 And we're live, actually, are we live or are we recording? Taylor, how the hell are we? You're recording, hey. We are not live, but we're recording live. So this is happening live, but as a recording. Anyway. It's happening live for us, you know? Yeah, exactly. And you can see it live later. It's live somewhere. Recorded, yeah. But we will be talking today about the art fair. There'll be a series of sessions we'll highlight and this one will be about the mister and what you're calling the micro living room of the 90s or the 90s micro living room, which I love the title of. But let's, before we get to the actual installation, maybe it might be useful, Taylor, for you to set up for the folks listening. What is, in fact, a mister? And how did you fall down the rabbit hole of that particular technology? Yeah, yeah. So the mister is a sort of retro computing and retro gaming device. It is kind of Raspberry Pi-like in that it's like a single computer board, basically. And but there's a community that's built up around it and actually there's, I'll show mine in a second, but there's additional boards that can stick to it that expand its capabilities. And I'm only saying that to say, you're gonna look at that and be like, that's not a single board, Taylor, that's multiple things. But my point is it's a very compact device, kind of like a Raspberry Pi, if you're familiar with that. But I got into this device from actually, like I'm really into like a video game stuff and retro video game stuff. And the mister keeps, kept popping up on my radar of like, oh, like this is interesting device that can do all of these old consoles. It can emulate old consoles. It can emulate old computers. And it does it very accurately and it's relatively simple to use. And I say relatively because it is like a hobbyist Linux device. So again, if you're familiar with the Raspberry Pi, it's kind of like using that. I actually think it's a little bit easier to work with than a Raspberry Pi in a lot of ways. But it isn't something that you can just buy and then plug into a TV and be like, cool, it plays games like there's some tinkering. But I came upon it from actually giantbomb.com, which is like a video games review site. One of the folks there, it's gone now, one of the founders of it, had like a series of videos where he would like just tinker with old computers and old consoles and usually obscure things. Like he was like, let's play some MSX games, which is like a Japanese computer that Microsoft was involved with. I don't really know a lot about the MSX, but my point was it really piqued my curiosity of like, this is a cool way to kind of play with some of these older platforms that I sort of don't have a lot of familiarity with, especially, and it does all these old retro console things, which was exciting to me. The FPGA itself, I'm not a computer scientist far from it, but basically it can do in hardware what we do with software emulation a lot of times. So if folks are familiar with things that can play like old NES games and you can load it up on your computer and you give it a ROM file to play, it's doing that, but it's doing it with a FPGA chip, which basically someone writes instructions for the chip and describes various parts of the NES in programming language to this chip and that chip sort of becomes more like an NES, for example. And so it's just a sort of a different path, but it means that it can do some really amazing things and very accurately on this little tiny device. And then the game emulation world, right? Like there's emulation through software and then there's FPGA, which for many is like next level. Like there's even in the retro arcade cabinets or even the original ones, there's discussions around, can you put an FPGA board in there or not? And I think it's the only board people will even discuss, like a MAME computer or something like that is out of the question. But FPGA, depending on who you talk to, is a possibility. Yeah, it's basically it's imagine a processor that you can tell it how it should work after you make it basically with just simple, well, I shouldn't say simple. It's probably hugely complex, but with lines of code, basically. So you tell it how to work. So exactly how an FPGA works and all of the nitty gritties of it, I don't know a lot about, but I can just tell you that the emulation is really good. It does it at a very low latency so I can play games that I remember from like the SNES and they feel like they did to my brain anyway. And the other cool thing about the MISTER is that there's these add-on boards and I have one as well that adds analog outputs to the MISTER. So you can plug it of course into like an HDMI TV and do all kinds of things with it. And it's really good for that. It actually does it on digital displays. It can overcome a lot of the latency issues that they often have with using other emulators or it does it better anyway. But that analog output is amazing because you can plug in that VGA port I showed. Isn't really a VGA port? It's capable of a lot of different things with various adapters you can get online. I've used it to plug it in directly into CRT TVs so you can have this modern, tiny computer plugging into an old CRT and it looks amazing and authentic and then when you fire up an emulator it's really hard to tell that from the real thing in my opinion. But you can also plug it into old computer monitors as well. And that's what I actually have at home is I have an old VGA computer monitor. It isn't really the same thing as an old CRT TV. I mean, it is a CRT but they are slightly different in various what you can use them for and what they're