KETTLE Windows XP is turning 25, and with AI still causing a memory crunch we're really missing the days of low-overhead OSes from Microsoft that just worked.
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This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by FOSS reporter Liam Proven and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to talk about why XP might have been peak Windows, but that's not the only retro thing we're chatting about in this episode.
Along with reminiscing about Windows of days gone by, we're also looking at Casio's remake of its classic digital watch to add some basic smart capabilities without losing a two-year battery life, and we're reexamining the long-held belief that putting passwords on paper is a bad idea. After all, you can't hack a paper notebook.
A lightly edited transcript is below.
Brandon (00:01)
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the latest episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm Reg Reporter Brandon Vigliarolo, and this week we're finally going to step away from the AI industry for a few minutes to talk about something decidedly more old-fashioned that we've been covering lately. And with me to discuss these stories are our open source reporter Liam Proven
Liam Proven (00:20)
Hello.
Brandon (00:20)
And Microsoft reporter Richard Speed. Thanks for joining me, guys.
Richard Speed (00:24)
Hi Brandon.
All right, first up, Richard, we hit a pretty momentous date in Windows history this week with the silver anniversary of Windows XP's release to manufacturing. So what does that date mean for lovers of what may have been the peak of Microsoft's operating systems?
Richard Speed (00:43)
That's great. RTM is the release to manufacturing. And that's basically when the code is stable, complete, and they ship the code off to mass production, where disks are then stamped out. Remember when disks came with software instead of being digital? I mean, we are talking a quarter of a century ago.
It was a fairly major milestone as far as Microsoft is concerned because before that you had the Windows NT codebase and Liam actually wrote a piece on Windows NT 4 this week because there's another anniversary there. And then you had the consumer Windows 9x, Windows 3.0, MS-DOS code base. NT - sorry, XP (there's a Freudian slip there) was the point where Microsoft merged those two code bases together, whereas consumers...at the time, and I think we've forgotten now, it was a dreadful shock because for consumers they were used to the Windows 9x time and that was great. Windows 98 would run in 16 megs if you were quite brave. You'd probably need a bit more. Whereas Windows XP needed 64 megabytes minimum to work. And really you'd need a lot more than that to make it usable. I had a Windows XP machine. I think I might have been running in either 128 or 256 megs.
You needed more resources, but it was a heck of a lot more stable. It was night and day. If you compare XP to Windows 9x, it was so much more stable. So it was a really important milestone. But at the time, a bit of a shock because the reason it was so stable is that lots of the old software, drivers, and things that worked with Windows 9x didn't work anymore. Windows XP had a compatibility mode. You could in theory increase compatibility, but there was still all the stuff that simply wouldn't work. And looking back on it, fair enough, because Windows NT was very stable, while Windows 9x was not quite so stable.
Liam Proven (02:39)
That's very diplomatic.
Brandon (02:41)
I remember the transition from 95 to 98 was a mess.
Richard Speed (02:46)
Exactly. With 95 you had 16-bit with 32-bit bits on top, and then with 98, whereas NT in the background was very solid. It needed more resources, but was really robust. I think that NT 3.51 and NT4 were probably peak NT as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure people will disagree and have a preferred version of NT, but it was designed from the outset to be professional quality software. It was really good. And again, Liam can speak to the whole history of Windows NT, NT4, OS/2, what have you. But I think XP was where consumers got their hands on this serious software. Microsoft tweaked the interface. The Start menu got changed, made into two columns. They changed the fonts and the iconography. It was an overhaul of the interface from what people were used to from Windows 9x.
Brandon (03:38)
There are some rounded edges in there, like some green and blue.
Richard Speed (03:40)
There were some rounded edges, although it could fall back to battleship gray if you asked it to. It would do that. But the visual effects were in there. I think it maxed out at four gigabytes of RAM in the early days. You were only allowed one CPU on the Home Edition. You could have two on the Pro Edition. And I think the 64-bit version would allow you to have more RAM as well, but that came out a few years later.
