 Coming up on DTNS, put your whole computer desktop online, a new way to buy a car on the internet, and what the US Department of Justice's big antitrust trial means. This is the Daily Tech News Show for December 24th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chan. Now, I very cleverly teased the show in a way that might make you think these are current news stories, but it's time for our retro show. In past years, we have pretended like it was the day we were pulling the stories from because it was fun to do that in the 1980s. But this year, we decided to just admit up front, we know it's 2020 because 2020 is unavoidable. But we're gonna look back at stories from September 21st, 1999. And because we're not pretending like it's 1999, as we do that, we'll be able to make some comparisons between what was reported then and what we know now. And as you heard in that tease, some of these stories feel strangely current. You'll see why we chose September 21st, 1999 as we go along. Our stories were sourced from Jesse Burst's anchor desk. And we'll have links to the archive.org version of that in our show notes if you want. But Sarah, kick us off 1999 style. Oh, let's. Car points, remember car points? Well, car point was a new joint venture between Microsoft and Ford to deliver it built to order cars to consumers through MSN's car point. Set to begin in the first quarter of 2000. Yeah, cause it was 1999 back in September. Car point's new feature lets people order cars meeting their exact specifications that arranges for purchase and delivery of the vehicle. While Ford was going to be the lead partner in car point, Microsoft anticipated that other automakers such as Honda may want to participate as well. The announcement illustrated how e-commerce is evolving to incorporate larger big ticket items. Well, this, this caught my eye because, hey, I didn't think I thought buying cars online was maybe not a recent phenomenon, but something that came along sort of with web 2.0. But this is, this is dot com era stuff. And they're basically describing Carvana, right? Like for new cars, cause you're customizing it, not used, but you decide what you want and then they deliver it to you. Which Carvana, that's how I bought my used Honda this year, that was a revelation of, oh, we'll bring it to you. I feel like that's still very modern. And here they were trying to do it back in 1999. Well, and even, yeah, I mean, back in 1999, my most recent car, which is a Volvo, you know, I sort of, I sort of built it on, well, all the cars have great websites now. You don't have to use a third party at all if you want to go through a particular manufacturer. But that whole thing has been such a constant for so long that, yeah, if you're going to get a used car, well, the car already exists. So you got to find the car that fits your needs because it, you know, it's, it's, there's only so much that you can customize. But the idea of being able to say, all right, well, I'm not even going to go into a dealership. I'm going to see what's out there, how much it costs, what I can get, do some comparisons, all of that stuff. In 1999 was very exciting, very new, very, you know, Jetsons. That line from, from the anchor desk, the announcement illustrates how e-commerce is involving to incorporate, like that strikes me as like, the e-commerce was still new. Like, man, you can, you can have a magazine and a sandwich delivered to you by Cosmo and now a car too. That's a, you know, that's where we're going with all this. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I remember the first place I worked during this time was, I worked for a news magazine show for a local network in the Bay Area. And it was all about like emerging technology because it was Silicon Valley, right? And it was, yeah, you know, the dot-com boom hadn't busted yet. And so everything was like, here's this business, but now online. And remember my boss at the time, because we would, you know, turn out these stories and our story slugs, you know, which is like the story titles for what the package was, she said, okay, we have to do something different than dot-dot-dot online. Yeah. Like, let's get a little bit more creative because that's all it was. It was all about, here's this business that everyone still needs, but here's how it's become more convenient for you because of the internet. Well, I think the difference between Carpoint and Carvana or even, you know, autodirect.com or cars.com is this was a partnership between Microsoft through MSN's Carpoint and Ford, right? It wasn't an independent agency saying, we'll work with dealerships or we'll buy the cars ourselves, which is what Carvana does and be a middleman. They hadn't figured that out. Back then it was like, well, no, you go to the company selling the thing, Ford, and the company that can do the internet's thing and then you partner together and that was clunky because they're like, well, we hope to get Honda on board and my