 2.0 and

1:02:19

then 2.04, that was a

1:02:21

serious crunch mode time to try

1:02:24

to get that out the door. And one

1:02:26

of the big issues was compatibility. And

1:02:30

so we were literally working around the

1:02:32

clock seven days a week, literally

1:02:34

sleeping in a back room

1:02:37

on some cots with, in

1:02:40

the middle of a whole bunch of old arcade machines. I

1:02:42

have no idea why they were there. I

1:02:45

think they were part of the CDTV team had

1:02:47

them or not, I don't know, to try to

1:02:49

get it to the point where we could ship

1:02:51

it. And this is

1:02:53

where the infamous Hemi Rubin, it's

1:02:56

darkest before the Dawn pep talk that's

1:02:59

recounted on the deathbed vigil came into

1:03:01

play. I won't repeat the whole thing

1:03:03

right now. But so,

1:03:06

yeah, and I remember one time I was debugging

1:03:09

something with an in circuit emulator for the 68,000, if

1:03:11

I remember correctly.

1:03:13

And I figured out why an entire

1:03:16

company's worth of games were not working.

1:03:18

And that's because they made an assumption

1:03:20

that when you called open device, that

1:03:22

the value that was in,

1:03:24

I think, a one, one of the parameters to

1:03:27

it, when you made the call, when

1:03:29

the when open device returned, even though the

1:03:32

return value was in was in D zero,

1:03:34

I believe, that the value

1:03:36

you'd put in a one would now

1:03:39

be in a zero. Right. And

1:03:41

it just so happened the case that was

1:03:43

before but a zero was a

1:03:45

scratch version storage could have been anything. And

1:03:48

the new code randomly did

1:03:50

not do that. So we

1:03:52

had to put in a hack to make sure that

1:03:54

a one was copied to zero. And

1:03:57

you know, doesn't game started working. So

1:04:00

Stuff like that. Almost all

1:04:02

the cases of incompatibility were

1:04:04

the fact that the games

1:04:06

programmers ignored the rules. And

1:04:08

the guidelines, yeah. Yeah. Another

1:04:11

thing you saw often, even

1:04:14

including later, was games

1:04:16

programmers trying to play games with the

1:04:19

track disk and dealing

1:04:21

with the floppy drives directly instead of

1:04:23

going through the OS. And

1:04:26

you'd change floppy drives to another

1:04:28

compatible floppy drive that met all

1:04:30

the specs of common respects and

1:04:33

all the specs in our documentation. And

1:04:35

games would break because there was some

1:04:37

slight difference in track

1:04:40

to track times or rotational

1:04:42

speed variants or whatever. I

1:04:46

was the one who was responsible for rewriting

1:04:48

the entire track disk device to make it

1:04:50

much more stable, faster,

1:04:53

resilient against errors, etc. And

1:04:55

I remember reading through someone wrote a book

1:04:57

on how to use

1:05:00

the Amiga floppy. Someone

1:05:03

in Europe targeted it like

1:05:05

game programmers, whatever. And I went

1:05:07

through it and I put post-it notes

1:05:09

everywhere they did something wrong in the

1:05:12

book. And

1:05:14

it looked like it was a

1:05:16

forest of post-it notes. I

1:05:18

think I've got that on my shelf. Amiga disk drives inside and

1:05:21

out. I think that's a weird one. Yes, I think it. Yes,

1:05:23

in fact, it's wrong. Very, very

1:05:25

wrong. Well, you

1:05:27

know, the structure of the OS as

1:05:29

well with those device drivers, it really

1:05:31

allows it to kind of

1:05:34

expand. And even today, people are doing

1:05:36

new ones and adding to the OS.

1:05:39

Do you think if it didn't have that, would

1:05:41

it have been, you know, as

1:05:43

successful or as well

1:05:45

used as it is nowadays?

