Transcript
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The hosts introduce the episode, explain what the Retro Hour covers, and thank listeners for tuning in. They also set up the week's mix of retro gaming and technology topics.
coming up on this week's show The Return of amstrad watch movies on your Atari 2600 and we chat to the father of Internet radio KL
malam and the Retro Hour podcast is brought to you every Friday with our incredible friends at bitmat books now brand new and just launched this week have you seen their lightest title N64 for a visual compendium packed withthe most gorgeous screenshots in game art and celebrating over 150 titles the defined Nintendo's 64-bit wonder you can check that out in the rest of their retro gaming collection at bitmat books.com hello and welcome to the Retro Hourpodcast episode number 419 your weekly dose of retro gaming and technology news with me Dan wood me Ravi Abbott and me Joe Fox and very nice of joining us for the podcast every single Friday of course a showthat takes you back to the classic age of video games actually you know I do this bit every week I will set what the podcast is I'm going to pick on someone Joe explain the show what is it
oh why are you picking on me I said you know what before we started recording I said Don't drop me in it this week D well that was like red R to a bull that was Joe it reallywas what is this podcast sometimes people ask me at work oh what's your podcast about it's about retro games it's about those years that we missed the years of you know Nostalgia the 70s the 80s the '90s theGolden Age of gaming not just gaming sometimes we dabble you know in technology the internet radio video Etc but yeah anything retro kind of goes anything that's older than 15 20 years you know we do a little bitof a News segment then we do a little bit of an interview and yeah it's uh usually about meant to be an hour it's about an hour and a half long there you go that's the Retro hour the
Retro hour and a half doesn't flow that well off the tongue we don't fine so hence the name but we do get messages all the time like for example at the rich voices um sent us a tweet duringthe week or axi said disappointed to have only just discovered the Retro hour is making up for it by binging the last 418 episodes at the moment so loving the Nostalgia so I guess you'll hear this probably inabout a year or something um but we do get messages like that all the time so uh whether you listen every week you know since the beginning or whether you've just found us we really appreciate you joining us
The conversation turns to the Brit Awards, Calvin Harris using an Amiga backstage, and the viral Windows 95 Man Eurovision entry. The hosts reflect on how retro tech keeps resurfacing in modern pop culture.
and we have got an incredible guest on the way in the second half of the podcast like you you know we cover gaming and Technology as well this is a bit more of a techy episode but before weget into that um anyone watch the Brit Awards over the weekend no it's not as uh controversial as it used to be is it I I used to watch it for for all the madness and Anarchy that happensthere but it's it's quite a tame nowadays isn't it yeah I mean generally I I must admit I didn't watch much of it the Mrs out on on Saturday night and it's uh it's like probably the nafest ofall the award shows isn't it you watch it mainly to see what goes wrong and the awkward silences and you know the cringeworthy stuff from the presenters but there was one moment that has got kind of the retr
world in a bit of a stir this week and uh everyone's been sharing this I've seen it on uh all my friends Facebook timelines people have been tagging me in it in our Discord as well that Calvin Harriswho is um it might be people are not familiar with Calvin Harris he he's a world famous DJ and producer been around for around 20 odd years now and ra R you talked before about the fact that youknow that Calvin had his roots on the Amiga but it turns out backstage at the Brits there was a little video that he posted on his Instagram feed basically him messing around backstage with an Amiga 1200 have listento this I've got an Amiga um and I'm making the
remix to me so him basically messing around on what sounds like octamed or something on the om GA 1200 yeah he he's just tracking and playing around with his machine I think it's um quite cool he's mentioned usingthe omiga uh he used it on his first album actually but um he kind of used it to set the basic layouts of the tracks and then obviously expanded because it was it was four channels and uh youknow you need a lot more than that for a modern tune um but he was using optim you know playing around with it and I think it's quite cool it's like um we saw those videos of you knowpeople with game boys linking them up and using them on film sets uh to play with in in a kind of modern context and I love the idea that you know it's a creative device he's not sitting there
playing Canon fod or Lemmings well you don't know maybe between takes he was yeah or maybe remixing the tunes from them uh but he's actually kind of still producing but uh you know doing it in a spare timeI think that's pretty cool yeah the fact that he's got one of his modern songs actually kind of sequenc in on the Amega you've got Ellie Golding the singer who looks a little bit bewildered kind of looking athim like okay but I did see a post actually straight after that that um Steve from retro passion who is kind of one of the UK's Premier like recapping Services he sells a lot of retro stuff turns outhe actually recently recapped this amga 1200 I think for Sony music and he wasn't sure why and then he kind of put two and two together like Ah that's a machine that I was working on the other week
has a quote um here from Kelvin Harris and it says uh when they asked him about the omiga this is years ago from music radar he said uh I loved it it was like playing a computer game butactually you making something at the end and it was kind of creative yeah which um it's incredible to see that you know he's got that Amiga setup running and you know still kind of using it as well takingit to a massive music award show so that was very cool to see and also did you see Windows 95 man who is at finland's entry for the Eurovision song contest this year I'm going to vote for Finlandthis is is bizarre this has just been like I've seen this everywhere as well over the last couple of days a guy who is basically wearing a kind of a cut off kind of crop T-shirt with the Windows
95 logo in the world of you know being a radio DJ Dan you're going to get like shown all the Eurovision stuff I honestly hadn't heard of Windows 995 man yeah um looking at him he's got like acrop top yeah yeah and then this kind of manm made out of pure denim um but like a denim kind of strappy coat yeah I wonder if he's going to have like the windows theme song in it orlike sound effects oh wow like errors and stuff that would be awesome just kind of the Windows 95 like sounds throughout his performance yeah I'd vote for that so it has been a really cool week in terms of
The hosts discuss their own early experiences with internet radio and how it changed listening habits. This leads into the story of Carl Malamud, who pioneered internet broadcasting and on-demand audio.
you know music and award shows and just seeing kind of retro popping up everywhere really kind of proves how out there it is these days and actually we mentioned music and you kind of touched on radio there aswell because uh today we're going to be talking about internet radio radio now I don't if you guys remember kind of the first time you listen to Internet radio I've Got a Feeling Joe you still haven't ever listenedto radio over the internet in uh in 2024 really dropping me in it this week you should give it a go it's really cool you know what was really funny Dan asked me earlier and he goes but don'tyou listen to the radio don't you listen to you know I we we listen to Dan actually quite a bit in his day job uh when he's on the radio at home and he was like how do you
do that and I was like on the radio Dan we just have a radio in the game blew my mind I was like you're not or Google home or yeah no just on the radio in the kitchen Iwas always a radio Fanboy so I kind of listened to early internet radio um there was also this amazing thing called the the pirate radio scanner and I've never seen anything like it um it was a radio scannerso I think you could control an FM radio and it would scan through all the pirate stations on um on London at the time like a remote radio then was it yeah and then you could actually tune inand like pick them but it was in real time and uh it really low quality as well cuz I remember real audio was one of the one of the first kind of um you know experiences I had of
listening to internet audio but also uh ice cast was another thing where you could set up your own station and I remember doing that but all of this is is long long after our guest this week yeah Imean I remember being a college actually and kind of staying late and they had um I think it was one of the the lecturers must have used it's like what looked like a really high-end windows ntpc up inone of the computer labs and I remember it having like a like a 22in flat screen Trinitron CRT on there and it had some gorgeous speakers I remember stopping there late listening to like you know KISS FM inLondon listening to like the the garage shows on there in like this must have been 9098 and then it still a pirate then are no it was legal then but they had like you know likes of tough jam
and people like that on there which you I love listening to those and not being able to to receive them when I lived in North Yorkshire that was cool to be able to listen over the internet you knowI didn't have a good enough internet connection at home then but also you reminded me that I did used to uh do a show on a on a radio station on the internet this was in must have been9899 um a station called I think it was widr in Florida me and my friend Barry used to do a weekly dance music show on there but obviously I mean back then we didn't have the the skills orthe tech to basically record a radio show digiti it FTP it over I didn't know how to do any of that so the way we used to do it is record like a 2our show onto a VHS video
tape and then stick it in the mail every week and post it over to Florida so the guy the other end would digitize it that's great I love that so yeah things have changed quite a bit but actuallylike you said our guest this week was doing pretty much what we do today over 30 years ago now this is Cole malamud who set up the world's first ever internet radio station and it was called internet talkradio now Carl came onto my radio because I was watching an old episode of the computer Chronicles from I think it was 1995 when they were profiling so you know every couple of years if you've ever watched archivesof the computer Chronicles I mean they're on YouTube if you want to check them out but they often do these um these shows basically profiling the internet like every couple of years there's one in like 93 one in
' 95 one in '98 but there's a very short like 90c section in the the 95 episode where they show Carl's radio station and they're talking about how he does this kind of first ever not only real timeinternet broadcasting but also offered OnDemand programming as well so if you think about I mean his Flagship show was something called geek of the week and he had the likes of you know Tim burners Lee on there whoyou know was the inventor of the worldwide web he did an interview with him back in 1993 recorded it digitized it uploaded it for people to download and listen to it so by all you know what we knowtoday by all definitions that would be a podcast wouldn't it yeah in 1993 as well like you think you think about the internet and when it kind of came around that such early days uh Vince surf as well
you know um he he was talking with Carl he had a lot of people on the podcast and well on the internet show and uh yeah I just I just think it's amazing because I love it when weget these kind of pioneering guests and especially stories from back in the days when uh you know we were talking about multicasting and the fact that you know the bandwidth was so small for the entire internet that whensomebody would multicast you know people would get really angry because all the bandwidth was being used up you're slowing my connection down get off it and people would be using like sun Micro Systems and all these kind ofyou know workstations to listen to this and of course it was aimed at a very techy crowd and uh you know Carl talks us all through the process of how they went about it because it was quite a
professional setup to be honest yeah a proper Studio to do it all in in and you know he's recording on their dat you know digital audio tapes um to get the best quality even though he's uploading them ina 8 bit format onto the internet cuz I mean you know far sizes had to be uh you know competitive today very small then but you remember I mean he started this in late 1992 it was before evenlike MP3 was invented yeah um and you know we think today you put a podcast out there you can get it on you know phone in your pocket marketing it you put it out on social media we hearabout how he actually got the word out and found his guests back in those days you know decades before anything like you know Facebook or even Myspace or anything like that was inv for the limited crowd that had
a sound card yeah exactly then also he put on I mean he a he's a big supporter of those early internet days he put on the world's first um internet World exhibition that was basically uh you know aninternet World Fair you kind of brought the world fair concept into the digital age and there's like a time capsule of that as well so really interesting guest and you know that particularly I try and do these episodesevery now and then kind of internet history episod EP CU you and I get a chance to really geek out about these ravies so you're going to love this we went crazy on this one yeah this is totally
The first half of the show covers major retro news, starting with Alan Sugar reviving the Amstrad name. The hosts debate what that might mean for the brand's legacy and other related trademarks.
