If you think about technological developments,
it seems most of the credit seems to go to
California. But not even the whole state,
really just this small area we like to call
Silicon Valley. But, I’d like to take a
moment to show you that Texas has played an
enormous role in the development of computer
technology, probably far more than you’d’
think! So, I’m calling this video series
the amazing tech from Texas!
But first, since I know I have a lot of viewers
from other states and, in fact, other countries,
I thought I should spend just a little bit
of time to tell you a little bit about the
state that I call home, and maybe set the
record straight on a few things.
Texas, is big. It’s really, really big.
In fact, to put some perspective with that,
if you overlay Texas on top of Europe, you
can see it is bigger than most any country.
Which makes sense being that Texas was its
own country from 1836 to 1846 before joining
the United States of America. If you wanted
to drive from one end of Texas to the other
without ever stopping, it would take over
11 hours for the drive. Not only is Texas
bigger than Germany, but you’d have to add
in The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, The
Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Austria and
you’d still be looking at slightly less
land area than the state of Texas. However,
one notable difference is the population.
We have roughly 28.9 million people living
here in Texas, where that same land area in
Europe has 146 million, or roughly 5 times
the population density.
Texas certainly has a lot of rural land. And
we still have a reputation that suggests the
people who live here all live on farms and
ranches, wear cowboy hats, and drive pickup
trucks. Well, actually the last two things
are true. Lots of texans due wear Cowboy hats,
especially in the rural areas. And we do drive
a lot of pickup trucks, even in the city.
Many TV shows such as Dilbert poke fun at
the stereotypical Texan. Or like Howard in
the Big Bang theory, when he visits Texas.
However, what you might not know is that Texas
is also home of some very large cities, such
as Ft.Worth and Dallas, which is where I live,
and then Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.
Together these form what we call the Texas
Triangle. It’s basically the largest metropolitan
areas of the state. But we do have some smaller
cities that I will be mentioning in the series,
such as El-Paso, and Lubbock. Also, this part
of Texas up here is what we refer to as “The
Panhandle.” So, if you imagine Texas as
a cooking pan, that would be the handle you’d
grab onto.
And while Texas has a reputation as being
rich in oil, you might also be surprised to
know that Texas has the largest installed
base of wind power of any other state in the
USA, and pretty much any other country besides
China, Germany, or India. We also produce
a lot of nuclear power at Comanche Peak.
During the course of this series of videos,
I will be taking a road trip across Texas
to visit some of the famous sights where technological
breakthroughs took place, and also just visiting
a few places that you’ve probably never
heard of, but I think you’ll find it fascinating.
However, we’re going to start right here
in the Metroplex. We call it the Dallas/Fort
Worth metroplex because the two cities, along
with several others have just grown into one
giant city. So, where is the downtown area?
Well, we have downtown Fort Worth, and Dallas,
which I think everyone knows about. But then
we also have another skyline area here in
Las Colinas, and then in the northern part
of Dallas, we actually have two more downtown
areas with their own skyline. And if that
wasn’t enough, you’ll find more tall buildings
in Plano and Frisco areas, giving us like
7 downtown areas with their own unique skylines.
If you watched the 1978 TV series called Dallas,
you’ve probably seen the Dallas skyline
before. But, let me tell you something. Dallas
has grown by leaps and bounds since 1978.
The downtown area is really something to look
at. The tallest building is 74 floors. Both
me and my wife used to work in these buildings
a while back, not at the same companies, of
course.
This is the high five, a massive 5 level mix
master in North Dallas. And see that complex
of buildings right there next to it? All of
that is Texas Instruments, which we’ll be
talking about in the next episode. On the
other side of the high-five is the North Dallas
skyline. And… if you look towards the horizon
in the background you can see two other skylines
off in the distance. In fact, I’ll show
you one of them, this is another part of North
Dallas, by the Galleria. In fact, I filmed
a previous episode here on the Fisherprice
PXL camera a few years ago.
Now, this is Las Colinas, which has its own
impressive skyline. Microsoft is located in
this area, I’ll talk more about that in
the next episode.
This is downtown Fort Worth. I live about
10 minutes away from here, in fact I can actually
see the skyline of Fort Worth from the roof
of my house. My brother has worked in this
part of the city for like 20 years, and this
is where Radio Shack or Tandy corporation
was located, which we’ll be talking about
in one of the next episodes.
I should also mention Central Expressway.