1:05:47

Probably not. I mean, to

1:05:50

a certain extent, I mean, it would allow

1:05:53

this success was around the

1:05:55

whole thing. I mean, that's

1:05:58

one of the things that, you know, those. those

1:06:00

sort of flexibilities and the things you

1:06:02

could add to it and improve it

1:06:04

with are part of why it

1:06:06

was so popular and remained popular. They're

1:06:09

not all of that. I mean, it probably

1:06:11

would have been the same way. I

1:06:13

mean, the C64 was not expandable in the

1:06:15

same way, but it's still popular. But

1:06:18

the Amiga was special because of that. And

1:06:20

I think that had a

1:06:22

big play into why everyone thought it was

1:06:24

special and still remembers it as special. Well,

1:06:27

I know in 1990, Commodore released something or started working

1:06:29

on something. I've got Phil,

1:06:31

it was released in 1991. There

1:06:34

was a little bit left of centre and that was the

1:06:37

Commodore CDTV, which was, you know, people

1:06:39

don't remember that was a, it was

1:06:41

a market that I remember Phillips were

1:06:43

going for as well. Phil's CDI was the

1:06:45

competitor. It was a home

1:06:48

multimedia box, which it seemed like I remember

1:06:50

all the magazines at the time thinking this

1:06:52

is going to be like an emerging market

1:06:54

and everyone's going to have one at one

1:06:56

stage, which obviously never happened. But what memories

1:06:58

you've got of CDTV? I heard you worked

1:07:00

on that platform as well. So CDTV was

1:07:02

handled by sort of a separate and almost

1:07:04

entirely separate Tiger team run by Don Galbraith

1:07:07

and a few others. So I didn't

1:07:09

have much contact with

1:07:11

the CDTV people for the original

1:07:13

version. I mean,

1:07:15

it was happening in there, but they had their own

1:07:17

sort of separate area and

1:07:19

so forth. For the CDTV

1:07:21

CR that came back

1:07:24

more into main engineering. Can you

1:07:26

explain what that is for people that might not be familiar with it? So

1:07:29

the CDTV CR was CDTV

1:07:31

cost-reduced. Okay. And

1:07:34

this was a redesign of the

1:07:36

original CDTV, which was expensive to

1:07:38

produce. To cost-reduce it, make

1:07:41

more use of custom chips that

1:07:44

we, you know, because we had the ability to

1:07:46

quickly do gate arrays and so forth with

1:07:49

the MOS technologies. You

1:07:51

know, get it all into one simple

1:07:54

board and also add

1:07:56

some additional capabilities and put all the

1:07:58

video on it on a on

1:08:00

a daughter board so that you could have, you

1:08:02

know, PAL or NTSC daughter boards and have all

1:08:04

the rest of it be the same. It

1:08:07

had a, the CD

1:08:09

drive didn't require a Caddy, it was just an

1:08:11

open one. And instead of,

1:08:14

and we saved money by controlling

1:08:16

the CD drive directly instead of

1:08:18

having a bunch of external stuff.

1:08:21

And it also had memory

1:08:23

expansion slot built in. You

1:08:26

could also put ID hard drive

1:08:28

interface on it, which was

1:08:31

the idea hard drive, ID hard

1:08:33

drive interface was shared with the, what's

1:08:36

now called the A600, which at the time was

1:08:38

called the A300. Yes. And

1:08:41

I'd written the ID driver

1:08:44

for the A300. And so

1:08:46

I was working

1:08:48

on the ID drivers for

1:08:50

the CDTVCR. My understanding is we had,

1:08:52

CDTVCR design was done, everything was set.

1:08:56

We were ready to go into production, but because

1:08:58

they had a whole bunch of CDTVs in the warehouse, they

1:09:00

did not go into production. So.

1:09:03

Cause there are a few out there aren't there? I've seen a few prototypes

1:09:06

like, people have gotten their collections. There are a

1:09:08

few out there, you know, there's definitely, there were

1:09:10

probably, you know, 50,

1:09:13

maybe a hundred built, I don't know.

1:09:16

And there were obviously prototypes, and

1:09:19

there were obviously prototypes out around. And there

1:09:22

were a few out there that are still

1:09:24

working. I still have mine,

1:09:26

which never had a case in the first place, just

1:09:29

never had a top case, but it has the EL

1:09:31

front display. I'm trying to get

1:09:33

it working again, but it

1:09:36

was a fairly nice design. It was, you

1:09:38

know, still running a 68000, you

1:09:41

know, very, very compatible with the

1:09:43

CDTV, but had some additional

1:09:46

capabilities. Cause I

1:09:48

had a, a 570 CD

1:09:50

ROM drive for my Amiga 500, which obviously for

1:09:53

people I'm not familiar with, that basically was an

1:09:55

add on that you put on the side of

1:09:57

the Amiga 500, that transformed it into a CDTV.

1:10:00

And for me, that really came into its

1:10:02

own when they started releasing public domain collections

1:10:04

on CD-ROM. Yeah, that was something. Yeah,

1:10:07

that was like game changer for me. It was better

1:10:09

than having 20 pounds

1:10:12

of floppy disks. Yeah, 100%. But

1:10:15

obviously, I mean, CDTV initially was, they're

1:10:17

talking about it being for encyclopedias and

1:10:19

atlases and things. Microsoft did later on

1:10:21

with Encarture and had success, but I

1:10:23

always thought maybe CDTV was just a couple

1:10:25

of years too early. What did you think of the

1:10:27

concept and the idea of it? And why did you

1:10:29

think it failed? I think it was,

1:10:31

I agree it was a bit too early. The

1:10:36

concept was good, having CD storage. You'll

1:10:40

note that soon thereafter, PCs

1:10:43

started getting CD drives, started

1:10:46

getting, we had CD-based game machines,

1:10:48

including the CD32, some of the

1:10:51

Sega stuff, et cetera, that

1:10:54

rapidly became a popular way to do

1:10:56

it because it could be inexpensively produced

1:10:59

with existing CD tool sets. So

1:11:04

yeah, I mean, it was just

1:11:06

a little early with

1:11:10

certain things that happened a little differently, timing

1:11:12

a little different, whatever, who knows? I

1:11:15

mean, the whole encyclopedia thing,

1:11:17

yeah, that ended up being useful, but

1:11:19

it was not a prime

1:11:21

driver for people to get them in their

1:11:23

house. Games turned

1:11:25

out to be more effective. Yeah,

1:11:28

and the Amiga had like two

1:11:30

kind of lines, essentially. You had

1:11:32

the professional line with the big

1:11:34

box Amigas and higher demands for

1:11:36

those. And then you had the

1:11:38

gaming line. How important was stuff

1:11:40

like SCSI? I know

1:11:42

the Amiga 3000 had it, and

1:11:46

it also had a flicker

1:11:48

fixer built in and stuff. I

1:11:51

mean, those sorts of

1:11:53

things were really important to the professional

1:11:56

market, getting the better video.

