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.
A caller asks whether online-game patches turn paying users into beta testers. Dr. Dave broadens the question into an early prediction that software will move toward subscriptions and continuous releases, while warning that customers already absorb too many defects and may tolerate that bargain less readily in business software.
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A newspaper advertisement from 1991 lets Dr. Dave and Evil Steve measure how much technology had collapsed into one phone by 2014. They move through a Tandy computer, CD player, CB radio, camcorder, tape recorder and Dr. Dave's own trunk-mounted cellular phone, finding roughly a page of once-separate equipment inside an iPhone.
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Dr. Dave describes blogs as a revolutionary force because people no longer had to rely only on traditional publishers to encounter political and intellectual information. It captures an early view of the Internet widening who could participate in public discussion.
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In his 2004 retrospective, Dr. Dave calls blogs one of the Internet’s genuinely powerful cultural developments and argues that they give ordinary people a way to challenge major news organizations and expose both true and false claims.
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Twenty years after the first PC virus, Dr. Dave traces the change from floppy disk boot infections to the Morris worm disrupting the still academic and defense oriented Internet. Evil Steve’s recollection that regular computer use did not become part of his life until the early 1990s makes the rapid technical history personal.
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Explaining Internet Explorer compatibility, Dr. Dave remembers creating effects for his own website that worked in other browsers but disappeared in Internet Explorer, forcing him to remove features or code against standards simply to reach its users.
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Dr. Dave remembers Computer Shopper as a distinctive grassroots technology publication and objects to CNET making acquired outlets feel alike by reusing the same content. News of a sale gives him hope that new ownership might restore unusual stories and angles instead of another standardized technology voice.
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Evil Steve tells listeners that he uploaded Dr. Dave’s spontaneous website of the week to DaveMason.com moments after the previous show. Dr. Dave explains that Find a Grave can help genealogy researchers locate long lost relatives, preserving a small but direct record of how the brothers connected the radio program to the original website.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve celebrate the 787 Dreamliner's 7/8/07 unveiling, admire the aircraft's shape and efficiency and congratulate friends who worked as Boeing engineers. Their enthusiasm connects a major technology milestone to people they knew personally.
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Dr. Dave explains perpendicular magnetic recording in plain language and marvels at a 750 GB desktop drive. He compares it with his first 10 MB hard drive, which had its own power supply and fan, connected through a ribbon cable and cost $2,500, turning storage progress into personal history.
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In 2013, Dr. Dave says breakthroughs can appear twenty years away until the final year before they arrive. He compares experimental metal printing with his old Oki Data color dot-matrix printer: slow, loud, low-resolution and barely usable, yet a visible sign of the inkjet and color-printing future that was just around the corner.
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Comparing Windows generations leads Dr. Dave back to the days when Internet Explorer was Mosaic. He remembers doubting that the browser lineage would ever become competitive and marvels that by 2015 it had, even as Firefox extensions still shaped his own preference.
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Google begins offering downloadable scans of public domain books, which Dr. Dave compares to a larger Project Gutenberg. Calling himself a book guy, he delights in unusual old editions and hand drawn artwork while also acknowledging that reading a long work on a scrolling monitor lacks the continuity of paper.
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While marveling at Google Earth's processing and 3D buildings, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve imagine an airplane screen that follows the flight and labels the rivers, towns and landmarks below instead of simply playing a movie.
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Closing the CorelDRAW interview, Dr. Dave and Evil Steve explain that they used the program for their own materials and specifically say the image work on DaveMason.com was created with it. It is a concise piece of first-person provenance for the original memorial site's design history.
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Dr. Dave recalls defending Microsoft during its antitrust fight, years of criticizing products such as Vista and Zune, and the unfamiliar feeling of believing Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 were finally good again.
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Dr. Dave describes MySpace after News Corporation’s purchase, when the young social network had become a cultural phenomenon and its users worried that corporate ownership would change its character. He also cautions parents that the Internet is not separate from real life and requires the same awareness of good, bad and deceptive people.
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Nikon’s decision to stop making most film cameras and lenses marks an industry shift toward digital photography. Dr. Dave admits that the old camera enthusiast in him feels nostalgic, then accepts that digital cameras are useful products whose direction has become undeniable.
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Reading a scanned copy of Paul Kruger’s memoir, complete with aged pages and a prior reader’s notes, leads Dr. Dave to praise the internet for putting rare original records within an ordinary person’s reach.
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At the beginning of September, Dr. Dave plans to buy nearly all his Christmas gifts online. He contrasts that confidence with his distrust only a few years earlier and concludes that Internet shopping is becoming the real deal even though some companies still get it wrong.
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The HP Pre 3 announcement prompts Dr. Dave to note that the Palm brand has disappeared from the phone and to speak personally about his long attachment to Palm devices while recognizing that the technology has moved into a new company.
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Dr. Dave and Evil Steve tell listeners that the DaveMason.com archive began almost on a lark and became one of the site’s most popular features. Dr. Dave says the office also holds show CDs and reel to reel recordings from the late 1980s, then reflects on the nostalgia of hearing how quickly technology changes.
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Dr. Dave tells the story of a Lockheed Martin engineer who spent four years recreating the Apollo guidance computer, then compares its tiny memory and processor with contemporary machines. The project becomes both major computing history and a portrait of patient technical curiosity.
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In a compact piece of site history, Evil Steve reminds Dr. Dave that the cameras are on and the brothers tell listeners the program is being recorded for the DaveMason.com archive and its around-the-clock streaming feed.
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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.
