Hi everybody. Today I chat with Cameron Valahan 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 Windzip and Winroar. 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 dialogue, 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.

Awesome. Well, thank you for having me, Kirupa. Uh, as you know, I'm Cameron. Um, I am uh the PM for the Go programming language at Google. Uh I you know I've had a long kind of like unfocused uh sort of history of jobs before this. Uh you know when straight out of school I actually went to law school. I became a lawyer for several years. Um after that I worked in um high frequency trading. Uh I had a prop trading firm. Did a lot of like you know that sort of low latency market making in um in US equities and building the infrastructure around that. Uh and then uh 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. Uh and yeah, you and I work together uh like sort of in tangential organizations uh working uh on developer tools generally which has become kind of uh my focus in the last several years. Uh so yeah, that's that's about it. Yeah, you know, I live in New York City, uh, and I kind of enjoy all things tech and especially all things that cater to developers. So, uh, this

is a question I like to ask everyone I meet. How do you get involved in tech? Like, what was your earliest memory where you're like, you know what, I want to make my career about working on computers and doing things that we're doing right now. I I I wonder if I know

like I can if I think about it like I always had a fondness for like space, you know, like outer space. Uh and I liked like the future. I liked Star Trek. I liked things like that. So like the same nerdy kind of uh you know things. Uh then next to them somewhere is technology or at least it was in say the early 90s or something like uh where not that many people had computers. Uh and so at some point my dad bought me a computer. Uh I think I was like you know 9 years old and um and that's a huge sort of credit to him uh for for doing that like uh like thinking like this could be a useful thing for this kid to

to play around with. Um and in those days you know he didn't know about screen time or trying to limit my like you know time on this thing. And I just spent all the time on it because it was so interesting to me like you know I I hadn't seen any of this before and all the you know games at first which are super cool and whatever else. Um and you know you just like back then like the internet was so small. So when I got that it was like still massive but like not like uh as sort of multifunctional and and with all of the variety of options you have today. And I think like I found myself in certain like little rabbit holes and uh like next thing I

knew I wanted to learn how to like build with computers or how to build my own computer physically uh how to build software, how to whatever and and it all kind of like grew from there and I had no sort of person telling me no, you can't do that which I again I'm grateful to my parents for just letting me sit on my computer all the time. Do you know

what computer it was that you first got?

Yeah, it was a clone uh like uh something we bought from like a computer show in Costa Mesa, California. Uh and it was a Pentium 100. Um and it had like 800 megs of hard drive space. Uh I think it had 16 megs of RAM, which was really, you know, like I I was blowing out all my friends with with this configuration. like the Pentium was awesome, the RAM was awesome, even though the the hard drive space was awesome. Um, that's about all I remember about it, but it was uh yeah, it didn't have any specific brand on it. What about you? What was your first computer? 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 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? So, it started with like, you know, came I think it even came pre-installed with uh with DOSs and uh Windows 3.1 or maybe 311 uh Windows for work groupoups. Oh, networking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which Yeah. I never really understood what I I didn't I didn't know. And I still don't what the difference between them was but uh uh that uh and then quickly thereafter I installed uh OS2 warp on it uh the third version of OS2 because I thought OS2 was the future of operating this Microsoft thing and run its course. DOSs is not as good as uh uh or Windows even is not as good as OS2. Um, and I think that's actually like something that uh still persists with me where I like to like do

the thing that other people are not doing and usually to my detriment. Uh, like uh like I I was using a Linux laptop just until like last year and um like running you know Arch Linux on it with uh with Gnome and and 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. uh 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 uh

that that's my early operating system

you end up installing Windows 95 on that same computer or did you get a different computer by that time same computer same computer yeah well those are fun times right where the drivers probably didn't work to figure out like you know is it plug-and-play compatible I I I think I vaguely remember that we had to have a separate floppy disc of the Windows 95 drivers separate. So during installation, you had to put it inside and be like, "Oh, by the way, do you have a disc with the Windows 95 drivers?" You had to put that in. Or was it Windows 98? I keep forgetting when, but there was a moment where if your drivers weren't there, you had to

provide it. I think 95 had that, too. Uh, 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.

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.

Yeah. And it was satisfying knowing that it was like no this is my monitor that it 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 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. Uh Sound Blaster 16, I think. and 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 uh just talking about it. Yeah. And

was it same modem upgradeable? So when like for example everyone because I think back then right you had to you basically had to choose a camp. You were either in the US robotics camp or you were in what was the other competing standard? Was that by Lucent or someone else?

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 I I think they merged eventually, right? But I'm not sure when. So now I have to figure out I had

to Google this now. Like Yeah. Yeah. You know, US robotics versus threecom connection. I'm leading the search on by the way. So 1997 three comp merged. They did merge robotics. Okay. Well, you know, we can figure that out. Then 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. Uh, 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 uh with the little lights the satisfying lights telling you whether you're receiving, uploading or both. Exactly. Exactly. And

you know then there was this moment I always find it to be a right of passage when they realize I could use a default software my ISP provided for being able to put phone number, username and password or I could set it up myself by setting my own connection thing in the connection manager tool and I can bypass the ISP tool directly. Like that to me was like, "Wow, I can actually choose like, you know, TCP IP, put those weird settings in, and now I don't need to deal with the whatever the clunky software the ISP provided for making this all work." Well, and the bloatware,

you know, I from early from the from from the beginnings, I hated bloatware. I hated whatever like came pre-installed with your computer. Like if you bought a new computer, you'd immediately format it and install the operating system fresh because I don't know what you know, whoever, you know, compact or whoever you're buying from is putting on there. But I'm not I'm not interested in that. Yeah. And I would also religiously

like check my there was a tool that showed you all the things that run on Windows startup. You know, it was like a built-in tool. It was like a bunch of check boxes. And I'm like, why is all this here? Why doesn't it need to be I'm going to uncheck everything? Cuz the first time you restart your machine after like a fresh Windows install, that was the fastest your machine was ever going to be. No matter how careful you took care of it, that was the smoothest, fastest experience you're ever going to get. And I remember like even buying like Norton had various tools of questionable quality. I think it eventually became system works. And then so every year just like Turboax, I would buy the new version of System Works

because they had one of those things

where it would actually scan your system, analyze it for like all the performance issues and go ahead and fix it. Like your bloated registry was one of the biggest things. So even if you uncheck stuff, your registry is having all kinds of things was like one of the main reasons your computer was slow. And System Works would go and clean up your registry. It also broke a bunch of things behind the scenes because they didn't really know what it was actually deleting was needed or not needed. But it gave you for the first reboot again after that the same illusion of a clean, freshly formatted machine. See, I I wouldn't have trusted something like that. I would have just formatted again.