1:12:00

getting the access

1:12:02

to all the SCSI devices, all the large

1:12:05

hard drives, having

1:12:07

high transfer rates, you

1:12:10

could get access to tape drives

1:12:12

and DAT drives and

1:12:14

all these other SCSI peripherals

1:12:17

was incredibly important at the

1:12:19

time. At the time,

1:12:21

your choices were like some ancient

1:12:24

AT hard disks or

1:12:26

SCSI drives. SCSI drives were by far preferred, all the

1:12:29

Macs were SCSI, all the Suns were

1:12:31

SCSI, everyone was SCSI. Later on,

1:12:33

and we started

1:12:35

using this with the A300, A600,

1:12:38

A1200, et cetera, IDE

1:12:41

drives showed up, which

1:12:43

had much of the capabilities in terms

1:12:45

of command sets and so forth of

1:12:47

SCSI, but a

1:12:49

much simpler physical interface, not

1:12:52

as fast and often were set up, were

1:12:54

not set up to use DMA though you could,

1:12:57

but the IDE interfaces we had were

1:12:59

just directly used, you

1:13:02

just read from the memory allocation repeatedly.

1:13:04

So they used a lot more CPU

1:13:06

time than

1:13:08

the SCSI drives we had, but

1:13:10

they were a lot cheaper to add onto

1:13:13

a motherboard. Were you

1:13:15

guys kind of amazed at

1:13:17

seeing what people were doing with Amiga,

1:13:19

like with the video toaster? Oh yeah,

1:13:22

I mean video toaster was

1:13:24

awesome. I mean,

1:13:26

it was like, yes, we had pioneered

1:13:29

the idea of desktop video, but

1:13:31

video toaster took that pioneering

1:13:33

and brought it to culmination,

1:13:36

a peak. Genlocks

1:13:39

and so forth were cool

1:13:41

and useful and so forth, but video

1:13:43

toaster gave you a full video

1:13:46

editing suite that

1:13:49

would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars

1:13:51

before and you'd need like

1:13:53

a quantel or whatever and you

1:13:55

could have that all on your desktop for a few

1:13:58

thousand dollars. huge

1:14:00

game changer for all

1:14:02

sorts of stuff. And that's not even

1:14:04

including things like Lightwave and so on

1:14:07

for doing 3D rendering using Babylon 5

1:14:09

and everything else. Yeah,

1:14:11

and those were really impressive when I learned that

1:14:13

the Amiga was doing the introduction to Babylon

1:14:15

5. I was like, really? Wow, the machine I've

1:14:18

got at home is capable of doing that

1:14:20

kind of thing, which was pretty

1:14:22

jaw-dropping. And just kind of going back to the IDE

1:14:24

interface that you mentioned there, because

1:14:26

I remember there's a bit of a backlash at the time about the

1:14:29

the top-end Amiga 4000 not having SCSI and having

1:14:31

IDE on board as well. But I think it

1:14:33

definitely made sense in the lower end machines like

1:14:36

the Amiga 600 and the 1200. I'm curious, because

1:14:38

you mentioned

1:14:41

about writing the IDE drivers for what was

1:14:43

originally called the Amiga 300, that

1:14:46

then was rebadged as the 600 and replaced the

1:14:48

Amiga 500, which I remember upset a lot

1:14:50

of people at the time, because the Amiga 500

1:14:52

was so loved. What kind of memories have you

1:14:55

got of working on that project then, the

1:14:57

Amiga 300 and that morphing into something else? It

1:15:02

was interesting. The

1:15:04

IDE drives, like I said,

1:15:06

they had lots of the capability of

1:15:08

SCSI and very large overlap in the

1:15:10

command set. They were absolutely a lot

1:15:12

cheaper to include, so they made tons

1:15:15

of sense at the low end. You

1:15:17

waste some CPU time, lose a little

1:15:19

bit of transfer rate, but boy, they

1:15:21

were so much cheaper to include. I

1:15:25

emitted the driver by basically

1:15:29

making an IDE drive look like

1:15:31

a SCSI drive to the system. Basically,

1:15:33

just a compatibility layer that

1:15:36

turned an

1:15:38

IDE drive to all the other

1:15:40

layers of the system, including the partitioning code, for

1:15:42

example. It just looked like

1:15:44

a SCSI drive and responded to SCSI commands.

1:15:46

It sent a SCSI command. I

1:15:49

would translate that to an IDE

1:15:51

command and translate the response. That

1:15:53

worked out really well, very smoothly,

1:15:56

and we got good performance out of it.

1:15:58

The 4000 was an interesting Beast.

1:16:01

It was originally, they didn't

1:16:04

want to do the

1:16:07

3000 plus, which was a higher end machine,

1:16:11

possibly with a DSP. And

1:16:14

they didn't want to do the pizza box A1000 plus

1:16:16

idea that we

1:16:19

had for doing

1:16:21

an inexpensive Sun350 style

1:16:24

pizza box with maybe

1:16:26

a zero to slaughter two on the side and an

1:16:29

O20 or an

1:16:31

O30 and an ID drive

1:16:33

and be inexpensive, but still

1:16:36

a nice machine with double A.

