Cameron Balahan and Helping Define the Fun 90's Tech Scene! ☕️
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by kirupa | Interviews with Creative People: https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm

Cameron Balahan (https://cameronb.dev/) turns a nostalgia trip into a smart look at how much grit early computing demanded. From beige clone PCs and dial-up modems to WindShareware and 3D benchmarks, this episode captures a time when learning tech meant hunting for drivers, breaking things, fixing them, and slowly building taste along the way.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8
A conversation with Cameron Balahan | 1h 28m

ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION

This conversation starts in familiar 1990s territory, but it quickly becomes more than retro-computing comfort food. Cameron Balahan and Kirupa revisit the era when getting a computer to do anything interesting often meant learning far more than you planned. Operating system bets, mystery hardware, driver disks, flaky peripherals, and phone-line internet all made personal computing feel more physical and more fragile than it does now. That friction is a big part of the episode's appeal, because it shows how technical curiosity was often built through maintenance, failure, and repetition rather than polished tutorials.

The centerpiece is WindShareware, Cameron's early web project for Windows enthusiasts. In a messy ecosystem full of utilities, experiments, and questionable fixes, a site like that mattered because it helped people decide what was worth their time. The discussion around registry tools, software downloads, and the general state of Windows maintenance captures an important truth about the period: software discovery was a skill. You did not just search, click, and move on. You compared, installed, recovered, and lived with the consequences, which made curation feel genuinely valuable.

The gaming and hardware sections are just as vivid. OpenGL versus DirectX, graphics card loyalties, benchmark bragging rights, and the thrill of seeing a better machine in a store aisle all come through as part of one larger culture. By the end, the conversation shifts into reflection about later careers, side projects, and whether the solo-builder magic of that earlier internet can exist in the same way now. That closing note gives the episode real weight. It remembers the fun, but it also explains the conditions that made that fun possible in the first place.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR ABOUT

- Early PC knowledge often came from repairing and reconfiguring your own machine by hand.
- WindShareware mattered because curation was a real service in a chaotic software ecosystem.
- Graphics APIs, drivers, and hardware choices shaped how people experienced games and the web.
- Benchmarks and system tuning were part hobby, part competition, and part identity.
- The small-web era made it easier for one person to build something culturally significant.

JUMP TO A TOPIC

- 0:00 - A 90s Tech Time Capsule: Kirupa sets up a conversation about WindShareware, classic PC culture, and why 1990s computing still feels special. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=0s)
- 4:00 - First PCs and Early Tinkering: Cameron looks back at his first computer, early operating systems, and the habit of learning by experimenting. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=240s)
- 16:00 - Keeping Windows Alive: They revisit backups, utilities, and the endless work of maintaining a usable Windows machine. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=960s)
- 20:00 - Why WindShareware Worked: Cameron explains how the site emerged and why software curation mattered so much on the early web. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1200s)
- 29:00 - OpenGL, DirectX, and PC Identity: The conversation turns to graphics cards, game ecosystems, and the strong opinions they inspired. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1740s)
- 48:00 - Benchmarks and Driver Culture: Kirupa and Cameron dig into performance tuning, custom drivers, and the thrill of chasing better numbers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2880s)
- 1:03:00 - Running a Project Solo: Cameron reflects on hosting, support burdens, and why sustaining a side project got harder over time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=3780s)
- 1:19:00 - What That Era Still Means: They close by comparing the old solo-builder internet with what modern tools, including AI, might make possible again. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=4740s)

TO LEARN MORE

- Cameron's Blog: https://cameronb.dev/
- Cameron's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronbalahan/
- Cameron's X / Twitter: https://x.com/cameronbalahan

TRANSCRIPT

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

0:00 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=0s)

Hi everybody. Today I chat with Cameron Balahan and among the many cool things he has done, in the mid 1990s he created one of the best sites for tech enthusiasts. He created windshareware. Com, where you could go and get the latest details on the things you can download and run on your Windows machine. Now this chat is a trip down memory lane for those of us who started off with the internet in the 1990s. We talk about classic shareware or nagwear, like WinZip and WinRAR. We talked about OpenGL and DirectX and how that influenced whether you played Unreal Tournament or whether you played Quake.

We talked about the Windows registry, connecting to the internet via dial-up, hunting for drivers, AOL CDs, classic video games like Math Blaster, and a whole lot more. This is going to be a great chat. So, invite your friends, get some popcorn, and let's get started. All right, Cameron, it is great to, you know, meet you. The funny thing is that you're one of the handful of people that I know in the real world, having met you in person, actually at our day jobs at Google.

But hopefully, what you want to talk to you about is something that you did decades earlier, that I'm also very familiar with, which I only found out recently as well. But before we get there, though, I just want to have you introduce yourself. Tell us who you are.

1:09 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=69s)

Awesome. Well, thank you for having me, Kirupa. As you know, I'm Cameron. I am, the PM for the Go programming language at Google. I, you know I've had a long kind of like unfocused sort of history of jobs before this. You know, when straight out of school I actually went to law school. I became a lawyer for several years. After that I worked in high frequency trading. I had a prop trading firm. Did a lot of like you know, that sort of low latency market making in US equities and building the infrastructure around that.

And then, and then I came to Google about five years ago and I've been on the go team the whole time, but I've been leading product for it for just the past like three and some years. And, yeah, you and I work together, like sort of in tangential organizations, working on developer tools generally, which has become kind of my focus in the last several years. So, yeah, that's that's about it. Yeah, you know, I live in New York City, and I kind of enjoy all things tech and especially all things that cater to developers.

2:21 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=141s)

So, this is a question I like to ask everyone I meet. How did you get involved in tech? What was your earliest memory where you thought, you know what, I want to make my career about working on computers and doing the kinds of things we're doing right now?

2:33 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=153s)

I wonder if I know exactly. If I think about it, I always had a fondness for space—outer space—and I liked the future. I liked Star Trek and things like that, the same nerdy kinds of things. Somewhere next to them was technology, or at least it was in the early 90s, when not that many people had computers. At some point, my dad bought me a computer. I think I was 9 years old. That's a huge credit to him for thinking, “This could be a useful thing for this kid to play around with.” In those days, he didn't know about screen time or trying to limit my time on this thing.

I spent all my time on it because it was so interesting to me. I hadn't seen any of this before, and all the games at first were super cool, along with everything else. Back then, the internet was so small. When I got it was still massive, but not as multifunctional or full of the variety of options you have today. I found myself in certain little rabbit holes. The next thing I knew, I wanted to learn how to build with computers, how to physically build my own computer, how to build software, and how to do everything else.

It all grew from there, and I had no person telling me, “No, you can't do that.” Again, I'm grateful to my parents for just letting me sit on my computer all the time.

4:07 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=247s)

What computer was it that you first got?

4:09 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=249s)

Yeah, it was a clone, something we bought from a computer show in Costa Mesa, California. It was a Pentium 100, and it had about 800 megs of hard-drive space. I think it had 16 megs of RAM, which was really something. I was blowing away all my friends with this configuration. The Pentium was awesome, the RAM was awesome, and even the hard-drive space was awesome. That's about all I remember about it. It didn't have any specific brand on it. What about you? What was your first computer?

4:52 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=292s)

It was a 46 DX2.. Okay. 50 MHz. So, it was a 25 MHz like DX2 chip made it 50 and it had 8 megabytes of RAM and initially 250 megabytes of storage. Windows 3.1 OS that it ran on. I'm trying to think of the brand for it. It wasn't. It wasn't like a major brand, you know. It was definitely one of those like beige, unnamed versions of it, you know. I want to say, yeah, actually I have no idea. I don't want to butcher it completely. You know, the name is a combination of Huelet, Packard and Compact, but it wasn't either compact or Help Packard.

So it was definitely going after the, you know, we want to make it sound like it's like the big brand, but it's actually not the. Confuse you space. You're like, I've heard of that. Yeah, exactly. No, it was a Yeah. What operating system was your computer running on?

5:44 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=344s)

So, it started with, like, you know, came, I think it even came pre-installed with, with DOS and, Windows 3.1 Or maybe 311, Windows for work, Workgroups. Oh, networking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which, Yeah. I never really understood what I didn't, I didn't know. And I still don't, what the difference between them was. But, that. And then quickly thereafter I installed OS2 warp on it, the third version of OS2, because I thought OS2 was the future of operating, this Microsoft thing, and run its course. DOS is not as good as or Windows even is not as good as OS2.

And I think that's actually like something that still persists with me, where I like to like do the thing that other people are not doing, and usually to my detriment. Like, like I was using a Linux laptop just until like last year and, like, running, you know, Arch Linux on it with, with Gnome, and then I got, like I got a MacBook and it was so nice not having to like configure anything and having the battery just work and all of that. You know, and those M, M1, M2, M3 chips are pretty awesome, like that.

