Wow what a song I love this new intro song. I'm feeling jazz. I'm ready to take on this day Brandon, How you feeling? How you doing?
Brandon Minnick:Oh my gosh. Feeling incredible now. I it's so it's been beautiful here in. In Northern California The weather's just been 70s and sunny. And so I've started swimming again, I got to get a gym membership again if this beautiful outdoor pool and I say this because I got some laps in this morning before work. And that already kind of gets my gets my blood flowing. Like it's better than drinking 10 cups of coffee for me. So yeah, that combined with this intro music. I'm ready. It's it's gonna be a great show.
Chloe Condon:We thought were like Should we just keep using the normal Intro music and now we've got this new intro music and it's like, New Year new class, you know, new website. new intro music. We've got it all cast new podcast. We're growing things are happening. Yeah, we've got PJ says, could you play that song? Again? It goes boop, BB bop. Exactly.
Brandon Minnick:Precisely.
Chloe Condon:Yes. Yes. I couldn't have put it better myself. Brandon, how has your week been? What have you been up to? Since we last did the show last Wednesday?
Brandon Minnick:Yeah. No, it's been a really good week. So far this week is the MVP summit at Microsoft. So our most valuable partners, I believe is what it stands for. They all get to check out kind of the the insider stuff at Microsoft. And so what that means, and the reason I'm being kind of cagey when I talk about it, is because the MVPs are all under NDA. So they we saw
Chloe Condon:a funny tweet about this.
Brandon Minnick:So when you're granted MVP status, you're also kind of read in you get the inside scoop on what projects we're working on. Because, yeah, there's a lot of things that don't make it off the cutting room floor at Microsoft. And I'm sure that's true with a lot of large companies were like, hey, let's try something. Let's see if we let's see if we can do it. Be. Let's see if people even want to use this. And so we the VPS are Oh is our first first previews of all the cool tech we've been working on. So I got to sneak into a couple MVP sessions. I mean, Microsoft employees are able to join, decided it wasn't that hard to sneak in. But yeah, it's been so exciting seeing all the details and I wish I could talk about it, but I guess we'll just say stay tuned. You know, Microsoft has conferences coming up throughout the year. that's usually where we announce it to everybody. But there's a really cool stuff going for dotnet develop So stay tuned.
Chloe Condon:I saw a very funny tweet about this that was like, it was a Microsoft MVP. And they said, I'm so excited about redacted at Microsoft due to NDA. And I was like, Ah, yes, it is MVP summit time. And
Brandon Minnick:it's very true. Like, there's some things that I didn't even know about. And we we work at Microsoft. But again, it's a big company. So there's been some things that have debuted, at least for me during this MVP, something like, I can't wait to talk about that.
Chloe Condon:Oh, my gosh, is he related? I've got Clippy on my shirt here. I'm sorry, shirt. This is a shirt that I got off, you know that the Instagram algorithm targets me pretty aggressively and targeted me with this word Archer that says all kinds of things like thankful and 100% energy and like self love. And I thought, This is such a great shirt, because we're not getting to our guests yet. But we're having a continuation of our conversation of retro tech today. So I figured this in my hat, My Word Perfect office Hopper, but the perfect accessories for this for this chat.
Brandon Minnick:You look great. It's very on brand for today's show.
Chloe Condon:Thank you. I wanted to look like a walking Geocities page. So fashion is important to get that player Yeah. It's so interesting that it is the MVP summit this week, because I feel like there's so many exciting Microsoft events happening right now. Brandon, I participated as a judge and a mentor. In the Imagine Cup. Since last we spoke so much has happened, my life has changed. I'm so inspired by these these kids, I call them kids because most of them are 16. And above students who are competing for the chance at the Microsoft Imagine Cup where they get to see their project turned into a reality. And oh my goodness, when I tell you, so I participated. Let's see, this would have been last Wednesday night, with these students all over the world, everywhere from New Zealand, to China to the US everywhere. All of these amazing projects. So it's not only MVP, summit time, it's imagined cap time and this morning where the finals I believe, not the championship, but the Yeah, so the number is slowly getting grounded down. It's very exciting. And if you have not checked out the Imagine Cup or know what the Imagine Cup is, oh my goodness, take a peek at the projects that are happening this season. I'm so impressed. I truly believe Brandon that these kids are going to be our bosses someday. Awesome projects, I'm very inspired by them. If you've never heard of the Imagine Cup before, in previous seasons, I guess or previous iterations and years. So many amazing projects have have come through this like oh my gosh, robotic arms. And, you know, the projects that I got to look at and judge varied from everything from cattle tagging, IoT projects, to masks that displayed, you know, visual cues based on what you said, the neural net microphones, so many awesome things. And it makes me want to just go back to school and pretend that I'm 16. And because it's very, very cool. And I and I feel these kids make me like, feel very excited to even be a part of this journey. So I got to judge and I got to mentor one of the teams and it's been so lovely. It's check out the Imagine Cup. It's incredible. If you're looking to get inspired and feel very lazy. It has been an awesome sight to see. Have you ever participated in the Imagine Cup? Brandon,
