The History of Computing

TiVo is a computer. To understand the history, let’s hop in our trusty time machine. It’s 1997. England gives Hong Kong back to China, after 156 years of British rule. The Mars Pathfinder touches down on Mars. The OJ Simpson trials are behind us, but the civil suit begins. Lonely Scottish scientists clone a sheep and name it Dolly. The first Harry Potter book is published. Titanic is released. Tony Blair is elected the Prime Minister of Great Britain. Hanson sang Mmmm Bop. And Pokemon is released. No not Pokemon Go, but Pokemon. The world was changing. The Notorious BIG was gunned down not far from where I was living at the time. Blackstreet released No Diggity. Third Eye Blind led a Semi-Charmed life and poppy grunge killed grunge grunge. And television. Holy buckets. Friends, Seinfeld, X Files, ER, Buff and the Vampire Slayer, Frasier, King of the Hill, Dharma and Greg, South Park, The Simpsons, Stargate, Home Improvement, Daria, Law and Order, Oz, Roseanne, The View, The Drew Carey Show, Family Matters, Power Rangers, JAG, Tenacious D, Lois and Clark, Spawn. Mosaic the first web browser, was released, Sergey Brin and Larry Page registered a weird domain name called Google because BackRub just seemed kinda’ weird. Facebook, craigslist, and Netflix were also purchased. Bill Gates became the richest business nerd in the world. DVDs were released. The hair was big. But commercials were about to become a thing of the past. So were cords. 802.11, also known as Wi-Fi, became a standard. Microsoft bought WebTV, but something else was about to happen that would forever change the way we watched television. We’d been watching television for roughly the same way for about 70 years. Since January 13th in 1928, when the General Electric factory in Schenectady, New York broadcast as WGY Television, using call letters W2XB. That was for experiments, but they launched W2XBS a little later, now known as WNBC. They just showed a Felix the Cat spinning around on a turntable for 2 hours a day to test stuff. A lot of testing around different markets were happening and The Queen’s Messenger would be the first drama broadcast on television in LA later that year. But it wasn’t until 1935 that the BBC started airing regular content and the late 1930s that regular programming started in the US, spreading slowly throughout the world, with Japan being one of the last countries to get a regular broadcast in 1953. So for the next several decades a love affair began with humans and their televisions. Color came to prime time in 1972, after the price of color TVs introduced over the couple of decades before started to come down in price. Entire industries sprang up around the television, or at least migrated from newspapers and radio to television. Moon landings, football, baseball, the news, game shows. Since that 1972 introduction of color tv, the microcomputer revolution had come. Computers were getting smaller. Hard drive capacity was growing. I could stroll down to the local Fry’s and buy a Western Digital, IBM Deskstar, Seagate Barracuda, an HP Kitty Hawk, or even a 10,000 RPM Cheetah. But the cheaper drives had come down enough for mass distribution. And so it was when Time Warner, a major US cable company at the time, decided to test a digital video system. They tapped Silicon Graphics alumni Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay to look into a set top box, or network appliance, or something. After initial testing, Time Warner didn’t think it was quite the right time to build nation-wide. They’d spent $100 million dollars testing the service in Orlando. So the pair struck out on their own. Silicon Valley was abuzz about set top boxes, now that the web was getting big, dialup was getting easy, and PCs were pretty common fare. Steve Perlman’s WebTV got bought by Microsoft for nearly half a billion dollars. Which became MSN TV and played the foundation for the Xbox hardware. I remember well that the prevailing logic of the time was that the set top box was the next big thing. The lagerts would join the Internet revolution. Grandma and Grandpa would go online. So Ramsay and Barton got a check for $3M from VC firms to further develop their idea. They founded a company called Teleworld and started running public trials of a new device that came out of their research, called TiVo. The set top box would go beyond television and be a hub for home networking, managing refrigerators, thermostats, manage your television, order a grocery delivery, and even bring the RFC for an internet coffee pot to life! But they were a little before their time on some of this. After some time, they narrowed the focus to a television receiver that could record content. The VC firms were so excited they ponied up another $300 million dollars to take the product to market. Investors even