casio watch non stop

so today, we are talking to stewartcheifet. hello, stewart. hello. and you are very much known for yourcomputer show that you did for 20 years. that would be the computerchronicles. well, i'm very pleased that you agreed for the interview, sothank you for that. sure, pleasure to talk with you. thank you. would you start, please,in telling us about how you started to be a television presenter,actually? well that's a long story, but i'll try tomake it short. before the computer chronicles,

i had done general news work as a tv reporter,so i'd been doing this tv journalism, covering all kinds of things before computer chroniclesever started. and the fact is, i also happen to be a lawyer, so i was covering trials anddoing legal stuff as a reporter also. and the technology part just came out of my personalinterest. as a college undergraduate, i was a math major, so i've always been a sort ofgeeky kind of guy, and when the pc revolution started, i thought: "well, this is fun, solet's do a tv show about that." okay, so you said you're originally alawyer, so you did law stuff for television side of the law orsomething? a little bit both. when i got out of school,i actually went to work for american news

network or abc news in new york, and i coveredgeneral things and then i actually worked in europe, i worked in paris for a while workingfor cbs news, and then i did some other things; i went to los angeles and i actually producedcourtroom television shows, and one thing led to another and i eventually got into thetechnology field. okay. so you said you started with itwhen you saw the computer business takes off? actually, the show startsat 1983. so did you do anything before the computer chronicles? actually, before the computer chronicles,there was a local show in the san francisco area in 1982. and on the history, that iskind of interesting, is you can think back

-- were you born in 1982? yes, i'm born in 1982. you think back to that period of time whenpersonal computers are just coming about, and we had trs 80 and apple ii and that kindof stuff. there wasn't very much of a support system of information and knowledge for thesecomputer users. it was all pretty much a hacker's community. and as you well know, the big wayyou got information about what to do with all these new things, was you joined the usersgroup, and you went to a users group meeting every thursday night at 8 o'clock at someguy's basement, and: "how do you see that thing?" and "did you figure out that gadget?"and "how do you this?". so my brainstorm was

instead of having a users group meeting where20 guys sit around and drink beer, why don't we have a million people around the country,around the world attending a meeting. and that was the genesis of computer chronicles. how you got the idea to do thecomputer chronicles? frankly, i did the show for myself. i wasone of those guys -- there were no computer magazines at the time, the only way to getinformation was from some other guy who was smarter than you were. and so, i guess myfirst computer was the radioshack trs model 80. i bought a couple of computer kits andso just sort of messed around. i guess when i was looking for help, and i found it throughpeople i knew who knew more about this stuff

than i did. i really wasn't a computer scienceguy; i was a math major, so i had an inclination, but i didn't know computer stuff that well.and i just thought it'd be a great idea to get smart people together in a room or ina studio and talk about the newest stuff, and help guys like me figure out what wasworth buying, what was worth spending your money on and how you can fix problems. so the idea was actually to combineyour computer hobby with your work? exactly. that means you have your dream job,kind of. interesting. so i was watching past interviews, for exampleat the triangle show, and you

mentioned that when you started theshow, it was very hard to get people being interviewed and being guests inyour show. you mentioned, especially steve jobs was like, "why should isupport your show that nobody knows yet?" so how did you get this off andstarting so you could actually get the big guys for the show? well, there were two issues. one was gettingthe big guys to pay for the show, the other was getting the smart guys to be on the showas guests. so they were both challenges when we first started out. people said, "who'sgoing to watch a television show about computers?" you know, i never thought this was going towork. so when we first started out, it was

a local show with no budget for the firstyear. and it was kind of interesting, i might have explained this one to the triangulationshow, but we didn't do anything to promote this show. but even at the time, back in 1982,there were still guys on the network talking to each other, and people just starting saying:"there is a show in san francisco, it actually explain this stuff.", and i started literallygetting phone calls in my office, saying: "can we get this show in buffalo, new york?"and "can we get this show in cleveland, ohio?" and by just answering the phone, like 30 televisionstations around the country took the show, and we said: "oh, i guess this is a good ideaafter all." and that's when we started trying to raise some money, and do it the next yearas a proper national show with higher production

value. well, what we should mention here isthat, at the time this started, it was still like everybody was afraidof touching a computer, being afraid he could break it or something. yes, absolutely. because in those days, youhad to take it apart, right? you're putting in boards and throwing dip switches, and tryingto figure it out; it wasn't easy. nowadays, it's like a refrigerator; you just turn iton. but in the early days, you really had to know what you were doing and you probablycouldn't have broken too much, but that thing's that were so expensive in the early days,you didn't want to take a chance in breaking

something. computers, we can buy for herein the states for 800-900 dollars today were 5000 dollars. the other interesting things i read, actually,by the 20 years, you had over 300 american channels broadcasting the show? at least wikipediasays that. by the time we were into our last couple ofyears, there were actually about 250 stations in the united states, and the show was alsoall around the world in 100 different countries. there's a french version of the show, a spanishversion of the show, an arabic version of the show... yeah, and chinese too, actually, iread.

that wasn't official, but some people on theirown did translations of it in china. ah, interesting. so we could say youare internationally famous? we didn't try, but it just turned that way.i'm always amazed when i go into other countries and people say: "oh, you're the guy from thecomputer chronicles!" i had no idea the show was even on in that country, but it's prettyfascinating. from africa, to europe, to asia; it really became a phenomenon as we promotedit at the time, it really was the world's most popular television show about computers. what was interesting me is, how didyou actually get the knowledge? i was watching tons of shows from thecomputer chronicles, and i actually

figured out that when you interviewedpeople, there was always the impression that you knew what theyare going to talk about, and you had the technical background. but back inthe 80s, you didn't have internet. what did you do to get somebackground and knowledge to make sure that guests don't tell you crap? right, well that was a big issue. a coupleof reasons. i didn't do the show all by myself; we had a staff, and each show would have whatwe'd call a segment producer, and that segment producer would spend a week or two researchinga topic for that show, and they would then provide me with what we used to call a briefingpaper -- maybe a 10 or 20 page thesis on a

particular subject of that show, which i wouldthen study and read. and then i would meet with the guests ahead of time, so i couldanticipate on what they were going to do. and again, we were dealing a lot of timeswith this cutting-edge technology, which half the time didn't work. i not only had to understandthe subject, but understand how to deal with problems and things didn't work and they'dfail. this is what we call live television, so we didn't want too many embarrassing moments.and there were time restraints; we would only have four or five minutes with the guest orwith a product, so we had to do our homework or the show would've been very boring. so what was the first guest you hadand what was the first big thing you

introduced to the show? do you stillremember that? well, we did over 600 shows, so it's likea little bit of memory. the first season was interesting. i do remember the very firstshow we did, it was called "from mainframes to minis to micros" and it looked at the wholeevolution of how we got to the personal computer from those big monster things that used totake up all that space before. the first 26 shows of the series actually got repurposedand became a course, a college course, on introduction to computers. in fact, probablymost don't know, there's actually a book called computer chronicles which was written by aguy who worked for rsi in the silicon valley, that really had a chapter that explained eachof the first 26 shows.

