Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster talks to Guy and Rene about coding on NeXT, forming the Omni Group, dealing with the "Air Force", making Delicious Library, and what he's working on now. Here's the audio again in case you missed it, and below, for the first time, is the complete transcript.
Debug 19: Wil Shipley from NeXT to Delicious Monster transcript
Wil Shipley: ...yeah actually, I started when I was 11 or 12. My dad was a professor at a small college. He taught computer science. My parents were divorced, and so I would visit him during the summer. He didn't know what to do with us, so he just started taking all three of us to the classes he was teaching. He was teaching "Intro to BASIC" and all that stuff back then. I learned to program when I was 12 and just immediately loved it and spent all my time in the computer lab just hanging out with the actual students and programming. I just wanted to be around computers, just crazy in love with the technology thing.
Guy English: What was the first stuff you were doing? You were doing games?
Wil: No, I was so dumb.
Guy: [laughs]
Wil: I didn't even know basic math or anything. I couldn't really do much of anything. It was just little short programs. Plus, back then, it really was hard to do anything. At that time, when I started, we were dialing into a computer at the University of Georgia, which was 300 miles away. We were dialing in at 110 baud. [laughs] I actually started on teletypes. You would actually type in your thing, view it on paper, and then scroll it up a little bit and the computer would respond remotely. It's not a great way to type in programs. It's hard to do anything more than 20 lines.
Guy: Wow, that's pretty hardcore.
Wil: Yeah, it was weird. I miss those little machines. I actually want to get an old TTY, the original one. There's one where the keys are these cylinders. They're an inch high. They come out of the case like an inch high.
Guy: Do you have to press them all the way down? You have to press the inch to get...
Wil: It wasn't that much play, but it was a lot of play. [laughter]
Wil: It was so incredibly retro future looking. If you saw one today. It was just that's the coolest thing I've ever seen. There was one with this giant ball head. Maybe if you remember ball head typewriters. It was just really scary and really fast. As you type this giant head would come up and bam and come back and whoa, Jesus.
Guy: Yeah, those things remind me of Terminator style futurism.
Wil: Yeah, exactly. I really, really want one of those. Right now I have a IMSAI 8080 and my original Apple IIe.
Guy: Oh, you still have that?
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Lily Allen
Nadine Velazquez
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