my job so it really interesting guest KL malamud the founder the father of Internet radio and probably podcasting as well he's going to be on the show in around 35 minutes from now but of course first half ofthe podcast that's when we have a little mattera about what's been happening in the world of retro over the last seven days and it has been another busy packed week in the Retro Gaming and Tech world including thisheadline that has been uh all over the standard news sites outside of the you know the Retros spere the Allan sugar has apparently revived amstrad are you going to start Joe I didn't I'm just waiting for someone todo an Allan sugar impression I know you're both pretty at it I can't do it I can't boy there you go but Alan sugar I mean are you watching The Apprentice joil that's kind of what he's most known
for these days here in the UK yeah I mean I am watching The Apprentice at the moment and all we do is point at it and go oh this is terrible this is so set up oh kind ofthing but um yeah Alan shuger interesting guy so he has just inverted commas revived amstrad so uh he famously founded amstrad in 1968 was it do you know what it stood for uh Alan Michael sugar trading definitely didn'tread that did you you knew that by heart uh I read it yesterday good memory Joe I read it yesterday yeah but obviously they were you know in terms of British Computing they were you know big player backin the day and also there's quite a few on the continent as well I remember I wasn't amstrad the uh an amstrad PC your first computer ravy uh yeah it was actually there was like that huge Market of
PC clones that came out and uh I think they also did like sound systems and and stuff like that um it was it was kind of Allin one concept wasn't it with amstrad yeah and it was you knowa really big play I remember my auntie having one of the amstrad you know the PC WS I think they were the little word processors which were a very big market for amrad back in the day but thething that they really kind of found their fortune in was making setop boxes for Sky which is a major satellite which is an interesting path because you know obviously you had a lot of companies like Amiga at thetime and stuff and it kind of failed um and they didn't go into anything where the amstrad name lived on I do remember seeing those kind of Sky boxers with amstrad on the back and being like Oh you
know a bit of nostalgia there and of course there was the whole connection with uh Sinclair as well yeah you see I didn't know that they went into the uh the Sky Box you know making them and thenthat Sky bought them I just assumed amstrad fizzled out you know it just died you know and obviously cuz he's you know multi-billionaire or whatever he is now he just had his fingers in lots of other pies ifwe if you will I didn't realize you know that he actually sold it he sold it in like 2007 to Sky didn't he yeah I mean he sold it for $125 million I think the reason was you knowthey were basically paying royalties and licenses every year to amstrad and Sky completely relied on that you know or B Sky be as who were known then so they were basically like look we'll just buy the whole company
we'll buy the name um so that saved them licensing it but they did do some other weird like kind of products that maybe some people have forgotten like we were talking about the the amstrad emailer which were thesekind of you could almost call them I guess desktop smartphones in a way yeah they had like video calling and stuff and I remember they were used by old people quite a lot um but they also had Spectrumgames on them which was pretty cool well obviously amra bought um Sinclair back in the 80s which is interesting because basically what what's happened now is um Alan sugar has bought back the name of amstrad from Sky becauseI mean it doesn't seem like today that sky are kind of doing anything with it you don't see the amstrad logo go on name anywhere but apparently it's not going to be the amstrad that we knew it's not
going to be you know slapped on any new computers or tablets or anything like that apparently it's going to be a uh a digital marketing agency that's going to be run by his grandson so it turns out youknow he's bought the name back his grandson's going to take up the uh the amstrad Legacy but the question that a lot of people in the Retro world have been asking is does that mean that he's kind ofgot the the rights to Sinclair and the Spectrum back now and what does that kind of mean for stuff like you know the Spectrum next for example I've seen a few people a little bit worried that it mightaffect that I can't imagine that they're linked in any way anymore though because obviously all Allen's done is to buy back the amstrad name so I don't think they'd come as like a package bundle I imagine when Sky
took over amstrad they basically acquired everything and now you know the the S lay name and the Spectrum trademarks all that kind of thing is just part of Sky's portfolio and Alan Sugar's literally just bought back the amstradpart of that so I can't see it affecting the the Spectrum next or anything like that well also it it kind of says online and digital I'm thinking maybe they'll expand out into you know amstrad nostalgic style clothesthat they have in like H&M and stuff you know you get Polaroid I've seen Polaroid absolutely everywhere and uh these older brands but also if he is doing digital getting into that sphere of going online he's going toget absolutely hammered by amstrad fans of course and then probably think oh there might be a potential here to you know do something with it and and see that as as a way of getting Revenue well if you
are a viewer of The Apprentice I mean he's not shy about talking about his past I think it wasn't it last year Joe if you watched it there was an episode where they do like a treasure hunt don'tthey where he sends them out into certain places and they get like a list of items they've got to bring back and I remember one of them was an amre CPC computer I if you remember that episode Ithink it's about a year ago maybe a year before oh I I I don't I don't remember it yeah I mean and and and often if you follow him on Twitter occasionally do do posts about like you knowor retweets about the am didn't he mention that he was going to open like an amrad Museum a few years ago as well he did yeah and I mean a lot of the press pictures of this article you
know that seemed basically the pr agency sent out to a lot of the uh the media there are pictures of like Alan sugar now with a lot of old amstrad PCS and cpcs and stuff like that so itseems like you know they're kind of using the the computer angle of it for the Nostalgia to get the headlines I'd love to see a TV series of that like the BBC could do it and like you knowI love microman and stuff and I thought that was good but the Alan sugar story you know themed in a d booy style yeah well good maybe we could present it in green screen like you're watching it onamrad CPC monitor yeah Rodney could present it pictures are available now if Netflix want to get in touch R I'm sure you'll sell the idea yeah develop it with them so amstad is back it's interesting to see what
The hosts examine a cartridge that lets an original Atari 2600 play movies from SD card. They discuss how it works, the technical trickery involved, and the novelty of watching films on such old hardware.