guess is Carpoint really didn't take off because they didn't have enough selection. They didn't have enough of the different automakers on there. Well, what's fascinating is how businesses tried to find how they could have an internet-facing entryway into their business, right? Like we have a set business, what way can we, for lack of a better term, internet it so that we could either A, make it more flexible for the customer to buy stuff from us or B, find new avenues of business that have been traditionally shut off because of traditional sales models where you go into a showroom and figure out what you want, especially with BTO stuff from, especially with cars. BTO. Built to order. When you select like, I want this kind of engine, I want this package, I want this color, typically most people now just buy cars off a lot, but being able to selectively pick all your things without having to go to do a dealership was huge back then, honestly. Yeah, yeah, it was a revelation, you're right. Well, we got some bad news, it doesn't look like AMD's long for this world. They won't make it out of the century, is my guess. Bad news. Gateway gives AMD the boot, right? It's anchor desk. AMD suffers a major setback in its microprocessor chip war with Intel, microprocessor. Gateway, the leading US supplier of home PCs, which recently was just brought back as a zombie brand, by the way. Gateway, the leading US supplier of home PCs announced it will no longer use AMD chips in its machines in favor of the now competitively priced Intel processors. This move is yet another blow to the troubled AMD, whose latest high-performance Athlon chips is considered to be the company's best hope for survival. Oh, poor AMD. Plucky little AMD. Yeah, what a sad story that ended up being. But yeah, it just goes to show you how these things ebb and flow, don't they? Well, and this is a story that I'm sure, I don't know this for sure, but I know enough of having covered this for long enough that people said, that's it. Like, Gateway, they're not gonna sell enough chips like they're done, it's over. I'm sure there were people saying that. Well, you know, it's hard to remember there being a time when there were multiple CPU manufacturers. You had MIPS, you had Cyrex, which also made an x86 compatible CPU. You had Sun, Sun Microsystems developed their own CPUs. There was a lot of companies in that space, and over the years, it's kind of whittled its way down to where we have ARM, we have Intel, we have AMD. AMD was considered to be the prime competitor to Intel because they created a very competitive 486 compatible chip, and that went on throughout the 90s, and the Athlon was one of their big bets. It's interesting to note, as AMD got to the point in the beginning of the 2000s, where they were beating Intel with beating Intel's top of the line Pentium 4 CPU in performance, not just value, but actual performance, so much so that Intel, people were talking about Intel, it's like, oh, is Intel long for this world? Because, you know, they're getting their market share eaten away by AMD, and at this time, Cyrex and a few other of the other x86 companies couldn't compete anymore because they just didn't have access to the same kind of funds that AMD did, but AMD really kind of took the blows, but they managed to come back up. It's like a Rocky story, right? They beat them down and they came back, not just back up, but better. Yeah, if you look at the story from September though, it was Stellaron. Stellaron was the reason that Gateway wasn't going to use AMD and wasn't even gonna get into Athlon. They didn't even buy any Athlon chips because they're like, oh, we got a deal with the Stellaron and I'm sorry, Sarah, I wanna point out this one little passage here. People close to the matter say AMD believes it lost the Gateway business because Intel began offering Gateway more favorable terms than it had previously. Intel later went to court in the EU and the United States, both, over those kinds of deals where they would essentially go in and pay companies not to use AMD. Well, I don't know why you apologize to me for that. Well, because you started to talk at night. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, I was like that, yeah, that doesn't upset me. I was gonna say of the story, the fact that AMD has come a long way since where it looked back in September of 1999, but look at Gateway, home PC manufacturers, suppliers of home PCs. I mean, we had a Gateway back when, gosh, I think it was maybe sort of the first like family computer that we had that was running Windows kind of thing. I mean, probably not, it wasn't our first family computer, but the Gateway computer, I had one in college, I mean, that was a well-priced sort of every man computer for a long time. Gateway. