
English: 
[Intro music]
[V/O]
Every year, I drive over to Las Colinas, Texas to participate in the Let's Play Gaming Expo.
I usually arrive the night before the expo begins to help set up the vintage computer museum,
which is just a small part of the expo,
but obviously my favorite part.
I also bring several systems from my own collection for participants to play around on.
We have quite an active retro community around here,
so a lot of collectors show up to bring in various things.
And after a few hours, we transform this room
into a vintage computer playground.
Next door to our computer room, there's a larger room for vintage consoles being set up.
This room has pretty much every console
imaginable up and running and while a lot of them are somewhat more modern consoles like the Xbox,
there are quite a few original
Nintendo and PlayStation consoles set up.
Downstairs in the main area,
arcade machines are being set up

Turkish: 
[Giriş müziği]
[V / O]
Her yıl Let's Play Gaming Expo'ya katılmak için Texas'tan Las Colinas'a gidiyorum.
Genellikle fuarın eski bilgisayar müzesini kurmaya yardım etmeye başlamadan önceki gece gelirim,
bu fuarın sadece küçük bir parçası,
ama tabii ki en sevdiğim kısım.
Ayrıca kendi koleksiyonumdan katılımcıların oynayabileceği çeşitli sistemler de getiriyorum.
Burada oldukça aktif bir retro topluluğumuz var,
bu yüzden çok sayıda koleksiyoncu çeşitli şeyler getirmek için ortaya çıkıyor.
Birkaç saat sonra bu odayı dönüştürdük
vintage bilgisayar oyun alanı içine.
Bilgisayar odamızın bitişiğinde, eski konsollar için daha geniş bir alan var.
Bu odada hemen hemen her konsol var
hayal edilebilir ve çalışıyor ve birçoğu Xbox gibi biraz daha modern konsollar olsa da,
çok az orijinal var
Nintendo ve PlayStation konsolları kuruldu.
Ana alanın alt katında,
çarşı makineleri kuruluyor

Turkish: 
ve Kalma Puft Hatmi Adamı
 onlara başkanlık ediyor.
Ve satıcı alanları hemen hemen hazır. 
Ve bu fırtına öncesi sessizlik gibi.
Bunlar bu sene getirdiğim bilgisayarlar,
buradan başlayarak
Tetris kartuşlu Tandy Renkli Bilgisayar 2.
Sonra bir Peynir ve Soğan kartuşu ile VIC-20.
Sırada Donkey Kong'lu Atari 400 var.
Ve son olarak, elbette,
Commodore PET tüm restore edilmiş ihtişamıyla.
Ve gördüğünüz gibi,
Biz birkaç bilgisayar ile sona erdi.
Ben de sergilemek için birkaç nadir ürün getirdim,
takılmalarına rağmen,
aksesuarları ile Commodore 116 dahil
ve Commodore Max.
Ertesi sabah, tüm yer çarşı alanı ve satıcı alanı dahil insanlarla dolmaya başladı.
Duke Nukem 3D'nin ağ oyunlarını çalıştıran eMac'larla dolu özel bir oda bile vardı,
ki bu oldukça hit oldu.
Chimera Laboratorium adında bir oda vardı, uh, gee bunu nasıl açıklamalıyım?
Yüzlerce doldurulmuş hayvan vardı ve insanlar hayvanları alıp parçaları kesiyorlardı
ve onları Dr. Frankenstein gibi diğer hayvanlara koyun.

English: 
and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
 is presiding over them.
And the vendor areas are just about ready to go. 
And this is like the calm before the storm.
These are the computers I brought this year,
starting here with the
Tandy Color Computer 2 with a Tetris cartridge.
Then the VIC-20 with a Cheese & Onion cartridge.
Next is the Atari 400 with Donkey Kong.
And finally, of course, is the
Commodore PET in all of its restored glory.
And as you can see,
we ended up with quite a few computers.
I also brought a few rare items for display,
even though they aren't hooked up,
including the Commodore 116 with accessories
and the Commodore Max.
The next morning, the whole place started to fill up with people including the arcade area and the vendor area.
We even had a special room full of eMacs that were running network games of Duke Nukem 3D,
which was quite a hit.
There was a room called the Chimera Laboratorium where uh, gee how should I explain this?
There were hundreds of stuffed animals and people would take the animals and cut parts off
and put them on other animals like Dr. Frankenstein.

Turkish: 
Kızım ve arkadaşı Ürdün de dahil olmak üzere birçok insan bundan kurtuluyor gibi görünüyor.
Ve elbette cosplayımız vardı; çok ve çok cosplay.
[Müzik]
Küçük bilgisayar müzemize geri döndüğümüzde insanlar eski bilgisayarları doldurmaya ve oynamaya başlamışlardı.
Getirdiğim sistemler özellikle popülerdi
kalabalıkla, hatta PET ile.
Ancak, bu nadir Macintosh yıldönümü sürümlerinden biri de dahil olmak üzere başka temiz sistemlerimiz vardı
ve Oregon Trail'i çalıştırmak için oldukça popüler olan birkaç Apple II sistemimiz vardı.
Commodore 64'te yeni Super Mario Brothers dönüşümünü gerçekleştirdik.
Ayrıca orijinal Tetris'in tasarlandığı orijinal bir Sovyet dönemi bilgisayarında da çalıştığını gördük, bu da oldukça büyük bir hit oldu.

English: 
A lot of people seem to get a kick out of this, including my daughter and her friend, Jordan.
And of course, we had cosplay; lots and lots of cosplay.
[Music]
Back up in our little computer museum, people were starting to fill in and play on the vintage computers.
The systems I brought were particularly popular
with the crowd, even the PET.
But we had some other neat systems, including one of those rare Macintosh anniversary editions
and we had a couple of Apple II systems set up running the Oregon Trail that were quite a hit.
And we had the new Super Mario Brothers conversion running on the Commodore 64.
And we also had the original Tetris running on an original Soviet-era computer that it was designed for, which was also a pretty big hit.

English: 
But you probably didn't click on this video
to see any of those things.
You came here to see my presentation on working for AST technical support back in the 1990s.
So let's get started on that.
[Presentation] OK, so the company started out around the year of 1980 or approximately in there, and they called themselves AST Research.
Now a lot of people wanted to know they always asked me, or even back then, always asked
"What does AST stand for?", and yeah,
some people actually pronounced it "ast".
I used to get phone calls;
people say "Is this AST Computer?"
No, it's A.S.T.
But anyway what it actually stands for, is the
first three initials of
the three guys that founded the company,
which is Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey, and Thomas Yuen.
So nothing fancy there, but that's where it came from.
So just to give you an idea
of perspective of the size of AST,
they were the third-largest computer company
in the world,
during the 1990s, right under Compaq and Dell.
[AST AD] [Security Guard]
"It's sensible for your business to have a PC from AST,

Turkish: 
Ama muhtemelen bu videoyu tıklamadınız
bunlardan herhangi birini görmek için.
Buraya 1990'larda AST teknik desteği için çalışma konusundaki sunumumu görmek için geldiniz.
Öyleyse başlayalım.
[Sunum] Tamam, şirket 1980 yılı civarında ya da yaklaşık olarak orada başladı ve kendilerini AST Araştırma olarak adlandırdılar.
Şimdi birçok insan bana hep sorduklarını, hatta o zamanlar hep sorduklarını bilmek istedi
"AST ne anlama geliyor?" Ve evet,
bazı insanlar bunu aslında "ast" olarak telaffuz etti.
Eskiden telefon alırdım;
insanlar "Bu AST Bilgisayar mı?"
Hayır, bu AST
Ama her neyse, aslında ne anlama geldiği,
ilk üç adının baş harfleri
şirketi kuran üç kişi,
Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey ve Thomas Yuen.
Yani hiçbir şey fantezi değil, ama orası geldi.
Size bir fikir vermek için
AST boyutuna bakış açısından,
onlar üçüncü büyük bilgisayar şirketi
dünyada,
1990'lar boyunca Compaq ve Dell yönetiminde.
[AST AD] [Güvenlik Görevlisi]
"İşletmenizin AST'den bir PC'ye sahip olması mantıklı,

Turkish: 
haftanın yedi günü ve sosyalleşmeniz gereken saatlerde telefonu açanlar kimler. "
[Spiker]
Intel Pentium 2 işlemcilere sahip AST Bravo PC'ler
[Intel Jingle Sesi]
[Haber raporu]
Başkan Yardımcısı Al Gore, Southland turuna Orange County ziyaretiyle devam ediyor.
Bu sabah bir 
Fountain Valley bilgisayar şirketi.
Başkan yardımcısının hükümeti yeniden icat etme kampanyasının bir parçası olarak AST araştırma şirketine ziyaret.
[8-Bit Adam]
Yani hiçbir şey yapmadılar
Apple gibi tarihsel olarak önemli veya
Commodore, bu insanların bazılarını biliyorsun,
yani AST'yi hatırlama eğiliminde değilsiniz,
Dell'in
1997'de iş dışına çıkmıştı,
Muhtemelen onlar hakkında fazla düşünmeyecektik, çünkü korkunç bir şey yapmadılar
tarihsel olarak önemli.
Ama çok önemli bir şirketti
o zaman AST de öyle,
Ve bu sadece size şirketin ölçeği hakkında bir fikir vermek için.
Şimdi aslında ürün üretmeye başladılar
bunun gibi, bu bir AST altı paketli kart.
Şimdi,
Bunun gibi bir kartın amacı orijinal IBM PC'ler ve bazı klonlar olabilir.