will happen we'll keep an eye on that now another interesting story that has caught our eye this week is watching movies on your Atari 2600 now as soon as I saw this I thought what is this for likethe the modern Atari 2600 Plus or someone hacked it or something but no this is the original 1977 Atari 2600 console have you watched the video of it like the quality yes it's mind-blowing for what it's running onum I don't know if it's going to replace watching Ultra Blu-ray 4K discs on my 65 I don't know about you guys but I've just watched Dune 2 on it yeah fair enough don't ask how I've done itno jokes aside so uh yeah this is the movie cart um which has been made by uh a guy called um low Death Mode and he's developed this cartridge that allows your original 2600 so like you say it
is the OG Atari 2600 essentially yeah play play films you am I right in thinking so I don't really get my head around I can't really get my so I'm usually quite technical on these things and I cannotunderstand this at all um I don't know how it works to be honest ask me Joe and I try to bang I think I've got my head around this cuz seems like magic well this is basically it's aI love it if Dan just went It's Magic yeah basically w a magic one it appears on the screen that's how it works uh yeah this is a cartridge he's released called the movie cart so what this isIt's a little circuit board looks like a a custom design that you plug got like a a little processor on there or a microcontroller something yeah I assume it's got some Modern Hardware in there that you wouldn't be
able to get back in the days and uh you know H have on a cart and do this yeah this wouldn't have been possible 40 years ago but there's basically it's comes in a you know what looks likea standard Atari 2600 cartridge there is a little hole at the top where you can put an SD card in and what you've got to do is is you've basically got to get the movie onto your PC oryour Mac and then using some software you then basically down reses the movie to a resolution of 80 by1 192 and uh as you can see the the color palette isn't all that rich on here as well butbasically it translates it into a format that then you can stream essentially using this cartridge to the Atari 2600 that's what I thought I thought the C must be doing some kind of process there or you know handling
the load on there because there's no way that that can run on the original Hardware unless it is just magic you know without without the car but um yeah just seeing that it's it's pretty amazing to be honestyeah we're seeing stuff like this before like on the the commodo 64 you know there's that s the the 1541 ultimate I think it was I remember seeing the guys from the Retro computer Museum in Leicester who displayingthis at the Cambridge computer Museum kind of blasting movies down it as well but I would have expected like you know a Raspberry Pi or something something to be kind of repurposed but this seems like it's it's acustom board and it's it's not that badly priced as well you know $24.99 basically yeah he was selling these you know $24.99 that was a a fully assembled PCB board um with an SD card as well apparently and
labels so I think that as a bargain who're selling those on website called Tindy it's it's got Night of the Living Dead pre-loaded on it as well yeah which I know about the legality of that that sound alittle bit iffy but well well there's a whole story there Night of the Living dad is in public domain right okay that makes sense yes I looked at that I was like that's even if it wasn't I can'timagine any any movie studio like you said looking at this thinking well no one's going to go to the cinema now if they can just watch it on H I can't I can't imagine anybody sitting down saying I'mgoing to watch this because the quality of it is um yeah it's is pretty tough but I think also all the captures that we've seen have been on a flat screen TV maybe it'll look a bit nicer on
a CRT that is a good point yeah it could um and it looks like there's some basic controls like he can change the the brightness if you watch his YouTube video it turns out the the videos I've seenof this it's basically him filming a flat screen TV like using his phone there doesn't appear to be any kind of direct video capture so he's probably not the best there's a few on Atari age like Fred onAtari age I tried to understand it and it's pages of like stuff that's far beyond head sounds age but um yeah I mean talking about the quality of it I'd kind of say it looks like a a 40-year-oldVHS tape that's maybe been left in a damp attic with playing back on a video player with bad tracking and scan lines are just digitally cut in yeah it is a bit flickery but I think you know you
got to remember what this is running on and yeah we often talk about yeah we talk about this that it's in in a little format as well you know something like this I'd expect to see wires hanging outyou know all kind of Madness uh from stuff that you usually see on hacker day but um it's it's really clean and uh well done yeah and you look at the the size of it as well I meanobviously he's kind of viewing this on a a widescreen modern TV so I imagine kind of there be you know there' be borders at the side of it if you if you're looking at this is like a 4-3display but actually I'd say in terms of the video it looks a lot bigger than something like the movies that you would have gotten a a Sega Mega CD back in the day or you know something like the
CD TV or the cd32 I think terms of the actual size of the video it's it's almost full screen it says it's got audio present as well and the audio can be controlled via the joystick like the volumeof it and that's another amazing feat having audio coming through there as well as video you know lowy quality they're saying I love this as well you're like then you know who know if he's going to do thisbut then bear in mind Ravi didn't you just like pay out quite a bit of money for a system to let you watch video CDs on your Omega 4000 shush don't tell anyone we are Geeks if there's away to do it and it's fun it's a bit of novelty so that you know I think it's very cool and like you said for $24.99 um it turns out they're they're sold out at the moment but hopefully
those pre-orders will come back if you want a nice little novelty show your friends you watching movies on your Atari 2600 and blow their mind um I will link that up as well there's a little waiting list option
A new game called Thunder Helix is introduced, drawing comparisons to Desert Strike, ZWOLF, and other classic helicopter shooters. The hosts talk about its visuals, gameplay style, and appeal to retro fans.
on there so if you want to be alerted when they're back on sale I'll put that in this week's show notes as well now this looks right up my street as someone who loved games like desert Strike Backin the day and uh zwolf on the Amiga I love a good kind of helicopter shoot him up 3D kind of sim and this is a new game called Thunder Helix that takes inspiration from a lot of thoseClassics like the strike games I think this looks Wicked it's it's it to me it feels like deser strike meets Star Fox for the Super Nintendo graphically yeah graphically the look of it so this has been developed byone developer David Walters and it's coming out on Steam it just says in the future so it's just coming out soon essentially but there is a 35 minute gameplay video out as well as a trailer but yeah it's
a you know very much in the vein of so think graphically Star Fox so those polygon graphics and you know quite a Bas not basic color palette but you know it's it's it's a very bright game isn't itbut there's not many different colors Etc but I I guess it's I guess it's a setting as well you know like desert you in yeah yeah absolutely um but then gameplay-wise it is closer to the strike games youknow a little bit more open world and you can fly around um you know blowing up the baddies and rescuing hostages and stuff like that um but yeah I saw this and spotted it and I thought of youright away Dan I thought this is very like obviously it's coming out on Steam so it's not coming out on any retro consoles or anything like that you know and it is going to be joystick uh compatible as
well as you know Xbox controller compatible and stuff like that so very old school with the joystick as well what I love but it it reminded me very much of a very good looking Amiga game as well wellyeah I know Dan's going to say zwolf straight away but um it also reminds me of 3D construction kit which was another one like all the element seem like that they were built in that way uh with thekind of shading uh like Castle master as well but um of course you've got all the benefits of it being a modern title uh so you know it's got nice frame rate uh the the effects are smooth andstuff like the there's a section with these oil tankers and stuff and smoke going up and that looks really impressive and I kind of feel like there's been uh you know there's not been many of these kind of
games made over the last couple of decades that I've seen yeah I I would totally agree with you there you you know you get like World of Tanks and stuff like like that but I'm just off the topof my head trying to think of like any helicopter Sim games where where it's not just like flight simulator where an actual game where because you know it used to be a whole genre of like Ace Combat andyou know it weird kind of like I don't know maybe the Amiga version didn't have music but the desolate kind of D flying around a desert in a helicopter and all you can hear is voom voom voom andthen like picking up oil crates and the whole idea about Fuel and stuff like that I kind guys over here yeah over here your little crane your little thing that used to come out the bottom of your helicopter
go yeah yeah I miss that I miss that kind of act uh you know that that kind of era of gaming and like yeah that was like a world that we were all trapped in at some point desperatefor fuel in the desert like yeah I love those games and it is something that I've you know I do regular go back and play desert strike and uh zwolf 2 which I don't if you played zwolf beforeor even seen it Joe it's it's basically like uh it looks a bit more like this a game that plays like desert strike but it's kind of rudimentary 3D Graphics ran very slowly on my amga back in theday but like on know you know more souped up moderner Amiga um it works a lot better so I think I've always been a big fan of these kind of games and even looking at this at the screenshots
of uh you know the helicopter landing on the the fry gate out in the middle of the sea very much like desert strike started and having to return there well also um I looked at it and that that'sgot zwolf style in there but also there's some the the people that look like you know Hunter which was another one it looks like one of the guys of Hunter the little characters in there as well so Ithink it's pulling Nostalgia from everywhere I hope there's some really over the toop weapons in it like do you remember the hellfires that you get in desert strike I remember I had like a cheat code where you gotlike basically infinite ammo and I just use them to like you know massive missiles just to shoot any little tiny enemy on the screen you felt really powerful doing that so that was quite a laugh so I like
chasing cars that was good yes so yeah I mean it was just a great genre so I I welcome it back like you said only available on PC pre-order on Steam at the moment I think something like thiswould be awesome to play on the switch and I say that about kind of pretty much every kind of retro game that we talk about but um hopefully it'll be a success enough for them to consider porting itto other systems as well so who's not much of a PC Gamer but you know I'll definitely uh yeah get get back on my steam account for this I think so um no word on release yet or pricing
The discussion shifts to Digital Eclipse's interactive documentary on Jeff Minter and the many games included in the collection. They also cover the surprise emulation of the unreleased Konix Multisystem title Attack of the Mutant Camels 89.
