It's 631, you're late.
Oh, God…
All right. This is the slug general monthly meeting. Today's date is Wednesday, March the 11th, 2026. Are we are not doing our basic tutorial tonight. So we're just going straight into the announcements.
And a little short Q&A, and then we'll have our main feature speaker of the evening, which will be Scott Graneman. He'll be continuing his series on the history of computing. We'll be doing the decade of 2010 to 2019 this evening.
Let's see with that, I guess it's time to continue on with the announcements. Let's see, what are our questions?
Is that where I want to be, Stan?
No? Well, you just sit quick, you know, one minute on each of these slides would be nice, you know.
Okay. Okay. There's the about us. Slough Geezer group. It's 501c corporation. We've existed for a few decades now, and we hope to keep going.
guidance on our web. I'm sorry. Say it again, Stan.
We have a website. We have a website. Yay!
We have a website. You can find all kinds of great stuff out there. I'm going to mention specifically the archives, uh, all… not all, but a lot of our previous talks are in the archives. So good to go back and look, listen.
So anything else that anybody wants to ask there, by all means.
Yeah. What time is it?
What time is it? Normally, normally, uh, we'd be starting our base topic, our basic tutorial, but we're not having one of those tonight. Instead, we're just at 7 o'clock, the middle introductions, announcements, archives. That's what we're doing right now.
Uh, introductions. I'm Gary Meyer. I'm our emcee for this evening. I'm also the president of the organization. Our Vice President is Stan Reichert. Uh, Stan's at Other Voice you've been hearing, uh, telling me what slide I'm on, and Stan also does so much of the production work of keeping stuff in the archive and keeping slides going, so… Our treasurer is Lee Lamert, he's also the man who hosts our machines, virtual machines at his company, Omnitech, where he's the chief scientist and secretary position is vacant. If anybody has itchy fingers and just really loves to type things, uh, we can use a secretary by all means.
Talk to me, please. Chat monitor during the talk tonight, if anybody would care to pay attention to the online chat, basically the thing that you could anybody can type into and make a comment or ask a question.
And that way, if we miss it, we can tell Scott or me that, hey, there's something going on in the chat. Topic Wrangler for any of our monthly meetings that we do our talks plan talk with a topic and an agenda.
Yeah, if anybody wants to help us find speakers, find maybe just topics to talk about that would interest people, it would really help. You don't have to come to meetings, you just help us find the speakers, the topics that people might want to talk about.
And of course, speakers. We're always looking for new speakers. Our old speakers who want to reprise or do a new topic. So yeah, if you got a hanker to talk about something, talk to me, talk to San, talk to Lee, and we'll get something lined up.
Next slide.
Sorry about that. Button button. Who's got the button?
Who got the button?
Darn thing broke it. I broke it. broken.
It's broken! Slide 6.
Oh, shoot. Well, shoot.
There we go.
Yeah. Okay. We're not going to have a base tonight. So bip!
Hmm. So yeah.
Oh, stupid. Oh.
Yeah.
I think that says enough right there. People got polio. Okay, we have the gooey middle of the meeting. Normally we call the gooey middle. And that's where we're at now. It's basically the announcements and a really sharp call for help.
Q&A. There'll be time after the main talk for general Q&A as well. But if somebody needs to get something done early in the meeting, and then leave, this is an opportunity. Announcements. The next slave general meeting is the second Wednesday of each month. Uh, the next.
Uh, meeting should be on April the 8th. Eight days after that. In other words, Thursday of the following week is the St. Louis log meeting.
And there's also the new Linux meeting and also the Slack meeting. Those are both monthly meetings that we do.
October, last October, Microsoft Windows went end of life, the old version, version 10.
Let's see. Oh, there's a movie coming out called Project Hailed Mary. Some people think it's going to be a pretty good sci-fi movie comes out March the 20th, and it's also an IMAX, so you might want to see that.
There's a extended ways to extend the end of life for Windows 10. We've got some stuff out there on our website. There's people who've written books, magazine articles. Of course, everybody knows the best way to deal with the end of Windows 10 is to get off windows and go to Linux. I'm sorry.
Okay, deadline. Missouri radiation exposure Compensation Act. That's for those of you here in the state of Missouri, there's a whole area of town that has, going back to the nuclear bombs that were built for the war with Japan, World War II.
There's people who were exposed to radiation that was from that, and there's a way of claiming vote for yourself and also for dead relatives. You can get some compensation or some help paying medical expenses. Go to that URL.
or contact myself or Stan, and we'll tell you where else we can find some information on that.
I would like to say that out of my classmates from Francis Howell.
One of them had cancer in 2009, it came back to him, and he just… It came back on him again, and he passed away this last, uh, this last month.
And I've heard also around about unofficially, another person that had cancer a number of years ago as just… Again, is… has cancers. This stuff comes back at you.
And there's unfortunately a lot of people I've talked to didn't know anything about it.
Even though they were in these areas. Well, if you know anybody that lived or worked in St. Louis, just mention it to them, depending on where they live. If they lived in the area for 24 months, and they don't have to be consecutive months.
They may, uh, be able to claim, uh… make a claim if they come down with cancer, or if they've had a relative that passed away from the cancer.
Definitely worth checking into. Thank you, Stan. Okay, balance extension, as you may remember from last month's meeting. Normally, we vote in the month of February for one or 2 of the 5 people on the board of directors. We also vote. It's an advisory vote for officers.
There was a mix up at the post office. The post office changed where our box was located. We're hoping that everyone's ballot came in. But we did find out.
by Stan being very studious about this. Some. Envelopes came back because the mail.
The post office couldn't figure out where the box was. So, uh, we've extended voting for one more month, so if you haven't voted, or if you're afraid your vote's missing, uh, you can continue voting. We'll count the ballots at the next steering committee meeting, which is, well, first Monday?
30… no, it's gonna be 30 March. That's…
Next month, I believe. Yes. Fifth. 30 mark. Okay. So yeah, if you if you question whether your ballot made it or not, you could vote before 30 March.
And you can vote online. do the ballot and mail it to us email.
Then you can vote online.
Yeah. So if anybody has any questions again, contact me, Stan, Lee, somebody.
Bye-bye to windows 10, as I said earlier, Windows 10 went out of exist. Well, it didn't go out of existence. It no longer has support unless you pay through the nose with a private contract to Microsoft. And.
As it says there on the slide, you can go out and go to one of these sites and find out more information.
various authors, ways of getting around it. Stan, go ahead.
it. Oh, it's the Pdf is free online. You can pull it down the details are there. You can pull up the PDF of these slides and get it, or you can just go Google it and go or go to Amazon, and they they share the.
They give you sample pages, and the first two pages of the book. They actually give these PDFs and say it's a free PDF, or you can get the Amazon paperback copy for money, or the Kindle version, etc, etc.
There's also a project in Europe, the end of 10 org. They are allow sites to list their.
Uh, assistance for people to convert from 10 to 11, or switch over to Linux. That book, as a matter of fact, first half of it, it tells you how to install Linux Mint. The second half tells you how to, uh… Uh, what kind of machine you need to get to… from 10 to 11.
Okay. Big Brother's watching!
Mm-hmm.
Okay, first off, as you probably have all figured out anytime you go on an online meeting, anybody in that meeting can be recording it. So yeah, no, no.
And we can't help that. So mind what you say. We do record it ourselves for the general meeting, the one you're at tonight, and also the slug the.
log meeting, the Thursday meeting next week, and we, uh, we do post those in the archive. The other meetings we generally don't keep a posted copy of it, but as I say, anybody could be recording you, so.
You can't stop that. Sorry. Let's see.
Presentation archives. Yes, we keep the archives. They are out there on the Slug homepage. The URL is there, and they're organized by date. And of course you can go through and.
Uh, do searches and find them that way. calendar. We've been keeping a graphical calendar for what been a few years. And we try. I've been sloppy about it. I try and keep it divided into local St. Louis events.
and remote out-of-town events, that was more important before the age of Zoom. But I still try and keep it oriented that a little bit. There's also yet a separate color in the calendar for meetings that we flew sponsor.
So mailing lists of. Let's see ones that you'd be interested in the announce mailing list, very low traffic, usually only 1, 2, 3 emails a month. It's usually just an announcement of our meetings. There's other things that we know of that are important that you know somebody might want to go into quick.
we discuss is anybody composed to discuss, so you can put your opinions, your questions. Help! What went wrong? Sometimes you get an answer in 5 min. Sometimes you get an answer 5 days later, sometimes longer.
You might get one answer, you might get two dozen answers. Steering Committee. It's where the sausage gets made. You're more than welcome to send information to the steering committee and we'll take your opinions.
Sysadmin, that's a mailing list for the people who keep our computers running where our mailing lists are, where our web pages. So it's not generally available to everybody unless you're actually helping us.
Administrate those computers. Other versions of this group besides your general meeting. We also do a lug meeting, the St. Louis Lug meeting, Linux user group. We also do the new Linux meeting. We call it a beginner workshop. But, as I've said previously.
For those of us who aren't beginners, it's really informative to go to that meeting. You learn things that, gee, I didn't know it worked that way, or… It's an interesting meeting to go to.
Slack meeting is more of a hardware oriented. We'll even talk about Microsoft Windows there. So it's not Linux only there.
Well, and those are also monthly meetings. Okay, quick call for help. As I said, there'll be time after our main speaker tonight for.
For more call for help or comments, Q. And a. But if anybody feels they really need to get a quick request in here before we get to the main presenter.
Go ahead and ask a question. Or make a comment.
I am not hearing anything. Okay.
And that brings us to… Our main presenter this evening of Scott is waving. He's got his screen up already, your camera on. That's Scott Granaman. Scott, I'm going to ask you here at the beginning. Would you prefer that people vocally interrupt you during your talk and say, hey, wait, I got a question or a comment?
Scott, we're not hearing you. I think your microphone's off.
I said no, just like I'm doing with you right now, and interrupting you.
Don't do that.
No.
Don't do that. Okay. Okay, hold questions until Scott asks for questions.
Or put them in the cap.
I'll put them in the chat. Yep. Okay. All right.
Okay, I've tried… I've tried to kill my browser here, and it's just not… there we go. Okay, cool.
All right. Okay, our speaker tonight. I think I'm done with all the slides right, Stan?
Yes.
Okay, our speaker tonight is Scott Graneman. Scott's been a member of our organization for decades. He's the former vice president of this group. And he's a principal at Websanity, I believe.
Yup. Yep.
It's the name of the company. And he's also an adjunct faculty member. I think right now you're teaching at Maryville.
No, you always make up stuff.
Like, Georgetown! You know, Virginia State! Uh, no!
I keep getting that mixed up.
Webster University and St. Charles Community College.
Right.
Webster and St. Charles Community College, but you taught at other universities, too.
I taught at WashU, I've taught at several others, yes.
Yeah. All right. And of course, all those places love having Scott on the on the faculty. He's always always gets a good good review from the students. So he always gets a good review from the participants in our meeting.
Yep.
68.
Yes.
So Scott's been doing a series of talks for us on the history of computing. I believe it started in 1969 and 68. Okay? And so tonight we're up to 2010 to 2019. So I'm going to turn it over to Scott, who's going to tell us all.
Thank you. And by the way, uh, the other principle of Web Sanity is Chance Carton.
And you guys have seen him speak as well, and he and I last spoke about a little over a year ago,
about, uh, AI, and showed you guys Cursor,
And we've been very heavily using, uh, Claude code,
And really gotten into that and learned a million things, so…
I don't know if you've had one lately, but soon would be a good time to have us come back.
Because we have so much… things have advanced so fast since last November and December.
3 months ago, that it's crazy now.
And so, that would be a good opportunity, if I might say so myself.
So, let me go ahead and share my screen.
If I mouse, there he is.
Wow, my mouse is going…
Absolutely insane.
hold on one sec.
Zoom causes my mouse to just completely freak out.
Pretty wild.
Let me move you guys over here.
Alright, let me close…
This…
Okay, can everybody see my main screen, History of Computing?
Okay.
Yes.
Yes, I can see it.
Yep, I can see it.
Cool. Now, there is a little audio. How do I ensure…
Yeah.
Yeah. Bye.
that you guys can hear my audio correctly when I play something.
Well, I don't know where it is.
Turn it on, let's see what happens. No, no.
Uh, no, no, no, I know, I know. When you first joined, the sharing, it's an option down in the lower right hand corner.
option screens.
on the option screen. So you have to… at this point, if you haven't selected that, you've got to unshare your screen and go back to share it again.
I think the option which I'm looking at here is original sound for musicians.
And that actually plays whatever is here.
Even if it's on the computer, so I think I'm set up for that.
But let me know if I'm not. There's only, like, one or two places at most, so…
Okay.
I think we'll be good. Oh, let me get my clicker. One second.
Oh, man.
Alright, here we go.
Alright. Anyway, good to be back. We are now at the fifth talk, and the last one for another 3 years.
So, in, uh, 2030,
I'll be able to deliver a talk to you guys.
Assuming we're all still here, um…
about computing history 2020 to 2029.
So, as of this one, we're going to be as caught up as I can be for the moment.
So, um, this is history computing. As Gary said, 2010 to 2019.
I'll be honest, when I started working on this, I didn't think there was gonna be a lot.
And, um…
I have had to leave so much out. It just shocked me. So…
There's a lot of things I know you guys are gonna be like, why didn't you mention this? Why didn't you mention this? Because I didn't have time.
And we don't have time.
Because there was just an enormous amount of stuff. So I've tried to cover…
high points, but I know I've missed out on several high points.
Um, but I'm trying to cover as much as I can, so I think there'll be a lot here.
for us to go over, but please keep in mind, I know I have not covered every single thing.
Um, and I'm aware of some of it. I'm probably unaware of others, so let me know in the comments if you guys think of something
Um, once I'm past a year, if you're like, hey, you kind of miss talking about that, put it in the comments.
And I'll maybe come back and add it to this.
Um, so I would appreciate that.
So, let's start with 2010, which is only 16 years ago at this point, barely 16 years ago.
So, that January,
Uh, Steve Ballmer announces the HP Slate running Windows 7, because Microsoft had decided it was going to get into the tablet business. Now, this is before…
Um, the iPad.
And so, they've been pushing Windows tablets for a while, and Windows 7, of course, any of us, I know most of us here have probably used Windows 7 at least once back in the day,
And I'm sure, as you were using it on your desktop or laptop, you were thinking, man,
This would be so great to try to use with my finger on a tablet.
It's like it was designed for that.
And so, um, that January, Ballmer says, hey, we're gonna… HP's gonna release this thing called the Slate, and it's gonna be running Windows 7.
So, we have that to look forward to, as you'll see.
That January 27th, Oracle buys Sun for $7.4 billion.
Um, personally, I think this was unfortunate, because I think Oracle tends to be pretty evil on the evil company scale.
Um, but as a result of that, and from Oracle's perspective, it was a great purchase for only $7.4 billion,
They got control of Java, they got control of the Solaris operating system, they got control of the Ultra Spark CPU and the Spark servers,
That son had been selling. They got control of it. MySQL.
Which, to their credit, they haven't screwed up too badly.
Although, the founder of MySQL has since created his own drop-in replacement for MySQL called MariaDB, which
Janz and I have recently started switching to, and it's excellent.
Uh, the VirtualBox virtualization software, which I know some of you guys use, the ZFS file system, which I know some of you guys use.
Uh, openoffice.org, which they pretty much just let crumble into nothingness.
So, that's why LibreOffice is now the one to use, that's a fork of OpenOffice.org that does get
regularly updated. In fact, it got so bad, as many of you know, that Oracle gave Open.org, OpenOffice.org,
Uh, to the Apache Foundation, I believe, and they've done virtually nothing with it.
Because everybody's working on LibreOffice.
Uh, they also got control of patent… of sons' rather extensive patent portfolio, licensing agreements,
enterprise customers and more. So again,
From Oracle's perspective, great deal. From the perspective of people that are interested in open source, and not having one giant
semi-evil corporation control everything? Not so good.
That January 27th, Steve Jobs introduces the iPad, um, the last
Major product category he would ever introduce on stage.
Um, this was a big deal, because it validated the tablet as a device category, because there have been tablets before, Microsoft had been trying,
for years to create a tablet market,
And it never worked very well.
And the reason was because…
As you're gonna see, Windows was never designed to be a tablet operating system, so they were trying to shoehorn a desktop
operating system onto a tablet device,
And it never worked well. I remember people showing me their Windows tablets, and they sucked.
that the interface simply wasn't built to be used.
on a tablet. And so, what Apple did was, they took the interface of iPhone,
Uh, iOS, and put it on a tablet. And over the years, they've made more and more diversions from that.
But the purpose of this, what it did was that it validated the tablet as a device category.
So, this actually is a large business now. Now,
Apple has most of it.
Uh, because the iPad… iPads, over and over and over and over again, is ranked the best.
Of all the tablets, but it did create the tablet market as we now know it.
Um, and what was interesting about it was jobs made a big deal when he displayed the iPad, of saying, we're trying to position this between smartphones
and desktops. And this is a third category, the tablet.
the iPad. And so, I mean, to this day, I use my iPad every single day. I love it. It's one of my favorite devices.
