Tech Gifts Past, Present, and Future - DTNS 5172

0:28That song. You'll be seeing them again later in the main show as well. I got to give him 60. Rob got the cool hat, of course. Hey, remind me of, what's his name? The guy used to do the 7-Up ads because he had that white fedora hat. I thought you were going to say the babe with the power. Pharrell? No, the guy used to say 7-Up had no caffeine, never had it, never will. Remember? It was like this big catch thing. I remember that tagline, but I don't remember the guy's hat. Yeah, me either. I remember the guy with the cola nuts. We all have a cola, I hope. Yeah. Hope so. Cola nuts. One of my daughters.

1:08Oh, that was like it. I was going to say, some of ours work better than others. Sure. No, like I was at one of the test markets for a like soda. I didn't realize that. I came home from school. One day there was two glass bottles. Not like a 16, not like what they give today, but like it was shorter and squatter. Not like what the kids had. And it was sitting at my door. But it was sitting on my door. It's like, what is this? And I noticed that all the neighborhoods all had the same thing. It was wrapped in a little plastic. And they said, please enjoy. And then you write back what you think about it.

1:39And it was like soda. It was a non-caffeinated soda. It was called Like Soda? Oh, you don't remember Like? You don't remember Like? No. It was a non-caffeinated cola. It was made by 7-Up. I did not. No. I missed that train. It was not very long-lived. No. Things you can't do anymore. It was not a long train. It's not a surprise you missed it. Apparently people didn't like it as much. Like new Coke? Yes. I remember that whole thing. I wasn't allowed to drink soda, so like... Oh, yeah. I wasn't going to get any soda. The monastery had very strict rules about fizzy beverages. I do remember... I don't know if Shasta is still around.

2:18Yes. I want a pop. I want a Shasta. I think I was like in kindergarten or something, and it was just a very popular song. And I was just like, I'll just do anything for Shasta. And my mom's like, no, it'll rot your teeth. My classmate in Catholic school was just like, yeah, we went up to Shasta for the holidays. You were like, to the Cola Kingdom? Like, no, to the mountain where you go. I know, but I was saying. No, no, that's what I was saying. No, that's what he said to me. It's like, what, you went to the factory to see where they make it? It's like, no. It's just a mountain. Yeah. I'm trying to find out when they discontinued Like Cola But everything just says it was introduced in 1982 I don't even remember that one So maybe it's called around It's made from the real Cola nut Yeah, made from the Cola nut It's what plants crave, Jason It's just a weird name They sponsored a NASCAR Winston Cup Series in 1983 You gotta like this race to win Well, because it's like Cola or it's cola that you like?

3:25I guess both are supposed to make sense. All I know, it was made from a real cola nut. I don't know what that meant. Whatever makes you buy it. I don't know what a cola nut is. Take the wallet out. Yeah. I just remember a commercial by a guy with a thick, I think, Jamaican accent laughing about his cola nut. The soda wiki, which specializes in soda entries claims that Like Cola was last advertised in 1996. Oh, wow. A massive boner than Joel. Survived. They gave it a good solid try. Gotta go through all those bottles in Surge. This wiki also says that similar flavors include Coca-Cola, Pepsi, RC Cola, and Spur Cola.

4:19Spur. I don't remember Spur. I don't remember that one. Me either. From 1948. So then it lasted longer than Crystal Coke. It did. You're right. No, Crystal Pepsi. Crystal Pepsi. There we go. It was Crystal Pepsi. I remember they used that Van Halen song right now, and it's so annoying. So every time I hear that song, I think of the ad. Well, the song itself is fine. But the best Saturday Night Live skip. No, I know, but you associate. It's just like Toyota used that one song, like Everyday People. and now every time I hear that song, I think of a Toyota ad. I just think of a commercial. Which reminds me, I need to wish everyone a happy Honda days.

4:57Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thanks, Tom. As a former Honda owner, I appreciate this. It's raining keys, everyone. Not Kia's, keys. Ow. Well, listen, if it starts up a new car, I'm on it. It's raining keys coming from the sky. It's dangerous. It hurts, man. It hurts out there. Did you guys ever see any of those kinds of parties? I was explaining to Gary as I was coming back down 99 from Northern California, right at the grapevine in Bakersfield, I encountered a giant brown wall of dust because the winds were so high. It's like, really? You couldn't see through it. It's like, oh, this is great. I should probably slow down.

5:35That's where my daughter was born, Bakersfield. Good idea. And then someone blew by me at 90. So it's like, eh, they must have good insurance. I prefer 99 to the five. takes a little longer. Not really, though. Californians. We always end up here. I can't help it. It's just what I do. The advantage of 99 over the 5? Costco's, and that's where I get my cheap gas as I go down. There are just more interesting places to stop off if you need to stop off. Fresno, Merced, Tulare. No, I just mean like On the five it's like I don't know Two minutes The Castle Air Force Base Museum Is there one called Oil Patch Or something like that There's a lot of oil patches There's a lot of oil that's Called Oil Patch There's a Buck Owens Boulevard or something Yeah, Bakersfield Buck Owens Museum I think even.

6:40Oh, and I finally found the Merle Haggard off-ramp. Have you been looking for it for a while? He made his thing in Bakersfield like his name. He walked the streets of Bakersfield with Buck. Mama tried. As many times as I've been adjacent to Bakersfield or Fresno. CCR, they were from the East Bay. I didn't realize that. Welcome, Amos. Happy Honda days Sure Creedence Clearwater Revival is from the East Bay? Yeah Really? One minute I thought they were from Mississippi Why else would they have a song called Lodi? Come on Yeah, stuck in Lodi again I never thought about it Yeah Listen, if I were stuck in Lodi I would want to go screaming to Stockton Which tells you something Lodi's not that bad It's fine Yeah, I got no problems with Lodi It's near the Manteca water slides It's Manteca right next to the RV in a town named after Lard.

7:43Manteca. So this is a Lodi, Ohio. Is there? And it is basically what is in between here and there. Yeah, well, that's kind of the way to say. I think there's a... Lodi is everywhere. Yeah. All right, Gary, Brad. All respect to people from Lodi. I'm going to put you in the back. Okay. Thanks for having me. Don't go anywhere. We'll have you out on real short.

8:09All right. Oh, have a good show, everybody. Let's do it.

8:26This is the Daily Tech News show for Wednesday, December 24th, 2025. Happy Boxing Day, everybody. Why does it say Happy Boxing Day? I don't know. I'm just reading, but was it? No. Happy almost Boxing Day. Merry Christmas Eve. There we go. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Can we start that over, Plans?

8:54I did not write that for the record. I am Ron Burgundy. Isn't Boxing Day the 26th? Yes. We must have copied the gift support show template over and missed that. Yeah. Apologies, Sarah. That's fine. Take two. I like to be the butt of a joke.