but if you want to check out the trailers I'll link those in the show notes as well now this is pretty exciting now I think you know we can all bow to Jeff Minter we do generally talk abouthim quite a bit as you been one of the uh the best British developers of the last 40 years and everyone loves Jeff Min don't they everyone you talk to not only his games but also Jeff is acharacter as well I mean we've had the the pleasure of meeting him at several retro events over the years um he was in our book wasn't he that we did last year as well there all around lovely guyand the world's kind of changed and uh Jeff stayed the same and actually you know done him really well and um his Styles changed the same but it's evolved as well and uh it's a fantastic kind of story
of a independent developer yeah well the reason we're talking about this is because there is a new it is kind of an interactive documentary and we've seen a few of these before there's obviously the uh this is bydigital Eclipse who did the massive Atari 50 collection a couple of years ago they also did the Jordan Magner Prince of Persia one a bit more recently so what they do is they basically package a lot of retrogames together with documentary footage you know stuff from the archives could be like you know game development notes blueprints basically you know any graphics from the game maybe on new stuff so these are real celebrations of a certaincompany or in this case an individual so coming out next week on uh March the 13th they're going to be releasing llamasoft the Jeff Minter story so this is basically this calling this the most exhaustive look yet at
the life and library of the legendary British developer so are you excited about this and ravix and you're a big Jeff Minter fan like I am yeah yeah I I think I might get this actually um because youknow a lot of these titles uh are on different systems uh and systems that aren't available like the KX multis system which is something we can talk about but uh this look great cuz it's it's a full Irationand I I love like you know the humble bundles and stuff that you used to get um uh with like collections of games but this looks a hell of a lot more kind of developed than that and it'syou know they they've got like interviews with Jeff as well they've got like extra chapters in there hidden footage um I just need to get a modern console to play it on but I assume it's also going to
be available for steam yeah I think the the Atari 50 came out and steam didn't it so I've got a feeling it probably will be um and there there is 42 Jeff Minter games included here from you knowhis earlier stuff on the zx81 and the Vic 20 through the Spectrum c64 um tar 800 in the Jaguar as well you got stuff like you know grid Runners on there attack the mutant camel Tempest 2000 latron cheapin space hover bover and that lawn mower game that he did as well revenge of the mutant camels obviously all his big games on here as well but he did touch on something very interesting there that for thefirst time we're going to get to play the conx multis system now I'm sure a lot of people will be familiar with what the multi system was but we I can do a good impression now of the adver
com had a spot on actually a lot of people might have seen this I mean it was basically a British system that was cancelled back in the very early 90s um it was meant to be a it wasa bit Allin one wasn't it it was like a steering wheel and uh had motorbike handles on there and a mental chair as well about to say is this the one which had the mental chair like you stickyeah you'd like attach everything to it like like I'm mty system funny that yeah I'm going to play racing game let's put the steering wheel on right I'm going I need some force feedback yeah when it was veryvery adventurous I'd say um and then you it was almost about to be released cuz like Ravi did an impression there there was a TV advert made for it and everything that you know they were they putting on
video I I Know M dink was developing I think it was last ninja uh for it as well they were like all custom versions coming out and Jeff Minter was one of the big developers at the time yeahand the interview we did with Jeff not only in the book but also on the podcast a couple of years ago as well we went into that with him as well because the company they're doing the technology forit was a flare technology which um a lot of those guys came out of Sinclair and they'd also go on to make the Tori Jaguar so really you know the you could say the the conics was kind ofthe the precursor to the Jaguar if you like um but again like a lot of companies then you know conx had some big financial problems turned out the system got canceled as well but um the interesting thing is
that Jeff was working on a game that was previewed in some magazines at the time and this was at loft's attack of the mutant camels 89 and it turns out now that the game has been finished and 34years after the kic multi system was officially cancelled and even though you know no one really knows if there's a full working system anywhere I've Got a Feeling Jeff said he might have had like some in his garagehe wasn't sure but um they're actually emulating the conx multisystem and you're going to be able to play attack of the mutant camels 89 this game that was previewed in magazines 34 years ago finally on your modern machinefor a fan that's worth it alone you know and and the fact you're getting all these other titles and I've just noticed um heart of neon as well which is just a fantastic documentaries going to be on there
and uh two of his light synthesizers as well um psychedelia and and color skate which was a another kind of area that Jeff was famous for yeah mean he did the uh the the virtual light machine on theoriJaguar so basically you put an audio C CD into the the tri as well was another one yeah even the Xbox 360 did the uh virtual light machine on there didn't he if you ever listen to an audioCD on the 360 those kind of trippy visuals you got were you know Jeff minter's work so it is incredible to see a celebration of Jeff's work all in one place and I think this format I mean I'dlove to see more of these coming out so I think they work really well if you know watching yeah you watching more traditional like in a documentary on a Blu-ray many of which I love but often I'm like
I didn't know about the game I want to play that game again and you know I'll go and download it or find a way to play it but actually having them all kind of bundled together so you canhear about a game come out the documentary play it for like 10 15 minutes go and watch the next part of it I think that interactive experience is just really really good for you know game preservation and uhthe history of it so hopefully we'll see more of these from digital Clips if you want to get hold of that llamasoft the Jeff Minter Story coming to steam it is on Steam Ravi PS5 PS4 switch and Xboxas well from next week and the price-wise like looking at the Atari 50 um you know that was that was 30 99 and uh for the amount of games you're getting on there and uh stuff I wonder how
much this one's going to cost but um I've already you know added it to my wish list yeah I've got no word on on pricing yet but generally they're around that kind of I think the the Atari 50on the PS5 was about 45 50 Quid it's a pretty standard you know new release price on on a system so but I you know even with those you wait a couple of months the gemy around 25 quidbut I would encourage anyone that wants it to go and get out on day one though because I want to see more of this kind of thing so that is out on March 13th I'll put the uh the
The hosts react to the discovery of a playable TimeSplitters 4 prototype on a PlayStation 3 dev kit. They discuss how it was found, what it contains, and the chances of preservation or release.
Articles and the links in the show notes if you want to check those out now um this is very cool we love talking about lost prototypes and the weird ways in which they were discovered turns out that someonehas found a prot prototype of time Splitters 4 on a PlayStation 3 devkit oh man I'm so excited for this one so yeah it is exactly what you've just said somebody has found a prototype of time Splitters 4on a PlayStation 3 development kit um so this has been posted on Reddit by a user known as L Lukey yeah and he shared a couple of photos uh the initial photo being just the time spiters 4 logowith a save date on there which is the 11th of July 2008 and How The Story Goes is he's bought this dev kit off eBay and he spotted it on eBay you know just you know trolling looking for
retro consoles Etc and he saw somebody was selling for500 uh a PlayStation 3 dev kit which had come from free radical um so to kind of like test the legitimacy of it he messaged the seller and was justa bit like well what's the the story here and he said well I had a friend who worked at free radical and he left in November 2008 uh which is a month before the studio got shut shut downand uh obviously he had all his development kits and stuff still um and you know this particular seller had ended up with them and sold them so um it's been bought and yeah there is a fully playable prototypeof time Splitters 4 on there so let me just as someone who's not all that familiar with the time Splitters series what is it about number four then was this kind of a game that was never finished what
what kind of happened it so it just never came out it was never finished it was it's been rumored for years time Splitters 4 as so we got time Splitters one two and three on the PS2 and twoand three were on like Xbox and GameCube Etc as well and then it was always you know it was a big series it was always time splits 4 would come out it was in development and it's kind ofbeen in development hell because obviously it got revived when was it last year that was another one that was going to be time Splitters next so I think they kind of they' put put time splitters for aside yesand uh went on to time Splitters next then uh embracia group took over I think free radical cancelled the studios all this was going on in Nottingham and yeah all all all happened in Nottingham funny enough but timeit
the next time splits has just been in development hell since like 2007 2008 hasn't it Ravi it almost sounds like J nuk forever time SC just actually leaked some footage of time Splitters next as well on there wego yeah and it and it does look really cool actually from where they got you know so uh what he's done is he's posted some screenshots of just one of the levels which looks like a campaign level arounda kind of like a haunted castle stormy Castle from the outside and the graphics look really nice and it's a you know it's raining and uh he's got some sort of huge time gun something you'd probably see onCall of Duty Duty zombies like you know with like a stop poch on the side of it and stuff and David do uh who obviously famously worked at free radical and you know worked on well you know worked
star work everything rare before that Dr do yeah Dr do yeah he has legitimized this he has said yep that's they were the levels we were we were working on and it all looks credible I recognize these levelsabsolutely so what lukai has said is he doesn't know how to dump you know from a HD driver or anything like that but he's going to reach out and if anybody wants to help him he will put itonline uh so I'm sure somebody is probably already helping him yeah um and it will be there for us all to play the Prototype of time Splitters 4 and as Ravi just said I'm sure we'll probably all getthe uh the newer version timeit next yeah it's it's disappointing man because I absolutely love free radical they're amazing guys and you know it's been just really tough getting a new time Splitters game out there and I think
everybody wants it you know but yeah it's oh gosh it's it's a story of frustration isn't it yeah I'm very I'm very pleased that this has been found and preserved because it's always the weirdest ways isn't it hebasically said he found this uh found this this dev kit for £525 and then it's happened to find this sitting on the the hard disk of it so the fact that you know you imagine like you said thestudio is closing down equipment gets sold on you know often they do like company auctions where people buy stuff not everyone wipes the hard diss if the the employees have been let go so it is very very coolwhen these are kind of rescued I think you know rather than just being wiped and lost to history um and like you said I'm sure because there is such a passionate Community around time Splitters there'll be people helping
him out already to dump this you know this will be online before we know I'm sure um kind of how finished it is we'll be interesting to see do you know how far along they got with the gamebefore it was pulled it didn't it doesn't say so obviously this is a July bill and the company got you know was done by the December right um so I can't imagine they got much more done but wehave a first level on there by a looks of things so I mean it'd be incredible if there was like an entire campaign or you know multiplayer and everything well the fans the fans could rebuild it up butI'm I'm not sure if um you know there's assets as well who owns them now and which company could uh you know stamp down on it yeah true very cool that out there though hopefully will get a chance
The hosts wrap up the news segment and remind listeners where to find links and articles. They then read the sponsor message for ExpressVPN and explain how it can unlock different streaming libraries.
