Full Transcript for 082: A Hacker Has Entered the Chat!

you know back in the, In the late 90s when I was involved in the BOS community, I was used to being somewhat recognized, but that just went away immediately as soon as the whole B enterprise tanked and I went back to normal life. Learning from you that I'm a white whale to someone, it just makes you wonder how many lurking whales are out there. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, yes. It's really fun to be here. I've been listening to the podcast for the past few weeks and really enjoying the heck out of it. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you so much. That's a real, that's a real, if imagine if you had listened and not liked it and then had to send the awful email, actually on second thoughts. Turns out now that I've heard it, it's off. Yeah. Now I'd like to, oh sorry, okay. I just wanted to jump in very quickly and say, BOS is something that I had heard of. And I frequently, I frequently get made fun of on this podcast. I think it's fair to say for being the younger one. Andrew says that I finished primary school or elementary school about six years ago. Is that right, Andrew? If that. If that. Like, you are very much the baby of our group. Thank you. Thank you so much. But it's not about me. I just thought it would be interesting to very quickly get a summary or a rundown of what Bee was all about from Scott to kind of contextualise this, because I had heard of the name. I'd been kind of generally familiar, but I thought I should do some actual research before we jump because I didn't have that tactile, you know, usage experience. I wasn't there to really kind of have a go at it. So, Scott, can you give us maybe some context for what that was and why Andrew was so inspired by the system? Yeah, absolutely. So, late 90s, you know, we were on Windows, you know, NT, 3. whatever, and Mac OS 9. And, you know, these operating systems had accreted and accumulated gunk over the course of a couple of decades, as software does, and had just gotten to become bloated and tangled. And it was really hard to sort of reveal what CPUs of that time were even capable of because the operating systems were so, you know, just chewing gum and bailing wire. So Jean-Louis Gasset, who was the head of research and development at at Apple at the time realized the only way clear was to start fresh. He was like, we just need to build an operating system from the ground up to take advantage of today's CPUs and it's unencumbered by backwards compatibility and all of that. So he split out of Apple and assembled this team and this is Silicon Valley heyday and there was lots of venture capital and lots of good engineers. And they decided to create an operating system that had protected memory, preemptive multitasking, a database-like file system, which was just mind-blowing at the time that you could treat your file system like a database. We did some really cool things with that. And had GNU underpinnings, a UNIX interface, and they just started from scratch. And what they created running on the hardware of the day was so fast and so flexible The people like Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel at the time, when he first saw it, we saw like 12 video windows and checking your email and recording an audio file in the background and rendering OpenGL animations all at the same time. He said, "I had no idea my hardware was capable "of this kind of performance." It was like, it was just like unlocked for the first time. And we were so excited and we felt like we were gonna take over the world because everybody who tried it was just thrilled. And eventually it started well. There was the B-Box. So they created their own piece of hardware, their own computer called the B-Box. It was a vertical tower and it had two CPU activity indicators that bounced up and down as LEDs on the front. It was so geeky and it was quite a (indistinct) It was so cool. But that was a really expensive enterprise. Eventually they decided, no, we're just gonna do the software. We'll run it on Intel hardware. And at that point, Compaq, Hitachi, and Dell, wait, Compaq, Hitachi, was it, I think it was Dell, realized that this was a way to differentiate themselves in the market. And they're like, you know, if we could get onto the shelves at CompUSA, selling this instead of Windows, we'll actually look different than the other beige boxes. They got very excited. So I'm really short-circuiting history here, because I'm gonna go right from the beginning to the end. this is over the course of about a six-year period. And what ended up happening as those contracts started to be formed was that Microsoft caught wind of it. So Microsoft is mass licensing Windows to all these big computer manufacturers and they're getting a big bulk discount. Well, it turns out that paragraph 329 clause 11 on page 79 of the Microsoft contract agreements have what's called the bootloader agreement that says, "Thou shalt boot no other operating system but Microsoft Windows on the computers thou sells." And if you violate the terms of the contract, they were going to lose their bulk discounts, and they couldn't afford to lose their volume discounts, and they all backed out. So that was one challenge. Because without that, the only way to get BOS onto people's computers was geeks who could, who were comfortable with partitioning their own. You know how to use Grub and partition your hard drive and you're not afraid of this stuff. That was one challenge. And then the other huge challenge that they faced was driver drivers. So you know, Apple and Microsoft don't write most of the drivers for the hardware out there. The printer makers and the scanner makers and the camera makers write it for them and say, here, Apple, here's a driver for our stuff. You can include it in the operating system. In the Linux world, you have people hacking this stuff together, and that probably could have been leveraged. But you get this computer that's capable of amazing performance, and it supports exactly three printers and