9:18This is the Daily Tech News show for Wednesday, December 24th, 2025. Merry Christmas Eve to those who celebrate. We're going to tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help all of us understand it a little bit better. Welcome to our last show of the year, last live show. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. In Studio 7 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. In whatever this room is called in Petaluma, I'm Jason Howell. I'm the sub-producer today, Anthony Lamos, a.k.a. Amos. I know. And under soggy SoCal skies, I am the producer, Roger Che.

9:58And you are joining us, too. Thanks to everybody who sent in their tech memories or wishes for today's show. We are looking forward to hearing everybody's contributions. We have a little bit of news first. It is our last regular show of the year. Then we're going to each share a tech memory from holidays past or some kind of tech we're getting excited about, in some cases both. But before we do that, thanks, everybody, for gathering one last time for our last live show of the year. This is great. It's good to hang out with everybody. it's great for yourself Rob. I mean, I didn't want to speak for anybody, but I just, I'm having a good time.

10:40Yeah. You know, you got your party hat on. Of course you are. I'm happy if I'm wearing a hat. So, you know, I have to go pull out the biggest, widest brim for door. That was close to me. We do so many shows throughout the year. So when we kind of break, not break character, but break format for some of our holiday episodes, It's really fun. It's like we're just winging it. We're just being ourselves. We've got special guests coming up as well, both recorded and live. So stick around for that. Everybody ready to get to the briefs? Let's do it. Let's do it.

11:22Samsung announced details for several gaming monitors ahead of showing them at CES. Getting the most attention is the Odyssey 3D, which has, as the name implies, glasses-free 3D, along with a 6K display and a 165 hertz refresh rate. But there's also the 27-inch Odyssey G6, bringing a world-first 1 ,040 hertz refresh rate, though that's in dual mode. Yeah, so you don't get the 4K, or it's not a 6K screen. 6K, we're already to 6K monitors. Yay! Still trying to make the 3D work. Apparently. But you don't need glasses, so that's positive. That's different. I'm curious to see it. If it looks good. 1040 hertz.

12:06That's got to look like looking out of a window, I would imagine. That's really smooth. Reuters sources say NVIDIA stopped its test of Intel's 18A production process to make chips Intel just opened its first mass production ATA line in its Fab 52 site in Arizona. And personally, I was rooting for Intel on this. They're building a big giant foundry in my backyard. I was hoping that this would be the thing. But when this announcement came out, their stock kind of tanked yesterday. Yeah, it was a good piece of news when we heard NVIDIA might be testing using Intel Fab. It's a bad piece of news that here to the NVIDIA might have stopped that testing, but you never know.

12:53Maybe this is just, well, we're going to stop that testing and then restart with something else. Maybe they learned something from it. Who knows? I would say, I mean, honestly, all fabs are like this. Like there's a lot of stop and go. There's nothing that comes out of it. Nothing comes out like a peanut butter jelly sandwich out the first time. The U.S. Department of State announced Tuesday it will deny entry to the United States for five Europeans because they worked with non-governmental organizations that pushed for regulations on tech companies. U.S. Secretary of State said the five individuals pushed for what he called, quote, acts of extraterritorial censorship.

13:33The individuals include the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, two leaders of an anti-hate speech group called HateAid, the head of the Global Disinformation Index, and former EU Commissioner Terry Britton, who helped create the EU Digital Services Act. That's a ringing endorsement from everyone. That's it. Yeah. It's like, what do you even say about this? If you are confused, if you're like, wait, Europeans don't need a visa, it's being called denying a visa, but essentially it's saying we won't admit them to the country. And even if you don't need a visa to travel to the U.S., you have to do a digital registration ahead of time.

14:13And that's how they would say, ah, these people are not allowed entry. So if they show up at customs, turn them away. hmm well following a widespread power outage in san francisco just last week that actually caused stoplights to go out overwhelmed waymo cars ability to even navigate the city waymo has issued an update to its fleet it's pushed a software update to make the vehicles more aware of special circumstances like widespread outages like that so that they can act more decisively if multiple stoplights are out at the same time. Waymos previously might have asked for a confirmation check at unusual traffic instances like a dead stoplight.

14:55That was used as a measure to safeguard against incorrect assessment. The number of Waymos asking for confirmation in this case overwhelmed the system. That caused the temporary stoppage of most of the fleet of cars this weekend. So they're like, they basically were saying like, you know, this was a cautionary thing that we had baked in when the scale of everything was much smaller. Now it's a much larger scale. We're going to go in, we're going to tweak this so this doesn't happen again. Remains to be seen if it won't happen again. You know, I was thinking about this because Southern California and pretty much all of California at this point is experiencing some very extreme weather.

15:32I am going to a family member's house tomorrow and I thought, you know instead of driving, maybe I just take a Waymo. But if there's some sort of outage when I'm away from home, how easy is it for me to get back? Now, I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it did cross my mind. Yeah. It's better today than it was a few days ago before they pushed the update is what I would say. The good news is I think it's interesting and I'm very glad they posted more details. I'd like even more details, but I'm glad they posted the details they did. And it was through them being extra cautious that caused this problem.

16:11They said most of the Waymos were actually getting through the dark stoplights, but some of them were falling back on this like, hey, something seems odd. We're going to check for confirmation. And that caused a spike of confirmations. And that was a DDoS on the system, essentially. And they realize now that the Waymos are good enough that they don't need to always check for confirmation. So what they're going to do is put in a system that says, if there is a widespread power outage, we'll let the Waymos take more action without having to call for confirmation. That makes sense to me. Yeah, Tom, we kind of got our wish.

16:42We talked about this on Monday on Daily Tech News Show, and we both hoped that they come out and tell us what happened, why it happened, and what they're doing to fix it. And they've done all of those things. We still want more information, but they didn't necessarily have to say anything. So the fact that we actually got some news is pretty good. Yeah. So that said, Sarah, will you take a Waymo given all of that? Well, I need to take my dog too, and we're not supposed to do that. And he will be a very wet dog by the time he gets in the Waymo. So I'll report back. Okay. Yeah. Let us know after the first of the year.

17:18All right, folks, those are the essentials for today. Let's dive into your holiday tech hopes and dreams.

17:28So Sarah, you get the honor of going first today. So tell us, what are you doing? Are you giving us a holiday memory or a holiday wish? What are you coming with? I'm going to go with memory. I don't do a lot of gift exchanges with family or friends at this point in my life, not because we don't love each other. We just don't do it. So I have a lot of really fun memories of holiday gifts. And so mine today is, uh, hearken back to 1992 and my parents, uh, who were, you know, we were a humble family. It wasn't like they could buy me a car or something like that, but they said, what would you like for Christmas?

