On The Metal

Bryan and Steve are joined by Adam to revisit some highlights from almost two years of the Oxide and Friends live show and podcast. Bryan’s blog entry on Twitter Spaces: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2021/05/02/twitter-spaces-a-few-weeks-in/ Oxide and Friends, “Mr. Leventhal, Come here I want you”: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/mr-leventhal-come-here-i-want-to-see-you-2021-05-03 (Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-WSU3kiXVg#t=28m10s) Oxide and Friends, “NeXT, Objective-C, and contrasting histories”: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/next-objective-c-and-contrasting-histories-2021-07-05 Oxide and Friends, “Tales from the Bringup Lab”: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/tales-from-the-bringup-lab-2021-12-06 Flying Blind: Boeing's Max Tragedy and the Lost Soul of an American Icon by Peter Robison: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55994102 Oxide and Friends, “Flying Blind with Peter Robison”:…

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Ken Shirriff, long-time computer programmer, retro computer aficionado, analog computer programmer, and miner of bitcoin by hand. Join us as we talk about breaking down silicon wafers, restoring old computers, what computers Ken grew up with, and even mining bitcoin on an array of different computers.

You can find Star on Twitter at https://twitter.com/starsandrobots. Super Munchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchers Metrowerks CodeWarrior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior RadioShack (RIP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack "Marilyn Monroe's World War II Drone Program": https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/upshot/marilyn-monroes-world-war-ii-drone-program.html Radioplane Company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioplane_Company Piasecki PA-97: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piasecki_PA-97 TacoCopter: https://tacocopter.com/ TacoCopter on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742676 TacoCopter's cameo on Stephen Colbert: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/53yh09/the-colbert-report-thought-for-food---tacocopter Wired on TacoCopter: https://www.wired.com/2012/03/qa-with-tacocopter/ FAA Section 333 (now Section 44807): https://www.faa.gov/uas/advanced_operations/certification/section_44807/ FAA Part 107: https://www.faa.gov/uas/media/part_107_summary.pdf Canidu: http://www.canidu.com/…

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview John Graham-Cumming. Some folks might know John as the CTO of Cloudflare, but he is also a great source of knowledge about computer history including Turing, Babbage, and Lovelace. Join us as we step back in time and learn about how John got started in computers, hacking his school's network to make his own network faster, and all sorts of details of computing history.

Welp, that's a wrap for the first season of the On the Metal podcast. Join us as we reminisce about some of our favorite parts (although it was very hard to choose). We also uncover some aspects of the podcast you never heard about! While this is the end of the first season, we absolutely cannot wait for the second season. Thank you so much for listening, we will be back soon!

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview legendary game designer and programmer Jonathan Blow. Join along as Jonathan takes us from collision detection on the Atari 800, through porting Doom to SGI's famous set-top box, starting a game company at the worst possible time, his adventures with the (in)famous Cell processor, making several hit games -- and his more recent experiences with a new programming language of his own creation.

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Jon Masters, computer architecture raconteur, microprocessor enfant terrible, and Patron Saint of Lost Computational Causes. Join us as we learn why Jon hates simultaneous multithreading, why he loves UEFI (?!) -- and when we can expect the supremacy of the quantum blockchain.

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Rick Altherr, who has experience working all over the stack. Join us as we discuss impossible bugs, fires in the data center, reverse engineering BMC firmware, BMC vulnerabilities, Cray computers, and Windows NT on MIPS. Yup you heard that right!

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Kenneth Finnegan, internet exchange homebrewer. Join us as we delight in the underbelly of the internet, learn about OG ASNs, run upon illegal cabling -- and thrill in the discovery of a root DNS server thirty feet away.

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Trammell Hudson. Trammell has some of the most interesting side projects related to every single hardware / software interface you can imagine. Join us as we step into the negative privilege rings with stories of reverse engineering lightbulbs & a Canon 5D Mark 2, hacking a Mac SE, dissecting modchips, evil maid attacks, and more.

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Tom Lyon, Sun Microsystems employee #8, network storage pioneer and systems software polymath. Join us as Tom recounts losing bits in the hallway at Princeton, the peril of software-refreshed DRAM, and how to write a token ring driver from scratch in two weeks and still be mistaken for someone from sales. Along the way, Jess, Bryan and Tom nerd out about first calculators, favorite editors, and hard tabs.

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Ron Minnich. Ron has had a fascinating career working on the interface between software and hardware. Join us to hear a mesmerizing conversation about Unix, Plan9, LinuxBIOS, Chromebooks, RISC-V, of course some Gentoo jokes, flip flop programming toys, and more!

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Amir Michael. Join us as we listen to stories of growing up and coming up in Silicon Valley, from answering a Craigslist ad during the Dot Com Bust for a company with a funny name, through starting a project at Facebook that became an industry-wide movement -- with many exciting tales in between!

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Jeff Rothschild. Jeff has had a fascinating journey solving all sorts of fun problems at various levels of the stack. He is most widely known as being a co-founder of Veritas Software and the first VP of Engineering at Facebook, but his story does not start there. Join us as we hear Jeff’s stories from his impressive technical endeavors including disassembling MS-DOS, editing machine code in an octal editor, trolling coworkers in error messages, the origin story of ftruncate, and more.

Welcome to our new podcast, On the Metal! As a part of starting Oxide Computer Company, we decided to also create the podcast we always wanted. It’s unapologetically technical and as Jess says, “the nerdiest podcast on the face of the planet.” Join us as we interview various guests from the hardware / software interface. Their stories have captivated us all and kept us wanting more, we can’t wait to share them with you! Stay tuned!