one camera. And that was a real challenge trying to get the whole driver ecosystem boot started. For me, my course of evolution through it was I had been working at ZDNet. And I'll come back and talk about that because there's some cool stories there too. And my boss was old friends with the Jean-Louis Gasset. And he heard about the Bee Box. He said, "Send us one, we'll review it." And it landed in his office. I said, "What is that?" And he said, "Oh, it's an interesting new computer. "Do you want to review it?" And I said, "Yeah." So I fell head over heels and I started writing articles for ZDNet. And then Byte Magazine caught wind and they started contracting me to write a monthly column for Byte. And I was doing that. And then eventually I got a book offer from Peach Pit Press. I said, "Do you want to write the BOS Bible?" And I was young and just getting my career started. And I jumped at the opportunity, had to quit Zipf Davis to do that. And I spent a year of my life writing that book and it did surprisingly well considering the small number of BOS users who are out there. And that was going on. And then the editors of the Linux Journal decided this is really taking off and they wanted to start the BOS Journal. And they contacted me and said, "Do you want to be the editor-in-chief?" I'm like, "Are you kidding me? Sure, yes." And so I had just signed on to do that. And it was only a month later when the bootloader agreement stuff went down. B was running out of venture capital and basically the market tanked out from under them and It was all over and they canceled the BOS journal. And I went back to being a normal schlub working in a cubicle, like all the other tech workers. You mentioned Jean-Louis Gasset obviously has the connection to Apple as well. And he's still, he's a blog. He's still a blogger. I read still subscribe to his RSS feed, his weekly note that he writes, Monday note. I can't remember the name of the, but he's still a great website to read if anybody's interested in him and also compact. Tiny fact I've never shared with the Hemispheric Views audience, I don't think. And look, I feel a little bit guilty at this point because very, very distant relative, Rod Canyon, one of the founders of Compact, related to yours truly, but so distant that I've never received any financial benefits from the Compact partnership. But the Canyon name is strong. But I'm so, so I feel a bit sorry about that. I couldn't, I couldn't really extend out and, and help you in that situation back in the time. Yeah. No, JLG is, is interesting to read. You're right. He's, he's got it like penetrating insight into the industry and he's not afraid to share it. Yeah. So Scott, you were obviously very well connected to the bee community. Were you actually part of the bee organization at any point, Or were you always sort of doing like third party stuff related to the community? Always third party stuff. Okay. Yeah, there was talk of an opportunity for me to become a developer evangelist with a role they could see me in. And I really liked that idea. It never, never quite took off while I was writing the book. I made appointments to go down to Menlo park to be headquarters and, you know, I've got to meet a lot of the famous engineers, you know, who are well, famous air quotes, but really, really cool people. And, you know, I had people whiteboarding the internal architecture and just making sure that I understood everything really, really thoroughly. And boy, one of those engineers, Dominic Giampolo, who wrote the B-File system, which was, you know, really revolutionary file system. At some point during the year I spent writing the book, my file system became corrupted, you know, it was early days and there were bugs and everything. And suddenly I couldn't boot. And I contacted him and he said, "Pop the drive, come down, let's take a look at it." And I did that. And I remember going into that cubicle and him mounting the drive and opening up the raw file system in a hex editor. You know, it's just binary garbage to ordinary mortals. And he's just scrolling through and scrolling through, he's like, "Ah, there's your problem." And he just manipulated some direct byte code right in the file system and then restarted and it came right up. - He's literally reading the matrix as it's flying down. He's just like, "Oh, there it is right there, red dress." And you're like, "Oh, of course." - I wanna say a little bit about the database-like file system and how revolutionary that was. And some echoes of that have come into Apple now because the Apple file system has some similar capabilities but not nearly as extensive. So you could define a custom file type on the operating system and you could define its collection of properties and attributes and give it its own icon. And then you could create files, you know, with any of these properties and then you could query. So, you know, in the system's find panel, you could query for your files on any, you could say, you know, show me all emails from Jean-Louis Gasset or Jason Burke written between these two dates to talk about country music, you know, like whatever you want. So I came up with this idea to, I was running the BOS tip server, which were just tips and tricks for BOS users. And I initially had started out of, it was before WordPress, I think it was movable type. - Oh yeah. - And I thought, wait a minute, I could, let me put this thing to the test. So I created a custom file type and I gave it properties like you would have in, you know, a tip server, like titles and dates and categories and tags and all that. And then I just wrote some shell scripts with a CGI interface and I served it out of a computer in my house. But the website was like literally being served, like the file system itself was the only database that was being queried and it ran perfectly. It was so fun. - God, the days of running websites out of your house. I miss that so badly. Yep,

and then you'd go to visit it and be like, Sorry, I had to reboot because we had a thing with the circuit breaker. It'll be back up in a little bit. Don't worry. One of the things I wonder about you authoring that book at the time, because I found when I used BOS, I loved using it, but the dearth of applications that were available for it made it very difficult to actually do anything. You could kind of-- you could tool around with it, but how could you actually do stuff? And it led me to wonder, when you were writing your book, was that-- were you dogfooding BOS? Were you writing that book, the manuscript in BOS, or did you, did you have another, like a windows box on the side where you're typing in Microsoft word or something? Like how, what was the workflow back then? I wrote it initially in a text editor, forgetting the name of just, you know, in plain text, but then I needed to format it. And there was an office suite called Gobi Productive. Gobi was the name of the company. What an instruction, I love it. So I converted it from plain text into Gobie docs, which could output RTF, which the publisher could handle. That's so and so that was fully formed with because I don't know the publishing world very well, but you had screenshots and that sort of stuff. And don't you have to use LaTeX to sort of get them all finalized? Is that a thing or am I totally misspeaking? I think some people do. You know, my contact at Peach Pit was fine with me dropping screenshots into RTF, and that was fine with them. It worked out for us, yeah. Although I realized later that it would have been a lot more productive to use words revision tracking, you know, which is like, that's a good workflow, which we couldn't emulate at the time. But I mean, you're right, a lot of the software that was out was demo level. It's like, look how fast this teapot can spin. And you know, and here's I mean, you had a music player, but it was nowhere near, you know, what was available on Mac and Windows, but it was functional. You know, you had capable email platforms, but they just weren't as good. We had a capable browser called net positive, but you know, it was wasn't as good. So so you're right. I mean, there was. But people were forgiving because it was the early days and you felt like, well, yeah, but look at the performance, you know, which will you couple the performance with like really high quality software, you know, but yeah, there were not a lot of commercial vendors leaping to join the space. Everybody's, nobody wanted to be first on the dance floor. They wanted to prove itself out in the market first, you know. - I vividly remember every time I used it, it was always such a good proof of concept. It was such a fully formed and functional proof of concept that it was over the hurdle of like, is this gonna go anywhere? Like, of course it's gonna go somewhere. like look at what it is already. And then you sort of just kept waiting for like, any day now, any day now, this is just gonna like rock it up and we're all gonna be using this. And it just sort of, it just didn't happen. And whenever I think of BOS, I always think of webOS. WebOS to me was sort of, on mobile was sort of the same story where it was a great demo, it worked, it was functional, everything was great. You were just sort of waiting like, any day now, this is just gonna really go somewhere. Everybody's gonna start writing for this and it's just, not this week, maybe next week, maybe next week. And I feel like webOS felt to me much like it did back with BOS, where, like you said, there's three printers at work. Unfortunately, I don't have any of those three, so I don't have a printer right now. So it's like, I'm not gonna go out and buy all the things that work with it. But yeah, it was just, oh, it felt like any day is gonna be our day. And unfortunately, didn't happen. - It's a tough lesson. I feel like I never quite get that lesson. Every time I'm convinced something is the best, and therefore the public is going to flock to it, they don't. In my young Whippersnapper research, I thoroughly enjoyed looking at the demos that you were talking about. You could see there was a lot of taste in the design or forward thinking, like the live updating of dragging windows around and videos and frames aren't being dropped. It just looked very... I could see that you were really, or the company was really thinking about the future. And I like to think about that idea of alternative history. Listener of the show who I also work with, Craig, he was really into HyperCard back in the day with Apple, for example. And you think, what would the world have been like had HyperCard taken off? And maybe we would be thinking differently. When you think about writing that book and what was happening with BOS, if history had turned out differently, and BOS had become, let's say, a juggernaut or even more influential and lasted. How do you think computing might have been different? Or where do you think we would be today if BOS had continued? Oh, that's a great question, because there's an important piece that I left out of that arc, which is when Apple was transitioning out of Mac OS 9 to Mac OS 10, they were looking for the underpinnings for it. And they were kind of trying to decide between Next Step and BOS. I I mean, it was on the table. And I don't have insight into why they made the decision that they did. But, you know, I think that if they had made that decision, clearly the future of BOS actually would have been the replacement for macOS. Assuming that that didn't happen and BOS continued on its own trajectory, what would be different? One thing I think about sometimes is like how intolerant the market is of having a lot of diversity in operating systems. Like we can deal with having dozens of car brands and makes and models. And that you don't feel like, you know, Mercedes or Volvo or Volkswagen have to win to succeed. You don't have to win to succeed.

