hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1354.txt

Episode: 1354
Title: HPR1354: Wayne Green
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1354/hpr1354.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:05:15

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Let's go...
Good morning, good afternoon, David. Good thicknesses to gadgets. There's been a
passing of one of the Titan's of tech, and you may have never heard of them, but he's
heads on your life nonetheless. I remember a couple years back we lost Dennis
Richie and Steve Jobs all the same time period and I don't want to get into the various
and sundry arguments about which one had a more profound effect.
But I found out to see other day and posted some things on social media and my blog,
www.MrGantus.blog at www.MrGantus.com doesn't have a poster, often, but I did post this
and it was Wayne Greed, a well-known publisher of both HM radio magazines more recently.
He was still publishing HM radio magazines, but also publisher of computer magazines years
ago, has passed. He was like 91 years old, lived a full life and there's some notes
that I'll send in and there's a quote at the beginning of one of these articles for somebody
who worked for Wayne. Before there was the PC Revolution, before the days of PC Magazine
and Macworld, before context, there was Wayne Greed. And it really is quite a story of Wayne
Greed. I remember that I first encountered Wayne Greed Magazine way back in the beginnings
of the Revolution. I have mentioned it before, but it's worth noting again that I was very
interested in electronics and in fact, thought that I would pursue a career not only in performing,
but also recording and working in a recording studio when I was in music school. That's
right, I have a music degree and I can great use the rich by making my way in technology as
a profession for all these many years. And back in the 70s when I first went to school,
it was the very start of the computer revolution. And there was lots of talk of digital audio
coming along and digital audio was going to revolutionize the recording studio and the entire music
industry and so you better learn about computers now. And so I picked up a bite magazine,
which has recently come back into existence as a website, was really one of the first
micro computer magazines that was totally dedicated to computers and it was founded by Wayne Greed.
I learned when I was doing some of the research about him that apparently he lost that
in a divorce settlement with his wife who then sold it to the, I think with McGraw-Hills,
whoever the publishing company was that ran by for all those years. But it was actually originally
started by Wayne Greed. He also was the editor at the time of CQ magazine, CQ being a call that you
send out on Morris code when you're asking for somebody to communicate with you and CQ magazine still exists.
In fact, I have electronic subscriptions to a couple of CQ publications, even though I'm not
very radio active nowadays, but I still keep up with that. So way back to the very beginning,
the first computer magazine I remember actually picking up that was totally dedicated to computers
was by magazine and I picked it up and I read it and I didn't understand at least three
of what I was reading and I put it down and I picked it up again later and that time
through I understood a half of what I was reading and gradually I taught myself about computers.
This was a very, very embryonic age of micro computers here and he went on to publish
several magazines which I read on a regular basis, Killabot Hydro Computing, which is a really good one back here.
This is all in the time of the F-100 bus and just a plethora of different types of buses and computers and it was a really
creating time and everybody was trying to get it in depth, whatever this was going to be and trying
on to different things and Killabot was a cool one because it went across the various types of systems.
So you'd see multiple articles in Killabot and one would be for one type of computer system,
one would be for a completely different type of computer system and different ways that you would program them.
So it was very good to keep abreast of what was happening even though you didn't own that machine.
You could kind of read through the articles, look at the code and see what was going on.
Also, lots and lots of things that had to do with here at 80 computers.
You know, the good old touch, 80's, the 80 micro magazine, which was a specialized
magazine for here at 80 types of computers and there was also a cutting computer magazine spin off of that.
And that was the only thing that I could afford as a single guide back in that time period.
I couldn't afford an apple too for that color type stuff, but I could scrape together enough money for color computer.
And so that was a good one.
And there were all these different magazines and the reason why I say he has had an effect on your life,
even though you never heard of them, is a lot of people never heard of it.
You know, it's rich, right? But the programming language is the underpinning.
So most of the computers that are out there are running something that has seen as the underpinning.
It's not that much that happens in real assembly language anymore.
It all happens in universal assembly language, right?
I get another episode on why I think that's maybe not a good idea.
Maybe we could come up with a better way to do that.
So in this particular case, many people of my age, I was coming up age and going to college,
literally, well, all this was first starting to happen.
I graduated from high school in 1973, and there were only about half of my physics class by two years
that got four function calculators.
That's just, we were still using slide rules.
And so my computer revolution was really just happening as I was going to college.
And on into the 80s, many people have espoused that their first computing platform
that they had access to was, you know, of that time period, maybe not the 70s stuff
where everything was still literally sometimes being built in people's garages,
maybe original apples and things like that, but more the things of the corridors,
the Commodore VIC-20, the Commodore 64.
And a lot of them learned to program and develop their love for technology and their love for computers
in this time period when they were actually learning to program by the Gamma Magazine like this
and typing in the code that was in the magazine to get the computer to do something
and teaching themselves about how the computer worked in the process.
