Gary was such a visionary, he really sees through to the ultimate use of things... It's such a shame he's not alive anymore, I really don't feel like he got the recognition he deserved... but to us nerds he is a hero.. maybe that's all that matters.
One of his family members has spoken out and said that he was an alcoholic and I also believe Stewart Cheifet brought it up in on Triangulation (an interview did with Stewart a few years ago) and that he used to go out and drink and party heavy in bars, he never had a good time because he was always getting into fights and had constant hospitalizations as a result. It's really sad when people get addicted to things that quickly go to a downward spiral, trust me I've lost a lot of people in my life who I watched deteriate with their alcohol use, I've done 2 videos on my channel about it. Gary was definitely a legend, he certainly never got the credit he deserved and yeah that would freak me out to see some shrine of Steve Jobs too lol.
Yes. Exactly. We would have traded Bill Gates for Gary, but Gary is a former hippy and was more ethical than Gates, so it would have likely been a good trade.
Things conspired against Gary. First he was a good man in a world of cutthroat business men. Then he blew off a meeting to have his OS be the dominant one in the market because he wanted to celebrate him and his wife's anniversary. Then that same wife left him in 1983. He turned to drink which he should not have done but its called a disease for a reason. He died because of it whether through a fight or a fall or both. She died in 2005 from brain cancer 11 years after Gary. In my opinion Gary was too good a man for his work with a terrible disease.
The '90s was a great decade for standardization. I have an old IBM machine running Windows 98. That computer has a 3Com network card with an RJ45 connector that can plug directly into a network switch that is 22 years newer than itself and negotiate a 100Mbps link speed and IP address. Even software standards. I can transfer files to it over the network from PCs, Macs and Linux boxes which all support SMB.
@@4zazel777 My company uses our credit card processing machine on WiFi. Makes me want to bust out Kali Linux and Flipper Zero for some mayhem. They didn't want to listen when I said wireless payments is a bad idea.
mind blowing. I started in the computer field in 1985. I saw all this being put together and me as a tech ,was supporting it all. I remember all this. To this day i am an IT guy. Love that younger people watching this. The history of computing is important for IT people.
I remember my early LAN parties in the early 90s... Coaxial cables, terminators and then setting everyone's network address (via DIP switches) so there were no conflicts... just for some DOOM action. Haha.
Watching these things we smugly smile at how primitive it all is. But I remember first networking my two PCs at home (basically, my old one and a new build) in 2002, 18 years after this, and it felt super high tech at the time just to do that. Now I've got gigabit ethernet, Wifi, multiple PCs, two tablets, a network printer and IP addresses are everyday things. We've come so very very far.
Yeah I remember hooking up two Windows 95 computers at home with coax and BNC connectors, so that we could play Command & Conquer, and Duke Nukem 3D. That was my first networking experience, and it worked great!
I always find it very interesting to look back at stuff like this and see the beginnings of common every day things (LANs in this case) and see what it's earliest stages were like
How old are you.....? :) I ask because if you're under 20, I find it cool that someone your age, and someone my age, (I'm 25), are into things like this..... :D Basically, no matter how *advanced* things get, things like this always seem to be *relevant*..... :)
Nacalal Yeah, I know what you mean..... :D When I first saw the Computer Chronicles, I was a bit cocky, looking down on those old Machines..... But the more I matured, the more I gained a newfound respect for the older Machines..... :D I'm watching one on Computer Graphics right now!..... :) It's funny how we mature, even past 18....... :)
Dr. Michael Pliner at 5:45 into the video, wow, visionary! He basically foresaw and described the broadband we have today in 2023. Amazing 👍 I love these videos as this was the era when I got into computing. I think I was 14 when this program was made. It's amazing looking back on these with the machines and technology we have today to realise how lucky we are.
In the early 1980s, I just graduated from high school, going to college, and was a Radio Shack sales person. I was trying to sell TRS-80 Model II and 16s to a business. Part of this proposal was using Arcnet to link the computers together, to be able to share files and printers. Never got sold, however I had some hands-on experience in both cabling and TRS-80 networking. Later, I worked at a factory floor supporting broadband networking -- that was a pain since it was analog, and in order to use the channels, you have to convert the digital to analog for physical transport, then convert back for the computers to digest the transmission (this is where “gateways” come in). Plus you have to have amplifiers at every fixed distance. Now we have high-speed Ethernet baseband, but the network protocols support video, audio, and data with more robust error-correcting capabilities. A far cry from what was being developed in the 1980s and 1990s.
