September 12, 2009

Dr. Dave opens by correcting a mistake he repeated the previous week: eBay, not Google, had owned and sold Skype. He then remembers sitting with Evil Steve in their office during the September 11 attacks and recalls Evil Steve warning the next day that America would eventually forget, a prediction Dr. Dave says he initially rejected. During a later repair discussion, Dr. Dave explains why he will spend forty hours on a five-hundred-dollar computer when another technician might erase it: someone has to push through the problem and learn enough to teach others. The show also captures his preference for tools that add clear value, his insistence that marketing labels describe what a product actually is and an early vision of multiple virtual networks sharing the internet's physical infrastructure.

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