so the first year was really a lot of thebasics. people didn't know much about computers. i have a whole list on my computer, i canpull it up and tell you. hold on one second, i'll see if i can find it. that would be awesome. let's see, i have it right here. the veryfirst show we did. yeah, mainframes to minis to micros; the next show was integrated software;third show was computers and music; the fourth show was computer simulations; the fifth showwas operating systems; word processing; security; robotics; speech; networking; microprocessors;on and on. i see. so with all these years, whatwas your most memorable moment? what

was the best show? what was the bestguest? what did impress you the most from all what you have seen? there are things that impressed me a lot,and things that didn't impress me alot. i guess the most impressive thing early on,was when i saw the first color laser printer. was that xerox? xerox, right. you might have heard this storybefore, but it's a rather funny story. the printer was the size of two volkswagens, andit was gigantic, and there was six engineers who came along to plug in it and hook it upand tweak, and tweak, and try to get it working. and when they first turned it on, the steamcame up and nothing happened, and just sort

of blew up. but eventually, they got it working,and the output was incredible. it was the most gorgeous thing i had ever seen comingout. way back then, you're looking at dot-matrix printers. this thing printed out this gorgeouscolor photo on high-res, it was extraordinary. that was one of the most exciting things,in terms of hardware, that i saw. the funny things were that so many thingshad just never really gotten better, like speech recognition; artificial intelligence;virtual reality. and if i tell the crew, "we're doing a show on midi music" they're like,"oh my god. because we're going to be in there all night long because the stuff didn't work."we're doing a show on virtual reality, "oh my god, we're going to be here until midnight."

so a lot of things didn't work first timearound. i'd say that colored printer was the most amazing thing i had seen at the time.after that, a lot of the productivity tools we did using computers were fun, but everyonce in a while, we've come across an application category that really solved the problem andchanged the way you did things. i was particularly fascinated by artificial intelligence andintelligent systems, unfortunately they never really got very far. but on the other hand, things likesiri, for example, got very famous three years ago with the iphone 4,and people are fascinated by how well the speech recognition actuallyworks, and you just told me it didn't

really improve, so how does this fit? well, it's been 30 years, so yes it's improveda bit, but still there's a lot of frustrated siri users, and i'm one of them. it sort ofworks, but it's obviously gotten a lot better. the period of the 20 years when were doingthis show, not a lot of things changed. every year, somebody would come on and show us,talking to your computer instead of typing it, and it just never worked. if the guy reallypracticed and then did the same 20 sentences every time, it worked, but it took a longtime for that. it's still a challenge, obviously. to me, the most interesting challenge thatstill exists in general between humans and computers, is the interface. qwerty keyboards,it's kind of ridiculous in a way, when you

think about it. ultimately, we should be ableto get to speech and all that kind of stuff. and you think of the early pdas like the newtonwith handwriting; none of that stuff really worked. but what this brain does is prettyhard to emulate. that's true, actually. on the otherhand, i find it always fascinating on how you were actually able to getthings interesting, that were supposed to be boring at the time,back then. for example, i saw this show where you had david crane on theshow for the ghostbusters skit. i guess that was '84 or '83, and backthen, people thought: "oh, computers are just for working, not for havingfun", kind of. and as you know, david

crane was one of those guys who madeactivision and even the first third- party game producer. and i found itfascinating how you managed to make the ghostbusters show actuallyinteresting for the viewers. didn't you think, while you interviewed thepeople, "oh, this must be kind of boring for the people who watch it",and did you try hard to make it exciting? i definitely tried hard to make it exciting.well, it depends. some things are rather easy. certainly, if you're doing games, that's sortof easy to do. what i found fascinating about that period of time -- i'm trying to rememberthe name of the piece of software, i don't

remember the guy. just around that time, wehad another guy on -- i don't know if it was activision or not, i think it was somebodyelse -- and you remember the memory size we had at that time, and the programs had tobe tiny, and this guy had written this space shuttle program. i don't remember what computerit was for, it might have been for amiga -- i don't remember -- and i still have the program.it's unbelievable what this guy squeezed into that space. that was one of the most spectacularthings from a software point of view i ever saw. it's just brilliant coding. so if you look from it now, did youever think that computers and video games would have gone so far as theyare now? the games industry is quite

big, it's bigger than movies industrynowadays. yes. i did frankly, because i was -- not anut, but a pretty big video game fan, and especially simulations where you could dothings on a computer you just couldn't do in real life. and to me, that was absolutelyfascinating. it was like being in the movies, you could interact with things and do activitiesthat in the real world you couldn't do, or you would risk your life by doing in the realworld. whereas on a computer, you can try anything out, so i was pretty much fascinated.i loved the early adventure games, any of those kinds of things where you live in anotherworld and interact with things and people and characters. i always thought that wasone of the most exciting things, and really

created a new reality; in the reality beforecomputers and video games, it was you and me -- normal human beings with flesh; allof a sudden, you could interact and have fun, and play, and be challenged, and compete withthings inside your computer. i still think it's fantastic. and of course, nowadays, withphone apps, it's crazy. so how did you decide who to get forthe shows? it was a pretty regular process for that,each show had a segment producer that was assigned to that show, two weeks before weactually did the show; they would go out -- the thought of the show was, it was pretty complicatedto be a computer consumer at that time; and everybody was telling their thing was thegreatest, and you had to make the decision

as to where to spend your money, and whatto guess was going to work, and what wasn't going to work. and it was pretty burdensome,so i consider it our job to do all the hard work, to do all the leg work. so like goingto a trade show, and visiting a hundred booths, and a hundred things. we saw four or fivereally good ones, and that's the ones we put on the show. so we literally would go do theleg work, the shopping, the hard work, that most normal people don't have time to do,or may not have the knowledge to do it effectively. and then the segment producer would come tome after doing that research and say: "you know, out the 25 things, i think these eightare the most interesting." and then we would then have a meeting with our staff, and i'dlook at them and say: "that's boring" and

"that's interesting" and "that's boring" and"that's interesting"; "let's do these four or five or six." and we just made our bestguesses. but after all it got a budget for theshow, because at the beginning you said you didn't have a budget. the first year when we did this as a localshow, it really was a hobby; nobody got paid anything. luckily, i happen to be runninga tv station at the time, so i had control over tv studio, so i could make the decision,"we're going to do this." it didn't really cost anything. after that, when we went onnational/international basis, and we had to really step it up a little bit more, thenit'd take money and it became a business at

that point. and an interesting business, because the modelthat we would start in public television in the united states, where we gave the showaway for free to stations; they didn't pay for it. it was basically a barter arrangement;we would then sell sponsors in the show, and the stations would then allow us to use theirairtime to promote sponsors, so it was a very odd business model. so we basically gave awaythe show; we never charged anybody for computer chronicles. okay, but at the end, you got moneyfor the show, in the way. from the promotions and stuff?