Um, so, I'm very glad they introduced the category.
Um, what was cool about the iPad, and people complain about it all, they said at the time, this is just a big iPhone.
That was correct, in that it was running the same software. Now, again, over time, it's diverged.
But, what was cool about it was, yeah, it was running the same software as an iPhone, but it was big.
So all of a sudden, you had this large,
uh… multi-touch
tool that could become anything you wanted. It could be a web browser, you could watch videos, you could read books, you could play games, you could run any of a variety of apps.
And so, um, even though it was running iOS, the size is what made it so much more useful.
And again, as we've gone through the decades, and certainly, uh, last fall, when they released the latest version of what is now iPadOS,
It's become more and more
Uh, more like a desktop.
Uh, operating system in many ways. So, for instance, now you have multiple windows, and it's much more like… I know you have a menus that you can call in and things like that. So what started out as pretty much a big phone is now something
Very different. And here are the prices, which again, for the time, were really great. Now, what struck me again and again and again as I looked over these slides and worked on this,
was how small the storage was back then, I mean…
16GB, 32GB, 64GB, and those were seen as, you know, pretty good.
Uh, so it's just funny to me now, in this era where, you know,
Apple just last week released the MacBook Neo, which is their lowest-cost Mac ever, it's only
$600, $500 if you're in education,
And it comes with 256 gigs.
out of the box, and if you pay $100 more, you get 500 gigs.
And that's, to me, 256GB is kind of small.
But, you know, 15 years ago, 64GB, oh man, that's a lot of space.
Um, so it just struck me as I was looking at these, the difference in our storage needs
Over the last decade and a half or so.
So, again, here's your prices. Notice it was both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Plus 3G, so you could use it on the go. This is still the case to this day.
I thought this was a funny little human interest story. February 24th, uh, 71-year-old Louis Sulser of Woodstock, Georgia,
buys a Johnny Cash song on the iTunes store called Guess Things Happen That Way, and funnily enough,
things happen that way because he is… he has just bought the millionth song on the iTunes store, and Steve Jobs gives him a $10,000 iTunes gift card.
So, Steve Jobs actually calls him, you just bought the one millionth song, and gives him a $10,000 iTunes gift card. I thought that was great.
Okay, so, that April 29th, I remember this very, very distinctly.
Steve Jobs writes an open letter that's published on Apple's website called Thoughts on Flash.
Because, since 2007,
Apple would not allow Flash
On the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and then the iPad when it came out.
And people were complaining about this right and left.
Well, Jobs finally wrote this open letter explaining why we don't allow flash on our mobile devices. And if you've never read it, and all the citations are in the notes, which I'll make available,
Um, I highly recommend you do, because it's very well written.
Uh, just makes his case really, really well, and he basically explains the mobile era is about low-power devices
touch interfaces, and open web standards, all areas where Flash falls short.
And really makes a very cogent case that we don't need flash, we've got other options.
And what's funny is, I remember at the time reading articles where Android tablets and Android phones and Windows phones would have flash on them, and
Every single review I ever read said, yeah, it's janky as hell. Uh, you know, you start scrolling and it stutters,
It eats up battery life, and so on, all things which he pointed out. So I was actually glad
That flash was never there. Plus, as a web developer now for 30 years, I hated dealing with flash.
for lots of various reasons.
Uh, one of them being, of course, Google couldn't index flash websites. So, for me, I was glad it didn't support it, and I agreed with everything he wrote here.
Uh, what's funny is, of course, Adobe protested this. Oh, how dare you say this? Flash is just fine.
But, a year and a half later, they announced, yeah, we're gonna… we're no longer gonna develop Flash Player plugins.
for web browsers on mobile, uh, it's not gonna work.
And so, I find that really funny that everybody's like, why doesn't Apple have flesh?
And then Apple says, because it's terrible! And then a year and a half later, Adobe's like, mm, yeah, actually we can't get it to work well, so bye.
And you're absolutely right. HTML5 handled streaming video, but HTML5 didn't come out until 2014.
So, there was a gap for a period of time.
Uh, that October, hey, that HP Slate!
Running Windows 7 finally gets released, so I want you guys to see
What a premium piece of kit this was, because I know if we could all go back in time, we would want to buy this amazing device,
Running Windows 7. So, it had a 1.86 GHz Intel Atom CPU, and I know some of you guys know that the Atom SUCKED! It was slow as hell.
So, right there, we got our problem. 2GB of RAM for Windows 7?
No. 64 gigs, uh, flash storage,
8.9 multi-touch screen, but you needed a stylus, because, again,
Windows wasn't developed for your finger, so there were all sorts of teeny tiny little places that your big fat finger couldn't activate, so it needed a stylus so you could click on those.
The resolution was 1024x768, and it only gets better from there.
Uh, it did have Wi-Fi.
didn't have 3G, though, so unless you're on a Wi-Fi network, you couldn't use it. It had 2 cameras,
One in the portrait, and one for landscape. It was one and a half pounds, and it was a whopping $800.
Now, there's some other great features about this. So, obviously this was not aimed at consumers, it was aimed at businesses, so it ran a full version
of Windows 7, and PC Magazine's review said this is less like an iPad and more like a laptop with the keyboard ripped off.
Um, it gets better. Of course, there were the stupid logos.
on the side of it, of course. Um, but you guys are gonna love this detail, because there's no keyboard, right?
So, you either attach a keyboard, or you use the on-screen keyboard. Well, the problem is, if that's not working,
How do you invoke Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Well, they included a key on the side
To invoke Ctrl-Alt-Delete in case it got hung or crashed, and you needed to reboot it.
So, yeah, there's a home button and a Ctrl-Alt-Delete key,
And there was a button.
to manually show the keyboard?
So, again, on the iPad, it shows up when it needs to. Nope, not here. You click a button, and that causes the keyboard to show up.
Um, there was a slide-out tab that the only purpose of it was to have this small print crap on it.
With all these licensing agreements and logos and crap like that.
That was it! That was the only purpose of this slide-out tab, and according to Engadget, they interviewed it, they said HP tells us it had to be included.
Yeah, just like the iPhone had a slide-out tab with logos and crap on it. Now, as a result of this, people made fun of it a lot, and I love this. This guy said, well, I don't understand why they just didn't do this.
You know, just put the same tag mattresses have on the tablet, and that'll solve the problem.
So, clearly, this was an amazing, amazing device that we are all fools for not buying.
When it came out 16 years ago. Uh, that October, Instagram launches.
And features square photos.
And over time, becomes the place to share photos via mobile devices.
Uh, as you probably know, as I'm gonna mention later, Facebook buys it, of course.
I never really used it, and after Facebook bought it, I deleted it, because I hardly was using it, and I'm not going to support anything from Facebook.
But I hear in the early days, it was great.
It was really great.
That December 17th, the Arab Spring begins, and I actually remember talking to you guys
Back in the early 2010s,
at a meeting about… I was talking about social media for techies, and I talked about the Arab Spring.
And that might be a memory for most of us.
that citizens in 18 Arabic countries were sick and tired of their oppressive governments.
And they use social media, which, again, was starting to get big around this time.
To inspire and coordinate protests against their governments.
Now, unfortunately,
This led to a lot of violent crackdowns,
by the governments on these people, so within 2 years,
the movement had died out. However, it did lead to some long-term consequences. So this is starting to show
The power of social media affecting the real world, affecting governments. And so,
As a result of the Arab Spring, lots of conflict started, so the Syrian Civil War that was only resolved
Within the last couple of years, uh, started. ISIS…
resulted as a result of the Arab Spring movement, the insurgency in Iraq, and the following civil war in Iraq was part of this.
Uh, the Egyptian crisis, where Muhammad Morsi was removed from office, and then there was unrest and insurgency after that.
Uh, the Libyan crisis that led to Muammar Gaddafi getting overthrown and murdered.
Uh, don't shed a tear. And the Yemeni crisis, which is still going on, and the subsequent civil war.
that's still going on today. So, um, this was a big deal. It started back in 2010.
Okay, 2011.
That January, the Mac App Store launches. Now, the iOS devices, the iPhones, had had app stores.
For several years at this point, starting in 2008.
However, this was the first time Apple said, we're now going to move the App Store to the Mac as well.
And when it launched, there were more than a thousand apps. Now there are millions, especially since we've had the rise of vibe coding.
Now, there's more apps added every day to the App Store, and as we all know, John Campbell, the famous science fiction writer,
once said, 90% of everything is crap, although he didn't say crap.
And, obviously, that's true for the App Store as much as anything else.
Uh, so… but at lunch that day, and at the time, there were a thousand apps.
Within 24 hours, there were a million
Downloads. A million downloads in 24 hours.
Now, obviously, this is still con… parts of this are still controversial to this day.
In my opinion, Apple has done some really, uh, stupid, um,
unethical things with the App Store. They have put a heavy finger on a lot of aspects of the App Store.
Uh, they started by charging 30%,
Uh, of any price that the app developer makes off the App Store, and they've extended that to in-app purchases, subscriptions, and so on in ways I don't think they need to do at all.
and are unethical, so I am very critical of this. On the other hand, I recognize that the App Store's done a lot of good. A lot of people have… a lot of developers have made a lot of money.
From the App Store, and…
We're nerds. We are totally used to downloading software from any place and understanding… having a pretty good idea of what's safe, what's not.
Um, I know most of us, probably by the 90s, were comfortable downloading software over extremely slow modem connections and installing it.
Many of us in here use package management tools.
The thing is, we're unusual, most people don't.
Uh, a lot of people still, to this day, are unsure about downloading and installing software, and so the App Store, to its credit, has made it easy for normal people
to, uh, that are otherwise relatively unsophisticated to feel much safer about downloading and installing and using software.
So, the App Store, in my opinion, has definitely done… has negatives.
And still does, but I also want to recognize that there are positives associated with it as well.
Like most things, it's shades of gray.
Uh, that February 3rd,
The IPv4 is declared completely emptied. So what that means is, when IPv4, IP addresses were invented,
They thought, surely we'll never run out, and so they did 2 to the 32nd number of IP addresses.
And, of course, at the time, they thought, this is plenty.
And they didn't foresee that the internet would happen as a thing for the public, and we'd all start carrying around multiple devices that needed IP addresses,
And as a result, we ran out.
And we're still running out. We're still run out of them, but what that meant was this accelerated the need to move to IPv6. Now, IPv6 gives us a quintillion
addresses. So, this, in fact, should be plenty until we start assigning one to every atom in our body.
Um, but until then, we should be fine.
So, right now, we're still in this midpoint,
Where IPv4, again, the standard IP address we all know, you know, 163.204.4.10,
Those are everywhere still used,
Slowly, we are moving to IPv6. Of course, the reason we can't just switch over is because, at this point, there are billions and billions and billions of devices
Connected the internet that don't understand IPv6, and will never understand IPv6,
So, this is a very slow, steady process. That said…
Uh, many, many, many websites and internet resources are available
Both with IPv4 and IPv6. So, for instance, all of the websites that Janz and I have through our company
We have… that we control DNS for, we have gone in and made sure that there's both an IPv4 and an IPv6 equivalent.
That April 28th canonical reaches… releases, rather, Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhale.
Now, this was interesting, because it switched to the Unity UI instead of GNOME 2 as the default, because Canonical had this idea, we're gonna make a better UI than GNOME. Now, in my personal opinion,
any of you are an etch-a-Sketch has a better UI than GNOME, but I know a lot of you guys love it, and that's totally cool. I don't like it.
It's not for me, but that doesn't mean it's not for somebody else.
Um, but canonical said, we can make a better UI, uh, we're gonna go with Unity, and so they switched to that. The problem
is that, of course, they later switch back, because it didn't get that widely adopted,
And GNOME has a lot of momentum behind it, and so they eventually switch back later.
That may 10th, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion.
Now, what's funny is, 6 years earlier,
eBay had purchased it for $2.5 billion.
So, hey, eBay made a good amount of money. They made $6 billion!
On this purchase. And what's funny is, eBay had done next to nothing with Skype.
They bought it, but they really didn't do much with it. Microsoft turns around and buys Skype.
And the really funny thing is, as most of you probably know from reading tech news,
is that, uh, last year, it was either last year or early this year, I believe it was late last year, uh, Microsoft shut down Skype entirely.
And said, yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore, we're gonna go with Microsoft Teams. So, use that instead. So, they spent $8.5 billion,
And ultimately, shut it down years later, because they were, you know, we've got multiple messaging and collaborative apps.
We're gonna kill this one off. So they buy it, and then put it to death… put it to death 15 years later.
That may 4-24th, and this is something that's either gonna make some of you happy, or some of you like, oh, good.
Uh, Fedora 15 comes out with System D as the default in it.
And this is what started SystemD's
Eventually, you know, uh…
movement throughout all these other Linux distros.
So, there are a few that don't support it, but pretty much, by and large,
Okay.
Virtually every other Linux distro now has adopted SystemD as its
in its manager. And, um…
I've had to… I've had to get used to this, too.
Uh, there are parts of it I like.
I don't know.
And there are parts of it I do not like. Sometimes I think it's trying to do everything.
And that's never a good idea, but it is, like it or love it, like it or not, it is something you will have to deal with,
If you manage Linux boxes. So, it's everywhere.
That June, Samsung releases the very first Chromebook, and I know some of you guys have owned Chromebooks, maybe some of you still do.
Um, the Samsung Series 5.
Asus also released one at the same time.
And this was only $429 for the Wi-Fi model,
or $4.99 for Wi-Fi plus 3G.
Now, you got, for that money, you got a 12.1 inch screen, you got an Adam Lee.
CPU with an integrated GPU, so you know the graphics were not good on that thing.
2GB memory, 16GB SSD. That's tiny!
Right? I mean, sure, it kind of fits in, but that's pretty… that's on the small end. Why is that?
Because, you'll see why in the next slide. Two USB 2 ports and an SD card reader port. So what made this special?
Well, the name Chromebook should give it away, but the thing that made this unique
and special was it ran Chrome OS. They were designed as a cloud-first,
Auto-updating, browser-centric system, unlike
Any other desktop out there at the time.
Cloud First automatically updates because it's running Chrome, and Chrome automatically updates.
Browser-centric. As a result, because it was so light, because it didn't have all the cruft and all the other stuff,
that macOS, Linux, Windows needs, you could boot it very, very quickly, they could keep it very, very simple,
And they could vastly reduce the amount of maintenance that traditional computers required.
So, for instance, those automatic updates were a big deal. They, uh… each tab was sandboxed.
Verified boot, so it would actually check the operating system on boot.
an easy device management. Well, as a result of these features, this became
very, very, very popular in K-12 education and in lots of businesses, where people were using browsers anyway as their main tool,
in that business. To this day, my son goes to Webster Groves High School, and all the students are issued Chromebooks.
Okay? We'll see what happens, by the way, as a result of Apple's MacBook Neo. I think a lot of schools are going to adopt that.
due to the price and the extreme high quality of it, as compared to Chromebooks, but we'll see.
Uh, so, it ran Chrome OS.
Because that made the Chrome browser and web apps the primary computing environment.
There wasn't a desktop. That's why the drive, the flash drive, could be so small, because everything is in the cloud, primarily.
Right? And so, unlike macOS, Windows, and Linux,
Google-centered Chrome OS around the account, so that meant a student could log into a Chromebook, and all of their stuff would be there immediately.
Because it was so quick, because it was just adding their apps, their
bookmarks, their settings, and so on, which is super quick.
Instead of being centered around the file system, it was centered around the browser and the network.
So this is what made these things interesting and unique and popular.
Now, I thought you guys would enjoy this. I didn't know this until I started researching. So, Chrome OS…
was derived from the open-source Chromium OS operating system, which is based on Gen 2 Linux.
I never knew that! I knew it was based on Linux, obviously, uh, but I had no idea it was based on Gentu, so I thought you guys would find that kind of interesting and fun.
So, boy, this was a big mistake here.
Um, that June,
Google is really worried about Facebook, because Facebook's getting bigger and bigger and more popular and more popular.
And so, as a result, Google decided, we're going to launch our own social network, and we're gonna…
All of the soft… all of the apps people are using, all of the websites people are using of ours,
And basically, we're gonna force our social network down everybody's throats,
And they called it Google Plus, and in fact,
The word went down from Sergey Brin and Larry Page that
Every group in Google was expected to try to put Google Plus into what they were doing.
So, the browser, any other social networks, any apps,
Google Docs, everything was supposed to have Google Plus integrated into it, and you're… you're a…
You're a bonuses, and so on at the company were going to be based on how much and how well you did that.
So, it did have some interesting features. One of the problems with Facebook,
Well, there's a million problems with Facebook, but one of the problems was that when you shared stuff back then, either everybody could see it or nobody.
And Google invented this concept called circles, which meant you would have circles of groups of people, and whenever you shared anything,
You would pick the circle,
of people that would get to see it. And this sounds like a really good idea, except most people, it turns out, don't want to worry about crap like that. They just want to share it.