18:07And I said, I want a video camera. And they were like, well, we're, you're not going to get a video camera for Christmas. What else would you like? Maybe a nice sweater from the gap or, you know, that, you know, that kind of stuff like what would you like in your stocking a pair of earrings and i was like no i want a video camera now and jason knows this because he and i talked about this not that long ago i have been obsessed with recording since i was a baby pretty much you know lots of audio lots of cassette tapes um and i we never as a family we never had like you know the big old vhs camcorder that you know the the parent would have at the school play we just never had one of those and then technology started to get better and so I was like that's literally all I want one thing, that's it my dad was like, you're not going to get it so please tell us something else that you want he had already bought it so this was like the fun surprise this was the fun surprise, my dad was very good at that so anyway, Christmas morning you know, open the box you know, it's the camcorder it was the Sony Handycam high eight camcorder.

19:13It was Christmas of 1992 and I was ecstatic. And he was like, I remember he was like, just so you know, this is not your camcorder. This is our camcorder. This is a camcorder that belongs to the family. It's not yours. We did not buy this for you. We bought it for us. And I was like, totally fine. Don't eat it every day. I was really the only one who ever used it. But yeah, I mean, I took it to school. I took it to like slumber party, dance parties. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the teachers would be like, Sarah, no more recording. And, you know, I just, it was like, it wasn't like I was doing it in secret.

19:49I was just so excited to have it. Yeah, it wasn't like Google Glass. They could tell you were so right. No, no, no. It was never supposed to be like clandestine at all. It was just, it was like taking photos. It felt like that to me, but better. So that was, and I've gotten lots of wonderful presents over the years, but that was, that was the big one. because it was very unexpected. True surprise. True surprise. And it was not, I mean, you know, the handycam back in the day, I mean, that was, there were others that were using Hi8 technology, but that was a cool camera. And my dad was very much a Sony man.

20:27I went on to eBay just to see what these are going for these days. Varies wildly. You can get something for, you know, sub 100 bucks, but it usually doesn't have, you know, batteries and accessories and it goes up to about a thousand dollars, but they are, they are definitely still being traded around. So for everybody who has that, you know, kid who loves legacy tech, we're just, you do as well. Um, you know, that was, that was my, that was a very, very fond holiday memory for me. You know, funny thing about 1992, uh, I was covering the 92 election for Channel 3 at the University of Illinois.

21:08And we just got our first Hi8 cameras for that coverage. Oh, yeah. Exactly at the same time. Because at the time, it was like, well, this is really leveling up from what we had before. And you have longer recording time than a VHS. It's much smaller and more compact. Yeah, it was a great game. Whenever I had to run camera, I was very thankful if I got the high eight instead of one of the old three-quarter inch. That was a big thing, right? Right around that time is when America's Funniest Home Videos was like a thing. Oh, that's right. And so everyone, that was the new Polaroid photo, right? I'm going to submit my tape of my kids doing wacky or my husband falling off his hammock or something weird.

21:51Yeah, that's what we called TikTok back then, kids. I was going to say, that was going viral back then, was getting on America's Funniest Home Videos. It's the same format. You give us your content. If we use it, we'll give you some sort of like conciliatory prize or something like that. We'll just say, Paul sent this. Yeah, like here's your bag of Rice-A-Roni or something. No, you got on TV. That was your payment. That was the prize. But that was the thing. It's like, I was on TV. That was the thing. Back then, like even if your foot was in the shot, you'd say, that's my foot. That's me. That's me.

22:22But even going back in earlier years, in my stocking, I'm not kidding, like every year it would be like oh i'd get like 10 um uh cassette tapes you know like in a in a you know wrapped and i'd be like yay i mean that's is that exciting for a lot of kids i don't know for me it was like oh i can do a lot of stuff with this well before the video camera days it was like i would have my friends on speakerphone again not secretly recording them but we would be talking on the phone just like kids do and i'd be like okay let's record and then i would listen to these things later yeah what were we even talking about but it was so fun for me to be like i have now a recording of this well this is why it's so cool and important to encourage your kids to be into the things that your kids are into because your parents probably said she really likes these recorders yeah let's get her one she really likes tv and camera stuff let's let's go ahead and get her one and look what you're doing today 30 some you know 30 years later definitely tracks yeah the value you mentioned the value and how the how it's interesting the the wide range of value in ebay and i can speak from personal experience in our family my older daughter you know she's almost 16 a couple of years ago she finds in a drawer a little digital camera you know just one of my random like i can't even remember what brand sony or something you know a little thin digital camera from probably like 12 or 15 years ago.

23:54And she freaked out because she was like, oh my God, people are like, these are all over TikTok because they see that old legacy tech as like a different type of filter. It's like, I can apply a filter inside of an app or I can use that thing, which gives a very unique look to it that you can't get in an app. That's the real thing. And she loves that thing. I don't need to fake the tracking across the screen. It's built into the camera. you couldn't get rid of it turns out all right before we continue with more of our memories and wishes let's hear a few of yours hi this is hit and run tony long-time listener first-time caller one of my favorite christmas tech memories is when my older sister got me a sony psp i didn't really think she had gotten me one and i thought she had put like socks in the box or something but I opened it up and there it was that thing was like space age for me because you can play games on it you can play watch UMD movies on it you can put digital copies of your movies photos mp3s which I did like we didn't even have wi-fi at the time so I remember I wanted to update it to get the browser on it I was walking down the street and found the you know open wi-fi signal that I was able to use to get it updated.

25:15We eventually did get Wi-Fi and I was able to download games. I was able to browse the internet. I used that for so long and will always treasure that as one of my favorite memories. The great philosopher Douglas Adams wrote, Anything that is in the world when you're born is natural and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things. This most certainly was true for me. Born in the early 70s, I grew up just as computers started to become mainstream.

25:57I was presented with a TI-99-4A one Christmas, probably because my dad got it cheap as they went on clearance. The concept of the computer seemed natural to me, and I wrote that as they became more widespread. Getting a job at Radio Shack when I was just 15 and learning to build, repair, and program computers gave me a great toolkit for my career. I eventually evolved into teaching others how to use computers and technology. Social media, and certainly AI, have come along later in my lifetime. These are clearly against the natural order of things and really should be abolished. A Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Pleasant Holidays to the DTNS audience, and a gracious thank you to Tom, Sarah, and the rest of the DTNS family for keeping us entertained and informed these many years.

26:43Greetings, DTNS crew, and Happy Holidays. I'm Corey Kaye, long-time listener, first-time caller. For your co-host show, I wanted to mention a couple things. so I always get some sort of technology around Christmas time that's who I am but last year I got a Tempest weather station and after having tested and used many other weather stations I find this one to be the best it's low profile not many moving parts it's remote so I can get it on my Amazon Echo or my cell phone and it's pretty accurate. So I thought it was a good buy. And then for this year I have decided to purchase myself a DJI Mini 4K drone.