English: 
who's got people picking up the phone, seven days a week and at hours when you should be out socializing."
[Announcer]
AST Bravo PCs featuring Intel Pentium 2 processors
[Intel Jingle Sound]
[News Report]
Vice President Al Gore continues his Southland tour with a visit to Orange County.
This morning he met with the employees of a 
Fountain Valley computer company.
The visit to AST research company as part of the vice president's campaign to reinvent government.
[8-Bit Guy]
So, they didn't do anything
historically significant like Apple or
Commodore, you know some of those people,
so you don't tend to remember AST,
You can kind of imagine if Dell
had gone out of business in 1997,
we probably wouldn't think much about them either, because they didn't do anything terribly
historically significant.
But, they were a very important big company
at the time and so is AST,
And so that's just to give you a little bit of a an idea of the scale of the company.
Now they actually started off producing products
like this, this is an AST six-pack card.
Now,
The purpose of a card like this would be the original IBM PCs and some of the clones, you know

English: 
They had, I don't know, 5, 6, 7 expansion slots.
But they were always filled with things like serial cards, parallel cards, floppy controllers, stuff like that.
And so when you wanted to add new cards,
sometimes there just wasn't any room.
So what AST came up with is,
they combine all of these things into a single card.
So this card here for example has a floppy controller,
it has RAM and has a real-time clock,
it has serial and parallel,
and so it took all of those functions into one card
and so this was actually a very desirable card
to have for early pcs and clones and
they actually made these cards for the Apple II and
The PS2 micro channel architecture as well.
And these cards were actually
very profitable and very desirable.
The only problem was as time went by
motherboard manufacturers started integrating more of this stuff onto the motherboards.
So,
Eventually these cards kind of became redundant, like unnecessary. Just didn't need them anymore.
So, their business started to decline a little bit and
so they wanted to move into new markets.

Turkish: 
Bilmiyorum, 5, 6, 7 genişleme yuvası vardı.
Ama her zaman stereo kartlar, paralel kartlar, disket denetleyicileri, bunun gibi şeylerle doluydu.
Ve böylece yeni kartlar eklemek istediğinizde,
bazen hiç yer yoktu.
AST'nin ortaya çıkardığı şey,
tüm bunları tek bir kartta birleştiriyorlar.
Örneğin buradaki kartın bir disket denetleyicisi var,
RAM ve gerçek zamanlı bir saati var,
seri ve paralel,
ve böylece tüm bu işlevleri tek bir kartta aldı
ve bu aslında çok arzu edilen bir karttı
erken adet ve klonlara sahip olmak ve
bu kartları Apple II için yaptılar ve
PS2 mikro kanal mimarisi de.
Ve bu kartlar aslında
çok karlı ve çok arzu edilir.
Tek sorun zaman geçtikçe oldu
anakart üreticileri daha fazlasını anakartlara entegre etmeye başladılar.
Yani,
Sonunda bu kartlar gereksiz gibi gereksiz hale geldi. Artýk onlara ihtiyacým yoktu.
Böylece işleri biraz düşmeye başladı ve
bu yüzden yeni pazarlara girmek istediler.

Turkish: 
Böylece kendi bilgisayarlarını kurmaya karar verdiler.
Şimdi bu mutlaka ilk AST PC modeli değil, ama ilk olanlardan biri ve bence bu bir
286 ya da bunun gibi bir şey, ve bu aslında orada çalışmaya başlamadan çok daha önce.
Böylece aslında adı
AST Bilgisayarına AST Araştırması.
Ayrıca yazı tipini biraz değiştirdiler.
Yani, bir bilgisayara rastlarsanız ve birini ya da diğerini görürseniz, bazı insanlar düşünebilir,
"Peki bu farklı bir şirket olabilir
AST araştırması veya AST bilgisayarı, "
ama aslında aynı şirket.
Aslında, aslında birkaç bilgisayar var
her iki logoda da olduğunu görebilirsiniz.
Önde AST Bilgisayar diyecekler
ve AST araştırması
arkada bir çıkartma falan,
çünkü henüz etiketi güncellememişlerdi.
Böylece, Irvine'de Kaliforniya'da başladılar
dağ manzaralı alanda ve
gerçekten çok başarılıydılar ve
Aslında üretim kapasitesinde maksimum,
ki bu iyi bir problem.
Aslında üretemediler
talebi karşılayacak kadar bilgisayar.

English: 
So they decided to build their own PC.
Now this is not necessarily the first ever AST PC model, but it's one of the first ever and I think this is like a
286 or something like that, and this is actually well before the time that I ended up working there.
So they actually ended up changing the name from
AST Research to AST Computer.
They also tweaked the font a little bit.
So, if you ever come across a computer and you see one or the other, some people might think,
"Well that might be a different company like
AST research or AST computer,"
but, it's actually the same company.
In fact, there's actually a few computers
you can find that have both logos on them.
They'll say AST Computer on the front
and AST research like
a sticker or something on the back,
because they just hadn't updated the sticker yet.
So, they started off in California in Irvine
in the mountain view area and
they were actually really really successful and they were
Actually maxed out at manufacturing capacity,
which is a good problem to have.
They actually could not produce
enough computers to meet demand.

Turkish: 
Bu yüzden, genişlemek zorunda kaldılar ve genişlemeyi seçtikleri yerlerden biri, Fort Worth, Teksas.
Şimdi bunu yaptıklarında,
Tandy RadioShack ile bir anlaşma yapmışlardı.
Ve tabii ki, tesis ve Fort Worth nedeniyle AST için çalıştım.
Tandy RadioShack ile anlaşma
ilginç bir şey, çünkü yaptığımız şeylerden biri Tandy'nin üretim tesislerini ve destek tesislerini devraldık.
Ve bu demek oluyor ki, destek verdiğimizde
için
AST biz de Tandy ve GRID destek vardı,
çünkü Tandy birkaç yıl önce GRID almıştı.
Yani bu destek tesislerimizde,
Samsung ile birlikte Tandy ve GRID için telefon görüşmeleri yaptık,
sunumun ilerleyen bölümlerinde konuşacağım.
Ama evet, bu yüzden telefonumun ekranında Tandy diyorsa sık sık telefona cevap vermek zorunda kaldım,
Telefona "Tandy Teknik Destek" yanıtını verirdim
bu makineleri de desteklemem gerekti.
Ancak bu makinelerin hepsi ömrünün sonuna gelmişti.
Onlardan o kadar çok çağrı almadık,
ama bu anlaşmanın bölümlerinden biri,
AST bilgisayarlarımızı sattığımız için de olması gerekiyordu.

English: 
So, they had to expand and one of the places they chose to expand to was, Fort Worth, Texas.
Now the way they actually ended up doing this,
was they made a deal with Tandy RadioShack.
And of course, that's how I ended up working for AST because of the facility and in Fort Worth.
So the deal with Tandy RadioShack was
kind of interesting, because one of the things that we did is we actually took over Tandy's manufacturing facilities and their support facilities.
And so that meant, when we gave support
for
AST we also had to support Tandy and GRID,
because Tandy had bought GRID a few years earlier.
And so that meant in our support facilities,
We actually took phone calls for Tandy and GRID along with Samsung,
which I'll talk about later in the presentation.
But yeah, so I often had to answer the phone if it said Tandy on the screen of my phone,
I would answer the phone, "Tandy Tech Support"
and I had to support those machines, too.
But those machines were all very much at end of life.
We didn't get that many calls from them,
but one of the parts of this deal,
that was also supposed to happen as we were supposed to be selling our AST computers in

English: 
RadioShack, since they would no longer
be selling Tandy computers there.
However, for some reason or another that fell through
and I've never been able to find out exactly why that
didn't happen and they ended up going with I think Compaq instead if memory serves...
So we never sold
AST computers in RadioShack stores,
but that was originally part of the deal and that was supposed to happen.
So, if you look at this graph
and this is just kind of a rough graph
showing the like the prosperity of AST,
and throughout the years and that first part up 'til around,
I don't know, like 1987,
that was when they were building their expansion cards.
Which was, you know, it was profitable for them,
and then you know, they kind of hit their peak
and then like I said,
the motherboard manufacturers started
integrating all that stuff
and their business started to decline and then when they started building their PCs,
that's when the business shot up drastically,
and that was when they were
like "King of the World," for a little while,
and then they
started like very rapidly going bankrupt.
And so, I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the reasons why they went bankrupt.
First and foremost is poor quality.

Turkish: 
RadioShack, çünkü artık
Tandy bilgisayarlarını satıyorlar.
Ancak, bir sebepten ötürü
ve bunun nedenini tam olarak bulamadım
olmadı ve sanırım Compaq, bellek hizmet veriyorsa ...
Bu yüzden hiç satmadık
RadioShack mağazalarındaki AST bilgisayarlar,
ama bu aslında anlaşmanın bir parçasıydı ve olması gerekiyordu.
Yani, bu grafiğe bakarsanız
ve bu sadece kaba bir grafik
AST gibi refahı gösteren,
ve yıllar boyunca ve bu ilk bölüm yukarı,
Bilmiyorum, 1987 gibi,
genişleme kartlarını oluşturdukları zamandı.
Yani, onlar için kârlıydı,
ve sonra bilirsiniz, zirveye ulaştılar
ve sonra dediğim gibi,
anakart üreticileri başladı
bütün bu şeyleri entegre etmek
işleri azalmaya başladı ve bilgisayarlarını kurmaya başladığında,
iş büyük bir hızla patladığında,
ve o zamanlar
"Dünyanın Kralı" gibi bir süre,
ve sonra onlar
çok hızlı iflas etmeye başladı.
Ve böylece, iflas etmelerinin bazı nedenleri hakkında biraz konuşacağım.
Her şeyden önce kalitesizlik.