well, no. it wasn't promotions. by the timethe show was on the air a year or two, we had a million viewers watching every year.and that's a pretty valuable asset if you're a company with a computer product. and justfrom a business point of view, people could buy advertising on television for the latestcomputer gadget, but two-thirds of the people watching television were never going to beinterested in that product; they were just there to be entertained, but the advertisersknew people who watched my show were there for one reason, and that's to be told what'sgood. and so, it was a very effective advertising tool. so we could say that computerchronicles is the reason why the

public got interested in thecomputers, as well. to a large degree, i think it's why peoplewho might have thought it was boring, by actually watching what we tried to make interesting,we didn't just talk about things, we demonstrated it. and hopefully, people would find thatinteresting; and obviously, we weren't the only ones. the thing i loved about doing ourshow -- after a couple of years, of course, there were computer magazines. you can readabout a piece of software, you can read about an application, it's not the same thing asseeing it. on television, you could see it; you can actually see it run from here, tohere. and i thought that was a very impressive way to show off this technology, and to me,was much more fun and much more valuable than

reading about it in a magazine. great. so for example, like theghostbusters game or cell sprinter. if i understood correctly, the firstthing was to give the show away for free, and to go to booth, but i thinkthere was probably a turning point, where ceos and the big guys incompany actually ask you to be on the show. exactly, good point. so going back to thequestion you asked a little while ago -- when we started out, nobody's heard of us and everybodythought it was the dumbest idea in the world. so we would have to plead with people, "oh,we're doing this television show called computer

chronicles, and you think you could come tous?" and of course, we were in the silicon valley, so we had access to a lot of people,but people eventually came from all over the country, all over the world. and so we wouldhave to plead with people to come onto the after a year or two, i think the industrystarted to understand: "this is pretty valuable; to be on the computer chronicles", becausea million get to see your product. so it kind of switched around, and now we are answeringthe phone from pr people all over the country. "oh, can we get our guy on your show?", "canwe get our new thing on your show?", and "this is really cool". it was kind of exciting towatch that flip. but you also had probably put a lotof people down, in a way. right?

of course. not only did we let people down,that we didn't get them on the show, the biggest problem was, people would come on the show,and a lot of times we get these executives. two interesting problems: we get the executivefrom the computer company. number one; generally, they didn't know anythingabout the product. they'd have to bring someone hiding behind them and pressing the buttons,because they didn't really know how to run the technology. that was one problem. the next problem, these people were used tobeing in trade shows, and being in booths were they had a pre-written spiel. "here'sthe way; i spend 20 minutes, and i explain the product." and that's why people used tocriticize me, because i was constantly interrupting

these guests saying, "no, that's not whatwe want. i want the straight stuff, i don't want your pitch. we're not in a trade showright now. you got a million normal people, who want to hear the truth about what thisthing can do and what it can't do." so we disappointed a lot of people by not lettingthem do it the way they wanted to do it; the way they were used to doing it. so there weretwo issues there. but you couldn't always avoid it. insome shows, you can clearly hear that people were speaking like on ateleshopping show. absolutely, absolutely. i would try my best,but you know this is the real world; we only have so much time, and sometimes we do a segmenttwo or three times, and sometimes facing some

guy who is the marketing director of xyz computercompany, just flown 3,000 miles, gone to our studio, take them two days off from work.they'd make a big investment on being on the show, and they wanted to get a return on theirinvestment, basically; and that's not what i wanted. i wanted my audience to be enlightened;their not necessarily the same thing. i'm sure one of the most watchedshows on youtube, is the show where you had jack tramiel to show up. oh, yes. so what was your experience with him?because it's known that he never did a lot of interviews, because healways said in the few interviews

that he did, that a couple of mediapeople quoted him wrong, and he didn't want interviews anymore. sohow was it for you to have him in the studio, and to talk to him? well, it was pretty exciting, number one.i mean, jack tramiel was a legend from my point of view. i was a big commodore fan,i still have a couple of amigas right here in my office. so it's very exciting for meto meet him. i was lucky, we got to meet him through gary kildall. as you may know gary,he was my co-host in the first ten years or so, and worked with jack tramiel and someof his early optical gadgets that he was working on.

so it's gary who talked jack into coming ontothe show, and i think jack's son sam was on the show too, as i recall. and it was reallythanks to gary kildall that he agreed to do that, and he felt a little more comfortablebecause gary was going to be there, and he knew gary, so i wasn't just some other journalistwho was going to be stupid. and with gary there, and it was a some credibility, andif all else failed, he could just talk to gary instead of me. he was very interesting, i just had a meetinga week ago, with some people who are putting together a movie on the life of jack tramiel,and it's quite an interesting story. and i thought he was interesting, because he wasn'ta silicon valley guy. everybody else we dealt

with, was sort of the same, the sort of youngtechy type of guy. this was an older european businessman, bottomline guy, who was ableto see the future and realize that: "hey, this personal computer thing is going to big.a lot more interesting than calculators, or adding machines", whatever he was doing originally. it was quite an exciting thing for me to meetjack, he's a very interesting character and not easy to deal with, but this was all thanksto gary kildall's intervention. i heard that in interviews, he wassometimes not easy to handle. he was a no bullshit kind of guy, and in thisworld, everybody's always doing pr, pr, pr; nice, nice, nice; but not telling the truth.he was the truth guy.

i guess jack knew gary because of thecpm deal they did? or how did they know each other? i don't think it was so much the cpm deal,but when gary got very much into the early disc stuff. i don't remember all the detail.one of my prized possessions, is the very first digital optical encyclopedia. gary madea deal, i think it was at the time, to actually take their entire encyclopedia and digitizeit, and put it on a disc. at the time, we didn't have dvds and the cd-roms didn't haveenough space. so he put it on a laserdisc, this old fashioned huge 10-inch, has the firstsearchable digital encyclopedia. and actually, to jack tramiel's credit, he was interestedin this. they first started to go-- i don't

remember exactly what it was, but gary wasdoing some really interesting work in optical storage stuff, and that's when he and jackfirst connected, i believe. okay, they actually knew each otherfrom business apart from the show? yes. they're total opposites. gary was allintelligent, coder, scientist-type guy; jack was all business kind of guy. so they completelycomplemented each other. i don't know how they ever had a conversation, but as a team,they were a great team each one did for the other, what the other didn't have. looking back at the episodes you did,weren't you concerned that you are a bit biased because you were promotinggary's inventions in your show, at

some point? no, i think it was just the opposite, in fact.what gary had done, obviously at that time, was really a very small piece of the market.gary sort of kept us on us. i mean, you know the whole long story about gary and microsoft.every time i'd say, "we're going to do this thing for microsoft." "wait a minute, i've got a better of that!dri is working on this thing which way better than windows! gary was always fighting withme. "if you're going to show that, you got to show my thing." this visual environment.he came up with something before windows; it was competing with windows, basically,and competing with the mac. gem. graphical

environment management. it was called gem.that was a gary digital research product, and in some ways it could do things that windowsand a mac couldn't do at the time. so he was very competitive in that sense. i don't reallyfeel we promoted gary's stuff too much, but to keep gary smiling and happy, we had togive him a little bit of space to say: "hey, i did something that's better than what microsoftis doing." or "i'm doing something better than what apple is doing." just let peoplesee it. i see, i see. so interesting thingis, after all you did this for 20 years, did you ever think it wouldcome to an end? and the big question is, why did it actually end in 2002?