It's pretty amazing that this 1984 date is fully SEVEN YEARS after Datapoint's ARC System was introduced, which offered 2.5 megabit distributed interconnected-stars packet networking, transparent to existing applications, and which could easily and transparently access files on one or more connected file servers just as easily as they could access them as local files on their system's own local hard drives. Datapoint had more than 10,000 local area networks installed worldwide by 1981 (when the first IBM PC came out) so it's hard to imagine that by 1984, a supposedly serious program like Computer Chronicles would be ignorant of (and not even mention) Datapoint's ARCnet, or The ARC System LAN. Take a look on RU-vid at "Datapoint ARC System" (and "Datapoint Integrated Electronic Office") and note the copyright dates on THOSE videos...!!
Glad to be able to help!! Feel free to ask me for more information....!! I was the programmer who proposed, designed, and wrote the system software for Datapoint's ARC System. (Interestingly, the first customer to get the pre-announcement version in September 1977... Chase Manhattan... we were calling the product "Internet".... but my boss told me in November that "...Gordon, we have to change the name of the product. If we call it 'Internet', it will NEVER be successful.... because people's perceptions are that networks are complicated and hard to manage." But it's interesting to wonder what today's "Internet" would have been called, if Datapoint had already taken (and kept) the "Internet" name...!) :-)
EXACTLY!!!! You just saved me from watching this video when they don't even realize that Datapoint was the "Microsoft/IBM" of their time, even with the creation of the 80xxx chips from Intel That being said, I still think of the 8600, Mids drives and a load of coaxial cables
I also started computer career in the early 80s and was there for all of this. They were some great times and we had to be jacks of all trades, hardware, software, network installation and configuration. Things were easier then as there was no Internet... for a while.
I am glad that the world soon settled on Ethernet TCP/IP and the OSI model as the network standard. Apple talk trying to connect to Tolkien Ring, then Ethernet and another standard is a bit of a nightmare, you would need a router / gateway just to merge the standards together....it was quite a mess, and I'm old enough to remember it.
If you stood still in your brown clothes, you just disappeared against the background. Some expert camouflagers employed countershading techniques, with a dark brown jacket and lighter tan trousers. It was a fabulous time for brown, a golden-brown age.
Given that two years prior to this show, both the US DoD and ARPANET standardised to TCP/IP, it was inevitable that it would win at those layers . I didn’t watch the whole thing but these guys seem to be talking about lower layer protocols.
Company where I worked used a lot of Ungerman-Bass network equipment back in the 1980s-1990s, with XNS protocol, on a broadband network channel 6-T, worked very well, amazed still remember all this after 30 years. Eventually all got replaced with fiber and Cisco routers, which is baseband.
I also remember how significant the jump from 56k dial up to 1.5 megabit DSL was....web pages wouldn't take all day and I could actually do online gaming pretty well with a PS2 Slim. Now a days, 1.5 megabits is too slow to do much of anything! lol.
10 years from this my wife got me a 28.8 USRobotics modem for that Christmas. 10 years after that I got a wifi router and cable internet. 10 years after that I was kinda burnt out :)
@@c7261 There was actually more gender balance in computer science prior to the mid-80s, in the heyday of mainframes & minis, with a lot of regression since the PC revolution; various theories as to why.
Fast forward to 2019, broadband has been the defacto transport protocol, lans have become essentially peripherals to the wan or gan(global area network) which has become what we are use to now. Ethernet is the base of network connectivity for the vast majority of home and soho applications, even for most businesses, with big business having a large portion of their networks supported by fiber, but even those companies still have miles and miles of ethernet cabling in their infrastructure.
“GAN” isn’t a thing. LANs are hardly just peripherals to the Internet. You posted a comment that tried to be authoritative about the current state of networks but just stated the obvious and you still got that wrong.
Both are still in widespread use today (e.g. nearly all Ethernet standards, up to 10Gb/s are baseband), though of course nowadays "broadband" often is used imprecisely for any fast connection, regardless of signal modulation details.
20:20 Broadband as an alternative to ethernet! It's a shame this programme wasn't allotted more time; seems like even when narrowing it down to one topic they're having to rush.
HeadlightMorningGlow They did actually make a broadband version of ethernet, the 10BROAD36 system, It offered some advantages, like a much larger range(3,6 km) compared to the 10BASE5(500m) and the ability to use a wide frequency range (which is why it is "broadband"), but the complexity and expense compared to the baseband systems meant it never became popular for LANs and fiber optic versions became more common for backbones and building interconnections and campus area networking.Today the term broadband generally refers to a high speed WAN connection irrespective of whether it actually uses a broadband signaling scheme or not.
Ts6451 Thanks for the info! Despite my interest in these programmes, it - and the comments below - tend to expose just how little I actually know! lol Ever thought of doing a video on it yourself?