Brandon Minnick:I not as a student, I didn't know about it as a student. And I mean, to be honest, I wasn't that good of a student. So I probably wouldn't have done it, even if I didn't know about it. But yeah, I mean, I didn't really get into tech until college. So that's where I started writing code. Those are sort of played around with circuit boards, electronics. When I was a kid, I was just big into like computers and video games, which I don't know, if they hadn't imagined cup about like, maybe it's like video game speed reading. I could probably do that. But no, I did host or I'm sorry. I mentored a team a couple years ago, I think it was the the year before the pandemic, maybe who knows. But yeah, they made a, an AI app to help mitigate bullying in schools. So they created a an API where you could upload text or the idea was, if there's like emails or Facebook feeds or wherever, wherever the text may come from, you could upload it to their API and it'll parse through it and tell you is there any bullying going on and so on. is a really great app. But my team didn't make it out of the US. So I think we got six which is good. Really good. Ah, but yeah the Imagine Cup. The finals take winners from every country, every region around the world. So there's usually teams from all around the world that have created amazing projects. And it is it is a really, really cool thing that Yeah, I I wish I had known about when I was a student
Chloe Condon:there solving all kinds of incredible problems that are out there. And oh, my goodness, good luck to everyone participating in the Imagine Cup World final championship, I believe. Like, what are the actual words? I feel like such a pageant model? You know, I'm mentoring. I'm very emotionally invested in this now. So good luck to all the participants. We've got a special guest today. We're talking about, you know, all the new coders. Let's talk about we stand on the shoulders of giants. We stand on the shoulders of Clippy, I've got Clippy on the bottom of the shirt here, you can't really see it. I think this guest doesn't really need much of an introduction, because we have had them on the show before. Should we just bring them in?
Brandon Minnick:Absolutely. Brian. Welcome back to the show.
Brian Benz:I was laughing my head off behind the scenes there over the, you know, talking about the MVP seven stuff and all the NDA stuff. And it's pretty cool. Yeah. It's really great. To see all the things that are going to be happening and yeah, the joke about I'm really excited about redacted. That's great. That's great. I'm, I'm looking forward to them as well. I mean, Microsoft build is coming up. And I'm sure everyone out there would like to know the dates for Microsoft bill. And so what I because they're
Brandon Minnick:gonna ask is, cuz I do
Unknown:these little. But yeah, no, I there's actually a lot of speculation out there now outside of Microsoft. But I personally haven't heard the final dates either. So but Microsoft usually happens in spring. And that'll be the next thing that comes up. And I suspect a lot of the things that they're talking about the MVP summit will be will be covered and filled as part of big announcements. So yeah, absolutely.
Chloe Condon:So for anybody who wants a sneak preview of build every year, become an MVP, because then you'll know before everyone else, and then you can tweet very ambiguous tweets about how excited you are. It's Friday, last time you were here, we started our deep dive into retro tech. And we only got to I mean, we finished kind of like mid late 80s.
Brian Benz:Yeah, I know.
Chloe Condon:How should we catch up everybody who missed our first episode? First of all, you can go back and watch the prequel to this of course. But
Brandon Minnick:if it's not TV episodes, fine. The last episode with Brian if you haven't already listened to it or watched it. That's where you can find the podcast and actually every episode in the catalogue.
Chloe Condon:Random, should we attempt a quick recap? I'm trying to think of all the things that we mentioned on the last
Brandon Minnick:one. I mean, yeah, we talked about what flying toasters
Chloe Condon:Yes, important topic.
Brandon Minnick:We talked about punchcard programming.
Chloe Condon:We talked about jugglers, the mouse
Unknown:early forums of you know, early web forums and what it used to be like to travel around when you when you before the web connected everything together and and actually work in companies and things just before that as well. T one lines and all kinds of other stuff.
Chloe Condon:Yeah, we also saw your incredible website, Brian. challenge for that.
Unknown:Hand coded folks. If you want to see some artisinal original HTML written in Notepad and saved and open in a browser. Check that out. Yeah,
Chloe Condon:but we really only got you. I mean, it was kind of perfect because we stopped right before y2k. Kind of we're right in that late 90s 2000. Sweet Spot. So where do we begin? Where do we pick up Ryan?
Unknown:You know, I was thinking I was gonna start with COMDEX because we didn't mention COMDEX before and it's such a big part. So before in Las Vegas, I live in Las Vegas, out in the suburbs. And before the Consumer Electronics Show, which is probably the biggest show in the world for anything, I believe it's 125 to 150,000 people come every year. They fill the entire right yes CES consumer lecture. On a show and before this, the Consumer Electronics Show was COMDEX. So COMDEX was the big computer show. Bill Gates used to do a keynote there every year for about, I don't know, five or 10 years. And it was just everything that was everything to do with computers before the internet was on at COMDEX, and one of the things I wanted to mention was, you know, where you could get flying toasters. So we talked about flying toasters last time. People would go to an event like COMDEX and they'd look for the shareware table, if you walked into COMDEX in 1995, there would be this massive booth right at the entrance, everyone has to walk around it. And it would be basically these picnic tables set up with boxes of diskettes. And on the diskettes, that you can buy them like you there was like bulk pricing and you can buy the discounts and on the discounts was shareware and freeware. So shareware was something where you're supposed to pay for it. Before you can use it. And freeware was just, it's just free. You can use it, but it's really the precursor to open source software,
Brandon Minnick:in a diskette, protecting floppy disks.