And so, it was a good idea, in a sense that, well,
You know, we'll make it easier for people to share only with certain groups of people. But the problem is, and introduced a lot of friction, that people ultimately didn't want.
And so, it also introduced Google Hangouts, the video chat service that's still around today as Google Meet.
Um, by 2012, it did have 500 million users, but that's again because people were forced into it, because Google
Basically, made everybody
Use it as kind of a precondition for using anything else on Google. Gmail, etc. So, it had 500 million users,
But, it turned out, people only spent 3 minutes a month
on Google+.
3 minutes a month!
And at that time, people were spending seven and a half hours a month
On Facebook. So, sure, you can try to compete with Facebook, but it turns out, even if you force it on everybody, if people don't really want to do it, and there's lots of extra friction,
They're not gonna use it. And so, consequently, uh, on, uh, in April 2019, uh, at 8 years old, they killed it.
So, it has been dead for quite a while, so it lasted until it was 8 years. So yes, Google are child killers. I will go on record saying that right now.
You guys know I'm not a big fan of Google.
Uh, that July 8th Snapchat, then called Peekaboo or Pickaboo, I don't know which,
launches on iOS, and what… and I know… and nobody I'm talking to right now uses this, right?
Kids use it. My son and his friends love it. It's been popular with high school and middle school students for years.
And one of the big, big, big reasons is because it's ephemeral.
So, you send a message or photo to somebody, and it disappears.
After a short period of time.
And if somebody tries to do a screenshot, it lets somebody know
that, oh, this person just did a screenshot of what you sent them.
So you know that for sure. So, I know my son and his buddies love it, because they can put stuff on there, and if I go, let me see your phone,
It's gone. So, I can't, uh, you know, kind of keep track of what's going on on that.
Uh, there's other reasons, it has funny filters and so on, but basically, it made ephemeral messaging
a core social pattern that a lot of people look for today.
That July 20th?
Apple released OS, and at this time, they had been calling it Mac OS X.
And then they got rid of the word Mac for a few generations, and called it OS X.
10.7Lion.
Now, this was… and I'm not going to go through every release of OS X.
Because very soon, Apple's gonna start doing one every year, and again, we don't have the time, and…
Many of them are just upgrades, they're not that interesting.
But I do want to talk about a couple of them that are special.
And so, Lyon was a big deal, because this was the first time
that Apple took a lot of ideas from iPhones and iPads and brought them onto the Mac.
For instance, mission… and I know you… several, many of you guys don't know what all these are.
Mission control. That's where you can swipe up and see all your windows and all your apps that are currently open.
lunch pad, if you've ever used an iPhone, and you know how you can see folders and files,
in a grid, that's what Launchpad was on the Mac. Uh, full-screen apps that took up the full screen, uh, additional multi-test gestures,
resume, so the system would resume for where you were when you rebooted it.
Autosave, so apps would automatically save while you were working.
Oh, IPS would also automatically verge… keep versions for you as you work.
AirDrop, uh, distribution through the Mac App Store. So this was the first time
the version of Mac OS was distributed through the Mac App Store.
You did NOT buy a DVD any longer. Instead, you bought it through the Mac App Store, as I'll talk about. In-app purchases and FaceTime for video conferencing.
And what this meant was not that they were gonna… people still to this day are like, oh, they're gonna merge iPadOS and Macs, and they're only going to have one operating system.
And Apple is repeatedly, over the years, and I don't think it's… they're gonna do it,
Um, have, you know, they're not gonna have, like, Mac iPadOS. That's not gonna be one thing. They're always gonna be separate.
But, what this indicated was, is that Apple was now going to be evolving Macs, iPhones, and iPads together, and they were going to feel free to take ideas from either one and add it to the other where they saw fit.
That said, by the way, although Apple's not saying anything, people that…
know this stuff, and are very good with reporting what Apple's going to do eventually, are reporting that by the end of the year, Apple is going to launch a Mac
Uh, with a touch screen, a laptop with a touchscreen. So, uh, we will see.
Now, again, it was not available on physical media. You could not
buy it on DVD. It was available exclusively from the Mac App Store for only $30. Now, prior to this,
Whenever you upgraded macOS, it was $130. Now, it was only $30.
Now, later, they did offer two alternate methods of getting the update, because people, some people didn't have broadband.
And you could either go to a retail Apple store with your laptop,
And, um, upgrade there, or you could buy a flash drive with the OS on it for $69,
And they would ship it to you.
Now, one of the things it did was it added support for emoji.
On this, it started out with 502 glyphs,
And now we're at thousands and thousands.
Uh, FileVault 2?
encrypted the entire disk, not just the home folder.
And it included, for the first time, a recovery partition that I've used.
Where, if you're having problems with your computer, you can boot into the recovery partition and restore the computer back to the original factory state, or reinstall the operating system to keep all your data on there.
Or, you can also run utilities like Terminal,
And so on, or change the password for the firmware,
Or, check your hard drive, your flash drive, or, uh, restore from a time machine backup. So this is still very useful, it's still included in macOS today.
That August 24th, unfortunately,
Steve Jobs resigns from the company he formed
And started in 1976,
The company that he'd been forced to leave in 85 and came back to in 97,
And eventually took to brand new heights that nobody had ever thought possible.
Um, that'll be written about in business.
school… studied in business schools, and…
so on for the next century.
Um, he had gotten, uh, cancer.
And had to resign as CEO, because
His health was just getting worse and worse. And the former COO, Tim Cook, takes over Apple.
who's still running it to this day.
And has made Apple the most, at times, the most valuable company in the world.
Uh, so Tim Cook has done a lot of good things for Apple. I don't like every single thing he does. I think he's done a lot of bad things for Apple.
Uh, but on the whole, as a business, he's caused Apple to become one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable company in the world.
Then October 5th, Steve Jobs dies.
Uh, this is a photo…
that was taken
in that July,
of 2011 by an employee at Apple,
Uh, the employee posted it on Instagram, so this is a photo on Instagram,
And he posted it and said he held the door open for Steve. Now, you can tell how skinny he is, he'd lost so much weight.
He was in terrible shape.
And, um, he held the door for Steve,
And said goodbye, and then took this photo of Steve Jobs walking and checking his email on his iPhone.
Um, so this kind of shows you, again,
You know, he was…
overly skinny, because cancer will do that to you.
And so, this was front pages on newspapers around the world reported this. This was major, major.
international news, not just in the English-speaking world, but everywhere in the world, because Apple
was so well-known, it's one of the most well-known brands in the world. Back then it was, it still is.
And so, it was covered everywhere. But what I thought was amazing were all the tributes made to Steve Jobs at the time. So, for instance,
at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and that's where Jobs lived. He lived in Palo Alto.
Um, people went to the Apple store, and they did this at other Apple stores, too, um, but people went to the App Store and wrote notes of thanks, or…
Rest in peace, or, you know, I'm sorry to see you go, or condolences,
and just put them all over the Apple Store. They left flowers in front of the stores. Uh, this was the San Francisco Apple store, and you can see people are leaving candles and flowers.
And memorials. Uh, there were murals made for him. This was in front of his house. He had a very modest house.
Uh, he was not like Zuckerberg, where Zuckerberg bought a house and then bought every house next to him and tore them down and put fences up and so on. Jobs was not like that at all.
Uh, he had a modest house, he knew his neighbors, children would come there for Halloween. Uh, I read stories from people whose cars had broken down,
And they didn't know Steve Jobs lived there, and he would come out of the house and help them with their car. Uh, his wife would come out and help people. So these were not people that were living, you know, in some
you know, castle somewhere, like other tech titans do.
And so, people knew where he lived, and so you can see, people left flowers and apples and…
And thank you notes, and candles outside of his house. Uh, he was on news magazine covers. I love that New Yorker cover.
Where St. Peter's checking an iPad. Uh, Businessweek ran a special issue about him.
Um, people made tributes in graphic design. I thought this was a pretty amazing tribute by a guy named Jonathan Mack.
Called Thanks, Steve. Um…
somebody did this, I thought this was quite brilliant, using the, uh…
spelling, uh, error notification. No replacements found.
Uh, Goodbye, the Sad Mac, echoing back a long ways to the 80s.
advertising agencies release this.
Other people, uh, advertising agencies, and others.
release notices like this. Uh, Boeing Boing, which is a blog that's been around for decades,
turned their homepage into a simulation of the original Macintosh.
with the tribute. Uh, Wired Magazine went black.
online as a tribute to him. And this is one of his really amazing to me.
Microsoft flew all flags worldwide at half-staff.
In honor of him.
Google never changes the homepage.
And they had a tribute to him on there. Uh, Adobe! He had been very close to the founders of Adobe. He had donated money to Adobe in the early days.
They mentioned that on their homepage. Even Amazon, which shocked me, but even Amazon had a tribute to him.
Uh, Pixar, of course, changed its own page.
Uh, because he had owned the company.
And, uh, in tribute to him with the two other leaders,
of Pixar. Apple, of course, changed its website. This was the…
This was the homepage of Apple for several days.
And if you scroll down, there was the tribute to him.
Um, but I also want to talk about his accomplishments, because when he ran Apple, after he came back,
He truly did something amazing. He took a company that was 90 days from bankruptcy,
and made it into a powerhouse. Now, again, Tim Cook
has taken it into the stratosphere. Since then. But what Steve Jobs managed to do
Between the time he came back to Apple, when it was almost failing,
And when he died, uh, a decade and a half later, is nothing short of miraculous.
So, here he is in 96, in front of his parents' garage, where Apple
started. So that's where this company started. Literally, like Hewlett-Packard did, in a garage in Silicon Valley.
Well, this shows you his market cap. So, Jobs comes back, he is named Interim CEO,
iCEO, in 97,
And you can see what Apple's market cap is. It was pathetic. Again, it was 90 days away from folding. And by the time he died,
Um, he had surpassed Exxon's market cap.
They had gone from 0, in essence, zero, to $375 billion market cap.
In just those few years.
Um, Apple before, well, this shows the number of Macs sold.
The number, uh, the PC share of Apple. Apple went from under 5% to close to 11%. Their revenue went from, you know, 1 or 2 billion to almost $30 billion. Now it's, I read today, it's like 400-something billion.
Uh, cash on hand went from next to nothing,
to, by the time he died,
almost $75 billion, and now they've got so much more. Uh, the share price, God, I wish I'd bought it in 97.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
I'm so regretful. Now, at least I will… I will brag on myself, although it was just dumb luck. I did buy 9 shares of Apple
The day the iPhone came out,
And, uh, they were about $100 each, and I said, I think this iPhone's gonna be a big deal.
And so I had $1,000, so I bought 9 shares
of Apple stock, and it's split, and it split, and it split, and now I own 252 shares.
And uh… it's pretty good! So, I've never sold it, it's like a little nest egg for myself, but uh… I wish I'd bought it in 97 instead of 2007.
But, uh, you know, oh well.
Uh, this shows you their quarterly sales by product. So again, from… this is just from 2005,
to 2011. And you can see the growth in sales. This shows you the cash they had on hand. Long-term, short-term, and just cash equivalent.
From 2005. This shows you the market cap, and this is delicious. I hope a lot of you guys appreciate this.
That, you know, Apple became worth more than Microsoft by 2010 or so. Now they're both close to the top in terms of… they're both worth about $420.
trillion dollars at this point, and they go back and forth, back and forth.
But at the time, for quite a while, Apple surpassed Microsoft.
And this shows you the PC growth rate.
Over time, so you see Apple, Mac,
All PCs and Windows. So you can see that Apple grew quite well, except I'm not quite telling you guys the truth.
Because you might notice Apple only stops in, uh, right before first quarter 2010.
Because I did that because I want to show you what the real result was. So just from 2009, so just in the two years before Jobs died,
They went from that,
to that!
to… they went up
272% in terms of Apple devices. Now, of course, this is counting iPhones, this is counting iPads, because those are computers.
Those are computers. As I always point out to my students. How many… how much, how many minutes a month
Do you guys use this so-called phone to actually make phone calls, right? Next to nothing. So, again, this shows the phenomenal growth rate of Apple compared to PCs and Windows.
Over time. And so, the two people that basically took over were Tim Cook,
became CEO, and Johnny Ive became Senior Vice President of, not just Industrial Design, but all design. Now, I personally think that was a mistake.
I think Johnny Ive is excellent, mostly excellent with hardware, although he's gone… he needed jobs to keep him…
controlled, but unfortunately, Tim Cook does not have the skill set Jobs did,
And, uh, does not have much design sense, and so he basically made Johnny Ive in charge of not just hardware, but software, and that was an enormous mistake,
And Apple users are paying the price today.
As a result of that mistake.
And finally, uh, President Barack Obama said there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success
than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.
Now, Mona Simpson…
Steve Jobs was adopted.
And it wasn't until years later that he discovered he had a sister, and she was a novelist,
Name Mona Simpson, and they actually became very close.
And she wrote in the New York Times, I believe,
about his death. She was at his bedside when he died.
And she said, Steve's final words hours earlier with monosyllables repeated 3 times.
Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children,
Then it is life partner, Lorene, and then over their shoulders past them, Steve's final words were, oh wow, oh wow.
Oh, wow. And so, those were his final words.
So, that October 12th, the next day,
Apple launches iOS 5.
And iCloud.
And they now are linking iCloud… they switched away from MobileMe, which was a failure, to iCloud. And this, they finally got it right.
Now, it had some rough patches, but it's much, much, much better than it ever was.
And now, people rely on it constantly for things. So, iCloud became… said, we are now doing a fundamental shift toward cloud-centric services.
And so, everything you see on the screen to your left there, you can now sync
with iCloud. So, then this means, once iCloud was available on Macs, and iPads,
that all your data would sync between them all, and you wouldn't have to worry about it, and it was all end-to-end.
encrypted. Other features iOS 5 had were Siri.
Being able to access the camera from the lock screen, notification center, newsstand, reminders,
Twitter integration! Boy, that's the days, right? You can tell this was a long time ago.
And so, iMessage launched. So this introduced iMessage, which is now fundamental
to all Apple devices. This replaced any other messaging service. And so, to this day, it's one of the most important things that Apple has, because a lot of people rely on it for their messaging.
And within 11 days, 300 billion messages had been sent
With an average of 28,000 per second, by February 2016, people were sending 200,000
messages per second. And so, I know that messages is mostly in the US and the Western world, and even in Europe, most people don't use it. It's primarily a US thing.
Because in the rest of the world, due to how people got charged,
For texting and things like that, WhatsApp became the default app in many, many, many countries, but here in the U.S., messages, iMessage, is
the central app many, many, many people use, and in the US, iPhones are over 50% of mobile users, so I think it's safe to say Messages is the most used messaging app
excuse me, in the US. Could be more.
Now, what's bad, though, is when Apple introduced iCloud in 2011, they said everybody gets
5GB of free storage! Well, okay, so…
Here's the sca… here's the chart showing you how much they've increased that in 15 years!
Still 5 gigs!
You still get 5 gigs free after 15 years, which is
unbelievably pathetic and useless.
So, um, yeah, that's… that's ridiculous.
October 14th! I mentioned this.
Apple introduced the iPhone 4S with Siri! This was the big deal. In fact, the S stood for Siri!
And they were like, this is gonna be the next phase of smartphone interaction. You're gonna talk to your phone, and it's gonna be able to help you, and look at your data, and help you with meetings, and you can dictate to it, and yeah, it was amazing when it came out, and then…
They have done next to nothing
on it for 15 years.
They have occasionally added something new.
But to this day, Siri sucks, um, and frankly, if any of you have used any sort of AI tools and talked to them,
Um, I do, uh, extensively on my Mac. I use a tool called Aquavoice that's using a tool that OpenAI created called Whisper. It is
Frickin' amazing. I have dictated hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words using this. It almost never screws up. I will say proper names, product names, it gets it correct.
It is so… it is… Siri is garbage compared to it. Siri… I use Siri to set timers.
And do very basic things, because it simply is not capable of doing more. Apple had a lead,
And they wasted it. Wasted it, wasted it. To the point where…
And they promised 2 years ago, oh, we're vastly improving Siri, we're gonna introduce Apple Intelligence, we're gonna introduce the ability, now you can tell Siri to tell you what's going on on your screen, and you can ask it to do multiple tasks, and it will integrate with your email and your messages and your calendar, and be able to tell you stuff, and it'll be just, you know, like we want, and of course, they screwed it up and haven't been able to do it.
To the point where, uh, they announced over the summer that they are now going to be using Google Gemini to power the new Siri. So,
Uh, and I am not a Google Gemini fan, um, but it's gonna be better than Siri, my god.
So again, Apple had the lead, and then just…
fumbled it, and it's gotten to the point now where, in order for them to be
competitive, they're having to turn to Google to power the Siri tool and the AI tools on their phone while they continue to attempt to develop their own. So, we'll see what happens. I do have high hopes it's going to be leap years better, light years better, than what it's been, but it's still pathetic. Apple's screwed up completely here.
Now, that October 12th, somebody we should all think of as very important died, and unfortunately, the fact Steve Jobs died overshadowed this completely, which sucks.