English: 
Now, to be fair AST had some of the most reliable
computers on the market, up until they hit
started hitting that decline.
Part of the reason the quality went bad which happened around the time they purchased the Tandy facility,
had to do with the
competitiveness in the PC market had changed dramatically over the last few years,
and it got to where was fierce price competition and
everybody had to cut costs in order
to keep their product competitive,
and there were different ways to accomplish that, unfortunately AST ended up
cutting a lot a lot of quality out.
So this is an example of how bad
some of the machines were,
we had this one called the AST Ascension 950n.
It was a laptop computer and it was it was terrible.
I mean people were calling in constantly with you know, plastic pieces were breaking and falling off,
the screen hinges were breaking,
the screens would go out,
and yes, they even caught on fire and melted.
In fact, that was quite a common call say:
"I've got up this morning there

Turkish: 
Şimdi, adil olmak için AST, en güvenilir
piyasadaki bilgisayarları vuruncaya kadar
bu düşüşe vurmaya başladı.
Tandy tesisini satın aldıkları sırada meydana gelen kalitenin kötüleşmesinin bir kısmı,
ile ilgisi vardı
PC pazarındaki rekabet gücü son birkaç yılda önemli ölçüde değişmişti,
ve şiddetli fiyat rekabeti nerede oldu ve
herkes sırayla maliyetleri düşürmek zorunda kaldı
Ürünlerini rekabetçi tutmak,
ve bunu başarmanın farklı yolları vardı, maalesef AST sona erdi
çok fazla kalite kesiyor.
Bu ne kadar kötü bir örnek
bazı makineler,
AST Ascension 950n olarak adlandırdık.
Bir dizüstü bilgisayardı ve korkunçtu.
Demek istediğim, insanlar sürekli seninle görüşüyorlardı, plastik parçalar kırılıp düşüyordu,
ekran menteşeleri kırılıyordu,
ekranlar söner,
ve evet, ateşe bile girdiler ve eridi.
Aslında, bu oldukça yaygın bir çağrı idi:
"Bu sabah orada kaldım

English: 
was this terrible stench in my house and my computer is like half of it's like melted." And you know,
so these were the kinds of problems that
the Ascension 950 had in fact, I talked to one of the
our database guys and
he ran a database query one time for me,
and he said the
return rate on the Ascension 950n was 110%.
So, for those who don't know what that means,
that means every single one of them
manufactured had been returned at least once and some of them had been returned twice.
And I know I took took some phone calls from people who it was their third or fourth time to return the computer for repairs.
So, I mean they were they were that bad and they were costing us a fortune on the backend
to support these machines,
even if they were profitable
when they were originally sold.
So that was one problem.
Another problem was we continue to
domestically produce most of our computers,
Even our laptop computers, where all of our competitors had started to produce their laptop computers in places like Taiwan and South Korea
where they were much cheaper to produce and
We just couldn't be cost-competitive.

Turkish: 
evimdeki bu korkunç pis koku mıydı ve bilgisayarımın yarısı erimiş gibi. "Ve biliyorsun,
yani bunlar,
Ascension 950 aslında,
veritabanı adamlarımız ve
benim için bir kez veritabanı sorgusu çalıştırdı,
ve dedi ki
Yükseliş 950n'deki getiri oranı% 110'dur.
Yani, bunun ne anlama geldiğini bilmeyenler için,
yani her biri
Üretilenler en az bir kez iade edilmiş ve bazıları iki kez iade edilmiştir.
Ve bilgisayar onarım için geri dönmek için üçüncü veya dördüncü kez olan kişilerden bazı telefon görüşmeleri aldı biliyorum.
Yani, o kadar kötüydüler ve arka uçta bir servete mal oluyorlardı
bu makineleri desteklemek için,
kârlı olsalar bile
başlangıçta satıldıklarında.
Yani bu bir problemdi.
Başka bir sorun,
bilgisayarlarımızın çoğunu yurt içinde üretiyoruz,
Tüm rakiplerimizin dizüstü bilgisayarlarını Tayvan ve Güney Kore gibi yerlerde üretmeye başladığı dizüstü bilgisayarlarımız bile
üretimleri çok daha ucuz ve
Maliyet açısından rekabetçi olamadık.

Turkish: 
Sadece bu değil, aynı zamanda ABD'de hala birçok bileşenimizi kaynaklıyoruz, bu da hayır, yanılıyorsunuz,
Ben tamamen ABD imalat malzemeleri için çalışıyorum, ama yine de bu olanların gerçekliğidir.
Örnek olarak,
Hala Creative Lab Sound Blaster çiplerini kullanıyorduk
anakartlarımızın çoğunda,
ve bu şunu söyleyebileceğimiz bir şeydi:
"Hey, Yaratıcı Laboratuvarlarımız var,
tüm diğer adamlar onlara ses çiplerini klonladı! ",
ama gerçek ESS ve Crystal Sound yongalarıydı
onlar
Asya pazarları çok daha ucuzdu.
Onlar kadar güvenilirdi
ve çoğunlukla Reklam öğesi çipleri kadar uyumlu
Dolayısıyla, bu noktada, özellikle de Windows işletim sistemi dünyasında pek fazla avantaj yoktu,
ve bu noktada neredeydik.
Bir sürü değildi
Yaratıcı Laboratuvarlara sahip olmanın avantajı
Bilgisayarınızdaki ses yongası
Ama evet,
Bunun gibi bir sürü şey
bizi maliyet konusunda rekabetçi olmaktan alıkoymak,
böylece diğer bölgelerde maliyetleri düşürdüler.
Ama gerçekten en büyük sorun,
ve bu muhtemelen en büyük sorun
AST'deki düşüş satış kanalı sorunlarıydı
ve bunun nasıl çalıştığını açıklayayım.

English: 
Not only that, but we still source a lot of our components in the US which, no you're wrong,
I'm all for US manufacturing stuff, but nevertheless this is this is the reality of what happened.
So as an example,
We were still using Creative Lab Sound Blaster chips
on a lot of our motherboards,
and that was something we could brag about saying:
"Hey, we have Creative Labs,
all these other guys got them clone sound chips!",
but the reality was the ESS and Crystal Sound chips
they were getting from the
Asian markets were much cheaper.
They were just as reliable
and mostly just as compatible as the Creative chips
So, there wasn't really a lot of advantage at this point, especially in the world of running Windows,
which is kind of where we were at this point.
It wasn't a whole lot of
advantage to having a Creative Labs
Sound chip in your computer
But yeah,
A lot of stuff like that was
keeping us from being a competitive on costs,
so they ended up cutting cost in other areas.
But really the biggest problem,
and this is probably the biggest problem that led to
the decline of AST was sales channel problems
and let me explain how this works.

English: 
So, our competitors at the time such as
Dell and Gateway, they didn't even...
They didn't even manufacture a computer until the customer had already ordered and paid for the computer.
At AST, we worked through retailers.
So, we had sales people who would you know call up the retailers and try to sell them our AST computers and,
I'm just going to give you, I don't know exact numbers.
I'm just gonna throw a numeric example out there.
So, let's say they're talking 
to one retailer and they said:
"Yeah, we want to order 500,000 of this machine
for sale in the country."
And the salesman would be like:
"Why don't you order a million instead?
We'll give you a little bit better deal."
The retailer would say:
"Well, we don't really think we can sell a million of them, so we don't want to buy that many."
And so our sales person would say:
"Well,
tell you what, we'll do. If you'll buy the million,
and If you can't sell them all,
within a certain amount of agreed-upon time,
You can start cutting the price and we'll pay the difference on the backend."
So the salesman got his big commission,
because he sold all these extra computers,

Turkish: 
Yani, o zaman rakiplerimiz
Dell ve Gateway, onlar bile ...
Müşteri bilgisayar için sipariş verene ve ödeme yapana kadar bilgisayar bile üretmediler.
AST'de perakendeciler aracılığıyla çalıştık.
Böylece, perakendecileri çağırıp onlara AST bilgisayarlarımızı satmaya çalışan satış elemanlarımız vardı ve
Sadece sana vereceğim, tam sayıları bilmiyorum.
Oraya sadece sayısal bir örnek vereceğim.
Diyelim ki konuşuyorlar 
bir perakendeciye ve dediler ki:
"Evet, bu makineden 500.000 sipariş etmek istiyoruz
Satılık. "
Ve satıcı şöyle olurdu:
"Bunun yerine neden bir milyon sipariş etmiyorsun?
Size biraz daha iyi bir anlaşma yapacağız. "
Perakendeci şöyle der:
"Şey, bir milyonu satabileceğimizi gerçekten düşünmüyoruz, bu yüzden bu kadarını satın almak istemiyoruz."
Ve satış elemanımız şöyle derdi:
"İyi,
Bak ne diyeceđiz. Milyonu alırsan,
ve eğer hepsini satamazsan,
kararlaştırılan belirli bir süre içinde,
Fiyatı kesmeye başlayabilirsiniz ve farkı arka uçta ödeyeceğiz. "
Böylece satıcı büyük komisyonunu aldı,
çünkü tüm bu ekstra bilgisayarları sattı,

Turkish: 
ama sonra, elbette, her zaman ne olduğunu tahmin et ...
Perakendecilere ödeme yapmak zorunda kaldık
bilgisayarlarımızı arka uçta satmak ve elbette,
Bu çok para gerektiriyor.
Aslında, ne zaman hatırlıyorum
Walmart ile anlaşma yaptık,
herkes gelir ya da tezahürat yapar ve der ki:
"Ah evet, bu şirketi kurtaracak!
Walmart ile bu kadar büyük bir anlaşma yaptık!
Walmart aracılığıyla çok fazla bilgisayar satacağız! "
Ve Walmart'tan TV'de reklamlar gördük,
Walmart'ın içine girip raflardaki bilgisayarları gördü,
Walmart'ta müşterilerimizden aramalar aldık ...
Yani, harika gidiyor gibiydi!
Sonra altı ay sonra,
Fişi çektiler 
Walmart anlaşmasında ve bize şunları söylediler:
"Her bilgisayarda 200 dolar kaybettik
Walmart'ta sattık. "Yani ... [Gülüyor]
Sanki onları bırakıyorsun gibiydi.
AST'yi gerçekten öldüren şey buydu.
Neden yapabildikleri hakkında hiçbir fikrim yok
bu sorunu kontrol altına almamak,
ama bu yıllarca devam etti
şirketin ölümü
ve neden bilmiyorum
kontrol altına alınamadı,
ama problem buydu
Şimdi bir kurtarıcımız vardı.
Samsung içeri girecekti ve
şirketimizi doğru satın aldılar
iflasın eşiğinde olduğumuz için.

English: 
but then, of course, guess what always happened...
We ended up having to pay the retailers
to sell our computers on the backend and of course,
That costs a lot of money.
In fact, I remember when
we made the deal with Walmart,
everybody come through or cheering and saying:
"Oh yes, this is gonna save the company!
We made this big deal with Walmart!
We're gonna sell so many computers through Walmart!"
And we've saw ads on TV from Walmart,
walked into Walmart saw the computers on the shelves,
we got calls from customers at Walmart...
So, it seemed like it was going great!
And then six months later,
They pulled the plug 
on the Walmart deal and they told us:
"Well, we lost $200 on every computer
that we sold at Walmart." So... [Laughs]
It was almost like you're giving them away.
So, that was the thing that actually killed AST.
I have no idea why they could
not get this problem under control,
but this kept going on for years until
the death of the company
and I just I don't know why they
couldn't get under control,
but that's what the problem was
Now, we had a savior.
Samsung was going to come in and
they bought up our company right
as we were on the brink of bankruptcy.