That I was like: oh, this is the pain that I've like been enduring and didn't even know so. So, even in those days, OS2 warp, and I didn't even know. Until eventually I was like: all right, let me try out Windows 95. And that that's my early operating system.

7:04 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=424s)

Did you end up installing Windows 95 on that same computer, or did you get a different computer by that point?

7:09 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=429s)

Same computer. Same computer.

7:10 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=430s)

Yeah, those were fun times, right? The drivers probably didn't work, and you had to figure out whether it was even plug-and-play compatible. I vaguely remember needing a separate floppy disk with the Windows 95 drivers during installation. You'd get prompted with something like, "Oh, by the way, do you have a disk with the Windows 95 drivers?" Or was that Windows 98? I keep forgetting. But there was definitely a moment where, if your drivers weren't there, you had to provide them.

7:34 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=454s)

Provide it. I think 95 had that, too. And maybe even earlier, for all I know, but like, yeah, there was, there was a thing where you'd say you'd go into like your device settings, right? Like somewhere in there, and there'd be like a little, you know, yield flag or warning for the one that wasn't configured correctly, or, and you can go into that and pick like what was, I don't know what was already on there, like what, what Windows knew for, like some generic configurations or something, or maybe some like like the more high-profile ones. And then it was like no, no, I have something else.

And you could say like pick from. You know, insert the floppy. Now, that's right. And then eventually there was like a search Windows update option as well. You can use the floppy or search from Windows update, which never worked. I'm like, it just never worked. I was like, absolutely, get it from Windows update. It never did find anything there. Never found my stuff. No. No.

8:24 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=504s)

Yeah. No, you're right. I completely forgot about the device manager and the little yellow icon. The display test would always be generic VESA or generic PNP monitor. I'm like, no, it the monitor has a brand to it. Not that it mattered back then. There were no color profiles as far as I can remember it actually adjusting. You could always set the refresh rate to whatever you wanted, even beyond what your monitor would support. So you always hear that weird buzzing sound of like. You know like, oh, I want to try 75 Hz. You know your monitor was going to go back 60, for example.

You just hear that flash and then buzzing sound. You're like, yeah, I should probably go back to something else.

8:56 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=536s)

Yeah. And it was satisfying knowing that. It was like, no, this is my monitor, that it knows. So, like I know there isn't a question about whether I'm misconfiguring this or not using the right resolutions or something you don't know. And if and when you did stick the disc in and it actually went like, "Oh, success". That was like, "Whoa, it worked". You know, because, like, more often than not, it go- I can't figure it out. Sorry. And you're like, "Oh, no. All right". Exactly. Like now my audio works. Now. You know, before you were like, I have no audio.

I hear like our beeps and boops, but no real sound. And then the drivers get installed and now audio works. Yeah. Yep. That reminds me, Sound Blaster. I think I had some creative sound card. Sound Blaster 16, I think. And then a US robotics modem that I think was like 144. That eventually, when I got like you know, AOL first, and then found out about other options, those you know, and I can, I can, I can hear the hear the music of the dialup. Just talking about it. Yeah.

9:56 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=596s)

And was the same modem upgradeable? Because I remember that back then you basically had to pick a camp. You were either in the US Robotics camp, or you were in the other competing standard. Was that Lucent, or someone else?

10:09 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=609s)

Yeah, I vaguely remember this. I don't know. Yeah, cuz you always had to check whether your ISP supported. Your ISP either supported the US robotics protocol or the protocol from some other vendor. But then V90 came about, which was this unifying standard across both. And it was like a. It was like a firmware upgrade on your modem. For many modems. You actually upgrade your modem to now support the V90 protocol. And then you had all these. I know the V90 was by Lucent, because I remember that was very particular. Okay. But US robotics. Was 3Com separate from US robotics or was it? That's a different company at the time, right?

I think they merged eventually, right? But I'm not sure when, so now I have to figure it out. I had to Google this now. Yeah, you know, the US Robotics versus ThreeCom connection. I'm leading the search on that, by the way. So, in 1997, 3Com merged with US Robotics. Okay. Well, you know, we can figure that out. This might be a rabbit hole in its own way because I don't even know what to search for at this point, and the internet just doesn't do a good job archiving data from that long ago. I know, so it is probably going to hallucinate heavily if I were to ask anything.

I know. I know. But I think that that V90 is what gave you 56K. Which was, like, you know, awesome. That's right. I never got beyond 53, but, yes, the knowing the potential 56 was possible was great, because you could always hover over the- I think it was like the- I forget what's called either network connection manager or something like that- computers, the line between it, and you could always hover over that and see, like, how many data did I send, how many data I receive, because back then you didn't have unlimited bandwidth for the most part.

You had to actually figure out how much data were you actually downloading or not. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I remember it back in the, in the little taskbar icon in the bottom, with the little lights, the satisfying lights, telling you whether you're receiving, uploading or both. Exactly. Exactly.

12:03 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=723s)

And then there was this moment that I always think of as a rite of passage, when you realized you could use the default software your ISP provided to enter your phone number, username, and password, or you could set it up yourself in the connection manager and bypass the clunky ISP tool entirely. To me that felt like, wow, I can choose TCP/IP, put those weird settings in, and I don't have to deal with whatever preinstalled thing the ISP gave me.

12:31 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=751s)

Well, and the bloatware. From the very beginning, I hated bloatware. I hated whatever came preinstalled on your computer. If you bought a new machine, you'd immediately format it and install the operating system fresh, because I didn't know what Compaq or whoever you bought it from was putting on there, and I wasn't interested in that.

12:51 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=771s)

Yeah. And I would also religiously check that built-in Windows tool that showed you everything running at startup, all those checkboxes. I kept asking, why is all of this here? Why does any of it need to be? I'm just going to uncheck everything. The first time you restarted after a fresh Windows install, that was always the fastest your machine was ever going to be. No matter how careful you were later, that was the smoothest, fastest experience you'd get. I even bought Norton tools of questionable quality. I think it eventually became SystemWorks. Every year, just like TurboTax, I'd buy the new version of SystemWorks because it had one of those utilities.

13:31 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=811s)

It would scan your system, analyze all the performance issues, and claim it could fix them. Your bloated registry was supposed to be one of the big causes of slowness, so even if you unchecked startup items, the registry was still full of junk. SystemWorks would go clean it up. Of course, it also broke plenty of things behind the scenes because it didn't always know what was safe to delete. But after the first reboot, it gave you that same illusion of a fresh, clean machine.

14:01 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=841s)

See, I wouldn't have trusted something like that. I would've just formatted again. I think I used to format at least once every six months, and when you're 10 years old, that's a lifetime. Every six months, it was like, "It's time." The registry was the one thing I could never figure out how to keep clean, because you'd uninstall something and the registry keys would remain. Then you'd go in and think, "I don't know if I want to delete this stuff. Who knows what it's going to do?" Sometimes you would delete it and break something you weren't supposed to break.

Then it was, "All right, now it's time for the format again." At some point, I learned all about how to slipstream a Windows installation. Microsoft actually provided a tool for enterprise administrators that let you create custom Windows images. You could download the full ISO, tell it to preinstall particular drivers and everything else, put in your own CD, and create a custom version of the installation. That way, you could bypass the initial setup problems, such as missing CD drivers and all those other things. I think it was called the Windows OEM Kit, and it was a very straightforward tool. That saved so much time during all those formats.

You're going further into the future now, though. You mentioned CD-ROMs, so that's one clue. Also, that sounds more like something from Windows XP onward. Or are you thinking of something else? I think it was XP. Maybe the technology existed back then.

15:30 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=930s)

I wasn't aware of it or smart enough to figure it out at that point, even if it existed. But yeah, you're right. Maybe I'm jumping back and forth now. This was all 25 or 30 years ago, so it's hard to know exactly what decade, what era of XP, or what Windows operating system we were thinking about.

15:48 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=948s)

Yeah, it is all sort of merged together. I know. But no, I never really got it that streamlined. I remember it always being like a project, and but a pro, a necessary evil. And. And then of course, there were the sort of data losses that would happen from time to time. And you know, like, if you hadn't backed up recently, and you know, of course, no one really starts backing up like responsibly. You usually have to get burned at least once before you learn to back up at least once, you know, and even then. And so there were always big wipeout events that you're like, "No, I lost everything again".

And there was no cl, like your email was gone, everything was gone. There was nothing. Yeah. There was no like cloud-based email. Even if you chose IMAP, which no one knew what it was at the time, you always had Pop or POP as your option, which meant it just got downloaded to your machine and that was pretty much it. Yes. And even if you exported your email, at least historically for me, I used Outlook Express for the longest time, like was free, and then like the formal Outlook. After that, it would always encrypt the file. I'm like, what password used to encrypt it? Why can't I import it?

Like I did not specify a password and I never got my emails imported properly either. So I just feel like there's so many things from that era that probably exist in a zip drive, an Iomega Zip drive- that I just cannot access the contents for anymore.