The Sytek devices shown here were very early cable modems, of course orders of magnitude slower than modern ones. Instead of a CMTS at the headend, they needed only a simple band-shifting repeater to translate upstream frequencies to downstream. Campuses with an existing CATV system could add this without having to run new cable, though often amplifiers would need to be replaced with bidirectional ones. My university still had some remnants of this old infrastructure, long retired in favor of Ethernet and inter-building fiber links running (at that time) FDDI.
I lööööve these videos. Fun drinking game: loser (of coin toss or whatever) has to drink one shot for every subsequent acquisition of the company represented by a guest on this show (and then the company that acquired the company) by another company and so on (if more than one guest on show, other plays choose the guest). So, I win coin toss and I make other player drink for Charlie Bass: UB -> Tandem-> Newbridge -> Alcatel -> Nokia (4 shots), but if person drinking can name all of the acquisitions in the change, person who tried to make them drink has to drink. Have Wikipedia to verify everything. Jump quickly from show to show for new guests. All shows must be from the 1980s or early 1990s (at least before crash).
Hard to believe that “baseband versus broadband” was a real controversy. In the end, the sharing of the wire was achieved by making everything digital, so the multiplexing was done at the frame/packet level, within a common transport protocol. So baseband won.
When computers and their I/O terminals were integrated, thus was the tele-communicating micro-computer, connecting online with other computers (again in turn, over "dumb" I/O terminals), over the existing telephone line systems. Later, after the opening of the publicly accessable Internet, computer networking broke into its own _broadband_ system from the older, more slow and narrow 'phone lines. Broadband, for one standard example, made audio & video data _streaming_ possible.
Ah, the good 'ol days, when we needed to get down into the weeds..... broadband vs. baseband, star vs. ring, ethernet vs. token-ring. That was when just getting one up and running was a great accomplishment ! I miss my Novell Netware 86.... LOL.
The twisted-pair variants (10baseT and successors) were still a few years out, though, and iirc even 10base2 was not yet available in '84, only "Thicknet" 10base5 with its AUI-attached external transceivers, vampire taps, and N-connector splices.
basically started with terminals and computers linked via rs232 with a RF modulator that connected in turn with the lan or the mainframe computers via coax cable, and the download / upload software was embedded in a hardware RF modulator device. Ethernet was another sollution, as i recall during the 90's network isa boards had coax and ethernet ports that could both be used to connect to other pcs or servers. In time due to Ethernet reliability and speed it seems, ethernet won the upload / download race, and all operating systems embedded communication software into them. I think is a nice piece of networking history that we saw, (still watching feb 2021)
few years back i ran a 12 man lan in garage. Was the first dedicated lan party i had been to since 1999. I ran it around christmas so basically all my friends had time off. It was so successful I ran another one the following Christmas. Everyone made sure they were available again and it was a total blast again.
This is going to sound like an extremely dumb question. I'm looking for something in the way of a TV show about computers, and I remember a little animated computer character at one point. I don't remember if it had arms or legs, but I do know it had eyes and a mouth, at least. The computer talk went over my head, because I was just a kid. A little background info on this: once upon a time, I had a clip of this show on an old VHS tape from 1984, but it has been taped over. I don't know the program, and my sister thinks it was "Computer Chronicles." We only had a little blurb of this, so I don't have the slightest idea if it really was "Computer Chronicles" or something else. Heck, I don't even know what channel it was taped from!
Some really interesting perspectives here. So much of this didn't come trur and some did. "Ethernet has been SOMEWHAT successful".... And baseband..... Well it is 99% gone. (I'm sure that somewhere out there is a VERY OLD left over untouched little tiny network on baseband (I have seen some amazing relics hang on WAY beyond there time!).
Our first biz network was a serial port daisy-chain; we updated a database on everyone's PC once a day, because it too too long at 9600 baud to do it more frequently.
Just a Humble question. The company Microfocus referenced as the sponsor of the tv show is the same UK based company which aquired Borland in recent years?
As far as the question mentions distributing an "operating system" over the network you could draw conceptual parallels with distributed hypervisors and in that sense "cloud", but for the most part he means accessing data and loading programs over the local network rather than downloading them over the local network: it's kind of what was archived with SMB and NFS - both of them invented in the very same year as when this interview was made. Run net use \\server z: under MS-DOS with IBM PC Network Program from 1985 installed and you map a network drive under MS-DOS and are able to use files and programs on a LAN server as if they were on your local machine without any need to download them to a local drive first. The same with SunOS and the mount command.