Like I think I used to format like once every six months at least, you know, and when you're like 10 years old, that's like a lifetime every six months. It's like it's time. Uh but uh but yeah, like the registry was the one thing I could never figure out how to keep clean because there was you uninstall something and the registry keys remain. Uh, and so then you go in, you're like, "Ah, I don't know if I wanted to delete this stuff." Who knows what's what it's going to do. And sometimes you would and you'd break something you weren't supposed to break. And then, all right,

now it's time for the format again. Anyway, yeah. And you know, I don't know if you ever did this, but at some point I learned all about how to slipstream a Windows installation. So, you can actually there's a tool that Microsoft provided for enterprise and administrators to create custom VM im custom Windows images. So you download the full ISO and then you say pre-install it with these drivers and all of that. You put in your own CD in and then create a custom version of your installation. So that way you could bypass the initial setup for like it's missing these CD drivers. It's missing all these things and you could do that.

I think it was called the Windows OEM kit and that was a very straightforward tool as well. I'm like that saved so much time in these formatting. You're you're going into the future now though I think like one CDROMs you mentioned. So, uh, yeah, that is true. That is true. One, but two is like I I think that sounds like more like something like Windows like XP forward. No. Or are you thinking are you I think it was XP. You know, maybe the technology existed back then, but I was

not aware of it or smart enough to figure it out at that point existed. But yeah, you're right. Maybe I'm jumping back and forth now between like, you know, this is all like 25, 30 years ago at this point. So, it's hard to know exactly, yeah, what decade or what genre of XP operating system or Windows operating system we were thinking about.

Yeah, it is all sort of merged together. I know. Um, but no, I I never really got it that streamlined. I remember it always being like a project uh and but a pro a necessary evil. Uh, and uh and then of course there were the um the the the sort of data losses that would happen from time to time. Um, 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 you learn to back up at least once, you know, and even then. Uh, and so there were always big wipeout events that you're like, "No, I lost everything again." Uh, 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 Omega zip drive that I just cannot access the contents for anymore. Yeah, I have those things too.

I not a zip drive anymore. I think I 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. I mean, once quantum computing kicks in and all the encryption from back then is trivial for it to crack, I I think it's only inevitable before you just like drag and drop all of these files from back then in and it's like, yeah, give me five minutes, I'll decrypt all these wind roar files and zip files that were, you know, compressed and encrypted and all of that. Yeah, the wind roars. I feel like there was something where you could like put malware in a RAR file or at least that's what my understanding was at the time. I was always pretty afraid of RAR and I still am if I see RAR.

Yeah, I never understood what WinRAR actually I remember like it was like winar.de was the URL. Like why is it a German URL? And also like why does it keep asking me to pay when I can just hit cancel and I can just use it because there were a lot of tools that were even Windzip was a shareware app. you know, you had to download it and you had to go through the payment screens and skip skip skip for free. Some had a 30-day trial and I'm like, one of the other big reasons I for machine so often is I had so many tools that had like time box trials that I needed to now reset and formatting was the fastest way. I mean, I didn't know about registry tricks or

like some random file that they write on disk with the time stamp that you would update it. Like I didn't know all that stuff. like but I can format it, you know, have a streamlined solution here. I'm going to be up and running in a couple of hours. Yep. Yep. Now, were you

on IRC and like news groups? Did you use

any of those channels? IRC definitely. In fact, I used the Microsoft chat client which gave the comic strip view on top of IRC. I don't know if you have only seen MRC. What? Yeah, it's all IRC behind the scenes, but it creates in the comic strip format. if other people are also using the Microsoft chat client, you could actually, you know, choose your character and you can actually do the same kind of things in a more interactive way. And that was actually a lot of fun because a lot of my early IRC things were on like very technical Windows and Microsoft related venues. I think Microsoft had something called MSN communities long time ago and that was a collection of IRC channels that you could join on various topics of interest

and there was like a Windows talk tech talk once and I remember that was like a thing that I was so actively involved in. How about you? Interesting. Very cool. Um you know that sounds a lot like the way iMessage works now. say like SMS on the background or RCS in the background and and and then uh some uh sort of improved experience between uh the two iMessage clients. So, seems like but microto is literally a comic strip. You could actually see a fake background in black and white and you could choose the characters you wanted and I remember it's an alien one. I always really enjoyed because I always enjoyed like the sci-fi space thing as well and that's what I that's what I use. Yeah, I

mean know those of us listening probably won't see this, but I'll try to post a screenshot of this so that those who are watching it can actually see what Microsoft chat client from back in the day looked like. That's awesome. I'd like to see that too. Uh, no, it sounds

great. So, getting speak of sharewware, you know, and this is what, you know, really like got me interested in wanting to talk to you is you created windshareware.com back in the mid 1990s. That's a time when most people did not know what the web server was, how to what even the internet was, much less create something on the internet. So talk to me a little bit about what went on behind the scenes for you to do that. Yeah, sure. So uh

you know the first iteration of uh win shareware was actually called the 95 sharewware page. Uh and I was like 12 years old so forgive the you know weird title. Um but uh I was with this like ISB after after I'd left AOL and discovered that oh you actually don't need to use AOL to get to the internet. You can just go straight to the internet. Um, I uh I I got into this network called like the concentric network was the name of it. Um, and uh and they'd give you five megabytes of space that you could just host whatever you wanted. You know, it's like concentric.net/tilda and your username. Um, and uh and I was like, okay, like let me let me, you know, in my infinite time there sitting