17:10 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1030s)

Yeah, I have those things too. I not a zip drive anymore. I think I like took them off some point and have them like in a bucket on my Google Drive. That's like, "Hey, just stuff from whatever". And you probably don't want this or need this, but I, you know, also don't feel like deleting it. Maybe one day, maybe one day, some AI will open it for me and tell me something interesting about my job.

17:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1048s)

I mean, once quantum computing kicks in and all the encryption from back then is trivial to crack, it feels inevitable that you'll eventually drag and drop all those old files in and some tool will tell you, give me five minutes and I'll decrypt all these WinRAR files and ZIP files that were compressed and encrypted. I remember being weirdly suspicious of RAR files too. I felt like you could hide malware in one, or at least that was my understanding at the time, so I was always a little afraid of RAR and honestly still kind of am.

18:00 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1080s)

Yeah, I never really understood WinRAR either. I remember wondering why the URL looked German, and why it kept asking me to pay when I could just hit Cancel and keep using it. A lot of tools were like that. Even WinZip was shareware. You'd download it, go through the payment screen, skip, skip, skip, and keep going. Some of them had 30-day trials, and honestly that was probably one of the other reasons I reformatted my machine so often. I had all these tools with time-boxed trials that I wanted to reset, and formatting felt like the fastest solution.

I didn't know the registry tricks or the random files they wrote to disk with timestamps. But I did know I could format the machine and be back up and running in a couple of hours. Yep. Now, were you...

18:51 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1131s)

Were you on IRC and news groups? Did you use any of those channels?

18:57 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1137s)

IRC? Definitely. In fact, I used the Microsoft Chat client, which gave you a comic-strip view on top of IRC. I don't know if you've seen mIRC. It's all IRC behind the scenes, but Microsoft Chat presents it in a comic-strip format. If other people were also using the Microsoft Chat client, you could choose your character and do the same kinds of things in a more interactive way. That was actually a lot of fun, because many of my early IRC conversations happened in very technical Windows- and Microsoft-related venues. I think Microsoft had something called MSN Communities a long time ago.

It was a collection of IRC channels that you could join on various topics of interest. There was a Windows Talk or Tech Talk channel that I remember being very actively involved in. How about you? Interesting. Very cool. That sounds a lot like the way iMessage works now: SMS or RCS in the background, and then an improved experience between two iMessage clients. Microsoft Chat was literally a comic strip, though. You could see a fake black-and-white background and choose the characters you wanted. I remember an alien character that I always enjoyed because I liked sci-fi and space, and that's what I used.

Those of us listening probably won't see this, but I'll try to post a screenshot so that people watching can see what the Microsoft Chat client looked like back in the day. That's awesome. I'd like to see that too.

20:26 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1226s)

No, that sounds great. So, speaking of shareware, this is really what made me want to talk to you. You created windshareware. Com back in the mid-1990s, when most people barely knew what the internet was, let alone how to create something on it. Talk to me about what was going on behind the scenes for you to do that.

20:48 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1248s)

Yeah, sure. The first iteration of WinShareware was actually called the 95 Shareware Page. I was about 12 years old, so forgive the weird title. After I left AOL, I was with this ISP and discovered that you didn't actually need AOL to get to the internet. You could just go straight to the internet. I got onto a network called the Concentric Network, and they'd give you five megabytes of space where you could host whatever you wanted. The address was something like Concentric. Net, a tilde, and your username.

In my infinite time sitting at the computer, I thought, "Okay, let me see what I can do with that." There was Microsoft FrontPage, if you're familiar with that. Very familiar. I wrote a book on it, actually. Oh, you did? Wow. If I'd known before you wrote the book, I would've been able to use it. I just played with FrontPage, and as I remember, it was super easy. It was drag and drop, and then it would generate the code for you. Were you using FrontPage Express or proper Microsoft FrontPage? Proper Microsoft FrontPage, but version 1.0, the very first version of the thing. There were two windows.

FrontPage Explorer was one of them, and the editor was the other window. Correct. Maybe that was it. You'd probably know better because you wrote the book. It's been a long time. It did come in a box. You had to buy it from a store, like everything else. I started with that and made random little things. One thing I made was a page with links to my favorite pieces of shareware. To take a step back, shareware was really interesting to me for some reason, probably because I was learning how to write software at the time. The first language I learned was Visual Basic.

It wasn't necessarily the best language for writing something you'd distribute to the public, but I'd gotten a sense of how to build little Windows programs. Then I saw that other people were building some very cool things. I was interested that an individual or a small team could just build something. Something about that really appealed to me. For those who don't know, shareware is typically software that you're allowed to share around. I think that's where the word comes from. There are subgenres of shareware, such as freeware, which is simply free for anyone to have.

Then there's nagware, like the thing you were describing, where a screen appears and says, "Hey, pay for me," or lets you skip that step. There's trialware, too. There are a lot of different "wares." Shareware was the overarching umbrella for things people had written that weren't corporate products sold through normal distribution channels. It was something you could discover online, download, and use. I really liked that stuff, so I created a web page. It had links to some of my favorite shareware, although I don't remember what most of it was anymore. WinZip must have been one of the programs, unless it was before WinZip's time.

It was a fun thing for me, and I put it up. The next thing I knew, a lot of people were coming. I had one of those little counters at the bottom, because that was a rite of passage in the mid-'90s. I didn't have a guestbook, but that was another rite of passage. There were certainly construction-worker GIFs throughout the web page, like everything else in that period. People started coming and asking, "If I link to your page, will you link to mine?" The 12-year-old me said, "Yeah, cool. This sounds great. Let's do it." There were so few websites back then that anything you built offered value right away.

It wasn't just some 12-year-old's opinion about which shareware was good. It was actually useful to some people, even though it was also a 12-year-old's opinion about which shareware was good. In the middle of this, I thought, "Maybe we can go a little further." I started categorizing the different kinds of shareware I thought were good, such as productivity tools and utilities. I slowly increased the number of categories, which made the page more useful. Speaking of device drivers, finding all of mine was a major pain point. You had to visit all these different websites and download them, so I started collecting those as well and made a whole drivers section.

The drivers section required more upkeep because the manufacturers only submitted their drivers so often. On the shareware side, though, authors were eager to have their software listed on my site. That created a whole new project: I had to write software to take the form they filled in, bring the submission in, format it correctly, put it on my site, and add it to the database I'd learned how to use. It grew from there. A side effect of all that traffic was that random companies would ask whether they could put a banner on the site and pay me for it.

That began another angle: "Oh, you can make money doing this." I started doing that and said, "Sure, yeah." Then more than one person wanted a banner, so I created a little Perl script that would rotate which one you saw. It turned out that some of those companies wanted to know how many people had seen their banners, so I started tracking that as part of the script. There were all these little channels of projects going on. One involved social relationships, where I linked back to other pages, fostered those relationships, and made sure everyone was happy with the arrangement.

Another was the revenue side, where I had to make sure advertisers were happy with what they were getting and improve the tools for them. Then there were the authors, who needed to be able to submit their shareware and have it placed properly on the website. The next thing you knew, it was a whole operation, and it grew from there. Some guy contacted me because he wanted to provide a steadier stream of advertisers while taking a cut. That meant I no longer had to deal with advertisers directly, because I had a middleman in between. That's essentially how it started.

27:56 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1676s)

What year was all of this happening in?

27:59 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1679s)

It started in 1996. And I said it was called the 95 shareware page. We moved it to, or I moved it. I say we as like the royal week. I moved it to shareware95. Com because, you know, it catered to Windows 95 and in that period of time I didn't know there would be, you know, every year is so long and who knows, this will, this will work fine. But Windows 98 came out, that's when I realized the name had a problem and that's when we moved to Windshareware.

28:22 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1702s)

No, very, very cool. And you know, back then, you know, one thing that reminded me, we're talking about all this is that going to a Best Buy or a Circuit City or one of that was a huge and fun experience. You could go to the aisles, you're going to see all the boxes of all the software going on there, and then you would be like, "Oh, that looks really cool". You know, like, "Can my computer run it"? No, I can't run it because I'm not running an MMX or whatever the new chip is it needs for all these things.

And those are some of the things I feel like people today have no recollection of anymore. Like I don't know anything. That I go to a store now I'm like actually looking forward to checking it out. And maybe I've gotten old now. Like for me, when I go to Home Depot or Lowe's I'm like, oh, this place is amazing. I like to go through all the aisles. But I felt like for a kid, young back in the day, that was the equivalent of it- going to see all the aisles, the games aisle, for example, of all the things that were going on there. Yeah.

29:14 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1754s)

You're right. And then they have, like the computers, the newest computers, the newest monitors. It was always a lot better than the thing you had. So I was like, whoa, this is what's next. Awesome. Oh man, that's right. Right. And they obviously really cool demos of like games that were playing on those machines. And you, just like we talked about whether you know which camp you're in when it came to your modem for your ISP. It also the camp also mattered if you were an OpenGL-based graphics card or a DirectX-optimized graphics card, because the games you could play were very different.