27:40I've had many other drones before but by the time I got around to using them they were out of date and didn't work So I'm going to give this the old college try and get it, get this going this coming year. So happy holidays. Wish you all the best and a happy new year. Bye. Good timing on the DJI purchase too. Yeah, no kidding. Lick of time. Well, thank you, Hit and Run Tony. Thank you, Brian O. Thank you, Corey K. All good stuff. I just ordered the Tempest weather station myself. After the winds of the last couple weeks. After a lot of research, I finally decided, you know, let's go ahead and go that one.

28:27I remember getting a Sony PSP I bought myself for the holidays. And it was very impressive. Very impressive piece of machinery. I found it kind of annoying, though, that I had to buy these special UMD movies to watch movies when I could easily just take what I already had and transcode it onto a thumb... Yeah, what you had legally backed up without circumventing DRM. Yeah, I remember my wife got me a PSP, and I still have it. It still works, and I still will every now and again go watch Hidden, what is it, Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger? Crouching Tiger. Crouching Tiger. Crouching Tiger. That was the movie that she bought for me on there.

29:09Oh, wow. And I remember, you know, I got it, and then we got on a plane, and I actually watched that movie on a plane, and it was like the coolest thing in the world. And then everybody on the plane is looking at me watching a movie because this is still pretty early back. That wasn't a regular thing for people. So I was like the cool guy, you know, sitting in the airport lounge. And then, of course, on the plane, as everybody walks by, I was like, are you watching Hidden Dragon? You're like, yes, I've watched it 10 times in a row. Are you playing God of War in a handheld? Yes. Getting a PSP from your sister as a present, that's pretty impressive.

29:44That cements a bond for a couple of years. Or it's making up for something. So it was released, Crouching Tiger was released in... It re-cements a bond for many years. In 2000. Yeah, it was the first movie Eileen and I saw when we were dating. Really? Yeah. Aw. I don't know if I knew that story. That's cute. So yeah, definitely the days where, I mean, in 2000, I didn't have Wi-Fi in my house. No. 2000. Definitely not. No, I don't know if I did that. Not yet. I didn't for a few years. Oh, no, I did because I had one of those Linksys routers we kept hacking on screensavers. So I had like a floating one.

30:24Of course. Okay, Rob Dunwood, it is your turn. Are you going to go memory or are you going to go wish for the future? I'm going to go memories. So initially I was going to pick the TI-99-4A, but since Brian picked that, I will go something else. But I will say that that is probably the best gift I've ever gotten because it helped me build the career that I now have. And also, it may be the oldest piece of tech that I own that still works. I've actually got it and it's still operational. It still works. So I'll give that my honorable mission. But the best Christmas, the best Christmas, my favorite Christmas that I remember is like, man, everything that the Santa Claus said he was going to bring me, he brought me.

31:11That was 1980. I was eight years old. And so we'll start off with the thing that I wanted most. It was the green machine. That was, for those who don't know, the green machine is basically a big, it's like a drag car, big wheel. But instead of the front wheel turning, it actually has rear wheel steering. and instead of a steering wheel you've got two control sticks you push you push forward to the right you turn left you push forward to the left you turn right and or that could be backwards it's 40 years ago I can't remember but it was it was an epic toy that thing um you know my you know my granddad actually went out and cleared the driveway uh you know he has it you know he's he's you know he's a landscaper and you know had a construction company so he literally just pulled out the backhoe and went and just did, you know, the driveway because they had a very, very long driveway.

32:02So I'm out and, you know, it's snowing hard, but, you know, I was able to play with that thing on Christmas morning. It was so fun. So that was the first toy. The next toy that I got also the same year, it wasn't the year it came out, but it was the year that I got it. It was the Big Track. I don't know if you guys... Oh, I had one of those. The Big Track was, it essentially was a robotic battle tank it was a little robot that you would program to go you know 10 feet to the right turn something degrees to the left and you could program this thing to literally traverse your house so i had the big track i also had the the trailer that came behind it the trailer that came behind it that you could actually put stuff in and it would take it off and it was basically the trailer was like a dump trailer so you could put something in it it would go to where your coordinates and it would drop whatever off and so so once i was freezing it had to come in because of writing the uh the green machine the big track is what we played with next and then the third toy that i got was this little thing called a rubik's cube i don't know if you guys have ever heard of that uh being arguably arguably one of the most popular toys of all time um but that was i think it was i can't remember if the rubik's cube came out in 80 or maybe it came out in 79 but i got one Christmas of 80.

33:20I will never forget that Christmas. I was eight years old. I was actually at my grandparents to celebrate it. And I got three iconic toys that year. The big track I remember, because I wanted an RC car. My dad was at Toys R Us with me. He's like, no, you're going to get this instead. It's like, why? I want an RC car. But it's like, no, it's good. It's educational. This is better. This is better. Well, it's effectively logo, right? So if you ever program with Logo, that's what you did with the big tracks. And it was kind of cool because you would say like force, you do four up, three to the right, and then two more up.

33:59And then it would traverse that. And then you could set it so you would do like this little attack run where a little LED light, blue light would flash in the front. And it would spin around to indicate that, you know, that was this attack mode. But I remember bringing it to my cousin's house. And my cousins were like at least five, one was three, the other one was eight years, or no, five years older than me. And everyone wanted to like, I want to program, I want to program it. Because it was kind of neat to input something and then see the results. Much like if you're programming in BASIC or any other computer language, it kind of led you to think, well, if I wanted to make it from here to the dining room, you would plot out how many spaces or how many movement cycles it would need to get to that spot.

34:42And it was really cool. I mean, I kind of broke it because I left the batteries in too long. Back then, batteries just sort of, you know, once the acid finished generating electricity through the housing. But it was fun. It was definitely a fun toy. And here's what I remember. It was a really, really good toy. We did have an unfortunate accident with it with a pet who knocked it down the stairs. And I love that thing so much because it was broken. It was not fixable at that point. My parents actually bought me another one. and that may be the only toy that i can think of that they bought me another one because i didn't break it the dog broke it but uh but the thing is and i remember my mom telling me this is like yeah this was like it was a good toy for you know for you but it was a good toy for us because in order for you to play with it you had to have the house clean it's like hey i don't want to see any shoes on the floor i don't want to see any look bags laying around yeah you want to play a big track you have to go clean up so uh and then i would want to no wonder they bought you another the tracks on the carpet.

35:47That was cool. So it was it was information that helped me determine, OK, I need to OK, I came this far. I need to go a little bit further. So you go back and reprogram to get it around the house. So I actually use like the tracks across the carpet because we had that thick carpet that when this thing ran over it, it would actually brush the carpet one way. I use that to actually help me to program what I was going to do next. And, you know, remember, all the steps that I was going into. So I absolutely loved that toy. And then the Rubik's Cube. That's no explanation there. The Rubik's Cube is just an awesome toy of all time.