to play it soon so if you want to check that out on all of the Retro Gaming stories that we talked about on the podcast this week you don't have to Google around I save you the job openyour podcast app the notes are all in there or you can head to the website and click through from the Retro hour.com right then patrons stay tuned we have got a couple of exclusive news stories just for ourpatrons because we chop all the adverts out of the patrons version of the podcast so we don't want to give you a short a show instead to get a couple more stories they're on the way and of coursethis week's special guest the father of Internet radio calll malamud is coming up in just a second before we do that let's take a second to give a massive thank you to a regular sponsor of our little podcast
that is our friends at expressvpn now it does seem to be a a bone of contention I've seen these articles everywhere whenever you go on Facebook or anything like that you know always the headlines isn't you Netflix areputting the price up again price on Disney plus it's all over the place and you think about how much money collectively spend I've tried to work this out before cuz I remember I was kind of canceling I don'twant to work it out and the same I cancelled Virgin Media you know the the cable service I thought it's getting too expensive there was that big movement a few years ago cord cutting they called it didn't theywhere yeah it be it would be cheaper it's it's kind of like you know when they promised um the paperless office when computers came it's like it doesn't happen you know no I mean I I'd say you know
the amount of services we subscribe or my M does you know without me knowing half the time probably over 100 quid a month easily on streaming services you had them all up you know Netflix Disney plus Prime youthink about them all but using expressvpn you can get value for your money here because you know you think of services like Netflix for example did you know that they've got literally thousands more shows than you can normallysee because Netflix have got I think it's around 90 different libraries around the world so whichever country you go in you'll see different shows so if you open Netflix here in the UK for example totally different to whatsomeone in America or Italy or Australia Seas but using our sponsor expressvpn you can basically really easily just through the click of a button change your online location expressvpn have got you know over 90 countries that you can
choose from so every time you run out of things to watch you can then switch to another country and unlock an entirely new library of shows and movies and this isn't matter I know you're doing all the timeRAV you always tell us about you know random things that you're watching on different Netflix libraries around the world well it's it's not just shows um it's also movies so you know movies have certain rights in certain regionsand and there's also stuff like movie series as well so you'll be able to see you know part one of The Godfather in one region or part two in another but um what I've been checking out is ofcourse Quenton Tarantino's classic pul fiction oh yeah um yeah on Netflix Canada actually and um uh Twin Peaks as well which is just oh one of the most trippy series absolutely love that and uh that kind of ntsc
um so popular D drama Vibe uh on uh Netflix USA and also Forest Gump uh classic classic one uh a really long film actually on uh the French Netflix did you cry at the end come on don't lieI I always cry at Forest gum I'm Back to the Future obviously Back to the Future interesting H but yeah but that's the thing about Express VPN tap of a button change your country an entire new library ofshows movies that you didn't know you had access to before and you can even get discounts as well well now this is just between us but you know that some Services Cost Less in other countries for example ifyou subscribe to Netflix from Argentina it is a fraction of the price from here in the UK so you didn't hear that from us just out there and express VPN pays for itself and so much more as well
less than $7 a month so it is a no-brainer to try expressvpn and actually if you want to give it a go why don't use our exclusive link you help out the podcast and also you will get threemonths free on top of a one-year plan as well so go to expressvpn.com Retro expressvpn.com retro I'll put that in our show notes as well so you can check it out and a big thank you to our friendsat expressvpn for their continued support of the show right then thank you for checking out the news this week we'll have more for you on next Friday show and keep it here uh Ravi and I love these kind
The interview segment begins with an introduction to Carl Malamud, the founder of the first internet radio station. The hosts frame him as a key pioneer in early internet broadcasting and digital exhibitions.
of really techy interviews as today we talk to a fascinating guest the father of Internet radio and podcasting as well let's be honest K malamud our special guest he's next on the Retro Hour
podcast you're listening to the Retro Hour podcast and it is time to welcome on this week's very special guest and today's guest is actually a real internet Pioneer and actually it's kind of doing what we do now over30 years ago the very first internet broadcasting radio station which was called internet talk radio and also was behind the internet 1996 World exhibition which showcased the internet's potential as a global stage for information and culture so it'sgoing to be incredible to some his memories and uh how this whole internet radio Revolution began with our guest this week car malamud how's it going Carl oh pretty good pretty good thanks for having me yeah appreciate you
Carl explains how his interest in technology began in childhood around CERN and early computers. He also describes his early radio experience, his work with modems and university systems, and how he first got online.
taking the time to talk to us and uh turning you know the mic around on you cuz I know you did lots of interviews on that internet talk radio back in the day so it's going to be interestingto kind of hear it from from your perspective but one thing we always like to do with our guests is get a bit of background on their interest in technology because I know before you did Internet Radio youwrote books about computers you were a journalist as well so what initially got you interested in computers where did your your interest in them begin oh I actually it began when I was real little my father was uhran the main ring at the FY National accelerator laboratory yeah uh Physics laboratory like shern in in uh Geneva in fact I I spent the first four five years of my life um in Geneva and loar because my
father was working at CERN and then when he was building family lab uh you know those old early PDP computers didn't boot themselves up until you flipped a bunch of switches and then it got smart enough to readthe paper tape and so one of my jobs on Saturdays is my father would bring me out to the lab and I I'd teach the PDP how to boot itself up so I I was using technology pretty earlyuh this was late 60s when I started using them and and and then I I got interested in in um I I was studying economics in Indiana University I was doing a PhD in in economics and I wasinterested in the uh IBM antitrust suit and the AT&T devestator this is when AT&T got broken up into a lots of little telephone companies and I figured if I was doing that for my doctoral work I should probably
know a little bit more about computers and started working for the Computing Center ended up dropping out of my PhD program and and you know there you go um doing computers ever since so when did you get ahome system and uh a micro as it as it was called back there and what were you kind of doing with it well so like early 80s uh you know in fact late 70s I I was using youknow teletypes that were talking to PDP computers over modems and you know modems were not quite yet going at 300 B they were still slower and and then I at Indiana University we had Min computers we had vaxesand and primes and and things like that and they were also time sharing systems um so I kind of terminals were they connected yeah they were basically terminals on a multi-user system and and a lot of those weren't
being used when I went to work for the Computing Center because the the Mainframe people were Mainframe programmers and they didn't quite trust these these mini computers and so there were several vaxes that really weren't being used andI I started to give every student in the business school at IU for example a a free account on the vax and and they they could use that to to to do various projects in in their coursework alot of them were studying for mbas master business administration um and so I I began dealing with users on a regular basis and it was different from the kind of the Mainframe culture where you you walked in atthree in the morning to the card reader and because that was the only time you could get access to it and you'd run your cards through and you know wait 30 minutes until your your program finished uh with
the mini computers you could actually type something and see it on the screen on on a cathod Ru well where did your interest in audio and radio come from were you were you interested in radio at this timeor doing anything in it before you got yeah I was a music uh a music guy like until I was 20 years old that's all I did so I um I I went to the interlan Arts Academy formy senior year of high school which is a a arts program up in in Michigan a residential school and and as part of that I was program director of the radio station and I I was also I majoredin trumpet but what I learned is where where I came from I was I was always the very best trumpet player I was always you know first chair and I got the interlocking and I barely made the jazz
band that do make the orchestra these people were good and so when I went to to college I decided I better like keep doing my music but that should probably also pull up some additional job skills um sothat that's how I ended up uh studying economics and then ended up doing Computing did you um learn much about radio and its kind of technology and how it related to Computing as well uh not in high schoolno this was this was L I graduated in 1976 um and so I I learned how to read news I learned how to work the board um you know did that kind of stuff but the kind of operationalside of it yeah yeah it was operational U you know it's mostly uh so it was a low power FM thing and you know was a lot of music uh for you know the kids um on C and
then you know we had news and and various other things were there but I I didn't really learn about the the computer side of audio till I started uh uh internet talk radio and that that was in likelate 92 I started working on that and got one hell in education I bet I mean before that you did touch earlier on uh you know modems you mentioned the 300 board modems there what about kind of personallywhen did you first get online and were you ingrained in that cly early online world we using stuff like bulletin boards at that stage oh yeah yeah cuz when I was at Indiana University one of the things Idid is I worked with others to get us connected to the internet and then after I left the IU Computing Center I ended up in Washington DC and was I worked for the Federal Reserve board for a year
and then became a consultant and then as part of that I built my own PC um you know ordered a board from Taiwan and ordered a case in a power supply and and you know added some of theUnix tools that were available this is all you know 3.0 3.1 or actually I think it was even earlier than that um but as part of that I connected my PC up to um to the uh to usethat in uucp so I was able to start sending email to people because I I had done that when I was at the IU you know Computing uh Center so when I was off on my own I kindof knew these things already existed and so I I I kind of hook myself up and that let me send email U which was like a big deal and when did you kind of um have the vision of
Carl расскаls how internet talk radio began, from the idea for Geek of the Week to the technical challenges of live streaming and file distribution. He explains the need for sound cards, software hacks, and the early audience of technically minded listeners.