Turkish: 
ve Samsung'un bu planı vardı. Satmak istediler
ABD'deki Samsung bilgisayarlar,
ancak AST'nin ABD'de Samsung'dan daha güçlü bir marka bilinirliğine sahip olduğunu hissettiler.
Böylece
Şirketi satın alırlardı.
Bilgisayarları üreteceklerdi.
AST etiketini onlara koyardık
ve bizim
Amerikan aksanlarımızla
ve Fort Worth tesisindeki her şey
ve bu bilgisayarları
ve bunlar AST ve
tüketiciler onları satın alır
ve bu bir nevi plantı.
[Gülüyor]
Samsung firmamızın
karmakarışıktı ve bunu biliyorlardı
birkaç yıl alacaktı
istedikleri yere ulaşmak için.
Yani, ilk ürünlerden biri
Biz satış sonunda AST Ascentia M oldu.
Şimdi, bu aslında AST olarak yeniden markalanan bir Samsung Sense Pro 500 ve

English: 
and Samsung had this plan. They wanted to sell
Samsung computers in the USA,
but they felt that AST had a stronger brand recognition in the USA than Samsung had.
So they decided that
They would buy the company.
They would manufacture the computers.
We would put the AST label on them
and we would give support at our
facility here with our American accents
and everything in the Fort Worth facility
and we would support these computers
and they would be AST and
then consumers would buy them
and that was that was kind of the plan.
[Laughs]
Samsung knew that our company
was in shambles and they knew that
it was going to take a few years
to get things where they wanted to be.
So, one of the first products that
we ended up selling was the AST Ascentia M.
Now, this is actually a Samsung Sense Pro 500 rebranded as the AST and

Turkish: 
bunu yavaş yavaş destek sistemimize entegre etmeye başladık.
Bu yüzden aslında Samsung'un desteğini de kabul ettik.
Yani, Samsung hala ABD'de kendi Samsung bilgisayarlarını satıyordu.
Bazen telefonum çalar
ve Samsung'u söyleyin.
Bu yüzden cevap verirdim:
"Samsung Teknik Destek,"
ve aynı bilgisayar olan Sense Pro 500'ü ASC Ascentia M ile destekliyorum,
bu bilgisayarları içeride ve dışarıda biliyorduk.
Bu bilgisayarları sevdik. Aslında çalıştılar.
Ateş yakmadılar,
biliyorsun menteşeler onları kırmadı
ve bunun gibi şeyler biliyorsun
bunlar iyi bilgisayarlardı.
Ve böylece, yine
şirketin geleceği konusunda iyimser, çünkü sonunda iyi ürünlerimiz vardı.
Aslında ilginç olan, çok az perakendecinin hem Samsung hem de AST dizüstü bilgisayarlarını satmasıydı.
Aynı rafta ve bazen,
Müşterilerimiz şunları söyledi:
"Bunlara baktığımı biliyorsun.
Bu AST, Sense Pro 500'e gerçekten benziyorlar. "
Ben "Evet, ne tesadüf!" [Gülüyor]

English: 
this is kind of how we slowly started integrating this into our support system.
So, we actually agreed to do Samsung's support as well.
So, Samsung was still selling their own Samsung computers here in the US as well.
So, sometimes my phone would ring
and say Samsung on it.
So I would answer:
"Samsung Technical Support,"
and I would support the Sense Pro 500 which was the exact same computer is our ASC Ascentia M,
so we knew those computers inside and out anyway.
We liked these computers. They actually worked.
They didn't catch on fire,
you know hinges didn't break on them
and you know things like that
these were good computers.
And so, we were again, we were very
optimistic about the future of the company, because we had good products finally starting to trickle out.
In fact, what's interesting is a very few retailers actually sold both the Samsung and the AST laptops.
On the same shelf and occasionally,
we got customers saying:
"You know I was looking at those.
That AST that Sense Pro 500 they look really similar."
I'm like:  "Yeah, what a coincidence!" [laughs]

English: 
So anyway, everything was looking really optimistic,
until this happened.
So
Samsung knew that it was gonna take
two to three years to,
get our company where it needed to be to profitability,
and they had made it clear that they
were gonna stand behind us and
And make that happen.
Oh, and I forgot something,
so when they come and took over the company,
they wanted to give all the AST employees gifts
and we got to pick between a
TV, a VCR or a microwave oven.
All made by Samsung, of course
And so, I remember the day that we all backed our cars up to the loading dock and they were handing us off you
know the boxes of all this
Samsung products and stuff
and I picked the TV and interesting enough,
If you go up to the third floor
or wait, actually we're on the third floor
Sorry, so if you go down there
to the little computer museum,
you'll see a Commodore VIC-20
hooked up to a Samsung TV.
That's the TV that I got from AST and it still works today!
So, again a perfect example of Samsung's

Turkish: 
Her neyse, her şey gerçekten iyimser görünüyordu,
Bu gerçekleşene kadar.
Yani
Samsung bunun olacağını biliyordu
iki ila üç yıl,
şirketimizi kârlılık olması gereken yere götürmek,
ve açıkça
arkamızda duracak ve
Ve bunu gerçekleştir.
Oh, ve bir şey unuttum,
şirkete gelip şirketi devraldıklarında,
tüm AST çalışanlarına hediyeler vermek istediler
ve bir
TV, VCR veya mikrodalga fırın.
Hepsi Samsung tarafından yapıldı, elbette
Ve böylece, arabalarımızı yükleme iskelesine kadar desteklediğimiz günü hatırlıyorum ve bizi sizden teslim ediyorlardı
tüm bunların kutularını bil
Samsung ürünleri ve eşyaları
ve televizyonu seçtim ve yeterince ilginç,
Üçüncü kata çıkarsanız
ya da bekle, aslında üçüncü katta
Üzgünüm, eğer oraya gidersen
küçük bilgisayar müzesine,
bir Commodore VIC-20 göreceksiniz
Samsung TV'ye bağlandım.
Bu AST'den aldığım TV ve bugün hala çalışıyor!
Yani, yine Samsung'un mükemmel bir örneği

English: 
durability and reliability.
had that been an AST monitor
or it'll probably would've broke a long time ago.
So, um, but anyway this
Asian stock market crash of 1997
This was a big problem, because
it affected currency exchange rates dramatically
and
So even though Samsung had committed to supporting our company for two or three years,
the amount of money they had planned to spend on that was now suddenly like five times more,
Due to the currency exchange rate than what they had planned,
and there didn't be it seemed to be any
end in sight for this problem.
So when a few months later,
they announced they were gonna close down the company and liquidate the assets and so...
That's unfortunately was the end of AST.
We all got pink slips, we got laid off and
one last little tidbit about that:
this is the front of Blizzard Entertainment.
These the guys that make
Warcraft and Starcraft, Diablo.
Stuff like that from those who don't know
and that's actually the old AST building.

Turkish: 
dayanıklılık ve güvenilirlik.
AST monitörü olsaydı
ya da muhtemelen uzun zaman önce kırılmış olurdu.
Ee, ama yine de bu
1997 Asya borsa çöküşü
Bu büyük bir sorundu, çünkü
döviz kurlarını önemli ölçüde etkiledi
ve
Bu nedenle Samsung firmamızı iki veya üç yıl boyunca desteklemeyi taahhüt etmiş olsa da,
harcamayı planladıkları para miktarı şimdi aniden beş kat daha fazlaydı,
Döviz kurları planladıklarından daha fazla olduğundan,
ve hiç yoktu gibi görünüyordu
bu sorun için görünür.
Birkaç ay sonra,
şirketi kapatacak ve varlıkları tasfiye edeceklerini ve böylece ...
Maalesef AST'nin sonu buydu.
Hepimizin pembe fişleri var, işten çıkarıldık ve
bununla ilgili son bir küçük haber:
bu Blizzard Entertainment'ın ön yüzü.
Bunlar yapan adamlar
Warcraft ve Starcraft, Diablo.
Bilmeyenler gibi şeyler
ve bu aslında eski AST binası.

English: 
They they bought the AST campus
and now it lives on as another tech company.
So anyway, what you all were probably wanting to hear about is the tales from tech support.
So, let me tell you a little bit about
how this worked we had,
I don't have an exact count.
But if I had to estimate between
the three different shifts,
We had a day shift, an evening shift, and a night shift.
We probably had 500 people working
in tech support at AST
and we had different departments.
The Advantage department,
Which was the largest, that was
the consumer desktop department.
That was the biggest part of
our business at the time and
We needed the most
tech support people for that business.
Not only that, but let's just say the people that bought those computers were probably a little less...
computer knowledgeable than
the people buying the business laptops,
other laptops and the business products.
So again, we just we needed a
larger group of people for the Advantage support line
I actually worked in the advantage support line for the first year worked there and then the second two years
I worked in the laptop department. So um
That's me

Turkish: 
AST kampüsü aldılar
ve şimdi başka bir teknoloji şirketi olarak yaşıyor.
Her neyse, muhtemelen hepinizin duymak istediği şey teknik destek masallarıdır.
Size biraz bahsetmeme izin verin
bunun nasıl çalıştığını,
Tam bir sayım yok.
Ama eğer tahmin etsem
üç farklı vardiya,
Gündüz vardiyamız, akşam vardiyamız ve gece vardiyamız vardı.
Muhtemelen 500 çalışanımız vardı
AST'de teknik destek
ve farklı bölümlerimiz vardı.
Avantaj departmanı,
Hangisi en büyüğüydü,
tüketici masaüstü departmanı.
En büyük kısmı buydu
işimiz o zaman ve
En çok ihtiyacımız olan
bu iş için insanları destekleyin.
Sadece bu da değil, diyelim ki bu bilgisayarları satın alan insanlar muhtemelen biraz daha azdı ...
daha bilgili bilgisayar
iş dizüstü bilgisayarlarını satın alan insanlar,
diğer dizüstü bilgisayarlar ve iş ürünleri.
Tekrar söylüyorum, sadece
Advantage destek hattı için daha geniş bir grup insan
Aslında orada çalıştığım ilk yıl ve daha sonra ikinci iki yıl için avantaj destek hattında çalıştım
Dizüstü bilgisayar bölümünde çalıştım. Yani um
O benim