1:16:38

So the new management wanted to do

1:16:42

what they called the A2200 and the A2400 and 3400, which

1:16:48

were also at times referred to as

1:16:50

the A1000 junior and senior. Just

1:16:55

to add to confusion. Oh yeah, I have to add

1:16:57

to confusion. Literally, I've got source code comments and some

1:16:59

of the disk

1:17:02

driver code for the ID stuff that

1:17:05

references the A1000 junior and

1:17:07

senior. And the junior was, I think, the

1:17:09

2200 slash 2400 and the senior was the 3400. Namely

1:17:14

anything junior after the IBM PC junior would

1:17:16

have been a brave decision though. You have

1:17:18

to realize that Lou Agabreck was helping

1:17:21

run the engineering at the time

1:17:23

and he was one of the architects of

1:17:25

the PC junior. So

1:17:28

they wanted to do this and they were focused more on

1:17:30

the lower end and they wanted

1:17:32

to just simply have variations of it

1:17:34

that were slightly higher end like O20

1:17:38

versus O30, etc. The original 4000s

1:17:41

wouldn't have had an O40s. The 3400s would

1:17:43

not have had an O40, if

1:17:49

I remember correctly, maybe not. That's

1:17:52

why, for example, I have a CPU

1:17:54

card here that says 8

1:18:00

in Commodore, let's see, it

1:18:03

says 8, 3200 slash 3400, 68-020

1:18:08

slash O30 Rev1, which

1:18:11

had literally O20s and O30s both on

1:18:13

the card. Wow. This was

1:18:15

for sending out to

1:18:20

third-party developers who were preparing

1:18:22

AA software, and

1:18:24

so they could emulate either an

1:18:27

O20-based or an O30-based machine,

1:18:29

just by changing a jumper. Originally,

1:18:33

these were supposed to be cheaper machines,

1:18:36

etc. They morphed into somewhat

1:18:38

higher-end machines by the time the A4000 came out. I

1:18:43

don't think they ever sold the 2200, 2400 setup. Well,

1:18:47

the stuff of legend that we always used to

1:18:50

hear about was the AAA chipset,

1:18:53

which was a later chipset that

1:18:55

was going to come out. There was a lot

1:18:57

more advance. You

1:18:59

actually, before this call, told us that

1:19:01

you had a AAA chip with you.

1:19:06

In my hand, which you cannot see, I

1:19:09

have a AAA chip, which

1:19:11

might be the only

1:19:13

AAA chip still out

1:19:15

there. It's a Monika 1201RO chip.

1:19:20

I showed it at the Amiga

1:19:22

30th event at the

1:19:25

Computer History Museum, like nine years ago. They

1:19:28

were originally supposed to have AAA done in

1:19:30

something around 1990, or maybe 1991. It

1:19:36

was already underway when I joined Commodore in 1988.

1:19:40

It took a long time. I

1:19:43

don't know why I was not in the chip group. The

1:19:46

AA was

1:19:48

created, we call it AA

1:19:50

now, everyone else

1:19:52

called it AGA, was created as

1:19:54

a stopgap by some of the engineers who

1:19:57

said, trip ways taking too long, it's not

1:19:59

going to be... ready, we need

1:20:01

something. And a couple

1:20:04

of the engineers had a bright idea and

1:20:06

we got AGA,

1:20:08

which was a relatively simple thing for us to do.

1:20:11

If it had shipped in 91, it

1:20:14

might have made

1:20:16

a big difference. It had

1:20:20

hugely improved capabilities over the

1:20:22

original chipset, on

1:20:25

almost every level. Everything

1:20:27

from the graphics, obviously, the

1:20:29

bit blitters, the ability

1:20:31

to support non-planar graphics,

1:20:35

which turned out to be important as you start

1:20:37

getting these big resolutions. Even the floppy

1:20:40

drive interface, which supported even

1:20:42

higher size flopies, the

1:20:45

audio stuff in Mary, which

1:20:47

was greatly improved over

1:20:49

what was in Paula and

1:20:51

designed by the same designer

1:20:54

who did Paula. Yeah,

1:20:56

and it would have even been able to

1:20:58

directly drive CD drives

1:21:03

using Mary. All sorts of things

1:21:06

it could do. But by the

1:21:08

time it actually was semi-functional,

1:21:11

which was late 93

1:21:14

or late 94, when I was

1:21:16

actually working on it, writing test

1:21:19

programs to test

1:21:21

the blitter and so forth, it

1:21:24

was no longer as

1:21:26

game changing as it would have been a

1:21:28

few years earlier. It still would

1:21:30

have been very cool, would have gotten a lot

1:21:33

of interest, would have been competitive, but

1:21:35

it was no longer game changing in the same way

1:21:37

it would have been a couple of years earlier, in

1:21:39

terms of the super high resolution. It still

1:21:42

would have had really

1:21:44

strong graphics acceleration capabilities

1:21:47

compared to things that

1:21:49

existed out there and VGA boards

1:21:51

and so on. There weren't many accelerators out

1:21:54

there. So it's

1:21:57

really unfortunate. I don't know the details

1:21:59

of why it didn't get

1:22:01

done in time. I'm sure a lot of it had to

1:22:04

do with management. It would have been

1:22:06

cool. I'm curious about that moniker chip that

1:22:08

you've got there on your hand as well. So kind of

1:22:10

what state was that in? And I mean,

1:22:12

explain what the chip did and do you

1:22:15

think it could be made to work? What

1:22:17

kind of- So there were two, sorry to

1:22:19

note, there were two AAA

1:22:22

boards that were built and

1:22:24

running in the lab. And

1:22:28

they did run, I

1:22:30

believe they had graphics up and so forth, but

1:22:33

only as very limited test programs. One

1:22:35

of the problems was that that particular

1:22:37

Rev, and they needed to do another

1:22:39

chip Rev, had a problem

1:22:42

where the interrupts didn't work.