Unknown:Floppy disks, and then the little ones, the little, the kids out there will be familiar with the save icon on most things. If you blow that Save icon. Oh, that's what a diskette look by
Brandon Minnick:increasing in size, don't explode it? Oh, well.
Unknown:Yes, but that if you if you, yeah, if you zoom in on the, that's what, that's the discounts are there. So these things were basically the premium way that you can transfer things around. And then I remember, um, you know, those are the two things I remember at COMDEX there was always the electronics, and the cool, you know, hardware, but everyone would get their diskettes. And some people would bring an extra suitcase, then go and fill it up with this gets and bring it home. And by the way, you didn't have a laptop back at your hotel room, or anyway, plugs into it was like, they were like these desktops and they had these things called luggable laptops, which were not laptops at all, they were a normal computer like the you know, the dis, you know, this full size desktop computer case, that with a little monochrome screen tacked on the front of it. And some places where you could put this gets, that was kind of the the thing you could get back in the olden days. And so you didn't have one of those with you, you would go home and then see if the dust gets actually worked. And if there was anything cool on them. And yeah, I remember around 9798 there was a new innovation that came out, which was called the iomega zip drive. And if anyone remembers that
Chloe Condon:zip drive, I have to look at this. I feel like I had
Unknown:you probably did. And those things were really innovative because you can store a whole bunch of stuff on a portable medium that wasn't much bigger than a diskette than a three and a half inch disc.
Chloe Condon:Yeah. Did I have one of these? I have one of these now. Because I cannot part with my saved Sims two games like to know that I can be able to access them even though I do not have an iMac anymore to play.
Unknown:Wow. So you still have Okay, I don't have some just cats, but I'm gonna have the actual
Chloe Condon:after tweet out a picture of it later, maybe I should make some art out of it or something.
Unknown:I will tell you what, in 1998, everything kind of changed. Everything started becoming interconnected. And you didn't really need the diskette so much anymore, oh, big innovations against CD ROM. So CD ROMs came out. And you can store a whole bunch of information. And people started downloading things to forums on compuserve, on AWS, AOL, all kinds of things started happening. And then there was a whole bunch of talk about different formats that people should be using for sharing information and stuff. I mean, HTML was out there, you know, you people saw my 1997 website. But then XML, XML was the big deal in 1998. And I remember that Bill Gates got up on stage at COMDEX made a really a fairly long speech about how XML was going to be the standard archive format of the world and how that you could actually store all kinds of information that would be preserved for you know, I eternity in an XML format. And that's really when things started to change in terms of conductivity and things like that, and then programming languages started Come out, you know. And we mentioned last time about how the how the internet actually helped build standardizations for things. And one of the groups that came out of that was the W three C, so the World Wide Web Consortium, and there, they live kind of behind the scenes with XML, and other standards that they put together HTTP, HTTPS. All those standards are kind of managed behind the scenes by the World Wide Web Consortium, and people probably don't know that. But Oh, look at that.
Chloe Condon:Yeah, there we go. Found this image. Look at this Las Vegas neon here, right under this vintage Microsoft logo. I want to go to there. This looks like a party. I want to go to
Brandon Minnick:contacts.
Chloe Condon:This is COMDEX and ironically, I tweeted out this, I said, we're talking about COMDEX and someone said I was there in 1998. And yes, I have a T shirt. I wish I had that T shirt. Oh my goodness.
Unknown:Yeah. And that's, that's what's gonna so in 1998, then that person probably wrote probably, I don't know if they remember. But Bill Gates did his big speech then about XML and how it's going to change everything. And I actually I was working on, I was a lotus consultants, because they had this thing called Lotus Notes where you could build client server applications. And you could do things like replication and sharing data across the world. And it was way ahead of its time. It's pretty cool. But um, the, the speech about XML really resonated with me, and I actually became an XML consultant. And in 2003, I put out an XML book called the XML programming Bible. You can still buy it on Amazon, by the way, there's just a few copies left. But it's still useful, because frankly, XML hasn't been updated that much. Since 2003. Yeah, I know the way it is now. But yeah, so what happened was there was this big explosion around 1998. And you know, everyone talks about the.com bust. Where financially things really did go south in 2004. Big websites. And oh, Seth. Yes.
Chloe Condon:You have to come on the show and show us your geo cities page. I mean,
Brandon Minnick:we love to see it. Everybody listening on the podcast, Seth Juarez, just let us know in the comments that he found his 16 year old Geocities page as he was joining us for this nostalgia of rabbit hole. That's amazing.