Turkish: 
AST'de çalıştığımda ve bu fotoğrafla ilgili birkaç ilginç şey var, sadece
AST'deki odama göster bana,
ama bu aslında ilk tüketici dijital kamera Casio QV 10'da çekildi
o zaman satın aldığım ve
Bu korkunç bir çözümdü, ama o zamanlar oldukça yeni bir şeydi.
Umarım bir gün o kamerada bir inceleme yapmayı umarım
Her neyse, evet, kendimi çalışırken bulabildiğim tek resim bu.
Aslında, burada birkaç farklı resim var.
Ve bu benim desteğimi yaptığım bilgisayar.
Bu bilgisayar hakkında birkaç hikayem var.
Her şeyden önce, bence bu bir
4633 kullanıyordum ve Windows 95 çalıştırıyorduk.
Sonunda daha anlayışlı teknik destek insanlarına izin vermelerine rağmen
NT 4 iş istasyonunu yerleştirme
bilgisayarlarında ve ben
bunu yapan insanlardan biri.
Bunun bir nedeni, ara sıra aşağı inme eğiliminde olan sürücüler paylaşmamızdı,
Windows 95'te, sunucuya takılı paylaşılan bir sürücünüz varsa
ve sunucu çöktüğünde bilgisayarınız kilitlenir.
Bu sürücü Windows NT'nin kullanılamayacağı yerlerde,
ama bilgisayarınız hala çalışmaya devam ediyor

English: 
Back when I worked at AST and there's a couple of interesting things about this photo not only does it
show me in my cubicle there at AST,
but that was actually taken on the first ever consumer digital camera the Casio QV 10
which I happen to buy at the time and
It was terrible resolution, but it was a pretty novel thing at the time.
I hope to do a review on that camera someday
But anyway, yeah, that's the only picture I could find of myself working.
Actually, here's a couple of different pictures here.
And that's that's the computer that I did my my support on.
I got a few stories about that computer.
First of all, I think that was a
4633 that I was using and we were running Windows 95.
Although they did eventually allow some of the more savvy tech support people
to put Windows NT 4 workstation
on their computer and I was
one of the people that did that.
Part of the reason was we had shared drives that tended to go down every now and then,
And on Windows 95 if you had a shared drive that was mounted to the server
and the server went down your computer would lock up.
Where Windows NT that drive would just become unavailable,
but your computer would still keep working

English: 
So, I was kind of happy to move to Windows NT.
But also some of the things that we did on these computers is we play games.
It was not uncommon for me to be
playing Duke Nukem 3D or Starcraft,
While I was helping customers through problems and you might think: "How could you do that?"
But keep in mind that these calls were really long and a lot of it, I mean everyday it was guaranteed
I was gonna have to help somebody reinstall windows whether it be 3.1 or Windows 95 and you know
They had to feed the floppy disks in it
was at least a 30 to 45 minute process,
which I'd done hundreds if not thousands of times.
So I knew all that from memory,
so I could easily walk customers through the process of installing Windows while I'm
You know playing Duke Nukem 3d or Starcraft.
Now an interesting story about Starcraft is that we,
well even Duke Nukem,
sometimes we played multiplayer games with many of the technicians while we were doing our support calls,
and the problem with this is
now normally like in StarCraft,
The person who wins is the person, who you know, is the best at the game and the person who gets the most

Turkish: 
Bu yüzden Windows NT'ye geçmekten mutlu oldum.
Ama bu bilgisayarlarda yaptığımız şeylerden bazıları oyun oynamak.
Benim için olağandışı değildi
Duke Nukem 3D veya Starcraft oynarken,
Ben müşterilere problemler konusunda yardımcı olurken, "Bunu nasıl yapabildin?" Diye düşünebilirsiniz.
Ama unutmayın ki bu çağrılar gerçekten çok uzun ve birçoğu, yani her gün garanti edildi
İster 3.1 ister Windows 95 olsun, birilerinin pencereleri yeniden yüklemesine yardım etmem gerekecekti.
İçindeki disketleri beslemek zorundaydılar
en az 30 ila 45 dakikalık bir süreçti,
ki binlerce olmasa da yüzlerce yapmıştım.
Bütün bunları hafızadan biliyordum,
bu yüzden Windows yüklerken müşterilerimi kolayca yürütebilirim.
Duke Nukem 3d veya Starcraft oynamayı biliyorsunuz.
Starcraft hakkında ilginç bir hikaye şu ki,
Duke Nukem bile,
bazen destek çağrılarımızı yaparken birçok teknisyenle çok oyunculu oyunlar oynadık,
ve bununla ilgili sorun
şimdi normalde StarCraft'ta olduğu gibi,
Kazanan kişi, bildiğiniz kişi, oyundaki en iyisi ve en çok kazanan kişidir.

English: 
resources and
you know, knows how to attack their enemy at just the right time, whatever but...
The person who wins,
back then was the person who was able to keep the game open long enough,
because eventually
Something's going to come up
where you're gonna have to minimize the game and go look up some data or type in an RMA request,
or something for the customer
and when that happens everybody's going to come blow up your base, then that's
[Laughs]
That's just the way that worked!
and of course, our bosses were
totally aware that we did this and they really
Did not care as long as we were doing our jobs and taking care of the customers.
So yeah, another angle there of me.
Oh, yeah, and I did have hair
by the way in case you know
Anybody want to know. Yes, I had hair.
That was our visionary performers wall.
So, some of the best Techs who did the best work.
They could come put their
Hand in paint and put it on the wall and and sign it
and I got to do that as
I got recognized for my exemplary performance.

Turkish: 
kaynaklar ve
bilirsiniz, düşmanlarına doğru zamanda nasıl saldıracağını bilir, ama ...
Kazanan kişi,
o zamanlar oyunu yeterince uzun süre açık tutabilen kişi,
çünkü sonunda
Bir şey gelecek
oyunu en aza indirmeniz ve bazı verileri aramanız veya bir RMA isteğinde yazmanız gerekecek,
ya da müşteri için bir şey
ve bu olduğunda herkes gelip üssünü havaya uçuracak, o zaman bu
[Gülüyor]
Sadece bu şekilde çalıştı!
ve tabii ki patronlarımız
bunu yaptığımızın tamamen farkında ve gerçekten
İşlerimizi yaptığımız ve müşterilere baktığımız sürece umursamadım.
Evet, orada başka bir açıdan.
Oh, evet, ve saçlarım vardı
bu arada biliyorsan
Herkes bilmek istiyor. Evet, saçlarım vardı.
Bu bizim vizyoner sanatçılar duvarımızdı.
Yani, en iyi işi yapan en iyi Tekniklerden bazıları.
Gelebilirler onların
Boya verin ve duvara koyun ve imzalayın
ve bunu şu şekilde yapmalıyım
Örnek performansımla tanındım.

English: 
So that's about all the photos I've got from there, 
except for this one.
Now this one, I actually cut from a
magazine article and scanned it
and I remember this photo!
We were actually told to dress formally that day,
because we were going
to have this special photo op and
I'm actually in this photo but you can't see me,
because I'm way in the back and you know,
my head is like three pixels tall.
So, you can't see me,
but you normally we dressed business casual at work.
So, this is probably not, you know,
Exactly how we would look on a normal day,
but I actually know all these people in this photo
and one little tidbit,
I'll share is this black guy here on the left: Sean
I just recently learned that he passed away
and I was really sad to hear about that.
He was a great guy.
In fact, all these people were great guys.
So yeah, there's a lot of things
I want to tell you about that
You can see out of this photo.
So first of all,
If you could pan the camera up just a little bit
One of the things that you would see on the back wall is we had this big LED billboard
and it would show the number
of calls waiting on hold

Turkish: 
Bu, oradan aldığım tüm fotoğraflarla ilgili, 
bunun dışında.
Şimdi bu, aslında bir
dergi makalesi ve taranmış
ve bu fotoğrafı hatırlıyorum!
Aslında o gün resmen giyinmemiz söylendi,
çünkü gidiyorduk
bu özel fotoğrafa sahip olmak ve
Aslında bu fotoğraftayım ama beni göremezsin,
çünkü arka taraftayım ve biliyorsun,
başım üç piksel yüksekliğinde.
Yani, beni göremezsin,
ama normalde iş yerinde iş giydirdik.
Yani, bu muhtemelen değil, bilirsiniz,
Normal bir günde nasıl görünecektik,
ama aslında bu fotoğraftaki tüm bu insanları tanıyorum
ve küçük bir tidbit,
Paylaşacağım soldaki şu siyah adam: Sean
Kısa süre önce öldüğünü öğrendim
ve bunu duyduğuma üzüldüm.
Harika bir adamdı.
Aslında, tüm bu insanlar harika çocuklardı.
Yani evet, birçok şey var
Sana bundan bahsetmek istiyorum
Bu fotoğrafın dışında görebilirsiniz.
Her şeyden önce,
Eğer kamerayı biraz yukarı kaldırırsanız
Arka duvarda görebileceğiniz şeylerden biri, bu büyük LED billboard
ve numarayı
bekleyen çağrıların yüzdesi

Turkish: 
ve ne kadar zamandır beklediklerini.
Ofise girdiğinizde
Buna her zaman bakabilirsin,
ve günün geri kalanında neye benzeyeceğine dair oldukça iyi bir fikir edinirsiniz,
çünkü 30 beklemedeki çağrı olduğu ve bekleme süresinin 20 dakika olduğu gösterilmişti:
"Tamam, bu iyi bir gün olacak."
Ancak, içeri girdiyseniz ve beklemede olan 200 çağrı varsa
ve bekleme süresi iki saatti,
Sonunda telefona cevap verdiğinizde her müşterinin size çok kızacağını biliyorsunuz.
Hakkında konuşmak istediğim birkaç şey daha var,
Bu hücrelere bakarsanız, aslında gerçekten büyükler.
Yani, tam kare görüntüleri bilmiyorum,
ama demek istediğim bu kabinlerde çok yer var
ve iyi bir miktar vardı
aranızdaki ve
tanıdığınız kişi,
yanınızdaki diğer çalışan.
Yani, bir müşteriyle konuşurken,
müşteri sadece seni duyabiliyordu
ve mutlaka yapamadılar
etraftaki diğer çalışanları duymak,
birçok modern çağrı merkezinin böyle olmadığını biliyorum.
Ve ben de biraz konuşmak istiyorum
veterinerlik süreci hakkında.
Bu yüzden, iş için başvurduğumda, içeri girdim ve bana şu gibi teknik sorular gibi sordular:
"Tamam, eğer bir
bilgisayar ve yapıyordu