creating a internet radio station where did it come from oh well it came from a couple things I I was um I had uh so like in 1991 992 I I traveled around the world um you know halfdozen times and wrote a book called exploring the internet about the the internet you know starting to to grow and turn into something real it was a technical travel L is what I called it it's online you youcan uh you can download it and read for free um but as part of that I I was involved in the internet engineering task force I I was really like you know learning about the internet protocols uh Ihad written a book about tcpip protocols and as part of that I read every RFC um because I had to write about them in a book and in the internet engineering task force they were beginning to experiment with
with audio and it it was actually live streaming uh it was really low bandwidth um low bit rate uh not very good audio but the idea was allowing people in um remote locations to participate in the internet engineeringtask force meetings and not only did we do audio but we were doing video and it was you know little bitty images right we're talking 240 pixels wide for the the whole video uh frame and like you knowfour frames per second whereas today you know you're looking at 30 frames a second or overdrive in you know 60 frames a second and you're looking at high definition even like on YouTube it works but in those daysthat's all we at but it was interesting to see these meetings starting to like you know have remote participants and one day I was just want try to figure out what to do after having written that book exploring
the internet I was at an ietf meeting and and I thought to myself you know I could do a um I could do an interview with people and you know rather than trying to do it live why don'twe pre-record it and let people download it right because then you could you could actually have 8bit audio instead of you know four bit and it seemed like a reasonable thing to do and so I went up toa bunch of people I knew like vit Surf and others and I said hey I'm going to do a radio show uh what do you think and they're all like hey this is great um so that's how geekof the week was born I I was wondering um had you witnessed any of the gigs that happened cuz I know there was some like live streaming and uh uh multicasting back in the days um with uh Mone
technology as well multicasting was kind of going to be the the way forward in fact I I the name of my nonprofit was called the internet multicasting service and I I knew about there were a couple like youknow one-off concerts and things that had happened on the internet which were cool and uh I I was aware of those but I was thinking more in terms of actually starting a real radio station and and my insightwas that live streaming was good um but that was really hard hard to do when it was small audience and so so in addition to live streaming stuff make sure you've got a recorded file on online that's availableand so before I started the internet multicasting service I took another round the world trip and and I stopped by Amsterdam and Tokyo and I talked to my friend Rick Adams who ran uunet uh one of the first
big isps and I said look I'm starting this radio station can I have FTP space on on your central servers and what I'll do is we'll produce a program and then we'll we'll upload the program and and thenpeople will go to you and they'll download the program from you uh I also wanted to kind of socialize what I was doing because these were considered to be really big files a half hour of audio was 30megabytes and that was like being really piggish with the internet it was kind of a scarce resource right we're talking you know International lines running at T1 speeds 1.5 million bits per second and so if you were usingsubstantial bandwidth you you kind of owed it to the rest of the community to let them know what you were doing and in fact if you did live streaming etiquette in those days was you went on the ietf
list and you said hey everybody I'm going to be doing live streaming next Tuesday and someone would go oh no no no no no I'm already doing live streaming next Tuesday you can't do it and you kind ofhad to like give people advanced notice that that that this was going to happen and in fact when we put the floor of the US House and Senate on online for live streaming it was just an 8 kilobitaudio stream it wasn't that big um I got flamed by a bunch of people saying look Carl if you put the US Congress online for live streaming pretty soon every parliament in the World's Gonna want to be onthe internet and there's just not enough bandwidth to be doing that and luckily Vince surf kind of chimed in and said well I don't know if that would be a bad thing I I actually heard that yeah some
of those early gigs as well um they would take up you know quite a lot of bandwidth and um it would it would really really you know slow things down um when they were performing um I think theywere doing a few from Xerox Park as well Tire Damage weren't they the group yeah yeah yeah yeah no absolutely you had to rent the Internet those days and not rent as in pay money but you you hadto reserve your bandwidth and and if you didn't you'd get flamed by people saying you know all the international bandwidth being used by your your city silly Rock and Roll concert or your ietf meeting or whatever it wasyou were doing so you you kind of had the to reserve that that's something we don't really have to do these days anymore and around this stage I mean this was before Technologies like MP3 were even around so
I'm interested in the process of how you recorded the programs and how did you digitize them for distribution oh well that that was yeah no NP 3 wasn't there uh so we settled on the uh sun.format it was an8 bit audio format we actually recorded on on uh that de so we we were doing 44 you know kilohertz recording and there was a sound conversion Program in those days called Socks s Sox andit was written by a guy I knew who was working at the um the Mathematics Institute in the Netherlands a guy named Guido van rossom who went on and and developed the Python programming language but in those dayswhat he was doing was this sound you know Exchange program uh but it didn't support 44.1 in in 48 KZ and so I hacked socks to add that capability U it's just a matter of changing a parameter so
it it sampled it at a higher rate uh but that so we we started uh with full Fidelity dat recording and then we downsized it to to file so that it would fit into like 30 megabytes for ahalf hour program and that was that was about as big as you could get away with in those days I I was also wondering like what were your considerations for people with different sound cards and and different setupsbecause uh you know everything wasn't standardized back then well that was the deal when you said hey I'm doing a radio program on the internet the FAQ began with okay go get a sound card and install it andyou know if you were on a Dos platform you know you you had you know different drivers and on a Unix platform and um you really had to go get the device drivers and get it so it could
talk to the sound card it wasn't a totally trivial thing a few years later you know sound cards just started being built into every PC that was sold but but in those days you had to go buy oneyou also had to like download the TCP IP software from a place like a bulletin border get it on a floppy disc um because your your computer wasn't going to be able to talk to the modem and andnegotiate the TCP IP protocol so you you had to install internet as well as a sound card to to play in this game so a lot of our our our listeners were people that had like sun workstations rightor or the kind of higher-end workst that you'd expect to see in a in a research lab like Xerox or or at a university um there were a few people using the PCS uh there was one guy that
actually didn't really have internet uh but MCI mail had an FTP Gateway and what it would do is it would break up the 30 megabytes into 200 individual NCI messages and send them to you and then when yougot all the messages you would reassemble your audio file and this is how he listened to geek of the week every week that's awesome I mean know obviously you the P first person doing this there was kind of
The interview covers the physical studio setup, partnerships with the National Press Club, and how the station was marketed through mailing lists. Carl also explains the nonprofit model, funding challenges, and why the project eventually shut down.
no template either and you think of traditional radio before that I mean it was all you know soundproof Studios and expensive complexes what was kind of your setup in those early days of Internet talk radio did you havea studio um how many PCs did you have how did it kind of work behind the scenes well we actually um so you know I began in my house out in in Virginia but we very quickly after umI started it we rented a a studio in the national press building in Washington DC and we sound proof the studio um so we had nice Mackie mixing boards and we had uh that recording discs and and wewe had um you know real microphones and headphones and I mean we actually built a real studio in there and because we were in a national press building I kind of wandered upstairs to the National Press Club where
they had all their luncheons um and and people like the dolly Lama and Al Gore and Larry King you know would come in and do a one-hour lunch and speech and they had broadcast booths and one was occupiedby national public radio and one was occupied by C-SPAN and the third one was empty and so I said hey could I have that broadcast booth and in return I actually put the national Press Club up on theinternet I I ran a a a cable from my studio up up to the 13th floor and and got them online I happened to own press.org and so I gave him a domain name and built him a websiteso it it was a nice fair trade but as part of that I was able to record all the all the lunch and at first we just recorded them and then ftpd them up and about a year later
we started live streaming all the lunch out that's pretty amazing I I was wondering did you have those dats still and uh you know have them in the higher quality oh the dats are I think in my basementat this point um you know we at one point we were going to go back and rescue the Masters and and I I think I still got them but you know the Au files actually sound remarkably good umbecause we engineered our our our p es on on the sound the compression and the EQ and all that we kind of optimized it for AM radio um because that was a level of sound quality we had availableto us and they they come out nice and clean I mean they sound oldfashioned but but they still sound good so I'm I'm happy with the Au files and we obviously converted those to EG 3 as well um
and they're all up on the internet archive I was I was wondering how you uh marketed the station then in those early days and get the word out oh that was easy sent email to the internet engineering taskforce list and there was one other big list called com priv and said hey everybody I'm doing a radio program and so each week i' I'd um send out a a kind of a form email saying you knowon this week for Geek of the week we're interviewing Tim burner Lee or or you know Steve daring the guy who did IPv6 and multicasting was actually his pxd dissertation and so they were pretty in-depth um you knowtechnical interviews but since we were in the nation na press building anyway we added the lunch uh I put a satellite dish on the roof of the national press building and we joined the public radio satellite system so
I was able to get syndication rights to Tech Nation for example which is a great talk show that still runs um and so we put all those programs online and then we started helping out places like the JohnF Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and we went in there and you know recorded some of their performances and did some interactive things uh digital cameras were just starting to happen then so we had our digital camerasto take pictures of things um and so we did original Productions as well as you know the the the podcast neque of the week um and of course in those days it wasn't called a podcast that was somethingthat came along later in podcasting is specific to RSS syndication and m 3 files but I it was uh getting people participating kind of a harder sell than you know selling the already informed geek a radio show you
know convincing them we can put you on the internet you know I didn't worry about that it it um you know we didn't care how many people were listening you know it was a few hundred people a weekwere listening to the podcasts and the other program they took off we did a deal with Harper Collins in which they they gave us rights to bunch of cassette tapes they had called Harper audio and it was peoplelike TF Elli and Robert Frost reading their own poems and a wonderful collection so we put those online and people just discovered them um we didn't worry about about numbers in fact when we first did live streaming thisthis was funny um the Associated Press Center reporter in and and we were live streaming Al Gore I think and I was down in the studio looking at my son workstation you know because this was going out live
and the reporter's right behind me and he goes can you tell how many people are listening right now and I looked at it and I said uh six and you could see his face fall he's like really that'sit and I said yeah there's six people but they're on four different continents um at which point I think I got his attention there were big numbers but then though I guess you know like you said it wasit was four different con I mean that that was something that you know radio you know radio stations were limited to where their their um you know their their their radio waves would go and my radio station reachedall over the world uh so I mean that that that was different than than what you were used to with with radio that that got the reporter's attention yeah it's interesting to think as well about the the kind
of lineup that you had on internet talk radio because it sounds like you had quite a a diverse schedule of programming there different programs that you're putting out so how did you decide on the content for the stationwhat was kind of your vision for the type of programming and the the type of audience that you wanted to attract well I made it a public radio station when when we first launched it's funny we made frontpage of the New York Times above the fold I mean it was the headline you know move over Ted Turner um and my phone just rang off the hook because you know you make front pag New York Timesyou get a lot of random phone calls coming in but one of them was like Nicholas Negron and and Nick called out he said Nicholas neger Ponte I'm director of the MIT media lab can you send me your
business plan and at the time I had thought of like the business plan it was just we're going to do a radio station and so I thought about it real hard and I called Nick back a couple dayslater and said Nick I've decided to make this a public radio station I I think it's too early to be bringing in you know do money to you know and and my worry was that the medium was earlyenough that I knew we were going to want to change directions periodically and maybe do a World's fair on the internet we ended up doing that in 1996 um we ended up putting the Securities and Exchange Commission Edgardatabase online and my worry was that if we were a a DOT radio station right trying to make it a a business that that our investors just wouldn't understand if we came in and said listen we're going to
make a slight diversion here and you know get into the database business because we think that's important to do and so I told Nick and I'm making it a public radio station and he he was kind of disgustedwith me because he he thought there was commercial potential there but I I thought I I I am a big fan of public radio public TV um and so our content was kind of oriented around that um youknow that frame of mind but the the basic answer on how we chose programming is we took what we could get right I mean you know I saw Harper Collins had a bunch of cassette tape they were sellingand I called them up and you had to explain what the internet was and they were like okay I don't see any harm in this and so they sent me a box of cassette tapes and we digitized them
public radio satellite system uh there were a couple programs out there that had had me on as a guest and I called Mora marks up for Tech nation and said hey you know can I Syndicate your program andshe was like sure Press Club we happened to be in the Press building so we did the national Press Club um so yeah you took what you could get we were small there were you know half of usMax and you know more like three people so Marty Lucas was our our um our audio producer and uh my friend Luther Brown was our program director Luther uh had been a producer for Tom broka in NBC newsright um and uh ended up working with me on on the early days of Internet talk radio it wasn't a huge operation there were like you know there were maybe six of us and that that included running large
government databases and and and other things that we did besides the audio programming it's interesting to that you ran it as a you know basically a nonprofit corporation because I know you did have contributions from some parts ofthe tech sector I believe Sun Microsystems contributed towards the running of it didn't they I mean how did you how did you fund its running then I mean did you get much contributions from the tech industry no wellwe got some some Microsystems was great uh Eric Schmidt was at s in those days and so he gave me computers and I knew they're networking guys because I had written a book about you know Sun TCP IPand you know Sun NFS and the other you know um Network protocols so I knew the folks at Sun uh I knew Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly media and he thought it was an interesting experiment and so both sun
and and O'Reilly gave me a little bit of cash to get things started um son gave me equipment but you know at the end of the day we really weren't getting a lot of you know donation money comingin and you know by end of 96 I was unable to bring in enough funding and so we basically stopped doing the internet multi casting service then and and you know at that time the do thing was juststarting to explode and you you just couldn't get charitable contributions for a public radio station on the internet you couldn't get charitable contributions for you know things like the the buy software I I shared the internet um umsystems Consortium and they they produce bind which is the software that the the domain name system runs on on you know any Unix platform is is Bine based um getting that funded was heart you know the days of
that first nonprofit was maybe a a 4year um time span on that up so I what I did is in 2007 I started my current nonprofit called public resource and I I've been running that ever since so II I like operating in the nonprofit world I think there's more space to do creative things and more space to do things that are good for the world as opposed to good for the bottom line your program geek
Carl reflects on the origins of Geek of the Week, the guests he interviewed, and the broader culture of early internet standards and protocols. He also discusses how the web, multicast, and open standards evolved in ways he did not expect.