If you're OpenGL, I think Quake was your OpenGL thing that you could play. If you're DirectX, it was Unreal Tournament, because Unreal Engine was DirectX-optimized. And so can choose. Which graphics card am I choosing? And that meant half the aisle of all these things here did not apply to me, because it's going to be a software rendered crappy experience. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, and I was speaking of Quake, I was so into that that I don't think I even explored the DirectX side of things.

30:09 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1809s)

Yeah, I was in Unreal Tournament because I had DirectX card and so I never- I never- played Quake. Like I never rec, you know, installed it, played it, even though I saw all the videos. I'm like, you know, is that, Yeah. No, that that engine will not work. OpenGL. Ah, so we never encountered each other there. You probably would have killed me anyway. I was never very good. But I don't know. But so, getting back to, you know, this way you've done a lot of what you did, though, right, was in a world where there wasn't like well doumented best practices on all these things.

You kind of discovered things along the way.

30:40 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=1840s)

Yeah. And I mean, like, like I remember I got like a newsletter put together. So I found this open-source pack, software called Major Domo which would do like all of. Have you heard of Major Domo? I have not. Okay. Yeah. I, you know, I can't believe that name is still in my head somewhere. I should see if it still exists. But it was like something for managing big newsletters and you just kind of went through and looked at the comments in the configuration file to sort of understand like a little bit about what you need to do or figure out to set this newsletter software up.

But it was all, like, you know, very kind of just good luck. And at any point someone might be able to just go in there and take advantage of a misconfiguration and download your whole list or spam it or something like that. And you know, at the time I never really appreciated any of that, like that, that best practices even existed, or should exist, because maybe they didn't really. But you just sort of tried your best and that's all. That's all that, you know, I think. I think the whole online world was sort of like that, a little bit like a little bit of it's optional. It's the world.

That's like not the primary area where you need to like really worry about security, because the worst that could happen is it just affects a website. Who cares? It's not the real world. But as as stuff got more critical, I think, best practices became far more important. Now it's a big deal if, if, if you know, data is leaked, because that data could be very important. And back then it was just: ah, it's just some share, some people's email addresses. Yeah. And I always go back and forth as well, and I look at how complicated things have become today.

Like, is it truly complicated because the problem we're trying solving for is extremely complicated, or is this really complicated because companies have carved out a niche solving that particular solution and then they made it really complicated, which means that you now have to adopt this very complicated solution. I look at like login screens and oath and all these things as an example of it, because back then you had login as well, but it was like you had to come with a username and a password. It's probably stored in some text file somewhere on on the server itself.

So it wasn't like anything secure, like until, like MySQL or other databases came about. You were writing directly to disk. You know, PHP was writing to some file on disk and it was PHP, so clients couldn't really see it. And so you were like hopefully using obscurity, by security, by obscurity principle, to kind of get away with some of these things. I often wonder if we're even more better off today than we were even back then. Yeah.

I mean we clearly are on some levels, like like what you just said, like that's not a good practice and today we people would know to probe for that and try to, like you know, figure out, you know, find a way around your, your, your protection. But speaking of logging in, I don't even know that very many places had logins, like Windshare certainly didn't. There was, that was more of the open internet where, like you know, giving your info was kind of like h, I'd rather not. You know, and it was really like something like Facebook, that kind of.

I think I remember you were really like: okay, I will make an account with you because I guess that's the value prop you provide. Is, knowing about me. Or, okay, I will put my image here, because previously you.

34:01 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2041s)

Didn't even want your image on the internet. That was sort of weird. It was, you know, sketch everybody out. Nobody wanted their picture just available. That's right. There were, except for, maybe, email. I remember I signed up for Hotmail at some point. If I had a Yahoo account as well. There really weren't too many username password things you absolutely needed to provide. Yeah. Yeah. Rarely. I mean, even Google itself, right, didn't have anything any sort of login. Gmail was a separate thing. And then Google itself had no login capability till they- you know, went big on on Google+ in, like, you know, 2011, something like that.

So prior to that, there was no connection between your Gmail and your Google. Google was just an open search engine. What? What do you need to log in for your search engine?

34:40 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2080s)

Yeah. I think the idea that you can monetize user data may have been a forerunner to requiring better login and authentication systems. Now companies can actively know that you are who you claim you are. That means every action you take is a very high-signal activity that clearly indicates you're doing something they can track, understand, and monetize better. That's absolutely what it is. There are also second-order effects, such as the internet becoming less open, and I think a lot of people lament that. There was a time when the internet was truly a Wild West of anonymous everything everywhere, with both pros and cons.

The role of something like Google was to organize all of that, which was a very difficult challenge. Before Google, figuring out where something was or finding valuable things was really hard. Now we're in these little worlds that exclude other worlds. You have to go into one of them, and then you get locked in. You don't see the rest of the internet, and there's less opportunity for something completely open and random to show up. Speaking of the completely random and open things that would appear, people today feel that technology and computers are everywhere around us.

That's obviously true from a numerical point of view, but even back then, I remember going to random grocery stores and specialty stores and seeing an entire wall of shareware. You'd see 5 1/4-inch or 3.5-inch floppy disks, whatever the size happened to be, and a wall of shareware from random companies. Today, when you go to the checkout counter, you see chewing gum and candy. Back then, I distinctly remember there also being CDs where the magazines are now.

36:30 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2190s)

There were CDs or floppy disks offering a chance to try the new Doom or some random puzzle game. It was a shareware thing. Commander Keen was one I distinctly remember discovering that way. I thought, "What is this Commander Keen thing? I don't know, but it's 25 cents," which was probably like a dollar today. So I decided to try these things out. I feel like all of that has gone away now.

36:53 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2213s)

Yeah. Isn't that cuz? That's like the transition from the physical world to the online one. Like that was still in the era where, like you know, we had a foot niche and online was truly secondary to, the physical real world. And so this is how distribution works in that world. Is it exists in the physical world as well. Today you would think that's crazy, because you're like: why don't you just do online things in the online world? And yeah. No, I know that's a shame a bit, or maybe we're just being nostalgic.

37:19 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2239s)

I'm not sure. It might be a combination of things. Now we know much more about how complicated it is to get products into a physical store. Maybe it's from watching Shark Tank for so many years, but I think about what the logistics were like back in the day. Somebody had to produce all those floppy disks, and they weren't resilient to heat. I was in Alabama, where the weather gets really hot, so how did the disks get there without all the data becoming corrupted? How was the inventory managed? After 30 days, did they mail those disks back or destroy them?

Is there a landfill in Arizona where all these old disks are buried so that no one ever gets access to them? So many questions come up. If I'd known then what I know now, I would've asked about the viability of it. Did stores make money from this? How much could they possibly make by selling 50-cent or 25-cent disks? What was the incentive to use shelf space for them when stores could've put National Geographic or other magazines there? Questions like these keep me up at night even today. Then there's the joke about those AOL CDs, which all of us had by the hundreds.

I guess it was probably worth it to AOL because they got enough sign-ups. The market was quickly converging and everyone was getting the internet, so they sent everyone lots of CDs. That's right. I forgot about that. Everyone used them as coasters and for other things. You had more than you knew what to do with. The AOL offers started with 20 hours free, then 200 hours free, then unlimited access for free. There was a lot of that, wasn't there? There was. Did you ever subscribe to any computer magazines?

39:02 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2342s)

Yes. I was actually PC Magazine was my favorite. I thought that was the more rigorous one. There was also PC World, which I like. I thought that was maybe less rigorous. And actually, Shareware 95 was featured in. Not feature. Feature is a strong word. It was listed as one of the best websites to go to in one of PC Magazine's issues sometime in like 1997 or 1998. It won for like the best place to find your device drivers. So that was the one category, for that. But in any case, I loved PC Magazine.

I'd go to, like Crown Books or Barnes & Noble and just sit there and read, read the magazine for free, and I could, I could, you know, it was like there was nothing that compared to it online that could give you all the info you would get in this physical magazine. So, it was really a treat. Agreed. And you look at the state of. I don't even know if this magazines even exist today.

You know, Wired was a magazine I loved back in the day as well, because, you know, while I was a PC World subscriber- and I'm guessing it's because my school had, like, you know, the you know, you had like, as part of fundraising efforts, they used to have, like, you know, go and sell magazines to your friends. Like before. I think, like, you know, the Boy Scout was like cookies thing was a thing. Maybe that was thing back then. I don't know it, but the magazine thing was a big one. Like Readers Digest and PC World, all of these things were like part of some bundle that you could get.