English: 
and how long they've been waiting.
So, when you walked into the to the office
You could always glance up at that,
and you would get a pretty good idea what the rest of your day was going to be like,
because it was showed there were 30 calls on hold and the wait time was 20 minutes, you'd know:
"Okay, this is going to be a good day."
But, if you walked in and there were 200 calls on hold
and the wait time was two hours,
You know that every single customer is going to be very angry at you when you finally do answer the phone.
There's a few other things I want to talk about,
If you look at these cubicles, they're actually really big.
I mean, I don't know the exact square footage,
but I mean you had a lot of space in these cubicles
and there was a good amount
of space between you and
the person you're you know,
the other employee next to you.
So, when you're talking to a customer,
the customer could only hear you
and they couldn't necessarily
hear the other employees around,
which I know a lot of modern call centers is not like that.
And I also want to talk a little bit
about the vetting process.
So, when I applied for the job, I went in and they asked me like these really technical questions like:
"Okay if you had a
computer and it was doing

English: 
this problem, how would you solve it?"
If they didn't like the answer I gave, 
they wouldn't hire me.
And then after they hired people,
we were sent to a three-week training course,
where we went into this classroom,
They had all of the AST and Tandy and GRID computers that we were expected to support
laid out and they would go over each machine and tell us all the unique features of this machine all the
nuances, all the things that could break on this machine
and how you would go about fixing it whether it be driver configuration problems,
Or hardware failures things like that.
So we learned about these machines a lot.
They even sent us to a networking class
where I learned a lot of the
my skills for, you know, everything from IPX and
ethernet, you know low level languages and TCP/IP,
I don't know why they thought we needed to know that,
but we did and it was a really informative class,
and we learned we had a special class on viruses,
we learned how they worked and how to
Detect them on customers computers
and just from different behaviors
and little tests that we could do things like that.

Turkish: 
bu sorunu nasıl çözerdiniz? "
Verdiğim yanıtı beğenmediyseler, 
beni işe almazlardı.
Ve sonra insanları işe aldıktan sonra,
üç haftalık bir eğitim kursuna gönderildik,
bu sınıfa girdik,
Desteklememiz beklenen tüm AST ve Tandy ve GRID bilgisayarları vardı
ortaya çıktı ve her makinenin üzerinden geçip bize bu makinenin tüm benzersiz özelliklerini
nüanslar, bu makinede kırılabilecek her şey
ve sürücü yapılandırma sorunları olup olmadığını nasıl düzeltebileceğinizi,
Veya donanım arızaları böyle şeyler.
Bu makineler hakkında çok şey öğrendik.
Bizi bir ağ sınıfına bile gönderdiler
burada çok şey öğrendim
IPX ve
ethernet, düşük seviyeli dilleri ve TCP / IP'yi biliyorsunuz,
Bunu bilmemiz için neden düşündüklerini bilmiyorum,
ama yaptık ve gerçekten bilgilendirici bir sınıftı,
ve virüsler konusunda özel bir sınıfımız olduğunu öğrendik,
nasıl çalıştıklarını ve nasıl yapıldığını öğrendik
Müşterilerin bilgisayarlarında algılama
ve sadece farklı davranışlardan
ve böyle şeyler yapabileceğimiz küçük testler.

Turkish: 
Ve sonra bununla işimizi bitirdikten sonra,
biz dinlerken yaklaşık bir hafta boyunca bizi deneyimli bir çalışanla birlikte bir odaya yerleştiriyorlardı.
sonra çağrı bittikten sonra,
diğer çalışanla konuşabiliriz 
bize bunu neden yaptığını ya da biz
sorular sorabilir. Bunun gibi şeyler,
ve sonra bunu bitirdikten sonra, bizi kendimiz telefona koydular ve bize kalmışlardı.
müşterilerin sorun dinlemek ve çözmek ve ...
bu, bugünkü çalışma biçiminden çok farklı.
Aslında, sadece bir örnek vermek gerekirse
Eskiden BT uzmanlarından çağrı alırdım
kim arayacak, kim Ağ sorunları ve benzeri şeyler gibi olurdu
bilgisayarlarını bir sürücü ya da bunun gibi bir şey paylaşmak için ya da TCP / IP çalışmıyor ve aslında yürümek zorunda kaldım
üzerinden ağ yöneticileri
ağ sorunlarının nasıl çözüleceği,
ve muhtemelen bana ödediğimin üç katı
ama onlar kadar bilgili değildiler
bazılarımız burada destek merkezinde.
Bu sadece bir fikir
destekçilerimiz neye benziyor

English: 
And then after we were done with that,
they would put us in a cubicle with an experienced employee for about a week while we listen in and
then after the call was over,
we could talk to the other employee 
and they could tell us why they did this or that we
could ask questions. The stuff like that,
and then once we were done with that, they put us on the phone by ourself and it was up to us to
listen to the customers problem and solve it and...
that's kind of a lot different from how it works today.
In fact, just to give you an example
I used to get calls from, like, IT professionals
who would call in, who would be having like Network problems and stuff getting
their computers to share a drive or something like that or TCP/IP wasn't working and I actually had to walk
network administrators through
how to solve networking problems,
which they probably got paid three times what I got paid,
but they weren't as knowledgeable as
some of us here in the support center.
That's just an idea of
what our support people are like

English: 
and then this is kind of like
what a modern call center is like.
Now I have no idea where this picture came from.
I just grabbed it off of Google, but
they just squeeze them in like sardines and
They pay a minimum wage and that's why when you talk to somebody at one of these call centers,
you can hear like five other people
around the person you're talking to,
because they're all squeezed in like sardines and
These people more or less just read off whatever the computer tell to say.
They don't really have any training or
troubleshooting, in you know, 
knowledge of how to solve problems and
you know, back in the 90s,
A lot of the customers that were calling in and I mean a lot of them, it was their first computer
I mean today everybody knows how to use a computer and everybody knows at least some
terminology,
but back then, the customers calling in they didn't know
anything about computers
I mean just give you example it was not uncommon when you'd say something like
the monitor or the mouse
They wouldn't know what these things are and you would have to say stuff like:
"Oh, the thing that looks like a TV screen."
And they go: "Oh! That thing!"

Turkish: 
ve sonra bu biraz
modern bir çağrı merkezinin neye benzediğini
Şimdi bu resmin nereden geldiğine dair hiçbir fikrim yok.
Google'dan aldım, ama
sadece sardalya gibi sıkıyorlar ve
Asgari ücret ödüyorlar ve bu yüzden bu çağrı merkezlerinden biriyle konuştuğunuzda,
beş kişi gibi duyabilirsin
konuştuğun kişinin etrafında,
çünkü hepsi sardalya gibi sıkışmış ve
Bu insanlar az çok bilgisayarın söylediklerini okurlar.
Gerçekten hiç eğitimi yok veya
sorun giderme, bilirsiniz, 
problemlerin nasıl çözüleceği bilgisi ve
bilirsiniz, 90'lı yıllarda,
Arayan müşterilerin birçoğu ve demek istediğim birçoğu, bu onların ilk bilgisayarıydı
Yani bugün herkes bilgisayar kullanmayı biliyor ve herkes en azından biraz
terminoloji,
ama o zamanlar, arayan müşteriler bilmiyorlardı
bilgisayarlar hakkında herhangi bir şey
Yani size sadece örnek verin, şöyle bir şey söylediğinizde nadir değildi
monitör veya fare
Bu şeylerin ne olduğunu bilmiyorlardı ve şöyle şeyler söylemek zorunda kalacaksınız:
"Ah, TV ekranına benzeyen şey."
Ve gidiyorlar: "Ah! O şey!"

Turkish: 
Demek istediğim bu beceriksiz müşteriler
o zamanlardı,
çünkü daha yeni
bilgisayar deneyimi yok.
Bu aynı zamanda nasıl yazacaklarını da bilmiyorlardı
ve bu yüzden onları komut satırına indirdiğinizde çok zordu ve
Onlara,
bunu klavyeye yazdığınızda
genellikle iki nokta üst üste işaretinin (:) veya bir yarım nokta üst üste işaretinin (;) veya bunun gibi şeyleri bilmiyordu.
Ve böylece, birçok zorluk ve müşterilerle uğraşmak vardı.
Ama bugün, neredeyse tam tersi!
Bugün, müşterilerin aradığı gibi,
Destek merkezinde çalışanların yarısından fazlası değil,
bu da teknik desteğin olduğu gibi çok büyük bir tersine dönüş, 90'lı yıllardan beri biliyorsunuz.
Öyleyse, bazı çılgın çağrılardan bahsedelim.
Elimizde. Yani, bilirsiniz, bu neredeyse bir
kentsel efsane: bardak tutucu şey
Şimdi size dürüst olacağım.
Asla bir çağrı almadım
birisi CD-ROM'un bardak tutucu olduğunu düşündü.
Ancak, bazı iş arkadaşlarım ...

English: 
I mean this is this is how inept customers
were at the time,
because they just had
no computer experience whatsoever.
That also meant, they didn't know how to type
and so it was very difficult when you get them down to the command line and you would have to be
Telling them to, you know,
type this on the keyboard and they
often didn't know what the colon (:) or a semi-colon (;) was or things like that.
And so, there were a lot of challenges and dealing with the customers.
But today, it's almost opposite!
Today, you've got like the customers calling in,
no more than the people working in the support center half the time,
which is a very big reversal from the way that tech support was, you know back in the 90s.
So, let's talk about some of the crazy calls that
That we got. So, you know, this is almost like an
urban legend: the cupholder thing
Now I'm gonna go ahead be honest with you.
I never received a call where
somebody thought that the CD-ROM was a cup holder.
However, some of my co-workers did...