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because I did a quick search on Gateway PC news just to see because they recently got brought back as a zombie brand, I think by Dell. And the second result in the search is, holy cow, this Gateway with AMD CPU is only $279 in Epic Black Friday laptop. I remember, well, so Gateway came out of the same model that Dell did, which was the BTO, built to order PCs. And they, and to make money, they would skip the showrooms. They would, this was factory direct, right? They would mail it to your door, and which is something that Dell took advantage of. Before Amazon existed, kids, ask your parents. Before Amazon, but this is how Dell became the big business. Dell started out in Michael Dell's college dorm room. He was building PCs. He would buy the parts, his room was filled with it, and he would just put these all in, and he would pack them in a box and mail them out to his client. And he turned that into the business that is today, and Gateway was on track. And then something just kind of happened to the Holstein patterned business. And that was the other thing for people who may be too young about Gateway is that everything was cow-themed. And it is, again, they've brought back the cow box, the cow print box. Acer owns the company, not Dell. Ah, Acer. And is selling Gateway branded laptops exclusively at Walmart, exclusively with AMD chips. So it wasn't a mistake that I found that. How everything comes back. It's so weird, it's so weird. How long is 20 years? And it's just like, what? Well, this next story, obviously, could never apply to the modern day. Talk about dating. I don't know, ourselves or the story or both. Desktop.com, remember it? Well, if you don't, 1999 launches a new free virtual desktop site calling itself an internet home with aggregated customized personal information like email, websites that you care about, news, stocks. Desktop.com differentiated itself from other portals by using a desktop metaphor, complete with sponsored icons. So felt like your desktop, but actually was virtual. Service was free, offered 10 whopping megabytes of storage space for work, personal audio, and other files you wanted to access from any web browser. 10 megabytes, y'all. Fascinated me. I was like, oh my God, we can replace, like we won't need hard drives anymore. Because at that time, the 10 megabytes of the cloud. It was the cloud before we called it that. Yeah, it was totally the cloud. Desktop.com actually looks and acts like a Windows desktop. The site uses a special technique to replicate a PC-based applications responsive net. It's written in, like you said, dynamic hypertext market markup language. So I really thought like, this is it, this is the future. We're just gonna have our desktops in the cloud. This is just gonna keep getting better and better. You know, 10 megabytes of storage space, even in 1999, not too much, because that was sort of the Napster era. I mean, you'd still max out if you wanted to get enough audio files together. It would take a while, but it wouldn't take long. But yeah, the idea that you'd be like, oh, so if I, I don't know, I'm at my place of work and they're a bunch of like hoteling terminals. You know, we used to call them hoteling stations, meaning it's not your computer. You just sit there if no one else is sitting there and do some stuff. And that you'd be able to access personal information. Wouldn't always have to be in the workplace. It could just be anywhere. But you know, this is also the era of like, lots of internet cafes where you might sit down at a computer and you're not at home and how are you gonna get any data? And this was a revelation. Yeah, I'm trying to find a good ad of like, when you bought a computer in 1999, what was the megabytes that you would get on that computer? I think it would have been like 40, maybe 30. I think it was 20. I think it was about 20. Maybe 20 and 1999. You're right. 30 and 40 maybe more like a couple of years later. Because I remember I wasn't able to get a 40 until like well into the 2000s. So 10 would have been like around half what you would have on your actual machine. So it's still, it's yeah. It's not bad. For the time, definitely not bad. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what my first college computer had. I think it was like 20. But that was 1996 that I bought it. Oh yeah, my first, my college computer only had 500 megabytes. And that was huge. I was gonna say 500 megabytes. We're talking megabytes. Yeah, 500 megabytes. That's crazy. Yeah, 500 megabytes is huge. For 1996. Yeah. It's so hard to remember now. It's like 10 megabytes. I'm like an empty profile. You're lucky. My college PC, which would have was 1989 because I didn't have a PC my first year in college. I think I had four megabytes on that. I made use, when I went to college I took a lot of desktop video editing. And one of the things I had to buy was a ZipDrive and ZipDisk. Because those were 100 megabytes to low under 100 megabytes. But I remember still using that because I was working at a ZDTV at the time. I was using that at my desk because that's how I brought files home. Because I was big enough