Hello everyone And welcome to the switch statement podcast It's a podcast for investigations into miscellaneous tech topics This is the third episode in our series on masters of doom by David Kushner. Chapter three. Uh, dangerous Dave in copyright infringement. Hey John, what's up?
Jon:Hey Matt, um, nothing much is up. What's up with you?
Matt:Not too much. Um, have you ever infringed on anyone's copyright?
Jon:probably like inadvertently, but I've never made money off of the copyright infringement, so it's all been okay.
Matt:I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't include this in the podcast, but we got our website taken down
Jon:Oh yeah,
Matt:uh, um, we were hosting old tests, you know, formerly publicly available, uh, tests of the ACT.
Jon:and they're no longer publicly available?
Matt:aCtually I think they're still publicly available, but I think they just don't want them hosted on someone else's website, basically.
Jon:Right, right. But we weren't aware of that. Uh, and we immediately took it all down and complied with all of their demands.
Matt:Truth, truth, um, which, uh, that's a little different than the copyright infringement in, in chapter three of masters of doom.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:but maybe we'll, maybe that'll just be the tease for the, for the end of this or like kind of the reveal, what, what are they gonna, which copyright are they going to infringe? Um, but yeah, so when last we spoke. John Carmack was driving his brown car to Shreveport.
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:that in, uh, Louisiana?
Jon:I don't know. Shreveport. I wanted to say, like I, I'm, I bet there's many Shreveport's, but I don't know which one this is
Matt:Well, I think the, I think the most famous Shreveport is in Louisiana. Um, and that is where... Now, what was this company called? Uh... Sss...
Jon:Subscription Club. Is that the name of the company?
Matt:a... That was, I think that was like... Oh, is it Soft, just Soft Disk is the name of... Yeah.
Jon:And they had a software subscription club.
Matt:Yes, yeah, you could subscribe to the Software Subscription Club. And, as you mentioned, yeah, in the last one, they just had an army of programmers just churning out software every month
Jon:Yeah. Yeah. It sounds super fun. It's just like, you get a task at the beginning of the month, just work on it throughout the month and throw it out there at the end.
Matt:It's so funny because, like, the concept of, of bugs in that world, it's like, what does that even mean? You know, do you even have to, do you even have a bug tracker? Uh,
Jon:Yeah. Well, I mean, once the,
Matt:it's out there,
Jon:yeah, once the
Matt:once the disc is out, it's like, someone just grumbles and is like, Alright, well, like, what can I do about this?
Jon:This was the first chapter where they mentioned. Ideas from the Deep. Do you recall this, the mention of Ideas from the Deep?
Matt:I'm blanking on what that, uh, what that referenced.
Jon:Yeah, I think it was the name of, uh, either, like, one of the subscriptions they offered, or like, yeah, one of the companies that were sort of internal to, to Softdisk. But is that where id comes from?
Matt:Oh, what? Yes. I think, I guess that, does that, is that where that comes from? I mean, I would have to take your word for it.
Jon:Oh, I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm genuinely asking. Because... I don't know. It just struck me.
Matt:Okay. Here we go. So, Romero had a company called Capital Ideas, which, man, seemed like a pretty boring name for Romero's company. I thought it would have been like, I don't know, Flaming Death.
Jon:Yeah. Metal. Yeah.
Matt:Um, and then Blue Mountain Micro, they joined together to make ideas from the deep. Um,
Jon:It just feels like a precursor to Id. But I'm not sure.
Matt:Well spotted. Yeah, I guess we will find out. That was a little, yeah, that was a little hint. Um, but so, so, when we come into this chapter, Romero is working for Softdisk.
Jon:Right.