well, that's a really good question. you mayrecall at around 2002, it was a really slump in the economy in the silicon valley; businesshad become very, very bad; the dot com bust and lots of companies who raised money weregoing out of business. it frankly became very hard financially to support the show after20 years, because the economy wasn't so good in the computer industry. that was numberone. number two; computers had become so commonplace, that our strength explaining complicated thingswasn't such a strength anymore, because thing weren't that complicated anymore. you wentto the store and bought a computer from best buy. so a lot of things that the show wasvaluable for, weren't quite as valuable later on. we had to get a little more gadget-oriented.the third thing was, i was tired doing the

show every single week for 20 years. i justneeded a break. the final thing is, the industry did get alittle boring at that time. in the first 20 years, every week there was innovation, butas there was more mergers and microsoft took over everything, and apple took over everything,a lot of the little guys just disappeared, and it really wasn't the same exciting wildwest environment that it was for those first 20 years. so i think all those things addedtogether i said, "i think i got to take a break." do you think the internet is thereason? because around that time, the internet was dsl, digital subscriberline, here in europe. everybody got a

dsl line, which was 760 kilobits persecond. still horribly slow, but compared to modem, it was awesome. sodo you think it has to do with internet? people could lookeverything up, they didn't need computer shows anymore? i think that's a little bit of it. i thinkthe trouble, the economics of the internet at the time, didn't allow people to do whatwe were doing in terms of the high production value and bringing in the top people fromaround the country to talk about things. today, as you know, there's probably 500 computerchronicles clones online. but since this one guy, sitting in his basement, talk over 20minutes about something -- nobody ever quite

was able to duplicate what we did. but there'sno question about it; it became a lot easier to access information, and the demand forthat information was less than it was during the first 20 years when we started up. wealso did other things that were unique. as you may know, we traveled around the world,went to major conferences in different countries, in different continents and so on, and nobodydoing a website really had the resources to do that. but they do make a good point. i think it quit in 2002, i don't think theinternet was a big factor. the internet was a big factor in why i didn't bring it back,because the competition now was quite different than it had been original.

and if you had the offer to bring itback, would you actually do that? absolutely. i was just in a conference beforeour little skype conference here, with someone talking about that. and the amazing thingis, to me, the show's went off the air for 10/12 years or something now, but it's onlineeverywhere. i get e-mails every single day from people who watch in online. what amazesme, i get e-mails from 13 year old kids. "this is cool! this is so fascinating to see thoseold stuff!" why the hell are they interested in this stuff? so i think enough has changednow. i mean, the whole mobile world, the whole apps world, the whole wireless world. i thinkit's a little more exciting now. we're thinking about bringing it back, and frankly, i getan e-mail a day saying: "oh, why don't you

bring that show back? it would definitely be great to haveit back. and that leads me to another interesting question. we interviewedso many people in the last two years, even people like ralph baer, who isknown as the father of video gaming, who is 92 at the moment, and he'sstill active inventing electronic toys, and i wonder, because i figureda lot of people from the pioneer days, they never stopped. did youever consider stopping what you are doing right now, or will you be oneof those dinosaurs who will do this forever?

i certainly did stop. i mean, i've alwaysbeen doing television or journalism at some form or another even after computer chronicles,but not always in the technology field. frankly, i get so many requests from people saying,"bring back the show", and maybe that's a compliment, that people think that's a goodidea, especially as you say, with all the internet stuff out there these days. but it'san expensive thing to do, but if we could, we're just literally talking about that rightnow. but i mean, i still get these love letters from fans, from viewers, saying: "oh, it'sthe greatest show ever!" and "why don't you bring it back?" and so on and so forth. soit will be fun, yeah, and i'm not that old that i can't do it.

so do we have to cut this out or isthis not that big of a secret actually? not a secret at all. i haven't done anythingto actively promote it. because frankly, we're in the stage of trying to find the money forit right now, because it's a lot more expensive to do now than it was 10 years ago. kickstarter. we've talked about that; we've talked aboutkickstarter, i know, and we're thinking about that. that's one option. a matter of fact,we've actually already put some work together, putting together a kickstarter campaign. wehaven't pulled the trigger yet.

so i guess that means the answer tomy question is, no you're not planning to stop? if you had theoffer, you would go and continue the show? if we could put the right model together,with the right kind of sponsor support, and i had the right supporting teams to do it,sure, i'd do it in a minute; absolutely. it was great fun, i loved it, it kept me on topof the world in terms of knowing all the newest things. and as i say, basically, i was veryselfish; i did the show for me. i was the audience. and if anybody else wanted to watch,good for them. i wanted to know what the newest stuff was, i wanted to know what worked; istill do.

okay. and if you do a television show, it's a prettygood way to do that. so that leads me to another question,what do you think that is, that pioneers like yourself or the peopleyou interviewed, they are very often still going on with development? whatdo you think the reason for that is? that people still would go on? because it's a certain kind of high, and youdon't have to pay for drugs; inventing things, developing things, seeing that process isvery, very exciting. whether it's a piece of technology, or software, or a televisionshow, and that becomes addictive.

i'll tell you a funny story about that. once,we were in the studio. i was doing general news at the time. we were planning a show,and television production's a pretty high pressure activity. and actually, in anothershow i was doing that had nothing to do with technology, we were doing a show about workerson taking drugs at the workplace. so we had hired a drug tester guy to come into the studio,he's going to work with us on this project. so before we went out to the workplaces, hesaid, "look, i want to calibrate my meters. so i'm going to set up in the studio, couldyou send a couple of people from your staff in here? i just want to check and to see ifmy meters are fine." about four or five people went in there. afterwards, he said, "i wantto tell you something. your staff is high,

your staff is on drugs." i said, "no they'renot. they just love what they do." it's a high. i'm sure you know it yourself.i'm an idiot, but i have done a teeny little bit of programming; next thing you know, it'sthree 'o clock in the morning and you're still there, right? there's nothing like that. yes, but the problem is really, toget people supporting what you are doing. but in my case, doing sceneworld, it's helped a lot that the retro hype is happening since thelast four years. everybody is going back to the 80s and 90s and then"woah, that was a fun time!" it was!

so people actually go on ebay and buythe old computers, rather than using emulators to experience the hardwareand stuff. yeah, and there was a certain excitement andfascinating during those first 20/25 years, let's say, by comparison, it's pretty boringthese days, and there's been so much consolidation in the industry. in the early days, as youknow, there are hundreds of little companies doing this and doing that; it was really funto watch. it's become so much more corporate, it's not quite as much fun as it was. even the startup things, the facebooks, they'remonster internet operations now, even though it feels small.

so let's assume that the show goeson, because we say the show must go on. if you find out the money for it,how would the computer chronicles be nowadays? how would it change? that's a really good question. certainly,the things, the subject, and the topics we cover would be different. we thought a lotabout whether we would stick to the same that we had, which is sort of building a kind ofworkshop in the studio and bringing people then to us, versus going out on the fieldand doing more it on-location. there's some financial factors there, and what it coststo do those two kinds of shows. i don't think it would necessarily changea lot; the subject matter would change. obviously,

what was exciting ten years ago, is not excitingtoday. today, it's all about mobile, it's all about apps, it's all about wireless, it'sall about the whole change in the media field; the challenge of, as you pointed out, theinternet traditional media. so things are quite different now, but there'sstill a lot of stuff out there, that as we've actually thought about bringing back the show,we thought: "can we really sustain this for 52 weeks a year? is there that much fun happeningthat's new and different from the way we do things?" which is really to demonstrate, notjust talk. to do that, and we went through and i think we could do it. i definitely think it's possible. ihad an interview about augmented

reality, and that whole augmentedreality topic ate up like 2 hours of the interview. that's stuff's so great. that stuff is hardto do on television, but it's fascinating. so i definitely think it will bepossible. of course, it would have probably changed somewhere; that youhave an iphone app and streaming of the show online, which you didn'thave back then. that's the big change. i mean, at the time,when we took the show off the air, i was publishing a print newsletter. we didn't have the toolsthen that we have now in terms of social media, in terms of apps, and so on. now, it wouldbe a multi-platform show, it wouldn't just

be a television show. and we break up theshow into bite-sized chunks that will always be on the web and be on smartphones, and itcould be totally different. actually, i read, you are the reasonwhy almost all episodes of the show are on the archive.org. tell us a bitabout that story. well, that's a very interesting story too,actually. i don't know if you know the second show we did called net cafe. so in additionto computer chronicles, for six years, we did a show that was just about the internetand the web, and that was a very different show. it would show on-location in internetcafes, in different places. i saw that. quite noisy at times.