And Wayne was the publisher of many of those magazines.
It was interesting to read the article about the man who had worked for Wayne
who was then a young man to study college and how it was just a madhouse in terms of publishing all these things.
They were rich with advertisers and magazines that were literally almost like books every month.
I mean, there were hundreds of pages in these magazines with all those lines and lines of code.
So a lot of people who, on cold Mondays, that's all of us old parts that are,
the people who are doing lots of programming out there and we're all, you know, trying to retire
and getting ready to retire or at least thinking about maybe some day I'm going to retire.
And who's going to step forward and do this kind of work for us?
There's lots of people who are doing the front-end, you know, nice-looking gooey kinds of stuff
in the webpage design and all these kinds of things.
But there's lots of back-end infrastructure that's still being, you know, handled by the old bringer set.
And so, Wayne had a profound impact on a lot of aspects then and literally was the way that we learned some of the skills
that were our first place at least for getting into the profession of cooking.
So, an interesting part about this when I read about it in the blog post was Wayne's magazines,
the most interesting thing I found of Wayne's magazine, back in the 70s, was the fact that he would write an editorial for each of his magazines.
And I would read these editorials and, you know, sometimes he would just literally P.O.B. with the opinions that he was
and I would literally throw the magazine down and, you know, be, you know, talking wildly at it and saying,
oh, you old man, you don't know what you're talking about.
But, Danette, with the next magazine came out, got to be that the first thing I would actually turn to was the editorial.
Now, keep in mind on 70s magazines. Kill about it, I remember with like this.
The table of contents was actually the magazine cover. It would list right there on the cover of the magazine
where all the articles were and I had lots of favorite authors that I would always read anything that they wrote.
Even if I wasn't interested in the program, that they were actually going to go through with me.
I was interested in the things that they developed and just, you know, how they coded stuff was of interest to me because I was learning a lot about coding from them.
But it wasn't that ostensibly the technology was why I was buying the magazine.
And so you would think the first thing I would do is, oh, here's an interesting article on writing a program to do this.
I'm going to turn to that right away. No, it's the editorial. And even though he might have got me upset at him for something or rather that he had, you know, said in the previous months, that was the first place I would turn to.
And so fast forward about 20 years and it's the early 90s.
And one of the, you know, actual people who wrote articles, who I got introduced to, this particular author by a Wayne Green magazine, 20-some-odd years before.
And I followed him through the years. I would, I would always read his, his articles in various magazines, through the years, writing Jeff Duntonman.
And Jeff mentioned in passing in a editorial. There you go. Got me hooked on reading editorials.
And in an editorial magazine that he was editing, he mentioned in passing that the code requirement was being dropped for the technician class license here in the United States.
The FCC was going to drop the Morris code requirement. And man, I was on that like flies on sweet stuff in the summertime.
You know, that was, I had been wanting to be an amateur radio operator and get my license every since I was in junior high back in the 60s.
I think I mentioned in this, in some of these things where we've been talking, I used to build kits avidly back then.
And you know, some of the kits that I built were receivers at least for short ways. And back then, it was much harder to get a novice class license.
You couldn't just go to an amateur radio operator and have them give you the test the way it is nowadays. You actually had to go to the FCC office.
Now, it wasn't that there. That wouldn't have been that hard. There was an FCC office in Kansas City. And I lived in a sober of Kansas City. But I could never get that code requirement.
I could never learn the code and be fast enough. I was, it turns out I was learning it the wrong way.
So I never, I dropped it kind of from that interest when I was in junior high. I did ironically enough go to some hand theft back in the 70s when micro computing was first starting.
But it wasn't because I was interested in radio gear. It's because ham radio operators were at the forefront of the micro computer revolution or really some of the people who were taking these wild ideas of micro computers and development of different types of micro computers.
And putting them into, you know, using them right for various things that they could do in terms of ham radio.
So they were interested in technology in general. So they were early adopters and they were a good source for parts.
So this is back when we were literally putting together our computers with parts. And I'm not talking about plugging boards in children. I'm talking about parts that would be soldered onto a board or wire wrapped onto a board.
And it was a good source for those kinds of things. So I went to a couple of hand thefts. It used to be a big one here in town. The big hand theft was called PhD.
And that, the MFF ceased to exist as a MFF but for years that was the big one here in Kansas City in the spring. And I went a couple of times to that. But for computer parks, not radio.
So I got interested in radio and I found, you know, the magazines. And I had bought a radio magazine or two back, you know, in the day, in the seventies, but because they had computer, you know, types of articles.
And I found there was a magazine called 73 and lo and behold, the publisher was wangering. And he was still writing editorial.