Unknown:Yeah, I remember though it was it was cool. I mean, geo cities geo works. Remember geo works. It was a whole operating system competing with MS DOS at the time. And yeah, it was this, this whole thing where you could, you didn't need Microsoft technologies to run your applications on a PC, you can use geo works. And they have started, they made a little effort at an office product and a few other things. But back in those days, there was actually several Office products to choose from do there was Microsoft Office, there was Lotus Symphony. There was WordPerfect. Office close. Sure. Yeah. Kelly's hat. Sorry, is. Yeah, that was that was like there were all kinds of different things that people did. The business was really fragmented. I mean, it was really interesting. But the main thing, the reason why all these things were developed is there was all kinds of financial interest. All of a sudden, in computers, people started to realize that this was something you could make. Substantial buddy from what you know, Bill Gates was in the news constantly about, you know, the growth of Microsoft and the first you know, that was probably one of the first big tech stocks. You know, I remember 1995 or 96 and COMDEX, I remember seeing some guys, they were walking around in tweed jackets and they were smoking pipes. And they clearly were not part of the technology came out. That's that's a creeper vibes. These guys are really different. And they weren't, they weren't asking me questions. They were just looking around puffing their pipes indoors, of course, different world back then, and just looking around and all this stuff. And the pipes really stuck out and the tweed jackets, but I could tell you know, these were like Wall Street financial guys. And they were wearing some sort of uniform that, you know, showed that. But it was it was just interesting. And after that I really saw a real big interest in financial efforts. And this actually, so there was all kinds of things that came out of that. I mean, dotnet really grew around there. Java grew out of that. xml and the web world World Wide Web Consortium was funded and all kinds of things happen that really changed the world around that time and most people around 2010 to focus on the either y2k, or the.com bust, which happened around that time, but that was all financial, the money that was invested in a lot of these technologies did not go to waste. And it really did usher in the new era that we're still living with now, including music and other things as well. I mean, you know it from that was born mp3, video formats, document formats. Actually, I did want to show a little demo, I was mentioning XML before, this is a good time for that. Absolutely.
Brandon Minnick:My screen right now,
Unknown:I talked a little bit about XML. And I talked about how XML was so important back in the day from like, 1998, to 2003, there even magazines about XML it Oh, and it was really sort of a big, big thing that was happening. And as after 2003 years, so 2000 4005 actually, things XML just kind of faded into the woodwork, it was just, it's still there. But it's just part of the fabric of the Internet of data and everything now, and I did want to show a demo of that. So here's, I'm going to talk a little bit about some music later. But here's some of the music from the 80s. I'm a big fan of electronic music. And
Chloe Condon:I love some of these songs. I was in an 80s cover band in college. So I got some of these in my back pocket ready to go.
Unknown:Absolutely. I mean, these are some cool, I used to love or customer maneuvers in the dark Pet Shop Boys, Howard Jones craft work was a big one for me. Yeah, all these bands. And people are surprised because a guy my age they look at me and go, Oh, really? You know, aren't you supposed to be a Rolling Stones fan, which I am. But you know, it's sort of, I really like electronic music. And the reason why is because it really started in the 80s with synth pop and techno pop and all that stuff. So anyway, I digress. This is a Word doc. And people might notice when you're working with Word or office files, there's an x at the end of the file that used to be called like word used to be a duck file DLC. Now it's called DLC x, as of I can't remember what year but early 2000s. And the reason for that is this, you're actually looking at an XML file. So if I go into my file explorer here, I'm just gonna make a copy of this and paste it and then I'm going to rename it. And this works for pretty much any office file. People don't realize this, it gives you a warning, it might become unusable, but it's not unusable. Look at this. And I can open this up
Brandon Minnick:and say add on, you've changed the docx file extension to dot zip. Yep. And it turns out that the docx is just a zip file.
Unknown:It's a zip file with a bunch of XML documents. So if I open and I go into document, boy, this brings back memories, I can actually see the XML that's underpinning this entire document. And there's just a ton of stuff here, actually. And you see now these are schemas, for those of you who aren't familiar with XML schemas are something that actually is formatted for. It's a way of ensuring that you comply with format, right? So actually, let's try this. I haven't tried this before, let's just do it live and see if this works. But I'm going to open one of these. Nope, it's not there anymore. But the whole olden days, you could open one of these links, and it would actually go to a, an actual schema reference that was there. And the idea was, you could go to that reference, and check your file against the schema to see if it worked properly. Anyway, boring stuff. But it's kind of cool, because I can actually show you in here. Here's the actual text inside this Word document.
Chloe Condon:It was XML all along.
Unknown:Right there, the x tells you it's hidden back there. And yeah, that's kind of cool. So people don't know. But this is just a great example of XML used to be a big thing. And it's still there. But it's just sort of hidden behind the scenes now, like if I go into my settings, Doc, you know, there's a there's a whole bunch of settings here for this particular document. But you can see there was a whole bunch of things that went in behind the scenes in these Word docs that that made it the way it is and you know, this is what it looks like when you're viewing it, but there's an actual viewer and there's all kinds of things that happen behind the scenes to convert That XML into something you can read in Word.
Brandon Minnick:Yeah, it is. It's auto generated XML, which, yes, if anybody's listening along and can't see it, it's not pretty. I would not want to try and debug this XML.
Unknown:No, this is Yeah, this is all, you know. Yeah. The software keeps track of everything. But
Chloe Condon:really what you're saying is Microsoft Word is just a pretty fire for XML.
Brian Benz:In a way,
Brandon Minnick:well,
Chloe Condon:I know Mind blown. You heard it here first.