yes, it's true. well, that's the price youpay. i get that idea basically in the bay area, that was a guy who ran an amiga store,and it would sort became a users' group thing. if you walk in that store, these guys wouldcome from all over the bay area to talk to each other and see what was new, and i thought:"this is kind of fun, i want to bring a camera into one of these gatherings." and that'swhere the idea of net cafe came out. it was really, bring a camera into an internet cafe,and people would play around with these things in, you know, and those internet cafes sortof didn't last, but at the time it was a very exciting model. how did you actually succeed onbringing it on archive.org?

we were doing net cafe show, and one of thesubjects on the show was internet archive and the wayback machine. i was interviewingbrewster kahle, who was the inventor and grandfather of the internet archive, and he was the waybackmachine. so we finished the interview, we finished the tv show, and we were just sittingaround in this internet cafe, whoever was talking after show, and he was telling mewhat they were trying to do. and at the time, they were focused on archiving webpages; thatwas it. it had an audio/music collection, there was pretty much it. and i said, "you know, i have an interestingarchiving kind of problem. i have hundreds of hours of the whole history of the personalcomputer revolution on video sitting on shelves,

and nobody can access it." he said, "let'stalk about that." he said, "suppose i agree to pay to digitize all your shows and putthem online, would you agree to make them available for free to anybody who wanted them?"i said, "you got a deal." and that's how it all started, and it took like two years. imean, i say we had about 600 shows or something. and so, we took all those shows. technologywasn't as swift then as it is now, and made digital copies of all those analog video tapes,and slowly got them all online, and that's how it started. i thought it would be kindof a pretty small little thing, but to this day, certain shows, one of them the commodoreshow, were downloaded tens of thousands of times a week. i mean, it's astonishing.

so by accident, and through the good gracesof the archive, i've understood the value of this. and that frankly led to them doinga lot more of this. and i'll tell you something else, which most people don't know about.so i actually then went to work with the archive to help other people what we had done withthe content that i owned, and the internet archive was the original youtube. wow, okay. it was the first site that offered free hostingto anybody who wanted to put anything they wanted up online, but we were non-profit;we weren't running it as a business. and frankly, the people of the company at the time, didn'tsee what the business was. i ain't going to

make money hosting all these videos. and basically,the youtube guys stole our idea and put a better front-end a better user interface;but we were really the first youtube, the internet archive. i bet most people don't know that. nobody knows about that. and youtube starteddown the street from where i live in the silicon valley. we had talked to them originally becausethey never imagined youtube would become what it was. we had all this old stuff, they wereworking on new stuff. they wanted to make a partnership with us, where they would putup current stuff, but we would be responsible keeping the stuff around forever. at the time,of course, storage was a lot more expensive

than it is right now, and bandwidth was moreexpensive than it is right now. but that's a long sad story, us and youtube. the archive of the wayback machineseems to be outside of this copyright act problem, because they are alsohosting the main roms, the emulator roms for atari games. like, i haveone behind me. and actually, they were allowed to host all those romfiles for the arcade games, which is considered illegal if you don't knowthe original board, kind of. do you have an idea how that happened? i actually worked on that for a while. thegood news is, the archive is a non-profit,

so it's not a money making for-profit organization,so there were a little exceptions were made; nobody makes money off what's on the archives,so people have been a little more flexible, and the archive worked very closely with creativecommons and that approach to licensing intellectual property, and brewster is a very effectiveadvocate for openness; and that's i think, what's led to some of those exceptions. so you were not only doing the tvshow, you are also kind of responsible for that hype of videoonline? yes, very much so. and it all started, i say,with computer chronicles. that was the first model when we got all our shows online, andthen i spent three or four years working with

the archive, until we've brought in eventually,maybe a hundred other collections of film and videos. wow, so after all, do you consideryourself a pioneer in the computer industry? i'm not sure in the industry. i'm certainlya pioneer in the media of that industry. i mean, i never invented anything. but in termsof bringing this stuff to the general public and trying to explain it in a way that peoplecan understand it, yeah, i think we were a pioneer. my big thing was to be, kind of,a united nations translator. i think my skill was like, i'd talk to a geek, and i couldtalk to a normal person, and i could figure

out how to get them to talk to each other,and that was basically my job on the show. some guy would come in, and he was all high-techstuff, and we have normal people watching who just want to solve a problem. and so,yeah, i think we were a pioneer in developing that communication link between the geek communityand the normal user community. now, you said you are stillinterested in all the computer stuff and so on, and you keep current. sodid you actually follow the careers of those people? for example, davidcrane and all the other peoples, did you follow them? i must say, i haven't that much lately. certainly,while we were doing the show, i was much more

plugged in everyday because we had to knowall this stuff. i would say i'm not as plugged in now, but in certain areas, yes, but i thinki've -- when i go back and watch some of these old shows, i think: "oh yeah, i want to checkup on that and see what happened there." but i'm not as plugged in right now as i'd liketo be, because i do a lot of other things now that are not computer technology related,so it takes a little bit of my bandwidth away. are you checking people on wikipediaon what they are doing nowadays? are you interested in that? i'm definitely interested. i'm not interested,frankly, about the people, but about what they're doing. so as you say, people likechuck peddle, people who did interesting things

20 years who were doing even interesting thingsnow. so yeah, i'm not a fanboy of these guys, but i'm a fan of the products and the technology.frankly, to me, the most exciting thing in the world is some new gadget, and there'snothing more fun in life than, "wow! i didn't know you could do that!" so you are still into the newtechnology like augmented reality, like iphones, ipads, smartphones? i'm waiting to see the new iphone 6. i'm abig fan of the bigger screens. i'm a big fan of wearables, too; i just gave away my google glass for a while. ah, but i have a pebble watch, that'scool too.

the pebble? oh, i love it, yeah. i have awhole collection of watches. seriously? and yeah, the pebble is pretty cool. i haven'tquite gone into the samsung watch yet, or the casio, or the sony; i guess that's allchanging very quickly right now. again, i want to see what apple's going to do in acouple of months. i think i had the very first watch from 2/3/4/5 years ago, that connectedwith your cellphone. showing people that when my cellphone rang, i got a message, i lookedover on my wrist. so it wasn't new to me, i was there a long time ago. you have been in touch with thecomputer history. what's your opinion

about apple always claiming to be thefirst in the home computer business? for example, i'm sure you read thebook brian bagnall released in 2006, the rise and fall of commodore, whenhe actually made the standpoint that commodore was the one with jacktramiel to bring out the first affordable home computers, for themasses instead of the classes, which was also one of those statements jackalways repeated. so what's your opinion about that? about the wronghistory? i think it's a very wrong history. apple isbrilliant at marketing and advertising, and in design; but they didn't change the world.to this day, there are things that my commodore

and amiga does that nobody else can do, andit was doing it 20 years ago. i was a big fan of the game called lemmings. nobody hasduplicated what you could do with lemmings on an old amiga. commodore was really a breakthrough,and unfortunately i say, there were back east in west chester, pennsylvania, they weren'tpart of the silicon valley culture; jack tramiel didn't talk to these other silicon valleytype guys, so it sort of reminds me of the vhs-beta war. i mean, beta was a better technology,but vhs won because it was marketing, better way to package the product. and i think it'sthe same thing; commodore stuff is pretty cutting-edge, but apple is brilliant in selling;in convincing people that their product -- their advertising is brilliant. i use windows machines,i use macs, and i still have my own commodore.