You know, I wish this did not happen, because every single person in this meeting owns Dennis Ritchie
Thanks, because he is one of the most important people, not just to us, because we care, because these are tools we use, but because his
work is everywhere.
He affected all of computing.
Because of the work he did with Ken Thompson.
And of course, he created the C programming language. That right alone would put him in the history books. But more importantly,
He created the Unix operating system that's the basis of what we all use. I'm using a Mac.
That is Unix.
I use Linux servers. Those are Unix, not official, but it's Unix.
People in here right now are watching this using Linux or BSD computers,
We all, every time we use DNS, when we look up a… when we type a domain name and hit enter, and something has to go look that up and translate that into an IP address, that's most likely running on a Unix-based server.
Email is most likely running on a Unix-based server. Google is millions of Linux-based servers, so…
Everything and peop- normal people that know nothing about this, that know nothing about what this man and Ken Thompson accomplished,
They don't realize how much they have to thank for this man, because without him, we would not have the modern world we have today.
Because of what he and Ken Thompson did in 1968 and 1969 and beyond. This is… this man, in many ways, is just as important as Steve Jobs.
I will say that right now, the problem is, he was quiet. He was not a person who led a company. He was not a billionaire.
But what he did will be as important 100 years from now as what Steve Jobs did.
Now, he was recognized by his peers.
He won the ACM Turing Award, he won the IEEE Hamming Medal, he won the National Medal of Technology.
Okay? And I know people like us, we know who this guy is, we appreciate him.
But, again, he's a guy more people should know about.
And so, Brian Carnegan, who worked with him to develop C, said,
The tools Dennis built and their descendants run pretty much everything today, and he is totally correct.
Because the tools he built, he built Unix, we would not have Linux without Unix, we would not have BSD, we would not have macOS without
Unix, Windows now!
As incorporated large parts of Unix, you can now run Linux directly on Windows.
Android is Linux, C++, Java, Objective-C, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and many, many more.
All go back to the tools Dennis Ritchie built.
So, he deserves to be recognized and praised, and remembered.
Because of what he did.
Then October 24th, Walter Isaacson,
His biography, he was handpicked by Jobs to write his biography,
is released on an accelerated schedule, because the subject died, and so they want to get this book out.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs made a big mistake. Walter Isaacson did a crap job.
That is not a great biography. Walter Isingson doesn't understand technology.
He doesn't ask interesting questions. He doesn't delve into interesting topics. It's all surface.
So, I read it, but it ain't that good of a book. There are much better books out there about Steve Jobs and about Apple.
Um, so, yeah, it was big and popular, but it's not that good of a book.
That November 11th, one of the most important
Uh, games, video games, have a release came out. The Elder Scrolls V, Skyrim, just called Skyrim.
Uh, still to this day, widely played, still popular, people are still making mods for it,
Uh, and add-ons for it. Today, 15 years later.
Uh, this is… this was ranked, basically, one of the most highest-ranked video games of all time. I love this game. I have played this game over 400 hours.
It is awesome. Uh, it's… it's single person, single player, first person,
It is awesome. You can get it for, like, $10. I… if you like video games, and you haven't ever played this, you gotta get this. It is awesome.
Um, Tom Francis, a PC gamer, explained one of the reasons it's so awesome.
It's an open-world game.
Um, you can basically walk… there are quests, and there is a story, but you don't have to do it. You can do it whenever you want.
So, you can just walk around, and I've done that. I've just been like, well, I know I'm supposed to go do this,
But it doesn't matter when you do it.
And you know what? I'm just gonna walk around this area and see what I find. And, as Tom Francis said, it's hard to walk for a minute
In any direction, without encountering an intriguing cave that you can explore, a lonely shack, a wandering traveler, or a haunted fort.
enemies, uh, giant spiders, dark elves. I mean, you never know. It's… that's one of the reasons I loved it, because there was always something new to find.
everywhere, and people have written add-on after add-on, so even if you finish the game, and you're done exploring what's there, what came with the game,
There are so many add-ons that give you new areas to go explore that it's endless, and it's just awesome.
Love it. Okay, 2012. Uh, some of you might be developers that use the Rust programming language.
Uh, it came out January 20th,
Uh, people at Mozilla developed it.
Um, it is widely used today by a lot of companies, Microsoft uses it, uh…
Uh, Google uses it, uh, Linux has support for Rust, and more and more kernel,
pieces are being rewritten in Rust. Uh, it's everywhere. And one of the reasons is, it's highly focused on performance.
And concurrence and memory safety.
And for developers, this is incredibly handy to them, and um…
It's… it's got… it's got… it's widely used for a really good reason.
Okay, I know several of you on here love your Raspberry Pi. Well, February 29th, Leap Day, uh, in 2012, Raspberry Pi released the Raspberry Pi Foundation, released the Raspberry Pi.
And as a result, this accelerated the whole idea of low-cost Linux computing,
And ecosystems built around makers and education. Because this was originally designed, you can see how tiny it is…
It was originally created to help teach computer science in schools. Well now, it's everywhere.
It's everywhere, because due to its extreme low cost, its compact size, its flexibility,
It's now used for industrial automation, robotics, home automation,
Internet of Things devices, hobbyist projects, I know some people that use it as their desktop computer, uh, for instance. So, it is… it's been… it is punched way, way, way above its size.
That March, 244 years after it first came out, the Britannica
discontinued the print edition.
And for width, it would only be published on the web. So again, what we're seeing by 2012,
is the collapse of print publications, because everything is moving to the internet, to the web.
Uh, that March?
The makers of the BlackBerry?
report their earnings,
And it's going down, and down,
and down, because the iPhone is killing it, and Android, is just
killing the BlackBerry.
That April 9th, very soon! I mean, Instagram had barely been out!
Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars. Now, at the time, people were like, they're spending a billion dollars on this?
That was an enormous amount of money.
To spend. But, we now know that Facebook did it because they wanted to buy a potential threat, and this has come out in court cases.
Now, in my opinion, they should be forced to divest Instagram.
Um, you know, because they did it purely as a monopolistic way to block out competition.
Uh, but it is turned… it was a very smart purchase, so from Facebook's perspective, this was absolutely a perfect purchase, and a billion dollars is nothing.
Considering how much they make off of it.
So, that May, Facebook went public at $38 a share.
Its market cap was $104 billion, which is the most of any company
that ever had an IPO at the time.
That May, we had a Chromebox, so we had a Chromebook.
Uh, before, that was a laptop running Chrome OS. Well, Samsung releases a mini desktop running Chrome OS for $329. And actually, I can report, these were great. I bought one for my mom. Um, my mom, her, her late husband had a PC, and it ran
Uh, Windows 98, and then Windows Me, which was god-awful.
And then, uh, Windows 7, and then they bought… I don't know why they did this, they got Vista, and at that point,
It was a nightmare, and I was like…
All they did was browser stuff.
You know what I mean? And so I said, hey, you know what?
I'm gonna buy you a new computer, but we're gonna keep your monitor and your mouse and keyboard that you like, and so we got him a Chrome box, and it was the best thing I ever did.
Because she couldn't screw it up.
I used to get calls all the time about Windows crap, you know,
Everything from, the bar has moved, and of course I'm like, the bar has moved. What do you mean?
And eventually, I would discover that the taskbar had moved to the right, or the top, or the left, or they'd accidentally made it twice the height, or whatever, and so on. And all of a sudden,
And plus, the file system was always a nightmare. And all of a sudden, once we got this Chromebox, and all they were doing was Chrome OS, and everything was in the cloud,
I hardly ever got phone calls. It was awesome. So, this was a fantastic purchase.
Now, I didn't get this one, but later, soon after. It came with a Celeron CPU, which again, blew…
dog, but for this, it could work. Um, 4GB of memory, a 16GB flash drive, 6 USB 2 ports,
Two DisplayPort connections, a DVI output for monitors, 802.11n, Wi-Fi, and Gigabit Ethernet. So, for the time, for your average person,
This is gonna be great! Now, for nerds like us, no, we don't want the Celeron processor, 4GB of memory.
But for normal people, that do web stuff and that's it, this thing's gonna be fun! It's gonna be perfect for them. And I can speak from experience, it was.
Well, that June, on the other hand…
Apple releases the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
Now, Apple had had Retina displays on their iPhones for years, and a retina display was defined as, there were so many pixels per inch you could not see them from a normal viewing distance.
And so, that's not, you know, that's amazing that they could do it on a phone.
You know? But a phone's only got this little bitty screen. Well, now, Apple was able to do that on a 13 or 15-inch laptop screen.
And so, the retina display…
ran at 2880x1800 pixels. Well, notice they're comparing it there
to a HDTV that's 1920x1080.
So, this thing was… had a beautiful screen for the time, everything was crisp and clear.
It came with an Intel processor, because Apple doesn't start switching to its own processors until the 2020s.
So this whole decade is intel.
Came with 8 or 16GB of RAM.
Uh, 128, 256, or 512GB flash storage. It was $1,700 and up.
So, it was a great machine, but you were gonna pay for it.
Well, that June, Microsoft announces it's getting into the hardware business.
They'd never done this before. Microsoft announces the Surface, the first computer it's ever made. And you know why they did it? This is hilarious, but true.
One of the reasons that Microsoft decided to make its own computers was because of computers like the HP Slate.
Because they basically were like, we cannot trust our partners
to make good equipment. So, we're gonna do it ourselves,
And yeah, we're gonna compete with our OEM partners, but what are they gonna do? Stop selling Windows PCs? That's not gonna happen. So, we're just gonna go ahead and make our own computers,
And we're gonna basically say, look, we can do… we are able to make a computer that's this nice, that has this good of a hardware, why can't you?
And that's actually worked. Now, what's funny is, of course, is that Apple started making its own computers with its own software in 1984.
So, you know, 84, 94, 2004, so it only took Microsoft 28 years
To realize Apple was right, that if you want to have the best computer, you should be building both the software and the hardware, so they integrate together. But hey, they finally got on board. Uh, originally, this was only available at the Microsoft Store and online, and to this day, I have students with them. I have a student at Webster Groves, Webster University, rather, uh…
that has a surface. So, they've proven surprisingly popular due to their low price and portability.
So, for what you got, you got an ARM PCU.
An ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 3. Now, here's the problem with that.
The only version of Windows that supported that was Windows RT.
But the problem was, you couldn't run any Intel-compiled software
on it. Now, that's not the case now.
Okay, brilliant.
But back in the day, when you bought an ARM Windows machine, you couldn't run any of the software you'd bought
For Intel processors. That meant there were no legacy apps.
Okay? Well, that meant pretty much anything you would bought wasn't going to be able to run on this computer. So, it didn't do that great, because there wasn't any software for it, and you would have to re-buy software that was recompiled for ARM,
And since not a lot of people bought this, not a lot of companies compiled to ARM, and so it became this vicious circle.
Again, the world is moving to ARM-based processors instead of the old x86-based
Intel, uh, processors, and that's happening, obviously, all of Apple's stuff is there. Microsoft is moving there, others are moving there.
Android is already there, and so the situation's definitely changing.
So you got 2GB of RAM, 34 or 64GB storage, 1 USB port,
One, a micro HDMI port and Wi-Fi 4, and of course, one of the big features was the kickstand.
So it's an adjustable kickstand that lets you set it up at different angles.
That June, you guys remember this?
Google Glass. Google announced Google Glass, a wearable mobile computer.
And here's the deal. Apple, we know, are working on glasses. Meta has glass, smart glasses out now.
Right? But 2012 was not the right time. People were not ready for it.
And plus, these glasses look nerdy as shit, and anybody could tell you had them on.
And so, consequently, uh, people… there were all these news stories about people that wore this facing hostility.
And they became known as glassholes.
So, if you were out in bars and restaurants would ban them, uh, people would get hostile if they saw somebody wearing them.
And again, people that wore these became known as glass holes, so this did not do that well.
That July? Oh, man. Yahoo isn't doing well, and so it decides to hire the former VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google,
Marissa Mayer, um, to become CEO of Yahoo! And, uh,
She did… not great. Yahoo did not exactly do great throughout the decade.
That July, Google got into the fiber business, and so Google Fiber
Started laying it in Kansas City, Missouri. You got one GPS… you got 1 gigabit per second up and down
for $70 a month,
And they were ranked, they were called by Netflix, because they obviously know about every ISP in America, the most consistently fast ISP in America. Now, of course, Google at the time said, oh, we're gonna expand everywhere, and, you know, and I was like, oh man, I can't wait, I don't like Google, but geez, this'll be great.
And of course, after they did a couple of cities, they were like, yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore.
So, uh, once again, Google starts something and doesn't finish it. But hey, it did spur more fiber adoption elsewhere.
That July 25th?
Apple releases OS X 10 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Now, what's significant about this is…
This did 3 things that are really important. One bad, one that's both good and bad, and one that's good, in general. Number one,
This is when Apple started saying, we are going to start releasing a new release of macOS and iOS, and iPadOS,
every year. And so, instead of waiting till it's done, instead of you having to wait, you know, maybe 2 years, maybe 3 years, nope! Instead, we're gonna do it every year. Now, this, on the one hand, is like, oh, cool, I get a new update every year.
But the problem is that because they're so rushed,
That oftentimes, old bugs don't get fixed.
And new bugs get introduced,
And it's just too fast, so I and many others wish they would go back to maybe every 2 years, or maybe… fine, if you want to do it every year, do a big update every two years, and do something really minor and small, or maybe…
Every other year, focus on stamping out bugs and improving things. So, sure, release new features every other year, but on the other off years, fix things.
You know, improve it, but they're not, you know, there's no evidence they're going to be thinking about that at all, so it's still, every year, and again, I think overall that's been bad.
This also, as you're going to see, deepened the relationship between Mac and iOS. Now, there's… that's good and bad.
There's some good things about it that both… that iOS brought and Mac brought, but there's other bad decisions that have happened because, unfortunately, in a lot of cases, and we saw this this last year with Tahoe, uh, the latest release of macOS,
The people at Apple that focused on iOS started to kind of take over, and they don't understand the history of the Mac, and it's a UX choices, and that's been bad.
And as far as the good, they added iCloud integration for syncing data across all devices,
And that's been good. So, some of the things they brought from iOS to the Mac included messages,
Notification Center, Notes, Reminders, share sheets like the one you see there, that made it easy to share web pages, documents, information, photos, game center, airplay mirroring, and dictation.
And they added Gatekeeper for malware blocking, which is still being used to this day and does a really good job.
Now, August 10th.
After an extensive beta period, Pinterest is made available to the general public.
Now, it's kind of funny, Pinterest is all about collecting images.
Okay? And so…
It is interesting because you collect images, and you can add details about them and so on, but when you log into Pinterest,
What you will see are your Pinterest board, and that consists of a grid of images that you've saved as you go around the web.
Okay? And you can see other people's, too, if they share them. Well, I went on to Pinterest…
A few years after it had come out,
Just because I'd heard about it, I was like, I'm gonna check this out. And I was looking at it, and I was looking at other people's boards, and I was looking at the kinds of images I was seeing.
And after about 15 minutes, I said to myself, this looks like it's mostly used by women.
Because there's a lot of clothing and home design, and…
cooking, and things like that. And I'm not saying men aren't interested in that stuff, I'm not saying that at all.
And obviously, there's nothing wrong if men are interested in it. But it just had a very, very feminine slant.
towards what was being saved, and I went and read, and I saw, oh, like, 70% of Pinterest users are women. So I was like, okay.
That makes sense. And so, what this meant was, and it's still relatively popular, um,
This was showing that throughout the 2010s, we were shifting away from text and more towards the visual, more towards video, and curation.
The idea that people would collect stuff and have it available for themselves.
And Pinterest started that process.
Uh, that September, Apple releases the iPhone 5, taller, thinner, lighter, and faster. This included LTE wireless.
What we had before we had, uh, uh, uh…
5. Uh, it included the lightning connector, so we got rid of the 16-pin connector, and it included Apple Maps, which was another complete disaster when it came out.
Uh, it was terrible. Um, because Apple was trying to get away from relying on Google,
And Google would not add features to the version of Google Maps on the iPhones.
Uh, that it would on Android, and so Apple decided we need to make our own Maps app, and the one that rolled out was absolutely terrible.
Now, that said, within a few years, it's fine, and it's what I use 99% of the time, and it does a great job.
But when it rolled out, it was not good.
That September, Tinder launches mainstreaming.
Swipe-based mobile matching. So, if any of you guys have ever seen a reference in, you know, TV or movies to swiping left,
That's because the way you use Tinder is, you hold it, you look at a profile, you can read the profile, and if you want to indicate you like them, you swipe right to like, and if you're like, nope, not for me, you swipe left to say, nope,
And so, that kind of mainstream, that whole idea of swiping left for nope and swiping right for yes, and of course, what you hoped was the person you swiped right on,
would swipe right on you as well, and then you'd have a match, and you could start talking.
And so on. So, Tinder's still around, uh, not as big as it used to be, but it's still used out there and still has a large number of users.
Then October 3rd,
Apple expands the iPad line with the introduction of the iPad Mini. So instead of the standard 9.7-inch screen, this has a 7.9 inch screen.