Brandon (04:10)
So now RTM was getting it in the hands of manufacturers and OEMs. Just to clarify in terms of the release of XP, the first OEM machines started becoming available to consumers on September 24th. And then the retailrelease, where you can still go on YouTube and find videos of stylishly dressed people holding up their boxes of Windows XP, that was on October 24th.
Richard Speed (04:43)
It was indeed. Yes. October is when it hit the channel, when you could buy boxes of Windows XP. There was this gap after RTM. RTM is when the code is done and stable; it's not going to change again. That's what they're going to print the CDs from. And then the October release date was when it turned up in stores. All very exciting.
Now, there's an important point to make about XP. Back then, it was a security nightmare, looking back with modern eyes. Microsoft didn't really start taking security seriously until XP Service Pack 2, and even then there were problems. But if you look at its resource requirements, 128 or 256 megabytes is probably acceptable for a Windows XP experience. Look at Windows 11 today, and Microsoft is struggling to get that down to eight gigabytes, which is an order of magnitude more massive. What we have today is not an order of magnitude better than what we had when XP came out. If you look at the resources that XP needed, it's far less than what you need to run a modern Windows 11 PC today.
Liam Proven (05:54)
Absolutely. For me — and it's odd that these days I find myself as the FOSS guy — I was an early adopter of Windows, and early in my career, Windows is what made my career. I started using Windows 2 when everybody else at my office thought Windows was a joke and that Macs or OS/2 were the future. And I stuck with it. XP is the one that made me jump ship. XP was the version where I looked at it and said, "Enough. What's with the Fisher-Price color scheme?" And I got an old Power Mac from a client that his wife was throwing out. And I hacked Mac OS X onto it with a thing called X-Post-Facto. I started using Mac OS X, and my bodged-together Mac, with all these third-party upgrades—SATA controller, Firewire controller, USB controller, extra graphics card, faster CPU—crashed a lot.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for The Reg on using Windows XP in 2023, partly at reader demand. I got Windows XP64 (the AMD64 one, not the Itanium one) and put it on one of my oldest ThinkPads. It's a Core 2 Duo maxed out with 8 gig of RAM. It was a joy.
Brandon (07:09)
Wonder why?
Liam Proven (07:10)
So I used Linux on laptops when the Mac fell over. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for The Reg on using Windows XP in 2023, partly at reader demand. I got Windows XP64 (the AMD64 one, not the Itanium one) and put it on one of my oldest ThinkPads. It's a Core 2 Duo maxed out with 8 gig of RAM. It was a joy.
I put an SSD in the machine — a £10 spare from the parts bin, a 200GB SATA SSD — and XP64 flies on this machine. Windows snap open. Obviously it runs Microsoft Office, but I don't like Office with the ribbon. I prefer older versions, but you can run Office 2007 on it. You can get a modern fork of Firefox — not current, but recent enough that everything works. You can get a modern fork of Chrome, again not current, but everything works. A lot of the big FOSS tools, like Notepad++ or VLC, web editors, email clients, you'll find a lot of the leading free stuff for Windows. You'll often find an Android link saying, "This is our last version for XP." They still offer it, and now and again they'll put out a .1 version with a security fix in it. It took an afternoon's work and everything worked: I was online, Gmail, Google Contacts, chat, Slack. Everything just worked.
Richard Speed (09:13)
I think XP is almost like the unkillable cockroach of the IT world because it has carried on and on. Even in 2024, Microsoft was still doing patches for it, for SP3, there were patches. It's just going on. As Liam says, the performance of it today, Windows 11, in fact many modern operating systems, are simply not as quick as they were then. I look at it and think to myself, "What am I getting from Windows 11 that I didn't get with Windows XP, apart from that wondrous Fisher-Price look of Windows XP, which has now gone away."
Liam Proven (09:58)
Yeah.
Brandon (09:58)
Well, Copilot, right? You're getting Copilot crammed everywhere. Talk about resource consumption.
Richard Speed (10:02)
That's true. There's no AI, and there are almost no ads in Windows XP. Shocking. Exactly. We have progressed a long way.