Brian Benz:The way to pretty print your your XML docs. Yeah,
Chloe Condon:I'm gonna never look at were the same way again. And I love that we answered. Like, I always wondered why it changed to doc x. In fact, my dad is always asking me why cuz he recently updated his Microsoft Word. So Mystery solved. Oh, my gosh, new friends
Brandon Minnick:from third parties dead, dad's catching up. Because even Joe and Paul in the comments said, if if he's not mistaken that the docx format was introduced in 2007. So dad's getting on board, the office 2007, train,
Chloe Condon:Windows Server 2008. i hat here. So we're all about the nostalgia on this upset.
Unknown:I mean, it started around, I'm gonna say 1998 99. But yeah, XML. So there was the Open XML, there was a whole bunch of projects about Open XML and having things and there were standards. standards, let's call them struggles, where, you know, if people wanted to have one way, and other people wanted to have in a different way,
Chloe Condon:sounds familiar. Sounds like some of the debates we have nowadays about Kubernetes and various things. It's, it's interesting to see how the landscape changes and how well I mean, we're still using XML every single day in Word, so look at us.
Unknown:And anything with the axon and PowerPoint, the PowerPoint, PPT x others, they're all you know, with, you can you can change the zip, and you can look at it with varying degrees of success, you know, PowerPoints a little more complicated, because there's a lot of images in there and stuff. But yeah, that was a real thing back then. I mean, it was a real, you could make a living as an XML programmer. And I did. I work with Lotus Notes for a while was a big Lotus Notes partner. And then I was I worked with Java and XML, those were the two things starting in 1998. So I went to an event called lotusphere, 98. This was a massive conference, one of the you know, it's probably like the third biggest conference ever every year, back in the 90s. And they had this thing on the back of the hat called Lotus e suite, people will probably out there might remember this. So Lotus e suite was written in Java. And, you know, back in the day, I started working with Java in the very, very early days when you had to write it in Notepad, and then go into your command line and do a compile and see if it actually works.
Brandon Minnick:And
Unknown:there you go. But yeah, so that combined with XML really did sort of change the format of things. And you know, C sharp came out around that time as well. And that was the same idea sort of, there were all kinds of libraries for working with XML. And there was ways of actually programmatically managing things. dotnet dotnet, actually was growing around the late 90s, as well. As part of that. I can't I'm trying to remember when Linux came out, too, but I think it was around that era as well. But yeah, as everything sort of started exploding. And the reason for that was there was funding available, you know, through Wall Street and other means there was funding that came in and started to become available for all this stuff. But
Chloe Condon:now I'm having trouble finding images of lotusphere but I'll share my screen here. It doesn't seem like there's any images from the 90s but I did however, find this T shirt available. lotusphere have the Pirates of collaboration. But yeah, gosh, here's
Unknown:my buddy Ed Brill. So Ed Brill's there that's the guy on the right end But yeah, that's Ed Brill. He was the marketing I can't remember his name but not as named as title but yeah, he was one of the guys we had huge, you know, Wolter concrete, concrete. Walter. Cronkite came and did a a speech. Oh, Kevin Spacey. Okay, so but all kinds of really famous people used to come and talk at me Michael
Chloe Condon:J. That looks like Avenger folks.
Unknown:Yeah, Al Gore was there. You know, okay.
Brandon Minnick:didn't invent the internet
Unknown:and yeah it was it was a massive event i mean it was one of the biggest events in the world and ibm eventually bought lotus and then it became even bigger and eventually just sort of unfortunately faded away in a way but it was quite the technology at the time yeah yeah yeah was always in orlando at the the the whatever it was at the walt disney world swan and dolphin hotels which are still there yeah cool and yeah it was pretty cool it was a lot of fun every i look forward to that event so much every year but that's why i got into java and that's why i started working with java and i actually wrote a book called the lotus notes and domino programming bible and that actually led it to be writing the xml programming bible as well as are published by wiley and available on amazon they still are i don't know i still have some copies if anyone wants one but they're great for holding up your monitor two of them are just the right size but yeah that's cool stuff but you mentioned one thing as well you know music and oh you mentioned pictures so you couldn't find pictures right yeah reason for that because in the olden days i actually got a camera here this was you know you had to haul around one of these with flash and shoes yes yeah
Brandon Minnick:this is a separate flash i remember
Chloe Condon:all of my physical photos recently i can only imagine the incredible lotusphere photos that exist out in the world that just haven't been scanned up to the internet and this is our call to action if you have any retro photosphere throwback photos we want to see that
Brandon Minnick:yeah i guess tag us is eight bits pod
Chloe Condon:please please i'd
Brandon Minnick:love to see him now i
Unknown:remember around the time when lotus was really at its height i remember going to a couple of dotnet events and and i came back from those events incredibly press i was like wow they're doing all the things because you know there's always deficiencies you want to that you complain about the the platform you're working with like okay we've taken it this far and you know i was you know i don't mean to sound immodest but after i'd written the book and worked in a lot of years of lotus notes and domino i'd pretty much know everything about it you know and and i my knowledge was as good as ever going to get and there were all kinds of things that were limitations so you've complained about them i went to a couple of dotnet events and i was just blown away and i actually would come back to speak to my lotus you know colleagues compatriots whatever and i tell them well you know dotnet has all this stuff that we've been talking about doing and and they you know a lot of them hated me for saying that sorry man it's the truth and yeah so that's when i sort of got into java xml and and also a little bit into dotnet but not much to be honest and java was a big thing then back back then as well i mean if you remember applets applets were this thing where that was the first iteration of java where java was gonna run on everything and they had these things called applets so if you look up java applets the idea is you're going to take your java virtual machine and your application and it's going to load onto someone else's computer it's gonna run on their computer right so you have a java runtime and the application and it's just going to automatically load the only problem was it was way ahead of its time because there was the bandwidth was not great so you know you'd have a webpage and it would have a java applet on it the web page would load and then the little corner where the java applets going to load and just sitting there loading loading right yeah and everyone would you know everyone did you know there were a few complaints about that and it just never got off the ground because of that and then they started with servlets so servlets was the next thing and the idea behind that was all right applets didn't work so now we're going to make something that runs on servers but it's going to have a component that pulls data into your local machine as well so it was like this they were talking back in those days about fat clients thin clients all these you know client server things and you know applets were fat clients and then the other ones were thin clients and certainly it would be kind of a thin client architecture where you had most of the application processing running on a server right what used to be called middleware and it would go and get data from a back end and compile it and organize it and then it would serve it as a small piece of information to the client. And so that was what a servlet architecture was. And then a web. There's all kinds of things that came from that, including boy, trying to remember some of the names and things.