Matt:And then, um, so Carmack comes in for a job interview. And then Carmack is kind of like haughtily like, Alright, there's no way I'm going to take this job. There's just a bunch of turds, a bunch of suits, writing terrible software, but then he meets Romero and I don't know, have, has this happened to you? at the risk of over selling our friendship. I felt like we had some of this where it's like you go through your day a day and like, Most conversations are not, like, super intellectually stimulating. Um, it's not like they're boring, like, cause you're not an asshole, but like, there's some people who, when you're talking to them, there's like an electricity. Because there's this ba there's this dy dynamic back and forth, they're bringing up ideas that you hadn't considered, and like, yeah, it's just, uh, I I I heard this in their first meeting,
Jon:I definitely was reminded of when we met. Because it was similar in a way. Because we were both Really passionate about weird stuff that like no one else ever talks about and like, I remember I was using this software called Blender, which is this 3D modeling software that, you know, if you work at Google, people don't really talk about 3D modeling very often because it's not something the company does. But I was always interested in that for some reason, probably because I love video games. And I just remember you coming up and being like, is that Blender?
Matt:I basically accosted you, like, you were just, like, on your computer, and, like, I, as, as, I've mentioned in the podcast before, I'm not a very social person, but,, like, this just,, broke through my, social hesitance, uh, to, I had to be, like, Wait a minute, are you working on Blender right now? Let's, let's be best friends, uh,
Jon:No, and I definitely remember just kind of instantly liking you. It felt like we were, we were just very simpatico. We had similar ways of thinking about things and yeah, complimentary ideas and stuff.
Matt:it. I don't know that I've ever met someone else who would spend, like, a long time writing software that would, like, analyze the incidence of prime numbers and how they aligned when you, align them at different, widths. That's when I was sold on, uh, our friendship.
Jon:Yeah. It's very nice when you find someone who's just as weird as you are, it can feel very, you know, satisfying. one of the phrases I loved in this, uh, at the. I think it was in the beginning of this chapter at some point was Romero was talking about, he was, he wanted to grow as an engineer and he wanted to pick up this hot new programming language called C.
Matt:Yes, yeah, yeah.
Jon:I just thought that was awesome. It's like hot new programming language, C.
Matt:You, I mean, you raise a really good pointer. Like, this is something that was, like, running in the back of my mind when all this happening is there's so much, like, history before C, to programming and to computers. And, like, they're talking about, like, the relative capabilities of the PC versus the Apple 2. There's so much, technical context that I just lack about this, this time period. Like, I don't know what their relative capabilities were. Like, why? They go into some of the detail. And, like, it's also not clear to me, like, why is PC the future if it seems like it's an underpowered... Terrible, like a computing device. Like these are all questions that are running through my mind. And I just don't really, I don't know why, you know, why they're doing the things that they're doing. But, um, but it did just strike me as funny that like, Oh, this new high level language, C
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:yeah. Mm
Jon:from the history standpoint. Another thing about this chapter, sort of similar to what you're talking about, uh, that it was sort of a reminder about Nintendo, where... I think today we think of Nintendo as like an amazing video game company, but they're not like on the bleeding edge in terms of technology. they kind of are in terms of like form factor. Like I think they're very innovative with, you know, the, uh, the Wii had the like swingy controls and all that stuff. But I don't think people think of them as on the bleeding edge of like graphics and, you know, pushing the boundaries of computing power and all those things. But back in this day that this book is centered around, they were. Like their technology, the way that they did video games was super, super advanced. And, uh, they discussed John Carmack doing all of these brilliant things to try to emulate what the Nintendo was doing. Which I just found, you know, sort of a reminder to like how ahead video game consoles were.
Matt:Yeah. That confused me a little bit because I was like, wait a minute, you have all these PCs. That are supposed to be these, like, business machines, literally, like IBM, but, um, And then you had the Nintendo, which had already been out for a while, and like, was able to do some of these things seemingly with ease. And, and what, like, I guess what I, I chalked it up to the fact that Nintendo had a very specific idea in mind of what it wanted this machine to be able to do. And so. It was able to to do this basically custom logic that made scrolling across the screen very easy, or just like some of the core functionality of the machine. Whereas on, on IBM, like our, for PCs, they never saw them as needing to do this sort of functionality. So they didn't have any native support to do those things.
Jon:exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, PC's very general purpose.