good at. But yeah, so that's kinda how I found out about the device. And then when I got the thing I found out that one of the cool cores it could do one of the things it could pretend to be was a 486 PC in its entirety which is kind of amazing to me because if you know anything about how PC like how general purpose computers work like the ones you and I are talking to each other through there aren't just one chip, right? And to be fair, neither was even an NES but there were a lot of very complex chips. So the fact that they could even do this on a single FPGA is kind of amazing to me. And so I was like, okay, well what can you do with this 486 computer? And keep in mind a 486 is like an early 90s PC. So probably like 91 through, I'm not exactly a historian here but the early half of the 90s basically. Yeah, 93, 94 for sure, 95. You would when Windows 95 you would be 46. Probably on a 486. That was about the time. Pentium's were coming out. And a lot of people running Windows 95 would have been using a Pentium PC but which was quite a bit faster. But anyway, so it's that just it's like between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. And you can definitely run both of those things really well on a 486. Which so I did a stream man a year and a half ago. It was when you and I were, well, I guess you had been playing with PeerTube for a while. I was just starting to play with PeerTube. And so I did a little test stream of just checking my OBS setup out. I believe I did this on New Year's Eve. Yeah, let me pull the video up. It's one of the earliest things on my PeerTube. And the whole thing's like 40 minutes long and it's mostly just me like trying things out in OBS making sure audio is working, stuff like that. But one of the things I did in here is I hooked up a bunch of different cameras. I hooked up actually a document camera facing down. So I could kind of show this device off. And I also hooked up the output of the mister into OBS as well. So I could use it and demo it. And one of the things I messed with a lot of things. I played some arcade cores that it has installed. I played SNES games a little bit. And I messed around with a Commodore 64, which was kind of neat. And then I showed off what I had been playing with, which was this Windows 95 install that someone had posted a instructions on how to use a virtual dial-up device. So you can run Windows 95 and then use this virtual dial-up device to connect to the real actual internet, which is inadvisable for security reasons, but a lot of fun also. So don't do your banking on it. And maybe don't leave it connected all the time. But anyway, what I found out pretty quickly was that, hey, the modern internet doesn't really work on Windows 95, or at least not the modern web, the way we think of it. Anything that works over HTTPS is not going to work here, because basically the encryption ciphers, basically the things that allow it to decrypt the certificates that tell your browser, hey, this is a HTTPS site and it's OK to visit it and it's secure. Haven't been updated. There are very old versions of these things. They don't work. And I think in some cases, the browsers don't even support HTTPS at this point in some cases. So anyway, most sites do not work, because most sites are HTTPS. So then later on, or actually, I guess it would have been before this stream, because I did demo it in this stream, I also found out that there's this service called The Old Net, and I saw a YouTube video about this where someone was using it with a real, honest-to-god actual, I think it was like a Windows 98 computer, that they had somehow rigged up to work over Wi-Fi. And so this is a browser proxy. So basically you can go here and you can visit like, sure, let's visit nintendo.com from 1996. This is what it looked like. And it's very much like the Wayback machine. If you're familiar, I know you are Jim with the Wayback machine. And in fact, it's using the Wayback machines, the internet archives, old copies of pages. But the neat thing about this is that it doesn't put all that web UI around the Wayback machine, and it's actually somehow faster. I don't know. archive.org is always kind of a slow website for me. And what they, so you can browse it like we are here, which is neat. But even cooler, they have a actual proxy service. And so you can go in here and you basically set some settings up in your browser, and you can directly browse this thing. You can do this with a modern computer, by the way. You can plug these settings into Chrome or Firefox, and this will work. But I was like, oh, what if I fired up Netscape on Windows 95 on this mister, dialed up to the real internet, and then set up this proxy inside of mister? And so that's what I did. And it worked beautifully. It required some tinkering and things like that. But it was, it works. So here is me kind of messing with this. This is me setting it up on this stream. And then loading some old web pages. And then this is the first time I had really tried this. This old net proxy thing was on this stream. So I was, it's kind of cool me watching this now because I was like, oh my God, this actually works. So it's slow, but so was the internet at the time. So that was sort of how I got to, hey, what if we set up like some kind of thing where people could literally experience the web of like, let's say 1997, pick a year basically. And on this mister device I had, this FPGA device, and we could actually properly have people just literally use Netscape Navigator 3.0, look at pages from a certain year. And so that was my original proposal for the conference for the art fair I should say, which