 I'm here for more systems and I just got back a couple days ago from vintage computer festival 2023 in Chicago and it was a lot of fun. Now, for those of you that didn't know I was into retro tech, I do like it because I believe it teaches us a lot of fundamentals about how technology works. Also, a lot of this wasn't called retro tech. When I got into it, it was just the tech of the day. So I get to relive some of the history of things I started with. Also had the chance to meet some fellow YouTube creators who are creating content and I also realized a few of the retro computer people followed my channel. So I got to interact with people and subscribe to my channel. So that was awesome. That was amazing. I love, you know, coming up and interacting and talking to people. It's kind of, you know, get away from just talking to a camera and talk to real life humans. It's a lot of fun and me and Jason's Lego went together. So we're going to talk in an interview here about some of the fundamentals and important things that I think matter about preserving this history of our technology. I'm also going to give a shout out to many of the creators I met and leave some links to some retro tech channels. Maybe you didn't know they existed. They can be a little bit harder to find because niche content is a little bit trickier sometimes on YouTube to discover. But it was cool meeting all those people and I love helping them out. So if you want to check out any of those channels, if that's something you're into, the retro technology, they'll be linked down below. Let's jump into an interview with me and Jason Slagle. All right, Jason, how we doing today besides a little sick from the conference? Yeah, I don't know if it's from the conference or not. But yeah, I'm doing OK. I'm doing as well as can be expected being sick. Had to cancel my trip to Chicago tomorrow, which is a little bummer, but it's fine. But this trip to Chicago was definitely fun. The vintage community festival was I don't. It's so intriguing seeing like it's like a trip down memory lane. And it's like we're kids all excited. Like I was I remember when I first touched this device. Yeah, it's very intriguing. It's interesting because, you know, it had a lot of machines for my childhood. I saw my grandmother had an Apple II II or 2G. It was a 2E and then she also had an Atari 800 XL, whereas I had a Commodore 64 and then later an Amiga 500. So, you know, it really was a trip down memory lane. And I kind of want some of those machines. I know you were talking about it, too. Yeah, you get excited because I see these TRS-80s. They were the first computers that really learned programming and understood memory registers and all those basic functions because you you almost quickly run into the limitations if you try to write software for them. So that's what I think drove the innovation of the time. There's not these large frameworks that people have on a build a tool. Now they're like, oh, no, I have to get tricky and figure how I can craft this memory register and swap it out to make a sprite work or something like that with the game. It's so like I feel and I'm not trying to dog on programmers of the day, but there's still a little bit of a little bit wants to because, you know, there's there's spoiled. They don't have to do this. They are 100 percent spoiled, right? Like the entire ROM for Super Mario Brothers is what, like 8K or 32K or something ridiculously small. And like you don't even the graphic on the opening screen, the PDF with the installation instructions is larger than the entire game of Super Mario Brothers. The really cool thing about the whole vintage computer festival is it's not like everything's in a museum. It's like being in museum where everyone wants to talk about it. Everyone's an expert on what's at their table and you get two hands on. My wife was saying like, oh, don't touch it. I'm like, it literally says, please touch this. And the moment I picked up the controller, the guy wanted to break down the history of how this came to be, the programming he did. He wrote a custom game for this old system. And that is part of like the enthusiasm there. It's not a vendor driven show. It is pure unadulterated enthusiasm of everyone sharing their knowledge of this technology. Yeah. I mean, everyone that is there clearly wanted to be there right for the love of the equipment, right? Not for any other reason. Yeah. And I think they came through, especially the tech YouTubers who are up there, retro tech, specifically, YouTubers are up there is I always look at YouTube as you start with your passion and you try to figure out how to make it into a video and get it on YouTube. It always is driven by that. And no exceptions up there on the stage. We had eight big guy and a bunch of others up there just like talking the details about the, you know, why they produce the video. Some of their pet peeves, which I brought up about YouTube as a creator. There's certain annoyances that the platform has, especially when you're creating in niches and you're not trying to Mr. Beastify your content, as I've heard it referred to a lot. We're not trying to smash or destroy old technology. We're trying to preserve it, teach people about it. And so it was really cool. Yeah, the YouTube panel was actually really neat. I have started watching the serial port after leaving. So I'm watching some of his back videos. The interesting, I can't tell if it's real or perceived back and forth between Adrian Black and a big guy was interesting. I can't tell if they actually like each other or if they don't. It's it was it was fun. We can say that they don't all 100 percent agree and approach, but that also makes it fun. It's not drama. They have different opinions on different approaches to some of the technology. But you can learn from both of them. And it's it's kind of a cool rabbit hole. I'm happy that at least to some extent, the more I watch some of these other channels, the YouTubers and I'll link them link down below, you get suggested others. I've been following and yes, hacker. It's just fun to learn about all the programming of these CPUs and things like that. This whole history has just been I'm still as excited as I was two days ago when I was there. It's it's also really interesting to see what some of these people do, right? Like I watched he wasn't there, but the latest usagi electric video and somebody on his discord with high res photos