6 ms·

Archiving "The Famous Computer Cafe"

164 points by savetz 2y ago

a1o 2y ago
> Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others That's some interesting people listed. Here's the actual archive as a note to myself to listen to it later today: https://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe https://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe
Ciantic 2y ago
I started to listen to Bill Gates' interview [1], just to hear what he had in mind back then. Sounded almost topical in today's world. AI was mentioned, and predicting users' input in the distant future. Side note, archive.org has two players. The first one doesn't have a timestamp where you currently are. The second player, the Winamp clone does have it, but I don't think one can link to specific parts. [1] The Bill Gates interview starts at 10:10 https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1984-11-17_Bill_Gates_and_Kazuhiko_Nishi?webamp=default https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1984-11...
- a1o 2y ago
  > The second player, the Winamp clone Wait, what the Winamp clone? Clicks link This is beautiful, thank you for this!
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    A standalone project, incidentally: https://webamp.org/ https://webamp.org/
    - beardyw 2y ago
      That's great. Can't see a keep screen on option?
      - mananaysiempre 2y ago
        I wanted to say that sounds like too much to make available to web apps at all, but nope, apparently it’s indeed a thing that a website can tell your computer to do[1]. I don’t see an option to do that here either, though. I guess your choices are to submit a pull request[2] adding that capability or to use a manual systemwide toggle (I use Keep Awake![3] on GNOME Shell and Coffee[4] on Android). [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake_Lock_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake... [2] https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp [3] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1097/keep-awake/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1097/keep-awake/ [4] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.muellerma.coffee/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.muellerma.coffee/
        beardyw 2y ago
        Just a few lines of script and you are done. I think it was a reaction to sites playing a hidden video, which was just a waste. Even works on my Ubuntu laptop.
  - samstave 2y ago
    Wow! And you can move and resize the widgets! https://i.imgur.com/PmXmpVO.png https://i.imgur.com/PmXmpVO.png I wonder if we can get an MPV skin of Winamp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277014 This is a great interview with Gates. The interviewer is great too, great commentary and questions. "A machine on every desktop ad a machine in every home - and one of the things that will enable us to do that is graphics" (and he mentions how great the Macintosh was doing in the graphics area) --- Crazy the things that have been going on with him lately - and what was said by Thiel about him on JRE, yet HN seems to want to not discuss any of it... (This 1984 interview with gates deserves its own HN post. The commercials on it are great as well. And the fact that the interviewer brought up Aritficial Intelligence is great - and Gates' response was very cogent of the state of AI and the path forward. Where he says "people worry about AI taking over" - and says when "we can make software fully soft, we can get machines to help us" Great piece of history, that.
    - erickhill 2y ago
      If you click the little icon in the upper-left corner of the UI, you can change 'skins' as well. Very cool
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
myth_drannon 2y ago
In the episode with Joel Berez (Infocom) [1], he says people spent years trying to solve Zork. Imagine saying that about a modern game. [1] at 24:00 mark https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1985-07-12_Joel_Berez https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1985-07...
- haunter 2y ago
  >Imagine saying that about a modern game. Took 4 years to find the final scret cheat code in Nier Automata https://x.com/NieRGame/status/1345725199900155909 https://x.com/NieRGame/status/1345725199900155909 And that's just one modern game example, there are many more
- spanktheuser 2y ago
  I was one of those people. Or months at least along with a group of my high school friends. Most of the infocom games took between a few weeks to a few months of obsessive game play to get through & we played them all.
dudeinjapan 2y ago
Timothy Leary said PCs are the LSD of the 1990s. If that’s true, then AI is definitely the LSD of the 2020s.
- Woshiwuja 2y ago
  AI is on LSD not THE LSD smh
  - dudeinjapan 2y ago
    If you look at how PCs were used in the 1990s some of it was pretty trippy, so you could also say "PCs were on LSD." Take Andy Warhol's Amiga: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art/ https://www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art...
    - Woshiwuja 2y ago
      Cursed Andy Warhol MSPaint 1.0 selfie
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Given "it's" particular style of hallucinations, I'd put AI more on a mushroom scale.
- breadsniffer01 2y ago
  Tweeted this in 2021: “The current state of artificial intelligence is on psychedelics and we are simply trying to sober it up.” Src: https://x.com/miguelace_/status/1362646383077978115?s=46&t=gJEbI1inzC6i6iHVf9nKjQ https://x.com/miguelace_/status/1362646383077978115?s=46&t=g...
- toyg 2y ago
  The LSD of this century is social networks. People now see reality through them, with distortions and all.
  - dudeinjapan 2y ago
lasermike026 2y ago
Don't forget The Computer Chronicles.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jetrink 2y ago
Tip: The Internet Archive's advanced search can return results as an RSS feed, ready to import into your podcast app! Here's a feed of The Famous Computer Cafe episodes. You will need to rename it after adding it. 1. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=creator%3A%22The+Famous+Computer+Cafe%22&fl%5B%5D=identifier&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&rows=60&page=1&callback=callback&save=yes&output=rss https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=creator%3A%22The+Fa...
gsck 2y ago
On a slightly unrelated note, why is that webpage so slow to load? I'm used to the wayback machine being slow, thats fair enough, but their blog? I've not seen images load a couple columns at a time in quite a while.
butterfi 2y ago
I can’t decide if I want to hear the Douglas Adams interview, his passing still makes me sad.
ricksunny 2y ago
Transcript of Gene Roddenberry interview (h/t slashdot) https://archive.org/details/Gene-Roddenberry-Interview-Transcript/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Gene-Roddenberry-Interview-Trans... What kind of database could one access from a PC in 1985 from which one could learn about saltwqter crocodiles?
- blihp 2y ago
  There were lots of PC databases, of which dBase was one of the more popular ones.
  - ricksunny 2y ago
    So there was a content-layer market for the early PC-based DBMS's, a la someone marketing the early 1980s equivalent of Wikipedia or Encarta?
    - blihp 2y ago
      Yes, but as I recall it was a rather tiny subset of the database market unless one was very forward thinking and had Internet access and/or was part of a BBS community that shared information electronically which put you in the minority of the minority at the time. Financial market data was probably the largest one early on. Mostly individuals and small businesses were just rolling their own solutions and entering the data themselves until the late 80's / early 90's. Larger businesses had many of islands of systems and data but it was nearly all internal or used to generate paper documents... even internally. Roughly speaking: prior to the 80's one (often) wrote their own programs, prior to the 90's one entered their own data (i.e. for structured content like databases and spreadsheets), prior to the 00's one created their own content (i.e. documents etc.)