was to say, what if I set this thing up and wouldn't that be fun, right? And you looked at that and you go, that's a 90s living room, or that's a centerpiece to a 90s living room, and that's what we should do. And so that's kind of, it kind of took off from there. So I messed around with plugging my mister into my PC, my old CRT monitor. I have a Sony Trinitron 20-inch. It's a beautiful monitor, honestly. And so I plugged it in. I was like, hey, this works on this monitor too. So we could have it look more authentic. And then you and Meredith and I coordinated to get all the stuff for the 90s living room going, right? So I found Meredith and I scoured eBay to find a old era-appropriate computer tower, which we weren't actually using the computer there, but we wanted it there to sell the whole thing, right? And then crucially, we wanted a monitor. I wasn't going to fly with my PC monitor across the country. So we bought one, got shipped to Meredith's house, and she tested it out. And then I brought a retro-looking keyboard and mouse, basically. It needed to be USB to plug into the mister, but I wanted it to look appropriate. And I also brought some equipment basically to solve the networking issue of trying to do this, not in my home. So doing proxies and Windows 95 and virtual dial-up connections all over a Wi-Fi connection on a college campus, hard to do. I do say, I wanna blog maybe some of the technicals of this, but basically the way I got this actually working away from my home was, and it wouldn't work over hotspot of my phone directly because of the proxy situation. So I had a tiny router, my phone, and the mister. The mister connected via Wi-Fi to this tiny router. The tiny router ran a VPN connection over WireGuard back to my house that I have set up for my own use already. And then the router got an internet connection from my phone over hotspot. So it was basically a relay of two Wi-Fi networks over cellular and a VPN, just to make this happen. But I'm glad it worked. Where was the router? Was the router some time you had? It was just a tiny little router, it was just, yeah, I actually, I realized it wasn't going to, doing some testing when we got to UMW, I realized that it wasn't going to work on that Wi-Fi network. So I Amazon ordered a router and got it delivered to the hotel in time for the art fair. So, yeah, it was just a little cheap travel router. It's like literally slightly bigger than the mister and it was just plugged in, it's all over Wi-Fi. So it didn't have to be on the desk or anything. And that pointed to your VPN, the phone? Yeah, so it was both. You ran the VPN on your phone and that's what it connected to. It ran the VPN on the router. So the thing I was running into is trying to get the mister just tethered to my phone over a Wi-Fi hotspot worked, but the proxy wouldn't work. And I think it's just the T-Mobile, like my wireless, sorry, my phone carrier or maybe it's an iPhone thing, but the proxy has to talk on a specific port and it was just not letting traffic on just whatever. It only wanted traffic on certain ports for security. I don't know, whatever reason, right? It wasn't working. So the router liberated your port? Yeah, I was like, if I can wrap all of this in a VPN, then it will work because all that traffic, it becomes opaque to my phone, basically. It doesn't know what's happening at that point. Kinda, you know. But the problem is I couldn't run a VPN on the mister directly. I can't run a VPN while hotspotting my phone and I couldn't run a VPN on UMW's network either, they don't allow it. This has to be blocked because there's no way you can do it in a 20 minute conversation. Yeah, I won't, I won't go through all the specifics, but my point is, let me just say, it was undertaking to get the networking working. And here's a good look at the micro, what we're calling the micro living room, the 90s micro living room. And you had an NES TV as well. It's the N64. N64, yep. And then you also had that awesome kind of micro desk which you might find in a living room in the 90s, like I really love that. If you look close at this image, there's a bad day at the midway CD-ROM game. I think the speakers actually worked, is that right? Yes, yeah. So it's probably important to know, cause I had a lot of people ask me this of like, hey, how did you Jim and Meredith get the actual, like where's the actual stuff coming from? And I was like, oh, so like the monitor and the tower, like I said, we bought an eBay, the mister I brought, the keyboard and mouse I also brought, everything else was thrifted the weekend before. Yeah, that's Saturday. That's right, or Sunday. I think for the TV, we had Zach Whalen. Yes, Zach Whalen brought us the TV. Brought the TV and also the little micro TV on the desk too and some little knickknacks. But you know, the boombox, the N64 was the arcades, I believe. That's beautiful. So Tim brought that, the tapes, CDs, games, speakers, that lamp, I think, the desk and the TV stand, all of that was thrifted the weekend before. And I'm just so happy with how it turned out. I, it's so great. It came out great. It did, it came out great. And I think one of the cooler things is I believe Zach Whalen when he was playing with it, cause I'm sure he was a huge fan of it. He was like, oh, check this out. You can bring up, oh yeah, that's a great shot of it. Wonderful. Yeah, I love the reclaim hosting. Although the reclaim hosting wasn't around in the 90s, we could pretend, right? Yeah. But here's a great, another great shot of, and you might have this already, but this is actually the, I'm sorry, this is actually the MaryWashingtonCollege.edu website