asked how long it would take the TV networks to shut them down. Disruption was afoot. When Ramsay and Barton approached Apple, Claris and Lucas Arts veteran Randy Komisar, he suggested they look at charging for a monthly service. But he, as with the rest of Silicon Valley, bought their big idea, especially since Komisar had sat on the board of WebTV. TiVo would need to raise a lot of money to ink deals with the big content providers of the time. They couldn’t alienate the networks. No one knew, but the revolution in cutting the cord was on the way. Inking deals with those providers would prove to be much more expensive than building the boxes. They set about raising capital. They inked deals with Sony, Philips, Philips, and announced a release of the first TiVo at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of 1999. They’d built an outstanding executive team. They’d done their work. And on March 31st, 1999, a Blue Moon, they released the Series 1 for about $500 and with a $9.95 monthly subscription fee. The device would use a modem to download tv show listings, which would later be replaced with an Ethernet, then Wi-Fi option. The Series1, like Apple devices at the time, would sport a PowerPC processor. Although this one was a 403GCX that only clocked in at 54 MHz - but cheap enough for an embedded system like this. It also came with 32 MB of RaM, a 13 to 60 gig IDE/ATA drive, and would convert analog signal into MPEG-2, storing from 14 to 60 hours of television programming. Back then, you could use the RCA cables or S-Video. They would go public later that year, raising 88 million dollars and nearly doubling in value overnight. By 2000 TiVo was in 150,000 homes and burning through cash far faster than they were making it. It was a huge idea and if big ideas take time to percolate, huge ideas take a lot of time. And a lot of lawsuits. In order to support the new hoarder mentality they were creating, The Series2 would come along in 2002 and would come with up to a 250 gig drive, USB ports, CPUs from 166 to 266 MHz, from 32 to 64 megs of RAM, and the MPEG encoder got moved off to the Broadcom BCM704x chips. In 2006, the Series 3 would introduce HD support, add HDMI, 10/100 Ethernet, and support drives of 2 terabytes with 128 megs of RAM. Ramsay left the company in 2007 to go work at Venture Partners. Barton, the CTO, would leave in 2012. Their big idea had been realized. They weren’t needed any more. Ramsay and Barton would found streaming service Qplay, but that wouldn’t make it over two years. By then, TiVo had become a verb. Series4 brought us to over a thousand hours of television and supported bluetooth, custom apps, and sport a Broadcom 400 MHZ dual core chip. But it was 2010. Popular DVD subscription service Netflix had been streaming and now had an app that could run on the Series 4. So did Rhapsody, Hulu, and YouTube. The race was on for streaming content. TiVo was still aiming for bigger, faster, cheaper set top boxes. But people were consuming content differently. TiVo gave apps, but Apple TV, Roku, Amazon, and other vendors were now in the same market for a fraction of the cost and without a subscription. By 2016 TiVo was acquired by Rovi for 1.1 Billion dollars and as is often the case in these kinds of scenarios seems listless. Direction… Unknown. After such a disruptive start, I can’t imagine any innovation will ever recapture that spirit from the turn of the millennia. And so in December of 2019 (the month I’m recording this episode), after months trying to split TiVo into two companies so they could be sold separately TiVo scrapped that idea and merged with Xperi. I find that we don’t talk about Tivo much any more. That doesn’t mean they’ve gone anywhere, just that the model has shifted over the years. According to TechCrunch “TiVo CEO David Shull noted also that Xperi’s annual licensing business includes over 100 million connected TV units, and relationships with content providers, CE manufacturers, and automotive OEMs, which now benefit from TiVo’s technology.” TiVo was a true disruptor. Along with Virtual CEO Randy Komisar, they sold Silicon Valley on Monthly Recurring Revenue as a key performance indicator. They survived the .com bubble and even thrived in it. They made television interactive. They didn’t cut our cords, but they expanded our minds so we could cut them. They introduced the idea of responsibly selling customer data as a revenue stream to help keep those fees in check. And in so doing, they let manufacturers micro market goods and services. They revolutionized the way we consume content. Something we should all be thankful for. So next time you’re binging a show from one of your favorite providers, just think about the fact that you might have to spend time with your family or friends if it weren’t for TiVo. You owe them a huge thanks.