And so for me, I think I was, I did not have any salesman skills back then. And so basically my parents just buy the, you know, the four magazines you need to get your, your quota and then that would be it. And so Wired was one of them. And today, if you look at Wired, very different. You know, back then the mags were thick. They had information that you never saw before. But with the internet, everything whatever is going to be in a magazine, you already read about 3 weeks ago and you already discussed it on whatever network you're already in. It's another one of the things that changed significantly.

And if you go to a bookstore, Barnes & Noble, they don't even have a computer section anymore. And if they do, it's like the same 10 books on, like, you know, that are the best sellers. They know it's always going to be there. But the section back then was, like you had a dedicated corner of the entire store where you had like rows and rows of content, like you know, floating bookshelves as well of magazines and things that never would have been accessible otherwise. Yeah, I know. And is this part of the bigger thing? The internet kind of did? I think.

I think publications are one of the first sort of victims of this, which is, like distribution became free. And so when distribution becomes free, then you know that changes the nature of the, like you know the- I want to say gatekeepers maybe, like of the of where you can get your information. Previously, you had to win with a Barnes & Noble or you know some other distributor. You probably had to do that through a channel, like you know, whatever, you're an established publishing house. And so that's why Barnes & Noble will give you one of the five spots in their little magazine rack for computers.

And so this created like a narrowed funnel of like what could make it to you. And today, anyone can make anything, as, as evidenced by this thing we're doing right now. Like, you know, like making a podcast episode of this sort, like five, six years ago, was like unheard of. You know, Joe Rogan did it, but you know, that's Joe Rogan. Like none of us like knew how to get started. How do you make this work in a world where you're in New York? I'm in Seattle. It's like literally the opposite side of the country- and we're having a pretty high quality conversation with video and all of that going.

Yeah. Whatever company was making a lot of money back then facilitating this, they're not making us much anymore because, you know, I, for Riverside, you pay like maybe tens of dollars a month and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, right? And I mean, I wonder what the next step is, of course, when, like creating the information becomes a little bit more - I don't know how to say what the word is- like commoditized or free, cheaper, like, like with AI and other things like that. And it's always, it's always so hard to kind of look into the future, obviously, even though, like in retrospect, it's like, oh, of course.

But there's something, you know, there's something about like how it's easy to create things, that people want to see. Now that I wonder how that's going to change the nature of things. Yeah, I'm going to. I want to get back to the AI part because I think it's going to be a pretty fun one to discuss, given your history in content creation and all of that, but I'm going to go back a little bit further. You mentioned we got started with computers. You know, computer games was one of the things that you got into. That's what got me into computers as well. At the end of the day.

Like, you know, computers, yeah, you know, my parents were like, "Yeah, it has educational value". I'm like, "Absolutely. Apple has educational value".

43:35 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2615s)

I used to play games all the time. What were the first games you remember playing on the computer?

43:40 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2620s)

So, like way back, because you know, you asked my first computer, and that is actually the one that was like my first, like mine, but previously my dad had one and I don't know what he would do on it. Maybe just like, use a spreadsheet or something and you know it was fun to have. I think he bought like a PC Junior- it was called something like that. And on that was Math Blaster, which actually was an educational thing with like a rabbit and some other things and I guess you know, like, despite the math, I enjoyed it because it was a game and a computer.

But you know you were like, oh great, I got to tell you what the answer to this problem is. I'm not thrilled about that, but I want to know more about the rest of the game. That was a game where, like this little purple blob and it's a ladder and you answer: the more questions you answered, the higher up in the ladder you went, right?

44:27 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2667s)

Oh gosh, yeah, that does sound familiar, though I can't tell whether I'm remembering it or inventing it. Let me look up Math Blaster while we're talking. I'll pull up Google Images in the meantime. But after Math Blaster, what came next?

44:44 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2684s)

No, it was. That was a different game. But I also remember Math Blaster. You're literally in outer space and then various things you might be shooting at or you know solving, be interrupted with a math problem to solve if we could continue on. Okay. That sounds more familiar like like nagging you for education through nagging. Education through nagging. Yeah. But in like 1995 or something like that, I found this game. It was called Subspace. Have you ever heard of that? I have not.

Let me So Subspace was, eventually like Virgin Interactive- is the company that, like, either bought the little game studio or maybe was always behind it, and as a kid I didn't know. But it was like a massively multiplayer, little overhead 2D shooter where you were, like initially, one of like four different kinds of ships, and each of the ships had attributes about it, like maybe it was more maneuverable or had better bombs or better guns, and guns and bombs were the two primary, you know types of weapons. And you just flew around and like, first it was like, just like you just killed anybody or anything like that.

Like it was just a bunch of people in spaceships and a big map and I mean like a hundred people would be in a map, I don't even know how to define like the density, but a relatively dense, a relatively dense map and you just all shoot each other and that was fun. And then they had like versions of it with, like capture the flag, which I was particularly keen on. You know, like, I like a little bit of a more coordination team team level thing. So that was a lot of fun and I played that for what seemed like a really long time.

And what was cool, you know, bringing back to Shareware 95 for a second. Shareware, 95 was like really successful in the mid 90s, like it was. There was this thing called 100 hot, that was like informed by Lycos's search rankings. And so I'll take them at their word here. That's, that's the best as I know about the rigor of how they did their analysis. But Shareware 95 was at some point like the 80th most visited website on the internet. Like ahead of Amazon, ahead of a lot of other places. I didn't end up as sort of well off as Jeff Bezos, but like, I had, I had a start.

I had a head start. And so when I, when, when I played Subspace, the developers of that knew my website, you know. So this would, this would happen more in, like, like you know, 25 years ago, where people knew my website or remembered it specifically. These days. I know you remembered it, like when we chatted, and that's why we're having this talk here. But like I don't really talk about it much, if I'm honest, but like I wouldn't be surprised if most people just don't remember anymore.

It was part of the blob of stuff from the, from the 90s, but in those days they remembered, and so the developers liked me too, because they're like, "Oh yeah, that's, that's one of our favorite websites". And that meant so much to me because I'm like, "What? The people making my favorite game, love my website"? And so I don't know, just an aside that I thought was interesting. No, the for me, I now I know the other reason why I format my machine so frequently. That was a. You know, I love, I love video games.

I love graphics cards, and that that was like the thing that I really always was fascinated by. And I also like the benchmarking thing that they had back in the day on graphics cards. There was a company called Future Mark and they made a tool called Mad- I think it was Mad Onions, Future Mark.

I forget the name, exact thing, but it would run all these various 3D- you know heavyduty, you know simulations- and give you a score at the end of it and that score be published and along with that score would be like your computer specs and like your username and so on, and it was always a mini competition to see who can have the highest score on this benchmark on a regular basis. And the way you did that was you often installed custom drivers from like. You know, I had Nvidia graphics card at the time and I actually had it for a long time.

I was like an Nvidia, you know, fanboy when it came to graphics cards, and so you had to install custom drivers, and these drivers were optimized for most of that benchmark. They were terrible with everything else. But that's okay though, and you know you did that. And also, once you install that, your machine would pretty much become unusable after some point, after enough like of those hack beta drivers, and I had a format as well for it. So part of my routine almost every day was to like visit a handful of websites. One of wh, which was, of course, windshare.

Com, then it was winddriversnet and then it was neoin, you know. So, between those three, or in the, there's probably a handful of other ones that were alternate mix, but we know, between those four or five, I had a good idea of like, what can I install on my computer today that would destabilize everything requiring me to do a complete phone and so and so. That's why when you, when I saw that you created this on LinkedIn a long time- not long time, a couple of months ago- I'm like: dude, I totally use this stuff all the time. You had a very unique design as well. So what inspire you?

Were the designer as well, I'm assuming. Yeah. Yeah.

49:40 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2980s)

So what inspired you there? Because what you built was basically a version of the Windows UI, icons, windows, all of it, but inside a browser page.

49:50 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=2990s)

Yeah, that's what it was. That's what inspired me, basically. I've always been very bad at visual creativity. I could never quite figure out how to draw anything, and UX design still gives me a personal sense of insecurity. It was one of those areas where I didn't feel naturally capable. When I was younger, though, I still had a little bit of, "Maybe I can do this." I tried anyway. I wanted to make the site feel so Windows-centric that visitors would think, "Come explore my file system or application drawer." What you got on WinShareware, or Shareware 95 before it, was a window that looked just like Windows 95.

Inside it were a bunch of icons. I used software called Map This!, which was made by a guy named Matt something-or-other who published a bunch of cool little tools for developers to use. I don't remember his full name, but I remember the tool and its exclamation point. Map This! Let you create a map on top of a JPEG, with different links assigned to different places. Clicking different places on the JPEG would open different links, which was a huge thing at that point. There wasn't much JavaScript to speak of, other than the classic image map in HTML. That's right. FrontPage provided that, by the way. Oh, did it?

