Dr. Dobb's has always been on the cutting edge of technology. So when we took our first cut at the technology that is now called "podcasting," way back in the wild and wooly days of 1976, it was only to be expected that there would be some rough edges...
Dennis: If you've been following along attentively, you may have noticed that you are not in fact reading a magazine or whatever this thing is that we publish.
Bob: No indeed. You're listening to a radical new innovation that we call "Dr. Dobbcast," which innovatively combines the radical technologies of radio and telephone.
Dennis: Bob's right, and on this first Dr. Dobbcast, we're going to answer your questions about all things digital.
Bob: Not us, specifically. We're fobbing that job off on our underpaid intern, Wally Octal. So please come in, Wally.
Wally: I'mWally Octal, Dr. Dobb's expert on all things digital, and I have someone on the line now with a question that I'm sure will thrill and enlighten us all.
Man: Hello? Do you have Prince Albert in a can?
Wally: Whether we do or not is completely irrelevant. Listen, I know who you are, and I'm telling you once and for all that we here at Dr. Dobbcast have more important things to do with our time than to listen to your crank calls, Steve. Anyway I hope we do. Hello, you're on Dr. Dobbcast.
Boy: Hi, Wally, Greg Frustrum here. I finally got my Altair 8800 running and I've tweaked it to host the local utility company's multiuser timesharing system. I've written custom software in Algol to control the solar parabolic reflector the system uses for power and to do multilingual speech recognition so that I don't have to figure out how to interface a keyboard to the Altair. My question—
Wally: Hold it right there, Greg. I hate to tell you this, but there is no Algol compiler for the Altair 8800 at this time. In fact, you're pretty much stuck with 8080 assembly language or Tiny Basic.
Boy: Thanks, Wally. I'll throw away the 6000 lines of custom Algol code that I've written and start over in Tiny Basic. But my real question is, do you know where I can get a version of Hunt the Wumpus for my machine?
Wally: I think you'll have the best luck if you slip in the basement of the Stanford AI Lab after 11:00pm on a weeknight and go through its magtape library. Hello, you're on Dr. Dobbcast.
Woman: This is not exactly a technical question, but I hope you can help me. My son has been kidnapped.
Wally: Well, that's a little outside my area of expertise, but I'll give it a shot. Can you describe the young man?
Woman: He's a fine boy, with a good job at Hewlett-Packard, but he got in with a bad lot. I'm afraid that this other young man, Steve, has him locked in a garage on Welch Road in Palo Alto wire-wrapping circuit boards.
Wally: I think I can reassure you there, Ma'am. I happen to know for a fact that your son is having a high old time building hardware to rip off the phone company and making crank phone calls to this program.
Woman: Oh, that's a relief.
Wally: Sure, for you. Hello, you're on Dr. Dobbcast.
Man: This is not a question, Wally. I just wanted your listeners to know that I've started a fantastic new magazine for computer hobbyists, flying saucer enthusiasts, and Ham radio operators.
Wally: Groovy. What's it called, Wayne? That is you, right?
Man: Right. The working title is "A Thousand Times Better than that Magazine My Wife Got in the Divorce Settlement."
Wally: I think you should keep working on it, Wayne. Hello, you're on Dr. Dobbcast. Hold on a minute, sir. I can't hear you with all that giggling and gurgling in the background. Maybe you should turn down your radio.
Man: Could you Playmates put a sock in it? I'm on the phone here. And turn off the Jacuzzi jets. There, is that better, Wally?
Wally: Oh, it's you, Jim.
Man: That's right, it's your employer. The editor of Dr. Dobb's. And I have two questions, Wally: Do you think that I pay you $2 an hour to play radio announcer? And second, have you finished proofreading that 1600-line assembly listing I gave you this morning?
Wally: And so this is Wally Octal, Dr. Dobb's expert on all things digital, signing off for this first—and possibly last—episode of Dr. Dobbcast. Keep running light!
Michael Swaine
Editor-at-Large