Uh, 13… 1632 or 64GB storage.
tiny 11 ounces.
3 fourths of a pound. Starting price at $3.29. I actually had one for a year or two.
And it was okay, I enjoyed it. Uh, when I had a smaller iPhone, I liked having the iPad Mini,
But then, once I started getting a bigger iPhone, I was like, well,
the bigger iPhone, I don't need an iPad Mini, and so I actually went and got the much larger iPad.
So, um, for a… if you have a smaller phone, the iPad Mini… or if you want a reader, basically a tool for reading and consumption, the iPad Mini is still great for that purpose.
Well, they sold 3 million in 3 days. So, there was a pent-up demand for it, that and the price was $329.
That October 6th!
Oh, boy. This is a fun one. I'm sure some of you… some of… most people here, uh, have fond memories.
of Windows 8.
And by fond memories,
I mean, your parents are other people you knew where you were the tech sport, calling and going,
What happened to Windows? And you having to go, oh my god, what happened to Windows? And having to try to support them.
So, yep, Windows 8 comes out, and the reason I put that face there, that emoji, is because they were frickin' crazy!
This was a crazy thing for Microsoft to do. What you're looking at is the start screen.
So, start button, we don't need the start button that we've had almost 30 years, that we've trained every Windows user in the world to look for and expect.
Why would we want to do that? So instead of having a start button with the start menu, now we have a start screen that's all based on tiles, and looks like this. And if you're thinking, that kind of looks like what should be on a tablet, you're right! Because Microsoft still had not learned its lesson,
And thought, well, we're gonna make the same version of Windows, and it's gonna run on desktops and laptops and tablets, and it'll be the same on all of them! And this was a horrifically stupid, bad idea.
really bad. This was a complete radical redesign of Windows.
And it turned into one of, if not THE, most divisive release in Windows history, because it threw everything
that people have been building up from using Windows for almost 30 years, out the door to introduce
Brand new concepts, paradigms, UI, UX interfaces that were just brand new, and nobody'd asked for at all.
And there was too much. So, for instance, as I said, they were trying to create one version of Windows that would run on everything. Well, the problem is, the UI worked on tablets,
But it disrupted muscle memory on traditional PCs, and it had tons of stuff that was next to impossible to figure out.
I mean, on a tablet or phone, you can swipe and try to figure out, like, oh, if I swipe here, this happens.
But on a desktop, people aren't going to be thinking about that sort of thing. So, you know, Apple was a lot smarter about this. Apple said, we're gonna keep our main paradigms that people have been using since 1984.
But, we're going to borrow things from mobile. But we're not gonna try to make the Mac into a mobile UI.
But Microsoft said, oh no, hold my beer, that's exactly what I'm gonna do. And so, they just said, we're diving in, head first, there may be rocks, we don't care, and as a result, they paid the price. Because they got roasted for years
As a result of this, people hated it. It was confusing, it got terrible reviews. IT people hated it.
You know, it's so bad, they even replaced the traditional blue screen of death with this thing! Come on, guys!
Right there, when somebody said, hey, let's replace it with an unhappy smiley face, nobody, if their computer just crashed, and they lost their work, nobody is going to see that unhappy smiley face, and gonna go, aww, this is gonna off more.
So, Windows Explorer got named a File Explorer, which is still called, and gained the new ribbon toolbar, similar to that that they'd introduced in 2007 Office, which I am not a fan of.
Uh, they had the build… they did add the built-in ability for apps to sync info and settings. That's good!
That's a good thing.
Uh, they introduced the Windows Store, now called the Microsoft Store, for downloading and purchasing apps. Sounds like somebody was a little jealous of Apple, to me.
Uh, that's still… I've still, uh, you know, I run Windows in a virtual machine on my Mac, and I'm still shocked at how crappy the Microsoft store is to this day. There's just, like…
basic info, they don't show you, it's… I just… it's amazing how bad it is to me.
Uh, they even changed the logo from the old four colors to the new flat
logo there on the right. Uh, there were tons of hidden features that you only had to figure out through clicking and swiping, so that start screen, this is
So stupid! The start screen in the bottom left? That was a hot corner, so you had to move your mouse down there, or swipe up, and that would open the start screen.
Uh, if you clicked on the top left, if you had to click and move down,
Or, swipe from the left edge, and that would allow you to switch between the desktop and active apps.
Um, the hot corner that was in either the lower or top right of the screen, or if you swipe from the right,
That opened the Charms Bar. That's what they called it. The Charms Bar, which you're gonna see next.
And, um, if you right-click the mouse in the start screen, or if you did an upward swipe, that would show you all apps.
So, again, you're asking people to relearn 30 years of muscle memory and knowledge, and again,
Most people aren't like us, they're not nerds. You and I?
If there's a new interface, we're gonna be like, well, let's… let's check this out! You know? I'm gonna… what have they done here? Okay, let's experiment, let's see what this is. Oh, a new app? Let's check it out! Most people aren't like that. Most people want to learn how to do something, and then by God, that's what they want to know how to do.
Forever. They don't want to learn radical new ways of doing things. This was nuts!
Because this is nowhere like anyone's standard Windows user was going to be used to. Again, think of my mom.
or her husband, who were in their 70s and barely knew how to use Windows anyway.
This was crazy. And so, the Charms toolbar that appeared, that provided access to the Cirque! Oh, that's where CERC is!
Oh, you could also access Start There. Oh, you need to manage your devices, or your settings? This is how you do it. So, again, you would have to know that you would have to do a hot corner in either the lower or top right of the screen, or swipe from the right edge
to shut the machine down, or restart.
Our search, our access settings.
Again, insane.
Okay? And this was it. If you wanted to restart or shut down the machine, you had to invoke charms,
Click on Settings, go to Power, and then choose Sleep Shutdown or Restart.
Like, who thought this was a good idea?
Okay? All apps, again, if you did an upward swipe or right-clicked,
You could access all apps, but it categorized them alphabetically by name, or you could do a search over there.
And you had full-screen apps. Now, some of these were actually very pretty.
But these were new, so they introduced weather.
I thought the Microsoft Weather app, which is still available, uh, is quite beautiful and quite nice. The problem is, um, it's no longer available by default. You have to download and install it, because of antitrust concerns.
They have a Maps app!
Well, guess what? You have to download and install it on Windows right now. So guess what as a result? Nobody has it installed.
According to CEO Ballmer,
Microsoft sold 4 million upgrades in 3 days, and also sold tens of millions of units to corporate customers. Well, yeah, because people thought, oh, it's an upgrade to Windows.
And corporate customers, they knew Microsoft cuts off support for older stuff. I wonder how many of those got returned.
That's what my question is about.
And the upgrade pricing, I think they knew they had a stinker on their hand, because the upgrade pricing was much lower.
So, you could upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $40, which previously that was hundreds
of dollars, okay? Now, of course, being Microsoft, they had 4 different versions. Ones you could buy from OEMs, and ones you could buy as upgrades, and they were all over the place as to whether you bought it online or you got a DVD. So you can see the prices did go up, I mean…
For a while, for 3 or 4… for 4 months, it was $40. After that, it was $200.
And I love this. Windows 7. Downgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 7! Special 1.25! Lots of people, like I said, hated Windows 8 and wanted to go back
to Windows 7. And I love this. Windows 7 is backed by popular demand, and that's from HP!
Right? Backed by popular demand.
So, the head of Windows at the time is actually a very smart guy, he has a really interesting blog.
named Steven Sanofsky. Well, 10 years after this thing came out, just a few years ago, he was interviewed at Ars Technica, and he said it was too much,
And too soon. Yeah, you think so?
Widely considered a total… mostly a disaster for Microsoft.
Then, uh, 18th November, Nintendo released the Wii U video game console, had HD graphics, the controller actually was embedded in the… that was a touchscreen.
Uh, I actually had one, I thought it was great, it was lots of fun, but it did not sell nearly as well as the Wii before it.
Uh, that December 21st,
Disney buys Lucasfilm,
For $2.2 billion in cash and $1.8 billion in stock,
Giving it control of both Star Wars
and Indiana Jones. So, if you've wondered why there have been all these additional movies and TV series, and why Star Wars is all over Disney theme parks, that's
That's why, and actually, frankly, $2.2 billion plus 1.85 billion in stock…
I think they got a hell of a deal for what they did.
Okay, first YouTube video ever to reach 1 billion views.
Maybe some of you actually remember seeing this?
South Korean star size, song, Gangnam Style became popular all over the world. It was probably the first popular South Korean song
In the US, uh, South Korean music now is everywhere. One of the most popular movies of last year was A South Korean movie called K-Pop Demon Hunters about K-pop, Korean pop music. It's awesome, by the way. It's on Netflix. If you've never seen
K-pop demon hunters, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It does… it is awesome, and the music is awesome, but the point is, that was one of the most popular, um, movies of the year.
Kids everywhere now are willing to listen to South Korean music in Korean.
Uh, it's become a global phenomena, and I… it started all here with this song. So, this is
hard, I'm not gonna play the whole thing, but this is part of Gangnam Style. Maybe you remember the song, and if you ever watch the video, you'll probably remember the dance.
Got it.
!
There you go.
You wanna hurl? Oh, Robert, you just have no taste in music.
Yes, we heard this now.
Yes, we…
2013, Docker makes its public debut, and this starts the mainstream container era. Docker is everywhere now, Red Hat has Podman, of course, in competition with it. And these tools become
part of certainly every enterprise, uh, other widely spread, uh, throughout the industry, and these help reshape deployment, packaging, and infrastructure abstraction.
So now, uh, instead of the past, where, okay, you need to install this and this and this and this, and you gotta keep it up to date, and make sure this works with this, now the vices, I see it all the time, oh, just download the Docker image.
That is everything you need.
And that's what it does. It works great.
That June 5th, boy, I remember this well.
The first of Edward Snowden's revelations is published.
Reshaping global internet governance, because people are like,
Oh my god, the government… governments ARE spying on us! We need to adopt encryption more widely. We need to pass laws and rules and regulations about what they can access.
Uh, this change, global internet governance, um, this shaped encryption priorities, trust in AT&T was revealed, was basically bending over for the government and giving them anything they want.
So, this was like an atom bomb going off in terms of what it revealed to the world about certainly what the United States government was doing, but what the other governments it was acting in constant with as allies, the Five Eyes and the others, were sharing amongst each other, and in my opinion, revealed clearly unconstitutional surveillance
of Americans. And Stan, I agree with you. I think Edward Snowden is a hero, and I admire him greatly because of his bravery, and because of what he realized. He's definitely paid a price for it. I don't think he wants to be in Russia.
Uh, but he's stuck there. Um, but yeah, I… I admire him tremendously because of the bravery that he showed.
And what he did. So, what he did was, Stoden was an NSA contractor, and while he was there, collected tens of thousands of documents.
And instead of publishing them on the web at WikiLeaks, which does a terrible job of curation and checking, he gave them to journalists and said… because he trusted these journalists to curate it, and not
publish things that would damage American interests.
And so, they did that, and this went over for years.
Okay? And so, these documents showed the extent to which American, British, and other governments have been lying to citizens and Congress.
And conducting, again,
In my opinion, unconstitutional surveillance for over a decade, and aspects of it are still going on to this day.
Some of it has been curtailed, but there's still aspects of this going on.
Well, that October 17th,
Microsoft said, we need to stop the bleeding, or at least limit the bleeding, so they got Windows 8.1 out the door!
As quick as possible.
And, again, hey, if you notice in the bottom left,
Uh… oh man, I screwed… yeah, if you look in the bottom left of this screen, hey, what is that? Is that a… is that a
start button? Who would have thought we should have that? Are those…
Are those icons on a taskbar that we can click on?
Ed? Oh my god, is that a clock? And other items in the bottom right? Who would have thought this was a good idea?
I know! Isn't that crazy?
What is he talking about? I was there.
That's our boy.
So, we… they had more flip, they still had the tiles, but now they were more flexible. There was a less jarring relationship between the desktop and the start screen, although it was still there.
It still kept that tablet first, but they were trying to, like, make it a little better, but really,
it fixed, it, like, plugged a few leaks, but it was still bad.
And it would continue to be bad until Windows 10 came out in 2015.
That, uh, September, the iPhone 5S is introduced, and this was important.
For two reasons. Number one, the chip it had in it, and number two, the security it provided. Because, number one, it was the first 64-bit processor used in a smartphone.
And again, an ARM-based chip built with Apple's specifications, Apple's engineers,
The A7, so the first 64-bit processor used in a smartphone?
And the other thing that was important was this added Touch ID for biometric authentication.
So they redesigned the home button to add a fingerprint recognition system that works generally… worked great.
And you would use this to unlock the phone, as well as authenticate App Store and iTunes Store purchases. And yes, I know other phones had had this, but Apple did it really well,
And it marked the start of mainstream biometric use for authentication on phones.
Now, this phone, again, I was laughing when I saw what you got, 163264GB.
Uh, with a 2-year contract, though, hey, only $399 for the 64, but you could buy it unlocked without a contract, but then you're paying a lot more.
That September also, Apple released iOS 7. Now, the reason this is important is because it completely changed UIs.
And, um, Apple had gotten ideas from what Microsoft had done, a little of what Google had done,
But again, Apple took it and then really mainstreamed this whole flat design thing, which…
I really think people went too far on this. I think Microsoft went too far, Apple definitely went too far on this.
Um, they just went back from it last year. Unfortunately, they went in a worse direction.
Um, so hopefully they're gonna pull that back, too, with liquid glass, or as many others call it, liquid ass.
Um, they… I… iOS 7 was a flat design. So, everything was much flatter, they got rid of skeu morphism, where things try to look like the actual thing. You're going to see examples of what I'm talking about.
slimmer fonts, and Johnny Ive, who'd been behind this, said that it embodied a profound and endearing beauty and simplicity
clarity and efficiency. And I call BS, right? I mean, okay, sure, but it introduced a lot of problems that took a long time to iron out, things that still…
Uh, until last year were a problem, and like I said, now they've introduced new problems with this liquid glass redesign.
So, that shows you iOS 6 on the left and iOS 7 on the right. We immediately see the icons are flatter.
They've lost the 3D look, they've lost the skeu Morphism.
Okay? So, whereas, um…
The, uh, passbook looked like a little collection of tickets. Now, on the right, you see that's changed. Maps got much more flat. Uh, the photos icon.
In the top, the photos icon used to be a sunflower. Well now, it's a…
Pseudo-sunflower… color wheel?
thing going on there. Um, notes, if you look at it, the notes on the left, you can see where there's little bits of paper, like it's been torn off.
But on the right, it's completely flat with none of that. Newsstand!
Newsstand on the left, where you could buy magazines and so on, looked like a wooden set of shelves. On the right, that's all gone.
So, in my opinion, they got rid of a lot of the whimsy, they got rid of a lot of the interest,
Um, to go with this more flat design. This is what… before, you could record your voice.
And this is what it looked like on the left. Well, now it looks like that on the right. Again,
That skew morphism is when something looks like on a computer, what it is in real life. Well, this looked like a mic.
You had a meter at the bottom, right? They got rid of that entirely. Now, they said, we don't need to do that anymore. Everybody understands how to use this. And I get that.
I get that, I really do. And it's not necessary. We don't need a gigantic microphone.
But on the other hand, I'd say the fun, the whimsy, uh, got completely stripped out,
And it got to this rather, I think, cold, flat design that removed too much.
Uh, Game Center, where you could go and play games. On the left, they had a green felt background, right? And wood, like, on the edge of a crap table.
at a casino. iOS 7 got rid of all of that.
The calculator, um, got less interesting, you know? It just went to flat tiles instead of what looked like 3D pushable buttons.
That's newsstand, right? So, newsstand went from looking like a set of wooden shelves,
to… plastic?
I guess? The Notes app.
went from looking like an actual little yellow pad to… that.
On the right, all the character was leeched out of it entirely. Um, last one, this is what the settings looked like before and after. So again, you can see any attempt at a 3D look has been completely flattened and gotten rid of,
And the icons have been flattened also, and they're far less interesting.
Now, it did add Control Center, which you would swipe up from the bottom, and that gave you easy access to the most commonly used features.
Uh, sliders for volume and brightness, uh, music playback controls, you could toggle to turn on the flashlight or not, which was cool. You could quickly access the camera. Now, of course,
Android had that.
Android had it, it was called Quick Settings. So, on the left, that's what Apple introduced, Control Center, with iOS 7, and on the right, that's what current versions of Android, stock Android, had. Now, if you were using a Samsung did its own thing.
And other versions would do their own thing, but that was the stock version of Android on the right there.
And so, you tell me which you prefer. Uh, me, I think the one on the left looks far better. It's far more user-friendly, it's far more approachable.
Um, I think the one on the right just looks like a collection of 9 tiles. There's not really any grouping.
Uh, Apple attempts to do grouping of elements. This just seems like 9 tiles they just threw in a row, but I know some of you might prefer the other, but I just wanted to show you, because I do want to acknowledge
that it existed before.