at the computer, I'm like, let me see what I can do with that. So, um, there was Front Page, Microsoft Front Page, if you're familiar with that. Very familiar with that. I wrote a book on it actually. Oh, you did? Wow. Well, I know. Before you wrote the book or I would have I would have been able to use your book. Uh um I just like you know played with it. It was it was as I remember it was like super easy like it was drag and drop and then it would like generate the code for you. Something like that. We're using Front Page Express or proper Microsoft Front Page. Proper Microsoft Front Page but like 1.0 like the very first version of this thing. Um there

two windows. Solution Explorer was front page explorer was one of them and then the editor was the other window. Correct. Maybe that probably you would know better. You wrote the book. I It's It's been It's been a long time. Um it did come in a box, you know, you had to buy it from like the store like everything else. Y uh but yeah, I uh I I started I started with that and I started making just like random little things. And one thing I made was just a page that would have links to like my favorite like pieces of sharewware. I take a step back. For some reason, sharewware was really interesting to me. probably because I was like learning how to write software at the time and I you know

first language I learned was Visual Basics. So like not necessarily the best language for like writing something that you're going to distribute to the public or anything but like um I I'd kind of gotten a sense of how to build little Windows things. Uh and so I'd seen wow other people are building some very cool things. Um I'm interested uh that an individual can just build something or like a small team can just build something. Uh and and so something about it really appealed to me. Sharewware um and and you know for those who don't know sharewware is like uh just software typically that you are allowed to like share around uh I think is where the word comes from and there are like subver genres of shareware like freeware

which is like yeah just free you just anyone can have anything uh and then there's like nagwear like which is what that that one thing you were describing where there'd be a screen that shows up and says like hey pay for me or skip this step. Uh and uh and you know like trial wear I don't know a lot of different wares. Uh and Sherro was the overarching sort of umbrella that meant like just stuff that like people have written and it's not a corporate thing.

It's not like sold in normal channels, normal distribution channels. It's just something you can discover online and uh and download and use. Um and so like I really like that stuff. I created a web page. It had some links to some of my favorite sharewware which I don't even really remember what they are anymore but Windzip must have been one of them I think. Uh or maybe it was before Windzip's time. Um and uh and so like this was like a fun thing for me and I just put it up and then next thing I knew a lot of people were coming like uh like I had one of those little counters at the bottom because that was a right of passage in the in the mid 90s. Uh I

didn't have a guest book but that was another right of passage. Certainly those construction worker gifs uh or gifs they were they were present uh all throughout the web page um like everything in in that period and uh and so like people started coming people started like saying hey if if I link to your page will you link to mine and you know 12-year-old me is like yeah cool this sounds great let's do it and uh and there were so few websites back then that like anything you built like this was really just value right away like everyone wanted this like it wasn't just some 12-year-old's opinion on what what sharer was good. It was actually a useful thing for for for some people and

a 12-year-old's opinion on what sharer was good. So uh um in the middle of this I was like well maybe we can go a little bit further uh and uh and start like actually like making it so that we can categorize the uh the different kinds of shareware I think is good uh like productivity tools or like uh you know utilities or you and I slowly increased the number of categories that you would have um and and that made it more useful. Uh and speaking of device drivers, uh that was a major pain point for me like finding all my device drivers. You got to go all these various websites, download them, whatever. So I started just like collecting those as well and made a whole drivers section.

Uh and and then you know that one required a little more upkeep because I only the manufacturers would submit their drivers so much. But um on the shareware side, authors were all eager to have their sharewware listed on my site, which created just like a whole thing where now I got to write like the software that lets you intake like, you know, take the form that you filled in, bring it in, format it correctly, put it on my uh on my site, uh put it in the in the database that I learned how to use and all of those things. Uh and uh and so grew from there. And and and a little side piece of this was with all that traffic, these random like companies

would ask if they could put like a banner up on it and pay me something for it. Um and so that was the beginning of this other angle which was like, "Oh, like you can make money doing this." Uh and and so uh you know, I started just doing that. I'm like, "Oh, sure. Yeah." Um but then like more than one person wanted a banner. So, I I created a little like Pearl script that would go through and like show it like like change which one you saw. Uh, and then it turned out that some of these people wanted to know how many people had seen their uh their banner. So, I started like tracking that, you know, as part of the script and sort of there were all

these little channels of like projects that I had going on um that included like both like, hey, like uh let's have social things where I'm linking back to some other page uh uh uh fostering those relationships, making sure we're all happy with that. We had like the revenue side of this, make sure like, you know, my advertisers are happy with what they're getting and and improving the tools for them. and then having the authors be able to write uh or or submit their shareware and having it properly placed on the website and next thing you know it's like a whole thing uh and and and so then it grew from there you know like uh I got I got contacted by like some guy who wanted to be uh wanted to

provide like a a more steady stream of advertisers for me but take a cut of it. So now I no longer have to go sort of say like oh uh I didn't have to deal with the advertisers directly. I just sort of got a a middleman in between. Um, and that's that's sort of uh, you

know, uh, the start of that. What year was all of this happening in? 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. Uh, 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 uh, 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.