Liam Proven (10:15)
Right behind me my colleagues can see a racing bicycle clamped into a smart turbo trainer. This thing can hook up to a PC and show you great cycle courses of the world. As you pedal along, it gets harder to pedal when climbing uphill, and easier when going downhill. I got this rig, worth a couple of thousand pounds, for free — well, for 60 pounds a couple of years ago — because the software's discontinued and the activation servers are turned off. I'm trying to get it going again with open source, which doesn't work great because it's all undocumented proprietary stuff. But I found out the software only officially supports 32-bit Windows. So I managed to get Windows 2003 Server Data Center Edition, a version of 32-bit Windows that can see more than four gigs of RAM. It was a lot of work to find it, to get it installed and activated, and it works. But it wasn't worth it, and the cycle app can't see more than 3GB of RAM anyway. So I went to XP64, which is much easier and works much better. All these modern 64-bit apps will actually work on it. This is why we got Vista, then 7, and then the whole new look of Windows 8, because Microsoft had to kill its babies. It had to give people a reason to dump perfectly working older products.
Brandon (12:05)
It's so frustrating when you think about it like that. Using Windows XP now, it's still viable in 2026, it functions great without the bloat. I worked in the IT industry when XP was still the dominant OS, Vista didn't make an impact, and 7 was just rolling out. I remember having to strip bloatware off of new PCs with XP. But the bloatware you were stripping off then was minimal compared to what is in a modern OS. It's all in the name of profitability and shareholder revenue gain, not user usability. It's really kind of sad.
Liam Proven (12:47)
And yeah, and now Windows 11 makes Windows 10 look lightweight.
Brandon (12:54)
Yeah.
Liam Proven (12:56)
You could have your taskbar on the left or on the right…
Richard Speed (13:01)
Or the top. Don't forget the top as well.
Liam Proven (13:04)
I think 11 let you put it on the top, right?
Richard Speed (13:08)
I don't think so. I think it was bottom and that's it. I'm not sure you could move it.
Liam Proven (13:11)
I thought you could have top or bottom and that was it. But I rarely use Windows anymore. It is not a production tool for me, but I keep a Windows partition on most of my laptops just in case. It's very rarely come up for The Reg, but it has come up when I was working as a tech writer that someone only had a visualization tool that only talked to Windows.
So I'm putting Windows 10 LTSC on them now. It's still supported and will be until 2031, and it works, and it does the job and everybody still supports it. You can get current versions of basically everything. A few things pop up and say, "Your version of Windows is not supported, you should upgrade to Windows 11." They probably got kickbacks.
Brandon (14:07)
It's pretty amazing how slowly Windows eleven gained market share. It was only this year that it finally surpassed Windows ten. Richard, are you familiar with when it passed it?
Richard Speed (14:20)
It went past before the October support cutoff last year for Windows 10. But it has stalled a bit. Microsoft doesn't issue official statistics, but StatCounter has its data. In the absence of official figures, Windows 11 is on about 60, 65% of the market, and Windows 10 is on around 25 to 30% of the market and it's kind of been like that for a few months.
There are a variety of reasons for this, particularly with regard to commercial users because they simply don't want to move across. Microsoft, they blinked and offered one year free support, two years of extended support for consumers. So they blinked as well. But I think one of the problems is — I don't want to suggest there was a marketing reason for the forced upgrade — is that the Windows 11 hardware requirements were such that you had to buy a new PC to run Windows 11. That was great because the PC market had stalled, but since then, prices have skyrocketed. People who might have bought a new PC are saying, "I'll stay with what I've got because it works fine." There are ways of keeping support running for Windows 10 for a very long time. The ESU program in theory is going to end in 2028. Again, there are versions of Windows 10 that will go beyond that. Those patches will keep coming if you know where to look
Liam Proven (16:11)
I personally do not own any machine that can legally run Windows 11. I don't own anything with a new enough TPM chip. I've got two work x86 machines from The Register that can, but I was surprised, a friend of mine's son dropped his laptop and broke the keyboard. I bought a replacement keyboard off eBay, and while I had the machine open I put in some more RAM and an SSD — all secondhand because the memory price increase is already happening This is a passable gamer laptop with an Nvidia chip with a few gig of RAM, and a fast Core i5. It's got a TPM, but it's not the right TPM the TPM is too old.