Maybe not in version 1.0. At some point I moved on from FrontPage and used Notepad for a very long time. That was enough because HTML wasn't complicated yet, there wasn't much you could do, and JavaScript was still so rudimentary that it didn't add very much. You didn't do much with JavaScript, either. I don't think CSS had really arrived yet. No. Back in the day, you could write scripts in JavaScript or VBScript. You could type a script tag, specify VBScript, and use that as a viable language for your code. That's right. VBScript only worked in Internet Explorer.

At that early stage, when Shareware 95 came out, Microsoft Internet Explorer was a niche browser with a single-digit percentage of the market. Using it made you feel like a rebel on the side of the disruption, while Netscape was the old guard. Those were the two browsers you targeted, and Internet Explorer was optional. Speaking of shareware, Netscape was actually shareware. It was. That's right. It was shareware, and you could buy Netscape Navigator Gold or use normal Navigator. I ended up with the paid version because my parents paid for Navigator Gold. I don't remember anything being different except the splash screen.

The ship's steering wheel had a gold background, and the loading animation in the top-right corner, where the Netscape logo and stars kept flying, was different as well. Those cosmetic changes were the only differences I could see. I couldn't tell any meaningful difference between the Gold version and the free version. If I remember correctly, maybe Gold came with a suite of email tools and things like that. But I might be wrong, and you were using Outlook Express anyway, so you didn't care. Yeah, because I didn't know how to export my email. Exactly. It's a good thing, because Navigator was deprecated and disappeared, while Outlook Express lasted a little longer.

Speaking of that, do you remember RealNetworks and RealPlayer? Yeah, I do. Was RealPlayer for watching Flash things online? No, I think RealPlayer was for videos. Any video you wanted to watch often had a RealNetworks link that you'd click and play. Right. So it wasn't interactive like Flash. No, it wasn't interactive. With Flash, you had both Shockwave, which came from Macromedia Director and had 3D and hardware acceleration, and Flash. Flash was the more lightweight option. Its plug-in was less than a megabyte, so people could start using it very quickly. That's what made it popular compared with Shockwave.

I remember needing RealPlayer because Yahoo had something called Launch, where it put music videos on the internet. There were only a handful that the major labels allowed Yahoo to publish, or whatever the arrangement was, and you could view them only in RealPlayer. You needed RealPlayer to watch those embedded videos. Do you remember what YouTube used before Google bought it? Was it Flash? Yeah. Okay. At some point, playing video in Flash also became a thing. It became the thing because of Flash's distribution. Flash was a universal runtime that transcended the browser. It didn't matter whether you used Netscape Navigator, Communicator, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, or something else.

If you built for Flash, you were effectively guaranteed that it would work across those machines. Flash became the de facto choice, but it didn't have encryption. Silverlight came along with encryption support, and Netflix used Silverlight for a very long time. Okay, I didn't realize anyone used Silverlight. I thought it was always just the Microsoft competitor that never took off, but it's good to know Netflix used it. I was at Microsoft working on the Silverlight runtime and its tooling, so I saw that struggle directly. I agree that it had an uphill battle. It never really overcame it, but all of that sounds right.

Then HTML 5 helped do Flash in, and that was the end of Flash. I'd say Steve Jobs actually did Flash in. Yeah, that's right. HTML 5 absolutely played a part, too. Even today, I don't think we've fully recreated what Flash could do back then. There was also the creation side: how you actually made content for the internet, not merely how a browser played it. Flash was close to a perfect tool for that in many ways because you thought visually, represented the work visually in a graphics editor, and published it with one click. The result then worked exactly the same way everywhere.

Today, we don't really have a single tool that does all of that. It wasn't entirely Apple and Steve Jobs, of course, because Flash had trouble running performantly on mobile devices. Mobile was already a resource-constrained environment, and Flash added another abstraction that was fairly resource-intensive. Even on Android devices, where Flash had an opportunity to be really good for a long time, it struggled. I can't say that I mourn Flash, but Steve Jobs refusing to support it on the iPhone may have been the death knell. It was definitely the death knell.

The audience for Flash consisted of very creative people, and at the time those people were often early adopters of the iPhone and other Apple products. If you couldn't personally use the thing you were building for, even if the market was great, you probably weren't wired to keep building for it. It's a classic enterprise-versus-consumer mindset. As a consumer-focused developer, I wasn't going to build something I couldn't personally use. I was customer zero. That attitude connects to the rebellious nature many of us had in that era and helps explain why the iPhone decision mattered so much. That's right.

Content creators, companies, and almost everyone else recognized that the shift to mobile was happening. You could see that, a few years into the future, mobile would take a huge share of your traffic. You might as well future-proof yourself immediately. At some point, you decided to shut down WinShareware. Com. What was the story behind that? I didn't exactly shut it down. A company called eFront was creating a one-stop shop with landing pages for many different things. If I remember correctly, it was something like the old Yahoo sections that were curated around topics such as technology and gave you perhaps 10 options. EFront was creating something fully integrated.

It would own everything, all of it would be part of the same landing page, and the site would be the one-stop shop for everything. I was a kid at the time, so I didn't understand any of it. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say, "Oh, that's not a good idea." They were doing that and planning to go public. As part of the plan, they were going to pay me a boatload of money to join them, but I had to relinquish the website so it could become part of their operation. That sounded good to me.

In retrospect, I think almost anybody could go public then, or everybody was trying to find a way to take whatever they had public. If a use case was connected to technology, it had a good chance of doing well. Unfortunately, jumping on bandwagons has never worked well for me, whether the bandwagon was this, crypto, or anything else. I'm always either too early or too late. For this one, I was too late. We consummated the transaction, and eFront was supposed to go public in April 2000. Then they called me and said, "I don't know if you've seen everything going on in the market. We've delayed for a couple of months."

They said, "This will all shake out. It'll be okay." April 2000 happened to be exactly when the NASDAQ had its huge drop at the start of the internet bubble bursting. The website went down with eFront's failed IPO, and I was no longer in control of it. That's how it died. I did have a side business that I'd started alongside WinShareware: internet hosting. There was no cloud then. You had to get your own server, set it up, put it in a data center, and get everything connected. It was a real pain. I'd done it for WinShareware and had several servers set up in a data center.

At one point, they were in my bedroom. I had a T1 line installed there, and that caused problems, so I eventually moved the servers to a real data center. I had excess capacity and thought, "I'll create virtual hosts inside each of these servers and sell that space." It wasn't dissimilar to the AWS idea that later worked out. That's my second callout to beating Amazon to something but watching Amazon do it better. They did it far, far better than I did. I had tens of customers, not a huge number, who paid me to host their websites on the same servers that ran WinShareware.

There was no scaling or capacity-utilization optimization, but those servers hosted a bunch of other sites. All of them lived alongside the main WinShareware site on those machines. Did you rent space from an actual server company, or did you rent a warehouse somewhere, put your machines there, and connect them to a T1? No, it was a real data center. You brought your server to them and put it there. It was more legitimate than a warehouse. What did you pay them for? You paid for the bandwidth you needed, and they allocated that amount to you. But you had to go in physically whenever you needed to do something.

We didn't have remote access cards. I don't know whether you've worked with one of those. In modern times, if you have your own server in a data center instead of using the cloud, Dell has something called a DRAC, a Dell Remote Access Controller. It provides access even below the operating-system level. You can use it as though you're sitting at the server's keyboard and terminal. The machine doesn't need an operating system installed. You can connect virtual media through the computer you're using far away and tell the server, "Pretend this CD-ROM is connected to you." Then you can install the operating system and configure the BIOS, or whatever it's called now.

That's how you do it now. Back then, you had to go in physically. The data center had a little cart with a monitor and keyboard. You'd connect it and sit there for hours installing everything until the server was functional enough for you to log in remotely, using SSH at that time or perhaps something else. I did that, and it was fine. The problem was that I went to college and didn't enjoy supporting those customers while I was there. The data center was down in Orange County, while I was going to school in Santa Barbara.

If there was ever a problem, and occasionally there was, such as a server's hard drive failing, I had to go replace it. I hated that. I was young and didn't realize, "Hey, this is actually a cool thing you have going. Try to build it. It's not that big a deal, or you can find other solutions." I didn't appreciate that even tens of paying customers represented something worth preserving. Instead, I shut it down. I thought, "I'm done with this. I'd rather focus on partying, having fun, and maybe studying at school. I can surely start another company one day, and it'll be fine." It wasn't fine.

At least I had my fun at the time. That's how we shut it down.

1:04:16 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=3856s)

Do you ever get back to publishing websites again, like creating content and doing all of that?

1:04:24 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=3864s)

I, you know, I haven't really no, I've got like like I'm actually not even really good about like sort of participating in social media, that much. Like. I've got like accounts on everything and I've got things to say, but I'm always like feeling like a little like h? Like I don't. I don't really want to like deal with the engagement or deal with like actually like talking. I'd rather just read and go like like lurk and move on. Or or I like to be anonymous when I like comments, so that it's not associated with me. Not that I say anything bad.