that someone brought up. I think it was Zach Whalen saying, look, and then you could see all of these original faculty websites from like 96 or 97, like Gardner Campbell's was there. It was wild to see that. Yeah, and it was so cool to like, you know, the limitations of what you could browse were limited by, well, what does the Wayback Machine have from 1998 is the year we actually punched in? Because I found out that putting it to 96, that was the first year the Wayback Machine had anything and 96, 97 were not, just, there wasn't a lot there. But you know, it's accurate in the sense that, we were celebrating 30 years of the open web, but the reality is in 1992, most of us weren't using the web yet, right? So for a lot of people, this setup would have been kind of close to their earliest experiences with the web if they were there pretty early. And I do mean truly the web, not the internet, right, like web pages, right? Absolutely. In that you probably, if you were there in 92, there wasn't quite a lot yet and it kind of exploded over the next few years. And you might not have had a brand new computer you were using and you know, all these things that we like to think of like, well in 95, it would have been this and you would have used this and these would have been, you know, but that's not how technology works. People are using what they have. So I was really happy that we were able to get things within a few years of, as far as period, accuracy. But we, you know, as far as the archive go, we set it to 98 because that was the earliest we could go with while still having a broad range of stuff people could visit. You know, they could go to like Alta Vista and even type in some basic search queries that were archived. Mary Washington's website was so interesting. I think Tim brought it up and he was like, can you believe the Mary Washington website at this time is talking about, hey, students and faculty can request space to get 10 megabytes on the web. Yeah, it was literally like 10 megabytes. And he's like, can you believe they're doing this 98? And this is what's on this web. Like, amazing that we're here at, you know, the Reclaim Open Conference. And this is what's here. It was so cool. I saw a couple of people pull up their call, like their institution's pages. It was really rewarding for me to see people sit down and just use the thing. It was so cool. I, yeah. It was amazing. I mean, even when you were testing it as we kind of played around with it the day before and prepare for the conference more generally, hearing the Windows 95 chime as it starts up is really like a trigger of like emotions and memories and like that first experience with the web and all that like this magical new world. Your installation did a wonderful job of capturing that sense of wonder that I think many of us came to Reclaim Open with an idea of like, you know, how do we remember that? And like, what's a way to keep that at the forefront of our minds, you know, as the web continues to change and shift and all the things, right? I think it kind of retroactively ended up tying into a theme that I felt sort of proud to see emerge at the conference, not that it was my doing, I should say, but more like proud of the community, which was a theme of like, we're looking back, not just for nostalgia's sake, right? But we're looking back and thinking about how things worked and what that means and what we can take from that, right? Because, and this I thought was kind of a good example because it's like, you know, we can be nostalgic about the web, go use Netscape 3 on Windows 95 running 46, it crashes a lot, you know, it's not particularly fast. It's really fun and I was so glad, but like, you know, you got to look at some of the wrinkles too. And remember, and obviously some of it was the setup, right, like we're looking in an archive, so we had some people try to use some search engines at the time, like HotBot. You know, and Yahoo, of course, but, and some of that wasn't completely archived, but it's also probably important for folks to remember too, like even in 98, like search engines, yes, they existed and people use them, they, Google wasn't really a thing quite yet, you know, just about, but... Google was a revolution for a reason in 99, 2000 or whenever that hit big, I think it was like 2000 or something. In 1998, there was a preview, in fact, I think I have it bookmarked in Netscape, in that thing, but there's like a preview version of it that you could use, but yeah, it wasn't quite mainstream yet. Well, we're out of time, but I just want to say this was an amazing session at the Art Fair. I appreciate you taking the time to sit down with us and talk through your thinking and how you did it, but then also the fact that you promised that you would blog at all is twice as good as that. Yeah, I'm definitely going to get to blog it. I almost want to do an accompanying stream, kind of walking through some of it, like plug with the Mr. Plugged-in at some point too, but yeah, I need to blog it because honestly, the networking journey here was a little bit harrowing, but we got it to work. It worked. And I had a backup plan of like, well, we could run like DOS games and that'll be fun, but I will say like, I mentioned that when we were setting this up at Meredith's house, just to test things out days before the conference, and Tim was like, no, you gotta get the network. This is super cool. This is the web. He was like pulling up his friends' fans' webpage, like, and it was so cool. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Taylor, for everything and really for a brilliant art fair share. Thanks. Yeah!