Chloe Condon:I just love the name applet, it's like a little like a baby app, like a
Brandon Minnick:snack,
Chloe Condon:appetizer, little applet,
Unknown:and other web services. So web services where these things you could create, and they would actually get built with Ws dl web services, description, language, soap, for those who might remembers soap, single object x, I can't remember the name of the acronym now. But I used to do this stuff all the time it was XML based Ws do was XML soap was XML. And used to put these applications together, which were client server applications using this open source platform written in Java and doing a whole bunch of other things. It was it was cool. But that's kind of the way things evolved on the Java side of things. And these days, of course, the applications on the servers, they have these web application servers, web apps with the Apache web app was the first one and it was actually a processor that would run your Java on the server, serve up servlets and load them into the cloud. Simple object Access Protocol. Thank you, sir. Yes. Yeah, so that was, that was something that was, there was a whole bunch of different components of a web service out there. And the whole idea was these things were going to be componentized. And you could access things through corba. I don't know if anyone remembers corba. If anyone has the name of that acronym out there. Oh, man.
Chloe Condon:Yeah, with a k,
Unknown:c, O r ba. But yeah, it's, that was another way of accessing web services. And that was kind of the way you built applications back then. But then, the reason why I'm getting to that is dotnet, had this whole way of doing it, which was actually pretty good. As long as you had a Windows client and a Windows Server. That was the catch was, um, you could actually use dotnet, to build things like this much more efficiently. And that was cool. But you mentioned pictures. Sorry, I digress a bit there. But pictures. I mean, this is the digital taste bad digitization of the world, right? pictures, music videos, I remember Yeah, the reason why there's not a low sphere pictures out there is you'd have to take the picture with the camera, like this, my little xa camera, which is still pretty good camera. And then you'd have to get the film developed. And once you got the film developed, if you had a scanner, you could scan the picture and put it on the web, right. And then digital cameras came along. But those are really expensive and bulky and not very practical at the time. And the resolution was terrible for the first, probably five to 10 years. So if you actually wanted a useful picture that you could blow up bigger than postcard, you know, you still had to use a camera. A traditional camera with film and stuff. And I
Chloe Condon:vividly remember 1996 I know this was the year because the 101 Dalmatians live action film had just come out and all I wanted to do was go to this website. So Disney Channel had had just started putting websites on stuff to be like you can learn more about the movie at this is a channel COMM And I remember begging my parents let me go to this website. And this picture of Glenn Close with puppies just like line by line, loading on dial up internet just like a way to high rez image and remembering like, you know, thinking as a kid, someday we're going to be able to see images on the internet, and it's not going to take an hour to download. Being able to support high res images back in the 90s was no easy task. No. Oh, yeah,
Unknown:exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was like a whole different world, right? You had your you had your hobbyists with digital cameras, and then you had your serious photographers with, you know, with the traditional cameras. And there was all my my sister actually was a film producer back then. And I remember she used to make films with what they call ends. So this you take the cut ends of film, strap them together, and they would actually make, you know, analog films this way. And instead because she couldn't afford a full roll of film for herself, but then the digital came along and she started being able to do things that were pretty cool with digital as well. But still, it was like really low rez and you know, the professional cameras were these big, bulky digital cameras, like like TV cameras, and you know they were 1000s of dollars and yeah, the bigger the camera, the The more they see the more professional it was right? So you had these these cameras. I remember once again, COMDEX, and CES and stuff like that you have these people following people around with a camera that was like literally, like the size of an air conditioner. And they're carrying this thing around behind someone. You know, it's just, it's just recording on tape. And then they have to take the tape to somewhere and have it uploaded via satellite link. And
Chloe Condon:yeah, that was I ended up on a very bizarre rabbit hole. Well, not that bizarre if you listen to the show, or watch the show enough. But I was curious, I was thinking about the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and honey, I blew up the kids, which is like 8992 ish era. And I was thinking about how did they film these movies like today, I can just hop onto my computer and have a fake background on teams pop up immediately by clicking a button. But I ended up finding all of this behind the scenes footage of filming these movies. And it's incredible to see like, especially pre digital, like really having a grasp on that. What went into replacing backgrounds green screen how big the technology was that we use, and then you know, being an actress previously in my life, driving around in a car and having them suction cup, a video camera to you know, the window of a car and driving around the block. So it's incredible to see how making things go from analog to digital has not only just changed the way we're able to edit film, you know, make it so there's a giant baby in Las Vegas and honey. It's It's incredible how even just the size of the camera is just so drastically different. Like I remember my dad filming me with an over the shoulder camera as a kid and now we have it in our phone. It's so crazy.