Brandon (17:16)
Those hardware requirements are completely arbitrary. We've reported on the fact that it's been a forced thing. For a while Microsoft even had workaround instructions on their website. They finally pulled them down and said you can't do this anymore. You still can; they just don't want you to know about it. It's ridiculous. But maybe someday we'll get back to the good old days of operating systems where they just work.
Liam Proven (17:45)
That'd be nice. Some open source types say shrinking RAM availability in modern PCs might force developers to be frugal with code and make stuff smaller, but I'm not seeing any sign of that happening yet. Now the big trend is getting AI to extrude it for you and don't worry about it.
Brandon (18:07)
What worries me about it is, rather than a resurgence in low-end hardware and simpler computing, it's going to push more people into expensive cloud subscriptions where you host your workload on a service you pay for monthly as opposed to something you own. That's been my big concern. There's no sign that it's pushing computing toward the lower end, so it's a concern.
Liam Proven (18:36)
It should. I've been to China. I've never been to Taiwan. I really want to. But as the resident of a small island neighbor of a bigger and more famous country, I have a tiny, faint empathy with Taiwan because Taiwan's name isn't Taiwan, right? The name of the country is the Republic of China, which is why the big one is the People's Republic of China, and they really want it back. If China does take it back…there goes the bulk of the world's chip supply as TSMC goes under. Suddenly we might be looking at needing to get 10 years of working life out of every computer we own.
That will not work well with current commercial suppliers. Fedora is trying to push x86-64 version 3 into Fedora, which Red Hat Enterprise Linux already does. They want to optimize binaries for the latest revision of x86. They don't want you running Red Hat on server processors from a decade ago, they don't want to keep supporting this old kit. Bots are finding vulnerabilities in old drivers now, so instead of fixing them, they're ripping the drivers out. You'll be able to use an older version of the kernel, but the open-source industry is not immune to this tendency of needing a newer machine and newer hardware to upgrade. And it's not ready for a world where we can't make new microchips anymore, or we can can but in tiny batches that are going to cost several thousand US dollars per unit, and therefore you absolutely need to keep old hardware running for 15 years.
There's a 15-year-old laptop right next to me on this desk, and if I carefully choose the version of Linux and the tools I run, it's a capable tool. It has hardware virtualization. I could do my day job on this 15-year-old machine, though I wouldn't want to. I'm being recorded on a 10-year-old machine, and that's fine. That's still more than quick enough for everything I do. There is a cutoff point. My Mac is unsupported by Apple and by the podcast tool we're using. It does the job fine, but I'm still getting OS updates on it. I've hacked a newer Mac OS onto it, but that's going to go away soon, probably when Mac OS 27 ships. I'm getting backed into a corner, this is a corner we're all going to get backed into, and the industry has not faced up to this. Instead, it's going all-in on machine-generated software, which is bigger, slower, buggier, and works less well.
Brandon (21:58)
Security nightmares, et cetera.
Moving along from the nightmare of the future of computing, there are some old things that are still working quite well and have gotten incremental upgrades, like the classic Casio digital wristwatch. I believe you wrote last week about their bid to make it a little smarter, but not too smart.
Liam Proven (22:24)
Right.
I should have memorized a whole bunch of Casio part numbers, and I did not do so, for which I apologize. The Casio F-91W has received an upgrade and can now count your steps and synchronize those to your smartphone at the end of the day over Bluetooth.
A reader asked me which version of Bluetooth, and I said Bluetooth Low Energy. They asked which revision of the standard, and I said I'm sorry, but Casio is not publishing that detailed tech info.