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,

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 I was speaking of Quake, I was so into that that I don't think I even explored the DirectX side of

things. 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 uh Yeah. No, that that engine will not work. OpenG. Ah, so we never encountered each other there. you 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. Yeah. And I mean like like I remember I got like a newsletter put together. So I found this open-source pack uh software called Major Domo which would do like all of Have you heard of Major Domo? I have not. Okay. Yeah. I I 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 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. uh and at any point

someone might be able to just go in there and and take advantage of a misconfiguration and download your whole list or spam it or something like that. Um and and you know at the time I never really appreciated any of that uh like that that best practices even existed uh or should exist because maybe they didn't really. Uh but uh 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 um uh it's 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. Um but as as stuff got more critical, I think uh um 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. Uh and 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 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 uh figure out uh you know find a way around your your your protection. Um but speaking of logging in I don't even know that very many places had loginins like Windshare certainly didn't. Uh 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 uh you know and uh and it was really like something like Facebook that kind of I think I remember you you were really like okay I will make an account with you because I guess that's the

value prop you provide uh is is is knowing about me. Um or okay I will put my image here because previously you

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 uh, 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? Yeah. I think

this whole idea of like you can monetize user data that may have been the the front runner to requiring better logging in and authentication systems. And now they can actively know that you are who you claim you are. Which means every action you're doing is a very high signal activity that clearly indicates that you're doing something that we can track better monetize and understand. That's absolutely what it is. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean there's some second order effects which are like the internet is less open. Uh and uh I I I think a lot of people sort of lament that. It's like uh there was a time when the internet was truly just a wild west of anonymous everything everywhere with pros and cons to that. Um and and like

the role of something like Google was to organize all of that which was a very difficult challenge uh um you know before Google to like figure out where something is or something finding valuable things like that was you know it was really something uh and and now we're like in these little worlds of uh that are just exclusive of other worlds and you kind of got to go into that and you get locked in. you don't see the rest of it and and there's less opportunity for just something completely open and random to show up.

Yeah. Speaking of completely random and open that would show up, people always feel like today, you know, technology and computer and so on is like everywhere around us. I mean that's obviously true from a numerical point of view. But I also felt like even back then I would remember going to like random grocery stores, random specialty stores, seeing an entire wall of just sharewware files. Like there'd be like, you know, five and like the 5 in floppy disc or the three and a half, you know, whatever size it would be. You just see a wall of sharewware from like random companies that would just be available.

Like today, when you go to checkout counter, you see like the the chewing gum and the candy and so on just by the checkout. Back then, I distinctly remember there would also be CDs where magazines are right now. There' be like

CDs or floppy discs of try out the new Doom or like here's a random puzzle game. You know, it's a share word thing. Like Commander Keen was one of those things I remember distinctly being like one of the things I discovered purely to I'm like what is this Commander Keen thing? I don't know but it's like 25 cents which you know probably back then was like probably a dollar today. Yeah. So it was like yeah let me try these things out. I I feel like that all has gone away now. 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 uh uh the physical real world and so this is how distribution works in that world is it exists in the physical world as well. Um today you would think that's crazy because you're like why don't you just do online things in the online world? Uh and and yeah no I know that's a shame a bit or maybe we're just being nostalgic. I'm not sure. Maybe it's it might be a combination of things. It's like now we know a lot more about how complicated it is to get things in a physical store.

Maybe it's like watching Shark Tank for so many years at this point and so on. I'm just thinking like what was the logistics like back in the day? Like somebody had to print all these floppy discs and floppy discs weren't really climate you know weren't like resilient to like heat and so on. So like they had to be shipped in some form where you know I was I was in Alabama so like the weather's really hot there. So I'm like how did it get there without like all the data getting corrupted? How was the inventory managed after 30 days? Did they mail those discs back? Did they destroy it? Is there some, you know, landfill in Arizona where like all these old discs are just like buried so that

no one ever gets access to it? So many questions always come up where I'm like, if I knew then what I knew now, there are many things I be asking questions about on what is the viability of it. Like does stores make money from this? Like how much can you possibly make in like selling 50 cent, 25 cent discs? What was the incentive for them even take up shelf space when they could have put National Geographic or you know magazines and so on. so many things even today put me up at night and the joke is those AOL CDs right which all of us had hundreds and and and and you know I guess it was probably worth it to them uh where they got enough signups there

was probably like hey this market is quickly converging everyone is getting the internet uh fast let's just send everyone many CDs that's right I forgot about that yeah everyone had them as like coasters and other things you know you just had more than you knew what to do with with the AOL startup uh and started like 20 hours free or 200 hours free, unlimited free. Uh, and yeah. Yeah, that there was a lot of that, wasn't there? There was. Did you ever

subscribe to any computer magazines?

Yes. Um, uh, I was actually PC Magazine was my favorite. I thought that was the more rigorous one. There was also PC World, which I like. Um, I thought that was maybe less rigorous. Um, and actually, uh, Sharer 95 was featured in uh, not feature. Feature is a strong word. It was listed as one of the best websites to go to in one of PC Magazines like issues sometime in like 1997 or 1998. Um, it won for like the best place to find your device drivers. Uh, so that was the the one category uh for that.

But in any case, I loved PC Magazine. I'd go to like uh Crown Books or Barnes & Noble and just sit there and read read the magazine for free and uh and and 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 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 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 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. Uh and so when distribution becomes free then uh uh you know that changes the nature of the like you know the the I want to say

gatekeepers maybe uh 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. Uh, and so that's why Barnes & Noble will give you one of the five spots in their little magazine rack for computers. Uh, and and so this this created like a narrowed funnel of like what could make it to you. Um, and 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 and I mean I wonder what the next step is of course when like creating the information becomes a little bit um more uh I don't know how to say what the word is like commoditized or free cheaper uh like uh like with AI and other things like that. Um, 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. Uh, but but there's something, you know, there's something about like how it's easy to create things uh 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." I used to play games for the

longest time. What games were the first ones you remember playing on the

computer? So, um, like way back because you know, you asked my first computer uh, and that is actually the one that was like my first like mine, but previously my dad had one uh, and I don't know what he would do on it. maybe just like uh use a spreadsheet or something and uh you know it was fun to have uh I think he bought like a PC Junior it was called something like that. Um and uh and and on that was Math Blaster which actually was an educational thing with like a rabbit and some other things and and I guess you know like uh 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? Oh gosh. Yeah, that maybe sound I I can't tell if yes or I'm making that up in my head, but

yes. Let me look up Math Blaster on the internet. I can go to Google images in the meantime. Yeah. Um, so after Math Blaster though, while while you Google Okay, go ahead. What?