Unknown:Well, that's the thing. So I don't I can't remember the exact statistic. But there is a stat that says there are more pictures now produced every day or something than were created based from this date to the beginning of photography. Yeah, you know, sort of, because everyone has a movie camera and a picture camera on their phone. Now. It's all carried around with it with sound and everything. I mean, this was unthinkable back in the 90s even you know that you could actually is never going to be a serious thing that you could actually make a professional video on on on a mobile device that's always going to have to have something to plug it into and things like that. But no, it's it's pretty amazing now, I mean, yeah, and innovations that happened, as I mentioned for mp3 for music. You know,
Chloe Condon:Napster spent a lot of time on limewire. And
Unknown:yes, yes, I remembered. I mean, I I'm old enough to remember when cassettes you know, were replaced by CD ROMs and the the motion picture folks and the Recording Industry Association folks were up in arms about this because they thought that well, you know, the the, the whole idea of people being able to play a single music track from a album was just completely against the philosophy of the artists who produced the album, you know, they wanted to be able to create this, this event, this this feeling this this impression, and it really was about selling the whole album instead of a single song. But that was that was really what they were worried about was that oh my god, what's going to happen to our industry if we're not producing albums, and, you know, selling entire albums, it gets back to you know, I'm sure people who who've heard her albums and bought albums online, you listen to a few of the songs not all of them and and you know, so it's gonna change people used to have to, I had to go down and buy the album like a vinyl or cassette, which with 14 songs on it, you know, for $22 at at the local music store, and I would copy one of the songs on the CD ROM but that was like really, you know, this was a really really bad thing to the recording industry. And I guess, you know, in terms of them making money, they were right.
Chloe Condon:Oh, but I was making really cool mixtapes copying these over for my friends. I'm like, this is our vacation mix. This is our summer playlist. iTunes was a game changer for me.
Unknown:No, no mixtapes was like a big, big, that's the enemy of innovation as far as they were concerned, which is hilarious. But that was an interesting thing. And then when mp3 news came out, they had the same complaints, right? Oh my god. So now people are gonna be able to just copy an mp3 and they don't need the physical medium anymore, which is how the artist intended to send it. The artists are going Yeah, actually, you know, we didn't intend that. It's just the way it has to be packaged and we're totally okay with you guys using our songs and you know, hopefully you pay us for him, but yeah, It's just an interesting progression of things and it really has led to exposure to music and coming full circle now. Music from the 80s is now coming off copyright. So I'm seeing Yeah, I'm seeing a lot more dance music and stuff with with 80s music mixed in some EDM, as some of the things are using tracks from from I guess they always did but they're using longer tracks now and hooks and and things from 80s music which is being it's becoming more prevalent. I've noticed that as well. So I sure it does have to do with copyright,
Chloe Condon:Mariah Carey led the way with me to track from talking heads who knew that we would I I love that we're seeing more of that kind of synth wave like 80s stuff come back into, of course for the younger folks like what is this new set? dresser like we love this.
Unknown:I still have an old radio shack keyboard, which produces electronic music and it has a drum system built into it and stuff. And you can actually record the same things as what's the what's the format before mp3. It's
Chloe Condon:a mini
Unknown:mini file. Yes, yeah, you can save them as MIDI files. Yeah. And so those are a time back into the title of the show. Those are eight bit files. Eight or 16 I think that you could save and they're really kind of cool it would be it produces a lot of stuff similar to what your intro music was.
Brian Benz:Very cool. Yeah.
Chloe Condon:I think it's all coming back. It's all like all of this. I keep getting a bunch of Instagram ads all the time. This shirt included. Really harkening back to this like very, you know, I level the neon I level the design I love Clippy, of course, making a big comeback in a big way I'd like
Unknown:it's, it's nostalgia is a powerful thing. But
Chloe Condon:I'm ready to get my my old Walkman back out and I used to run around our park. We had a park in our neighborhood in Sacramento and I had a CD, like single CD player that I would run around with but I'd have to keep it kind of level. Skip.
Brandon Minnick:Yeah. And electronics get protection, no USB game changer. Yeah,
Chloe Condon:yeah, I mean, I just even remember around that time, a bunch of toys coming out like the Yak back the tama gottschee. The Furby, like all of these things that, you know, as a kid, we previously didn't have these digital, I had a, I don't know why this was so appealing. I was just looking at this earlier today. But these digital planners that were like marketed towards kids to be like, put your contacts in it and like. So I think it's really interesting that when we were younger, these things are so new, and now babies are able to play on an iPad, I It's incredible to see how exponentially Tech has grown. And even just the last century, really
Brandon Minnick:just how easy it's become to use, like, I'll never forget my niece when she was two years old, just picking up an iPad and using it, like, just didn't have to teach her anything. It was just all very intuitive. I was like, wow, that's, that's a testament if, if a two year old can pick up your product, and then just use it. Yeah, that's a great product.