to carry files home. Yeah, I remember that too. That was, in fact, Roger and I took the same desktop video class, at least one of them. I don't know if we were in more than one together, but it was something where it's like you do a bunch of stuff at school and if you wanted any access to that later, yeah, you had to have your ZipDrive and bring it home. And even then you'd have to have the same software on your computer at home and that was a whole mess and the whole idea of creative cloud did not exist. Oh gosh, no, yeah. Not that subscription-based stuff is always the answer for folks, but it was just, it was a whole mess because... It was a whole new world to paraphrase a land. Yes. I will just, I will leave it you with this nugget. So back when Sarah and I were desktop video editing, Premiere was on its maybe first and a half iteration, 1.5 or something, and they had a thing called proxy editing because editing full-sized SD, standard definition video, was too much for the computers. So you ended up editing a postage-samp-sized video, proxy of what you edit, and then you would edit that together then the software would re-nit the actual files together because that's how the internet and technology work back then. Yeah. Well, folks, you in the modern world don't have any of these problems, but we do thank you for participating in our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Fun place to be over the holiday break when we're not doing regular shows, maybe see some of the stuff that's happening there. Again, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, here's the big one. The latest round of antitrust action. Remember in the teas I mentioned it without the name because I was trying to fool you a little. Oh, it's Microsoft, don't forget. Department of Justice charged Microsoft with a violation of a 1995 consent decree about tying the license of one product to another, specifically the Internet Explorer web browser with Windows 95, DOJ filed suit, asking the courts at the time to force Microsoft to stop bundling IE with Windows 95, give PC makers the right to add marketing messages and other content to the Windows boot-up sequence, void Microsoft contracts that require ISPs and online services to play down competing browsers and generally cease and desist anti-competitive business practices, predatory contact, such as giving IE away for free. Giving a browser away for free was seen as predatory conduct by the Department of Justice back then. Now, Microsoft's response to the allegations and complaints, no, no, no, no, basically. Here's after the first round of the court battle what Anchor Desk thought was likely to happen. They wrote, now that the fireworks are over, the DOJ's case has lost steam. David Boyas is a hell of a grandstander, but Flare alone can't overcome the case's weakness. Here are my Vegas odds, according to Jesse Burst. 40% chance the Department of Justice wins the first round of Microsoft Appeals and eventually wins. 30% chance Microsoft wins the first round and the government folds. 20% chance the DOJ wins the first round and the appeal and 10% chance that they would just settle out of court. Of course, Burst said, don't expect any material impact for a year or more and here's why you should care. The case will set a precedent for the next phase of the digital economy. The PC era is over. The old rules don't apply. Now we have to agree on new rules to set fair limits on companies doing business in this new market economy, meaning dot com economy to decide what kind of restraints government must put on free trade to ensure the best results for consumers. So in other words, all the same arguments that we have about Google and Amazon and Facebook, it's all about like, well now that things are different the old rules don't fit anymore. And they've got to stop, you know, abusing their market position. Well, and yeah, it was early on that in 1999, sure some of us had been on the internet for a few years but a lot of people were, this is, you know, brave new world as you mentioned. And the idea of Microsoft saying, well bundle internet explorer into Windows 95 which a lot of people are using and it's become very popular. Of course, that makes sense because that's part of the suite of products. And oh, it turns out that now all these other browsers just will never be used again. And people go, well, that's sort of problematic. Well, shoot, okay, let's make Microsoft not do that because they're so successful, they're too big. And it's so reminiscent of stuff that we go through all the time now. But yeah, the rules have changed to the point where there are constantly new problems depending on the technology that we have. So here's what actually happened. On November 2nd, 2001, the 10% chance option occurred. The DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement would require Microsoft to share its API with third party companies. Which again, it sounds crazy now, like share an API, isn't