of these boards basically produced complete schematics for this rare computer system that I had never heard of. And now those schematics and the information they've gained are saved in history, right? So like if somebody else comes across that computer later, they can fix it and work on it based on the work that these people with no real monetary gain for doing it have done. Yeah, and it's there's interesting if you drew a Venn diagram with some of the people that we also know in tech who are really good at their current, you know, modern computer jobs, they're interested in it, Dave was there from Huntress. And it's it's fun because I love learning these fundamentals. So you stay really teach you that once you understand the basics, it's kind of like this really cool building block to understand modern and current tech. And you also you don't think of the I call it the technician. Just go, I don't know. Scuzzy just magics and you know, there's a lot of history and how that works and how we got here today. So me and you think of I scuzzy and people. Yeah, it's just this thing we connect to over a NAS or a sand network. We're going on. Oh, we know the history before it got to be a protocol like a work over IP. Yeah, I actually bought a blue scuzzy while I was there because I've got a bunch of retro stuff that I'm going to start getting to work. And the old scuzzy drives are they're loud, they're power consuming and they're not reliable, right? So like the ability to use an SD card to at least bootstrap the systems, you know, eventually maybe I'll put real drives back in them. But during the troubleshooting process, eliminating the drives as a source of failure is really is useful. It's the yeah, I would I would tend to agree that I have a general understanding of like how computers work because of how I came through it, right? It's like, OK, you know, maybe I'm using Ruby or maybe I'm using Python, right, which is an interpreted language on top of that. But in my brain, I go to what machine code is that likely running on the backside? Now, with modern x86 assembly, that's really hard with pipelines and all the other stuff. It's yeah, I'm a little bit lost there. And that's exceeded my capabilities of keeping up with it. But in the end, I can tell you why that thing is likely faster than the other thing, just based on what it likely turns into machine code wise. Yeah. And I think that's where this really gives me thinking again when I was on there and, you know, part of the reason I'm even posting this is not just because I want to share my love of the festival and vintage computers, but also, you know, maybe we'll cover some of this. I mean, you talked a lot about some of the vintage networking we seen. I don't know that I'd cover the PBX stuff. The vintage meridian stuff was awesome. They had set up here. I really think it's cool, a little outside of what I would probably go through setting up. I think there's some fun fundamentals because there were some token ring networks and they're fun to talk about. That's it's the fundamentals of networking of how this data was transported. And it gives you a good understanding and basis for networking that you can build on from a concept standpoint. Yeah. And the cool thing about it is, you know, even up to, say, you know, you can do token ring, right? The 16 or the 16 megabit or the eight megabit variety of it. Arkinet, right? That's another one that wasn't really covered. Even 10 meg ethernet, the data rates are slow enough. You can use an oscilloscope and actually see what's happening on the line, right? So like you can get a base level understanding of, oh, this is what a frame actually looks like on the wire. And that information, I don't know. I don't know how useful it is or how relevant it is, but I find it fascinating. Yeah, I, you know, just doing the electronic repair, once you think about the signaling, as you said, now it happens so fast, it's almost mind boggling how you just see a number when you're looking at the specs of the speed of the processor runs, but it's mind boggling compared to the way we started with it. And it's much harder to trace with an oscilloscope. You can't see the same ups and downs. It just happened way too fast, but it's still the intrigue of it all. But that's also why I wanted to post this on here on my channel. Let us know, audience, if you want to see a little bit more, some of the retro stuff or maybe a couple of history dives, right? Dive into some of these topics with Jason, because we were there. We started with some of this stuff. We think it's fun to talk about and kind of preserve some of the history on it. It's preserved as YouTube is, but I keep all of my original. So I'll upload them to wherever if YouTube is not some time in the future, the place to keep these things. Yeah. And I mean, I have a reasonable collection of vintage stuff. It's mostly old Unix stuff, right? So I have some deck stuff. I have some VMS, a Vax and some Solaris and some SGI stuff, but yeah, maybe maybe I'll try to get some of that stuff going on my channel. There is also definitely some people asking about some of the tape drive stuff. And I know I've seen some of that at the Toledo office. Yeah, I have here. I think I got rid of my DLT drive, but I definitely have a couple LTO drives here and then more at the office. So definitely something to play with. One last question, Jason, what was the coolest thing you've seen there? Was it the Amigos or which one? There was a PDP 11. The guy was selling it. He was asking, I was talking to my buddy. You were hanging out in the discord we were in about it. It's cool to see a fully racked PDP 11. I'd say that was cool. The ESSA or the step switches, the telco step switch was really cool. And then, you know, just seeing things like faxes running there. And the number of Commodore 128Ds, I guess that's the surprising thing. I didn't know that many of them still existed. There's so many of them. I only seen one Famicom system, but it was in mint condition. That thing was just pristine. I thought that was really cool. And the lots of TRS 80s and other ones, those are, those are neat. But yeah, there's, when you get to the really old stuff, it's the fact that some of that stuff still turns on pretty cool. All right. I'll leave links to the vintage computer festival. Some of those YouTubers, if you want to dive into the retro, they're all great people to follow on there. And thanks.