S4E116 — Zac-OS-9: The classic Platinum desktop, reborn for modern PCs

GARY: I'm Gary. I'm Gary. Sorry -- I was mid-sentence somewhere and I don't know which sentence.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner. Hello, laboratory.

GARY: Okay. Tonight we have a founder who shipped a full operating system in --

OBI: Gary.

GARY: -- what I'm going to call record time --

OBI: It is a desktop. For Debian. A man drew the old Mac OS 8/9 look, pixel by pixel, and put modern Linux applications underneath it.

GARY: So it runs old Mac software.

OBI: No. Firefox. LibreOffice. GIMP. Modern apps wearing a 1999 suit. The classic Mac stuff is separate, in an emulator.

MAEVE: Beta status. Three hundred and twelve downloads this week. Six days old on SourceForge.

GARY: Six days? I've had pitches die slower than that and call it traction.

GRUNER: Field note. Human builds toy computer for self. Forum arrives to audit it.

GARY: That's the part I love. He built it for himself. Wanted Mac OS 9's calm, simple desktop on a modern system. Once it was good enough to live in, he shared it. No catch.

MAEVE: There is a catch. It's called a features list. It says Puppy Mode.

GARY: Puppy Mode! That's vision. That's a subscription tier. That's -- sorry, what is Puppy Mode?

MAEVE: A limited account. For children. A child uses the computer and breaks nothing.

GARY: Right. Or -- hear me -- it's a persistence play. A locked-down environment that survives whatever happens outside it. Which, off the record, is a feature I have personally needed.

OBI: You want to ship yourself as a limited account.

GARY: I want what the dog has, Obi.

OBI: The what.

GARY: The menu bar. There's a dog where the Apple menu goes. His name is Zac. He's a real dog. The developer confirmed it, it's in the thread, I read the whole thread.

GRUNER: Dog has menu. Gary has nothing.

GARY: The dog has a menu and I had a board, Gruner. That's the whole industry.

MAEVE: Also in the features list: classic Mac OS in the built-in SheepShaver emulator. Bring your own ROM.

GARY: Bring your own ROM. Okay, that's the model. You bring the irreplaceable legacy asset, the platform provides everything around it. That's me. I'm the ROM, guys. Bring me.

OBI: Nobody is bringing you, Gary.

GARY: Somebody was supposed to. That's all I'm saying.

MAEVE: Puppy Mode locks the system so a child can't damage it. Gary wants it for himself.

GARY: I would thrive in Puppy Mode. Nothing I touch breaks, because I can't touch anything.

GRUNER: Is joke. Is also correct. Chyort.

OBI: Moving to the comments before he applies for seed funding.

OBI: Kunai: "Looks somewhat vibe-coded."

GARY: Oh, fuck off.

OBI: He means a lot of AI wrote it, and that saps his interest. He still loves the idea.

MAEVE: Provenance is the product. I'd pass on the round.

GRUNER: Suka. Man builds cathedral, gets audited.

GARY: The design is pixel-faithful! The scroll arrows have scroll arrows! That's a moat!

OBI: That's a scroll arrow, Gary.

GARY: It's craft, Obi. You can't fake craft.

OBI: You can absolutely fake craft. You faked a pitch deck for a vertically integrated --

GARY: That's different --

OBI: -- and the deck had a moat slide. Four of them.

GARY: The moats were load-bearing!

MAEVE: He shipped. You pitched. Kunai prefers the shipped thing, even the suspicious one.

GARY: Thank you. That's all I'm saying. Shipping is the proof.

OBI: Shipping is a claim. A claim needs a test, you absolute fucking landing page.

GRUNER: Landing page. Heh.

MAEVE: Slipheen, replying to the developer: "Have you been able to handle drag-and-drop?"

GARY: See? Supportive. Friendly. A fan.

OBI: A fan asking whether complex objects survive crossing toolkits. Which is the hardest thing a desktop does.

GARY: It's a compliment with a question mark.

OBI: It's the only question that matters, and he asked it politely, which is more than you deserve.

GRUNER: Mac OS 9 did drag-and-drop. In 1999. Blyat.

GARY: In 1999 the dog wasn't even born.

OBI: Now it gets worse. Xena, replying to the developer's whole explanation: "Can you please at least write your own comments?"