1:22:45

She had no interrupts. So

1:22:48

I wrote a whole bunch of test programs that

1:22:51

would test out, do glitter

1:22:53

tests and would

1:22:55

communicate over serial to another machine. And

1:22:58

it did it all without interrupts, which

1:23:00

was fun. It was a sort

1:23:02

of interesting challenge, but they would run.

1:23:04

I mean, there were two running systems

1:23:08

without schematics and all the chips

1:23:10

and the internal design

1:23:12

of the chips and everything else, which no

1:23:14

longer exists, far as I know, you

1:23:17

would never be able to build another board like

1:23:19

that. And the chip

1:23:21

I have, I have no idea if it even worked

1:23:23

in the first place. That's something

1:23:25

I rescued when everything was

1:23:27

getting cleared out. So

1:23:29

now aside of Triple 8, wasn't there also a

1:23:32

even more advanced chip setting?

1:23:34

Hombre. Yeah, that was, apparently

1:23:36

that was going to completely change the architecture. I

1:23:38

mean, what do you remember about that? And what

1:23:40

would that have been like? Hombre was very interesting

1:23:44

and sidestepped a lot of the things that had

1:23:46

tripped up the AAA work, I believe. Hombre

1:23:49

was the baby

1:23:51

of Ed Hepler,

1:23:53

who was one of the people who was

1:23:55

brought in, who knew

1:23:57

a fair bit about chip design and so on.

1:24:00

on, his idea

1:24:02

was to, instead of

1:24:04

having these huge custom chips

1:24:06

with lots of hard-coded logic on them,

1:24:10

his idea was to build something that

1:24:12

was a processor extension

1:24:14

based around a PA risk

1:24:17

core, one of the risk

1:24:19

processors from Heward Packard, and

1:24:21

add a bunch of instructions that

1:24:23

would let the processor do efficient

1:24:26

bit-blitting and other things

1:24:28

like that and do

1:24:30

it. It sort of

1:24:32

foreshadowed the modern system-on-a-chip

1:24:34

setups, wherever all the things

1:24:37

that are incorporated with the CPU onto one

1:24:39

chip. It would

1:24:41

not have necessarily been a single chip in implementation,

1:24:44

but it would have been something close to it.

1:24:47

And we were working with HP on it at

1:24:50

the time. I still have some

1:24:53

documents detailing how Hombre

1:24:55

would work that I showed at

1:24:57

the Amiga 30th stuff in

1:24:59

a fair bit of detail that I'm going

1:25:02

to be sending off to Dave McMurtry to

1:25:04

scan in for the Commodore

1:25:07

Historical Archives. That's a wonderful

1:25:09

Facebook group as well. People are not part of that.

1:25:11

It's absolutely worth showing. Oh yeah.

1:25:13

Dave's great. I have a box of

1:25:15

documents I need to send them. I'm

1:25:18

sorry I didn't save more from when

1:25:20

everything went poof. You

1:25:22

didn't know everyone was going to be interested in it 30 years

1:25:24

down the line. I

1:25:26

was one of a couple of engineers who

1:25:28

helped X-Engineers. After

1:25:31

they had the big auction where they sold off the

1:25:33

Vax and a bunch of other furniture and all the

1:25:35

other things, the company that

1:25:37

was responsible for the auction needed to clear

1:25:39

out the building, which was full of stuff.