164 points by savetz 2y ago

a1o 2y ago

> Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others That's some interesting people listed. Here's the actual archive as a note to myself to listen to it later today: https://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe https://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe

Ciantic 2y ago

I started to listen to Bill Gates' interview [1], just to hear what he had in mind back then. Sounded almost topical in today's world. AI was mentioned, and predicting users' input in the distant future. Side note, archive.org has two players. The first one doesn't have a timestamp where you currently are. The second player, the Winamp clone does have it, but I don't think one can link to specific parts. [1] The Bill Gates interview starts at 10:10 https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1984-11-17_Bill_Gates_and_Kazuhiko_Nishi?webamp=default https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1984-11...

a1o 2y ago
> The second player, the Winamp clone Wait, what the Winamp clone? Clicks link This is beautiful, thank you for this!
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  A standalone project, incidentally: https://webamp.org/ https://webamp.org/
  - beardyw 2y ago
    That's great. Can't see a keep screen on option?
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      I wanted to say that sounds like too much to make available to web apps at all, but nope, apparently it’s indeed a thing that a website can tell your computer to do[1]. I don’t see an option to do that here either, though. I guess your choices are to submit a pull request[2] adding that capability or to use a manual systemwide toggle (I use Keep Awake![3] on GNOME Shell and Coffee[4] on Android). [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake_Lock_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake... [2] https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp [3] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1097/keep-awake/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1097/keep-awake/ [4] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.muellerma.coffee/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.muellerma.coffee/
      - beardyw 2y ago
        Just a few lines of script and you are done. I think it was a reaction to sites playing a hidden video, which was just a waste. Even works on my Ubuntu laptop.
- samstave 2y ago
  Wow! And you can move and resize the widgets! https://i.imgur.com/PmXmpVO.png https://i.imgur.com/PmXmpVO.png I wonder if we can get an MPV skin of Winamp https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277014 This is a great interview with Gates. The interviewer is great too, great commentary and questions. "A machine on every desktop ad a machine in every home - and one of the things that will enable us to do that is graphics" (and he mentions how great the Macintosh was doing in the graphics area) --- Crazy the things that have been going on with him lately - and what was said by Thiel about him on JRE, yet HN seems to want to not discuss any of it... (This 1984 interview with gates deserves its own HN post. The commercials on it are great as well. And the fact that the interviewer brought up Aritficial Intelligence is great - and Gates' response was very cogent of the state of AI and the path forward. Where he says "people worry about AI taking over" - and says when "we can make software fully soft, we can get machines to help us" Great piece of history, that.
  - erickhill 2y ago
    If you click the little icon in the upper-left corner of the UI, you can change 'skins' as well. Very cool
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

