Oxide and the Chamber of Mysteries [video]

I felt a loss when the On the Metal podcast series wrapped up. I figured these Oxide guys now have too much real work to do, they won’t be able to keep up this podcast, even if it is the best tech podcast I’ve listened to. Bryan is an unbeatable host. If you love retro-computing or just the history of our industry in general, you will walk away learning something from anything he talks about. His quick wit and deep tech knowledge keeps you totally engaged, and gives you the feeling of living vicariously in the silicon valley that was about getting your hands dirty and building great tech products.

But now I can look forward to their leap over to “social audio”. First Twitter spaces (where I would sometimes chime in live) and now the Discord-hosted On the Metal.

Most podcasts are sports commentary. These guys are full-contact in the game. I love it. Keep it up Bryan!

Disclaimer: I posted this link -- and hosted the discussion!

To the best of my knowledge (and I would love to be proven wrong!), this is the first time an engineering team has gone on the record with their warts-and-all experience with electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and safety compliance testing. If you have never heard of compliance before or have no idea what any of this could possibly be about, you're guaranteed to learn something about the world of devices around you. And if you have dealt with EMC: you know how wild and unpredictable the process can be -- and I think you'll enjoy hearing some of our own harrowing details. Either way, this is a technically meaty discussion that I think the HN demographic will enjoy!

This reminds me of a story told by Mike Valentine (of Valentine radar-detector fame) about having to drive home from work near Cincinnati, across the path of the Voice of America WLW AM transmitter. The 500,000watt VOA signal would make the Bosch D-Jetronic fuel system in his Porsche reset itself; the car would stall and you had to be going a certain speed before you intersected the beam so you could coast through and then restart the engine once clear.

The D-Jetronic isn't really microprocessor-controlled though; a similar story came from the Missouri Highway Patrol. In the 1980s, they had pursuit 5.0L Ford Mustangs, with Ford EEC-IV MCU fuel injection. They also had police radios that had been tweaked to increase the transmitting power past what the FCC would consider normal, and past what Ford had rated the EEC unit for EMF. It was discovered that, at highway speeds with the cruise-control on, holding the transmit button on the handset down for more than ten seconds caused:

1.) The engine controller to think the gas pedal had been floored. 2.) The transmission to need to downshift.

With the police-duty 5.0, this was...startling.

I'm still catching up on the Oxide and Friends "birdsite"/"discord" recordings/podcast, and look forward to listening to this one in a few weeks (I save them for my walks in the big blue room).

In a time when tech is imploding under the weight of its own hype, the amazing retrospectives, history lessons and low-level hardware/software lore contained in that podcast has been the highlight of my days every. Single. Time.

It reminds me that there is a side to this industry that is still actually solving real problems (from testbench design to firmware/software supply chain and attestation) instead of just throwing GPUs at a problem and virtualizing an infinite number of monkeys to generate Shakespeare sonnets.

In these days of layoffs done to compensate for hyped investments and lack of strategic focus, it is a shining beacon of... actual engineering.

A minor sidenote, for those who probably care more about software: The podcast drew me back to Rust because, all of a sudden, here were these people who actually _reasoned out why_ it made sense, and had decades of expertise that allowed them to spell that out with actual examples.

But I really stuck around because of the low-level hardware discussions, and the history background (I just listened to the Optane episode yesterday, and although I knew some folk at Micron and understood why it had failed in general, the discussion was amazing).

(I'm a telco/hardware guy drifting inside the bowels of a cloud/software behemoth and dearly wish I could burn to the ground all the paperwork, ceremony and "strategic investments" that surrounds me and just go and do interesting stuff, so forgive me if this seems a bit much. If I can stay up late enough--I'm in Europe--I might try to join on Discord some day.)

Those are always fun to watch.

I've been wondering, what's the plan at Oxide with the recent announcement from Intel about moving away from the Intel Tofino business? Are you still going to be using tofino 2 chips for the network?

Is there supposed to be non-static video with this? I just see two still images over the course of the ~hour and forty minutes.

The conversation goes along as if there's periodic pictures to be seen of what's being discussed.

Yeah, just feeling grumpy about this not being a podcast like it used to be :)

Hi Bryan, as a young developer I have found your content and work so inspiring. As others have alluded to, On the Metal and your talks are fantastic! Keep up the good work at Oxide!

The best tech podcast that I had chance to listen. Especially I like history episodes, like the fall of DEC. The only podcast that I often relisten.

Oxide Computer is the new Soul of a New Machine.

have you considered doing more devrel? inventing node.js, youtube shorts, saving Sun from itself, Oxide laptop stickers and a history of giving metal oral like this are really inspiring to people serious about nft and are a good way to groom new engineers