that what everybody does now? Point a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft systems records and source code for five years to ensure compliance. The DOJ would not require Microsoft to change any of its code, nor prevent Microsoft from tying software to Windows in the future. On August 5th, 2002, Microsoft announced it would make some concessions toward the proposed final settlement. A bunch of states, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Florida, Kansas, Minnesota, Utah, Virginia, and Massachusetts kept fighting on, including the District of Columbia. But on June 30th, 2004, the US Appeals Court unanimously approved the settlement with the Justice Department, rejecting objections that the sanctions were inadequate. And that was it. The dissenting states regarded the settlement merely as a slap on the wrist, but there wasn't much they could do about it. Law professor Eben Moglen noted the way Microsoft was required to disclose its APIs and protocols was useful only for interoperating with a Windows operating system product. Microsoft's obligations under the settlement expired November 12th, 2007. Wow, yeah. I think what I take about this the most is everybody thought there's only one way to stop Microsoft. We've got to stop them giving away Internet Explorer. We've got to stop the bundling. And everybody thought, this is just a slap on the wrist. Now they're just gonna run roughshod over everybody and they're not gonna win. And both those things were wrong. It turns out that Chrome came in and beat Microsoft before Google was huge. I mean, now they're super huge, but Chrome came in while Google was on the rise. A lot of Microsoft's advantages with Windows went away as we developed the Internet and attention and priorities shifted outside the operating system. And the fact that it was only a slap on the wrist didn't end up being a big deal because all the problems they were trying to solve with the litigation went away because of other factors. And tying a browser to an operating system ended up just not even being a big deal. In fact, operating systems ended up not being a big deal. In fact, Microsoft doesn't even monetize its operating system the same way anytime these days. There were a few years though that it was like when you talked about big tech, it was Microsoft. Oh yeah. That's what it was. I mean, Apple like- And it felt sort of that would never end back then. Yeah. Yeah, and Apple had kind of was in a slump and that story also ends very differently. But that was what it was. It was like, oh, who's the evil network now that everyone's getting online? It's Microsoft. I remember- They're trying to do it all. In September 1999, I remember people saying like, yeah, it'd be nice if everybody went out and bought Apple, but really that's not gonna happen. There's no competitor to Windows. You have to get the government to stop them. And now Apple is how much bigger than Microsoft? I mean, Microsoft's still pretty big, but- Yeah. They're not even competing in the same arena as mostly. Well, I mean, what it tells you is that when people don't like a company where they think they're too big or too close to a monopoly, they look at the vectors that they come into the market with, right? So if it's Google, it's Search. If it's Apple, it's the top down integration between hardware software and their closed app garden. So that's how people look at things. So the next big tech company or biotech company or whatever, people look at it and say they're too big, too dominant, but they will look at the way they entered the market and perceive that to be the threat that needs to be regulated. Well, and maybe you need the court case and even the slap on the wrist to slow them down, to get them to not go too far. But it turns out that things change and it never looks like they will. It always looks like, yeah, but I mean, Facebook's an exception, right? They're gonna be here forever. Who could possibly compete with them? And it feels that way right now, but that's how Microsoft felt in September 1999. And we all know they didn't stick around forever. Well, speaking of Apple, if you're wondering, well, what was Apple up to in 1999? Back in September 21st, due to Motorola chip delivery problems, Apple announced temporary delays in the shipment of its new Power Mac G4 machines. The delays will cause fourth quarter earnings to fall well short of Apple's anticipated $120 million. Jesse's take at the time was, this is part for the course for Apple. Make a huge deal over an upcoming product and then work out production kinks as an afterthought. I think what caught my eye about this the most was, Tim Cook is the supply chain king. Tim Cook became CEO of Apple later because he was the magician at the supply chain. But in 1999, while Tim Cook was at Apple, it was the known thing of like, yeah, Apple always has these supply chain issues, right? It's just so funny to think of that now. Yeah. I mean, you could argue that