36:20Yeah. I used to peel the stickers off of mine. And then put them back on. And then say to my mom, look, I solved it. You didn't break it apart like I did? Yeah, I would break it apart. No, it was all stickers. Because you could pop them off the tracks and then pop them back on, too. No, because I got so frustrated. because I'm like, I'm never going to get this. They made ones on the key chain. And then you buy the little book. You remember they sold all those Solving the Rubik's Cube books? Now, that was probably years later, but I do remember getting a book. And I was like, oh, wait a minute.

36:53This is just an algorithm. You can do the same thing, and eventually you're going to solve it. You're like, wait, it's like programming a big track.

37:031980, those are the fondest memories. Like I said, the best gift ever was that TI-99-4A that I learned how to program. Actually, I learned how to start programming on that big track. Big track, yeah. I got this a few years later, and that's where computers became a thing for me. But that Christmas, like I said, I was eight, and man, it was – and the fact that my granddad got up and actually plowed like a 170-foot driveway with a – he didn't use an excavator. I think he used his cat. So what was that? The backhoe. Oh, wow. And just plowed the driveway because we probably had 10, 12 inches of snow on the ground.

37:42You cannot ride a green machine on snow. That is not going to work. So he plowed the driveway for me so I could ride that thing more on Christmas. Dang. I had a big wheel, and I was jealous when David Branson up the street got a green machine. I was like, oh, man. All right, Jason, do you have a tech memory for us? Yeah, definitely have a tech memory. And it's interesting when I think about this because music is a big part of my life, and I'm pretty sure that this is kind of the germ that kind of led to the rest of my life being so focused on music. But probably the first keyboard I ever got. This may have been a Christmas gift, but I don't explicitly remember it being a Christmas gift, although I think it probably was a small little keyboard by Casio called the Casio PT-87.

38:35And it was really this tiny little, you know, maybe two and a half octave keyboard where you could put these cassettes in and each cassette had like four or five different songs of a particular theme. So you might have a holiday or you might have pop music and it would have Michael Jackson and Prince or I don't know what the songs were on it. And basically it was like you could play a single note at a time and a light would light up on the keyboard so that you could play along with the accompaniment and learn the song. That was like my intro. And I think that probably was a Christmas gift. But the memory that I have is at least a couple of years later, because I used to love, and tell me if you all did this back in the day, but I used to love to go to the mall, the shopping mall, and find the keyboard shop.

39:24Because in our mall, there was like a dark kind of dungeon, like elegantly dungeon-like store for really high-end keyboards and pianos and electric keyboards and stuff. and I would go in there and they all had a little headphone thing hanging on the side of them and I put on the headphones and I'd play around with these high-end, I'd never be able to afford them style keyboards. They just sounded so good and I just wanted one so bad. Well, at our local Fred Meyer, which is kind of like a Target, that sort of thing back in the day, they had an electronics area and they had some keyboards in there, definitely not of that caliber, but they had this one keyboard called the Yamaha PSS 480.

40:08And this was like around 1988. And yes, it was your standard kind of, you know, I had a couple of stereo speakers, you know, four or five octaves, whatever, all tons of presets. I think it had like 100, like 200 total presets on it and a drum section, a digital drum section. What made it special is that it had this whole area that was about synthesis. And so it had a two operator FM synthesis engine, which essentially means that you can shape your own sounds and you could store them in like one of like 10 areas. They're really rough, really like gritty and buzzy, that sort of stuff. And I would go into Fred Myers and I'd play around with that all the time.

40:49And man, I wanted that so bad. $200 at the time, 98. If you factored that out. It's somewhere in the$500 range now, I think. I asked for it for Christmas. Did not expect to get it at all, but boy, did I want it. And I think like you, Sarah, I think of my parents probably did the same thing because it's totally something that my dad would do is like, yeah, well, yeah. Yeah. Don't get your hopes up, kid. Don't get your hopes up. It's not going to happen. And I remember that Christmas morning going out to the living room and all the presents are out under the tree and we actually have this on video somewhere uh on video cassette um and you know we open all the presents and yeah it was a fine christmas and everything like that and it was a total christmas story moment where i like looked over and right on the other side of the fireplace not obvious but obvious enough was this tiny little corner of a box hidden behind this pillow that was over there i was like wait a minute i i recognized that box and i went over there and threw off the pillow and sure enough, it was the Yamaha PSS 480 and I freaked out.

41:55It wasn't even wrapped. It was just weird. No, it was not wrapped. It was just out. He's going to love it. Don't even bother. Exactly. It was like, we're just going to make it a special kind of like realization. And I don't know how I didn't notice it before, but when I did, I just freaked out and oh boy, did I play that thing all the frigging time. And now when I think about it, I'm like, oh, well, that kind of started me down this path of not just playing music, but also kind of understanding on a deeper level what it's like to work with the elements to create sounds and all that kind of stuff.

42:28Synthesis, basically. So yeah, it was a pretty special Christmas memory for me. So here's my question. Did you actually find the gift there? Or did your dad say, hey, what's that over there? Right after you were able to take off the pink bunny suit. You know, I'm now... I didn't get a pink bunny suit that Christmas. I'm now remembering the video, and I'm playing the video in my head. And it was my sister. So my sister obviously knew because she's the one that was like, oh, hey, Jason, what is that? And I looked over, and I was like, oh, wait a minute, what is that? So she was in on it, apparently.

43:03That's funny. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. I remember those keyboards, but I remember them at the Macy's downtown in Union Square in San Francisco. because they used... So anyone who was not familiar with the Macy's in San Francisco downtown was, there was two separate buildings. One was the Macy's, and the other one was the men's department. And so you had to cross the street to get into the men's department. And then on the third or fourth floor was like the electronics. So that was where the video games were, the computers and the keyboards. And so they didn't have headphones, so they politely asked that you turn it down as you were sampling their wares.

43:43Testing. But I remember there was just a bunch of old middle-aged guys in there testing out the different rhythm parts. I assumed they were in some sort of after work. Jason's dad flew from Idaho. But I used to think, these things are so expensive. Who buys these? This thing's like$500. That would be like a million to me when I was in fourth grade. Who can afford this stuff? That was the funny thing about department stores back then, is that there was always in electronics department. And so, I mean, sometimes, you know, my mom drops me off at the mall, usually not by myself, but, you know, whatever.

44:22And I never left the electronics section. That's the only thing I wanted to do. And I didn't even really need to buy them because I'm like, I just played with it all day. Yeah, you find the Atari demo or the Intellivision demo. Yeah, and like, no one's kicking you out. They're like, oh, that kid, she's harmless. Well, it's the kids and they make, the sales reps make money on sales. So it doesn't matter. As long as you're not breaking anything, they don't care. Well, the kid's showing off how the thing works for people passing by. So that's not necessarily bad. That and it's like, look how happy these kids.