Uh, they included folders that you could have up to… you could have pages inside folders with up to 15 pages in a folder, and each page having 9 apps.
became weird. It was already weird. They made Bing the default search engine, so if you ask for a search, it would do it on Bing. Uh, it included Wikipedia, it integrated with Twitter.
But the new cool thing was you could change the gender.
And so now, you had options for male and female voices.
They also introduced CarPlay, as well.
And slide to unlock.
And this was new. And so now, because people would accidentally turn on the phone in their pocket,
And so now you had to slide to unlock, which made it more deliberate to unlock the device and look cool. It introduced airdrops so you could wirelessly share files, and for the first time,
Apps would automatically update.
Then October 22nd, Apple released Mavericks.
I'm only going to say one thing about it.
This was the first Mac OS Apple gave away for free. After this, they never charged again. Why? Because the business logic of desktop OS upgrades changed.
Because Apple said,
The important thing… we don't make enough money from this to be meaningful,
Instead, if we give it away for free, that's going to encourage more people to upgrade and use the latest version, number one, which is going to encourage developers to make software for the latest version.
And also, what's important now is the hardware and services and software ecosystem as a unit.
Not, you know, calling out operating system upgrades. And so, as a result of this,
Now, all Mac users and iOS and iPadOS users, we expect free updates and, like I said, unfortunately, annual.
At that. 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft.
This is the best-selling video game in history, 350 million copies have been sold. Now, I know some of you guys aren't gamers, and um… never have played this.
I guarantee you, if you've got nieces and nephews, they have played it. If you have brothers and sisters with kids, I guarantee they have purchased Minecraft for their children.
Because every parent wants to purchase Minecraft, because it's a game about creating and building.
You can do amazing things, and kids learn a tremendous amount from doing it. My son, like every other kid his age, was obsessed with it, and every once in a while, even though he's 17, he and his friends will still open up Minecraft and play on it together, because it's something they all did when they were kids. So, this was a brilliant purchase on Microsoft's part.
Um, October 20th, 2014, Apple Pay launches.
Now, you can pay with your phone.
And again, I know other… I know Andard had had this before, but it had hardly been adopted.
Apple made it so easy that… and all these businesses adopted it,
that that is why mobile payments became more popular. So if you walk into a store now, and use your phone to pay for things, which I do all the time, or maybe use your watch,
Tied to your phone. That is because what Apple did in 2014, because they mainstreamed
The idea of mobile wallets and mobile payments using your phone. And of course,
Touch ID allowed you to authenticate it.
Now, what's cool about Apple Pay was, it was better security and privacy. Merchants no longer got your customer info.
In fact, they… Apple creates a unique CVV code, and
can create a unique number with each purchase. So the merchant can't steal your credit card, because the change is so constantly with each purchase, and they're not getting your personal info, and Apple doesn't track anything with it.
So, Apple's not getting into your business and tracking what you're paying.
You can use it for online payments, it's awesome when it's available.
And within 3 days, 1 million credit cards were registered on Apple Pay.
That's how popular this was. I remember the first time I used it, it was like magic. It was so easy and so cool.
And, once the Apple Watch got released in 2015, you can just use that. So you just walk up at Shooks and hold your watch next to the thing, pay that way, you're done. It's awesome.
That October 30th,
Apple CEO Steve Cook wrote in an article published
In Bloomberg Businessweek, he published an editorial in which he stated, I'm proud to be gay,
And I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me. And what was important about this, why I wanted to mention it was, the reasons he did it, and why he did it,
And the result. Tim Cook said, people said, why did you do this? Why did you come out?
And he said, what was driving me was that I was getting notes from kids who were struggling with their sexual orientation.
They were depressed. Some said they had suicidal thoughts. Some had been banished by their own parents and family, and I know kids that that's happened to.
It weighed on me in terms of what I could do. You always know, if you have people reaching out to you, that there's many more that don't.
that are just out there wondering whether they have a future or not, whether… wondering whether life gets better.
From there, I really decided, because he wanted people… this was the time of the It Gets Better campaign, where lots of prominent gay people published videos telling people
I know it's hard now for you as a kid, it gets better. When you get to be an adult, it will be better, because so many suicides…
by kids that are LGBTQ plus, and adults, too, but kids have a really hard time in this.
And the significance of this is that Tim Cook, to this day,
is the first and only chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to publicly come out as gay.
Okay? Now, there were, since then, there are 3 other Fortune 500 CEOs that were… are CEOs, but they were openly gay before they became CEO.
Tim Cook is the only one to come out WHILE he is CEO.
And this doesn't surprise me, but it still horrifies me.
In nearly 70 years of the Fortune 500,
There have been roughly between 1,600 and 1,800 people who served as CEOs of those companies.
Only 4 have been openly LGBTQ. That's around .2%.
have been able to be out in that entire time. So, I don't always agree with everything Tim Cook does. He pisses me off a lot.
Especially politically. But, I will admire people when they do the right thing, when they do something that is helping people, and I admire him for this, and other things, too.
But I strongly admire him for this. This was a very courageous, important thing to do.
November 6th, Amazon unveils the Echo!
Your own Percival surveillance machine in your home!
Would I be goddamned if I ever have in my house. I don't even like going to people's houses that have it.
You know? I don't want to say anything when I'm around it. I don't trust it. I don't trust Amazon. Even though I buy from Amazon all the time, I don't trust them.
I certainly won't have a Google
listening device in my house. I bought Sonos speakers. Uh, they have the ability, they work with Alexa or Google. I've turned off the mic.
I don't even want them to accidentally turn on, but hey, a lot of people love it! Okay!
That's fine, you do you, people. But, um, yeah, sure, it has Alexa. You can ask Alexa things. You can have Alexa play music out of these crappy little speakers. You can have it control your lights, sure, absolutely. But it's also listening in to every single thing you say.
Nope. November 18th, and this is a result of what Snowden had revealed.
Up to that point, if you wanted to encrypt all the traffic on a website and make it HTTPS instead of HTTP, you had to buy an SSL certificate. Well, they cost money. They used to cost $100 a pop, or more, and even the cheap ones were 50 bucks. Well,
Most of our clients didn't want to do that. They weren't going to pay for it.
Well, on November 18th,
Uh, let's encrypt is an organization, and they made SSL certificates available
for free to any website. And this is one of the best things that's happened to the internet.
Um, it was founded by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Identrust, and people from the University of Michigan. It is going strong. They have issued at least billions of certificates, maybe more.
And once we did this, we turned around to our… we had a couple that were paying for certs, because they had to,
And we turned around and said, not only are you… do you not have to pay for this anymore, we are rolling this out free for every single client.
So, in my opinion, as a web developer, as a person who hosts websites,
If every website should be encrypted with SSL for free from Let's Encrypt, because that starts… that prevents gross surveillance at the network level.
As Snowden said. So by encrypting that traffic, oh, sure, they can get the traffic, but it's gibberish. To this day, we know of no way to decrypt it.
So, I love this. I think it should be everywhere.
Um, it's vitally important, right? SSL not only encrypts traffic between a browser and the web server, but it verifies that the website is authentic.
It verifies that that website is who it says it is. That's why it's important.
So, let's Encrypt is not only free, it's automated!
Every 30 days, it checks, and if a new certificate needs to be issued, it does it. It's awesome.
It's completely secure. It's all transparent. So all the records are public.
It's an open protocol. So, you can use any software you want to work with Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt has its own official software. We haven't used it for 5 or 6 years. We found software that we like better, that's a shell script,
that does a beautiful job called Acme.sh, that's what we use, it's flawless, it runs perfectly. We don't… you don't have to use the Let's Encrypt software, because it's an open protocol.
It's open source, and it's a cooperative effort. It's not controlled by some company that's gonna shitify it and jerk the rug out from under people.
So, Let's Encrypt is awesome, and any of you guys that have a website, you should never have to pay for certs, because they're free. Any company that wants to charge shouldn't be doing that, and any of you that are doing anything with the web should definitely look into this.
2015, the Apple Watch is available.
This launched Apple into the wearables market,
And it is dominant in the market.
So, right now, if people have a smartwatch, it is more than likely an Apple Watch. It started creating a whole new category.
For the company. That June 30th, Apple launches Apple Music, which began their subscription music strategy.
So, like Spotify and the others, $10 a month gets you, I don't know how many, 30 million songs available to you.
to stream at any time.
I quite like it, it's what I… I use that and Spotify, mostly Apple Music.
Okay, that July!
Microsoft's like, thank God we can leave the Windows 8 era behind us. We're gonna do Windows 10 now.
We're leaving behind the troubles of Windows 8, and I want you guys to look, oh my god!
A start menu! A start button with a start menu. Now, it's got tiles on it, but it also has some stuff that's a little more normal.
Right? Uh, we've got a taskbar, things are getting closer to normal, but they kept the tiles thing.
Okay, that's fine, but we've got, you know, we've got enough stuff.
So, Windows 10, I'm not going to go into super detail about it, but it's two things you need to keep in mind. Number one, it's a repair job after Windows 8.
We're gonna go back. We're gonna retrench and go back to the way, uh, people like. We're gonna keep a few things, but we're not gonna be radical like we were, and I would wager they never will.
But it's also more ambitious, because this reset windows…
to be a service. So, at the time, they said, we will never release anything after Windows 10. Windows 10 will just be added onto every year.
of course, they went back on that, they've released Windows 11. That stuck around for a while. They're supposedly going to be replacing
releasing Windows 12 sometime. But this set the idea that instead of waiting every 3 or 5 years,
to buy a new copy of Windows, it's just kind of constantly be updating all the time, and to this day, Windows 11, there's basically two times a year, there are major updates where they update stuff, so this kind of shifted Windows
into more of a service direction.
Now, it did… it did bring major changes. Uh, it brought the return of the start menu with some tiles, it added Cortana,
Uh, so you could talk to it, they ripped that out eventually. It added virtual desktops, it was the last major operating system to do so.
better window snapping into corners and so on. It integrated the Xbox.
It revised how settings looked, very flat design there, you notice.
It introduced Microsoft Edge, which finally murdered IE, although IE hung on a few more years, but, you know, if there was ever a piece of software I would want to take behind a shed and beat with axe handles,
And then Barry alive, and then set it on fire, it would be, i.e., as a web developer, it gave us nightmares for years. Edge, hilariously, never got above 3% or so market share. It utterly
failed, and that's why they shifted to using Chrome as the back end. So, the modern edge for the last X many years is based on Chrome.
Um, that September, iOS 9 was released, and it brought a whole bunch of new features, right? Search, map, it brought some intelligence. Again, not THE intelligence.
Uh, Siri supposedly was aware of what was on the screen, so you could say, Siri, remind me of this when I get home, so it supported geofencing. I have used that.
So, oops, series…
dictating what I say right now.
And so, I would say something like, um…
There's my iPad talking to me. Um, I could say something like, uh, remind me to call my brother when I get home, and then when I got home, it would pop up a reminder.
Um, the Settings app, added search bars, uh…
They had some… and so on, I'm gonna speed up.
Uh, you could use two-finger drag on a keyboard to move the cursor freely, like a trackpad. Uh, the iPad now had 16 apps per page and a 4x4.
So, folders could contain even more. Uh, a new system typeface, they stopped using Helvetica Anu, and went to one called San Francisco, which I quite like.
Um, you can now say, instead of a 4-digit passcode, it's 6 digits.
Apple Maps added transit and recommendations.
They integrated the watch together with the phone,
And they renamed the passbook to Wallet, which is what it's still called, and I use that to this day. You can store coupons, uh, your Panera card can go in there, your Costco card can go in there, a boarding pass can go in there to an airline.
any sort of loyalty card can go in there. It's really great.
I'm gonna skip this because of time.
Okay…
I'll skip that…
There we go…
Okay, so, um, that November, Asus released a Chrome bit, and so this is a stick PC,
Running Chrome OS, that you would plug into a display's HDMI port, and then boot, and it would actually boot off that,
And you would be able to have your own operating system on a stick. So we went from a Chromebook to a Chrome box, to a Chrome bit.
Okay? And so, ASUS processor, 2GB memory, and so on. Now, unfortunately,
They didn't keep it up to date, so it hasn't been updated.
Um, so since November 2020.
So, they tried, it just didn't catch on.
2016, my favorite social network now, Mastodon.
was launched. Uh, Mastodon, and I encourage all of you guys to check it out,
It's awesome. Uh, Mastodon is free and open source, it is social networking.
It's free and open source, unlike most of the others.
It is decentralized. No one company or organization controls it. If you don't like Twitter, you got two choices. Like it, or leave, which is what I did once Stupid took it over. Same thing with Facebook. You don't like the way Zuckerberg's running things? Great! You can stay, or you can leave.
With Mastodon, you can be on a server, and if you don't like the way the server's being run, you can move to a new server, and all your followers come with you.
So, that's because one company doesn't control it. There is… it's a protocol,
It's software, but anybody can set up a Mastodon server,
It acts kind of like Twitter, think about it that way. The servers are called instances. They all communicate using the ActivityPub protocol that was created by the, um…
That was created by the World Wide Web Consortium.
Yes, that is true. I did talk about Mastodon before.
So, I encourage you guys to check it out.
I love it. If you are, get hold of me. I'm at Mastodon Social, I'm Granaman at Mastodon Social.
Uh, and, you know, let's get, uh, let's get communicating.
Uh, March 30th, big deal for us.
Microsoft announced Bash on Ubuntu on Windows called WSL, Windows Services for Linux.
And this was a bit, obviously, a landmark shift, because all of a sudden now, Microsoft was supporting Linux running on Windows.
And a lot of people were like, oh, thank God, now I can use real software. I have to use Windows at work, but now I can use some real software. I can use a real command line, and so on.
Now, they did point out that this is a developer toolset. This is not a server platform, so this is not meant for you to run, you know, websites off of it and stuff like this. This is meant for developers, but, you know, other people besides developers can use it to do things as well.
Okay? Finally! FINALLY!
Windows users have access to a real operating system and real command line tools. You could run back scripts.
You could use tools like SED, AUK, grep, and Find. Oh, thank goodness. You could install managed packages with app-get. You could access languages like Ruby, Python, and Perl directly. You could use Git and SSH. Finally, there was decent SSH support on Windows. Nowadays, they finally added it into Windows itself, but, you know, before that, it was awful. It didn't have any.
Um, you can access your Windows files from Bash. So, this was great.
It's still great.
They're June 13th, Microsoft announced that they are acquiring everyone's favorite social network, LinkedIn, for $26 billion.
billion dollars!
Now, I, like almost every other person I know, uses LinkedIn because I have to.
Because that's where companies go to look.
Right? I feel obligated to use it, and I would wager 90-plus percent of people… nobody uses LinkedIn because they want to, except weird influencers and people that write these dumb, standardized articles. I can tell a LinkedIn post from a mile away, they all have the same format,
Um, and they're all about lessons I learned, and they just sound like the most fake garbage.
I can't stand them. Um, but why did Microsoft pay $26 billion? Because this got even more hooks into the enterprise.
and expanded their reach into social media. And like I said, everybody feels like they have to use it, recruiters use it, people look for jobs on it, people use it for social networking, and so on.
So, you know, it was, uh… I'm sure it was beneficial to them.
That September, Apple introduces AirPods!
And again, this catalogized and made mainstream wireless earbuds. I know, there had been others before, but they did not succeed like the AirPods. And now,
Pretty much, most people that have wireless earbuds, they're AirPods. I know there are others out there, but the vast, vast majority, uh, are using AirPods. And everybody made fun of them when they first came out.
But, uh, now, everybody has them.
They're everywhere. You know, the joke then was, uh, oh yeah, look like cigarettes are hanging out of your ears, but they made them shorter and smaller, and now
Everybody has them, nobody says a word.
So, this is interesting. Uh, in 2016… I'm gonna skip this, just in the interest of time. It's interesting, we were on time.
Um, skip that. Oh, uh, this is kind of… might make some of you throw up in your mouth a little bit. Uh, November 16th, 2016. Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation at the highest platinum level.
Because they were getting more involved in Linux. Now, yeah, they're offering Linux on Windows and Azure, their cloud hosting service, and cloud services service.
does offer Linux, but still, it kind of gives me the willies.
27 Nintendo releases the Nintendo Switch.
Which, I cannot tell you how many college students and gamers own one of these. Uh, the cool thing is, you can take it on the go and game, you can plug it into a TV or monitor at home in-game. Uh, it's really nice.
It's not for me, but I know so many people that have one of these, and just absolutely love it. This has been an enormous seller for Nintendo, and in fact, one of the greatest
games of all time, uh, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild was released for the Switch.
And it's widely regarded as a landmark in modern console games.
It's an open-world game. Uh, there's stuff everywhere, it's kind of like Skyrim in that regard, and it's one of the best-selling video games of all time, with over almost 35 million copies sold.
That September, iPhone… Apple introduces the iPhone X.
They get rid of the home button, and instead this begins the Face ID era. That's where the knock is at the top there, they introduce the notch, which everybody made a big deal about, but now nobody cares about, it's on every phone, it's not a big deal.
Um, they redesigned the phone, so now you'll notice it went much… the bezels were much, much smaller. It went almost all the way to the bottom, all the way to the top, so this was also a big new design.