So I adopted that. And you know, it wasn't just because of my friend of these were wangering. 73 was always my favorite and radio kind of magazine because it was more about building stuff yourself.
It had a lot of articles that were on building kids and building your own antennas. And it just tended to have more home brewing kinds of articles than the CQ magazines did or do.
And even the ARL magazine, you know, there is some specialized things in kid building and there's always a column for that. But wang went out there and tried to get lots of people to submit articles that were more oriented towards the building yourself.
You know, so he's kind of fit into that philosophy that I have. And it was kind of ironic. I saw that all these years later, I'm in amateur radio and I'm reading the magazine of the same guy.
And he knows something. I started reading those editorials and it is amazing how much smarter wangering had gotten in those 20 years.
So some of that stuff that used to be on me all of a sudden it didn't it didn't come quite as crazy. Now don't get me wrong. Wang was always always out there and had some opinions on things that were, you know, at least beyond what would be the norm and a lot of people might even consider crazy.
And, you know, he certainly did as well. So a lot of things that were outside of the norm and would get people certainly talking about it. And I never had figured out, you know, exactly how much of that was just the showman in him knowing that any PR good PR.
Anyway, it seems interesting though that I was in the middle of another kind of technological thing. There are a lot of people interested in computers that also jumped on to that no code tech kind of thing.
And that was another time period where lots of interesting things were happening in terms of digital votes or communication.
I mentioned in the blog post that, you know, those geeks back in the 70s. I really take it over the world. And in the 70s was when amateur radio operators were first beginning to get on to VHF with FM radio, frequency modulated rather than AF, which had been up until the early 70s, primarily.
And started inventing this idea of having a smaller handy talking with lower power that they could carry around on their belts and use that to talk to a repeater system that was way up high on a tower or on the top of the building, or if you're lucky enough on a mountain.
It was somewhere where there's mountains. And it would repeat that signal out so that everybody in town could hear it. And it was a way for them to be mobile around town with a low power radio.
And load behold, here we are all these years later, and we all carry around these things called cell phones partially built on that whole idea of the repeaters that have radio operators developed in the 70s along with digital modes of communication that have radio operators once again always the experimenters and out there doing the things to figure out how all this stuff works and continuing on with that experimentation to this day.
And so everybody is lucky around them. The geeks really have conquered the world, and I'll tell you why because up until the time that he quit Microsoft, you know, the geek was the richest guy in the world, now let's see Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs didn't do too badly either.
And a lot of those guys back then, you know, but the other thing is, everybody's walking around with a handy to hockey, and we've taken the 90s to carry him on their belt. And at least for a while there, some of those handy talkies, IE cell phones that they had on their belt, even had push talk switches.
So it's kind of funny how these things develop. As far as amateur radio operators developing new ideas that are going to be the commercial enterprises of the future, there's a real interesting thing going on.
And if I start doing this, or maybe if I get a hold of a guy who works downtown, and I think I can get him for a interview, so maybe I'll do that sometime.
In terms of mesh networking, there's a real interesting group of people that are working on this thing, and I got introduced to it by kind of Bob Hyle, who is famous in the Rock and Roll world for microphones that he's developed through the years, and developing right here in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because he is so famous for developing microphones for use by Rock and Roll people through the years.
And if he, in fact, developed the system, that system with the tunes that goes into his mouth, and you play the guitar, and the sound of the car goes into the mouth, and then you, wow, wow, or hear that whole system, right? He developed that.
I can't remember for the life of me right now, who it is that did that, but I think you might know using some of that weird description, who it is I'm talking about.
And so Bob Hyle does a web based show on Ham Radio, and he was talking about this. He has a summer home kind of a place that they lived part of the year, just south of Springfield, Missouri, and he does his radio show, his web show out of there, as well as in Illinois,
and he was talking about the local group down there, Green County, I would assume, because that's where Springfield is, and he went to a meeting where they were taking a Lynxis router.
Now, this is your typical blue Lynxis, Cisco, you know, those Lynxis routers, the ones that we all liked, right?
Because there was one that had the L on the end of it, next to your memory, so we could actually from it and give it a better operating system, right?
That kind of router, okay? Yes, those old, you know, G-speed routers, or even, you know, maybe slower than that, right?
The routers that nobody wants anymore, the ones that if you go to your average thrift store, run by, you know, insert your favorite charity group here, you probably can find two or three of them in the webcast, the sort of electronic section.
Of those for very little money, you may have some of these sitting in your pile of carp, it's in Panagram, in your basement or attic, or wherever it is, you keep your pile of stuff.
They take those, and they replace the 20 megahertz crystal, and if you know anything about radio frequencies and power radios work, you have a base crystal that all the frequencies are based on.
And even though it's 2.4 megahertz or, you know, 5.2, you know, whatever it is that is the frequencies that you're working with, it's all based on a crystal for locking that in, right?