What does insurance, J.R.R. Tolkien, HG Wells, and the Civil War have in common? They created a perfect storm for the advent of Dungeons and Dragons. Sure, D&D might not be directly impactful on the History of Computing. But it’s impacts are far and wide. The mechanics have inspired many a game. And the culture impact can be seen expansively across the computer gaming universe. D&D came of age during the same timeframe that the original PC hackers were bringing their computers to market. But how did it all start? We’ll leave the history of board games to the side, given that Chess sprang up in northern India over 1500 years ago, spreading first to the Persian empire and then to Spain following the Moorish conquest of that country. And given that card games go back to a time before the Tang Dynasty in 9th century China. And Gary Gygax, the co-creator and creative genius behind D&D loved playing chess, going back to playing with his grandfather as a young boy. Instead, we’ll start this journey in 1780 with Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, who invented the first true war-game to teach military strategy. It was good enough to go commercial. Then Georg Julis Venturini made a game in 1796, then Opiz in 1806, then Kriegsspiel in 1824, which translates from German to wargame. And thus the industry was born. There were a few dozen other board games but in 1913, Little Wars, by HG Wells, added hollow lead figures, ornately painted, and distance to bring us into the era of miniature wargaming. Infantry moved a foot, cavalry moved two, and artillery required other troops to be around it. You fought with spring loaded cannons and other combat resulted in a one to one loss usually, making the game about trying to knock troops out while they were setting up their cannons. It was cute, but in the years before World War II, many sensed that the release of a war game by the pacifist Wells was a sign of oncoming doom. Indeed it was. But each of these inventors had brought their own innovations to the concept. And each impacted real war, with wargaming being directly linked to the blitzkrieg. Not a lot happened in innovative new Wargames between Wells and the 1950s. Apparently the world was busy fighting real war games. But Jack Scruby started making figures in 1955 and connecting communities, writing a book called All About Wargames in 1957. Then Gettysburg was created by Charles Roberts and released by Avalon Hill, which he founded, in 1958. It was a huge success and attracted a lot of enthusiastic if not downright obsessed players. In the game, you could play the commanders of the game, like Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Meade, and many others. You had units of varying sizes and a number of factors could impact the odds of battle. The game mechanics were complex, and it sparked a whole movement of war games that slowly rose through the 60s and 70s. One of those obsessed gamers was Gary Gygax, an insurance underwriter, who started publishing articles and magazines, Gygax started a the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention in 1968, which has since moved to Indianapolis after a pitstop in Milwaukee and now brings in upwards of 30,000 attendees. Gygax collaborated with his friend Jeff Perren on a game they released in 1970 called Chainmail. Chaimail got a supplement that introduced spells, magic items, dwarves, and hobbits - which seems based on Tolkien novels, but according to Gygax was more a composite of a lot of pulp novels, including one of his favorite, the Conan series. 1970 turned out to be a rough year, as Gygax got laid off from the insurance company and had a family with a wife and 5 kids to support. That’s when he started making games as a career. At first, it didn’t pay too well, but he started making games and published Chainmail with Guidon Games which started selling a whopping 100 copies a month. At the time, they were using 6 sided dice but other numbering systems worked better. They started doing 1-10 or 1-20 random number generation by throwing poker chips in a coffee can, but then Gary found weird dice in a school supply catalog and added the crazy idea of a 20 sided dice. Now a symbol found on t-shirts and a universal calling card of table top gamers. At about the same time University of Minnesota history student, Dave Arneson met Gygax at Gencon and took Chainmail home to the Twin Cities and started improving the rules, releasing his own derivative game called Blackmoor. He came back to Gencon the next year after testing the system and he and Gygax would go on to collaborate on an updated and expanded set of rules. Gygax would codify much of what Arneson didn’t want to codify, as Arneson found lawyer balling rules to be less fun from a gameplay perspective. But Gary, the former underwriter, was a solid rule-maker and thus role-playing games were born, in a game first called The Fantasy