There's room enough for everybody. But when it comes to operating systems, people are like, that's like Apple versus Windows, and that's all there is to it. And you know, so and so is going to win and the other is going to lose. And it's like, it doesn't have to be that simple. So you know, I think there would have been space. Would it have gotten out of the geek space really depends on applications, you know, the quality and availability of applications. - I mean, it's same with mobile, right? Where it's like, it has to be Android or iOS. It's like, no, it doesn't, just have both, like to use whatever you want. But I think like if there were a BOS to your point, if there isn't that hot app for it, then yeah, it's gonna be relegated to sort of our nerd sphere versus the general populace, yeah. - I think one of the big differences between the problem with the car analogy though, is that it's okay if there's dozens of cars, they can all make them and people can make a choice. But for an operating system to succeed, you have to have hundreds of thousands of developers on board on working on your platform. And each developer can only spread themselves so thin. Like a developer can't afford to spend time working on apps for 12 different operating systems. - There is a kind of a weird crossover there though, right? With cars, where like, now that we're having things like CarPlay and Android Auto, that has sort of come into play a little bit of like, some cars have some, some have others, some have both. And now that's, those two things are starting to cross a little bit, which is an interesting place to play in. And now we're getting developers who can't even be bothered dealing with two operating systems. And then they're just going standardizing on something that's halfway in between both like electron. And it's like, Oh, just pick the worst of everything. So it's like my annoyance, but I'm, I feel like I also I'm kind of perennially backing the losing operating system. So I liked, I liked Amiga's back in the day. That was my operating system of choice. Then the BOS and yeah, finally I landed. I thought, I finally, I used Windows for a while and then like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to move to, to Apple. And then it quite right when they're kind of in their suffering days and everybody's looking at you going, why, why are you liking Apple? That's, that's a bit embarrassing, isn't it? But Scott, it sort of leads me to the question. So you had your BOS period. What have you been using for the last 20 years? What's your take? Oh, I went right to the back. Okay. Yeah. - Yeah, so I was Windows before BOS, and I never went back after that point. So I've been on the Mac train ever since. And so after the whole BOS thing, I landed at the only logical place for me to be, which was a company called Atomation that made a state-of-the-art video editor for BOS called Video Studio, Personal Studio. And they were right here in Oakland. And so I could, they

started just making BOS software, they forked it to Windows so there was a Windows port of that and I worked there for a couple of years before an opportunity opened up at UC Berkeley and I went and became what we call it at the time a webmaster. There's a comedy series in Australia where they still actively use that term ironically so. Whenever I hear webmaster I always think of sort of a kung fu look so I'm imagining did you your beard did you have it quite long and sort of just you're the wise webmaster wandering around saying. I wish I could grow a beard like that, but I've never quite been able to. This is about as long as it gets. Bit of a silly question, but everybody sort of, you always have some sort of luck in your career, right? Things happen and you're like, that could happen to anybody, but just by virtue of where I was at the time, I was fortunate to get that. Scott, your surname is Hacker. Did that play a role in the IT development career that you had? I'm thinking that's a pretty cool nickname. I want to say that I've sometimes said that a name is like a tattoo you put on a soul, you know, the people like grow into their names. But I certainly didn't pursue a tech career, right? So I was in, I gotten out of college with a useless philosophy degree and not quite sure what I wanted to do. And a friend on the East Coast had said, Hey, you know, a lot of my friends are editors and they hire freelancers, why don't you come out, we'll get you a job as a as a freelance editor. And so I did that and where I landed was at ZDNet, Zip Davis, and they published a lot of the magazines you've heard of like Computer World and Computer Shopper and PC Magazine and Mac Life and Mac World and there was like a dozen of them. And I just had no idea what I was signing up for and I had actually no contact with the tech world at that point. But the very first job I got, I'm so happy for this, that I started on DOS, right on the command line before I had a Windows machine. I was on a 386 with a scanner attached to it. And every day I would come and there'd be a stack of Zipf Davis magazines. And my job was to leaf through them, find interesting articles, scan them, perform optical character recognition, which was really bad at the end of the day because all the zeros and Os would be mixed up and the Ss and Fis and have to go through and manually fix the scan text and pick the most interesting articles. And then this is pre-web. So this is like 1991. So our business thing was on CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online. And so I had to learn the Bizarro formatting systems for each of these systems, you know, no more HTML 'cause it didn't exist yet, and publish our articles on those three online systems from DOS. And it was a great education, you know, and slowly but surely, like just by reading these articles and the contact, it's like, I'm kind of into this, you know, and it took off. And then in 1993, the web hit. And so, you know, they wanted to be like,