I use a budget smartwatch called an Amazfit Neo. Mine is secondhand, but these were about 50 bucks new. It has a step counter and can relay notifications from my phone to my wrist. It says you've got a notification, but doesn't tell you what from or what it is. That's not much use, but when my phone rings, my watch rings, which is useful if I left the phone in another room or on silent. That makes the two-way Bluetooth work. The Casio has one-way Bluetooth. The watch can talk to the phone, and that's it. The watch has to initiate it.
Brandon (23:55)
I found step tracking and Bluetooth connectivity a neat upgrade to this classic Casio digital design. I've been wearing an Apple Watch for years, and I'm kind of over it, I'm tired of the constant connectivity it gives me. Usuallyon the weekends I take it off. But I'm a runner, I put it back on when I go for runs if I'm not wearing it. A simpler watch, I would love to go in on that, even with one-way communication, but it needs heart rate tracking and metrics for runs. So this is a cool upgrade, but not quite where it needs to be to elevate it.
Liam Proven (24:37)
You're right, but what I find interesting is that there is now this overlap in different ranges. The Casio that does step tracking, which I think might be an FB100, but don't quote me on that, it's the same size as the 40-year-old Casio that they've sold 300 million of. It comes now in a lightweight resin case, which is a bit tougher than the metal model. And it's 55 bucks, which is about the same price as my Amazfit here But that would imply that the Casio range is growing up to touch the smartwatch range as it grows down, but that isn't really what's happened.
On one hand, Amazfit no longer make this thing, but on the other hand, Casio can do you a Casio watch with pulse rate monitoring, with notifications, with two-way comms to your phone if you want. What they can't do yet is do that in the 50 buck model.
Brandon (25:53)
Right.
Liam Proven (25:53)
But they have these upper ranges. The G-Shock range has a bunch of models which can do more than my low-end smartwatch can they can relay notifications but on the tiny LCD they can scroll what app sent you the notification they can scroll what the SMS text is or the subject line of the email if somebody whatsapps you you can see who
They do pulse tracking. They've got models that'll do that. The battery life is punished as a result.
Brandon (26:24)
Yeah, that's what I want. I think I want something that physically can't exist right now, right? Because this new Casio has two years of battery life. Is that right?
Liam Proven (26:32)
That's right, that's right. And they've managed to do that with Bluetooth because basically at the end of the day, once a day, the watch squirts a packet to your phone. So that synchronizes into your Google Health or Apple Health or whatever, or Google Fit, sorry, Apple Health, I think it's called. Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal.
So personal anecdote to explain the relevance. I emigrated about 12 years ago from the UK to the Czech Republic and when I was packing up my house I found my dad's old watch. It's a mechanical Seiko from about late 1970s and I put it on and to my amazement this self-winding watch started working. So right around the time Apple launched the Apple Watch I started wearing a completely non-smart watch again.
I got into the smartwatch thing a few years later and I do find some of the stuff useful, but I looked into buying a watch winder, which is a little machine that you put a mechanical self-winding watch on and it gently rocks the watch from side to side to keep the mechanism wound up if you don't wear it every day. In Japan these have enjoyed a big sales resurgence in recent years, not because people are wearing self-winding watches. People put their smart watches on them because it simulates a nice high step count. Why? Because their step count is synced from their watch into their fitness tracker. And the health insurance company want to see the figures from your fitness tracker, and so you want to inflate your step count to keep your health insurance premiums down. So suddenly, actually, this is not for convenience. It's because this could save you money having a 50 buck watch that can sink into your online health tracker and then your doctor can see that you are actually pretty active and tell you, you don't need to give up on a couple of beers a week because, you're doing 50,000, 60,000 steps a week. So, actually, you're okay.
Brandon (28:56)
Hopefully that doesn't that doesn't make them a little confused when you go in for that annual physical and the blood work and everything and they're like, Wait a minute, your cholesterol is way higher than it's supposed to be.
Liam Proven (29:04)
I think the driver of this is not the simple convenience. It's not the, hey, I can have this on my phone. It's that that's linked into your health footprint in the cloud. And your employer might want to know, or your insurance company might want to know.
Brandon (29:24)
And I guess getting these for your whole office full of workers to track their steps is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying them all Apple Watches.