Game. Gary wrote a 50 page instruction book, which by 1973 had evolved into a 150-page book. He shopped it to a number of game publishers, but none had a book that thick or could really grock the concept of role-playing. Especially one with concepts borrowed from across the puIn the meantime, Gygax had been writing articles and helping others with games, and doing a little cobbling on the side. Because everyone needs shoes. And so in 1973, Gygax teamed up with childhood friend Don Kaye and started Tactical Studies Rules, which would evolve into TSR, witch each investing $1,000. They released Cavaliers and Roundheads on the way to raising the capital to publish the game they were now calling… Dungeons and Dragons. The game evolved further and in 1974 they put out 1,000 copies of in a boxed set. To raise more capital they brought in Brian Blume, who invested 2,000 more dollars. Sales of that first run were great, but Kaye passed away in 1975 and Blume’s dad stepped in to buy his shares. They started Dragon magazine, opened The Dungeon Hobby Shop and started hiring people. The game continued to grow, with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons being released with a boatload of books. They entered what we now call a buying tornado and by 1980, sales were well over 8 million dollars. But in 1979 James Egbert, a Michigan State Student, disappeared. A private eye blamed Dungeons and Dragons. He later popped up in Louisiana but the negative publicity had already started. Another teen, Irving Pulling committed suicide in 1982 and his mom blamed D&D and then started a group called Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, or BADD. There’s no such thing as bad publicity though and sales hit $30 million by 83. In fact, part of the allure for many, including the crew I played with as a kid, was that it got a bad wrap in some ways… At this point Gary was in Hollywood getting cartoons made of Dungeons and Dragons and letting the Blume’s run the company. But they’d overspent and nearing bankruptcy due to stupid spending, Gygax had to return to Lake Geneva to save the company, which he did by releasing the first book in a long time, one of my favorite D&D books, Unearthed Arcana. Much drama running the company ensued, which isn’t pertinent to the connection D&D has to computing but basically Gary got forced out and the company lost touch with players because it was being run by people who didn’t really like gamers or gaming. 2nd edition D&D wasn’t a huge success But in 1996, Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. They had made a bundle off of Magic The Gathering and now that TSR was in the hands of people who loved games and gamers again, they immediately started looking for ways to reinvigorate the brand - which their leadership had loved. 3rd edition open gaming license was published by Wizards of the Coast and allowed third-part publishers to make material compatible with D&D products using what was known as the d20 System Trademark License. Fourth edition came along and in 2008 but that open gaming License was irrevocable so most continued using it over the new Game System License, which had been more restrictive. By 2016 when 5th edition came along, this is all felt similar to what we’ve seen with Apache, BSD, and MIT licenses, with TSR moving back to the Open Gaming License which had been so popular. Now let’s connect Dungeons and Dragons to the impact on Computing. In 1975, Will Crowther was working at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. He’d been playing some of those early copies of Dungeons and Dragons and working on natural language processing. The two went together like peanut butter and chocolate and out popped something that tasted a little like each, a game called Colossal Cave Adventure. If you played Dungeons and Dragons, you’ll remember drawing countless maps on graph paper. Adventure was like that and loosely followed Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system, given that Crowther was an avid caver. It ran on a PDP-10, and as those spread, so spread the fantasy game, getting updated by Stanford grad student Don Woods in 1976. Now, virtual words weren’t just on table tops, but they sprouted up in Rogue and by the time I got to college, there were countless MUDs or Multi-User Dungeons where you could kill other players. Mattel shipped the Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game in 1981 then Dungeon! For the Apple II and another dozen or so games over the the years. These didn’t directly reflect the game mechanics of D&D though. But Pool of Raidance, set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting of D&D popped up for Nintentendo and PCs in 1988, with dozens of D&D games shipping across a number of campaign settings. You didn’t have to have your friends over to play D&D any more. Out of that evolved Massive Multiplayer Online RPGs, including EverQuest, Ultima