DaveMason.com
ComputerTalk with Dave Mason
The official archive of all available ComputerTalk with Dave Mason radio shows. Spend some time with Dave. Listen to a full show or explore clips by topic.
3,475 unique clips. Each clip appears in one section. Historical conversations, not current advice. Full episodes remain available separately by date.
562 clips, strongest first.
While Dr. Dave plugs in the laptop holding his digital notes, Evil Steve points listeners to DaveMason.com and says roughly nine or ten months of the show can be heard there. They joke that the fast changing advice may be outdated by the time someone reaches an old episode, a fitting explanation of both the archive’s value and its historical nature.
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Dr. Dave recounts how a college student without a telephone used a Facebook status and messages to alert a friend during a home invasion, allowing the friend to contact law enforcement.
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Dr. Dave marks Theodore Maiman’s first laser and the vast range of later uses, while Evil Steve supplies the inevitable Austin Powers joke about laser-equipped sharks.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve react to experimental glasses free 3D monitors and a display that could present two different programs to viewers sitting on opposite sides. They immediately imagine a passenger watching a movie while a driver sees a three dimensional navigation map, preserving the excitement and speculation surrounding early multi view screens.
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A Chinese system reaching second place on the supercomputer list introduces the growing use of graphics processors for general computation before Evil Steve redirects the discussion to the fictional WOPR from WarGames.
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Dr. Dave connects the previous day’s frightening drive incident with a memorable server-room demonstration in which shouting causes a visible rise in disk errors, mixing mechanical explanation with jokes about hurting the drives’ feelings.
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Early voice-interface expectations and banter about whether a computer could understand Evil Steve. A broader technology-history idea, not a price or minor service promotion.
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As IPv4 address exhaustion approaches, Dr. Dave walks listeners through the far longer IPv6 form, jokes that simplification can make it look worse and predicts that even experienced network technicians will struggle with the mental change.
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Dr. Dave remembers a Vietnam veteran who flew Navy A-6 Intruders and described the navigation disk assembly mounted near the crew’s feet. When it failed while the aircraft was moving at high speed and evading missiles, the crew sometimes kicked it until it spun again, giving modern hard drive complaints a startling comparison.
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Ambrosio surveys biomedical, security and defense uses for Coherent lasers before Evil Steve asks about Star Wars weapons and lasers mounted on sharks. The exchange combines serious technology history with the brothers’ habit of puncturing a technical interview with a recognizable joke.
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Dr. Dave reviews features removed from Microsoft’s delayed Windows Longhorn and says it increasingly resembles a large Windows XP update, then later contrasts that uncertainty with Apple announcing an April release for Mac OS X Tiger. Together the passages capture a major operating-system transition in 2005.
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Dr. Dave records the moment Netflix separated streaming from DVD service and raised the combined price sharply, arguing that the business decision might work numerically even though imposing the increase all at once created a major public-relations problem.
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Dr. Dave reports Bill Gates’s password prediction and the hosts question smart-card security and what happens when the card is lost. Historical perspective rather than present-day security advice.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve explore early bioprinting of skin and possible organ tissue, inkjet fabrication of circuit boards and displays, and a Chicago chef printing edible designs. Their amazement and jokes capture a moment when additive manufacturing still sounded like science fiction.
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News that Prodigy is for sale prompts Dr. Dave and Evil Steve to remember dial up services before the open web. They contrast powerful but forbidding text interfaces with Prodigy’s attempt to add graphics, content and simpler navigation, describing the shift as designing online access for humans rather than only engineers and enthusiasts.
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Dr. Dave examines Michael Robertson’s DAR.FM as an early “TiVo for radio,” imagining how cloud recording could let a talk-radio listener leave the car, finish work and return later to the same program.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve examine the early push to place RFID tags under human skin for correctional and medical uses. Dr. Dave acknowledges the promised convenience of carrying medical records but sees the same technology as a serious privacy risk and another example of information overload.
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A worst-products list sends the brothers back to SoftRAM, Windows ME and Microsoft Bob. They recall misleading promises, awkward releases and ideas that lingered long after the products disappeared.
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On the fortieth anniversary of Star Trek, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve marvel that communicators and other ideas placed futuristic technology in the public imagination before similar devices became real. They trade McCoy, phaser and transporter jokes while celebrating the show’s influence.
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Evil Steve imagines a tiny earpiece connected through a computer integrated with a car, while Dr. Dave helps work through how the pieces might fit together.
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While reviewing notorious computers, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve recount the Apple III's heat problems and the extraordinary reported support instruction to lift and drop the computer so loosened chips would reseat. It is a concise and memorable story from early personal-computing history.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve react to Microsoft's first public surface-computing table, admiring the touch interaction while questioning its ten-thousand-dollar price and the ergonomics of looking downward. They then jokingly reinvent it as a small portable slate with a pen, capturing an early moment in the path toward modern tablets.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve discuss the aborted Falcon 9 launch attempt for what Dr. Dave identifies as the first commercial cargo craft bound for the International Space Station. They mix an appreciation for cautious engineering with Thunderbirds jokes and surprise that such a milestone received little attention.
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Dr. Dave calls the iPhone 3G a huge success while detailing activation, battery and reception problems that might have required a hardware recall. A reported software fix turns the story into his familiar argument against zealotry: even an Apple product he loves is manufactured on Earth by humans and can have a serious flaw.
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Browse by year, then month, to find the episodes from that month.
442 proposed broadcast dates, plus 2 undated entries. Dates are based on archive filenames and may be approximate. Some broadcasts survive as separate parts or incomplete recordings.