of the week was a very Innovative show um where did the idea come from and I was wondering did you have any influence from the magazine culture at the time oh a little bit I mean I had beenwriting for for you know trade press for long time I'd written for infow world and I was a weekly colist for communications week and monthly for data communication so I I was familiar with the Zen that are outthere I and and it looked at them I mean the the reason I did geek of the week is is my Talent poll was the internet engineer task force and my my basic moce was I I would goto an ietf meeting with a DAT deck and a microphone and I'd caral as many as my friends as I could say hey want you come up to the hotel room and I want to record an interview with
you so that that's how we came up with geek of the week and I guess that was the ideal kind of um subject for your audience as well yeah in fact one of our taglines later on when weadded other kinds of programming was finally the medium isn't the message um because you know geek of the week was all about the internet inter but again that was a townpool it was the people that that it wasmy colleagues and my peers the people that were helping develop internet protocols and and for you know a half dozen years going to iatf meetings was a big part of my life and it is incredible looking back Imean obviously the whole archive is available on archive.org which I'll link up in the show notes and I was going through the um the archives of geek of the week over the weekend and the first one that jumped
out to me was seeing your interview with Tim burners Lee in 1993 and I mean you know the worldwide web was uh hardly out the door of you know basically being a an alpha product at CERN at thatstage you know what I mean it was very early and so many other internet Pioneers as well so in terms of a a time capsule looking back at that time I mean you really captured some really exciting momentsin Internet development I mean are there any memorable interviews or moments that stand out to you and maybe if you've listened back in more recent years anything that kind of stood out to you listening back oh I don'tknow but you know the so the worldwide when we started putting the US Patent database and Securities and Exchange Commission databases online uh the web existed uh but I was very skeptical of it Tim had showed it to
me when when I visited him in CERN like in 91 92 I think I I he give me a demo was on a next workstation and my my reaction was yeah this is interesting but I don't think it'llscale um and I actually left it out in my book exploring the internet because I I didn't think it was an internet thing I thought it was a l thing right because he showed it to me on afancy next workstation with fancy graphics and things like that but but um obviously I was wrong but we do when we first started doing the databases we we didn't do it on a web server we did an FTPserver uh we had a wave database so we had full teex search and we used gopher and it was only about a year later that I said yeah we should probably do this web thing and so we we
brought in httpd and got it up and running and and started offering it on on on the worldwide web but but again I was skeptical when I first saw the web I I just didn't see how I couldpossibly scale to a global level which shows you never to listen to people that think they're experts did the audience give you much feedback I was wondering did you receive physical stuff as well as you know email ohwell no audience email is what you got um I mean yeah I I got some letters um occasionally uh you know snail mail but but no it was mostly email and it was mostly on on the mailing listright the ietf list and com priv and the various other lists that were there and that that's where the feedback would come in um you know and and usually the feedback wasn't about the radio thing it was more
about the content of the of the podcast about people you know like arguing about whether IP version six was gonna like work or not you know issues like that anyone who thinks that flame Wars are a recent thingwith social media let's go back to those uh uset archives back in the early 90s or the ' 80s it's always been around oh my oh my and it's it was vicious well you did touch on before theinternet 1996 World exhibition that you put on which um was a real groundbreaking project I think and that kind of it brought the concept of a world fair into the digital age so what inspired you to create thatCU I mean it was a very ambitious event particularly something to do online so tell us kind of how the seeds of that started and how did you bring that to life well it was online but also in
the real world so we actually had um over 50 countries participating uh we had a dozen heads of state endorse it so you know there were letters from Boris yelson and Bill Clinton and you know the president ofkyrgistan you know congratulations on internet 1996 World Exposition um but it was also in the real world so for example Vince surf was an MCI in those days um he convinced FCI and kdd to give us a T3line across the Pacific to break in a new fiber cable that had been laid between the US and Japan and that was like a $300 million contribution I if you had actually tried to get a T3 line inthose days you that's what you'd pay um to do that but he gave it to us and we were like the F for a while it was the fastest International line on the internet um and then in Japan
uh there were all sorts of real world street fairs in in in you know um you know IBM was a big sponsor of it in in Japan in Taiwan I went there and and the the main train stationwas outfitted with a whole bunch of you know banners and PCs and you know people standing there saying can I show you the internet and they actually had it all over um all over the island um in Taiwanum and and so that it was used as a way of rolling out the internet in in places like Japan and Taiwan um Thailand was a big participant in it um Netherlands had all sorts of activities that theyactually was the headquarters for the the World's Fair uh for a while and and it was a way of showcasing what the internet was and and so it was fun it was fun we we you know it was
kind of we were able to let loose a little bit and I had been fascinated by world's fairs as as that was where a lot of Technology rolled itself out right in the late 1800s and early 1900s Worldfaires were where where technology was shown to people and where people learned about it and so it seemed to me that a World's fair as a metaphor would be a useful one to do and I was able todraft a bunch of Internet folks to to work with me on it um because they they found it useful in their countries like Jun maray who's the vice president of research at Ko University in Japan found it areally useful hook to go and see government officials and say hi Japan is participating in a World's fair we should do something so it was a good way of attracting attention from from folks like that and introduce the
internet to them I was reading as well that the The Archives of the fair were put onto CD ROMs and sealed into a physical Time Capsule so when can that be opened and how did you plan for futuregenerations to access it because I mean you know CD ROM drives are already a bit scarce in 20124 so the the the the World's Fair book which um MIT press published a full color coffee table book uh hadan audio CD in the back that Marty Lucas did the programming on that was a lot of nice original composition and then there was also a CD ROM um in the front that used early Java software as theuser interface the archive was buried um uh in Japan and I have no idea if theyve dug it up or or what happened to it what I did do however is I took as much of the website as
we could and I made sure to keep that spinning and it's still there if you go to park.org uh it's a little primitive uh there were a few organizations that insisted we take down their materials but as ageneral rule we don't like to do that but but it's still up and you know it's so you can see the the HTML pages and uh the graphics which are pretty primitive um but then you know the music'sstill online and and a lot of the press that we got is still there and my world's fairbook um I I got copyright back when it went out of print so we we uh we made that available andthat was kind of fun because you know we we allowed anyone to be a country for the internet World fa we just decided we weren't going to get in the business of deciding who was the country or not
so both Tibet and Taiwan just grabbed on to that and said hey we're there we'll do a country Pavilion we actually got a protest from the Chinese government for allowing Taiwan to be be a country and Tibet wasvery glad to be a country and so I was able to get the do Lama to write the forward to to the book and then in 97 I was able to travel to darula and present him with acopy of the book uh which was very cool because I I got had to spend 30 minutes uh with him in his private office and that that was that was quite the experience that it's great to hear thatit's archived you know so people can look back on it as well because it do seemed really groundbreaking for the time and I mean going back to internet talk radio you kind of touched on before that you you
had to close it down and I think you said late 96 which really I mean that was around the time that I remember first discovering internet radio that's kind of when you know platforms and you know services likereal audio started to become usable to the the everyday person did kind of feel like you were maybe just a little bit too early to the game and it must have kind of felt a little bit sad tohave to close down your station just when it kind of thought the rest of the world was just starting to latch on to it did that feel a bit well it was early to the game which is whyI made it a nonprofit rather than a for-profit um you I I I stand by that decision I I got to do a lot of things that that if it was a for-profit company wouldn't have been able to
do it but then yeah Rob Glazer came along and did real audio Mark Kuban you know did his broadcast.com thing and was able to flip that really quickly to yahooo for a couple billion dollars but no I Ihad no regrets um uh you know I wish that the nonprofit could have been funded and um it's something I mean we were doing a lot of operational things like these big government databases and and and things likethat and and you know we thought it was a valuable public part of the internet but it's always been like that funding an operational nonprofit on the internet like the one I run now public resource that's always beena challenge um it's it's always really hard to convince people that that some things really should just be public right not patented not not you know man- in the-middle you know intermediary Gateway uh some things really should be
distributed and open and yeah available for everybody to use and I think there's an important role for that and but it's it's always been hard to attract Foundation funding for that kind of stuff you your work's been oftencredited as a precursor to Modern podcasting do you see that as an evolution oh I don't know you know I I I don't mind calling it podcasting I I get flamed by the people that invented podcasting as aterm with again RSS and imp 3 but no no it's it's uh it's been interesting to watch uh podcasting grow and you know become fairly ubiquitous it's it's it's a cool thing and I think today know there areso many podcasts that exist on you know just on YouTube for example and they call those podcasts and they're not delivered via RSS so the term does feel like it's Chang some so I think looking back at what
you were doing then it would definitely fit the the kind of modern term of podcasting I think fall under that umbrella well somebody came along a few years later and actually got a pathon podcasting um and efff useduh my prior art and other prior art to kind of beat that patent back but yeah look I I've never been religious on use of terminology and stuff like that I think you need to be a little bitflexible as to defining these things you need to be a little liberal I mean John pastell said said be be careful on what you send and liberal on what you receive and I think that applies to ideas aswell right you know you should have some discipline in what you're doing but but you should keep an open mind on what other people are doing um because that you know there was way too much table pounding in
the early days on internet standards uh particularly like International standards organization you know had a very set way of doing networking and you know there were two internets in the early days there there was open systems inter connectionwhich was the official International standards organization protocol Suite with very expensive standards I mean it cost thousands of dollars to buy these things and they were they were feature Rich let's say and then then there was this otherinternet that kind of rag tag unincorporated association of a few hundred people around the world put together the internet engineering task force and we weren't supposed to win right it was IBM and AT&T and defense department all thoughtOSI was going to be the internet and AT&T particularly thought it would be a smart Network right in which you would you know every text you send would cost 20 cents right it was it was kind of a
a shopping model of of Internet services ours ended up winning because it was open and distributed and most importantly the standards were available for free so any random person could walk in and come up with a new protocollike like Tim BL did or or like you know the email folks did and uh it's it's yrs succeeded in the other one didn't but but it wasn't obvious in the late 80s that that our version of the
The conversation turns to digital preservation, copyright battles, and Carl's work making legal and public-interest materials available online. He also describes his current projects, including large-scale book scanning in India.