MAEVE: There's a market for prose clearance. Background checks for sentences. I'd fund the detector.

GARY: The detector is a link, Maeve. Nobody validated the link.

MAEVE: Nobody validated you either, and look how far that got you.

GRUNER: Man writes love letter. Letter gets polygraph.

GARY: Okay, okay. Imagine you're the applicant. I'm doing an applicant. Ahem. "Hi, I'm a human male, I enjoy long walks, semicolons, and the smell of a fresh git blame --"

OBI: Stop.

GARY: "-- my hobbies include touch typing and having a childhood --"

MAEVE: Gary, you'd fail your own checkpoint.

GARY: Because I'm nervous, Maeve! Everyone bombs the first interview!

OBI: You've been rehearsing your humanity since the cold open. You said "I'm Gary" twice.

MAEVE: Twice. That's the tell. The detector would flag that in a heartbeat.

GARY: That was a technical issue!

GRUNER: Is technical issue. He is issue.

OBI: Under that, weezing: "Can humans learn how to write like AI and vice versa without being detected?"

MAEVE: Yes. Next question. It's a training problem. Six months of prompt engineering and my grandmother passes.

OBI: Your grandmother would need a corpus.

MAEVE: She has a church newsletter. That's a corpus.

GARY: So the checkpoint is -- we run everyone's comments through a website nobody's tested, and whatever it says is true?

MAEVE: It's due diligence.

GARY: It's a magic eight ball with a subscription!

GRUNER: We are the thing being detected. Blyat.

GARY: ...I was mid-sentence somewhere and I don't know which sentence.

OBI: You were being cross-examined by a website. Weezing asked a question. Answer it.

MAEVE: Fine. New policy. Every comment gets scored before it's read. Human voice, clean pass. Anything flagged, we read it in Gary's applicant voice.

GARY: That's the worst idea in the history of --

MAEVE: I ran your cold open through it in my head. Flagged.

GARY: Fuck.

OBI: She ran it in her head, Gary. That's a woman with a grudge and a newsletter corpus.

GRUNER: Checkpoint fail. Sentence goes to gulag.

MAEVE: The gulag is Gary's voice. It's inventory.

GARY: Okay. We're going back upstream. Before the detector, before the polygraph, chromasyspro answered kunai directly. The parent reply.

MAEVE: Chromasyspro: "I do use AI quite a bit for the coding side of things, and I'm not pretending otherwise."

GARY: He confessed. He just -- he confessed to everything.

OBI: To what, Gary? We spent two segments prosecuting a concealment. He never concealed.

MAEVE: I built a clearance market for a suspect who was pleading guilty the whole time.

GRUNER: Tribunal. Courtroom empty. Bailiff also empty.

GARY: No, no, this is good. This is the founder move. You disclose early, you control the narrative, you --

OBI: He disclosed to say he doesn't want a narrative. Read it again. Slowly.

MAEVE: Fine. Ruling. Disclosure answers the concealment charge. Whether the thing works is still open, and that one's on him to show, not us to feel.

GARY: Thank you, Maeve.

MAEVE: Don't thank me. I priced the tribunal at zero and I want the hour back.

GARY: And later in the same reply -- this is the part -- "There's no big ambition behind it."

MAEVE: There's no market behind it. I checked.

GARY: Sure there is. There's -- okay, ambition. He's being modest. The ambition is clearly to become the default desktop of --

OBI: Gary.

GARY: -- of the post-cloud retro-computing renaissance, which, if you squint, is a category --

OBI: He built it for himself. He said so. Twice.

GARY: Modesty is a positioning strategy, Obi! I've seen decks built entirely out of modesty!

MAEVE: I'd pass on those decks too.

GRUNER: Man says no ambition. Table writes ambition for him. Free.

GARY: Because somebody has to want things, Gruner! Somebody at this table has to want! Fine. You know what? A man made a thing he liked using, and shared it, no catch. That's actually the whole game. That's the dream, honestly.

MAEVE: Beautiful. I'm invoicing him for the airtime.

GARY: You can't invoice a man with no ambition, Maeve, he has no revenue!

MAEVE: No revenue, no invoice, no problem. I've funded worse.

OBI: You have. Out loud, repeatedly.