Online, Second Life, Dungeons and Dragons, Dark Age of Camelot, Runescape, and more. Even more closely aligned with the Dungeons and Dragons game mechanics you also got Matrix online, Star Wars Old Republic, Age of Conan and the list goes on. Now, in the meantime, Wizardy had shipped in 1981, Dragon Warrior shipped in 1986, and the Legend of Zelda had shipped in 1986 as well. And these represented an evolution on a simpler set of rules but using the same concepts. Dragon Warrior had started as Dragon Quest after the creators played Wizardy for the first time. These are only a fraction of the games that used the broad concepts of hit points, damage, probability of attack, including practically every first person shooter ever made, linking nearly every video game created that includes combat, to Dungeons and Dragons if not through direct inspiration, through aspects of game mechanics. Dungeons and Dragons also impacted media, appearing in movies like Mazes and Monsters, an almost comedic look at playing the game, ET, where I think I first encountered the game, reinvigorating Steven Jackson to release nearly the full pantheon of important Tolkien works, Krull, The Dark Crystal, The Princess Bride, Pathfinder, Excalibur, Camelot, and even The Last Witch Hunter, based off a Vin Diesel character he had separation anxiety with. The genre unlocked the limitations placed on the creativity by allowing a nearly unlimited personalization of characters. It has touched every genre of fiction and non-fiction. And the game mechanics are used not only for D&D but derivatives are also used for a variety of other industries. The impact Dungeons and Dragons had on geek culture stretches far and wide. The fact that D&D rose to popularity as many felt the geeks were taking over, with the rise of computing in general and the reinvention of entire economies, certainly connects it to so many aspects of our lives, whether realized or not. So next time you pick up that controller and hit someone in a game to do a few points of damage, next time you sit in a fantasy movie, next time you watch Game of Thrones, think about this. Once upon a time, there was a game called Chainmail. And someone came up with slightly better game mechanics. And that collaboration led to D&D. Now it is our duty to further innovate those mechanics in our own way. Innovation isn’t replacing manual human actions with digital actions in a business process, it’s upending the business process or industry with a whole new model. Yet, the business process usually needs to be automated to free us to rethink the model. Just like the creators of D&D did. If an insurance underwriter can have such an outsized impact on the world in the 1970s, what kind of impact could you be having today. Roll a d20 and find out! If you roll a 1, repeat the episode. Either way, have a great day, we’re lucky you decided to listen in!

Whirlwind Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we’re going to look at a computer built at the tail end of World War II called Whirlwind. What makes Whirlwind so special? It took us from an era of punch card batch processed computing and into the era of interactive computing. Sometimes the names we end up using for things evolve over time. Your memories are a bit different than computer memory. Computer memory is information that is ready to be processed. Long term memory, well, we typically refer to that as storage. That’s where you put your files. Classes you build in Swift are loaded into memory at runtime. But that memory is volatile and we call it random-access memory now. This computer memory first evolved out of MIT with Whirlwind. And so they came up with what we now call magnetic-core memory in 1955. Why did they need speeds faster than a vacuum tube? Well, it turns out vacuum tubes burn out a lot. And the flip-flop switching they do was cool for payroll. But not for tracking Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in real time and reacting to weather patterns so you can make sure to nuke the right target. Or intercept one that’s trying to nuke you! And in the middle of the Cold War, that was a real problem. Whirlwind didn’t start off with that mission. When MIT kicked things off, computers mostly used vacuum tubes. But they needed something… faster. Perry Crawford had seen the ENIAC in 1945 and recommended a digital computer to run simulations. They were originally going to train pilots in flight simulation and they had Jay Forrestor start working on it in 1947 ‘cause they needed to train more pilots faster. But as with many a true innovation in computing, this one was funded by the military and saw Forrestor team up with Robert Everett to look for a way to run programs fast. This meant they needed to be stored on the device rather than batch modes run off punch cards that got loaded into the system. They wanted something really wild at the time. They wanted to see