I just don't want it to like, I just want to talk about it really. And I think that at the moment is all. But I have like often thought I should like, you know, like I've got like a personal web page again, but it's just like a couple of ways you can contact me. I have thought maybe I should do more. But no, like like it's a great, it's a great idea. Like like sometimes I'd like to like try out one of my creative ideas, but I haven't gotten around to it. What about you? I mean, I still.

You know, the same blog I started in 1996, or something I still maintain even today and it still runs on- very similar. I actually wrote- I talk about it all the time is like it's still. I used dreamyware, even today, to manage it. I used to use front page, actually, and I used it for a long time until the server extensions from front page were no longer supported in my web host. They emailed me and said: like you know, of all the millions of customers we have, you're the only one that requires this front page server extension to be installed on our Unix machine. Would you consider not doing that?

You know, and I'm like, absolutely, why not? And discovered that, you know, there's an HTML equivalent for everything that Front Page did, for at least many of the things it did. Others are more proprietary and it couldn't really get it done. But so I still, I still, you know, for me it's a combination of: I like the technical challenges of just learning more about CDNs and so on. So, and FT, I still do, still FTP, because that's every page is a file save as of an earlier page. There's no like CMS behind the scenes, because none of it existed back then and so I actually started off writing about Windows.

You know my website was Explorer 98. Windows 98 was what I wrote about. And I wrote about like more on the UI side of things. Like you know, font smoothing, like what was the? What was the Microsoft font smoothing technology call like wasn't no true type is a more common name. There was a name they had for font smoothing. Oh, my gosh, hang on. I now I got to figure this out: Microsoft font smoothing thing. Name clear type, clear type. So like back then, like these weren't always enabled by default, your graphics drivers maybe didn't support, and so on.

So often I'd write about those kind of things like I never touched on drivers because you did a good job, wind drivers did a good job. And then I think you know we might have talked about this briefly when we met in person or chat async beforehand- there were two companies that created things that scanned your machine and would tell you if there are better drivers out there. One was something called catch up by manageable software. You install this device, it scans your entire machine and then it gives you a web page saying, like you have these 18 devices whose drivers are now out of date.

You can go download them from here. Then there was something called updatescom which was an active X control. So it ran in the browser itself. No need to download something until your machine. But it would catch different things than what catchup would do. And so I run that in parallel and that got bought by Ze Davis. And then, once it got bought, it died out. And then eventually manageable software also like, died out as well. And so I'm like: wait, why isn't anyone writing about Windows drivers in a way that you know this automate takes care of it for you, and you know.

So I briefly explored, you know, going down that path where I tried like build my own, scan your driver and make this all work and so on. But then I pivoted to flash actually, of all things actually I wrote about, and that's what actually made me really popular back in the day was flash like, and I also was like creating community forums around it, because I couldn't support emails one-on-one, so I like a forum for around that.

And so that's when that's what really got me into programming thing, design and that whole intersection of it which got me to dev tools and design tools, which is, I you know what I'm still enjoying working on all this time, but I still blog, I still keep up with that area because for me- because I work with developers exclusively, knowing how they work and so on is, like pretty important, and if I write about it helps me remember and recall and think through things more and also connects with interesting people.

Like you know, it's almost a world where even if you and I did not meet in person at Google and so on, would have probably connected because I'm like, "Oh, I remember when, Sher, let me just like reach out and talk to you about this". Many situations I've been in have often been where people were like, "Oh, yeah, I read this article about yours and done this, or you wrote about this. Can we talk more"? And then that became, like, you know, a professional friendship that lasted like decades and it happened so often. So for me, like that's the bigger motivation now.

Like back then I just enjoyed it because I was like had free time. I'm gonna write. I'm gonna do all these things. Now, it's a way for me to keep up to date on, like, what people are doing today and also keeps me in a know, in a situation where I can reach out to people and they can reach out to me because we have a common interest and that has been very helpful in more cases than I can imagine.

1:09:23 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=4163s)

Now, that makes sense. And, by the way, you are, among the most talented people I know in this like understanding, like what it, what, what developers want, and how to turn that into a delightful experience. Like you actually take that as more than a job. It's like your, your calling or something. So, you know, that's, that's obvious to anyone who works with you. That Well, thank you. It goes deeper than you know, like just just doing your job. So, that's probably informed by by, like what you just said, the fact that you participate so like sort of closely in the in the community, just in your own time.

But you know what would be fun is like coming up with like little projects from time to time that don't involve necessarily writing. I know you're not that your, your writing, your writing is fantastic. I'm a fan of all your work. But like, like just stuff that's like, you know, I don't even know. Like just just fun little projects that do something. I feel like I've I've not thought long enough about something like that. And that's what gives me so much satisfaction- is like standing something up real quick that does something fun, simple, and whatever else.

And, I've only done that for myself here and there and nothing that I could like share with the outside world. So, I should probably try to do that. I mean with AI. You know I said we'll come back to at some point. With AI, that's become easier now. The barrier for being able to try something out without investing too much time in both like creating the idea, learning about it and so on- has lowered the bar greatly on being able to just try things out. Discard it, try something new, yeah.

1:10:52 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=4252s)

There's a thing with that which I think I have to get over- and I think, others are getting over it- which is, when you like, just like, have AI create it chooses things that you wouldn't choose. It chooses designs you wouldn't. It chooses a language you wouldn't choose. You know, I would. I happen to think Go might be a better language- and it chooses, say, TypeScript. And so, like, getting like past that and saying like, look, this is not, like, like I don't actually have to understand everything about how this thing works and I don't have to sort of approve of the way this was created. Has a it's.

It's a double, double-edged sword because, on, on the one hand, once you start building something more complicated and whatever else, well, I can imagine that becoming like a trickier problem for you, especially if you start to move into something like you know real, or like enterprise or even beyond. But do you feel like that problems get solved as the models get better? Because today the models aren't there yet, so you still need to look at the code, and if the code is a language you're familiar with, great, you're going to be more productive.

If it's not, you're going to be like I didn't gain anything by it getting me 80% of the way there, because the 20% is actually the bridge that connects the road from between this river, but without it, my idea is like not feasible. Yeah, I know. I wonder like, like I think these, these things are getting better, like quite quickly, and so, you know, I would hate to be someone who says like no, I don't think, I don't think they'll get there, because they seem to be that the trajectory is there.

I could see anything from like well, actually, to answer your question, yeah, I think we'll get to the point where you can generate the code in a way that's better and can be used in an enterprise, reliable type of context, like like those needs are there now and people will fill those needs. I hope Go fills some of those needs.

I hope Google does and I hope, but the whole, you know, sort of there's a whole industry sprouting up to fill those needs and I think a lot of it's a question of the developer experience, like ensuring that you know the developer is involved in just the right places, that maximize his or her productivity and enable them to be able to, you know, use those tools in a way that is doesn't sort of like offend some other thing, like security or or the other enterprise, thoughts. But I think the role of the developer is kind of like elevating a little bit. Like it's.

It's like there still is a need for a human being to decide what they're going to build and how that looks, on the on the sort of system level, on the design level. It. It does, though, mean that maybe a lot of the like- like you know, not long ago I didn't even use an IDE. I just use, or like have any autocomplete whatsoever and just use, you know, Vim, and kind of like remembered what methods a class had, and went and just wrote them, and if I mistyped something, I would get catch it at compile time and deal with it.

That's clearly not as efficient as, like some, some IDE that will autocomplete for you or something that will automatically kind of write the whole loop for you, because it kind of knows already where you're going. It's able to predict that. So, like you can see how, like the coding, the actual, like that part of it is becoming more sort of automatable in a file by file, local context way. That looks like it's going like to be soon achieved. But that higher, like what do I need to actually build here?

Like what does this piece of the system need to do and how does it communicate with something else in this system? That seems to still be the world of an engineer. But maybe that'll go away too, and but there's another higher level above that then, which which I could see emerging, but then you know, I take that to its logical conclusion, which is, like, maybe eventually the AI can do all that too.

But I think at that point, and it's hard to predict now because you're looking into, like, such a different future. I wonder about that because, at that point, there's so much that's different about all kinds of, like, sort of knowledge work. You know, it's easy to anchor on the scary parts. Not that you were asking in a scary context; it's just where my mind went.

I think all of us have a little bit of an existential crisis here, wondering what you know where, where did our p, where did our, our craft go, you know, kind of like, like I actually liked writing code on that, real, I like writing a loop, you know, I it kind of satisfies me a little bit. I like having that knowledge and of all the, all the little things my program does, and I even sort of like the some of the things we call toil. I didn't necessarily mind it.

But I can see how like it does ultimately like lead to more productivity for, you know, companies not to not to have their devs doing that, to have them thinking a little higher up. And I wonder then, if we get to that point where, like, none of this is necessary, what it all looks like, and I, part of me is very afraid and part of me is like, nah, it always works out. So like something will work out or maybe it won't and we'll have to figure that out.