Apple still makes a huge deal over upcoming products and works out production kinks as an afterthought. But yes, this was a very different Apple. They don't have production kinks. There are people who wish that their products would ship more, but this was like an actual delay in a shipment. Not a like, oh, I didn't order right away and it's not coming until later. Like, there's a difference between that. Also, Steve Jobs was an interim CEO still, if you look in the article. Well, it's interesting because Steve Jobs just recently, I mean, as of this writing back in 1999, Steve Jobs had only been there back at Apple for a little under two years, so maybe a little two years. And it's just weird because he is cemented as this, you know, this Apple guy from the start to finish when in the middle he parted ways and Apple had Scully come on as CEO who originally ran Pepsi before he became the head of Apple. And, you know, Steve Jobs kind of went on this walkabout where he was trying to discover and find a new way of computing that would be a lot more effective than what he was able to do at Apple at the time. Yeah, because if it's not clear to folks, this is the chips that were delayed. This wasn't a product being delayed. This is the G4 chips. Like, ah, we didn't get enough of them. And you hear rumors about that happening. Like, oh, Apple might not get enough chips. They might have a lower supply, but you never get an announcement. Like, where the company officials say like, yeah, we didn't get all the chips or Motorola that we thought we were gonna get, so. In many ways, this is kind of what spurred Steve Jobs to say. Like, we need to own all the widgets that go into our stuff, all the widgets. And I mean, you see the culmination of that in the M1. I mean, yes and no. They still require other companies to build the stuff for them. They do, but you're not waiting on Motorola to get the chips. No, you're waiting on Foxconn. Yeah, but Motorola was a chip designer. Apple wasn't saying like this. But I don't know, was it the design that was the problem, or was it the manufacturer? I don't know. It was the manufacturer, but that was, you know, that was, Apple wasn't going up to the, was going up to Motorola, and Motorola was going up to. I'm just saying, they're still going to other companies and saying, please make this chip for us. So it could still happen. And it definitely still happened, but I think Apple has a lot more control than they did back then in terms of. Yeah, because they're, I don't know. They're more dominant over the Foxconn's and the Foxconn's an assembler. So it's an Apple's an orange, I guess, but they are, they are a more dominant client of that. Yeah, Tim Cook had started in 1998. So he had, he had been there around a year or two, not quite two years. 22 years now. Yeah, it actually, when you think of it that way, it's like, wow, Tim Cook's been there a long time. Yeah. But he hadn't quite worked out the supply chain yet. All right, before we wrap up, I thought it'd be fun for all of us to imagine, try to think back. I mean, I'm not going to be able to remember clearly, but if you had a guess on September 21st, 1999, what do you think you would have been doing on this day when this version of Jesse Burstankardisk showed up in your email inbox, Sarah? Well, so I had mentioned I was working for a local news station. And when I was in, when I was still in college, I was interning for them. And when it came time for me to graduate and I needed a job, they said, there's this show down in San Jose, California, which was, you know, Silicon Valley, right? And still is, but at the time, it was sort of this like weird place where people in San Francisco were like, yeah, things are happening and there's, I don't know, clean rooms and chips and stuff. And they said, there's a news magazine show called New Media News, and it's all about technology, emerging technology in the Bay Area. Do you want, you know, to be a production assistant or something, you know, on that show? A full-time job though. And I was like, totally. And I moved to San Jose. I lived there for a couple of years and I worked basically covering the first dot com era of companies. You know, a lot of startups, well, I would say, hmm, probably 95% of which do not exist anymore in any form. But some of it was larger companies and some of it was kind of nostalgia stuff, you know, where we'd go, you know, do like a history of the Cray 2 computer kind of thing. And it was all really fun for me, but I had gone to college to work in television. You know, I'd have a broadcasting degree. So it wasn't necessarily supposed to be television about technology. That's just where I landed. And I just never left. And the rest is history, yeah. Yeah, once I got there, I was like, oh, I love this. This is great content, you know. But on September 21st, what would you have been doing, do you think? I would probably have been, I would have been doing some field shoot at some startup