44:51They could be your kids. So you should buy the Sega Masters. No, I was – because Sega had this very elaborate setup. So they had like the four consoles. So they had one with the light gun, which was Bug Hunt. And then they had like Alex – Jones. No, no. It was like something – It was like a little... Alex Kidd. Alex Kidd in Miracle World. And then they had Shinobi. You could just play them all. There were just rows of kids. And it was a perfect testament to the amount of love and affection you could buy from children if you bought one of these. Yeah, the Sega Master System. Yes, not even the Genesis.

45:28It was the Master System. Yeah, it's the Master System. And I would go into our video rental store, because you used to rent video tapes and decks. And they had one of those set up. And I would go there and I would play Alex Kidd. And guess what? Nintendo had only one unit. available that anyone could test, but Sega had like three, so obviously there was definitely like, hey, we get more exposure if we get more kids to play. Sega does what Nintendo don't, by the way. Just saying. Yep. Do you know what happened to the Yamaha? You know, I looked, I don't know, I can't remember exactly what happened.

46:02If it's gone, it's a shame, although I could pick one up for like a hundred bucks, but you know, I don't know. It never seems like the high priority, but I have looked for it at my parents' house and it's not theirs. So it's possible that I either got rid of it, assuming stupidly that I'll never actually want this once it was beat by something else. Yeah, exactly. But I do wish that I still had it, even though the sounds were really archaic and really very low-fi. I know, but that's the thing though, right? It's like a harmonica. When you hear a harmonica in a movie soundtrack, it automatically is like, oh, is this movie from the 70s?

46:37If it sounds like Like a sax, is this from the 80s? Like it automatically cements sort of a time period, right? There's certain, like an electronic base on the synth, very, very much 80s, right? Because that's all you've ever heard through, like whether it was a movie, like it was either like a, what's the name? Yeah, Beverly Hills Cop or something, or something like evolving the city, right? Something urban. Yes, cool. And I would say that my bonus, and I'll just throw this out there just because it jogged my memory when you were talking, Rob, was laser tag. That was another one that one Christmas I got laser tag with the big plastic sensor thing.

47:22The chest thing. I can even hear that. When I was a kid, I was trying to look for a photon. that was like the original genesis was like the like uh arc it was not an arcade but it was like a play center and you played photon and you would have the whole thing with the gear you would have the chess piece and then you have the little light gun and then you would run around in this very elaborate mace system trying to shoot the opponent opposing team yep yep well folks uh we know some of you may have gotten a little uh extra cash or even a gift certificate or of some kind uh for the holidays. So if you're looking for some stuff that will support the show, we still got a whole store.

48:01In fact, the Len Peralta holiday art is still up there. You can still get those. You can get the DT &S pint glass. You can get my book synced. So go check it out. There are great gifts and a great way to support the show. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store.

48:18All right, Tom Merritt, it's your turn. Are we going Christmas past or Christmas future? I'm going Christmas past as well. I feel like that's what everybody's doing today. I think it's interesting that Sarah, your gift was like very video centric and kind of pointed towards your career. Rob's was very computer oriented, pointed towards his career. Jason's was musical, pointed towards his career in music. I don't know that this one points towards my career, but I've told other Christmas gift stories so much. I try, I wanted to try to tell one I hadn't. My dad got me the TI-30 calculator for Christmas because he was using it for work and I kept taking it.

49:03I would grab the computer and I would like play with the memory. It came with a thing for reading biorhythms. I don't think I have that card anymore. So I would like do my mom's biorhythm to tell her, you know, what her strength was. and so he was like you know what you keep taking my ti-30 i need it for work so i'm just gonna buy you one uh and i was super excited to get it i was like oh my gosh i got my like really i have my own i don't have to borrow yours anymore i didn't even think at the time because i was a kid i was like i didn't think like oh no it's my dad selfishly was like i need to get my calculator back from my kid uh but yeah i still have i don't know if this is my dad's or mine to be honest because they just kind of got thrown in a drawer at some point.

49:49But I used to do all kinds of stuff with this thing because it had memory. And you could spell things upside down with it and all of that. Very TI heavy, I know, with the TI-99 from Rob and our listener earlier. But this was like, I don't know, 1978, something like that. Did they have the red letters? Yeah, they had the red LEDs. The red LEDs. And the denim carrying case. Very stylish. I mean, it's honestly... Would you still have? Yeah. That's impressive. I mean, it's reflective of how big TI's impact on the tech. I thought you were going to say it's reflective of how much of a hoarder Tom is, but yes.

50:29Well, no, but like TI chips were in every... Why not both? Like some of the first EGA, VGA cards had TI chips in them because that was like the cutting edge of semiconductor fabrication was from TI. I mean, Tom, you mentioned you don't know how much this translates into your current career, but you're very fond of all things data. You're very good at payroll, so thank you for that. Actually, our accountant, Rena, does the payroll. I just pressed the send button, but you're fine. Thank you. No, I'm reaching a little bit, but no, this is, yeah, that calculator definitely, that precedes my first TI calculator.

51:23It was playing around with gadgets, right? I think that's what it presages. It's like, ooh, it's not so much what I could do with it. Like, I would press the cosine button just to watch it do a little dance while it processed the cosine. I had no idea at the time. For no reason. Yeah, I didn't know anything about trigonometry at the time. But, you know, I just love to play around with it and see what it could do. Yeah, now I never had that TI calculator. My dad actually is a tool and die maker. And when he got into tool and die, I think it was like the year I was born, so 72. My grandfather got him an HP 35 calculator.

52:02And I remember, you know, that thing was a tank. You know, he may have had multiple of them because it was something that he used, you know, at his job. but i just remember how cool that thing was now my dad was not getting me an hp 35 those things were probably a couple hundred dollars wasniac would would hack around on too it was one of the hp calculators yeah so it was they were not expensive my first ti calculator i think i got probably around the 11th grade or something and that's when they actually started doing the graphing lcd calculators yeah yeah but yeah i remember these because they had the the bright red lights on them.

52:34I just thought they were so cool. Yeah. My dad had something very similar, and he moved from using slide rolls to that. I remember, it's like, wouldn't it be cool if you could have an entire display of just those red LEDs? That'd be so cool. You could type up papers. I was just imagining what the future would hold. This is magic. Alright, Roger, let's go to your reminiscence or look to the future. Let me reminisce and keep in tone with everyone else. One is not that old. It's only about seven years ago. I picked up a Synology NAS, or rather got a Synology NAS, for the holidays. A good childhood memory, the Synology NAS.

53:20But this is the thing. This really kind of weeded out the data hoarding in me. I started becoming more selective. And it's because initially, because it's only two bays, If you want any sort of data backup, you have to mirror the drive. So I only had two 4-terabyte drives. So I was very selective about what I stored on it. But I upgraded to 2.12s, and now I have lots of space because I don't keep everything. But I found it to be very, very handy because in case of an emergency, I know where that is. I just unplug it and take it with me. Yeah, and just grab it. And then I'll have – yeah. That's smart.