So, not your question, but there's a little bit of a of a, of a, digression there where it's very valid, because, you know, clearly, you know, from our chat right now, probably anyone listening or watching right now, is that we both got started in a time in tech where it was just exciting. You know, there's a lot of unknown territory and we could try things out, figure things out, and it was just exciting every day waking up and trying new things and doing stuff. I worry that magic. I just can't find it anymore in today's technology.

I'm trying to figure out, like, what is the next thing where I'm like it's worth spending time in? Not because I think it's going to, like you know, pay off 30 years from like I have no idea the website and stuff that's going to be a thing that's going to. You know, nobody would have ever guessed that developer tools would be a hot market. You know, in my case, for example, right that you know, otherwise that's going to be like you know, in some basement, somewhere doing something that no one would have ever cared. But the know luck, luck plays a big role.

You know, right place, right time, right experiences. I'm trying to see, like for the next generation of people like you and me. You know someone who's like you know in, like you know, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old getting started in tech today, what is that equivalent of it? Because I have a daughter, she's seven years old and she, you know, if she gets into tech, for example, it's great. But I'm like, what is that equivalent thing that kind of sparked an interest in us that led us to go through all this, to do what we're doing today? What is that world look like?

Is there even that world for that audience like? Is tech even the thing that, as someone at this age- you know younger- would have a path in for the next 20, 30?

1:17:28 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=4648s)

Yeah. I- And I don't have an answer at all for that. I wonder, like it's. It's one of these times where I'm like, "Wow, I really can't tell". Like I don't, I don't know. And that's frightening a little bit. But you know, then I always think, like I think all of these cycles always frighten people. And you always think maybe this one is different. But this time I kind of wonder if this one really is different. I do.

I do believe it cuz you know, I feel like you and I've been through 30 years of this cycle where you know, back then it was never a case where, if you learned a lot about networking, you know you're going to be, you know you're going to keep yourself safe. If you learn about graphics, you learn about programming.

Every single thing that you and I did back then it feels like was one where, if you took any silent part of that in, made, went, went deep in it, made your entire career out of it, you would have still been very successful in any one of those dimensions, because not any of those skills was one where it wasn't really valued.

1:18:22 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=4702s)

Yeah. Today, I find that very little of what we did back then is even necessary. If you want a website, you go to Squarespace, Wix, Canva, or something similar, click a few things, and publish. You'll probably have something far better than what you or I would create manually in Notepad, FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or anything like that. We did it because we had the tribal knowledge and enjoyed doing it, but from the standpoint of the final output, it probably wasn't a good return on investment. If we were starting today, you and I probably wouldn't begin by blogging or writing websites.

Why would we do that when there would be almost no chance of success, even if we could imagine it? It feels very different, and I don't know how to navigate it from the outside. Is robotics the thing you'd work on? But then you think about AI and robotics. You can build something good enough, but to make it truly great, you can't do it alone. You need a team, staffing, and funding behind the work. In both our cases, we could build something on the internet that was good enough, and perhaps better than what many other people made.

In your case, you built one of the most popular websites on the internet, and it was mostly just you. I think that ship has sailed. In technology right now, it's difficult for one person to create something truly sustainable. There's always a ceiling, and the bar will be much higher than what you can reach alone. Actually, maybe the counterargument is the idea of a single-person unicorn, which we've been hearing about lately. Perhaps things have changed enough that one individual or a small team can create something very useful with AI as a facilitator. In that sense, the opportunity might not be gone at all.

But I wonder whether the window for that will be very long. Maybe we're in the wake created by the separation between the old and new ways of doing things. New tools, namely AI, brought about that separation. We're in the earliest phase, when people are finding ways to take the new things and apply them to the old regime. Wix bought a one-person startup called Base 44, I think. The startup was about 6 months old, one person had created it, and Wix bought it for tens of millions of dollars, perhaps $80 million. I think it was $80 million. It's incredible that something like that can happen in 6 months.

A company made by one person can reach that outcome almost immediately. Maybe it's a sign of what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance" in the late '90s. But I don't know. Perhaps things are actually changing rather than merely repeating an old speculative cycle. I wonder what people thought during the Industrial Revolution, or whether people had similar conversations back then about the scale of the change around them. I also wonder about all these technology leaders and titans saying that AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetimes. I find that hard to believe because the internet also happened in our lifetimes, and that's difficult to beat.

The internet was a whole transformation by itself. It laid the groundwork for the mobile, cloud, and other revolutions that followed. Are they really saying AI is bigger? Initially, I thought they all had to say that. If you're the CEO of Microsoft and hear the CEO of Google saying something, you have to say it too, or you won't look like a visionary. But as we get further along, I'm starting to think, "Okay, maybe they weren't wrong, and maybe it wasn't all bluster." I don't know what to think about any of it. AI definitely has a lot of risk and a lot of potential, and it looks different.

As a side thought, your daughter is 7 years old. If you're in college right now, AI could listen to the lecture and take notes for you. It could quiz you and write at least a first draft of your essay, which you could then work from. At first glance, that's frightening because the ability to listen to someone and take notes might be hurt by it. In college, you and I took notes all the time. Listening carefully while deciding what to write became a skill through repetition. If you're always assisted with that, maybe you don't become as good at it and can't think in the same way.

I'm guessing because this is how I learned, but I think the concern is real. This goes back to every generation saying that as things become easier and better, people's ability to think through a problem and reach a logical conclusion will get weaker. When Google first appeared, people said that quickly searching for anything online would defeat the purpose of learning how to research, go to a library, and follow footnotes. That was probably true. I probably don't have those skills at all, right? But I never felt that I missed much by not having those skills. Or maybe I did.

This is one of those situations where I don't know what I don't know. With AI, though, you can get high-quality output from very little input and barely play a role in producing it. Your brain no longer has to build the connections and pathways from a statement, through the intermediate leap, to a logical conclusion and an argument. It feels as though we're missing something important in that process. You're not necessarily better off. Your output may be great, but the process that produced it may not be great.

The Industrial Revolution was a form of creative destruction: something cool you worked on was no longer needed, but what you did next would hopefully be less strenuous. You no longer had to hover over a furnace for 8 to 10 hours a day in difficult conditions. You could do something different, such as white-collar work. With AI, I don't see what the next step will be. One common response is that maybe it's just UBI: everyone gets a universal basic income because of AI and doesn't have to do anything. That reminds me of the movie WALL-E, with its future dystopian world where robots do everything.

People mostly sit and float around because there's nothing they can do. Anything they want to do can be done better, cheaper, faster, and more efficiently by an AI assistant. That's different from earlier creative destruction because it looks like a wholesale replacement of the skills we bring to the table, rather than something that frees us to do more meaningful things we couldn't do before. It isn't clear what new kind of work waits on the other side. I know that's what I worry about, too. Perhaps people always feel this way beforehand, but I wonder. The nature of society is built around its members, or at least most of them, working.

There are obviously many inequities in that system, and it stems from a period with even more inequity. But the best arrangement we've figured out is that people work, make money, and spend it, which is how society remains in order. If there are fewer things for people to do, even giving them money so they don't have to work creates a problem. How do you restructure the way people think about their sense of purpose? That sense of purpose is important to feeling satisfied and believing you're doing something that matters to you. Unfortunately, for many people the purpose is simply surviving: making enough to live and hoping their children can do better.

But at least that still provides a sense of purpose. There's a silver lining in that existing sense of purpose, but I don't know how the transition works without even that. Society isn't particularly accommodating to big changes. They usually require breaking points before anything shifts. Even beyond the transition itself, I don't know what the other side looks like or how people would orient themselves within it. If there is AGI, you might expect the singularity: the AGI makes itself better in a rapidly accelerating feedback loop. That would lead to extraordinary things. Everything physically possible to do might shortly afterward become possible for us. I don't know what that opens up.

Maybe it creates all sorts of new challenges and interesting things for humans to do. Perhaps everything speeds up so much that we, the simple-minded people of this period, can only ask, "What are you going to do if you don't have something to do at your desk anymore?"

1:27:21 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=5241s)

Well, on that note, Cameron, I think that's the perfect place for us to wrap up. It was great chatting with you, and it was especially fun reminiscing about all the things we did back in the day that maybe only two other people on the internet can fully relate to. I really wanted to bike-shed about that old stuff with someone who was actually there, and you're probably the first person I've gotten to do that with. I had a blast. We'll catch up in other venues soon.

1:27:57 - Cameron Balahan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=5277s)

Yeah, and just a shout-out to those two people who could relate to that discussion. We're all part of that same cohort. And I'll just say thank you for bringing me on today, Kirupa. It was a real honor, and I'm really glad you asked. You're truly one of my favorite people to work with, and I'm really grateful for what you do here and on your blog and all those other places. It's great work.

1:28:27 - Kirupa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9TA7a8TFr8&t=5307s)

Cool. All right. Bye, Cammy.


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