in Milpitas, you know, yeah, talking to folks who were going to change the graphics world with some proprietary software that, you know. That is long forgotten. That's long forgotten, yeah. Or a couple of, I actually watched like a couple like startup bros get tattoos, you know, of the company logo, because that was, that still does happen. But like at the time it was just like, this is so crazy. I can't believe these guys are doing this. Yeah, and so we like got a camera and like went there and like watched them do this and stuff like that. So it was, and yeah, I mean, what else was I doing? It was kind of just, you know, I was pretty young and just trying to be an adult and working. Roger, what about you? September 21st, 1999. So I was at the time I was working at ZDTV and I was the tech PA for screen savers and call for help. And since it was September, it's a Monday, I was probably setting up the weeks, segments that I had to get in order for, in terms of product requests, stuff I needed to do on the set. There was probably an Uggum, an ultimate gaming machine build in there somewhere because screen savers always did that in the fall. And because it was September, we were probably doing a lot of back to school stuff as well. In 1999, there was a lot of Jesus Jones in the office because we were playing this promo video about right here right now with, you know, get it now at ZDTV. Oh, I remember that. That was tech TV, that was tech TV. Jesus Jones was tech TV, yeah. That's not gonna come till next year. Okay, next year. So 1999, oh no, I remember everyone had, everyone wanted to say, are we gonna party like it's 1999? Because this is going toward the end of the year. Right, yeah. Well, and there was all the Y2K talk. Oh yes, that was the other one. Like how are we, you know, what systems are really gonna fail and how much of this is hype? I remember Leo Laporte getting very upset at Mother Jones Magazine because he thought they were fear mongering because they had an article, or like one of their, the main article was about the Y2K bug and how you should prepare. It's like, ah, I'm really upset at Mother Jones. Totally blowing it out of proportion. Don't understand what's going on. It's the funniest thing ever. Well, on September 21st, 1999, I would have been sitting two seats down from Roger. One of the things I would have been doing would have been checking my Lotus notes to see if Roger had entered the text for the Q&A on screensavers that night so that I could take it and adapt it to put on the website. And I had been there for two weeks. So I know this happened, whether it happened September 21st or not, I'm not sure. But in September, during my first month, I was editing one of Patrick Norton's articles that he had submitted to the screensavers and he came and sat down next to me to watch me edit his article. And I remember being like, all right, man, well, this is what I'm gonna do. And I started editing and he stopped and went like, oh, you know how to edit articles. And I said, yes, that's why they hired me for this job. What did he think you were gonna do? He was just like, great, that's hard to do. He had some people who weren't journalism trained, who didn't, and so he was checking to make sure that I wasn't like a code monkey who was gonna just mess up his article because I didn't know what I was doing. And he was pleasantly surprised that I knew what I was doing. That was the last time he ever sat next to Tom. I was wondering how the story was gonna, Patrick Norton sat down behind me and it could have been, and then he tackled me and the article was never published. I actually kind of date my friendship with Patrick from that moment where he was like, oh, you know what you're doing? And I was like, oh, thank goodness, you realized I know what I'm doing and you're not gonna like, you know, try to mess with this. We've been friends ever since, so. I don't know if that was actually September 21st, but yeah. There are bouts. Yeah, there are bouts. Yeah. Well, that's it for our Christmas Eve retro episode for September 21st, 1999. Thanks everybody for supporting us on the Patreons. If you need a little more explanation on big tech topics of today, like Wi-Fi 6 or 5G, check out our related show, Know a Little More, so you can know a little more about all those tech topics at knowalittlemore.com. And don't forget, we have new merch options in Patreon for you that don't expire. It used to be, you've pledged for three months and you got the new thing and you're done for the year, but there are new art from Len Pearl to every three months as long as you stay a patron at your level. So go check that out, dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We are off tomorrow for the Christmas holiday in some parts of the world anyway, but we are live Monday through Friday, at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2130 UTC regularly, and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover. Hehehehe.