53:59But the one that really set me on the path of what I do today is the Tandy 2000. Now, this was an old Radio Shack computer. And this is interesting because it was MS-DOS compatible but not PC compatible. And I'll explain why. It had an Intel 80186, not a 286, a 186 chip. There are some integers in there that are not available on the 8086, although the 8086 was actually faster than the 186. And it had two high-density 720K 5.25 floppies. As long as it ran an MS-DOS, it would sort of work on that. But if it needed hardware compatibility with a PC, it kind of flunked out. But I remember spending an entire year just playing with that thing.

54:45Didn't have a graphics adapter, so the only thing I could play on it was Infocom games. So I played a lot of Zork. I remember writing a lot of batch commands. I remember trying to figure out how to get a word processor on there. because it came with a printer, but it wasn't a dot matrix printer. It was a daisy wheel printer. So no graphics on that either. So it was very limiting and eventually upgraded to a Tandy 1000. But I remembered just being awestruck. I have this machine, has a green monochrome screen. It beeps when you turn it on. And it had expansion slots, which only used specific expansion boards from Radio Shack, which I never bought.

55:26But it's fun. I still have it in my garage. although I haven't turned it on in about 20 years. Go get it. Oh, not this garage. The garage up in Northern California. Well, just go get it. That'll take a little longer. I'm in Northern California. I'll go get it for you. Yeah, Jason, thanks. And then just, you know, you've got a good arm, right? It's really windy, right? I mean, I remember looking up at the catalog at all the things I wanted to upgrade. Like there was a memory expansion. there's a graphics expansion so you could do graphics and then there was a light pen expansion so you could attach a light pen and then you could draw on the screen uh with it and i thought that was the coolest thing i didn't do any of that because it was very expensive but you know just the idea that that was there was that potential was was oh it was so astounding to me and i kind of just got hooked on computers from that point on not a trs 80 a tandy 2000 so it had trs on the freaking face plate, but next to the Tandy nameplate.

56:29That's funny. And it's, you know, it's weird because Tandy started out as a leather company that eventually bought Radio Shack and then they started doing the computers, but that was their bread and butter through the 90s was doing computers. A leather company? Yeah, just like ColecoVision. Like belts? Yeah, they did belts, boots, purses. Oh, wow. Saddlebags. That's quite a pivot. Nokia was a rubber boot company. Nintendo was a playing card company. Coleco started out as the Connecticut leather company before they made Cabbage Patch dolls in the Coleco. Samsung started as like Salted Fish or something.

57:04All right. Good stuff, Roger. Thank you for that. Before we finish up, let's hear from a few more of you who kindly shared your memories and hopes. Hey, everyone. This is Bill Russell. And I wasn't sure if you wanted us to say our names or not, so you can cut that if you would like. But the one Christmas gift that I got that I still wish I had was a computerized chessboard. And it was a neat device that you would just press your piece down and the computer would register it. And then you go and press it where the piece is supposed to go. And then it would register where that piece went. And then the computer would tell you where to move its pieces.

57:42Well, me being an elementary kid and really interested in electronics decided I want to see what it looks like on the inside because I bet it looks really cool. So I take it apart, I cut the data ribbon, and that was the last time she worked. And that was probably 30 years ago, maybe a little bit over 30 years ago, and I still remember that thing today. Merry Christmas, everyone. I'm VA on the best tech gift I ever got. This was probably when I was eight or nine years old. It was a gift from my mother. I woke up on Christmas morning and found a wrapped present that was roughly the shape of a book.

58:23On unwrapping it, I found a plank of wood on which she had written in Sharpie, Mom. I was very confused about this and thought it was a gag gift. She was a bit more techie than I was at the time. I eventually found out that it was a motherboard that she had replaced in my computer and sent my computer back exactly how it was. this was a 386 or 486 at the time i was the kind of kid who had this desktop computer running mostly dos maybe 3.1 at the time uh instead of a nintendo or any other uh console at the time uh she had taken it to the computer shop upgraded the motherboard um which i think they upgraded the cpu maybe the memory as well but this was back in the day where i still remember now you You could tell a difference in processor speed by hearing the frequency of it spinning up when you first power on the computer.

59:18And there was nothing like that sound of the high-pitched spin-up of my machine with a brand new processor in it on Christmas morning. Thanks, everyone. Motherboard from Mom. Also hilarious writing Mom on the board. Those are cool gifts. I can only imagine Benjamin being like, wait a second I know what you just did yay I mean I definitely remember the wine because back then you set the speeds with crystals on the motherboard for the old 8086 and then 286 so they if you were young and your hearing wasn't damaged because you were like you know driving with the window down all the time you could definitely notice it

1:00:11so folks we uh you probably thought we were done oh no but we are not we are not you know why we're not because we've actually got some more submissions from our listeners but this time our listeners are actually joining us live on the show so let's kick things off with brad and brad tell us about your holiday hey brad thanks for having me on uh probably the most memorable tech I remember getting for Christmas would be the Sega Genesis. And the only reason even that just stays in my mind, I have memory issues. So that just stays in my mind because my brother got, you know, the first Atari, the, what is it?

1:00:54The 2600 and all that. And my brother's was six years older than me. So he always got all the cool stuff, but not this year. This year I beat him. I got the Sega Genesis. It was the best hands down. That was probably the most memorable tech that I got. Later on, much further down the line, my wife at the time surprised me with a Palm Pre. And she thought cell phones would never go anywhere. They would never do anything. But she was like, Brad won't stop talking about it. This will be a nice gift. So Brad, please tell me that you had Tecmo Bowl on that. Oh, that was the first game I got was Tecmo Bowl on the Sega Genesis.

1:01:42Yeah, for those of you who are too young to know anything other than Madden, it was Tecmo Bowl in the late 80s and in the early 90s until Madden came. Madden took over when it came out, but Tecmo Bowl, Super Tecmo, those were the games on the Sega Genesis. It made the whole system worth it. Wasn't Tecmo Bowl? I always associated Tecmo Bowl to Nintendo. I didn't realize it was on Nintendo as well, but it was on Sega Genesis. I just thought it was like Nintendo. It was better on the Genesis than it was on the Genesis. And my graphics had eight more bits, so they were better. I mean, it originally started, I think it started out on the NES, but like when the Genesis came out, it's like, well, you're not going to leave money on the table.

1:02:17Heck no. You're going to port it. Yeah, we did that in Star Fox and a whole bunch of other stuff. Do you still have the Palm Pre?