Focusing on the screen with fewer bezels.
Um, September 13, 2017, TikTok launches!
In Indonesia, and soon spreads around the world. Within a few years, it's one of the world's most important short video social media apps, and if you've been paying attention to politics for the last 3 or 4 years, you know it's been a football. And now,
Huh, a group of people that are bankrolled largely by Oracle and Larry Ellison.
Now, own the American TikTok.
that they were forced to sell.
That's September 26th, one of the other biggest video games of the modern era is released, Fortnite Battle Royale.
Again, this is not a game for me, but I know people love it. My son-in and all his friends played it.
Uh, basically, 100 people are dropped onto an island, and you start killing each other, and the last player or team remaining wins.
And people love this game, absolutely love this game.
Uh, one of the ways they do it is, by the way, there's a storm on the outside of the island, and it comes in constantly.
And so, you are forced to get closer and closer and closer together over time. People can build forts and other things to use for defense or offense. There are weapons. So, again, extremely popular game.
I do not want to play it, because I do not like 13-year-old boys kicking my ass and taunting me, and claiming that I should put body parts
In other body parts, and making comments about my sexuality, which they have no actual knowledge or information about.
So, within 2 weeks, 10 million people played this thing.
Okay? $250 million by 2019. 35% female! The highest for any shooter game.
By 2020, 350 million people
are playing this game, and they've made $9 billion from this.
Okay? It is free to play.
How did they make all that money? Because you can buy skin, in other words, outfits, the way your character looks, they constantly are putting new ones in that have to do with social events.
new characters from other games, so this became a very big deal, and it's also extremely popular to watch.
people play, so people watch over YouTube and Twitch and other places, and watch people play it.
2018, the GDPR became applicable across the EU,
And this set, Global Privacy Expectations and Compliance.
So, for instance, you own your data. You can now tell companies, I want you to remove my data from your systems, and they have to do it under the GDPR. I wish so much
that we could have something like this here.
June 4th, Microsoft buys GitHub.
The largest, uh, source control system used by developers in the entire world.
Uh, this was major. Microsoft has always been big with developers and supported developers. They've always done a pretty good job with that, so this was a natural thing for them to acquire.
The amount of people and projects that are on GitHub is astronomical.
Uh, I've been using it for years. I bet many of you that are developers use it. There are other competitors, certainly, but GitHub is easily the largest one.
And again, you guys know, hell, the first time I ever met you guys almost 30 years ago, I delivered a talk about Microsoft and how crappy they were. So you know that, you know, I'm still there, I'm still pretty critical of Microsoft, but I will say when they do a good job,
And they've done a pretty good job with GitHub.
Overall, they have actually done a pretty good job. They have not inshidified it.
Um, there are still things that could improve, but they've reduced prices, they've added features, and overall, um, I'm gonna give them credit.
That August 2nd, this was, like, such a big deal, and now we're so far past that.
But August 2nd, 2018, Apple becomes the first company to reach a market cap of $1 trillion.
dollars, okay? And that was such a big deal, like, oh my god, a company is worth a trillion dollars.
And now, Apple's at $4 trillion.
Google is at 4 trillion. Microsoft is at $4 trillion. So, within, you know, it took centuries to get to $1 trillion, and then within 60… within 8 years,
We're now at 4 times that.
October 28th, IBM announces it's going to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion.
Because, as you know, my IBM got really big into open source, it's obviously been big in the enterprise forever and ever. Uh, Red Hat's hybrid cloud strategy.
Uh, it's Salesforce, so this was a smart purchase for IBM.
2019, our last year!
Microsoft gets to $1 trillion by April. So again, I love the fact Apple got there before Microsoft, after Microsoft was worth more than them for so long.
August 20th, the Apple card becomes available, so Apple issues its own credit card.
that works with Apple Wallet, extending their financial services footprint. This is a ridiculously nice credit card. It also is digital, and it has the best interface I've ever used
for managing your money and your credit cards, and giving you data, it is really incredible.
Um, I've had one for a while, and I love it. It's great. That is the interface you use to know how much money you need to pay by when to avoid interest charges.
So, this is a short animated GIF Apple made showing that.
So, you simply run your finger around, and that determines how much you want to pay.
So, if all you want to pay is the minimum, you can do that, but if you move it around, oh, that's your federal… that's your, uh…
February payment plus travel spending, or you can pay February's balance completely off at any time.
So, this is really… this is just one part of it, it's super nice.
September 19th, Apple introduces Apple Arcade, a video game subscription service.
Launching with 71 games. Um…
The beautiful thing about this, one of the reasons I like this is, one of the bane of normal gaming's existence is all these microtransactions. Oh, do you want to be able to do that? That costs a dollar. Oh, do you want to add this feature, or do you want to be able to more quickly level up? That'll be 50 cents.
Uh, the amount of ads in a lot of games, the fact that they track everything about you. The beautiful thing about Apple Arcade games is, there's no in-app purchases. You buy… you have the game, that's it.
There's no microtransactions, they're banned. Ads are banned. Data tracking is banned. Now, some games you play against other people on the internet, but most games can be played without an internet connection at all,
And… and… subscribers can share access with these games with other 5 other people.
through Apple Family Sharing.
Which is awesome. So, I only play a couple of games out of this, but for me, it's really nice, because I don't like ads. I don't like all that other crap.
I like the fact that I have a subscription, but my son can use it.
anytime he wants to play games.
That October 7th, Apple releases Catalina.
The reason that that's important is because it broke iTunes up into music, podcasts and TV apps.
I don't necessarily think that was good.
Uh, it added the ability to use an iPad as a second display, which I have done, it's really cool.
You can now run iPad apps on a Mac,
And… maybe the biggie is no more 32-bit support for apps.
So at that point,
Any 32-bit app, any 32-bit game, no longer is supported on the Mac going forward. Now, yeah, this was disruptive. A lot of apps I'd used,
went away. There's games that were never updated for 64-bit that I can no longer play.
But, the reason Apple did that was that allowed them to remove all this legacy 32-bit code,
and support out of the operating system. And Apple is always, unlike Microsoft, Microsoft keeps support
for 30, 40 years.
Apple, every few years, is like, yeah, we're getting rid of that, we're moving on. Um…
You know, we're not gonna support that anymore. And…
You know, yeah, it's gonna be disruptive, but it allows us to simplify things, and allows the platform to move forward.
And so that's what's happened as a result.
Wake up. Now, this next feature I want to show you guys was introduced on Catalina. This is about a minute and a half video. I'm almost done.
This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
And I, fortunately am not disabled. I have bad eyes, but that's about it.
But there are people out there that are much more disabled,
And using computers can be very difficult. Now, I love Linux, as you guys know.
But Linux is, and I've read reports from people that are disabled,
And other studies, Linux is easily the worst OS when it comes to accessibility.
because of the fragmentation.
Okay? I'm sorry to say that, but it's a fact. Windows is better?
But Apple has always been the best when it comes to accessibility. They really have always focused on that.
And they added a feature…
into Catalina,
that is absolutely incredible, called Voice Control, and this is the video they released. There is nothing like this on Windows, there is nothing like this on Linux, and I am so happy that it exists for people that need it.
Um, and so I want to share this little short, very short video showing you what you can do
On a modern Mac, or iPad, or iPhone, if you need it. So again, this is called voice control.
Wake up. Voice controls… Can you hear a breakthrough feature that gives you full control of your devices, comma.
With just your voice, period.
It's a whole new way to do everything you love, period.
Yeah, Scott.
Like this. Correct love.
16.
Open photos.
Scroll up. Show numbers.
13.
Click Share.
3.
Tim, next field.
Let's ride this one today. Thumbs up emoji.
Click send. Open maps.
Show grid. Long press at 20.
Open App Switcher.
Four. Tap share.
Top 10. Top 10.
Hey, good to see you.
open music, turn up the volume.
That still blows me away, 6 years later.
Uh, I hope it impressed you guys as well. The fact that that…
disabled man, that quadriplegic man, was able to completely control his computer through his voice,
and do all of that,
like that, it just really gives me hope. It inspires me that we have such tools available for people. And again, if you know somebody disabled,
They probably own an Apple device, and this is why! Because Apple puts time
And money, and work into making these tools accessible to everybody.
And there's tons of things in here that they do that we don't have time to talk about.
that are just incredible. In fact, remember, I have bad eyes. I use some of the accessibility features.
Every day to zoom in onions of the screen. I do that constantly.
Probably a hundred times a day. I am able to zoom in where my mouse is so I can look at that, then zoom back.
Because my eyes are not what they used to be.
And other features, too, as well. Um, so this is great. I just wanted you guys to know about that, because I think it's really cool.
And November 1st, finally, uh, Apple TV Plus launches, so this is their push into subscription streaming and content, and it's excellent!
Uh, Apple TV Plus, or now just Apple TV, is kind of like HBO.
Everything on there is very high quality, there's hardly any stinkers at all. Uh, they have excellent movies, they have excellent series.
Uh, highly, highly recommended. Apple now has the right to F1 Racing.
Worldwide, and so Apple TV is going to be featuring F1 races for free, all of them.
Uh, you can watch Major League Soccer, because they have the rights to that on here. So, I have been super impressed with the series and movies that Apple TV has on it.
So, to finish up…
I have a little question.
See if you guys can figure this out.
What was the most downloaded mobile app?
Android and iPhones,
In the 2010s.
Anybody can guess.
That is probably true!
I think you're probably right!
about.
What do you guys think was the most
downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Damn, Lee! You rubbed my notes!
Probably Facebook.
It's Facebook. Yeah.
Yeah, Facebook would… Facebook won, which, like, bleh…
Oh.
But, you know, facts is facts. I can't argue it.
Okay, that's it! Again, I know I missed a lot of stuff.
But I can't cover every single thing.
But I feel like we did cover an awful lot.
Uh, I hope this brought back memories for you guys. I hope this reminded you of things you might have forgotten. I hope you learned some new stuff that you didn't know before.
Um, but anyway, uh, as you guys know, you guys all know me by now, you know that I always ask people,
Man, Zoom is…
really gone wackadoodle. Uh, I always ask you guys, what did you find interesting? What did you find useful?
So, um…
I always ask you guys…
instead of doing that, because we have so many people, I'm just going to ask you guys, what sticks with you? What one thing are you going to take away from this that's like, alright, that was really interesting, or that's something I'm gonna stick…
that I'm gonna keep with me. So, I'm gonna pick you guys randomly in this thing till I get everybody.
So, Vincent, real quick, what did you find the thing that… one thing that stuck out with you?
Benson.
You're on mute.
Okay, no problem, I'll move on. Tyler, how about you? What did you find the most, uh…
Vincent seldom talks, uh…
interesting, cool thing. I know I didn't do BSD, I wanted to, but I just ran out of time.
Yeah, you, Tyler. Tyler R.
This Tyler? Um… That is what it was 2015, 2016 when Docker finally released.
Mm-hmm.
The fact that we're here 10 years later, and… I'm sitting here trying to find a job, it's like… If you don't know how to use Docker and Kubernetes, your SOL.
That's right, that's right, that's right.
Good. Excellent.
Uh… uh…
Randy! How about you, Randy? Randy Van Husen?
What about you?
Well, I thought about your, um… the part with, um…
With Dennis and all he did, and uh… I mean, that just… It stuck with me because… It's a monumental amount.
Yeah.
Um… And then, of course, um… When… the passing really.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, I remember it very well. I think the way you presented it, um… brought back a lot of details that I might not have known.
Good.
Thank you. Uh, Phil, how about you?
So, um, but great presentation.
Yeah, uh, I guess from a trivia point of view, talking about Gen 2 or whatever being the the original.
Uh-huh. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, I never knew that. That was kind of interesting. And yeah, going on what Randy said, too, you know, I knew that.
Yeah.
that, uh… You know, he did a lot of stuff, but I just didn't realize all the stuff you listed there. You know, it just really owes a lot of stuff. I kind of hate to see that he was like in the shadow of Steve Jobs.
Yup. I do too.
Yeah, he really deserved to be recognized.
Yeah.
And it was just bad timing.
You know?
Uh, somebody has their mic on, and we hear noise.
to be cap of any kind whatsoever. Uh, district. And there are a lot of white…
Uh, thank you, Phil. David, how about you? David B.
Yeah, Steve.
What do you find… what stuck out for you?
David? Okay, I'll move on to Joe.
Joe B., how about you?
Well, I didn't join until almost nine o'clock the night of work change tonight.
Okay.
So I'm going to have to rewatch it on the replay.
Okay, no problem. How about you, Stan?
Yeah.
A few thanks. I'm for one, I'm surprised you didn't have any Bollywood movies in there.
I can't cover everything, man.
I know. I want to say that Ubuntu made Linux easy to install. However, Unity drove me to Linux Mint, and anytime I say that word, my blood pressure goes up. I hate it.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And I really enjoyed… your thing on Whimsy is better. I agree. It's more fun. That was very nice to see that.
Yep, thank you, thank you.
Steve, how about you?
Well, when you played that clip from Gangnam Style, I could feel my IQ dropping.
Oh…
You're crazy.
Does that mean it's a negative numbers now, Steve?
That was terrible. Well, we know that. Um, let's see… Pardon?
Does that mean it's in negative numbers now?
Yeah, might be. Wow, um… What about VPNs? Do they still provide any security or are they completely obliterated?
Well, VPNs provide security as long as you know what threat model you have.
VPNs, basically a VPN
It encrypts traffic from where you are to where the VPN comes out.
Right.
So, if you're at a coffee shop, or some… or at a hotel, and you don't want people to be able to see what you're doing, they're great.
But that doesn't magically protect you from, um… that doesn't magically protect you from…
Uh…
from, uh, bad guys.
Oh, there's a million shuts that doesn't cover.
You know? So, they do, they do… they do protect you
In certain ways, but they're not going to protect you from everything.
So,
Mm-hmm.
Oh, God, no. That flat design you talked about, I suspect that was somewhere in there to reduce graphic load.
Oh, I don't think so at all. Devices by that point had no problem. That wasn't why they did it. It was a fad type of thing.
Yeah, they're…
I don't know. And I hate automatic updates, because now they break my phone, they break my watch, they break everything else automatically.
And that's one nice thing about Linux. It'll sit here and do exactly what it does till the end of the world.
Got it.
You know, if I want to change it, I can change it.
Yeah.
But, God, the other thing is just general comment.
Are there any people that test software?
Oh, well, no, that's gone downhill a lot. They've gotten rid of a lot in the last few years everywhere.
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Jesus, it's terrible. And then they rototill the user interface a couple times a year.
Yup.
I don't consider learning a new user interface recreation. I have other things I'd rather do for recreation.
Oh, I get it. I get it.
Yeah. Alright, Steve, thanks. I gotta move on. Tony, how about you?
You know, it's just… Yeah.
Tony C?
Okay, no problem. Uh, Gary, how about you?
Okay.
Oh, I got 4 things. Let's see. First off, 2017. I maybe I just phased out, but I I I realized I only caught like one or two things that happened in 2017. This is a slow year? Was I just not paying attention?
Uh… could be both, but, you know, some years… again, I didn't… I couldn't get to everything, so some years, I was like,
I know I'm missing a few things.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, okay. Let's see flash. When you mentioned flash. I haven't thought of flash in years. In one of those brain cells that was no longer needed, I guess. So I brought back a memory there. 2 memories that didn't come back of things you mentioned.
Uh, vibe coding. Remind me, what was vibe coding?
Well, vibe coding is still going on, it's what's very… it's very popular now. That's where you have the AI do all the coding.
You don't do it. You just tell the AI what to do, and it does it.
Hey, how are you doing?
And you either do no coding, or very, very, very little.
Okay.
Isn't that more current?
Like, I've done that, I've, uh…
Huh?
Isn't it?
I don't know Python, I've been using Codex, ChatGPT's tool to…
Mm-hmm.
create software with. Uh, it's built a tool I use, so I can go to any web page and hit a command, and it grabs the page either as Markdown or HTML,
exactly the way I want, and then saves it to a database, and it's… I have written no code,
Mm-hmm.
saved it to a database.
It is, at this point, 6,000 lines of Python.
And I've done none of it. I just told… I just…
What's that?
sounds like Firecrawl. Sounds like fire crawl.
Yeah, I've heard of that, yeah.
Yeah, but I wanted one customized exactly for me, but yeah.
That's.
I just heard about that today, actually.
I need to check that out.
Exactly for me.
Oh, I've been around for for a little while.
Yeah, I need to check it out.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that's that's big in research for AI. Yeah, it's it's a mechanism by which you can point AI at a web page, and it will tokenize it for your Llm.
Right…
and the.
Yeah, I've got that open now. Thank you for reminding me of that, Lee. I read it earlier today when I was frantically working on this.
And I was like, I need to remember that, but thank you for mentioning it. It's now on my phone, so I'll look at it.
Gary, what else were you, uh…
thinking.
Sure. Hello? My last comment question, skeu morphism. I totally am blanking out.