Matt:yeah, um, and that's why, you know, at, at the end of the chapter, they talk about some of this, these brilliant things that Carmack is able to do to, to get it, to do these things. Um, and I think, I guess, I guess the idea that like, they're so widely available cause people are buying them cause they are just general purpose, but then the fact that they can then go on to do something. You have this custom built hardware to do is like a game changer. And that's why everyone was super excited about this idea.
Jon:right. Yeah, exactly. Um, couple other things I thought were very interesting. They mentioned a character, uh, Jay. So they, they introduced a ton of characters in this chapter. It was kind of like hard to keep track of. Cause there was Big Al and Jim Mangham who were, I think were the owners of Softdisk. They mentioned another character, Jay, who was just this colorful guy that was Romero's friend, I guess. Uh, but I was going to mention, have you ever seen the movie Cocktail? The Tom Cruise film where he's like a cocktail waiter.
Matt:right. No, no, I have not. Uh,
Jon:Because they just mentioned this very, what I thought was a very amusing factoid, which is this guy, Jay, who worked at Softdisk actually taught Tom Cruise some of the like cocktail tricks that he did in the film, which I just found hilarious. It's like, what is this weird connection? Yeah.
Matt:And I guess so, right. They talked about Jay as being good, like sales. Person, I think, like who, he understood the code at a deep enough level to be like a really good sales person.
Jon:Right. He was a super gregarious guy. He wasn't the type of guy that could sit in front of a computer for like eight hours.
Matt:yeah, yeah, yeah. Um,
Jon:But yeah, what you were talking about, uh, where, like when Carmack is first introduced to Romero, Lane and Romero are like basically best friends. They're like the duo who's, they work together a lot and they initially talk about how well the three of them got along. Like Carmack was like, Oh, these two other guys are just like me. But then as the chapter goes on, there's this very sad part where Lane basically just can't keep up, for whatever reason.
Matt:this was kind of like a character assassination on lane in the last half of this.
Jon:yeah. And Carmack and Romero sort of turn to each other at one point when Lane's not in the room, and they're like, We gotta get rid of this guy. And I just found that very depressing.
Matt:Yeah. That's what I always, that's what I fear. Fear you're going to find some, some hot new programmer and you're just going to kick, kick me out of the podcast.
Jon:Nah, that would never happen, man.
Matt:But yeah, so, um, so then there's this other guy they introduced called Tom. Um, and Tom, Tom sounds like the guy, the kind of guy that I like, If I was a little bit less restrained as a person and like less worried about what other people thought, I think I would be like. Tom. Um, cause they describe him as like, just being like a complete class clown,
Jon:he makes alien chirping noises and him and Romero sort of trade these like verbal barbs. Like I actually wrote one down because I was so kind of blown away by
Matt:like nauseated.
Jon:Go press your man beef in a sheep's musky hollows. It's like what does that even mean? But anyway, that was the type of stuff that Tom Hall would say to.
Matt:we're not gonna say, uh, what it means. Um, I think that would get our podcast, uh, canceled.
Jon:Yeah, this podcast is now F rated. Er, wait, that's not even a rating.
Matt:X,
Jon:Axe, yeah.
Matt:yeah, a hundred percent more man beef in this episode.
Jon:I, I had a couple, a couple more random things that I wanted to mention that I can just throw out really quickly. For one, they mentioned this game, Defender. Which, I remember, I think I played Defender. Well, like around the time, maybe not around the time it came out, but when I was very young, I played Defender cause it was like this space scrolling game and I just have this like indelible memory of playing it. And I think it was one of the first games where they, they had juice, you know, the game cause a lot of games way back in the day just felt like they get the mechanics in and there was no, you know, there's no real juice, like the screen wouldn't shake or like, whatever. But Defender had this really cool thing where when you got hit, the game would sort of like pause time, and then your ship would explode, and I just remember really liking that. Also, another thing about Defender, I found the source code on Github. It's posted to Github, you can look through it.
Matt:is it written in?