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. Um but but in 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, so Subspace was um eventually like Virgin Interactive uh 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. Uh, but it was like a massively multiplayer uh little overhead 2D shooter where you were like initially one of like four different kinds of ships uh and 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 uh you know types of weapons. Um and 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 um 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 uh I like a little bit of a more coordination team team level thing. Um so that was a lot of fun and uh and I played that for what seemed like a really long time. Um, and what was cool, you know, bringing back to Sher 95 for a second. Sharer 95 was like really successful in the mid

90s, like it was there was this thing called 100 hot uh that was like informed by Lyos's search rankings. Uh, and so I'll take them at their word here. That's that's the best as I know about the the rigor of how they they did their analysis. But Sher 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 uh I had I had a start.

I had a head start. Um and uh 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. uh 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." Uh and that meant so much to me because I'm like, "What? The the people making my favorite game love my website?" Uh and 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 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 winddrivers.net 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. So, what inspired you? Because you

created what was essentially a version of like the Windows UI like you know icons and the windows and all that in a browser page. Yeah, that's what it was.

That that's what inspired me basically. I've always been very bad with like um like visual creativity. Uh uh you know, never never really quite could figure out how to draw anything or you know, just just feels like a a personal sense of like insecurity is anything UX design. Um, and uh, uh, this was like, you know, when when, you know, when I was younger and still had a little bit of like maybe I can do this. Uh, I I tried and I I basically just tried to make it feel like, yeah, this is so Windows centric that like let's come come explore my file system here, you know, or my uh, application drawer or whatever. So what you got on on Wind Shareware or Shareware 95 before it was

basically like yeah like a window that looked just like Windows looked in Windows 95. Uh and inside were a bunch of icons. I used this software called map this uh which was like by some guy named like Matt something or another who had like a bunch of cool little tools that he published um for developers to use. Uh, and map this exclamation point. Map this exclamation point. Uh, uh, that was uh, it let you create like a little map on top of the um, on top of like a JPEG or something where you'd have like different links to different places uh, if you clicked in different places on the JPEG, which was a huge, you know, thing at that point. Um, no JavaScript really to speak of other than like Yeah,

you know, the classic image map in HTML. That's right. Front page provided that by the way. Oh, did it? Well, maybe not in 1.0. know. And by the way, I I moved on from from Front Page at some point and I just I just used Notepad, I think, for a very long time. Like that was, you know, I mean, HTML wasn't really that complicated yet. There wasn't much you could do. Uh JavaScript was like so rudimentary. You didn't really do much with that either. Uh I don't think CSS had really come around yet. No. Back in the day, actually, you could you could write in JavaScript or in VBScript. So you could actually type in your script tag and specify VBScript. And that was a

viable language you could have written your code in. That's right. VBScript will only work in Internet Explorer and and at this stage like uh early enough it was like the market was like actually you know when when Sher 95 came out when Sher came out like like Microsoft uh uh Internet Explorer was like this real niche like you know singledigit percent uh number of the browsers and it kind of felt like if you were using that you were a bit of like a rebel. you were on the side of like the disruption and Netscape was the old, you know, old guard. Um, but yeah, so so those are the two browsers you targeted. Uh, and Internet Explorer was optional. Uh, speak of shareware, Netscape was

actually shareware. It was sharewware. That's right. It was shareware and allow you to buy gold, which or be a navigator normal. And when it got I end up actually paying for navigator, my parents end up paying for navigator gold. I don't remember anything being different except a splash screen. The the ship, you know, the turning, what are you going to call it? Steering wheel thing on the ship that you use had a gold background in it and the loading animation in the top right corner where the Netscape logo and the stars would keep flying had a different animation as well. I could not tell any difference between what I got from the gold version of it versus the free version. I think I think that's right. You know, if I

remember correctly, maybe Gold came with like a suite of like email tools and things like that. Um, but I might be off here and and you were just using Outlook Express anyway and you didn't care. Yeah, yeah, cuz I had, you know, I didn't know how to export my email. No. Yeah, exactly. Good thing it would have been deprecated and gone and Outlook Express worked out a little longer. I mean, speaking of that, do you remember real networks and real player? Yeah, I do. I do. I'm trying to remember like was it just the fact that we would like watch like flash stuff online? Is that what it was for?

No, I think real was for videos. Videos like any video you want to watch, they often had like a real network link that you' to be clicking on and playing. Right. Right. So, it wasn't interactive like Flash would give you. It wasn't interactive. No, because you had in flash you had you had both shockwave which was the macro media director one you create which is like had 3D had hardware acceleration had all of that and they had flash was more of the lightweight one where the plug-in was like less than a megabyte in size and so people can start very quickly and that's what made it really popular compared to shockwave but real networks I remember the only time I ever end up needing it

was back then Yahoo had something called launch and that's where they put music videos up on the internet And these were like a handful of them that you know the major labels allow you to publish or whatever and you could only view them in the real player and so you had to have real player to view embedded videos from back. So now do you remember when YouTube first like before Google bought YouTube do you remember what what it was in was it in flash? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So at some point like video playing in flash was also a thing at some point. It became the thing because distribution that Flash had because I think Flash was the a universal runtime that transcended what browser you were on. It didn't

matter if you're a Netscape Navigator, Communicator, Internet Explorer or Firefox or whatever it was at the time or Opera and all of these things. If you built for Flash, you were guaranteed to have it work on all of these machines. And so that was a de facto thing. What flash didn't have was encryption. So, Silverlite came about and then Netflix was on Silverite for a very long time because it supported encryption. Okay. I didn't realize anyone used Silverite. Interesting. I thought Silver Light was always just the, you know, Microsoft competitor that didn't pick up. Uh, but okay. Good to know that Netflix used it.