Turkish: 
Aslında, gerçekten oldu, aslında,
Kaydı dinlemek zorundaydık
sadece doğru olduğunu duymak için bir kez.
Ama görünüşe göre kahvesini
Tepsi ve bilgisayarı açtığında
ya da sanırım yeniden başlattı,
geri çekildi ve kahveyi klavyesinin her yerine döktü ve bu konuda gerçekten üzgündü.
Evet, bu çağrıyı almadığım için mutluyum,
çünkü bunu nasıl güzel açıklayacağımı bilmiyorum
birinin amacının ne olduğunu
Bu her zaman uğraştığım bir şey,
ve son derece sinir bozucuydu.
İnsanlar teknik destek istediğinde,
iki saatlik bekletmeleri olsa bile,
bu çok sıradışı değildi,
bir rapor kaydına sahip olurlardı.
"Lütfen parça numaranızı ve seri numaranızı hazır bulundurun yoksa destek alamazsınız."
ve bunu beş yüz kez duymasına rağmen
iki saat boyunca,
telefona cevap verdiğimde bu numaraları ne kadar az kişinin hazır bulundurduğuna şaşıracaksınız.
Ve böylece onlardan bu sayıları almalarını istemem gerekir ve sonra bilirsiniz, ne olur
kaçınılmaz olarak onlarla bir tartışmaya girerim

English: 
So, it actually really did happen, in fact,
We had to listen to the recording
one time just to hear that it was really true.
But the guy apparently sat his coffee on
The tray and when he turned the computer on
or I think he rebooted it,
it retracted and it spilled the coffee all over his keyboard and he was really upset about that.
Yeah, I'm glad I didn't get that call,
because I have no idea how I would explain that nicely
to somebody what the what the purpose of that is
This is something that I dealt with all the time,
and it was extremely frustrating.
So when people called in to tech support,
even if they had a two-hour hold,
which was not terribly unusual,
they would have a report recording that would just repeat over and over like a broken record telling you:
"Please have your part number and serial number ready or you will not be able to receive support."
and despite hearing this like five hundred times
over the course of two hours,
you would be absolutely amazed how few people had those numbers ready when I answered the phone.
And so then I would have to ask them to get those numbers and then you know, what would happen
inevitably I would wind up in an argument with them

Turkish: 
Öyleyse neden sevdiğimi vermek zorundayım:
"Şey, biliyorsun,
We have to know what kind of computer you have."
And the invariable answer that I would get when I would say something like that is like:
"Well, I have an AST,"
or better yet: "I have ast."
And I'm like:
"Well, gee I would have never thought you'd have an AST calling into a AST tech support.
But yeah, we need to know the exact one. We do make more than one computer, you know."
So, finally after struggling with this, they'd be like:
"Oh, ok. Alright,
I got the part number, serial number for you here,"
and invariably I would look up the serial number
and I'd find out it was a
keyboard, they pull the keyboard upside-down and look at the tag on the bottom and read me that and I go:
"No, I think you read me the number off the keyboard. I need the number off the computer,"
and they'd go: "Oh, ok, ok,
oh you want the one here on the back of the monitor?"
"No, no, I don't want the back or the TV screen," as they say sometimes.
"No, I don't want the number on the back of the monitor. I want the one on the computer."
And after a minute they finally go

English: 
Then why why do I have to give those I'm like:
"Well, you know,
We have to know what kind of computer you have."
And the invariable answer that I would get when I would say something like that is like:
"Well, I have an AST,"
or better yet: "I have ast."
And I'm like:
"Well, gee I would have never thought you'd have an AST calling into a AST tech support.
But yeah, we need to know the exact one. We do make more than one computer, you know."
So, finally after struggling with this, they'd be like:
"Oh, ok. Alright,
I got the part number, serial number for you here,"
and invariably I would look up the serial number
and I'd find out it was a
keyboard, they pull the keyboard upside-down and look at the tag on the bottom and read me that and I go:
"No, I think you read me the number off the keyboard. I need the number off the computer,"
and they'd go: "Oh, ok, ok,
oh you want the one here on the back of the monitor?"
"No, no, I don't want the back or the TV screen," as they say sometimes.
"No, I don't want the number on the back of the monitor. I want the one on the computer."
And after a minute they finally go

English: 
"Oh! You want the one on the back of the hard drive!"
Of course at this point, I don't even want to argue with them over the definition of what a hard drive is,
but at this point, I'm like:
"Fine, just the one on the hard drive, great.
Just give me that number," you know, and so they finally gave me the number.
But that was a, you know,
One of the things that people would often complain about when they called in is like:
"Do you know how long I've been on hold?"
Of course,
What would always surprise them,
is I could look down at my phone
and it would actually show me
the exact time that they had been
on hold, on the old screen there and I'll be like:
"Yes sir, you been on hold 
for 57 minutes and 42 seconds."
They're always really surprised to know that I actually knew the answer to that question.
And then they said 
"Why did I have to wait on hold so long?"
And sometimes I would actually tell them like "Well...
The 10 customers I had to deal with before you they didn't have their part number
and serial number ready either
and I had to wait on them.
And that's why you had to wait. So, huh?"
Give a little bit of a guilt trip for him there.

Turkish: 
"Oh! You want the one on the back of the hard drive!"
Of course at this point, I don't even want to argue with them over the definition of what a hard drive is,
but at this point, I'm like:
"Fine, just the one on the hard drive, great.
Just give me that number," you know, and so they finally gave me the number.
But that was a, you know,
One of the things that people would often complain about when they called in is like:
"Do you know how long I've been on hold?"
Elbette,
What would always surprise them,
is I could look down at my phone
and it would actually show me
the exact time that they had been
on hold, on the old screen there and I'll be like:
"Yes sir, you been on hold 
for 57 minutes and 42 seconds."
They're always really surprised to know that I actually knew the answer to that question.
And then they said 
"Why did I have to wait on hold so long?"
And sometimes I would actually tell them like "Well...
The 10 customers I had to deal with before you they didn't have their part number
and serial number ready either
and I had to wait on them.
And that's why you had to wait. So, huh?"
Give a little bit of a guilt trip for him there.

Turkish: 
So yeah, this is another example of of what the sticker would look like on the back of a lot of the computers.
One of the things that we had to learn to do as
employees there and tech support
is we had to listen really really well.
Now remember what I told you earlier,
a lot of these customers had no idea how to type or what things were called on keyboards.
Whether it be a colon or semicolon
or a slash or a backslash.
Good God, if you try to tell them the pipe command, they'd never find that one.
Space bar, however, was also something they often didn't know what was called,
and so this was actually an extremely common thing.
If I would tell them: "Type 'cd (space) dos'." 
and that's exactly what they'd type ('cdspacedos').
Trouble is we didn't have any way
to see their screens back then,
I mean, not like we can today
with remote access and stuff like that.
So, the only way that you knew they'd be typing something crazy like this,
is to listen to the number of keystrokes
they would type.
And if there was a lot of extra keystrokes, then you know, you might ask them:
"Hey, can you exactly tell me what you're typing there?"
and eventually sometimes we'd figure out
and yeah, things like telling them, like the difference between a slash and a backslash and a forward slash.

English: 
So yeah, this is another example of of what the sticker would look like on the back of a lot of the computers.
One of the things that we had to learn to do as
employees there and tech support
is we had to listen really really well.
Now remember what I told you earlier,
a lot of these customers had no idea how to type or what things were called on keyboards.
Whether it be a colon or semicolon
or a slash or a backslash.
Good God, if you try to tell them the pipe command, they'd never find that one.
Space bar, however, was also something they often didn't know what was called,
and so this was actually an extremely common thing.
If I would tell them: "Type 'cd (space) dos'." 
and that's exactly what they'd type ('cdspacedos').
Trouble is we didn't have any way
to see their screens back then,
I mean, not like we can today
with remote access and stuff like that.
So, the only way that you knew they'd be typing something crazy like this,
is to listen to the number of keystrokes
they would type.
And if there was a lot of extra keystrokes, then you know, you might ask them:
"Hey, can you exactly tell me what you're typing there?"
and eventually sometimes we'd figure out
and yeah, things like telling them, like the difference between a slash and a backslash and a forward slash.

English: 
Things like that could be really difficult as well,
and especially even after you tell them which is the right one and how to find it on the keyboard,
they still wind up pushing the wrong one and you get some weird error message
that they would read back to you
and you know, you couldn't see what was on the screen,
so you didn't know they were typing in the wrong thing.
Although, you guess they were typing something wrong.
But yeah, these were some of the challenges that we had to deal with back then.
Now here's a funny story for you.
How many of you familiar with WinFax?
Just a few of you here I can see.
So, let me tell you what WinFax was
Back in the 90s, if you wanted to send a fax to somebody from your computer using your fax modem,
You needed a fax program.
I think Windows later integrated some of this into Windows,
but with Windows 95 you needed a third party program to accomplish this,
and WinFax was the program we bundled
with the computer that did this.
Now the way it worked is you could go into like,
I don't know, say Microsoft Word.
You could type out a document
and then you could hit print
and when you hit print it would come up
with a list of printers, and one of those

Turkish: 
Things like that could be really difficult as well,
and especially even after you tell them which is the right one and how to find it on the keyboard,
they still wind up pushing the wrong one and you get some weird error message
that they would read back to you
and you know, you couldn't see what was on the screen,
so you didn't know they were typing in the wrong thing.
Although, you guess they were typing something wrong.
But yeah, these were some of the challenges that we had to deal with back then.
Now here's a funny story for you.
How many of you familiar with WinFax?
Just a few of you here I can see.
So, let me tell you what WinFax was
Back in the 90s, if you wanted to send a fax to somebody from your computer using your fax modem,
You needed a fax program.
I think Windows later integrated some of this into Windows,
but with Windows 95 you needed a third party program to accomplish this,
and WinFax was the program we bundled
with the computer that did this.
Now the way it worked is you could go into like,
I don't know, say Microsoft Word.
You could type out a document
and then you could hit print
and when you hit print it would come up
with a list of printers, and one of those

English: 
printers would be the WinFax printer
and you could click the WinFax,
and then you could put in the phone number
you wanted to fax to,
and then it would it would do its thing.
Now, there was a place in the manual that described how all of this worked and you know,
it explained about going to print something
and you know,
and it gets so far and it says
whatever is on your screen at this point will be faxed.
Well, I had this one customer call in and he kept saying it wasn't working
and we kept going around and around and
I kept asking him to read this error message
that he said he was getting he says:
"Well, I can't see it right now,
because there's this paper in the way."
And like what? Can you move the paper and he's like:
"Well, I can't I'm holding it up to the screen."
[Laughs]
I'm like:
"Why? Why are you holding paper up to your screen?"
And he says
"Well, it says right here the manual,
whatever is on your screen will be faxed."
[Laughs]
So that was fun explaining to him how that worked.