have an early presence on the web. And so I was, you know, just totally right place at the right time. And I got to help build one of the first corporate websites. And then on the side, I registered birdhouse.org and created that as an arts collective because, you know, the early web was just so funky and full of artists, but none of the artists knew how to do tech, right? So I could help them print their poetry and their images and, you know, all the funky early HTML experiments and things like that. So that was a blast. I was just thinking back the other day about one of the biggest mistakes, missed opportunities that I've been through. As you probably remember, a lot of the big domain names were selling for giant money. People were scooping them up, you know, and selling coca-cola.com to the Coca-Cola company for a bazillion dollars. Well, one day, like 1993, '94, I was thinking, what's the shortest email you could have? Like, I wonder if you could be a@b.com, like a domain could be just a letter. And I looked it up, NS lookup or dig or whatever it was, and it was available. It's like, wow, I could buy b.com. And what about c.com? I checked all the letters of the alphabet and they were all available except for the letter Z, which was owned by Nissan, 'cause they had the Nissan Z car at the time. And, you know, I think there were 20 bucks each at the time. I could have bought A through Y.com and had them all. Who knows what the market would have been? But what am I going to do with those? You know, don't be ridiculous. So talk about alternate reality. Scott is now a billionaire over here because he sold A through Y.com. He owned the alphabet, basically. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. You mentioned computer shoppers, so I just have to throw in a quick tangent. Jason Scott, who does a bunch of the archive stuff, he recently had people, or he asked if people would donate some money to buy this like massive collection of computer shopper magazines, and he got them all and he's now scanning them all. So they're all going to be on archive.org. And I am so excited to go back and look at all these. Well, if you need if you need this, if you need a scanning workflow, Scott's got one ready to go. I've got that old 386 still right here next to me. The other cool thing about that office, well, cool in retrospect, it wasn't cool at the time, was that it was like an office of like 60 people all on 7, what was it, 7,200 Baud modems. We're all dialing in all day long, just the howl of connecting handshaking modems, just connecting and disconnecting and trying to configure, swearing at Winsock. Oh God, he mentioned Winsock, no! (laughs) Ah, DLL errors, oh. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was a noisy office. (upbeat music) - So we talked about magazines, we talked about computer books. I feel like there's a lot of people that probably listen to the show, they're like, what the hell are you talking, why would there be a book about a computer? Like, I think that's probably not, that's probably a valid question. So I think just thinking through, I think we're familiar with, you know, having computer books, having shelves of these giant thick books. All computer books were huge, which I always thought was interesting because a lot of them just were, they had more information than you ever would need. And I'm curious now that we actually have some of you here that wrote one of these books, did they say like, hey, we want to write BOS Bible. Here's the criteria. It needs to be 65 million pages and have so many screenshots. Or was it more like, write the book that has all the information you think needs to be in there? Or what did that look like from a, specifically for a tech author, which is very different than, you know, you write a novel, there's a story, it's starting an end. Computer book could be anything in between. So I'm curious, what did that look like? - I don't recall there being a page limit. - Okay. - And I also was shocked as I started trimming it out, like how big it was becoming, how quickly, because, you know, there were so many angles on it. There's like, how do you use it? There's the philosophy of it. Where did it come from? Where is it going? How do you do this? How do you do that? You want to address it like tips and tricks or like just like a strict reference manual or like here's exciting things you can do. And we kind of did it all in that book. And, you know, it turns out, well, jumping ahead possibly, I later wrote a book about MP3s for O'Reilly. Right, which was also, I think it was like 400 pages. And somebody's like, how do you write 400 pages about an MP3? MP3s appealed to, at the time, appealed to everyone. But BOS appealed only to a very small cross-section of the population. But the BOS book outsold the MP3 book by 20 to 1. You know why? Because almost nobody who uses MP3s feels like they need help. Like I got this, you know, you download the files, you play, and that's all I want to know. I stick the CD in and I rip it, now I've got the MP3s. But everybody who used this brand new operating system felt like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, alienated, and you know, I need guidance. How do I find my footing? So, and I think also everybody who was into BOS was passionate about technology, and they just wanted to gather and collect everything they could. Can I steal this moment? - Don't get ahead of yourself. Oh, come on. Shameless. Can I host it on canyon.blog/save? Pitch away. My wife and I were cleaning out a closet during the recent atmospheric rivers that rolled through California on one weekend, and I came across a box of old BOS-related schwag that I had saved from back in the day. I've got pens and mouse pads and software installation disks. The coolest thing I've got is some of the B-Box motherboards that didn't work, they converted them into clipboards and they cut them into rectangles and put clippy things on. I've got one of those. >> Please send me your payment details

immediately. >> Right? See, this is exciting. I thought, wow, I want to keep this forever, but it's been sitting in a closet for all this time and doing nothing. I've really got nothing to do with this. And I was in contact with another person who worked at B and he also had a box of schwag. And we thought, you know what, let's do, let's have an auction and donate the proceeds to charity. So he sent me a box of his schwag, oh, t-shirts, did I mention t-shirts? I've got t-shirts. And I'm gonna reach out to some other BOS people and engineers and try to pool it and just try to come up with a big old charity donation. And I'm not ready to announce this guy I haven't gathered the materials, but this is the idea and we're going to do this. I can tell right now that Jason is thinking, how do I come up with the Burke Foundation really quickly to somehow get some motherboards or revenue here? What's going on? If I still use a checkbook, my checkbook would be ready. Look at me, I'm still wearing a pyjama shirt with bluey on it. I need a new shirt. I've got one for you, Andrew. Oh, my gosh. Unfortunately, I think there's some loopholes in it. It was a very one for him. It was a t shirt that I think was only for for B developers. And it's Jean-Louis Gosset's head on top of like a Greek figure in a toga. And he's like holding forth on top of some podium. And there's some caption like, can just can this email just be a meeting, please? Or something like that. Oh my, that poster would sell like nobody's business. Oh my gosh, that's ridiculous. Well, yeah, absolutely. Let definitely let us know when you get that going, because I would love to shout from the rooftops. Well, actually, no. Do I want to shout from the rooftops? I don't know if I want competition, but it is it is for charity. So all right, I'll shout from the rooftops. It's worth it. If it's set up well after this episode, and you know, we can always put it back in the show notes or do a little share on mastodon or add it to our blog definitely for charity yeah. Yeah absolutely for sure absolutely that sounds awesome okay oh I'm so excited now. You got a scoop um Scott so I guess over the last 20 20 odd years 20 25 I don't know how long it's been it's been a long time probably before Martin was born. I'm older than that by the way. BOS probably hasn't been a great revenue stream for you. I imagine the BOS Bible, while it sold well initially, probably sales have probably just tapered off a little since then. So what have you been doing in the interim? I understand you do a bit of photography. Is that kind of a passion project? What have you done in the last 20 years, really? What have you been up to, mate? as I mentioned, I bounced off of the freelancing over to Atomation, which is a software company that made BOS and Windows software in Oakland. And then my wife was doing preservation work at the library at UC Berkeley, and she heard of a job at the Graduate School of Journalism as a webmaster, and