Liam Proven (29:30)
Right? I mean, I don't wear an Apple Watch. I had an Amazfit higher-end model that looks like an Apple Watch for a while, but I'm sorry, I'm not wearing a 500 buck gadget on my wrist, because I'm a bit clumsy. I walk into doorways and stuff occasionally, and I will not use a $1,000 smartphone with a $500 watch. I'm not willing to pay that much, and I'm afraid I'm going toa lose it or break it also because I got a toddler she's going toa drop it in the bath or something no I like I like my 20 bucks smartwatch which sinks to my 150 buck Chinese smartphone they they do all the same stuff but
It's not the end of the world if somebody picks my pocket or if it falls out of my pocket on the train and I lose it. Or my kid takes it to take a photo and then she drops it off the side of the ferry and it's, you know, 600 meters down in the Irish Sea. So it's really interesting that the very low end of the smartwatch territory now has a big overlap with the high end of the Casio territory.
And Casio will do you devices that are definitely not a smart watch, but they're a very capable digital watch that will actually do what a Garmin that's four or five times the price will do while delivering five, 10 times the battery life.
Brandon (31:02)
It'll be interesting to see how these how the market responds to these. I'm interested to see kind of what what happens with these 'cause I could see there being quite a bit of space for it, you know.
So not to change the subject too quickly, but going even further back in the world of technology, to close out tonight, I wanted to talk about a story that our security reporter Connor Jones wrote about the Australian post office. Someone spotted and posted on Reddit and he picked it up as a story. But they were selling password notebooks for just three, four dollars a piece. It was funny because when I was in IT, I remember scoffing when you'd see those at the bookstore, being like, oh my God, what would I have to tell my parents if they actually wanted to buy one of these things? Or people at work, don't write those passwords down, please, for the love of God. And now the consensus on Reddit seemed to be that this is actually probably a better alternative than a lot of the other ways people are storing their passwords nowadays. Now the security landscape has changed greatly enough to where paper actually might be where it's at again. I don't know what you guys think about that.
Richard Speed (32:10)
Certainly my parents-in-law, they have been using paper notebooks for some time. And 20 years ago , I would have been horrified, but now I think, it's like it's a bit of paper. Sure, if you burgled my house, then maybe you might get a hold of my bit of paper, but otherwise it's pretty – it's going to be no good for passkeys, I hasten to add. Passkeys, I think, will render these things obsolete once and for all. And they won't suggest a new password for you, but as Connor quite rightly says, if you look at the infosec worldpeople are saying, well, actually, perhaps this is not such a bad idea after all. Users who maybe are not technically savvy enough to have a password manager don't want to pay the money to have one. A bit of paper, absolutely fine. And of course, there's the benefit that if you unexpectedly need to get hold of that, of access to systems, then it's written down, it's there. Whereas, I don't know about you guys, but I actually have the key word to my password manager written down somewhere where my nearest and dearest can find it in case the worst happens. Because otherwise, people are, how do you get access to a loved one's information? So yeah, I think this is great, actually.
Liam Proven (33:29)
Yeah, I concur.
Richard Speed (33:31)
And I'm pretty sure when I speak to my father-in-law, he's 90, tonight he'll be overjoyed to hear that it's got the thumbs up now.
Brandon (33:39)
It's the new hotness in infosec, right? Writing your stuff down in a nice place.
Richard Speed (33:43)
Exactly, you are with it, my friend, you are with it.
Liam Proven (33:46)
I used to use these Psion organizer pocket computers in the 90s. I don't think Psion ever cracked the US market, but Apple launched the Newton and kind of implanted the idea of the personal digital assistant in people's minds. And then Psion, this little British company – I just wrote an obituary for the founder a couple of months ago, sadly – produced a lower tech one that just worked and was very nearly bulletproof. And at that time all my friends carried philofaxes bulging with extra bits of card and bookmarks and Post-it notes stuck in them. And I said, "Yeah, but what happens if you drop it in a puddle and it gets wet and it turns into a small leather-bound brick of papier-mache? So how do you back up your philofax? I can't. Well what do you do, photocopy it, buy another one and handwrite all the entries in? I back this up every day, how about you?"