Yeah, I was I was at Microsoft working on Silverite runtime and tooling for it. So, yeah, I agree. It had it had an uphill battle. Yeah. Yeah. It never really got over it, but uh but yeah, no, that that that all that all sounds right. Uh, and then HTML 5 is what kind of like did did did Flash in and that was the end of Flash. I'd say Steve Jobs actually did Flash in, you know. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Like that's something that HTML 5 absolutely you know I'd say even today we still haven't gotten to what Flash was able to do back then because there was the creation part of it like how you actually end up creating content for the internet and

flash was a perfect tool in many ways for that because you think visually you represent it visually like in a graphics editor and you publish in one click and you had it working exactly the same way. Today we don't actually have any tool that can do any of that. But it's not entirely of course Apple and Steve Jobs because slashers had difficulty running on mobile devices in a performant way because you already had a a resource constraint environment and now you needed more abstraction on top of that which is also pretty heavily you know resource intensive and so even on Android devices for the longest time flash just you know if they had opportunity to be really good there they had difficulty. Yeah, I I can't say that

I mourn flash, but I do remember Steve Jobs just like not supporting Flash on the iPhone, which was maybe the death now. Like that was definitely death now. Like that essentially made it cuz the audience for Flash was very creative people and creative people were almost exclusively on at the time early adopters for the iPhone and so on. And so if you can't personally use thing that you're building for, even if the market is great, you just weren't wired in a way to like it's a classic enterprise versus consumer mindset. I wasn't going to be building something that I couldn't personally use myself because I was going to be focusing more of a consumer and I'm customer number zero which is the the rebellious nature

thing of a lot of us from back in that era. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's right. And and just all all content creators and companies and everybody sort of recognized that this mobile shift was happening and that like you know you could sort of see that like a number of years in the future this is going to take a huge share of uh my traffic so I might as well future proof myself now. Yeah. Yeah. And so at some point, you know, you decided to shut down Windows, you know, winshare.com.

What was the story behind that? Yeah. So, not shut it down, but uh you know, there was a company, it was called Efront, uh that like uh uh was creating sort of this one-stop shop for very like like a bunch of different kinds of like landing. It was supposed to be the landing page for a bunch of different things. Uh so so you know I think like if I remember correctly something like akin to like how Yahoo used to have like a section that was curated by them with like these are the web pages that are you know tech this and with like 10 options. Well they were creating something that would be all fully integrated like they would own it all and it would all be like part of the

same landing and it would be like the one-stop everything. I I still you know like I don't I was a kid at the time so like I really didn't understand anything and now I have the benefit of retrospect so I'm like oh that's not a good idea but like uh you know they they were doing that and they were going to IPO uh and so as part of that they were going to pay me like a boatload of money to just be part of this but relinquish uh the the website like like it would be part of their thing now. Um, and so, uh, that like, you know, sounded good to me.

Uh, and and now in retrospect, I'm thinking about it a little bit. I think it's just like anybody could IPO or everybody was trying to find a way to IPO, uh, whatever they could at the time. And if it was a like connect it to tech, uh, kind of like use case, you had a good chance of doing well. Um, so, uh, unfortunately for me, trying to trying to jump on, uh, one of these bandwagons, it's never worked well for me, these these bandwagons, crypto or or anything else. I'm always not either too early or or too late. Uh, and and for this one, I was too late. Um, they we consummated the transaction and then they were supposed to IPO in like April 2000. Uh,

and uh, and they they were calling me. They're like, "Yeah, I don't know if you've seen like all the stuff going on in the market. We've delayed for like a couple months. this will all shake out. It'll be okay. Um and and April 2000 happened to be like exactly when the NASDAQ had like its huge drop uh for the the beginning of the internet bubble burst. Um so really the website kind of went down with that with their failed IPO. Uh and uh and I was no longer in control of it. Uh so uh so it died that way. Uh but I did um you know I did have a a side business that I'd started alongside uh Windshareware which was like internet hosting because like at

the time there was no cloud. There was nothing like that. You had to get your own server, set it up, put it in a data center, get it all connected. It was like a real pain in the ass. Uh and uh and so I had done this for Windshareware. I had like you know several servers set up in a data center. At some point they were in my bedroom. I had like a T1 put into my bedroom and that that was causing me problems. So I eventually moved it to a real data center. Um and and I had like you know excess capacity uh and I was like oh what I'll do is I'll create like virtual hosts inside each of these and try to

like sell uh you know sell that space. Um so you know not not dissimilar to the AWS thing that worked out for you know my second my second call out to Amazon beating Amazon but Amazon doing better uh uh is uh they they were able to do that far far better than me. Uh but I I had uh you know like not huge but uh like like on the order of like tens of customers uh who were paying me something to have their websites hosted on my servers that were the same ones that win shareware was on. There was no like scaling. there was no capacity kind kind of uh uh like like utilization optimization thing. Uh but there were a bunch of these uh other sort of hosts up

on those on those uh servers. Um and you rent space from an actual serving company or do you just rent a warehouse somewhere and just put like your machines there connected to T1? No, it was a real data center. It was like a place where like they they were you you brought your server to them and you could put it there. They had and it was all Yeah, it was it was more legit than that. uh and and you paid them for something for like what the the bandwidth you needed was you know and they gave you they allocated you that much um but you had to physically go in yourself uh and like you know whatever you needed to do and we didn't have any

like remote access cards I don't know if you've ever worked with someone one of those now like in in modern times if your servers if you have a server in a data center uh like you're not using the cloud there's a thing like like Dell has one it's called the DRA the Dell remote access card probably uh and uh and you go in there and you actually get like it's as if you're sitting behind the terminal uh or behind the keyboard like you get like a physical uh like there doesn't have to be an operating system installed, nothing. You can have like a virtual media through the computer you're sitting on far away and say like, "Okay, pretend this CDROM is now connected to you so I can install my

operating system uh and and set up the BIOS or or you know, whatever it's called now." And uh um so that's how you do now, but back then you have to actually physically go in there and they'd have a little cart that would come around with a monitor and a keyboard. You'd connect it. You'd sit there for hours installing your thing till it was good enough that you could sort of log in uh remotely like uh I think SSH at that time or maybe it was I don't know something honey pu capital.