I thought, "Oh man, that's got my name written all over it." And I applied. It took a little but I got that role and it turned into the funnest job I'd ever had, maybe not the best career wise, but through that job, my software skills developed but I also was able to teach. I was teaching multimedia skills and web development to mid-career journalists who are trying to get their tech footing. I was running a whole webcasting operation. So I learned all about that. I started running Apple servers and doing a lot a lot of serving related stuff. And then this was the best. These mid-career journalists who had come through for multimedia training, we come up with story ideas and we go to interesting places and people in the Bay Area. And I go out with them and help them with their cameras and their gear and everything and just got to go have adventures. The people that, you know, the journalists who worked as professors there were just fascinating people. They really, really been in the trenches. I mean, some of the stories I heard, Well, I'll give you one anecdote. There was a professor I saw walk into his class and there were students walking behind him, carrying a futon. And when he got to his class, the students laid the futon and the teacher laid down on it and started teaching. And I was like, what is going on here? And they said, oh, haven't you heard? He was one of the journalists in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government rolled through with tanks on the people and he raised a camera to record it. And the Chinese police beat him to within an inch of his life, broke his back in 24 places. And he can't stand for more than a few minutes. - Wow. - And another day I was talking to a woman who taught photography. And she'd come back from a sabbatical and there was a big bandage over her eye. And I was like, what happened to your eye? And she's like, somebody's brain splattered into it. I was like, what do you mean somebody? She's like, yeah, I was in Iraq and I was standing by this wall and then some sniper just like took out the guy standing next to him and to me and his brain exploded and pieces of it went in my eye and I got infected. It's like, I don't meet people like that in my job now. Just really intense, awesome, awesome people. But had a really good time there. But the problem with that role for me as a professional was they wanted one WordPress site after the next. You know, so I was managing like 40, every time a class was going to go out on some special project, like, can you stand up a WordPress site for us? And I had learned some Python and Django there to build the internal internet and public facing website. But even that was pretty simple, you know, software wise, basically basic content management stuff. And I got tired of WordPress and I started to realize it's like software developers outside of my sphere of one, they had things like planning meetings and code review and unit tests and like all these things that I wasn't

learning, you know, I just had nobody to bounce anything off. It was somebody would come by my desk and say, can you put this badge on the website, please? You know, and then it would happen. And that's like, that was software development to me. So I realized that I had to get out of there if I wanted to, to grow. So I then took an opportunity with the Central Campus Department, Educational Technology Services, and they were working in Rails and Angular, which was pretty overwhelming at first, but I started to get a sense of like Agile teams and all that. And then from there, I bounced out to the Center for Investigative Reporting in Oakland, doing pure Python Django, which I had basically fallen in love with by this point. And then the California College of Arts. The only reason I left California College of Arts was, as I was mentioning to Jason before we started, that the commute home was like an hour a day getting out of San Francisco. And then I was contacted by Energy Solutions in Oakland that is a carbon footprint reduction consultancy. Not just software house at all, I had people working on policy and ratings and helping set building codes and rebates for energy efficient equipment, insulation, solar, electric vehicle stuff, everything you can think of that touches carbon and some big utility or company needs a hand with it, they hire us. So we're like, we're almost 500 people now. We're really growing fast. But they were a pure Python Django shop and they were doing really deep software. So I was like, I can have an environmental impact, rid of this commute, have much more flexible work from home hours. So I started there six years ago and I'm still doing it full time from home. I haven't looked back. It does sound like you found a way to combine your philosophy, sort of background degree, into a computing career. I wouldn't call it useless. I reckon it was probably incredibly useful in researching and writing a book. So you shouldn't be so modest. I think that's true. Yeah. I mean, I mean, very few philosophy graduates end up working in the field of philosophy. But you know, it does, it's brain training that's, you know, applicable to all sorts of things. And in fact, I feel like I meet a lot of software developers with philosophy backgrounds. It's not uncommon. Yeah. So is it fair to say maybe you were seated at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts? And we perfectly fair to say that. Perfect. Oh, you were also asking about photography. So, you know, I had it in my background. My dad was a semi-professional photographer back in the day, and he was developing film for MGM and doing some studio work. And my wife has an MFA in fine art photography. And, you know, she was really the photographer in the family. And I was always a casual point and shoot type, you know, photographer. And then a friend had encouraged me to get a Fujifilm X100F. He's like, you know, you should take what you're doing with the iPhone and translate it

