Episode: 700
Title: HPR0700: Tech Tales of April's Past
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0700/hpr0700.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:06:41

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Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. It's Mr. Gadget. Once again, and I thought I would
call you with a brief hour, a little talk about the history of computing, and as I move
forward my history with the Unix and getting over to Linux eventually. And it seems particularly
apropos. And so the subject of today is because of the time of the year that it is. And I was
reminded of this recently because of some other podcasts and things like that that celebrated
this. And there's a grand tradition of it. So years ago, and I already mentioned Don Lancaster,
he was the one who wrote the original TV typewriter cookbook, which actually taught you how to use
a bunch of discreet ICs to build something that would actually put a TV signal onto a relatively
cheap composite monitor. And you could hook a surplus keyboard to it, and you could use that in
lieu of a teletype machine, which was a big mechanical hard to move around hard to maintain
kind of the device for your input output of your alpha numeric characters into your very,
very early computers like your inside computers and things like that, your MITF computer, your
original computers where you were flipping switches. Or as I have talked about on some of my
single board computers that I owned, if you were lucky, you had one of those. We actually had a
hex keyboard instead of flipping all the 8 bits of the byte and then pushing another switch to
actually store that, you could actually type in the hex equivalents of those bytes and program the
microphone computers that way. But if you really have the money, you could have a teletype machine,
or you could have this electronic teletype machine from Don Lancaster, and he has continued through the
years to write a lot of articles that were in various magazines and write on technology right up to
this day. And if you go out and search for Don Lancaster on Google, you'll come up with this
site first thing. And it's still an interesting site. He has quite the character Don is. You'll find
some references there to his very, very cogent arguments against patterning anything. According to
Don, not only should software be free and open, but ideas should also be free and open and patterning
ideas is a patent-leaf stupid idea. So he's an interesting character, as I said, amongst other things
after the initial circuitry for the typewriter cookbook and some other early kinds of things there
in the world of computing. I'm pretty sure that Don also came up with some of the first circuits
that would allow you to take the signals from your computer and form them into audio tones that would
be something that you could store on a cassette recorder, and then load those back in to store
your programs and read them back. And I think he was one of the people that was a pioneer in
that regard, also, and very types of things. He took to very much to post scripts when that
became available as a language, and the usage of post script was first, actually, you know, it's
around all over the place now, but then again, the day, the way that he used post script, it was if
you have a laser writer printer, which was of course one of the first laser printers that came
for computers, and one of the first printers that was really capable of producing high quality
kind of output from the computer, and that was the Apple laser writer product. And it was actually
a post script interpreter that you would use to actually produce the things there on the laser writer.
And Don discovered that this was actually one of the most powerful computers that went
to Don, and one of the most powerful computers that he owned in terms of its graphical capabilities.
And he really, really leveraged that to the point that he was writing post script code, it's
actually a programming language, and he was writing post script code that would not only do
graphical things that would be output on paper, he would just use it as a computational engine,
and take the results that would come out of the post script engine that was built into the laser
writer. And he was a real, did a proponent of writing post script code, and using your laser
writer to actually run that code as an adjunct to the computational power you had in the computer
that the laser writer was connected to. And I know how it sounds crazy, but Don could convince you
that this was a good idea. I mean, just like it's really, really good arguments against patents,
and I actually agree with them on the patent kind of idea.
So he really, really has some really out there out of the box kinds of ideas, including the
usage of post script, as I said. A brief sojourn here off to the modern world, Bart Bouchantz,
who quite often talks across the pond with Allison Sheridan on the Musclecath,
Bart hasn't been doing that recently because he's had some health issues, and we're all thinking
about Bart, and wishing him well, and getting back onto the internet as quickly as possible.
Bart has many, many times railed against Dolby, and well, he might, for their security kinds of
issues. And he has really, really questioned this whole idea that why is it that PDF documents,
and a PDF reader, has the ability to actually run code snippets. Why would I have a PDF reader
that could run code he has limited many times in terms of security holes?
I can't find any corroborating evidence to this, but I would swear that PDF initially stood for
post script document language, not portable document format, but post script document format,
yet uses the post script language to render the document, and thus any reader has to be able to
run the post script language that is included as part of that rendering process.