Uh so so uh that was that I had that you know and and u that was fine and good but the problem then became that I went to college um and uh um I like didn't really like supporting these customers while I was in college cuz the data center was like down in Orange County. I was going to school in Santa Barbara if there was like ever a problem and occasionally there was like one of the servers would have like a hard drive would fail and I had to go like replace it. Uh and I hated that. So like uh like you know I think I was just young in those days and I didn't like realize like hey this is actually a cool thing

you have going on try to build it you know it's not that big of a deal or or or find find other solutions. I just shut that down. I was like uh you know I'm done with this like I'd rather just focus on like partying and having fun and maybe studying uh at school and less of this and and I'm sure one day I can just start another uh company and it'll be fine. uh and it wasn't so uh but uh but uh but but at the time at least I did have my fund so so we we shut it

down that way. Do you ever get back to publishing websites again like creating content and doing all of that? I you

know I haven't really no um I've got like uh 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 and I've got things to say, but I'm always like feeling like a little like h uh like I don't I don't really want to like deal with the engagement or uh deal with like actually like talking. Uh I'd rather just read and go like like lurk and move on. Uh or or I like to be anonymous when I like uh comments so that it's not associated with me. Uh not that I say anything bad.

I just don't want it to like I just want to talk about it really. Um, and I think that at the moment is all. But, uh, 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. Um, I have thought maybe I should do more. Uh, 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 I I haven't gotten around to it. What about you? I 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 updates.com 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 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 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. Now, that makes sense. And by the way, you are um among the most talented uh 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 uh um more than a job. it's like your your calling or something. So, uh you know that's that's obvious to anyone who works with you. Uh that Well, thank you. It goes deeper than you know like just just doing your job. So, uh uh 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. Um 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. Uh I I know you're not that your your writing your writing is fantastic. I'm a fan of all your work. Uh but like uh like just stuff that's like, you know, uh I I don't even know. Like just just fun little projects that do something. Uh I feel like I've I've uh uh 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 uh and whatever else. And uh I I I've only done that for myself here and there and nothing that I could like share with the outside world. So um 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

there's a thing with that which I think I have to get over and I think um others are getting over it which is uh when you like just like have AI create it um 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 I happen to think Go might be a better language and it chooses say TypeScript. Uh and uh and and so like getting like past that and 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 um sort of approve of the way this was created. uh 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 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 I I wonder like uh like I think these these things are getting better um like quite quickly and so uh 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. Um I 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 but but the whole you know sort

of there's a whole industry uh 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 uh that maximize uh his or her productivity and 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 uh thoughts. Um, 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 uh decide what they're going to build and how that looks uh on the on the sort of system level on the

design level. Um 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 and and kind of like remembered what methods a class had and 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 it's going like to be soon achieved. Um 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 the world of an engineer. Um but maybe that'll go away too and and but there's another higher level above that then which which I could see emerging but then you know I I I take that to its logical conclusion which is like maybe eventually the AI

can do all that too. Uh but I think at that point and and it's hard to predict now because it's you're you're looking into like a such a different future there at that point there's so much that's different about all kinds of like sort of uh knowledge work uh that I wonder like you know it's it's easy to anchor on the scary parts uh uh you know not that you were asking in a scary context it's just the my uh I think all of us have a little bit of an existential uh crisis here um wondering what you know where where did our p where did our our craft go, you know, kind of like uh 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. Uh I didn't necessarily mind it. Um, 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. Um, 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, um, not your question, but there's a little bit of a of a of a, um, 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

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. Uh uh and that's frightening a little bit. Um but you know, then I always think like I think all of these cycles always frighten people. Uh and you always think maybe this one is different. Uh 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.

Yeah. Whereas today I find very few of what we did back then that is even needed today. Like you don't need to do this. Like you know the website today you go to Squarespace or Vix or Canva or whatever click a few things you publish. You probably have something that's far better than anything that you and I would probably create manually in Notepad or Front Page or Dream or anything like that. It's kind of like yeah you did this cuz you have tribal knowledge in it. You did it for your own satisfaction but from an end output point of view probably a good ROI. Like if it started today, you and I probably would not start blogging or writing websites and so on. Like why why would

we ever do something like this when it's going to be no chance of success even if you could imagine it. So I do think it's very different. I just don't know how to navigate this outside like okay is it robotics? Is it robotics a thing you're going to be doing? But then you look at about AI and robotics being like something that you know you can build something that's good enough but to truly make it great you can't do it yourself. You need to have a team. You need to have all this staffing and funding. Whereas in both our cases, we were able to build something on the internet that was good enough and probably even better than what many other people did. In your case, you were

one of the most popular websites on the internet. It was just mostly just you and you're able to do that. I think that ship has sailed. I feel like for technology right now, I think it's very hard for any one person to create something that is truly sustainable because there's always a ceiling and it's going to be far greater than what you can do on your own. Well, I mean actually I would say maybe the argument is that now I mean you've been hearing about like the concept of like a single person unicorn uh uh the potential for that. So maybe maybe it's not even uh uh it's like it's changed. Um it's like possible now for even one individual or a small team to actually create

something very useful using AI as like a facilitator. But I wonder if the window for that is not very long. uh if this is like just a kind of the wake of that um separation in time between like the old way of doing things the new way of doing things that's brought up uh brought about because of the new tools we have namely AI uh and and we're just in that very beginning phase now where people are finding ways of taking the new things and applying it to the old regime um so it's really yeah I think when I heard about Wix I think bought a one person startup for I think it's I think called base 44 or something and yeah they just bought it was like six month

old one person created it and then Wix bought it for like I think you know tens of millions maybe 80 million or something. I think 80 million. Yeah. That's incredible. Like that's that's incredible that something like that can happen in 6 months. Uh so something you know maybe it's a sign of like um what is the word that like Alan Greenspan used in the late 90s? Irrational exuberance. Maybe it's that. Uh um but I I don't know. I think I think maybe it's actually just like a change of things. I wonder how what people thought like during the industrial revolution, you know, or like those who like spoke had a had a similar conversation back then like uh uh and I also wonder, you know,