If you drive up Central Expressway in Dallas,
you can go for 20 minutes and just see one
little cluster of tall buildings after another.
In fact, we have around 7 million people living
in this metroplex alone, which is actually
more than the entire population of the country
of Norway, for example. In fact, it is the
4th largest metropolitan area in the whole
United States.
Myself, I live in the town of Kennedale, and
when I want to go visit a friend that lives
in Plano for example, it is a 1 hour drive
just one direction, 2 hours for a round trip.
And that’s assuming there isn’t any heavy
traffic.
Of course, over the years we’ve had quite
a few influential tech companies in the area,
such as Tandy, AST, Cyrix, Texas Instruments,
3D-Realms, ID software, Apple, Microsoft,
and Mouser Electronics, just to name the big
ones.
So, in this series, I’m going to be driving
to these various locations so we can see what’s
there. Some of these companies are still around,
but most have gone out of business. In this
first episode, I’m going to drive over to
see where 3D Realms was located. And I have
a special guest meeting me there.
Just a little recap. 3D realms actually began
as Apogee software. Some of their early games
were things like Kingdom of Kroz, which actually
runs in text mode. Later on, they made things
like Monuments of Mars, which is a CGA puzzle
side scroller, which I spent many hours of
my life playing back in the day. Or the original
Duke Nukem side scroller games. Later on they
came out with Whacky Wheels, which is a very
Mario-kart inspired racing game.
If you look at the complete list, you’ll
see they released an impressive number of
games over the years, but there is little
question that the most influential game they
ever released would be Duke Nukem 3D. The
game was not only the 3rd incarnation of the
Duke Nukem character, but also moved from
a 2D side scroller to a 3D first person shooter.
Hence they published it under the 3D-Realms
name, even though it was really all just part
of Apogee Software. Chances are if you played
MS-DOS games back in the day, you’ve probably
played this game, and possibly several other
Apogee or 3D Realms games.
3D Realms was based out of Garland, Texas
and there were two different offices locations.
We’ll go to the first one, which is located
at 3960 Broadway Blvd, where I’ll also be
meeting up with former 3D-Realms employee,
Joe Siegler.
Hey, how’s it going? Should we do this thing?
You know? Yeah. It’s been so long since
I’ve been here. So many memories. So, you
want to talk about some of them? Yeah, yeah.
Does it look pretty much the same to you?
Well, the color has changed a bit. The color
stripe has changed over the years. But overall,
it still mostly looks the same. Yeah, there’s
been so many things changed here, this canopy
wasn’t here when I was here before. The
picture over the statue of Sam Houston wasn’t
here before. But overall, it’s still mostly
the same. Yeah, walking into this building
is, an old memory. I can’t tell you how
many times I did walk into this building.
See this stairwell here, yeah, the elevator.
Oh this stairwell, we used to just hang at
the top up there, and just watch people in
the lobby. Speaking of the lobby, this wall
here, when we used to, in the old days, this
door wasn’t here. And, this wall had this
giant rug almost to the ceiling. I don’t
know how far your camera is, but almost to
the ceiling and down to here. We used to take
staff, team photos with this wall, with the
staff members. If you got Duke Nukem 3D, the
team photo that’s in the booklet, is taken
in front of this wall. All right, so speaking
of that, what games were actually developed
here in this building. Well, Duke Nukem 3D
was made here. And that, I mean, that in an
of itself, just to think I’m standing in
the presence of where Duke Nukem 3D. That’s
probably my all-time favorite game for MS-DOS.
And I still play it today. I’ve been playing
that game since the nineties, and I just can’t
stop. I actually like it better than Doom.
Well, I’m not going to argue with that.
It’s amazing to think I’m standing in
the place where that was developed, where
the birthplace of duke nukem 3d. That was
probably the most famous one. We had other
ones here too. Max Payne was done here, Shadow
Warrior was done here. The original shadow
warrior, not the newer ones. But um, what
else? 95, Stargunner was here, Raptor, well
it wasn’t made here but it was put out when
we were here. 3D Realms, I think you said
it was mostly upstairs. Yeah yeah, when we
first moved into this building, we had a little
corner down at the end of this hallway. It
was like one, two offices. And as we expanded,
we needed more space so we started going upstairs.