things happening on screens. It started with flight simulation, which would later become a popular computer game. But as the Cold War set in, the Navy didn’t need to train pilots quite as fast. Instead, then they wanted to watch missiles traveling over the ocean, and they wanted computers that could be programmed to warn that missiles were in the air and potentially even intercept them. This required processing at speeds unheard of at the time. So they got a military grant for a million bucks a year, brought in 175 people and built a 10 ton computer. And they planned to build 2k of random-access memory. To put things in context, the computer we’re recording on today has 16 gigs of memory, roughly 8,000,000 times more storage. And almost immeasurably faster. Also, cheaper. The Williams Tubes they used at first would cost them $1 per bit per month. None of the ways people usually got memory were working. Flip-flopping circuits took to long, other forms of memory at the time were unreliable. And you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention. By the end of 1949 the computer could solve an equation and output to an oscilloscope, which were used as monitors before we had… um… monitors. An Wang had researched using magnetic fields to switch currents and Forrester ended up trying to do the same thing, but had to manage the project and so he brought in William Papian and Dudley Buck to test various elements until they could find something that would work as memory. After a couple of years they figured it out, and built a core that was 1024 cores, or 32 x 32. They filed for a patent for it in 1951. Wang also got a patent, as did Jan Rajchman from RCA, although MIT would later dispute that Buck had leaked information to Rajchman. Either way they had the first real memory, which would be used for decades to come! The tubes used for processing in the Whirlwind would end up leading Ken Olson to transistors, which led to the transistorized TX-O (the love of many a tech model railroad clubber) and later to Olson founding DEC. Suddenly, the Whirlwind was the fastest computer of the day. They also worked on the first pointing devices used in computing. Light sensing vacuum tubes had been introduced in the 1930s, so they introduced a pen that could interact with the tubes in the oscilloscopes people used to watch objects moving on the screen. There was an optical sensor in the gun that took input from the light shown on the screen. They used light pens to select an object. Today we use fingers. Those would evolve into the Zapper so we could play Duck Hunt by the 80s but began life in missile defense. Whirlwind would evolve into Whirlwind II, and Forrester would end up fathering the SAGE missile defense system on the technology. SAGE, or Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, would weight 250 tons and be the centerpiece of NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. Remember the movie War Games? That. Dudley Buck would end up giving us content-addressable memory and helium cooled processors that almost ended up with him inventing the microprocessor. Although many of the things he theorized and built on the way to getting a functional “cryotron” as he called superconductors, would be used in the later production of chips. IBM wanted in on these faster computers. So they paid $500,000 to Wang, who would use that money to found Wang Laboratories, which by the 80s would build word processors and microcomputers. Wang would also build a tablet with email, a phone handset, and a word processing tool called Wang Office. That was the 1990 version of an iPad! After SAGE, Forrester would go on to teach for the Sloan School of Management and come up with system dynamics, the ultimate “what if” system. Basically, after he pushed the boundries of what computers could do, helping us to maybe not end up in a nuclear war, he would push the boundaries of social systems. Whirlwind gave us memory, and tons of techniques to study, produce, and test transistorized computers. And without it, no SAGE, and none of the innovations that exploded out of that program. And probably no TX-0, and therefore PDP-1, and all of the innovations that came out of the minicomputer era. It is a recognizable domino on the way from punch cards to interactive computers. So we owe a special thanks to Forrester, Buck, Olson, Papian, and everyone else who had a hand in it. And I owe a special thanks to you, for tuning into this episode of the History Of Computing Podcast. We’re so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Today we’re going to look at publishing and from a different perspective than the normal history of computing podcast episodes, we’ll actually interview someone that has been living and breathing publishing technical content since, well the inception - and so one of the most qualified people to actually have that conversation: Adam Engst of TidBITS.