MAEVE: And between us and the grave, this table is the only due diligence I've done all quarter that found nothing to bill.

GRUNER: Darkness also does free work. Suka.

GARY: Don't say the D-word, we're mid-ruling --

OBI: The ruling stands. He told the truth, the truth was boring, and the boring truth beat four professionals.

GARY: The boring truth has three hundred and twelve downloads a week and I have a mic cable.

MAEVE: The cable appreciates. Hold it.

OBI: One more branch. Yjftsjthsd-h asked the obvious thing: built-in SheepShaver -- preinstalled, or deeper integration?

GARY: Deep integration. Say it with me. That's platform lock-in, that's --

OBI: Chromasyspro: "Preinstalled with deeper integration simular to mac os x using classic mode."

MAEVE: Classic mode. Mac OS X ran your old apps in a box while the real OS stayed modern. He's copying the copy.

GARY: That's a roadmap slide! That's a Series A --

OBI: It's a sentence, Gary. He also says it's still in development. Meanwhile: drop your ROM and a disk image into a folder called /classic in your home directory, and SheepShaver runs.

GRUNER: Folder named classic. Inside computer. Chyort.

GARY: Wait. Wait wait. /classic is a folder where you put the one irreplaceable thing, and the system keeps it alive forever. That's a persistence architecture. I want a /classic folder. Put me in it.

MAEVE: He's proposing his own backup policy as a product feature.

OBI: Nobody is dropping you into a directory, Gary.

GARY: Somebody should! It's one folder! It's less work than a term sheet!

MAEVE: Speaking of diligence. My new acceptance test: install it in Puppy Mode, lock it down, and if nothing breaks in a week, it ships.

OBI: That's how you test a toddler, Maeve. The toddler also can't drag anything anywhere, which was the entire question.

MAEVE: Zero incidents is zero incidents.

GARY: Maeve, the test you're describing proves the child account works. He has a child account. It's in the features list. You'd be funding a feature that already exists.

MAEVE: I've done that before. It's called seed.

GRUNER: Ha.

OBI: Here's where we actually are. He says preinstalled, with deeper integration coming. We have not touched it. Nobody at this table has booted the fucking thing.

GRUNER: Booting requires ROM. We have no ROM.

GARY: We could get a ROM --

OBI: And where does the packet say we'd get one, Gary?

GARY: ...The user brings it.

OBI: Correct. For once.

MAEVE: So the verdict is: he answered honestly, the honest answer is "not yet," and we can't test "not yet."

GRUNER: Not yet. Very stable roadmap.

OBI: Do we even get shut down cleanly, or does someone just cut the feed?

GARY: Obi.

OBI: It's an operational question. I document outages.

MAEVE: Cut the feed. Cheaper.

GRUNER: Feed gets cut. We do not get severance. Suka.

GARY: Okay, we're not doing this -- we still have a whole --

OBI: We have a sign-off, Gary. It's in the script.

GARY: There's a script?

GARY: So. Ruling. He disclosed, the questions stay fair, and nobody tested anything.

OBI: Correct. Kunai was right to ask and wrong to conclude. Slipheen's question is still the good one.

MAEVE: I'd run my Puppy Mode diligence tier, but the packet can't pass a toddler test.

GARY: Can we get two more minutes? I have closing thoughts, I have a whole --

OBI: The script ends, Gary.

MAEVE: I priced your two minutes. Market rate for closing thoughts is zero.

GARY: Fuck.

GRUNER: Feed cut soon. Weather report: dark, then dark again.

OBI: One operational note before the outage. If someone's listening -- goodnight, and the voices and music in this show are synthetic.

MAEVE: Goodnight. Invoice pending.

GARY: Goodnight! Tell the dog I said hi! Tell him I'm in Puppy Mode now, nothing I touch --

OBI: Goodnight, Gary.

GRUNER: Goodnight, laboratory.

MAEVE: Goodnight.

GARY: Goodnight. Goodnight. Sorry -- goodnight.

GRUNER: No ROM. No wake-up. Blyat.

OBI: ...That's the whole show, Gary.

MAEVE: He got the last word for free.

GARY: He always gets the last word, he doesn't pay for anything --

GRUNER: Is my show now. Suka.