Wow, we take this so much for granted these days, 5G getting 700mbps and 6G getting possibly 1tbps in as early as 2030 is going to make even todays networking primitive
I think that waiting for computer was a calm lifestyle, it was comforting in someway. Now its all like woosh whats next? cmon cmon cmon, lol, hasty lifestyle
As popular as peer-peer was for a time, people eventually realized that servers were just much more convenient, and -- once hubs came down to a reasonable cost -- the star topology was a whole lot faster...
RonJohn63 Peer To Peer refers to how the resources are distributed in the network, not the physical topology itself. In a peer to peer network any machine can share resources with any other machine, that is contrasted with a client-server network where the server(s) offer the resources and services. The peer to peer model is still used for small networks, like what you might have at home or a small office, but for larger networks the server-client or a hybrid of the two is probably more suitable. I suspect you meant bus topology networks, like the coax Ethernet popular back in the late 1980s and early 90s. By the way, a network with a hub is still logically a bus network, it just moves the bus to a central point. It is more reliable, but not really faster, since it still have the collision problems that bus nets have. You are probably thinking of network switches, as they reduce the collision problem by switching the frames to the port where the destination computer is, rather than repeating them to all other ports like a hub would do, and so allow for better utilization of the network, and as the technology behind them has become cheap these days, they have pretty much out-competed hubs.
Ts6451 "Peer To Peer refers to ..." Having lived through it, I know exactly what I was talking about. Yes, peer-to-peer is how resources are distributed (heck, TCP/IP is P-P), but the *small* *office* *concept* of P-P (which is "where do I store my data?") did not last long because it was too cumbersome to manage, and slowed down the computer where the data was located. It's why file/print servers made a comeback, and printers eventually got their own built-in computers. Printers were the last common peripheral to be shared in a P-P manner, even when data went back to the server. "You are probably thinking of network switches," They were the finale, but before the price of switches came down, or if companies did not want to replace paid-for hubs with expensive switches, hubbed networks could be partitioned -- thus reducing congestion -- using transparent bridges. (Thick- and Thin-net networks could also be bridged, but partitioning was physically so much more difficult.)
Hubs? No one used hubs in anything except for extremely small networks - like less than 10 computers. Their price made no difference in purchasing decisions since they didn’t scale at all.
Their concepts of wire, terminal, session are pretty hard to part remember part learn about now. And they really were as clumsy and hard to adapt to when Novell NetWare was around. It's almost as unnatural from modern point of view as Linux switchable consoles in the age of GUI domination. In comparison shared directories and shared desktops are natural.
Shown below that floor tile is one of the infamous "vampire taps" of early Ethernet - adding a new node back then required actually drilling a hole in the thick yellow cable (but only at one of the marked positions, to prevent standing-wave interference), clamping on that large transceiver unit, then snaking a 15-pin AUI drop cable to the new station. The trunk cable could span a long distance, though = the 5 in 10base5 stood for 500 meter length.
Gary cut through the bullshit of these guys. Dog and pony show and Gary was like yeah not impressed...I just want to get a file from the network and shouldn't know it's a network. I think if Gary was alive today he would be impressed and also incensed at technology today. He would have seen how insidious the smart phone is. How it's an addiction and people are way to tied to them.
And when Woz did all the work to reduce the number of chips on Breakout, Jobs brought it into Atari, lied about how much money they payed for it and pocketed the rest.
therealhardrock Well, not exactly, the term broadband in this connection does not refer to a fast Internet connection, but rather a way data is modulated onto a cable in a local area network.A broadband LAN device modulates the data onto carrier waves similarly to how channels would be sent on cable TV systems, it is broadband because it can use a relatively wide range of frequencies unlike baseband networks which uses no carrier frequency, but places the line coded data directly onto the cable.
+therealhardrock They had broadband but the standards where not set. At the time you could send and receive data on cable TV networks but the cost to upgrade head ends was expensive. It also was limited to the hardware\software used at the time. As you had cable, DSL, ADSL. etc.. and the hardware was way out of the average users budget. Much less the cost of the service provider. One reason modems were used and multi phone lines for years. As all you needed was some software, modem and some phone numbers to call. All of which was published in the backs of computer magazines for BBS, Newsgroups, User Groups etc.. Using RIP. Man those were some fun times... I even used the old RS232 cable to "Network" two PC's to each other in separate rooms. You had to build your own! I had Procomm Plus for years using Web Zeppelin. As the standards for modems was set by the phone company years before. You just had to have the correct parity setup using dip switches on the modem. Mind you all this before any web browser was ever even thought of. They had no clue what was coming until Netscape come along.
@@Moon___man nah brother what would really jog their noggings would be the US Presidential Election Fraud of 2020, where candidate Joe Budden ungracefully stole the throne from Mr. Trump