1:25:43

And so a couple of us got hired

1:25:45

by the auction company

1:25:48

to help clear it out,

1:25:50

take mounds of stuff down to

1:25:52

dumpsters and so forth. And we

1:25:55

culled over some of the stuff that

1:25:58

we were taking to dumpsters. and kept

1:26:01

it. That's why I've got a Commodore

1:26:03

65. I had stuff from my

1:26:05

office already, but I picked up a whole bunch of

1:26:07

other random items that were just sort of

1:26:09

lying around and no one cared about and it's just going

1:26:12

to go in a dumpster. So

1:26:14

most of the documents I

1:26:17

have were from my own files and so forth,

1:26:20

but there were a million documents I could have

1:26:22

grabbed that I did not. I'm

1:26:25

glad you saved that Commodore 65. I've seen the

1:26:27

prices of those on eBay now. So you made

1:26:29

a wise choice there. I will probably be selling

1:26:31

that one. It's fully functional. Oh wow. I

1:26:34

was just headed up a few days ago. You'll

1:26:36

have a nice vacation with that money after

1:26:39

you've finished it. Well, talking

1:26:41

to kind of companies, you know, that

1:26:43

were doing amazing things with the Amiga,

1:26:46

Scala was one and Scala

1:26:49

had some absolutely amazing

1:26:51

stuff that was going on there and they were

1:26:53

growing so quickly. What

1:26:55

point did you join them? So

1:26:59

I joined Scala a

1:27:01

couple months after Commodore

1:27:04

went bankrupt. A

1:27:07

whole bunch of my friends had already joined Scala,

1:27:09

including Peter Turner and

1:27:11

Jeff Porter and Dave Haney. Yeah,

1:27:13

there was a lot of the

1:27:15

original Amiga team that went

1:27:17

on to Scala straight after and if

1:27:20

I just don't know, Scala was a

1:27:23

piece of kind of presentation software that

1:27:25

had a lot more to it that

1:27:27

would control digital signage,

1:27:29

but also have interactive aspects

1:27:32

as well. Yes. And

1:27:36

Scala was expanding into the

1:27:38

US and over the

1:27:40

previous year had hired Michael Sins

1:27:42

and Peter Turner and

1:27:45

other people. You know, a

1:27:47

bunch of others had gone to 3DO.

1:27:49

I had interviewed at 3DO back in 93.

1:27:52

They made an offer to me and

1:27:54

I turned them down. I basically

1:27:56

said, I don't believe this is

1:27:58

actually. I should be in

1:28:01

the target market for this. And

1:28:03

I don't believe that it's

1:28:05

actually, the price you're gonna be asking for, I don't

1:28:07

believe it's gonna work. So, and

1:28:09

it turned out I was right. But I joined

1:28:11

Scala and I

1:28:14

was also interviewing at DEC, my

1:28:16

first SCSI work. But then I

1:28:18

worked at Scala for about four

1:28:20

years, four and a half years. We

1:28:24

did some incredible stuff with graphics

1:28:28

and sort of a

1:28:30

follow on almost to the desktop video of

1:28:33

the Amiga days. It's

1:28:36

quite crazy because looking at it

1:28:38

on the surface, it looks like

1:28:40

a titling piece of software or

1:28:42

something that would just

1:28:44

be very basic, like kind of

1:28:46

maybe like a PowerPoint. But then

1:28:49

with stuff like the extended scripting

1:28:51

languages, interfaces with

1:28:53

stuff, you

1:28:55

could turn it into a

1:28:57

whole like non-linear video editing

1:28:59

suite. What was it like

1:29:01

when you started to connect

1:29:04

stuff up and get devices

1:29:06

working with Scala, genlocks,

1:29:10

genlocks, all these kinds of things? Yeah,

1:29:12

I mean, some of the stuff you could do with

1:29:15

this scripts there were really

1:29:17

impressive. The

1:29:19

ability to make complex things that

1:29:22

would show off all sorts

1:29:24

of reveals and

1:29:26

fades and all sorts of

1:29:28

other stuff. And as you said, they could be interactive

1:29:30

as well. We were using

1:29:33

it as a front end interaction software

1:29:35

for some satellite video companies, for example.

1:29:38

So were you working with Info Channel

1:29:40

as well? Because just for the listeners,

1:29:42

there were two versions. There was Info

1:29:44

Channel, which was the kind of

1:29:46

high end presentation software

1:29:49

that also communicated on

1:29:51

a network. And

1:29:53

then there was Scala, which was the kind of

1:29:56

software that people could use at home and

1:29:58

do their own thing. Yeah, it was

1:30:00

all one and the same internally for us.

1:30:03

You know, the core of it was all

1:30:05

the same stuff. The info

1:30:07

channel added a bunch of additional capabilities on

1:30:09

top of it, so. Guess stability

1:30:12

was an important thing as well, because

1:30:14

some of these machines, you know, They'd

1:30:16

run for weeks. They'd have them in

1:30:19

a box, you know, running for weeks.

1:30:21

Yeah, yeah, you know, the Amiga experience

1:30:23

was a good thing there. Memory leaks

1:30:26

are bad. You

1:30:28

know, making things nice and stable

1:30:30

was critical. We had no memory

1:30:32

protection on the Amiga. So,

1:30:34

you know, we would

1:30:36

set things up so that they would run

1:30:38

for a very, very long time and be

1:30:41

stable. And for

1:30:43

all these sort of like rotating displays

1:30:45

and cable system, you know, putting something

1:30:48

up on a cable system channel, whatever,

1:30:51

they need to just be up. It's

1:30:53

very annoying when you turn on your cable TV and

1:30:56

you switch to the local

1:30:58

information channel and it's

1:31:01

showing a guru meditation error, which I've

1:31:03

seen, or equivalent

1:31:05

for Scala if it's crashed and

1:31:07

sitting at the OS. It's

1:31:11

like when I drove to ATM once

1:31:13

and I was like, oh look, there's

1:31:15

a window NT login screen. Well, I

1:31:17

found it really hard to get Scala

1:31:19

to crash. You know, if it's a

1:31:21

really solid piece of software. We

1:31:23

wrote an entire, we had an entire language

1:31:25

and compiler that was written by Dave Haney

1:31:28

that everything was written in.

1:31:31

And I think it was called Scala

1:31:33

Player, but it was kind of a

1:31:36

way of having the scripts that

1:31:38

would be kind of created in

1:31:40

a like little encrypted

1:31:42

file system. Yeah,

1:31:45

I did all the encrypted, like

1:31:49

put all your files into a single

1:31:51

file, basically a file system within a

1:31:53

file and encrypt the whole thing.

