Archiving "The Famous Computer Cafe" | Hacker News Reader

Archiving "The Famous Computer Cafe"

blog.archive.org

164 pointssavetz30 comments

Tip: The Internet Archive's advanced search can return results as an RSS feed, ready to import into your podcast app! Here's a feed of The Famous Computer Cafe episodes. You will need to rename it after adding it.

1. https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=creator%3A%22The+Fa...

I started to listen to Bill Gates' interview [1], just to hear what he had in mind back then. Sounded almost topical in today's world. AI was mentioned, and predicting users' input in the distant future.

Side note, archive.org has two players. The first one doesn't have a timestamp where you currently are. The second player, the Winamp clone does have it, but I don't think one can link to specific parts.

[1] The Bill Gates interview starts at 10:10 https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1984-11...

> The second player, the Winamp clone

Wait, what the Winamp clone?

Clicks link

This is beautiful, thank you for this!

A standalone project, incidentally: https://webamp.org/

That's great. Can't see a keep screen on option?

I wanted to say that sounds like too much to make available to web apps at all, but nope, apparently it’s indeed a thing that a website can tell your computer to do[1]. I don’t see an option to do that here either, though. I guess your choices are to submit a pull request[2] adding that capability or to use a manual systemwide toggle (I use Keep Awake![3] on GNOME Shell and Coffee[4] on Android).

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake...

[2] https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp

[3] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1097/keep-awake/

[4] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.muellerma.coffee/

Just a few lines of script and you are done. I think it was a reaction to sites playing a hidden video, which was just a waste. Even works on my Ubuntu laptop.

Wow!

And you can move and resize the widgets! https://i.imgur.com/PmXmpVO.png

I wonder if we can get an MPV skin of Winamp

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277014

This is a great interview with Gates. The interviewer is great too, great commentary and questions.

"A machine on every desktop ad a machine in every home - and one of the things that will enable us to do that is graphics"

(and he mentions how great the Macintosh was doing in the graphics area)

---

Crazy the things that have been going on with him lately - and what was said by Thiel about him on JRE, yet HN seems to want to not discuss any of it...

(This 1984 interview with gates deserves its own HN post. The commercials on it are great as well. And the fact that the interviewer brought up Aritficial Intelligence is great - and Gates' response was very cogent of the state of AI and the path forward. Where he says "people worry about AI taking over" - and says when "we can make software fully soft, we can get machines to help us"

Great piece of history, that.

If you click the little icon in the upper-left corner of the UI, you can change 'skins' as well. Very cool

> Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others

That's some interesting people listed.

Here's the actual archive as a note to myself to listen to it later today: https://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe

In the episode with Joel Berez (Infocom) [1], he says people spent years trying to solve Zork. Imagine saying that about a modern game.

[1] at 24:00 mark https://archive.org/details/the-famous-computer-cafe-1985-07...

>Imagine saying that about a modern game.

Took 4 years to find the final scret cheat code in Nier Automata

https://x.com/NieRGame/status/1345725199900155909

And that's just one modern game example, there are many more

I was one of those people. Or months at least along with a group of my high school friends. Most of the infocom games took between a few weeks to a few months of obsessive game play to get through & we played them all.

Transcript of Gene Roddenberry interview (h/t slashdot) https://archive.org/details/Gene-Roddenberry-Interview-Trans...

What kind of database could one access from a PC in 1985 from which one could learn about saltwqter crocodiles?

There were lots of PC databases, of which dBase was one of the more popular ones.

So there was a content-layer market for the early PC-based DBMS's, a la someone marketing the early 1980s equivalent of Wikipedia or Encarta?

Yes, but as I recall it was a rather tiny subset of the database market unless one was very forward thinking and had Internet access and/or was part of a BBS community that shared information electronically which put you in the minority of the minority at the time. Financial market data was probably the largest one early on. Mostly individuals and small businesses were just rolling their own solutions and entering the data themselves until the late 80's / early 90's. Larger businesses had many of islands of systems and data but it was nearly all internal or used to generate paper documents... even internally.

Roughly speaking: prior to the 80's one (often) wrote their own programs, prior to the 90's one entered their own data (i.e. for structured content like databases and spreadsheets), prior to the 00's one created their own content (i.e. documents etc.)

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

Given "it's" particular style of hallucinations, I'd put AI more on a mushroom scale.

The LSD of this century is social networks. People now see reality through them, with distortions and all.

Social networks were the LSD of the 2000s and 2010s. I would say the "cocaine" of those decades, because it wasn't particularly enlightening, it made some of us belligerent, and at this point we all regret it. At least we're starting to build some tolerance now.

You'll have to define "we all". Politically, most discourse that matters still flows through Facebook and Twitter/X, and will likely continue to do so until alternatives emerge.

Once knowledge moved to the online world, it was inevitable that debate would follow. This cat is not going back in the bag. We might refine our tools a little bit, but things are unlikely to change significantly for a very long time - possibly ever.

> This cat is not going back in the bag. We might refine our tools a little bit, but things are unlikely to change significantly for a very long time - possibly ever.

Yes, agreed. This is called "addiction".

Tweeted this in 2021: “The current state of artificial intelligence is on psychedelics and we are simply trying to sober it up.”

Src: https://x.com/miguelace_/status/1362646383077978115?s=46&t=g...

AI is on LSD not THE LSD smh

If you look at how PCs were used in the 1990s some of it was pretty trippy, so you could also say "PCs were on LSD." Take Andy Warhol's Amiga: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art...

Cursed Andy Warhol MSPaint 1.0 selfie

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

On a slightly unrelated note, why is that webpage so slow to load? I'm used to the wayback machine being slow, thats fair enough, but their blog?

I've not seen images load a couple columns at a time in quite a while.

Don't forget The Computer Chronicles.

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