believe me, apple was not a superior product,they do a very nice job, they're very expensive, and they've conned people into paying morefor the same thing. but i mean, i say, i work on these three machines everyday, and i gocrazy when i see these ads and these people saying, "oh, the mac is so much more reliable!"it's hard to look inside to know what's going on; give me a das machine, i know what thehell's happening in it. that's actually a problem youcounter-expounded as well, and they just get rid of interfaces of theapple and stuff. and you know, i mean, apple stole the interfacefrom xerox parc; apple didn't invent the graphic user interface, or the mouse. they workedvery cleverly at stealing that idea and promoting

it. but isn't microsoft told to do thesame things? of course, but apple claim that "we're thesmartest guys on the planet." microsoft doesn't claim their the smartest guys on the planet,they're better stealers than anybody else. apple has done a brilliant job of creatingthis myth around mac products; steve jobs was part of that, he was a great salesman.but there's a little bit of discontinuity between facts and what people think the factsare. what i hear from speaking to peoplein commodore or other companies, that the marketing department was alwaysthe one that made up history their

own way, like saying: "our companydid this first" and "i did this first" and so on. i'll give you one example of brilliant marketing.there was a documentary, it was done a couple of years ago that we provided footage for,called macheads. have you seen that? i didn't see that. okay, there was a wonderful interview withthis hot chick who's standing in line, waiting to buy her latest apple product, and she says:"you know, i couldn't sleep with a guy who uses windows." that says it all. phew. so all this hype is reallynonsense, in a way? where do you

think our computer life is going to?what's the next big thing? well, robotics. i'm a big fan of robotics,i think we're going to see intelligent things, the wearable computers and a sort of internetof things, i think. that merge is going to be very important over the next couple ofyears. interfaces are still a big issue; how to talk to a machine and how a machine cantalk back to you. i think security is going to be increasingly an issue, people have justsort of surrendered control of their information, and i don't think that's going to last forever.so there's still a lot of interesting stuff going on, and i think the embedded chip -- imean, there's no question we're going to have a little chip in our brain 20 years from nowor something.

don't you think that's kind of scary? i mean, that's the ultimate interface, right?very scary, because who knows? but i mean, the idea, when you think how far we've come,some of the learning tools on computers now. young people are using computer technologyfor education, and we're pretty close to that chip in the brain. i've got, on my phone,college courses; they're right there. so it's not the far; it's going to be from my phoneto my wrist, and from my wrist to glasses, and who knows what else? it's like any pieceof technology; it's a good and bad. most people don't think, but certainly in the immediatefield, in the computer field, a lot of technology was driven by pornography.

the first time around, what sold video taperecorders? pornography. what sold the internet? pornography. so you never know how these thingsare going to work out, and eventually you figure it out in a better way. and actually, the pornographyindustry is the one that made blu-ray win against the hd-dvd. yes, exactly! i did the interview with the inventorof internet of things, adam dunkels, the swedish guy who's known to be theinventor of that technology. and actually, to get him, i had to makephone calls to his sister and his

wife, all across sweden. to get himdoing the skype video interview, and i wonder actually, was there oneperson you really wanted to have for the chronicles shows, and you had tomove hell to get him for the show? was there one such guest? that's a good question. yeah, i think oneof the hardest ones was larry ellison of oracle. he's a pretty interesting character, and ifinally nailed him down once in paris at a computer trade show and got to interview him,and he's a pretty colorful guy. a lot of people hate him, but he's a pretty interesting guy.that was a real hit for us, i was really excited to finally get that; we tried for a long time.

of course, bill gates, i've interviewed gatesmany times and he's a really interesting smart guy, too. that was a hard one. and he wasvery cooperative. jack tramiel's another one. it was really hard to get. another interestingguy we got, we got sergey brin. we had sergey on our net cafe show before anybody had everheard of google. that was a kind of big one, that was kind of fun. i guess they're someof the ones that would stand out. and what was the character thatimpressed you the most? i'll tell you a funny story, i'm not sureif it answers your question, but it's close. do you remember a company called amdahl computer?they made minis at the time. there was a guy named gene amdahl, who was a brilliant computerguy, all intellectual, and he was very smart,

and i had interviewed him some time ago, andi remember, he was such a serious guy. he worked 24 hours a day, and i said: "what doyou do for fun in life?" and he said: "think." that's pretty good, so that's the beginningof the story. so here's this super intellectual brainy guy, he's an older guy, and we wereat a trade show in las vegas, and in the trade show in las vegas there's long lines for taxicabs, so everybody's waiting to get a cab, and gene was in line -- i was close to him-- as he was about to get his cab, some other guy just ran in front and stole the cab fromhim. gene amdahl socked him, there was this pure brainy intellectual guy, all of a suddenwas a fighter. it was the most amazing thing i'd ever seen, and the most unbelievable thingi've ever seen. i don't think this guy ever

said a nasty word in his life. he socked aguy, but he had a sense of what's right, what's fair. you mentioned earlier that some showswere really hard to make, of course the topic was so boring, what do youthink was the most boring show or situation? operating systems, microprocessors, that kindof stuff is really important but it's hard to make that interesting when there's os/2battle against windows, and i'll tell you a funny story about that by the way. we hada guy from microsoft, when microsoft was battling ibm for the operating system, and this waswhen os/2 was still there, and nobody knew

who was going to win this battle for the non-appleworld. and this guy from microsoft says, on the show, "of course. windows is just a temporarysolution. the future of computing is os/2." i heard that os/2 is still used in some banks... i believe it is. what's your take on that? i mean, yousee, now we have one of the last shows actually was about theintroduction of windows xp, and the big topic this year was the stop ofsupport for windows xp in april. and as you know, the embedded machineslike the atms are still supported for three years for the security update.why do you think that in some areas,

the technology development neverreally went on? that's really incredible. i'm not sure. there's a lot of possible answersfor that. frankly, i thought windows xp was a pretty good operating system. that's whypeople still use it. it's pretty stable, it's pretty good. and there might be economic issuesthere, what's the cost of upgrading and how much do you get for it, versus what you investedin, and so on. i think the microsoft decision to visibly announce its stopping support forxp, i think it was a mistake. apple has done a very good job at that. you could alwaysupgrade for nothing, and here's microsoft saying: "oh, by the way, we don't care aboutall these people who supported us for all

these years." and there's frankly, a lot ofscams going on right now about that. i have a friend who just called me a couple of daysago. well, somebody called me, saying they were from microsoft, and saying because therewas no more support from xp i'm going to have a lot of problems with my computer, but for150 dollars they'll fix it for me. so i mean, there's a lot of nasty stuff goingon, i think, dropping the support for xp. but frankly, if you really know it's gone,what the hell do you need support for xp for? it's not that important. i don't see whatthey gain from that, from what microsoft gained from doing that. microsoft has become a verydifferent company now. in which way you think the companychanged?