1:31:56

That was something I did. And

1:31:58

that meant you could just. pass on

1:32:01

a Scala kind of presentation that had

1:32:03

already been done. Right, a single file,

1:32:05

just drop it in and play. Yeah,

1:32:08

that's amazing. Yeah, I

1:32:11

was just hiding all the existing

1:32:13

files into a single file, make

1:32:16

it all look like it was

1:32:18

an entire file system worth of stuff to the

1:32:20

rest of Scala software. Well, another

1:32:23

thing that you also worked on was

1:32:25

pretty cool, which was Worldgate as well

1:32:27

with a interactive TV

1:32:29

and the OJ video

1:32:31

phone as well, with that kind of

1:32:33

directly because you had that world

1:32:36

of presentations and displays and wanted

1:32:38

to get into that area. Yes,

1:32:40

so when I was working

1:32:43

at Scala, Joe Augenbron, who was

1:32:45

one of the other hardware engineers

1:32:48

at Commodore, was one of

1:32:50

the founding people working on

1:32:53

working at a company called Worldgate to

1:32:55

do internet access over cable

1:32:57

boxes. And he

1:33:01

called me up, I'd like loaned him

1:33:03

one of my computers at one point

1:33:05

to do some demonstrations of how it

1:33:07

was supposed to look. So

1:33:09

he called me up and said, hey, you

1:33:12

should work for us. And so I ended

1:33:14

up joining and working

1:33:17

on internet browsing via

1:33:19

cable boxes. We

1:33:23

did that for a few years, we went public,

1:33:25

and the company was worth a billion dollars. But

1:33:28

we couldn't get the we were

1:33:30

partnered with the cable companies, but you

1:33:32

couldn't actually force them to deploy the

1:33:34

stuff. They would go through

1:33:36

mergers and they would have other things they

1:33:41

were worried about at the time. And eventually,

1:33:44

they bought our technology so that

1:33:47

they could use it to get out

1:33:50

from under patents that TV Guide had. And

1:33:53

so they paid us off for that. We

1:33:56

basically had to go

1:33:58

from like 300 people down to about 20 people. And

1:34:01

we decided to take that money they'd

1:34:03

given us and totally switch businesses

1:34:06

and go into hardware video phones, which

1:34:08

the head of the company, who

1:34:10

was a previous CEO of

1:34:13

General Instruments, Big Cable

1:34:15

Block Assembly, he'd always wanted to do. And

1:34:17

when we did that in literally

1:34:21

from the time we got our first DSP

1:34:24

prototype board to when we

1:34:27

went to CES with it, six months, less than six

1:34:29

months, and

1:34:32

had a working video call to

1:34:35

CES from Pennsylvania. In

1:34:37

fact, that was the first time we made a call outside of the

1:34:39

building. And

1:34:42

the first words spoken over that call

1:34:44

when we got it up and working

1:34:46

at 2 a.m. to Las

1:34:49

Vegas were, Holy shit, it works.

1:34:53

And so we did the hardware video phones for

1:34:55

several years. We were partnered with Motorola. They

1:34:58

were used in addition for

1:35:01

just general calling also for video

1:35:03

translation systems for

1:35:06

people who are hard of hearing or deaf, where

1:35:08

they could use sign language over video to

1:35:10

an interpreter who would be on the phone

1:35:13

to your doctor or your pizza place or

1:35:15

whatever. So that

1:35:17

was used for that and very,

1:35:19

you know, it was really well done.

1:35:21

Worked well. Eventually,

1:35:25

we got bought by a company that sold

1:35:27

video phones. There were all sorts of

1:35:29

things along the way, but I won't go into them. And

1:35:32

that company, unfortunately, was

1:35:34

a multi-level marketing company and

1:35:38

they fired the original CEO, moved

1:35:40

us into nicer quarters. But they

1:35:43

were in bed with a

1:35:46

TV personality who had

1:35:48

a big TV show at the time called

1:35:50

The Apprentice, i.e. Donald Trump. And

1:35:55

some more video phones actually appear in an

1:35:57

episode of The Apprentice. So

1:36:00

yeah, that was fun. But

1:36:02

eventually that company, which

1:36:04

was kind of, they were kind of scummy, not

1:36:07

surprisingly, they

1:36:11

decided they fired almost everyone except

1:36:13

for the engineering team and

1:36:16

then started trying to sell the engineering

1:36:18

team to various

1:36:20

telecom companies. So all

1:36:22

of us, you know, over the

1:36:24

period of like two or three days, en masse,

1:36:27

quit leaving them with basically

1:36:30

nothing. Wow. I

1:36:33

can imagine as well, like, you

1:36:35

know, your experience with video phone,

1:36:37

kind of putting live real

1:36:40

time video in there helped

1:36:42

you when you joined Mozilla and you

1:36:44

were on the web RTC project

1:36:46

and you were doing, you know, audio

1:36:48

and video on the web. So

1:36:51

the short story is, after

1:36:55

quitting Worldgate, I

1:36:57

was brushing up my

1:37:00

skills, fixing 10 year old

1:37:02

bugs I've reported for to Mozilla.

