YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Plummer

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2025-08-29
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2025-08-29
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  1. “There's no moment when I dropped out. You just go less and less and less until you realize it's going to be embarrassing if I show up because I haven't been there in a long time. And then very soon you're just not going, and that's how you drop out of high school. So if you find yourself on that path, stop doing that. But that's precisely what I did. And so now I'm not at school and I have to get a job. So I'm working at 7-Eleven in a paint warehouse and stuff like that. And 7-Eleven is actually kind of an interesting job because it's a job I think to keep rotating for people that are smart enough to do the night shift with all the accounting and the administration stuff they make the night shift do, but that have reasons personally that they need to work at 7-Eleven. And I was one of those people because I had no high school diploma.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think there were two stages for me. I always knew immediately that I was fascinated with these machines from the TRS80 Model 1. That's all I wanted to do was ride my bike back there and have more time with it. I did that, you know, to wear out my welcome as much as I could. And the other revelation came, I think, about second or third year university when I realized I love programming. But I love what I do. And so I think that was a lot of consolation. It's like, it doesn't really matter what I'm doing at this point because I kind of love doing it.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “That game would be, I mean, an assembly language, I've done a fair bit of complicated stuff, but in actual machine language, I think that game would be the only thing I've actually”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The biggest issues you have to write completely sequentially because, at least in that variance, 6502, you can't add things later. You can only add things on the end. So it's like programming a tape in a way.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Trivial. And it's just one of those things that sticks. I think you do it so many times. You know, if I give you a C issue, there are certain syntactic issues in C that you're never going to forget and get wrong. And it's just one of those.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's not even assembly. Not assembly yet because there's no assembler built in. So I should have written an assembler as my first task, but I wasn't that clever.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, there was a huge amount of guilt because, right, you destroy several weeks of work and you know it was because you rushed or you did something stupid or you made it unwise choice.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And I went to make a backup of it to preserve it for future scholars or whatever the hell I was doing. And I copied my blank floppy onto my data floppy. So that was my first experience with data management. And so I don't have a copy of my first program anymore.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, the first thing I did was overheat the floppy drive on it, which is unfortunate because it wasn't the warranty machine. My parents didn't have a lot of money, so we bought it from computer house as opposed to one of the major retailers, which meant when it died, it had to go back to Germany or something to be fixed. So I was left with no floppy, and so I had a cassette deck, which was the best you could do at the time. And so I was writing small things, and I had a machine language monitor that you could load from cassette. Didn't have an assembler built in, but had a disassembler, so you could enter the opcodes in 6502 in hex. And if you were careful about planning, you'd be able to write some basic programs. So that's kind of how I learned. And the first thing I ever wrote on it was a club of Gallagher. It's a bad clone of Gallagher, but it has the major enemies that attack over time. And it's all written in hand-coded machine language, and you can't relocate 6502. So if you need to add code in the middle, you need to manually sort of jump to somewhere else, do your work, jump back to where you were. It's just hideous spaghetti code. But it all worked eventually.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah. I mean, the numbers are hard to believe. It depends which numbers you believe. But even the medium estimates are pretty high.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's hard to gauge the long-term impact, but I think the 64 itself probably influenced more people, so that's my reason for picking that one. The sales are certainly higher”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, the big three had come out. There was a theorist 80 Model 1, there was the PET 2001, and the Apple II came out roughly simultaneously.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah. Didn't know any better. And I still have an old foolscap that I wrote in sixth grade of a program that's kind of logically correct, but has no chance of working on any interpreter that existed at the time. So it took me a while to figure out what was actually going on with him, but I rode my bike down there every Thursday and Saturday, and they had graciously let me use the machines.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Absolutely not. I mean, it's no worse than a component stereo. The only thing is that tandy and their infinite wisdom use the same five pinned DIN connector for power, video, and I think cassettes, so they're all identical. If you plug them in wrong, you'd blow it up. So I read the label. And got it working and wounded up playing with it and not knowing anything about computers. So I'm typing English commands into it and print two plus two works perfectly, yet more simple in English that you enter into a basic level one interpreter is not going to get you very far.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I do. I didn't own my first computer for a long time, but the first computer I ever used was a TRS 80, Model 1, Level 1, 4K machine. And I rode my bike in fifth or sixth grade, so I was about 11 to the local radio shack. And, you know, they had standard component stereo systems and everything else the radio shack had. But they had a stack of boxes that was labeled computer. And so I was asking the people who worked there about it. And they said they just got it and they hadn't set it up yet. And so I was rather precocious and I figured, well, I'll set it up for you. And they said, okay, have a shot.”

    2025-08-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #479 – Dave Plummer: Programming, Autism, and Old-School Microsoft Stories · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source