to some degree, the way apple has changed.when you have a really iconic leader, like a bill gates, sort of steve jobs, that reallydefines the company and that personality defines the approach that companies that company takesto its customers. when steve jobs left apple, it's a different apple. and steve ballmerwas not a bill gates. when bill gates left microsoft, it sort of lost its way a littlebit. gates was an extremely smart, open-minded guy. and so, i think, when you lose that earlyleadership, things changed a little bit. i think apple's not the same it used to be,and microsoft won't be the same it used to be. that's what i find so interesting aboutoracle, is about larry ellison there. he's really a dinosaur, but he still rules thatplace.

i think, going from a more corporate normalstructure from the old original maniacal founder, makes a big difference in a company. obviously,steve jobs was brilliant, and that he paid attention; as jack tramiel was. the greatabout jack, was, you need every single decision. that was considered a bonus if you calledsteve jobs, but a problem if you called jack tramiel. that's kind of interesting! so, youthink this tom cook's doing apple now and the new indian guy doingmicrosoft. are they going on a downhill path? i can't say downhill necessarily, but thepassion for innovation, i don't think is the

same. in fact, i saw this happen with google.when google started out, it was a private company, you know? they had their motto, dono evil, and all that stuff. it were a pretty fun and interesting company. once they wereworth billions of dollars, that company changed. they went from being some really smart graduatestudents at stanford to just being another wall street company and you just see thatevolution change in a lot of these companies. i think google is another good example, youknow? whether it'll happen in some of these other really new-y web-y type companies, thefacebooks and all of that, i don't know. but i think there's still a lot to be proven insocial media, too. that's a really interesting business model; and again, there's just thistwo new guys who just started facebook type

sites in which you're going to offer to paypeople who post information on there claiming that facebook's have the greatest rack inthe world, everybody provides them their content for free. not many businesses like that around. so i think then, the social media thing makeit kind of interesting. not only from the security point of view i mentioned earlier,but trouble is, a lot of people are so excited about seeing their name online, but they'rewilling to give it away. i think that may fade after a while; the big thrill of knowingthat everybody's a publisher may fade away when you can see the downside of everybodyhaving access to all your information. that could be the second dot combubble, in a way.

yes, absolutely. i think so. i think it'sgoing to happen. i'm not sure when, but the trouble is all this social media stuff andall the internet stuff, you're just so fragile, it's so easy for a user to change. you don'thave to go in a store and bring on a heavy box. you press a button, and you use them.you're using amazon instead of this guy, or bing instead of google, or whatever. the barrierto entry for competitors is so low, it's not like physical stuff. if you're going to changefrom driving an audi to driving a volkswagen, that's a big decision. in the virtual world,in the internet world, in the software world, it's so easy to be unfaithful. i think that'sa risk these companies have to face. but on the other side, you havethings like second life, where people

actually invest me to have a yard anda house , where people actually buy this hard money... yes. i know what you mean, yeah. well, that's crazy for me.i mean, i have friends who make a lot of money selling nothing on second life, or in thewhatever that other one's called. i don't get that. apart from the technology, all ofthis stuff is fascinating from a sociological point of view. human beings are interactingwith the technology, and willing to surrender so much, is really interesting. do you think that the amount ofinnovators will be smaller? i think so, unless there's a whole new categorycomes about. obviously, the internet was different

from traditional hardware and software, thatallowed new people in. whatever it is some other new world of interfaces or embeddedchips or something, you'll have a new innovation. but right now, the business is sort of whackeddown in many ways, and the barriers to entry are higher in many fields, even on the internetbusiness. six or seven years ago, you could start a website for nothing, but now you gotto spend ten million dollars in promotion, just to get enough critical mass to proveto advertisers that it's worth it. that's certainly a lot harder to do right now. i'm working with one group in los angelesright now, that's trying to do that, and if they win, if they're successful; it's a hugewin, that the odds against breaking through,

powerful forces right now are pretty difficult.i think it's kind of sad in a way. again, i remember, 10/15 years ago, it was reallyexciting. everybody and their brother was inventing something, coming up with some newproduct, some idea, and there was maybe more opportunity, then. i think the app world ismaybe different, because that's still low cost of entry, but also the competition isridiculous. you write an app, you're one of ten million guys trying to sell an app. sounless you're really lucky and you got good viral stuff going, it's a hard business. but nowadays, everybody can be apioneer. let's have a look at this vietnamese guy who did flappy bird.

yup. if you've got something really cleverand you're lucky, and you can merchandise it, that's true. so, the world is a big place,is the good news, and in the interconnected world, the whole globe is your marketplace,so you can make a lot of money on a little idea because it's so easy to deliver; youdon't have to put it in a box of mail at anywhere, it's all virtual. thinking in that point ofview, it's a lot easier than it used to be, but it's very competitive. again, the appworld is insane when you think of it. i always think it's so funny that the apple brands,"we have over a million apps in the app store!" who needs a million apps? right? it's justconfusing. i want a hundred apps, i don't want a million apps. it's one of these sillythings, but it's very good apple marketing.

how about new industry fields? thereare still a lot of people like 60/70+ who are scared to use a smartphoneand stuff. if i looked around who uses smartphone, it's either peoplewho are pioneers, all this has been tingling around with new stuff likeyour stuff, but people about 50+ or something, the hardest thing theyever used was the television. do you think there is the future, or maybethere is a way to make new technology more comfortable for people of higherage groups? that's a really interesting question. in fact,we were playing with putting together a show just for that very group of people, it wascalled digital seniors, and trying to help

people over 60 years old or whatever, notbe intimidated by the technology or by the grandchildren, who understand that they don't.i think that's changing though, i think people who used to be afraid of smartphones. theymay not be really god at it, but you kind of have to have it right now. these numberscame out of china a week or two ago, that more people are accessing the web on a smartphoneand not a computer. i mean, that's phenomenal. i mean, there were people who were afraidof computers 10 years ago; you can't be afraid of a smartphone these days or you're out ofit, i think. a smartphone, it's not a smartphone. it's everything. i remember doing research when i was a student.oh, what a nightmare that was, right? in the

library, it's two o'clock in the morning,pulling things up. it's so easy to do everything right now; all that knowledge is right inyour pocket and you can't ignore that, you're going to get walked over. so you think it's wrong that elderlypeople are afraid of new technology? i don't think it's wrong. i can understandit, i look at people who i know, family friends, and so on, it is intimidating, and it's kindof tough when you're 50/60 years old, and your 15 year old grandson knows more thanyou do, and that's a tough thing, psychologically, to face up to, and it takes a certain mentaldexterity to adjust. it's really interesting. it's funny, sometimes somebody will be workingon a computer problem, and say: "can you help

me?" well, i have no idea what i'm doing buti just understand the language and the way of thinking. i say, "well, let's try this.that will probably work." -"how did you know that?" -"i don't know, it's just in my dna.i just live in that world." so it's a hard thing to explain, but there'ssome people who just weren't raised that way. so i think the problem with some of the peoplewho are older, they're not digital people, they weren't surrounded by all this stuff.so it's a certain way of thinking, in terms of the way things work. and it happens tome many times, i'll go to solve a problem, and say: "how'd you know how to do this?"i had no idea. i just know. this meant, on the other hand, thatin 20/30 years, this problem will be

totally faded away because everybodythat is younger now will be older then, and say "ah, new technology!" who knows what the next new thing will be,right? i mean the next new thing will be telepathy or something, and they're to read other people'sminds and be afraid of that. that's probably nice. but still, since you learned incomparison to the generation before, i think every generation is like 30years, and then you learn how to adjust to new technology; it shouldbe easier for us anyway. even though if the next big thing is likesomething we can't imagine now; i