Back in the 60s, you used to have to have crystals for your amateur radio transmitter when you were a novice operator to guarantee that you weren't drifting off sand and interfering with TV at your neighbor's house, and things like that.
So you had to have crystal-controlled radios.
But the crystals involved were never up in the frequency that you were actually talking about.
It was always a very low frequency crystal, but it then it multiplies that frequency and power radios is concerned.
They take the 20 megahertz crystal that is in those right now, or comes from links us that way, right?
They replace it with a very common, very readily available 16 megahertz crystals.
Now, what that does is there's an amateur radio band that's just below the typical frequency band used by the Wi-Fi system for the license-free Wi-Fi that we use here.
And by replacing that crystal with the lower frequency crystal, it moves some of the channels, not all of them, but some of the channels, out of the normal range where they're used by Wi-Fi hotspot, and down into the amateur radio frequency range.
If you're an amateur radio operator and a technician class as full privileges in this area here, and besides that, you don't even have to know code now, even for HF radio.
But the range that it moves it into as an amateur radio operator, it's fully legal for you to run that at a higher power.
So I don't know if you do this, but when you run that alternate WWRT or tomato tomato on your router, and you bump up the power, technically speaking, you're illegal.
You don't have permission to run that higher power.
But here, you would, because you're in the amateur radio band, so they boost up the power of these things, put better antennas on them too, and run these in their house, and there's an actually group over in Johnson County, where this guy who works close by to be downtown Kansas City, he lives out there, and there's a mesh network that they're running out there.
And those routers are talking to one another, and passing back information, and actually forming host files on the, that can be downloaded to your computer so that you can mesh network and talk to other people of the network.
So we're talking about an internet without an internet backbone here.
And this is amateur radio operators that are out there going through this experimental stage with this protocol and developing this kind of software hardware combination, and the software undoubtedly will then eventually become a open standard and depending on the license of course.
If you may become a commercial standard or something close to it, the lessons learned right will be used for commercial mesh networking in the not too distant future.
So always experimenting, always out there at the edge of technology, even though they're not building their own radios, the way we used to, the amateur radio operators are still out there experimenting around at least those of them.
And it was always a small group of people who were really doing the experimenting forever in amateur radio.
And so all tying it back to Wayne Green, he got me involved in the amateur radio technology, and I was reading his tutorials again and really, really enjoying those.
And really, as I said in my blog post, Wayne Green taught me a lot, especially in those editorials.
I learned interesting things, and it was always entertaining, and it really was always educational.
Even as a wild idea, there was always that great of truth that you could take away from it.
And I learned not just things about technology from Wayne Green, but I also learned things about philosophy and even religion.
And the interesting story about how he got into publishing, Bite was not the first magazine that he started publishing.
When he saw, but the micro computers come along, he started by, because he do, he had a good thing, and he knew that he can make money publishing articles, feeding people information they needed, though, about this new DC revolution.
And Wayne was the kind of thinker that would be this, that would recognize it for what it was, and then find a way to serve that need and give his customers a product that they wanted to have.
In other words, Wayne Green was doing capitalism the right way.
He was paying attention to his customers and giving them a product that fulfilled their needs for information, because this is all pre-internet, right?
He actually published his first magazine way back in the sixties, when he was a member of the Porsche car, Porsche, a car odors association in the US, he had a Porsche, and he started publishing a magazine for that association.
So he had had experience of publishing magazines before, dealing with advertisers, and all that kind of thing, and he put that to use them when the computer revolution came along, and started a cluster of magazines.
And I am really, to a great extent, in many aspects of my life, not just technology, but keep in mind, the things I learned from Wayne Green's magazine gave me the basis for the way that I have made a living for the past 40 years.
But also, in terms of philosophy, and really make me the person that I am today to a great extent.
And so I was very sad to hear about his happened, and I do think that there's a lot of people who Wayne Green had an effect on, may not realize the name, but really, really did have an effect on the computer industry.
That it's really hard to stress at this point, exactly how much that was.
So, rest in peace, Wayne, although I'm not sure there's going to be that much resting, after all, he was sure he was going someplace else, and was ready to go.
And I do, too, if I have anything that I regretted life, I wish I could have gotten the meat Wayne Green in real life, instead of just getting to know him through his writing.
But, you know, next time, right, in that next place where he is, and I look forward to reading all of the wonderful locations he'd probably, since he's ever going to get tired, and he's not going to have any pain anymore,
whatever pain he was going through.
The energy that he had here in this work well, he would think that there's going to be a lot of good reading when we get up there.
So, 73, which is what we am into radio operators say at the end, Wayne Green silent keys here in 2013 at 91 years old.
73, Wayne, and we will look forward to that next QFL.
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