1:37:04

We'd used the Mozilla browser in Worldgate when

1:37:06

we were doing the internet browsing over TV

1:37:08

and I'd stayed perfectly involved in the project

1:37:11

all the way through. I've been heavily

1:37:13

involved back in 2000, 2003 or so. And

1:37:17

so I was fixing some 10 year old bugs

1:37:19

I'd reported. And one

1:37:21

of the people I used to work with at Cal

1:37:23

On said, hey Randall, how the hell are you? You

1:37:26

need to work for us. We've just the project

1:37:28

for you. And that was WebRTC, audio and video

1:37:30

in the browser over the web. Cause

1:37:33

that combined all the browser knowledge I had

1:37:36

and all the video communications

1:37:39

knowledge I had. And

1:37:41

so I was the lead for the

1:37:43

WebRTC project for Mozilla and heavily involved

1:37:46

in the IETF and

1:37:51

W3C spec side of all this. Design,

1:37:54

data channels, et cetera. And

1:37:57

lead implementer for that. That's

1:38:00

what we're using right now to

1:38:03

chat on this podcast. Well, I

1:38:05

was wondering, Firefox is pretty fast, but

1:38:09

why do you think people should use Firefox? A

1:38:12

couple of reasons. A, you're

1:38:14

right, Firefox is fast. In fact, I've

1:38:16

worked on the performance team there, and

1:38:19

we blogged earlier this year

1:38:21

about speedometer three results.

1:38:24

We've done great on our

1:38:27

performance. We're on a par or

1:38:29

better than Chrome and

1:38:31

Safari on our performance. Our

1:38:34

page load performance, we

1:38:36

often are significantly ahead of Chrome.

1:38:40

So we've been very proud of that. But

1:38:42

the biggest reason to support Mozilla is

1:38:45

that we're not part

1:38:47

of a huge advertising

1:38:49

conglomerate. We

1:38:51

are harvesting all your data to sell,

1:38:54

to put you into boxes, to

1:38:57

sell your information and

1:39:00

ads to all these other people. We

1:39:04

have a mission to all the

1:39:06

people, all the users of the

1:39:08

Internet to make their

1:39:10

life better and to help protect them.

1:39:13

That's what we do. We do

1:39:15

that partially by providing a product

1:39:17

that has those capabilities. And

1:39:20

we take the money we make with that, and a lot

1:39:22

of it comes from Google, that's true, to

1:39:25

push those things, not just there but

1:39:27

elsewhere, and to stop

1:39:30

bad regulations from

1:39:33

getting promoted, bad

1:39:36

specs that will hurt users' privacy

1:39:38

and security. And

1:39:40

we have often, though not always, been successful

1:39:43

with that. When we were doing WebRTC, we

1:39:46

were pushing hard for end-to-end encryption

1:39:48

in WebRTC. And we were slowly

1:39:50

losing that fight because Google

1:39:52

didn't care. They were happy to use

1:39:54

the existing telecom

1:39:56

standards that exposed all the keys to

1:39:59

the people. in between, we were

1:40:02

fully losing that fight. And then there

1:40:04

was a smaller release of information from

1:40:07

Snowden about how people

1:40:10

were snooping on all these

1:40:12

online communications. And so at

1:40:14

the next meeting of the

1:40:16

IETF, we called the

1:40:18

issue and we had

1:40:21

an almost unanimous result

1:40:23

of everyone, they don't vote in

1:40:25

the IETF, they hum, agreeing

1:40:28

to have end-to-end encryption,

1:40:30

which we had pushed for so hard

1:40:33

and fought tooth and nail for, and

1:40:35

everyone finally agreed to it. And

1:40:38

that's why communication like we're doing

1:40:40

now is end-to-end encrypted

1:40:42

and so much safer

1:40:45

for everyone. And I think

1:40:47

that's always important, isn't it? And I think

1:40:49

particularly even more so in the world today.

1:40:52

And there might be people listening who maybe haven't

1:40:54

tried Firefox for a while. I must admit I

1:40:56

did download a new version of it

1:40:58

before we had this call here. And I must admit,

1:41:01

it does look like it's come on a hell of

1:41:03

a long way in the last few

1:41:05

years. I mean, there was a time

1:41:07

when it had gotten a

1:41:09

little more bloated and slow, and we

1:41:11

have worked hard

1:41:13

to make it more memory efficient,

1:41:16

more CPU efficient, faster

1:41:19

at loading pages. When

1:41:21

I was working on our site isolation

1:41:23

project, which

1:41:26

separates out all the response

1:41:28

to all the Spectre issues and

1:41:31

so on, I was

1:41:34

in charge of the performance for that because

1:41:36

it's a danger of reducing our page load

1:41:38

performance. So I was monitoring all our page

1:41:40

load performance for that. And

1:41:43

when this shipped, not

1:41:46

only did we only have like a 5% regression from

1:41:49

– actually, no, sorry, 1.5% regression from site isolation, but at

1:41:51

the time, we were 10% to

1:41:58

12% faster at

1:42:00

loading pages than Chrome was

1:42:03

across 30 some odd

1:42:06

different websites that we tracked

1:42:08

for this. And we've maintained

1:42:11

that as well as improved

1:42:13

our JavaScript performance as part of the SP3 work

1:42:15