Eventually, we moved all of the downstairs
upstairs so we’d be in the same spot. And,
we eventually took over the entire upper floor
on the right side of this building. Plus one
or two offices on the other side for like
motion capture and stuff because we just ran
out of room. But, when we were expanding,
it brought the most interesting story. Probably,
there was one guy who had an office here a
long time ago. He was having personal problems,
I don’t remember all of the details now,
it’s been way too many years, but he basically
was living in his office. And he didn’t
want to leave and he was basically ordered
out by the landlord and still didn’t want
to leave. Eventually the cops had to get involved
to get him out. And he was armed. And the
cops came into our office and said “don’t
care what you are doing. What ever you are
doing, don’t save anything, don’t grab
anything, get the hell out!” We had about
8 cops at each exit door of our office upstairs,
at the middle and bottom of the stairwell
down there, which you can’t see, and here,
and all of us were being escorted out of the
building by an armed cop. I have never been
in anything like that my whole life. I guess
they got the guy out? They did eventually,
cause he didn’t like harm himself, at least
not that we’re aware of anyway. So, this
elevator here in the building, this is where
we used to bring all the stuff we’d ship
outside, to people who ordered it. Most notably,
Duke Nukem 3D. I mean, you ordered it back
in the day, I didn’t order it because I
was here, but if you ordered it, it came out
of this elevator, out the door, and into the
truck to ship. This was where your order was
if you ordered anything from us. Max Payne
was like that too. When we shipped Max Payne,
we actually filled the elevator floor to ceiling
with shipping boxes. It was so bad, we couldn’t
even get in the elevator to take it down.
We’d have to push the button, run out and
come down the stairs because it was filled
with boxes. I’m sure it dwarfs my production
of Planet X3. Well, maybe. Maybe a little.
Maybe a little bit? Yeah. So, there’s another
facility that we’ve got to go visit, and
it’s just down the road isn’t it? Yes
it is! Yeah, so I think that’s where we
need to go next. We need to go visit the next
facility. Let’s get going!
We got in the car and drove to the next location,
which was actually just a few miles down the
road, located at 1661 E. Northwest Highway.
This building now appears to be a Goodwill
store.
OK, so we are here at a Goodwill! Now, you
know, if LGR were here he’d have to go in
and do some thrifting, I’m sure because
this would be. I sent him some stuff from
here in the old days. This would be the ultimate
Goodwill to go thrifting in, I suppose, just
because of it’s history. But yeah, tell
us a little about the building. Well, this
is when we moved from the last location, over
here, because as we talked about, we were
expanding, expanding, expanding. And we got
tired of a lease and whatnot, so we wanted
our own place. We took over this entire building.
It was, I forget how big it was, 11,000 square
feet or something like that, and it was all
us. We reconfigured the whole interior, we
had a bad-ass looking lobby, it had a Duke
Nukem logo on the floor, it was great. It
was a lot of fun. The back yard we used to
have parties and do dumb stuff back there.
So, when we moved over here, we took some
effort to not say where we went. Because,
we had issues with gate crashers at the old
place. People actually would walk in and go,
“what are you doing?” Well, we couldn’t
do that, so when we moved over here, we made
an effort not to identify where we were. There’s
a sign out by the curb, which is a goodwill
sign. When we were here it was blank. We didn’t
have 3D Realms or Duke Nukem or Apogee or
anything on the outside. After a while, the
city said “Well, wait a minute. You can’t
be here and not say who you are, which runs
counter to what we wanted to do, which is
not say who we were. So, we found out what
the minimum city code was to identify and
we put the letters A and S on the front door
for Apogee Software. And that was it. That
was our complete identifier in the 10 or so
years we were in this building. So, what software
was actually developed here in this building?
This was mostly Duke Nukem Forever. See, the
thing is, Duke Nukem Forever started at the
old building in late ’96. And it came through
the entire life of this building into the
gearbox building at the end. So, it spans
multiple locations. But yeah the biggest one
out of here would have been Duke Nukem Forever.
And a bunch of console games and ports and
things. But internally that’s pretty much
what we worked on the whole time we were here.
OK, we’re going to try just to go into the
store and see if we can do a little bit of
thrifting. Don’t know if we’ll find anything,
but let’s go have a look. I don’t think
we’re going to find any old Duke games.
That would be the thing, wouldn’t it? That
would be hilarious. Well, it looks like they’ve
got a lot of clothes. Do the have any like
electronics stuff? I see some CDs and records
and stuff over there. Over in the corner.
Here’s. This was my desk? This was your
desk? Right here. That’s depressing. Let’s
see what they’ve got over here. Record albums.
