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.
Intel’s discontinuation notice astonishes Dr. Dave because some Core processors are being retired roughly two years after launch, giving him a snapshot of how performance gains were shifting from clock speed toward multiple cores, lower heat and longer battery life.
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Months before release, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve review Microsoft’s announced Xbox 360 games, worldwide launch plan, backward compatibility, hardware, removable storage and customizable interface. Their excitement and doubts preserve a detailed snapshot of a major console transition before its final price and date were known.
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Dr. Dave reports that the Apple rumor site Think Secret will stop publishing as part of a confidential settlement. He notes that its sources were not revealed, jokes that the young publisher earned a doctorate in real life from Apple and calls the closure a negative moment in the developing controversy around Internet rumor sites.
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Dr. Dave reports the debut of Intel’s Thunderbolt technology in Apple’s new MacBook Pro line, works through its promised bandwidth and daisy-chaining design and sees faster external backups as an immediate practical benefit.
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A 1981 visual pitch for Tron lets Dr. Dave compare what once represented the edge of computer graphics with modern film effects, while Evil Steve separates the movie’s uneven storytelling from its genuine technical ground-breaking.
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Dr. Dave reports Ray Kurzweil joining Google in 2012 to work on machine learning and language processing, then reads Kurzweil's comparison between once-dismissed forecasts and the arrival of self-driving cars and voice-answering phones. Dr. Dave closes with affectionate teasing about the futurist's eccentric reputation and their imaginary rides together.
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Dr. Dave reacts with unmistakable excitement to the announced Ubuntu smartphone operating system. Although he doubts it will become a major success, he hopes an open-source phone not controlled by Microsoft or Google could give ordinary users a practical alternative and more authority over their own data.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve react to the announcement of USB 3.0, compare its promised transfer rate and power with older USB and FireWire and temper their excitement with a warning that first-generation products may not be good.
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Dr. Dave describes the public beta of Microsoft Virtual Earth as a free combination of aerial photographs, maps, directory data and location detection. The segment captures an early stage of online mapping before bird’s eye imagery and many now familiar sharing features were finished.
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Dr. Dave reports the Windows Vista delay and its effect on computer sellers but tells listeners he would advise waiting even after release. He explains that real public use will expose failures across systems and software that formal testing misses, describing consumers as the involuntary final phase of beta testing.
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Launch-era reaction to the North American delay of a major handheld console. Preserve uncertainty about Sony’s explanation and avoid presenting an announced schedule as the eventual release date.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve compare the 1980 eruption with the precision instruments used in 2004 and marvel at technology that could track the mountain and help warn people.
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As IBM’s Watson appears on Jeopardy, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve consider how the system combines many processors, sometimes answers impressively and sometimes fails in revealing ways, capturing an early public milestone for artificial intelligence.
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With listeners still using Windows 98, ME and 2000, Dr. Dave points to websites that preserve earlier program versions after current releases stop supporting old systems. The short discussion captures a practical form of digital preservation long before mainstream software history became easy to revisit.
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Dr. Dave describes Microsoft’s newly explicit position that replacing a working motherboard could create a new personal computer for OEM Windows licensing, preventing reuse of the manufacturer supplied operating system. He notes that recovery discs had already enforced similar limits through BIOS checks, turning a hardware upgrade into a software licensing cost.
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Dr. Dave marks the arrival of a one-terabyte laptop solid-state drive, contrasts its price with an eighty-dollar conventional drive and anticipates solid-state storage taking over portable computers as capacity rises and prices fall.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve admire the production quality of JibJab’s cutout animation and the way creators who began putting work online for their own amusement reached a much larger level of success. The passage captures an early web moment when independent digital creativity could suddenly find a mass audience.
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Dr. Dave traces BlackBerry’s rise through real-time mobile email and the moment that advantage stopped being unique as people discovered that iPhones, Palm devices and other smartphones could provide the same service with more usable features.
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With Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Chrome and Opera competing intensely, Dr. Dave tells listeners that it had become difficult to choose a truly bad browser and points to the tangible benefit that rivalry brought users.
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At CES 2012, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve examine the MakerBot Replicator as a preassembled desktop machine that could make two-color physical objects for under two thousand dollars. Their surprise captures the moment a capability once associated with industrial prototyping was becoming accessible to far smaller users.
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Dr. Dave describes a federal effort to extend emergency alerts beyond radio and television to pagers, cell phones, the Internet and email. He calls the idea sensible while asking whether networks could deliver the necessary information to every subscriber at once without overload.
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Days before Tim Cook’s first major product event as Apple CEO, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve capture the rumor-driven expectation that Apple would unveil an iPhone 5. The event instead became the introduction of the iPhone 4S, making the confident prerelease language an unusually vivid period snapshot.
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A launch-era discussion of a major Apple creative application, preserving the Logic software context and the hosts’ reaction. Historical interest, not an obscure product deal.
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Microsoft’s purchase of a large block of IPv4 address rights from bankrupt Nortel lets Dr. Dave mark the moment Internet addresses became a scarce, tradable asset as the industry anticipated IPv6.
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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.