into a real camera. And I just didn't have time to put into like learning. I didn't realize how much of a learning curve there would be to really to really master it. And then the pandemic hit. And I found myself like a little extra time, but I was saving up of commutes and things like that and feeling like also that I needed a creative outlet, you know, that my life had just become I'm like all software. And so I just, I sat down and took an online class and really started to master the exposure triangle and everything there was that I could possibly learn about photography. And I started getting out. I already was doing a lot of hiking and cycling and taking the camera with me and adventuring through the suddenly empty streets of the Bay Area and sort of getting the ghostly downtowns and things like that. And I just started getting more and more into it, just watching photography videos nonstop on my lunch hour and just taking in everything I could. And I also had a friend, a photographer in the area named Bored Ruth, who is just a master landscape photographer who kind of took me under his wing and just gave me little tips and tricks that I accumulated into my workflow. - Previous, this actually also segues into the J-School work because I had participated in some of the photography workshops led by the professors there and they were encouraging doing, you know, photo a day projects. So 2011, '14 and '17, I had done photo a day and that had really sort of trained my eye to sort of just always be on the lookout. But, you know, then I sort of adopted the mantra of like never leave the house without a camera and taking every opportunity. and I didn't really glom onto any particular genre. I was doing street and landscape and people and macro and just whatever I came across at the time. And so now I'm posting two images per day, sometimes three to Flickr, Glass, Vero, Instagram, and one a day to Mastodon and sometimes Facebook. - Wow. - So I just have this workflow, actually it's really easy. It's all about the share sheet, baby. It's about Lightroom Cloud. So I edit on the desktop in Lightroom. It translates into Lightroom Cloud on mobile. And then from the iPad, just using that share sheet, get the Instagram post ready with all the hashtags. And then you can copy that into Vero. The hashtags translate. Glass doesn't take hashtags, so I just whack those out and pick one of their categories. And there's this magical thing on the Flickr share sheet that I discovered by accident. Because Flickr has hashtag objects, not strings, that you think you have to type in. But if you paste hashtags into the description, and then you tap out of the description field, like into the title field, it detects the change on blur. It converts all the hashtag strings into hashtag objects down below. So those come in automatically. - You're such a nerd, Scott. - I'm such a nerd. (laughing) So I can post all four platforms in 10 minutes flat. It's actually really quick,

yeah. I love everything you said about wanting to publish a diversity or variety of stuff, whether it's the platforms or also the genres, 'cause I know I've been bringing photography up a little bit more in recent episodes, and I apologize to listeners if it hasn't been a bit of a photo podcast, but now we have the license to do it with our special guest, which is great. I love that you're aiming for a variety, because I know whenever I've seen photographers' blogs or YouTube channels or even stuff, sometimes that people mention on a network like Glass, It's always find your theme, find your genre. But personally, like I relate to what you're saying, where it's, you know, if you see something interesting or you wanna try a different style or black and white or macro or whatever, just go for it because it's the practice of doing all of those things. And I had been photographing for years, just purely as a hobby. And then one day some helpful salesperson said, "It sounds like you need a micro four thirds camera. You need to go smaller." And I completely rediscovered my passion for it with a new system. So how much is Fuji kind of like a part of your photographic identity now? Is it what they make that really ignited it for you? The same way that I had with the brand that I use? It's the only proper camera system that I've owned. And so I don't have the perspective to say, well, I can't say I wouldn't enjoy working on Sony or Nikon or Canon or whatever. But what I do know is that, you know, I read a lot and I keep seeing people say the same thing that using like a Sony is like using a computer. It's like very digital experience. It's a lot of digging through menus for things and, you know, everything's kind of very clinical. And Fuji really goes for a kind of retro aesthetic and a feel to the controls. So it's, you know, very reminiscent of old film cameras, the way they operate. and it's very tactile. And so people just say they enjoy using this. So, you know, I don't think you can make a rational critique at this point about who makes the best quality images 'cause everybody makes great quality images. The question is, what's the workflow and how does it feel in your hands? And, you know, how can you develop a relationship with the tool or have the tool disappear? But the XT line of Fujis especially has something that I just love, which is the ISO dial on the left, the aperture ring on the lens where God intended it, not in some sub menu or a little weedy device, and the shutter speed dial on the top right. And so it's the exposure triangle, quite literal and manifest in your hands. You don't need to look, you don't need to dig, it's just always there. And that makes manual photography a lot more enjoyable to me. The other thing about Fuji is that they have a history of making all these famous films like Provia and-- Acros. Acros, and they have a Chrome one, they have Velvia. And they have simulated these looks and baked them into all of their cameras. So when you bring them into Lightroom, the profile that you selected in the camera, the look, is already there associated with the RAW. But you can change your mind. you can toggle to another one. That means you can shoot in black and white, across mode, if you like to compose in black and white, change your mind and go to color. You're not colorizing, it's just raw data, right? You're just applying a different profile. So all those are really, they're all beautiful, right? I mean, there's just great film looks that are built in. And I feel like there's a different characteristic look to Fuji images that's hard to put your finger on, but they really get color science right. But I feel like Sony and Nikon users would dispute that and say they liked it, it looked better and that's cool. - I remember years ago when I was into photography, I'm not anymore, I sort of gave that hobby away, but I remember being obsessed with the Velvia look and using it in Lightroom, just constantly trying to find the best Velvia preset. And basically all my photos just looking like that. - Jason's holding something up. What do we have there? - X-Pro3. It's just, it's, they just, it's hard to describe a Fuji look. It, when you, if you like the Fuji look, you just, it becomes part of you. It's a weird thing. I think you mentioned that the tool disappears and I used Fuji years ago. Then I went through my Sony phase, my Leica phase, and I'm actually back to Fuji now because it's this digital representation of analog that just disappears. The range finder look, you just feel like you're more there. The Sony is very clinical to me. I still have the Sony, it's fine, but it's very much a tool more so than like an expression for me. So yeah. - And that's a new camera you're holding there, right Jason? The one you just flicked up? - Yeah, is that new to all of us? You've, this isn't a reveal. - This is a reveal, yeah, I have changed my ways. I am no longer a Sony and Leica shooter. I am back into the Fuji world. And I cannot say how, you talked about the film simulations. It's just, there are filters and there are film simulations, I find. And I know this is very controversial, but when we talk about film simulations, I think it's easy to think like, oh, it's just an Instagram filter. They really aren't. They are really something special, I find. I mean, maybe technically they're the same in the way that they're changing ones and zeros. Fine, whatever. But if you're looking at it from an artistic standpoint, I do feel like the Fuji film simulations cannot be matched on any other platform. Sony, Leica, whatever. I just feel like they are inherently different and wonderful. - Developing those films professionally, I mean, they're tuned and fine-tuned and professionalized and it's very different from most presets are created by a single developer working at home, which doesn't mean there aren't lots of great presets. But the other thing about profiles versus presets, and