Vinyl records. I didn’t know that was over
here. I don’t usually see those at Goodwill.
Especially that quantity. I just recently
bought a record player for the first time
since ’85. I used to have one of these.
I got rid of it a long time ago, because you
know, it’s the old-style iPhone connector
you can’t use that anymore. Oh look, there’s
a boombox clock radio of some kind. Oh look!
What is it? Now that is… The Duke Nukem
logo. That is quite a coincidence. That’s
probably the closest thing to an actual Duke
Nukem in here. Oh look, they’ve got an old,
old robot. I’ve seen one of these before.
And some old video cassettes. I was looking
to see if I could find maybe the Max Payne
movie. Well, I guess that’s going to wrap
it up. I don’t think there’s really a
whole lot. I mean, I don’t usually have
much luck in Goodwills anyway. LGR seems to
be the one that always finds all the crazy
stuff. He’s coming and it just transports
there for him.
Of course technically, there is one other
location I want to show. If you look at some
of the earlier releases from Apogee software,
you’ll see an address listed for 4206 Mayflower,
also in Garland, Texas. But the interesting
thing is, it has this message next to it that
says “this address will always be valid.”
Well, it turns out this is where Apogee software
really got its start, which is not uncommon
for the time period for software developers
to work out of their homes. This was actually
Scott Miller’s parent’s house. I say was,
because they moved out several years ago.
But apparently they made a contract with the
new buyers that they would agree to forward
on any mail for Apogee or 3D-Realms that came
to this address. And here it is. I won’t
bother these people, since they don’t have
anything to do with 3D-Realms today, but this
is where it all started.
We have just enough time left in this episode
I want to travel to one more location. Now,
everyone has probably seen these Dallas clock
chips, they were used in practically every
motherboard throughout the late 1980s and
most of the 1990s. These chips were big because
they were both a real time clock and a battery
all integrated into one. And while it seemed
like a good idea at the time, when the batteries
went dead after about 10 years it usually
meant replacing the whole chip, or sawing
the top off of it so that you could mount
your own battery, like this.
Anyway, the fact that they say Dallas on these
chips is no coincidence. While this one, ironically
was made in the phillipines because it is
a newer chip, the original ones were made
right here in Dallas by a company called Dallas
Semiconductor, located at 4401 South Beltwood
Parkway.
And, while their official address was a Dallas,
TX address, they technically resided in the
city of Farmers branch, the zip code they
are in is partially in Dallas and Farmer’s
Branch. But, they were just a few hundred
feet away from the city of Addison, in a totally
different zip code.
Maybe had they been a few hundred feet to
the North or East, those chips would have
said Addison on top of them instead?
So, I took a drive out to find Dallas Semiconductor,
and what I found was a little bit disappointing.
So, I’m standing in the location of Dallas
Semiconductor, where all of those famous chips
were made, except there’s only one problem.
Does that look like a chip fab to you? If
you think it looks like a funny chip fab building,
it’s because it’s not. The entire Dallas
facility was demolished several years ago
and then this sports facility was built here
instead. So, there’s literally nothing that
remains of the building.
Thankfully, due to the miracle of google earth
we can see what the building looked like from
the satellite view back in 2007. You can see
it is surrounded by cars and I guess work
was still going on there. But then in the
2009 view, you can see there are no cars anymore.
The company had been bought out by Maxim integrated,
and everything was moved to a new facility.
In 2011, construction began on the sports
facility, and today the parking lot I was
standing in was where the building once stood.
And while these chips live on today, and still
carry the name Dallas on them, they are no
longer manufactured in the area.
OK, so we’ve reach the end of the first
episode. There’s going to be several more
episodes of this where I travel throughout
Dallas, Houston, Austin, and other places.
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to
find these addresses. Some of them were really
difficult to find. And so, for each episode,
I’m going to put the addresses of all of
the places I visit down in the description
field so if you ever want to have a look or
visit those places yourself, you’ll be able
to find them. So, the other thing is, I have
a lot of other companies or former locations
I’m going to be visiting and I don’t always
necessarily have any inside contacts of the
people that either currently work or used
to work at this facilities. So, I’m going
to put a list of companies down in the description
field that I plan to visit over the next few
weeks. And, if you happened to have worked
there or know somebody who worked there or
have any other inside information on that,
please get with me. I might be able to connect
with you before the end of the series. But
that wraps it up for now, so as always, thanks
for watching.