Now it's the flip side, it's like, "Here you go, I got all my passwords right here, come on, come at me bro, hack this, go on, I dare you. What are are you going to do, dox me, work out my address, get on the boat, come and break into my house and get in? No, good luck with that."
Brandon (35:03)
If someone breaks into your house and steals your password book, you've got more pressing issues to deal with probably. And not only that, but if you're the kind of person who has a tendency to reuse passwords, (coughs) excuse me. I don't want to implicate myself. But I mean I think we all do to a degree. it's nice to be able to have a record of them. And I mean, if you're really that concerned about your privacy, leave yourself clues in a paper notebook rather than writing the whole password out, right? One of the things I adopted a while ago was using passphrases, right? And using long passages. I think I read somewhere several years ago now that, if you don't want to use a completely random password that you're relying on a digital device to remember, a sentence is going to be way more secure than a word and some numbers, sort of thing.
Richard Speed (35:53)
I mean, I saw some great advice, actually. I think it was an XKCD comic. All the best ideas come from those. Why don't you have a mnemonic which will give you a password? So you think of a phrase of maybe four five words, and that will give you a word at the end. And that, think, also makes sense as well. But certainly, your point about reusing the same password over and over again. I may have been guilty of that several decades ago, and I feel much better now thank you but certainly I think having a paper passport to write these things down in, it's actually more secure isn't it really.
Liam Proven (36:36)
That is not only correct, it is correct horse battery staple.
Richard Speed (36:40)
Thank you, Liam.
Liam Proven (36:45)
I have a system for generating passwords and I've been using it since the 90s. And it makes me feel like some kind of fossil these days, but my personal email address I signed up for in 1991 and it still works. I use an email address that's older than the World Wide Web.
But I've been generating passwords since when the web exploded, mid-90s. And a few years ago, some Russian company, pre-Ukraine invasion, bought ICQ. And they spun ICQ back out of AOL and sold it. And the Russians bought it. And when they announced the service, they honored old accounts.
So if you could remember your, whatever it was, eight-digit ICQ username. And I found it in my address book, which is synced to the cloud these days, but it started on a Psion 30 years ago. So it's got my ICQ number in it. So I went to the website and downloaded a client and put my number in and then went, what would my password have been in 1996?
And I worked it out and it worked and I was back in. And I said to people, hey look, ICQ is back, you can use ICQ again. And they went, my God, I remember my number, but I have no idea what my password was, I was 12. Well, if they'd written it on a bit of paper, if they'd written it in the back of their childhood diary, they'd probably still have that. Whereas if they have it on a 5 1/4" floppy or something, they can't read it anymore. So paper lasts longer.
Brandon (38:26)
If you're that concerned, get yourself if you're that concerned about the security of your notebook, get yourself a child's diary with a lock on it, I guess, right? Yep.
Liam Proven (38:34)
Andy Tannenbaum – he was the guy that wrote Minix, which is the operating system that inspired Linux; it was bootstrapped on Minix – he said, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes hurtling down the highway." Words to that effect. Well, these days, if you try and calculate the bandwidth of a truck full of micro SD cards hurtling down the highway, inothing in the world could approach that. The CERN accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, was generating petabytes a day, maybe more, and they needed to invest in some extremely elaborate kit to back it up. Well, the problem with a truck full of backup tapes is, it takes you a week to fill the tapes, but then you can move them to another city with a bandwidth nothing digital can equal. Well now, have backups in the cloud, have backups on removable media, but have backups on paper of the really important stuff. Encrypt your physical backups on whatever with a password and then write the password down in a little book. It's no use to anybody who can't get at the tapes.
Brandon (39:54)
Nope. It's amazing how what's old is new again in a lot of ways in technology. It's constantly cycling around, I suppose. So we will be here to talk about all that's old and new in tech in future weeks. And we hope you will join us on the next episode of The Kettle to talk just about that. ®