internet would actually work yeah could have gone a very different way definitely um well one thing that's a real Hot Topic in recent years is you know particularly with you know things like subscription models and you know gamesconsoles for example a lot of them you know rumors that they're going to be losing physical media and everything's going digital now digital archiving and the preservation of digital media has become really important to a lot of peoplehow do you think we should should approach the preservation of things like internet history and digital content for future Generations have you got any thoughts on that cuz I know that's something you've always been passionate about well myso my day job at public resources we make the law available right we we um make building codes available for free we make State Legislative codes like the state of Georgia we just won a huge win in the
European Union court of justice just just now um in which they said that harmonized Public Safety standards like safety of toys are the law in Europe and therefore need to be made available but increasingly what's been happening isso like I was sued by the state of Georgia for putting the official code of Georgia annotated online and we were sued for copyright violations uh it's the law right it's this isn't you know any big secrets hereum we lost in the district court we went to the US court of appeals and then to the US Supreme Court and we won and it's the proposition that edicts of government which is the law and legal materialsissued in the name of the state don't have copyright in the United States but despite that win what Lexus and Georgia have done is is they basically have a streaming solution to the law in which in order to
to get the official code of Georgia annotated you have to subscribe to the Lexus Advance service and you can you can get your law as a service but you're not able to download the entire code and put iton line and it's ironic because when I won in the Supreme Court the Chief Justice said that citizens shouldn't have be limited to economy class access to the law they should be upgraded to first class and despite youknow this first class upgrade that the Chief Justice gave me I still can't get the official code of Georgia annotated and and so this is an issue not just for for archiving you know content from Tumblr or YouTubeor on the Internet arive archiving the web it's also a huge situation for you know fundamental databases of our democracies like the laws um so law Librarians cannot download official code of Georgia annotated and it used to be
that you know a law library in Georgia would have all the previous versions of the official code of Georgia anotated because sometimes you had to dig back in the stacks to consult those and with the current systems beingput in place you no longer have that saf guard anymore you're counting on you know a few private players to safeguard history for you and that's not going to happen right that's that's always when there's a single pointof failure the failure will occur yeah and it does feel like I mean you know you kind of touch on the copyright aspect of it there as well I mean we had uh Jason Scott from internet archive onI know you continually see the amount of stories about companies demanding takedowns or suing them it feels like it's such a mindfield that balance between archiving and treading on copyright it just feels like there needs to be some
way solving that but I'm not sure what it is well I I get that all the time because of the stuff that I mean we were sued for posting all the building and electrical and fire codes for theUnited States and we lost and we finally ended up winning but it took 10 years of litigation and this is for something that everybody agrees is the law right and the idea that it should be hidden behind A1thousand you know pay wall with keep off the grass signs is is just nuts and we get that a lot with some of our other databases that we have online now I I tend to focus on you knowthings that everybody any reasonable person agrees ought to be public like the law but even there that's a huge bone of contention um like I said we got sued for posting building codes and fire codes which which is
a little bit nuts well um obviously geek of the week shows are all available on um archive.org and uh listening back to these old shows they kind of have you know the history the evolution of the internet umbut I was wondering were there any different paths or any any kind of big surprises that have happened that you didn't expect to happen well we thought multicasting was the way audio and video was going to be distributedright that there would be a a multicast backbone which you know connected uh different Islands together with dedicated lines or at least you know lines with high priority and that somehow the audio would get distributed that way andand instead it's all shoved in Port 80 um know HTTP protocol and so I I thought multicasting was going to be the the wave of the future but but it turns out it it's it's used so multicast um
packets are used on your local area network it's it's how your Windows Server discovers your printer for example they they each advertise that hey I'm here and then there's various protocols to connect them together um but it's nota wide area protocol so that that was the biggest surprise to me the other big surprise is you know this space was a huge deal um when I did the internet World's Fair I I got um uh itwas Western Digital I believe gave us two terabytes of disc drives and that was considered oh my God infinite amount of space I've got that on my key ring now in my on my carc case yeah yeah butwe we got it we got a whole bunch of disc drives I forget 100 Meg or you know 500 Meg or you know 500 gigs I don't know but it wasn't big and so we we got boxes and
boxes of disc drives and we flew them around the world to where our our various servers were and that was considered a really big deal um and now you know I'm buying 18 terabyte drives and ganging them upand uh you know I've got a computer that's got 24 disc slots in it creates a big ZFS array and so the idea that this space would be essentially infinite was something that I had read about that waskind of going to happen but I didn't really believe it and now now I do believe it and it's totally changed the way I do things right I mean you know high res now means really High reses uhwhereas before it me well I don't know that'd be too big people might not be able to download it yeah I mean we go to YouTube today if you know if that 1080p option isn't there I'm like oh
yeah the quality is not good enough to watch it in 720 but you know we're spoil these days out we compared to we had to deal with 30 years ago yeah no absolutely I mean 4K video is likea real thing and and not only that things like cameras you know used to be really expensive especially video cameras uh my first video camera was a real TV video camera and it you I don't know how muchit cost but uh one of my friends at Sun Micro Systems had it and he let me use it but now I mean you know your your average iPhone like does the job and and does pretty good andif you want to do high-end video you know there's all sorts of tools available that let you do that that again was not on my my Horizon when I I first started doing that well Carl it's been incredible
to hear your memories of you know these these pioneering days of Internet broadcasting and as people interested in finding out a bit more about you know public resource.org tell us a bit about what you're doing these days andwhere people can find that more well so public do resource.org is our website um although we're all over the internet archive I've probably got two million objects up on there uh we do two things one is edicts ofgovernment right the law and making it available and that's partly uh showing by doing but buying the law and scanning it and putting it online uh and it's also been a litigation experience we've had a dozen law firmsworking for as Pro boto um this building codes case which was 10 years of litigation we we had over $10 million in free legal help on that one because us litigation is so expensive the other thing we do
is I spend uh I'm making six trips to India this year um and I have been doing so for for almost 10 years now uh we run one of the largest libraries of Indian books um online now we'vegot over 600,000 books uh we're scanning 1 .5 million pages every month at our scanning Center in um in Bangalore uh we've got we make our own scanners now in India it's modeled on the internet archive uh tabletopscribe but you know it's high-end Sony cameras and frames and cradles that that let you do non-destructive scanning and we're really scaling that up uh significantly in India so that that's one of the big things that we've been
The hosts thank Carl for joining them and encourage listeners to explore his archives and current work. The interview ends with a warm sign-off and final thanks.
doing lately yeah it's really important work that you're doing um and if people want to check out your website I'll link that in the show notes as well well um along with the archives of geek of the weekbecause they are really interesting to listen to you know through through a modern lens kind of looking back at how um those early internet Technologies we developing so I'll I'll link those up as well and who knows maybeone day this interview will be uh in those archives as well for future Generations car so it's nice to have you on the podcast and really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share some of yourmemories with us well thanks so much for having
me