this is something I've really come to love in Lightroom and as a workflow is, they both have the same effect in dramatically changing the overall look of the image. But when you apply a profile, you've got that look and all of your sliders are zeroed out. The profile is your baseline. that when you apply a preset, all the sliders are set to wherever that person that they think they're preset. So you can still adjust them later. But you know, we're talking about changing the baseline, the color lookup table is it's the LUT, not you know, just where the sliders are. It's a different thing. Yeah. And I know that people, I know that people in our kind of general listenership are going to be very enthusiastic to hear this one person I'm thinking of, particularly is Mike. I don't know, Andrew, I saw you comment about it, Jason, you would have seen it too. He actually wrote a blog piece recently as a bit of follow-up as a reply to a discussion of Hipstamatic. So a quick shout out to Mike. Thank you for writing that big blog post. I look forward to seeing what people like him or others in our listenership think about this kind of expanded interview crossover photography corner. And I also want to ask you, Scott, you mentioned that you're on a few different platforms sharing your photos. If people listening are keen to see your stuff, what would you say is the first thing they should check out? Or what's your main profile or portfolio that you'd want to show off? - Well, okay. We were talking earlier about why don't people flock to the best platform? And I feel like Flickr is the hands down best photography platform available. It's got so much functionality and features that are not available on any other platform. You've got entire interest groups. You've got a functional API. None of these other platforms have a functional public API. I don't think Glass does, does it? I mean, and you know, I've built in it, my entire photography portfolio at Shacker.net is built against the Flickr APIs. I do not upload photos to my photo platform. I just plug in the ID into a Django-based content management system and it pulls from the Flickr API and caches it in Redis. And it's a beautiful thing. It's like, I can't do that with any other platform, but also, you know, Flickr doesn't limit the aspect ratio. You can go nuts, you know, whereas like Instagram is gonna like auto crop stuff. They'll never recompress your stuff. You can go as high resolution as you want. You've got built-in print shops. You've got tags and groups. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. There's so many reasons why Flickr is the superior platform but everybody or so many people have this idea that like, oh, that's yesterday's news. You know, Yahoo ruined the music. Well, yeah, Yahoo did ruin them but Yahoo hasn't owned them for years now. And people are unaware that it's like it's gotten better and better and users are coming back. and there are tons of awesome photographers there. You just have to find them. So, you know, at this point, I mean, when I post the same image, I literally get 10 times more engagement on the Flickr version than on the Instagram version. I feel like, you know, Instagram was crap to begin with, and it's gotten worse, and people are not even there anymore. And the algorithm's like punishing me. I don't know what it's doing, but. - You're not selling something, Scott. That's the problem. - You don't have the, it's the home shopping network now. (laughs) - SkyMall. It's not really about photos anymore, is it? - No, it's not. And I feel forced to be there because I feel like all the other platforms are where people who really care about photography go. You know, people on Flickr, on Glass, on Vero, these people care about photography. But I also want to reach my nieces and my old friends from high school and everything. And they're just going to stay on Instagram. They just are. So, you know, if you want to reach both audiences, you have to post in both places. So anyway, long story short is, I feel like Flickr is the best platform I have a lot of love for it. But now that said, glass is just rocking it. They're what they're creating is it's just beautiful. And you know, it's so thoughtful. And you know, listening to their new podcast recently, you know, in hearing Tom Watson talk about the philosophy of creating glass and how they're consciously anti toxic, you know, and their awareness of how toxic most social media is. I mean, glass launched, there was no like button like for the first six months or something. It means I wanted to get people talking and it's really working and I'm seeing more thoughtful comments on my photos on Glass than anywhere else. And then recently, maybe I should have done this to begin with, I discovered, oh, it's not just an app, they've got a beautiful website too at glass.photo. And it's now my favorite photography website. And then like I just tried some intuitive shortcut keys like, well, let's see, A is for appreciation. Yep, A sends an appreciation. And it's just like, and of course, it's way easier to type on a keyboard. So I'd be torn between Flickr and Glass. What they have in common is no ads and no algorithms. And that's true of Mastodon too. And that's kind of my new mantra. It's like, I just want to get away from ads and algorithms. Scott, I've been following you on Flickr for some time, and I'm just now scrolling again through your portfolio and it's incredible. The photos you take are magnificent. So congratulations because I sort of had, sometimes you get lost in the feed, you know, they pop up but it's just another photo in a feed and you don't attribute it to the person. And just looking at your portfolio now as just you and I just scroll my mouse and it is amazing some of the stuff you're doing. So definitely worth a follow. And I keep paying my Flickr subscription. I hardly post photos to it anymore, but I keep paying them just because I admire the service. But

it's a good point, though, because Flickr is obviously your profile, your albums, an extensive collection, whereas Glass kind of scratches that itch for a more thoughtful Instagram. It can just be that one photo each day. It doesn't have to be the pressure of the whole album. So it sounds like a nice balance. Yeah, I love Glass too, but I do think it makes sense to have both. I have SmugMug, which they own Flickr, so there's a little bit of, I'm still finding a little bit of weirdness between the two offerings where they're very much becoming sort of the same offering, but it's becoming less clear why you would have one versus the other. The only reason I have SmugMug at this point is just so I can make it look exactly how I want, and it just basically mirrors my other website. But yeah, to that point, if I go out on a big hike or something and I have a mass of 50 photos, I don't wanna just dump all those into glass. Like that would be annoying to everybody. So it's nice to have the kind of two places for photography. We have the one where it's just like, oh, this was like a really good waterfall. Like I just wanna throw that in there and then have my whole collection somewhere else. So yeah, I think that's not uncommon for a lot of people to have both. - Understanding what dumping was and what it was doing to the service is the key to understanding the transition out of Yahoo ownership of Flickr into SmugMug. So Yahoo was actively encouraging like, "Use us as your backup service. We can auto upload all of your stuff." What does that do to everyone's feed? It just fills it with noise and unthoughtful garbage. SmugMug came along and said, "Not only is this ridiculously expensive, but it's ruining the experience for everyone." So now, they've really tried to actively discourage dumping and encourage you to, "Just your best things, just a few a day." And that's why it's getting so much better. Smug mug is they're great. They they've been great forever. I remember when they first started, um, when I was in the Bay area back then, and it was part of their kind of, uh, what did they call it? Smug mug. It was the smug mug user group. So I don't know. They had some cute name for it. Smug mug hug. Maybe I forget now, but like we would go to like the smug mug headquarters and we would have, you know, events and we would talk about photography and it felt very. If Glass were back then, it felt like that, where it was built by photographers, like they were photographers first, SaaS companies second, like that was secondary to the photography. And if it didn't make sense from a photography standpoint, they weren't gonna do it. And it was a family thing, and it was really great. And I think they've continued that quite well. And they've shown that we wanna take Flickr because we want it to be good about photography, and we wanna protect what Flickr is today in terms of photography. So I give them a big, big kudos for, I don't wanna say saving Flickr, but just