Anyway, back to the, what passes for a subject gather here, the columns that Don read were always
one of the most interesting things about having a subscription or picking up a copy of any one of
the various magazines that he wrote columns for, and he would be writing columns for computer magazines,
where he would be talking about his post script thing, he would also be writing columns for
popular electronics or radio electronics, the various electronics magazines, and he had regular
columns in these magazines for years, and one year he really had the going on the not only did I
not have enough money for a laser writer to even consider this whole using the post script engine
for other computational usage, but he also was using the Apple computers, the Apple 2 computer,
specifically which he was connecting up to the laser writer, and he really really got me at one
point in a article that he wrote, because he was talking about a new board that you can plug in
to the Apple 2 computer. Now, one advantage of the Apple 2 is it had its own bus, like that S-100
bus I've been talking about, or various computer buses, so this idea of having expansion boards that
you can plug in is not a new kind of a thing, it's been around since almost the beginning of
micro computing, we figured out we wanted the bus to be able to plug things into it pretty much
right away, even that Cosmic Elf had a little connector for a bus to plug in a video card into it
that eventually came out. So, there was this new card that he was working on, and he was working
with a company that had come to him, and the company had a special chip that they had designed,
and he had worked with them on the board, and he'd worked with them on the software to run on the
Apple 2, and of course the board would only plug into an Apple 2, and the software would only run
in the Apple 2 environment, but it was really exciting, and he was finally able to announce
that this board was going to come on to the market, and the really exciting thing is it would use
the RS-232 communications, and you'd actually need to have two Apple 2s. Now, in my mind, I'm thinking,
I can't even afford one Apple 2, Don, you're killing me here, I need two Apple 2s. What the heck
would I need to have Apple 2s for, and why would I want these boards communicating? I mean, we had
modems, and so it had to be something more. Well, you could do it faster, of course, if they were
connected directly to one another, but the really technical aspect of this would be using it with
a modem, and of course, depending on the speed of your modem, it would be slower to accomplish the
process, but there was a tiny little chamber, a tiny little opening with a door on it at the back
of this board, and it was about enough room to put in a small piece of paper, or maybe something
the size of a quarter, or something like that, could fit into this little slot in the back.
But the amazing thing was the special chip that they had, and the special solter that they
have had the ability to dematerialize the item that you put in the slot in one machine,
transfer via the digital signal to the other machine, and rematerialize this on the other side.
I mean, this was a Star Trek transporter, admittedly not over radio waves, right, but over wires,
or over the modem. And I mean, I was wrapped in just giving all the technical details
about how everything would work, and it was a very small chamber at this point because of the
technical limitations of where they had gotten so far, but they could see, of course, you know,
what the potential was in the future as this technology would develop. And then he announced
the really exciting part about it, which was you could actually hook up to four computers together,
and one computer could have the quarter in it, and the other three computers would each have a
quarter in their slots at the end of the process, three quarters for one. Then it hit me that it
was April, and this was April Phil's column, which he did every year, and he sucked me in totally
until that last column, when he talked about giving three quarters for one.
And so I wish you a happy April fool. I'd also like somebody to explain to me why it is
in this April fool's because no way shape or form in the way that I count years, even with the old
calendar, right, September 7, October 8, November 9, December 10, right? Even if you count that way,
I can't figure out how the Julian calendar had the first of the year being April. But
happy April fool, there were lots of April fool's just going on here in terms of some of the
podcasts that I heard and things like that. And I thought that was an interesting old story because
of that tight, you know, the people who were working on the computers were all the Star Trek fans,
and of course, he sucked us all in. To this day, he still has a book that you should look for on
the youth's bookshelf called the Incredible Secret Money Machine, which is an idea of how to
make a living from multiple sources of income. The basic gist of the book is you don't want to have
all of your dollar bills coming from a single source. You would rather have a bunch of quarters
coming from a couple of sources, or even better, a whole series of dimes that nickels coming
from multiple sources. So, any single one of those persons tries up, you lose all your income.
But he, of course, expands on this to a great extent. There were two different versions of this.
I own the original edition of that, and I think I also have a copy of his second edition.
On his side, I think he's got plans to actually put up the text of the second edition of the book
eventually online, but right now he's got some of the articles and things from that. So,
I encourage you to go out, check out Don Lancaster's site, just Google for him there, and see he's
got all kinds of interesting ideas, and even to this day, he's doing all kinds of interesting things
with technology, well worth the time and effort, and you're kind of looking at the past and the
present here of computing. And with that, I'd like to wish you a very, very happy April, and
hope you didn't get too bad, and we'll talk to you next time. This is Mr. Gadgett,
and I'll be out here on the technological frontier, Blake from the Trail of the Hoodie. Bye now.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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