Minecraft Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we’re going to look at one of my daughter’s favorite things in the whole wide world: Minecraft. Oh, and it’s also one the most popular games ever. Modding games had been around for a long, long time. Before Minecraft, there was Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress. A lot of people my age don’t really get Minecraft as a game. I mean, it’s not that far off from the world-builder aspect of World of Warcraft from 20 years ago. But there, you built a world to play in. Even before World Of Warcraft, when it was all about building and controlling a village of orcs or humans and conquering another. By the late 90s, a lot of people were tinkering with the Ultima world builder and building new games The Unreal Engine ended up getting used to build another dozen games. World building was going commercial. A few years go buy and in 2009, Swedish video game programmer Notch, known as Marcus Persson in the real world, writes a little game called Cave Game. Persson had been born in 1979 and started programming on the Commodore 128 at 7. He built his first text based game a year later and would go on to write software for others and co-found Wurm Online, a massive multiplayer online role playing game. Cave Game was more a world designer than a game, but the stage was set for something more. He added resource simulation so you could generate resource tiles and manage resources. Suddenly it was becoming a game, which he renamed to Minecraft. Then you could build things with the resources you collected. Like buildings. They were intentionally blocky. The world is generated based on code that seeds objects based on the clock when the world is created, giving it a nice random allocation of resources and areas to explore. You can travel in a 30 million block radius in a biome. These biomes might be deserts or the snow according to how the terrain is laid out. Since people could collect things and build things out of what they’d collected, the creations took on a new sense of meaning. That specific game wasn’t exactly unique. It was common going back to before even Civilization 1. The difference is you built buildings as a whole unit. In Minecraft you laid out the blocks to build things and so the buildings took on the shape you gave them. If you wanted to build a house that looked like a famous castle, go for it, if you wanted to design a dungeon like we used to do in Dungeons and Dragons, but in three dimensions, go for it! Other games eventually integrated the same mechanic, allowing you to design buildings within your worlds. Like Skyrim, which made an Axe named after Notch. And just as you can fight in Skyrim, Minecraft eventually added monsters. But famously blocky ones. You could craft weapons, mining tools, crafting tools, and all kinds of things. Even a bed for yourself. You could terraform a world. You could build islands, chop down trees, take eggs from chickens. While the game was still in an alpha state, he added modes. Like Survival, where you could get killed by those wacky zombies, Indev and Infdev. Today there are 5 modes: survival, creative, adventure, hardcore, and spectator. Bugs were fixed, gameplay tweaked, and in 2010, it was time to go beta. Notch quit his job and started to work on Minecraft full-time. Notch founded a company called Mojang to take the game to market. After another year, they took Minecraft to market in 2011. That’s when Jeb Bergensten became the lead designer of the game. The sound design was given to us by German composer Daniel Rosenfeld, or C418. By the way, he also produced the Beyond Stranger Things theme, an inspiration for what we use in this podcast! They added servers for better coop play and they added more and more areas. It was vast. Expansive. And growing. Notch made over a hundred million dollars off the game in 2012. Kids watch YouTube videos of other kids playing Minecraft, and many make money off of showing their games. Not as much as Notch has made of course. And the kids watch the game for as long as you’ll let them. Like for hours. You default as Alex or Steve. By day you can build and by night, you run away from or kill the zombie, spider, enderman, creeper, or skeleton. The blocky characters are cute. If they weren’t so simple and cute, there’s a chance the game never would have gone anywhere. But they were, and it has. In fact, it grew so fast that, check this out, Microsoft ended up buying Mojang for 2 and a half billion dollars. And since 2014 they’ve made well over half a billion dollars off Minecraft and they have over 90 million active players every month, just on mobile. In 2016 they crossed 100 million copies sold. Now they have nearly that many people playing consistently. One of which is my kid. And they’ve crossed 176 million copies sold. Microsoft took a beating from certain investment There are books to help you play, costumes so you can dress up like the characters, toys so you can play with them, legos because they’re blocky as well, apparel so you can show your Minecraft love, sheets to help you sleep when you’ve played enough. Pretty sure my kid has a little of all of it. The modding nature of the game lives on. Your worlds and mods follow you from device to device. You can buy packs. You can make your own. You can make your own and sell them! You can make money off Minecraft by building packs or by publishing videos. Probably the best summer job ever! The beauty of Minecraft is that you can build worlds and it unlocks a level of creativity in kids I’ve rarely seen with video games. It feels like Legos that way, but virtual. It can be free or you can pay a nominal fee for certain things in the game. Nothing like the whaling you see with some games. It can be competitive or not. It’s even inspired tens of millions of people to learn a little basic coding. It’s funny, Minecraft is more than a game, and the return on investment Microsoft continues to receive from their acquisition shows just how smart they are. Unlike you dear listeners, for wasting time listening to me babble. Now get back to work. Or trying to get a block of Obsidian in Minecraft. But before you do, thank you so much for tuning in. We’re so lucky to have ya!