keeping it from being, it didn't get bought by AT&T, that kind of thing, right? Like a Yahoo or a Verizon or any other crap that has gone on in the past. So I think we're fortunate that, we're fortunate and very lucky that flickr.com still works and still loads, because I think in a not too alternate universe, it could have just gone the way of many other websites that we love. And it's also respecting the integrity of a long archive, people's effort in photos and an active part of the web, which is more than can be said for a certain tech behemoth's treatment of a photographic review site. But that has been covered elsewhere, extensively already. Hey, there's a question I've been wanting to ask you. since I've been listening to the podcast, that theme music is so wonderful. And it feels like it should be the soundtrack for my life. You know, it's like, who is that? Where can I find more of that awesome theme music? That is such a good question. And kind of a kind of a funny story. So we, we started this podcast through was it three years ago? Now? I think September 2020 is what's in my head. Something like that. Roughly three years ago. So what do you have to do when you create a podcast? Well, you need people to talk a bunch of **** about stuff. Okay, we got that. That's clear. Three white guys. That's easy. Yeah, easy. We need a website. Okay, that's a dime a dozen. We couldn't get B.com, but we got, you know, one that's a little bit longer. And then of course you need the theme music. Well, none of us are musicians. None of us create music. So then it was go on the web, find somebody that can make you music. So I think we found maybe three or four different ones to begin with. Some of them were like, "Eh, they're okay." And then this one was the outlier of like, "It kind of sounds ridiculous. "It doesn't really make sense. "Are people gonna immediately delete the episode "as soon as this starts? "We're not really sure." But we're like, "You know what? "Screw it, this is a weird thing we're doing. "Let's just go crazy with it." So we ended up with this guy's music. He's actually, if I'm remembering correctly, he's actually in the Bay Area as well. And I tried to get him actually to be a guest to talk about the theme music and like tell us like, where did this come from? But it just never quite worked out. But surprisingly, everybody has been, I don't think I've heard one negative thing about the song. Like people love it. They're totally into it. has not gotten old in 80 some odd episodes. I still hear it every time and it brings a smile to my face. And we've got a couple different versions that I think we've played with and used in different ways throughout different episodes over the years. But- - Yeah, there's a different cut version for One Prime Plus that we do. And we took the sections out. Also, shout out to new One Prime Plusian Mark H. Thanks for joining. Gotta sneak that in. - Oh, Mark H. Right there. Oneprimeplus.com. the game, the

long game. Where is it, Jason? It's in the long game. What's the name of the artist? I am completely blanking on the name right now. And I will, I guarantee I will send it to you. And it will be in the show notes. The song is actually called Handy, you know, classic. And I've just been doing some email spelunking while you've been talking. And I found an email, I think it was the last email in the discussion, because Jason did the kind of round for us to check from and verify out of the three that we wanted. 3rd of September, 2020, Jason said, I honestly didn't think anyone else would dig that one. So Jason obviously loved it. We responded and went, hey, that's just weird. It's excellent. He's like, cool, that's the choice. So thank you, Mr. Handy. - Anyway, to answer your question, I am Shacker everywhere. I'm Shacker on Instagram, Flickr, Vero, Flickr bureau glass. We got to get you on to micro blog micro blog. It never ends. That's our that's it that's how we all came to be I think was if we we plot back our origin story for the three of us I think we all found each other on micro blog which is a wonderful social social network slash blogging site ad free algorithm free mountain race. Developed it himself and it's an amazing site. So I'm always aware of giving that website a shout out. I love it and it is the platform that runs my blog. Yeah, we don't have sponsors. We just know that without micro.blog there's no hemispheric views, historically speaking. And we have another micro camp coming up and I'm hoping that I'm allowed to say that because I just said it. So it's coming up in May. Go to micro.camp and it will be updated soon, hopefully. Or forget that I said it until it's actually announced. One or the other. Scott, this has been like, I feel like we could literally talk to you for probably about 10 more hours, easily. I feel like there has been, there's scratching the surface and then there's like, I feel like we're just still looking at the surface right now. We haven't even gotten close enough to scratch it. So thank you from the bottom of all our hearts. I think we're very appreciative of you taking the time to chat with us. This has been, thinking back to when I was looking at that big red book, I would not have imagined that I am now speaking to you today. And also it's good to know that Scott Hacker is not just a alias for when you're writing books because that seemed a little bit on the nose that somebody named Hacker would be writing a book about BOS. I was suspicious of that, but now I know the truth. So that's good to know as well. One time when I signed up for an account with an ISP, and then they cut me off and I called them and they're like, "Oh, we know your type. We don't allow hackers here." I'm like, "Do you really think I would use that username if I was an actor, if I wanted to crack your network?" So that happened once. And then my son, to this day, cannot get an account on Facebook. So I have one, but they won't give him one because they don't believe that's his real name. So. Well, thanks for joining us, Scott and listeners, check out the show notes, you know where to find him. It's been a total pleasure. It's so fun to meet you guys. Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation. And I also 20 years ago would never in a million years have thought that the BOS work I was doing then would have resulted in something like this decades later. [Music]