myth_drannon 2y ago

In the episode with Joel Berez (Infocom) [1], he says people spent years trying to solve Zork. Imagine saying that about a modern game. [1] at 24:00 mark https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1985-07-12_Joel_Berez https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1985-07...

haunter 2y ago
>Imagine saying that about a modern game. Took 4 years to find the final scret cheat code in Nier Automata https://x.com/NieRGame/status/1345725199900155909 https://x.com/NieRGame/status/1345725199900155909 And that's just one modern game example, there are many more
spanktheuser 2y ago
I was one of those people. Or months at least along with a group of my high school friends. Most of the infocom games took between a few weeks to a few months of obsessive game play to get through & we played them all.

dudeinjapan 2y ago

Timothy Leary said PCs are the LSD of the 1990s. If that’s true, then AI is definitely the LSD of the 2020s.

Woshiwuja 2y ago
AI is on LSD not THE LSD smh
- dudeinjapan 2y ago
  If you look at how PCs were used in the 1990s some of it was pretty trippy, so you could also say "PCs were on LSD." Take Andy Warhol's Amiga: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art/ https://www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art...
  - Woshiwuja 2y ago
    Cursed Andy Warhol MSPaint 1.0 selfie
Ylpertnodi 2y ago
Given "it's" particular style of hallucinations, I'd put AI more on a mushroom scale.
breadsniffer01 2y ago
Tweeted this in 2021: “The current state of artificial intelligence is on psychedelics and we are simply trying to sober it up.” Src: https://x.com/miguelace_/status/1362646383077978115?s=46&t=gJEbI1inzC6i6iHVf9nKjQ https://x.com/miguelace_/status/1362646383077978115?s=46&t=g...
toyg 2y ago
The LSD of this century is social networks. People now see reality through them, with distortions and all.
- dudeinjapan 2y ago

lasermike026 2y ago

Don't forget The Computer Chronicles.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

jetrink 2y ago

Tip: The Internet Archive's advanced search can return results as an RSS feed, ready to import into your podcast app! Here's a feed of The Famous Computer Cafe episodes. You will need to rename it after adding it. 1. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=creator%3A%22The+Famous+Computer+Cafe%22&fl%5B%5D=identifier&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&rows=60&page=1&callback=callback&save=yes&output=rss https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=creator%3A%22The+Fa...

gsck 2y ago

On a slightly unrelated note, why is that webpage so slow to load? I'm used to the wayback machine being slow, thats fair enough, but their blog? I've not seen images load a couple columns at a time in quite a while.

butterfi 2y ago

I can’t decide if I want to hear the Douglas Adams interview, his passing still makes me sad.

ricksunny 2y ago

Transcript of Gene Roddenberry interview (h/t slashdot) https://archive.org/details/Gene-Roddenberry-Interview-Transcript/mode/1up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/Gene-Roddenberry-Interview-Trans... What kind of database could one access from a PC in 1985 from which one could learn about saltwqter crocodiles?

blihp 2y ago
There were lots of PC databases, of which dBase was one of the more popular ones.
- ricksunny 2y ago
  So there was a content-layer market for the early PC-based DBMS's, a la someone marketing the early 1980s equivalent of Wikipedia or Encarta?
  - blihp 2y ago
    Yes, but as I recall it was a rather tiny subset of the database market unless one was very forward thinking and had Internet access and/or was part of a BBS community that shared information electronically which put you in the minority of the minority at the time. Financial market data was probably the largest one early on. Mostly individuals and small businesses were just rolling their own solutions and entering the data themselves until the late 80's / early 90's. Larger businesses had many of islands of systems and data but it was nearly all internal or used to generate paper documents... even internally. Roughly speaking: prior to the 80's one (often) wrote their own programs, prior to the 90's one entered their own data (i.e. for structured content like databases and spreadsheets), prior to the 00's one created their own content (i.e. documents etc.)