you hear like all of these tech leaders and titans talk about how AI is the most important thing that's happened in our lifetimes. And I find that so hard to believe because the internet happened in our lifetimes and that was like I mean that's hard to beat. Uh that was that was a whole thing. um it's it's created it laid the groundwork for the mobile and cloud and other revolutions that happened after that. And are they really saying that this one's bigger? And and initially I was like, well, they all have to say that like you can't if you're if you're, you know, the CEO of uh Microsoft and you hear that the CEO of Google is saying something, you got to say it, too. You can't if you don't,

you're not a visionary. Um but now as we get like further along, I'm I'm I'm like, "Oh, okay. Maybe maybe they they they were like uh not wrong or maybe it wasn't all bluster. Uh and and so I don't know. I don't know what to think about any of it. Uh and it's uh it's it's definitely got like a lot of risk and a lot of potential. Uh and it does look different. Now, on a side little thing there, I also wonder like your daughter's seven years old. I'm thinking like if you're in college right now, you could have AI kind of like listen to the lecture and take notes for you. Um, you can have it like quiz you, you can have it, uh, sort of write your essay for you

as a first draft at least, and you could work from there. And like, you know, that, um, is in and of itself at at first glance pretty frightening because I think the capability of being able to take notes, listen to someone and take notes might get kind of like, uh, a little bit hurt from this. Uh, because you, you know, in college, you and I probably just like took notes all the time and it would becomes a skill is listening and taking notes. Um, and if you're always assisted with that, maybe you're not as good at that. Uh, and and and you're not able to think the same way. Maybe, you know, I'm just guessing because this is the way I I think it's very true. You know, this goes back to

the same thing as like, you know, every generation says the same thing that, you know, as things got easier and better that people's way to think and conclude to a logical destination, it's going to get more tricky. I think when Google first came out, people were like, you know, you can just search for whatever on the internet very quickly. that's gonna completely defeat the purpose of like you learning how to research, going to a library, looking at footnotes and so on. I'm like probably true. I probably don't have those skills at all, right? But I never felt like I missed out a whole lot on not being able to or maybe I did. You know, this is one of the things where like I don't know what

I don't know. But I do think with AI giving you high quality output with very minimal input where you don't really play a role anymore in actually having your brain build the connections and the pathways to go from here's the statement, here's the leap I'm making, here's a logical conclusion to make an argument and so on. It does feel like we're missing something here. You know, you're not better off. Your output may be great, but how it got there wasn't very great either. And I do think it's different in that with the industrial revolution, it was always called creative destruction in some way that okay, you're working on something really cool, but now it's no longer needed. But we're going to be doing though is going

to be hopefully less strenuous. You know what I mean? You don't need to be hovering over a furnace for like 8 10 hours a day and in these very, you know, difficult conditions. You now can do something different, you know, like white color work and so on. Whereas I feel like with AI, I don't see what the next step is going to be because, you know, when when the most common thing is like, oh, maybe it's just AGI, like everyone just gets a general income from AI and they don't really do anything.

I'm reminded of the movie Wall-E where you you have this future dystopian world where the robots are like, you know, doing whatever they're doing. But people are mostly just sitting around floating around because there's nothing they can do because everything they want to do can be done better, cheaper, faster, more efficiently by an AI assistant, which I think is very different than that because this almost seems like a wholesale replacement of the skills that we bring to the table as opposed to one that frees us up to doing more meaningful things that would otherwise never been able to do. I know that's what I worry about too. of course I I think maybe you always feel that way beforehand but I wonder I mean because

the the whole nature of society is built around us as members of it uh working I mean or most of us working there's obviously a lot of inequities in the thing itself and it all sort of stems from a period of even more inequity before that um but like sort of the best thing that we kind of have figured out what to do is people work they make money they spend it and they this is how uh society kind of like remains in order. Uh, and if there's less things for people to do, I mean, even if you just gave them money so they didn't have to work, that creates a problem. So, how do you restructure the way that people kind of like think about their sense of

purpose? Um, and uh, and because I think that sense of purpose is really important to feeling um, satisfied like uh, like feeling like you're doing something that matters to you. Uh, and and for unfortunately for most people, it's just surviving, right? like it's like just being able to make enough so they can survive. Uh and and that is like the purpose and it's so their children can sort of hopefully do better or or something like that. Um but that at least there is a sense of purpose you know I mean there is a silver lining in the in that um but without even that one the transition there I don't know how that happens because it's not like uh society's particularly accommodating to these big changes like they usually

require like breaking points. Um, but even beyond that, like I don't know what it looks like beyond that. Um, I wonder if there is an AGI, like you would think that that means that like the singularity and things like that where the AGI is actually able to make itself better in in this in this crazy um speeding up loop forward would mean insane things like uh you know, everything that's physically possible to do should shortly thereafter be possible for us to do. And then uh you know I don't know what that opens up like maybe there's all sorts of new challenges and cool things that humans can do. And uh it all just speeds up so much that we the simple-minded people of this period

of time are like well you know what are you going to do if you can't if you don't have something to do at your desk anymore. You know something like that.

Well on that note Cameron I think it's like the perfect place for us to you know end our conversation here. It was great chatting with you and it was just great reminiscing about all the things that we did back in the day that probably only two other people on the internet probably who are watching this probably are like I can relate to that. I remember doing these things you know. So, we were bike shedding, but that was a perfect I wanted to bike shed about stuff from back then that you probably couldn't talk to anyone else about either. Like, I definitely could talk about that anyone except you're probably the first one I've spoken to ever actually like like Yeah, you did that.

You were there. You did that, you know. So, had a blast. We had a good time as well. And we'll catch up in other venues soon. Yeah. And and just a shout out to those two people uh who who could, you know, sort of relate to that discussion. uh you know we we we all are in that same cohort of people who appreciate

that and and I'll just say thank you for bringing me uh on on today uh Kirupa. Uh it was a real honor and I'm really glad you asked. You're uh truly one of my favorite people uh to work with and um I really I'm really grateful for what you do here and in your blog and all those things. Uh it's great work. Cool. All

right. Bye, Cammy.