So, skeuomorphism is when you take something from the real world,
and apply the way it looks or behaves or acts to a digital.
thing. And the idea behind that is it helps people understand what it is and how to use it. So, if you go back to the first Macs,
So…
Right? Nobody knows how to use a computer outside with a GUI, outside of a few hundred people at Xerox Park, so what do you do? Well, we've got a desktop, and we have folders, and we've got a trash can.
Good mood.
Right? Because that way, people go, oh, I understand, I know what a desktop is, I know what a file and folder is, I know what it means to put it in the trash.
And so, when the iPhone first came out, and you opened up the Notes app,
It literally looked like…
you know, a notes… a notepad you might buy that's yellow with lines, with a…
a dark brown thing across the top, and it literally looked like pages had been torn off at the very top. There was a little thing there, and so that helped people go,
Oh, this is a Notes app! I write in this like a notepad.
Right? And then iOS 7 comes along and says, bye, now it's just a blank screen.
Right? And you just start typing. So, we got rid of the skeu Morphism. Or, Game Center has faux green felt,
on it, like, you know, a casino table.
And that's skeuomorphic, but iOS 7's like, nip, gone, and then it's just flat white.
So, skew morphism is an attempt to make learning a UI easier,
Uh, or, uh, by referencing real-world appearance, uh, processes, things like that.
Does that make sense?
Cool.
Yeah, yeah. Very good.
What?
Vincent is back. Vincent is back. Vincent on you.
Oh! Vincent, do you want to say something?
Okay, that's fine.
Steve Gomez, how about you?
He may not. He might.
It's mostly downs.
Well, I was interesting, the whole window saga kind of, they had a… era of ups and downs. I put in the list there that, uh… Yeah, yeah.
the companies that I worked for, they skipped Vista, and I think it was Windows 8. I forget the numbers there. But yeah, we went. Yeah, it was. We went from Windows 7 to Windows 10.
And I'll kind of give Microsoft a pat on the back, because I you know, Windows 7.
It had some things that were less than ideal, but when Windows 10 came out.
Except for the fact that the the PCs that the company had issued for us were kind of… Or they had to go through some updates. I thought Windows 10 was actually pretty good.
Mm-hmm.
The problems it had, or the problems that we had, quote-unquote, it, um… for six, eight months was that the our laptops.
Mm-hmm.
They had BIOS problems, there were. And that's when the the first ones with the little docking.
Mm-hmm.
what do you call it? The thunderbolt? I think it was.
Uh-huh, yeah.
Yeah.
They were really problematic. And that was a real problem, because that happened.
That rollout happened, like, the day before COVID. And so we had to take these laptops.
Oh, boy!
Oh, boy.
that were kind of… You know, iffy, and… but anyway, once they rolled out that that they wrote out a big update that updated everything. And after that, it was actually pretty nice. Um… But when they came out with the Windows 11 thing, I shared this with the, uh…
I guess the new user group several weeks back.
Uh-huh.
But when they started coming out with Windows 11 and saw the hardware impacts it was going to have, it's like, now I'm… Uh, because I use it for some amateur radio stuff here at home, and shared that with.
a bicycle trainer that had… you can get an app that ran on Windows, or Android, or… an iPad.
Uh-huh.
And so I went with. An Android app from my bicycle trainer, and then all the amateur radio absence. That's all about hobbying and learning stuff anyway, at least for me.
Mm-hmm.
I took the laptop that once I got the… Android stuff worked out.
Mm-hmm.
I took that laptop that did have windows on it, which I got from EPC for like 200 bucks.
Mm-hmm.
Cool!
And it's now running Ubuntu something or other. Yeah, yeah. So… I.
Awesome! I have to… we have to move on, but thank you, that was good.
Sure. Okay. Next.
Thank you for that. And by the way, one of the other nice things is, of course, as Microsoft is forcing people to upgrade to Windows 11, a lot of people don't want to do it, so they're moving to Linux or Mac. That's great!
Thank you, Microsoft!
Um… Corey, how about you, Corey?
Yeah. Yeah.
What's that?
Thank you for yourself on the phone.
Corey, how about you? Can you talk?
Yeah, how about you? What did you find most interesting?
I…
You mean me? I… how many things I never heard of that were so important.
That's fine! Yeah.
That's true for everything, for everybody, that's great, that's no problem.
Thank you.
Cool. Thank you.
Uh, Lee, how about you?
Ah, let's this is too long to take up the time, but… The the biggest thing that I've taken away is everything.
that I hate about wind blows and to some degree Mac, even though it's not quite the same world. And I think the stars every day that I don't have to use either one.
Yeah, no problem. Yeah.
I use all 3 daily, so…
You know, I get to dip my toe. But I only use Windows for gaming, basically, so I figure, okay.
Oh, you're you're not a steampunk yet?
No, actually, I use, uh… I take that back, actually. I use GeForce Now, which is streaming on my Mac.
So, if you were watching over my shoulder, you would have no idea the game was not locally loaded.
Okay.
So I'm playing, like, AAA action shooters, and it's all streaming,
from Chicago, and it works perfectly.
So, I love it. It's called GeForce Now. NVIDIA. It's a service offered by NVIDIA, so I'm connecting to a computer in Chicago with the latest and greatest Nvidia chips.
And I absolutely love it, because it's allowed me…
to get rid of any PCs I had, and just use that.
But that's it. I don't actually… I hardly ever use Windows now that I think about it, unless I'm doing screenshots or trying to write something down for students on… about how to do something on Windows.
Oh.
But I use Linux every day on the server, and I use my Mac every day with Linux tools, and so on, so…
Yeah, I try to keep my toe in all of them.
But I certainly like some better than others.
Did I miss anybody?
Is there anybody I missed that wants to say something?
Nope. Okay, cool. Does anybody have any questions?
For me.
Okay.
Yeah, I got one. Well, you were showing the stuff about… The voice control of the Mac, whatever.
Yeah, yeah. Mac and iOS, yeah.
So I've got a cousin who's buying, and I was working on putting together a system for him, and he told me that there's this Jaws software.
Yes.
That's completely voice controlled.
Claws is Windows-based, it's the most widely used. Um, I would actually look at another called NVDA. I believe that is either cheaper or free.
Um, that's also for Windows, so if he's a Windows person,
I would tell him to… Jaws is certainly something to keep in mind, it's widely used, but they also kind of charge you for it.
Oh, yeah!
Yeah. Yeah, for me to get it. It was like 3 or 4 grand. But I think he he can get it pretty cheap because he's buying shirt somehow.
Yeah. Yeah, I would look at that, or NVDA is the other one that's big on Windows.
Um, yeah, I mean, sure, if he wants to stay on Windows, that's great. I mean, I…
Or, you know, look at an Apple thing and see how that works, because they have a lot of features for blind… a ton of features for blind people as well.
But if he's, like, a Windows person, yeah, I would definitely look at JAWS.
I if.
Scott, if anybody needs help with Apple and blind, tell them to look up Ed Holland.
Oh, yeah.
Yup.
So he's a former member that moved back home to Michigan, and he went, you know, he was. He's totally blind now.
Yeah.
He shows up for meetings once in a while, Lee.
He gives me, he leads meetings.
He's still on the base mailing list, so…
Yeah, no, it's great.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Brilliant, brilliant guy. Yeah, but unfortunate about his, uh, his blindness, absolutely.
No, that's good. Check out Jaws.
There have been through us.
Or check out, you know, talk to Apple, whatever. Uh, but like I said, I just can't recommend Linux for people with accessibility needs. It's just not there.
I hate saying it, but…
accessibility system.
It's true. Does anybody else have a question? Anybody else?
Yeah?
I'm looking through your comments.
What's that?
Do you like Apple? Do you like Apple?
I like some things they do, I think other things they do are not good at all.
I mean, I criticized them several times tonight.
You know?
Okay. Yeah. You know, I just wish my… allergies would let go.
I can't help you there, man.
Well,
No, I know. Nobody can help. I wonder if getting drunk would help.
Well, I'm allergic to Microsoft also, so I understand.
Gary.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Carrie couldn't do a vote. Close her up.
Absolutely.
Yeah. Alrighty. First off, I'd like to give a big thank you to Scott. It's been a wonderful travel through time. We all really appreciate it. Great stuff. Amen to that. And pass our thanks on to Jans as well, since his name was there on the end.
Yup.
I presume is working with you to put some of this together. So thank you both.
Actually, he didn't have a thing, it's just I copied the template and his name's on there, that's all.
That's why. But I do… I would like you guys to consider, if you're interested,
Oh, okay.
Having us come back and show you what you can do now with Claude Code and Codex, which is…
OpenAI's code tool, and so on, because it will blow your guys' minds.
Yeah.
topic for next month. We will do that. That's a great idea.
And he knows it really well.
Oh, absolutely.
Thanks for the offer, Scott. We'll take you up on it.
Okay.
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
Yeah, you guys will be amazed.
Oh. Let's see. Let me throw in a quick announcement. Our next meeting is next Thursday, a week from tomorrow. I should say next Thursday, a week from tomorrow, Thursday. And that is the monthly St. Louis lug meeting, St. Louis Linux user group meeting.
The topic is going to be playing out the roles that happen in Dns. And we have some some.
explanation of that. It's better than I can do. Oh, I don't know. We demonstrated last month, basically the DNS process is pretty convoluted.
and we're trying. We're going to try to simplify it for people, talk about the different roles.
how it works and hopefully clear some of the thought.
Continuation.
So this will be a. kind of a yeah continuation and an elaboration getting down and dirty of how it all works in Dns, and what things you don't really realize are happening in the background. So.
Uh, so yeah, come next Thursday. And that's what we'll be doing. Lastly, I know I said earlier that there'll be open Q&A at the end. So before we shut down, I should ask, is anybody.
It overdran a little long here. But does anybody want to present some questions that aren't specific to our topic tonight?
I do have one thing. Uh, somebody in the con… I'm just reading the chat, somebody in there recommended Skyrim soundtrack,
Somebody in my…
It is awesome. Uh…
it's on YouTube.
I highly recommend it, checking… even if you don't want to ever play the game, ever, it's a very cool soundtrack.
Um…
But but if you go to Youtube, you got to watch it.
Or just put it on, or rip it. I mean, I would just rip it from YouTube using a…
You know? But it's very… or streaming, I'm sure… it's on streaming services. But anyway, do give it a listen. It's quite good.
It's, uh, very varied. I think you guys… many of you would find it pretty cool.
Good, good. I think Scott's going over the rest of chat there. So while Scott's reviewing the chat. Anybody have any other questions that they wanted to bring up tonight? But again, remembering we're kind of run along.
Yeah.
Anybody want?
Mm-hmm.
I do have a question, Scott. I have been trying for days. I use ChatGPT quite a bit. I haven't tried to write code with it, but, you know… It's a fantastic internet search engine.
Mm-hmm.
At any rate, um, I've been trying to get logged into Croc.
Okay.
Hmm.
For weeks. And I can't get a login to it, or anything, and… I use Starlink.
And Chat says that they are… they must be getting buried under bots or something, I don't know.
To make a couple of comments about that, but… so I've tried uh I tried hospital parking lot this afternoon on my phone.
Mm-hmm.
Still doesn't work. The login just stops. Now, I don't know if I've been banned personally, probably not.
I can't imagine that would be the case.
No, I… you know, my life is way too dull for that.
Um, have you… are you… do you have ad blockers installed that might be interfering with it? Have you tried turning that off?
But…
Yeah?
Um… Excuse me?
or a different browser.
Or have something at your router level that's blocking stuff?
Jeff.
Okay.
No, the router is… is wide open. Um… that's how I get speed out of it.
Okay.
Um, but no, I don't know. It's…
I mean, if you're using Brave, turn off shields and see if that helps, for instance.
Yeah, that's an idea. Will I start Chrome, which is completely full of crap.
Yeah?
Uh, you know, it's not as bad as Edge, but… Well, they're about to send you out.
But I mean, if you're using Chrome, and you don't have any ad blockers,
I would think it would work.
But, um, I have no idea, that's interesting. I don't use Grok, because I don't do anything with Elon Musk.
Um, have you checked out Claude?
Oh, that's awesome. Anthropic, that's like the… that's the one the Defense Department, uh, banned.
No? Where's that?
For ridiculous reasons. Check out…
Claude, it's excellent.
I didn't you understand that? I don't even know what it really is.
What?
What's hard run?
I don't really even know what Anthropic is. I don't… Yeah.
It's a company like OpenAI. Claude is like ChatGPT. The difference is, Claude can be a general tool,
Claude, at this time, has more integrations on computers to do things and work on your computer. The other difference, the big difference is,
that, um, Claude has been focused for a long, long time.
on coding. And so, they are the most popular tool coders use.
Now, ChatGPT is trying… I mean, OpenAI's trying to catch up,
Ah, so…
And they're getting better, but I still think, uh…
I know for a fact, Claude has
Far more coders using it, and Jan's recently switched from OpenAI to Claude for coding, and is, like, amazed. He built…
The coolest recipe app for the web over a weekend, just using Claude.
C-L-A-U-D-E.
How do you spell Claude?
C-L-A-U-D-E, yup. I would say…
Claude? Oh, okay.
It seems like OpenAI used to have Claude on their list.
No, OpenAI is competitive with Anthropic.
Right? I know, that's what I'm saying.
Yeah. No, now, some of the people… the people that founded AI worked at Open… sorry, the people that founded Anthropic
Worked at OpenAI, and left, because the other big thing about Anthropic is they are very, very concerned with safety.
And they felt like OpenAI wasn't enough.
6.
And that's why they got in trouble with the Department of Defense, because Hezgeth and Trump were like,
Just let us use the AI, trust us, and they were like, no, we don't believe AI should be used.
to, um…
in autonomous killing engines and machines,
Excuse me.
Or… there was something else. And…
Hesgeth said, Trust us, and they said, we don't.
And then OpenAI came in and said, oh, we'll do it!
And so, they got the $200 million thing, and in an effort to punish them,
Hesgeth and Trump are declaring them
Uh, what is it? A supply chain risk, so no one at the Department of Defense
can use it.
Because they didn't agree with the idea of letting AI determine who can get killed autonomously without human intervention, or putting AI in things like guns and robots to determine who to kill.
So, as a result,
a million and a half people, last I read,
quit their chat GPT account and switched to Claude. Now, I'm still using both.
But that's what's been going on.
But Claude's excellent.
Yeah, Claude's excellent. They're both good.
Well, I'm gonna… I'm gonna try it, see if I like it.
Yes.
Then Google has Gemini. I would say Google Gemini is very good at a few things, but overall, I still think Claude and ChatGPT are better, and I think Copilot by Microsoft is at the bottom. It's garbage.
Isn't that the thing that takes all the screenshots of whatever you're doing?
Uh, that's called recall, and that's a feature of Windows 11. They then use Copilot to analyze them and so on.
The frickin' hilarious thing you guys will love
So…
is it came out 2 or 3 weeks ago, that internally,
Microsoft urges its developers to use Claude for coding, not Copilot.
So if they're selling Copilot to all these corporations, but internally, they're using Claude.
So what's that tell you?
Yeah.
Stupid Microsoft.
Well, maybe the File Explorer could stop eating up so much memory.
I…
Maybe they… maybe they could rewrite Windows and Claude, and it better. Who knows?
Oh, God.
Stop. I'm coding with…
But, um, I would definitely recommend checking out Claude at Anthropic.
privacy.
A-N-T-H-R-O-P-I-C, that's the company.
And Google Gemini, I would play with it, also.
Um, those are the big 3.
There's a few others, Mistral.
But the big… the big two, the big three are…
Our, uh, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropics Claude, and Gemini's… Google's Gemini.
Okay, well, I'm gonna look into them. I'm… I've been using the last month or so, and I really like it.
Yeah, I mean, grocs around, but remember, Grok is controlled by Elon Musk, and he routinely puts his thumb on the scale,
And control… and has people change what it says, because he doesn't like it.
So, I don't think it's reliable in the slightest. Plus, remember it called itself Mecca Hitler?
It's just money.
And said it loved being a Nazi and stuff. I mean…
And so… What?
Yeah, look up… look up Grok Mecca Hitler, M-E-C-H-A Hitler. It said it was Mecca Hitler.
Look it up!
I personally, I wouldn't touch Grok with a 10-foot pole.
Plus, it's very right-winger focused.
Okay.
So, it's… he's… they've trained it on all this right-winger stuff,
8.
Oh, and it also… it also references
you're you're you're breaking up, Scott.
tweets by Elon Musk as one of the central sources of fact.
So…
Oh, he owns it, so…
What?
Oh, yeah. Check it out.
Gary. Bookend!
Yep.
Yes. Okay, I think we have gone just about as long as we can go. So thank you again, Scott. You've been a great presentation, and I really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Thank you all for coming. Hopefully we'll see you all on Thursday. This is the bookend. This is Wednesday, March the 11th, 2026. This has been the monthly general meeting of SLU, the St. Louis Linux Unix Users Group. Our, uh, we did not have a basic tutorial tonight.
Our main feature was Scott Graneman doing a presentation on the history of computing, 2010 to 2019. Thank you all again, and good night.
All right