1:02:29So after a long military career, all of that stuff is gone gone yeah gone I wish I can still imagine me flipping the front you know pushing it up to get to the keyboard and I was like and the webOS is still great webOS is still a great operating system I use it every day on my LG TV I agree same with me every so often it's like want to update I'm like okay Yeah. Well, Brad, if you keep tech like that around for too long, you become contractually obligated to become a podcaster like us. So yeah, dodge the bullet. We have we kept it. We got to talk about it. Yep. Yep. I feel it. I feel it. Well, Brad, thank you for sharing that memory.

1:03:18We have we have another memory. This one's coming from Gary, a.k.a. Senior Geek. Welcome back, Gary, friend of the show. So I don't know if this is actually a memory or a wish. So what are you going with? Well, everybody's been going with memories, so I'll stick with that. Actually, I'm a little older than you guys. So the first Christmas present I remember that was just, it blew me away, was when I was 9 or 10, which was late 50s, we would have Christmas morning at our house and then we would drive to my grandparents' house and then we'd have a gift exchange there. And I walked in and there was an unwrapped gift just sort of up against a wall behind the tree.

1:04:11And it was like, I could see rockets. And I was fascinated by the Mercury 7 and everything that was going on. And it didn't even occur to me that I was the only one of my cousins and siblings that would be interested in something like that. I didn't dare think that that was for me, but it was. And it was one of the best gifts I ever got. And I don't remember playing with it that much because it didn't really do that much. But it did have an electric motor in it, so I guess it's... And what was it? It was like a rocket simulator of some kind? Yeah, it was like little plastic rockets, and there was a little cart that went across, and you could put a rocket on it and move it over and then put it down on a little spring-loaded launching pad.

1:04:58Oh, cool. And it would go like six inches in the air, and it was, you know, 1950s toy, yeah. Kids like things like that. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, eventually my dad and I were designing, building, and flying our own model rockets, you know, Estes Industries. But then taking a giant leap forward after my daughter was born, Debbie and I gave each other the full-size VHS shoulder mount camera. And I used that for several years. And then, Sarah, you may recognize this. Except this isn't a Hi8, it's a digital 8. Ah, okay. Ah, uh-huh. So a two-hour tape would hold one hour of digital data. It still has a FireWire interface.

1:05:54I don't have anything to plug it into anymore. But I'm thinking of seeing if I can sell it on eBay. I have a FireWire cable for you. Yeah, we just need somewhere to plug it. I have two, actually. I don't know. Are there firewire to USB-C? I bet there are. Oh, yeah. I bet there are, yeah. There are dongles for pretty much everything. There's a dongle for everything out there. There really is. Amazon Essentials or Amazon Basics, whatever they call them. I kind of messed Roger up because I sent him a list. And so I will mention the TRS-80 Model 3. That was my first home computer. and that led to me eventually I was on a patent application.

1:06:39I was going to be one-fifth owner of a patent, but the company decided not to pursue it. But I was showing you guys this 8-inch floppy here. Yeah, yeah. That, well, at one time. Gary is not very small. That is a large floppy disk. It's an 8-inch, not a 5-1⁄4. that is D-POS9. It's a real-time process control program for vapor deposition of thin films on visors for helicopter pilots so that it would just block laser frequencies and nothing else. And while we were working on that, somebody else came up with a better way to do it so they didn't pursue the patent. But I think that this is one of the proudest things I've ever done.

1:07:24I got out the listing of the basic that I wrote it in. I can't read it. It's complete Greek to me now, but I did write that. A whole different era, a whole different language. No kidding. But yeah, I mean, the one Christmas present I remember was that stupid little rocket toy. But once I discovered it only shot at about six inches into the air. It probably felt a lot taller when you were that small. Right. Well, yeah. So I was it would have been when I was nine, ten, eleven. It was about the time of the mercury shots. Well, and you mentioned going to grandparents house. There's cousins around that could have been for anybody, but it was for you.

1:08:08No, of the of the five cousins and my three siblings, I was the only one that had any interest in space at all. So, you know, I should have known that that was for me. But it really it was really exciting. Well, Gary, thank you for sharing your memory with us as well. Good to see you again. If folks want to follow you, you're still doing senior geek stuff, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Diary of a Senior Geek is on Substack. I'm trying to write a column a week. They've been getting way too political recently, but I'm hoping that I can move on from that. sign of the times uh yeah uh for the holiday season i've just been reposting some of my favorite columns from the past oh cool uh but i'll i'll be getting back to original columns uh uh in the new year fantastic and then brad if you ever hear us say thanks to brad at the beginning of the show this is brad thank you brad for supporting this and i always say brad two d's brad that's right double d my mom stutters it's okay uh brad i don't know if there's anything you want to tell folks about if it's something you do or you just want to give a wish or whatever but you know i wish everybody to use pass keys stop using passwords very nice wish to everybody else fantastic and brad thank you very much for your support of the show as well uh absolutely appreciate it uh joe turn your camera on this is the last show of the year amos popped back in here uh so we we want to let people see your face thank you joe there's joe he's always behind Thank you, Roger, for putting all this stuff together all year.

1:09:53Yay. Thank you, Amos. Thank you, Jason. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Continue into the future. That is it for today's show. Thanks, everyone, for supporting us all year long at patreon.com slash dtns and dtns.substack.com or wherever you supported us. We hope you're having a happy holidays and we will be back with live episodes on January 2nd. Indeed, we will. But until then, we have a lot of fun shows for you coming up. This Friday, that's our gift support show packed with troubleshooting tips for your new tech gifts. Hopefully you got everything that you wanted this year. And all next week, our holiday programming continues.

1:10:39We've got a best of 2025 show on Monday. our 2025 predictions results show on Tuesday, and our tech predictions for 2026 on Wednesday. We do a lot of predicting. Sometimes we're right. Sometimes we're less right. Tell a friend or a family member to watch or listen with you.

1:11:04This year's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host, producer, and writer, Tom Merritt. Producer and host, Sarah Lane. Host and writer, Jason Howell. Host, Rob Dunwood. Co-host, Jen Cutter. Co-host, Wen Tui Dao. Producer, Roger Chang. Producer, Anthony Lemos. Producer, Hammond Chamberlain. Producer, Victor Bognot. Video producer, Joe Kuntz. Contributing producers, Kevin Tech, Noel Cowell, and Brandon Richards. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermans. Contributor, Andy Beach. Contributor, Bodie Grimm. Social media producer and moderator, Zoe Detterdick. our mods beatmaster w scottis one bio cow captain kipper steve guadarama paul reese matthew j stevens aka gadget virtuoso and jd galloway modded video hosting by dan christensen music provided by martin bell and dan looters art by len peralta a cast ad support from tatiana matthias and patreon support from bobby wagner and thank you patrons you are the bosses who make the show possible have a great rest of your year and happy new year happy new year Happy New Year.

1:12:07Happy New Year. Happy Holidays and sending good vibes to the DT &S extended family.

1:12:20Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.