mean, nowadays, 3d printing is tryingto be the next big thing. like a replicator from star trek. sure, sure. i mean, i'm fascinated by the3d printing business but i mean, that's not complicated in a way that some of these otherthings are. i mean, you press a button and you get 3d instead of 2d. i think it's moreof the soft rig kind of things, the communications kinds of things that people would find you,or even just the social media stuff, i mean that's scary for a lot people, too. i mean,that's an interesting problem, too; in terms of young people who want to be in their worldand the older people who want to be in their world, and the certain discomfort in havingyour parents being a facebook friend. that's

another one of these issues; you really wanteverybody in the world to know what you're doing; that's really interesting. so, it'snot technology but sociology; it's really interesting, it seems to me. and you know that from a law point of view,there are very many interesting cases, i'll give you one: there was a woman, i think itwas in indiana in the united states, who, i think she was involved in some car accidentand ran over some guy, and during the trial, one of the pieces of evidence that the lawyerbrought up was pictures from her facebook showing her drinking, you know, really throwingstuff down her throat. and that was evidence that helped the jury convinced then that shewas alcoholic and that she was guilty, responsible

for this accident. she never thought whenshe put that picture up on facebook, this will be fun for her friends, this was hurtingher, this was a piece of evidence. i mean, it happens when people are looking for jobsright now. and there's this another interesting legalcase like that, too. there was another trial going on somewhere in united states, and thejudge in that trial created a pseudonym on facebook. he was writing every night whatwas going on on the trial; it was totally improper, totally unethical. i mean, you canhide so easily on the internet and be false. that's some really interesting problems withthis explosion of information and access for information. there is a complicated subjectfor law and a ph.d. thesis but they're interesting.

how do you protect yourself fromthat? i mean, you are a known figure. it took me ten seconds to find you. yes. that's some interesting question. there'sthis whole sort of reputation thing, i mean, people can put anything they want up online,right? i'll give you one example, i never google myself because i find it very annoying,embarrassing, while i was trying to show somebody how you can find people online and he said:"oh well, you know? put yourself in." and one of the first comments i saw was "stewartyour face is the most hated man in america." seriously. what the hell is that about? becausethey really didn't like that i interrupted guests on the show and didn't let them keepon talking. so, you know, people all of a

sudden, this is my reputation. it's a differentworld, i mean in the old days you have a little circle of friends and you knew them and youtalk to each, now you're going to have a lot of adjusting to do in this totally, totallyinterconnected earth. so, you think it's a big task to havethis global thing but also dangerous because everything's so open? it's wonderful and it's awful, yes. like isaid, any new technology, i mean nuclear weapons, it's a great invention but it could kill everybodyon the planet, it depends on what you do with it. and it's the same thing with any computeror digital technology, and just because it's easy to do this stuff or even just the hacking,china stealing american trade secrets and

the russians, i mean, that's another thing.i mean, this whole set of computer espionage we have is really wild to think about, i mean,people can break into stuff. and you would think that the things you think would be sosecure but there's a lot of smart hackers out there and you know, certainly united statescan listen in on america whole. countless phone being spied on andall. that was a scandal, yes, that's true. so, if you restart the computerchronicles someday, who would be the big guy you would interview next? mark zuckerberg. seriously? facebook?

hey. what they've done is phenomenal, i mean,they own the world. they own everybody's information. i mean, they're more important than googlein a way, certainly, than any hardware company. the facebook thing is absolutely amazing tome, and they have, i mean, you heard some of the recent scandal about them; they wereon this little phony psychological testimony on users? oh, yes! i heard about that. i mean, facebook has so much potential powernow. they control so much information. yes, i've never talked to him yet but that wouldbe pretty damn interesting conversation. so, on one hand, you'll scare him onthe answer, on the other hand, you

look after him because he made such afascinating product? yes, i mean, it's been a theme of everythingwe've been talking about. there's the good and the bad in all of this. yes, i mean, whatzuckerberg did is brilliant, but having all that information out in the open really raisessome social issues. and you know, it's a question of how ethical. the trouble is, it's the samething i mentioned with google, when you start out and you're all very high minded and highprincipled and we're going to make the world a better place; but that is a lot of moneyinvolved, and people get tempted to do bad things because they can make money doing it.and when you control a lot of information, there's a lot of bad things you can do.

it's no problem to talk to davidcrane or something, you can contact him, no problem, but for example,steve wozniak, i tried to contact steve wozniak but i was told thathe's booked out for years because he's such a great guy. how did thathappen? how did a person win so much fame in the computer world? how'sthat happen? because of some millions they made? hard to imagine. no, it's just that wozniak is an iconic characterin his business office. what i mean is, steve jobs is not the techie, wozniak was the techie;jobs is the marketer. and that's not true, i mean, wozniak shows up all the time buthe's a hot property and people wanted him.

he works for nothing basically but at thesame time, he does a lot of good things. but, yes, i mean, it's sort of a list than b listthat mean david crane is a big guy to you and me but he's not a big guy to a lot ofpeople. steve wozniak is a big guy to everybody in the world. but he got his award four years agofor his achievement. so, he is a big guy in some way. he is, but i mean it's a different character.sure, i mean, say the average guy in the street, "so, you know david crane?" "who's david crane?"we know him because we live in that world. "so, who's steve wozniak?" "oh, he's the appleguy." so, it's just different. and, i mean,

these guys are in demand, and after a whilethey get pretty big egos, you know? and frankly from a practical point of view, they can'tsay yes to everybody who wants a piece of them so that doesn't bother me that much.but, i mean, crane is like a normal guy, you know? i think he can identify more with somebodylike you or me who's asking for something. he hasn't lived in that upper echelon of appleor ibm or microsoft. so, we have those two categories,those media iconic people that everybody wants to talk to and peoplewho were still big and pioneers but weren't so iconic but there's a thirdperson. if you go to the people on the street, i tried this on my mom ormy friends or whatever, who are not

into computers and i named the personalexey pajitnov then about the half of the people would say wasn't therethis mind-puzzle game somewhere on the gameboy. so, some people seem toknow that he is the tetris inventor but not all. but tetris is pretty famous, i mean, anybodywho lives through those early game days, i mean, i still have tetris on my iphone. so, that's their generation, he is aperson, he is recognized by the game he did on a soviet country, wherethere was no freedom, and he was not paid until 1995. so, that's like ifyou are a little small guy but you

made a fun thing like tetris, you canalso be a vip. well, i mean, tetris is one of the most iconicgames, we mentioned angry birds, i mean, there are just certain things that are just bigaround the world. and i don't think it's necessarily related to money, it's just everybody knowsthem. i mean, david crane, i'm guessing, didn't make a fortune of money in all the stuff hedid, but i'm not sure; that's the issue. but i think, again, when you go back to my googleexample, when a company goes public and people literally make billions of dollars, it justchanges the whole deal. i'm going to have to go in a couple of minutes.yes, nice talking with you, very interesting discussion.

thank you for the interview. sure, pleasure talking with you, very, veryinteresting discussion. thank you! i hope we can keep intouch and to let me know if the computer chronicle project reallygoes on. maybe we could re-invite you if you ever make this thing happeningagain for the little podcast we are doing. absolutely. it was nice being with you.