Unknown:Absolutely, yeah. It's, it's, it's a great line and all the things that tie it together, like cool. You mentioned, you know, tamma gottschee. and stuff, those things are like magic at the time. I mean, everyone thought about, you know, digital is something that would have to be associated with some big box, you know, or to have a little digital thing that lives in this little tiny case. And runs on a battery was just really something
Chloe Condon:I couldn't believe I thought that my cousin's diva stars toy was had come to life it was this toy. It's a they look like these little dolls. And when you put on different clothes and accessories and hats, they would say and do different things. And, you know, similarly, I was like a computer is a computer. It's a giant device. I don't understand is the swipe is us like, is it? I don't know. But it's been incredible to see now you walk down the aisle at Target and almost everything has a smart element to it. Even the action figures like change color if they're nearby a certain beacon or something. So I as someone who's very obsessed with toys, I just think it's so cool to see how much we've we've grown like there are LEGO sets. Now. I know we've got Gil in the chat. There's Nintendo LEGO sets now that when you have the Lego Mario near certain things that reacts a certain way, and I can't even oh my gosh, don't even get me started. I'm an adult who buys a lot of Lego sets, but it's so cool. I get so excited. To see with these kids having these toys now what they're going to build, like, Can you even imagine? I'm thinking holograms, y'all. Clippy the hologram coming soon? I'm sure.
Brian Benz:Yeah.
Unknown:I was gonna mention your tie ins to music as well I remember, I'm once again old enough to remember like the first few days of MTV. And I was sitting in a little bar in and not really supposed to be sitting in a bar, but I was it's a small town. So we're out in this little bar in penticton, British Columbia, the whole place is shut down now. So it's okay, you're not gonna get in trouble. But we're watching this. The satellite satellites then have these massive dishes. You know, they're like 48 feet wide, and the hotel had a satellite TV. So that was a cool thing. These go down there, watch it. And they showed MTV and they showed you know, tying back to the music. I was talking about haircut. 100 was the first Yes, I don't know who haircut 100 is. But that was an awesome band and love plus one. And you know, and then I heard things like the Human League and Divo and eurhythmics. And this really was a big thing for my life. And I'm interested, I'm very interested to see how it's tied back, like everyone takes for granted videos now on YouTube. But this was something really new and exciting. And it was a new way to sort of Express music was with, you know, imagery in a in a video, and to have a three minute format. And then you know, and now of course, that video format is, is on YouTube everywhere. And but I think that was kind of like the early days before that TV was something where you had a bunch of producers and you had a huge cast and crew. And you know, you would maybe have a band on as a guest, but you wouldn't have a video that would just show without any introduction, no interview with the band, it would just show the video, and the show will show one after the other with some commercials in between.
Chloe Condon:I'm thinking of just in particular the Take on me video that was all animated. Like, that must have been such a like innovation. And now I see I just saw someone do an AR VR version of that. With all the visuals.
Brandon Minnick:I know crazy. Go into music video.
Chloe Condon:Yes. We've gotten so far, you've come from watching it in a random Bart's living it through VR. It's incredible.
Unknown:What the guy does right there, like the first couple seconds is real, actual video. And then he walks through a mirror and he's in animation. So yeah, it's it's that's exactly. That was probably the inspiration for the for the AI right? Is the guy standing there. And then he walks into this mirror and all of a sudden, everything's animated. Yeah.
Brandon Minnick:Yeah, cool.
Chloe Condon:Oh, my gosh, well, we're almost at the end of the show, Brian, and I want to make sure people know where they can find you. And tell us about your awesome show that you're doing every week.
Unknown:Yeah, so we don't talk about any of this stuff on my show, which is the last thing we should start weaving. So I'll see what I can do. But it's called the launch space. aka.ms slash the lunch space. It's on Thursdays at 1pm. on Microsoft learn TV. So if you had to ACA ms slash the launch space, you'll see the upcoming shows, which is actually happening. The next one's happening tomorrow. And it's all about the Power Apps, solution architecture certification, which is a nice segue. But yeah, it's a we talk about the latest launches, releases and offerings on Azure. It's an hour show once a week, you can check out the archives. Get some cool stuff there, too. But yeah, it's called the watch space. Thank you Ms slash launch space.
Brandon Minnick:And check it out. You know, like we were talking about earlier in the show. Microsoft's got a lot of things coming for all kinds of developers, especially on Azure. I work at Microsoft and can't keep up. And so thank you. Thank you, Brian, for hosting the live space so that we can all these try to keep up.
Chloe Condon:Get this good every week from Brian. And Brian. I feel like we got to bring you back for part three, like how can we possibly cover everything in two episodes, we got to get to part three here. And thank you so much for coming back and talking to us about the the days of the days of what was the what was the acronym that we had the days of soap
Brandon Minnick:back when we all use soap.
Chloe Condon:Now we use different kinds of so. All right, well, that would be all of us today, y'all. We will see you next time on Apex Thanks for joining us.