Jon:it's some assembly type language. It's very, you know, it's all just like command and then registers and stuff,
Matt:Could you even run it today?
Jon:I don't know. I mean, that'd be really cool to be able to run Defender with original source, but I have no idea how to do that.
Matt:I guess you'd have to emulate whatever the hardware was, but...
Jon:And then one, one last funny thing, or I just found this hilarious. Uh, they were talking about like big revolutions in gaming and how John Carmack was trying to figure out these like really cool, innovative things for his engine. And one of the things they discussed for quite a while, actually, was scrolling. Just being able to, like, scroll the camera back and forth as, like, a character moves. I just, yeah.
Matt:they make this game called Slordax, which is just fantastic, that's a, uh, S L O R D A X, um, and it's revolutionary because it can do this vertical scrolling, and, and they use this line in the book which is like, Romero had never seen anything like it,
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:And like, it was just like a tremendous overstatement because it was like, this, this came out in 1991 and there had been like, you know, if you go back to like Galaxian in 1978,
Jon:Yeah.
Matt:these hardware machines that could do this sort of vertical scrolling, obviously, like, well, the graphics were much simpler, I think it's a testament to how hard the problem was, because you have literally like a game from, you know, over ten years earlier that could do similar things, and you're only just able to do that on the PC. the way it was framed was so confusing because it was like, it was just that it had never been done in the constraints of the PC before. Um,
Jon:Yeah, exactly. Like, we already talked about Nintendo, like, Nintendo had games that were scrolling, you know, since the very beginning. So it's kind of funny. But Yeah, apparently Carmack had to do a lot of, you know, very, uh, sort of unique techniques to, in order to figure out scrolling for the PC because it was so inefficient, I guess.
Matt:This is, this is the funny thing. I had a note about, like, programming with constraints you had to really, work around the system to do the stuff. I'm not making like high performance video games. Maybe they still have to hack the system in order to improve performance. If you really are trying to eat every little bit of performance, but I feel like the vast majority of my programming experience, it's like, if you're hacking around something, like that's a bad thing. That's seen as like, Oh God, like this is going to be terrible. No, no one's going to understand what this is supposed to do. And like. You shouldn't be doing that. And, and by and large, like, there's more than enough performance so that you don't have to do that.
Jon:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Google has a very interesting framework for thinking about this where they just discuss the latency of various operations. In software and when you're doing web programming, which is primarily what Google does, the bottleneck is the network request, so you just don't need to worry about optimizing like an HTTP, you know, handler because it's just that's not going to be the bottleneck unless you're literally has some N cubed algorithm, you know, scrolling through imagery or something. So it is interesting. I think it happens more frequently in video games where you do have to worry about some optimizations. But yeah, I would agree that that style of programming is much more rare. And in a lot of cases, it's like not what you want to be doing. know, it's like, pre optimizing and it just makes the code harder to read or harder to work with.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. exactly. So, just to tee up the next chapter. so we talked about Slordax. Slordax was able to scroll vertically. But the problem with Slordax was you were on rails, like you, it just, it was just scrolling. The, the player did not control the pace at which it scrolled.
Jon:Right.
Matt:In, so, but now Carmack continued to optimize, continued to optimize. And eventually, he was able to get this Nintendo style scrolling. Tom, who we talked about, the weirdo, before, talking about his man beef, he showed Tom a proof of concept. And literally, like, overnight, in the office, they caught, they, uh, wrote a clone of Super Mario using, their own assets. And that's where the title comes from, they called the game, uh, Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement.
Jon:right. Yeah. And John Romero walks in the next day and it's sitting on his desk and he puts it in his computer and he's just completely blown away. And he's like, guys, we made it. Like we have this tech now we can do anything.
Matt:I haven't actually read the next chapter yet, but it sounds like they're about to just like, just peace out. They're like, Nope, we have, we have game changing technology and we're going to start a new company. we'll just have to have to wait for, chapter four? all right, well, I'll see you next time, John.
Jon:All right. Till the next time.