Turkish: 
printers would be the WinFax printer
and you could click the WinFax,
and then you could put in the phone number
you wanted to fax to,
and then it would it would do its thing.
Now, there was a place in the manual that described how all of this worked and you know,
it explained about going to print something
and you know,
and it gets so far and it says
whatever is on your screen at this point will be faxed.
Well, I had this one customer call in and he kept saying it wasn't working
and we kept going around and around and
I kept asking him to read this error message
that he said he was getting he says:
"Well, I can't see it right now,
because there's this paper in the way."
And like what? Can you move the paper and he's like:
"Well, I can't I'm holding it up to the screen."
[Laughs]
I'm like:
"Why? Why are you holding paper up to your screen?"
And he says
"Well, it says right here the manual,
whatever is on your screen will be faxed."
[Laughs]
So that was fun explaining to him how that worked.

Turkish: 
So CD-ROMS.
Well, CD-ROMs started to
become popular around this time.
You know, more and more games started showing up on the shelves with CDs in them and
customers, of course, would buy them
and when customers will call in
and say their CD drive wasn't working,
you know, I'd get their serial number from them
and I would be like
"Well, um...
your computer doesn't appear to
have shipped with a CD drive,
did you have this installed somewhere?"
and [they would say]
"No, no! This absolutely came
with the computer when I bought it!"
I would ask them:
"Can you describe what the CD-ROM looks like?"
"Well, there was this little slot in the front
of the computer,
and there's just a lever that you pull down in front of it."
and so, of course, what they had is a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive
and a CD will in fact fit in there
Eğer sen
put it in there... [Laughs]
So, I'd have to explain to them what that was
and then of course if the inevitable question
that would come after that is like:
"Well, how do I get it out?"
[Laughs]
And then I'm like:
"Well, you know, you can try some tweezers,

English: 
So CD-ROMS.
Well, CD-ROMs started to
become popular around this time.
You know, more and more games started showing up on the shelves with CDs in them and
customers, of course, would buy them
and when customers will call in
and say their CD drive wasn't working,
you know, I'd get their serial number from them
and I would be like
"Well, um...
your computer doesn't appear to
have shipped with a CD drive,
did you have this installed somewhere?"
and [they would say]
"No, no! This absolutely came
with the computer when I bought it!"
I would ask them:
"Can you describe what the CD-ROM looks like?"
"Well, there was this little slot in the front
of the computer,
and there's just a lever that you pull down in front of it."
and so, of course, what they had is a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive
and a CD will in fact fit in there
if you
put it in there... [Laughs]
So, I'd have to explain to them what that was
and then of course if the inevitable question
that would come after that is like:
"Well, how do I get it out?"
[Laughs]
And then I'm like:
"Well, you know, you can try some tweezers,

Turkish: 
You can try picking up the computer and shaking it upside down."
You know, sometimes it would come out,
sometimes they would have to take it into
an authorized service center to get it
removed. But, the other thing
that happened a little bit later,
we did start shipping computers
with CD-ROM drives and
so, people would buy these CD recordables on the shelves, because they say: "Oh hey!
It'd be nice to record stuff!"
So they would call me up and say:
"Well my CD-ROM drives not working, 
because I put these CD recordables in and it says it
can't write to them!"
And then I have to explain to them like:
"Well, it's a CD read-only memory it only reads."
And you'd be surprised how many people were irate to find out that like we scammed them or something.
"How could you possibly
ship this product that can only read?"
"You did this as a scam, so I would have to
upgrade or something like that."
I'm like: "No,
they're all like that.
You have to spend like a
thousand dollars to get like a writer."
and yeah, people were
not willing to accept that very well, but
that was something we had to deal with a lot.
Oh boy, speaker phones!
So beyond the fact, I hated it
when people called me on speaker phones,

English: 
You can try picking up the computer and shaking it upside down."
You know, sometimes it would come out,
sometimes they would have to take it into
an authorized service center to get it
removed. But, the other thing
that happened a little bit later,
we did start shipping computers
with CD-ROM drives and
so, people would buy these CD recordables on the shelves, because they say: "Oh hey!
It'd be nice to record stuff!"
So they would call me up and say:
"Well my CD-ROM drives not working, 
because I put these CD recordables in and it says it
can't write to them!"
And then I have to explain to them like:
"Well, it's a CD read-only memory it only reads."
And you'd be surprised how many people were irate to find out that like we scammed them or something.
"How could you possibly
ship this product that can only read?"
"You did this as a scam, so I would have to
upgrade or something like that."
I'm like: "No,
they're all like that.
You have to spend like a
thousand dollars to get like a writer."
and yeah, people were
not willing to accept that very well, but
that was something we had to deal with a lot.
Oh boy, speaker phones!
So beyond the fact, I hated it
when people called me on speaker phones,

Turkish: 
because it was really difficult to hear sometimes,
Especially if there were
other ambient noises in the house.
I also really hated it when people called me when they were chewing on food,
and drinking and
had crying babies on their shoulder and
a variety of other irritating noises that I had to listen to sometimes I was trying to help people.
But the real irritation, was this product that we had
with our consumer desktops.
We started shipping them with a special modem
that was not only a modem,
but it was also doubled as an answering machine
and a speakerphone,
and of course the way this worked was
Actually, this is probably not hard to imagine today,
because you know voicemail
has been around for a long time.
But basically you'd leave your
computer on 24 hours a day,
which back then was kind of an unusual thing to do.
But, you'd leave your computer on and when the phone rings, if nobody answered it after a few rings,
It would answer, it would play a message
and then it would record
your caller's message and then you can come back and see a list on your screen of all the messages you had
and play them back.
People thought that was really cool
and it also had the speakerphone feature,
where I don't know why people would want to use this,
but you could use the internals or
the speakers on your computer

English: 
because it was really difficult to hear sometimes,
Especially if there were
other ambient noises in the house.
I also really hated it when people called me when they were chewing on food,
and drinking and
had crying babies on their shoulder and
a variety of other irritating noises that I had to listen to sometimes I was trying to help people.
But the real irritation, was this product that we had
with our consumer desktops.
We started shipping them with a special modem
that was not only a modem,
but it was also doubled as an answering machine
and a speakerphone,
and of course the way this worked was
Actually, this is probably not hard to imagine today,
because you know voicemail
has been around for a long time.
But basically you'd leave your
computer on 24 hours a day,
which back then was kind of an unusual thing to do.
But, you'd leave your computer on and when the phone rings, if nobody answered it after a few rings,
It would answer, it would play a message
and then it would record
your caller's message and then you can come back and see a list on your screen of all the messages you had
and play them back.
People thought that was really cool
and it also had the speakerphone feature,
where I don't know why people would want to use this,
but you could use the internals or
the speakers on your computer

Turkish: 
and then this stupid little piece of junk microphone
we used to ship with those computers
and you could talk to somebody
with, like a speakerphone.
The problem was all this sounded great in
theory and it was actually a
big selling point for these computers
and we weren't the only one.
So, I think Packard Bell and some
of the other low-end machines were shipping
with stuff like this too is kind of a
lure for some sales.
The problem has it never worked right.
The software was glitchy, 
it crashed all the time,
In many cases, it would corrupt itself
and just wouldn't even run anymore.
Customers are always having to call in
and we would have to walk them through
how to uninstall the software,
reinstall the software,
and all the steps,
it took like 30-45 minutes and then
The next day, half the time
it would corrupt itself again,
and they'd be back on the phone again
and sometimes we go through this
a dozen times with people,
and people after it happened a few times
would start to get very irate and...
I'm gonna quote you something I heard dozens of times after people got irate about this.
They would say:

English: 
and then this stupid little piece of junk microphone
we used to ship with those computers
and you could talk to somebody
with, like a speakerphone.
The problem was all this sounded great in
theory and it was actually a
big selling point for these computers
and we weren't the only one.
So, I think Packard Bell and some
of the other low-end machines were shipping
with stuff like this too is kind of a
lure for some sales.
The problem has it never worked right.
The software was glitchy, 
it crashed all the time,
In many cases, it would corrupt itself
and just wouldn't even run anymore.
Customers are always having to call in
and we would have to walk them through
how to uninstall the software,
reinstall the software,
and all the steps,
it took like 30-45 minutes and then
The next day, half the time
it would corrupt itself again,
and they'd be back on the phone again
and sometimes we go through this
a dozen times with people,
and people after it happened a few times
would start to get very irate and...
I'm gonna quote you something I heard dozens of times after people got irate about this.
They would say:

English: 
"I spent $3,000 on this computer
and all I wanted it for was the speakerphone
and it doesn't work and I want my money back!"
We're not allowed to be rude to the customers,
but I so badly wanted to tell them:
"Dude, if you go down to RadioShack,
for about $12,
You can buy a speakerphone
and it always works every time."
[Laughs]
But unfortunately that was not an option to tell them.
But, I so badly wanted
to tell customers that
when they would say that, because I don't know who would spend $3,000 on a speakerphone!
This is kind of a crazy thing. So...
During the time I worked there,
we had quite a few different computers
and we were up into the Pentium era.
I think we were selling Pentium II machines,
around '97 if memory serves and
But just as an example,
I gonna use this Pentium 166 as an example
So, say somebody goes out to the store and they buy an AST computer and it had a Pentium 166 in it.
It was the latest and greatest at the time. 
They spent $3,000 on it or whatever,
and now they're happy with it,

Turkish: 
"I spent $3,000 on this computer
and all I wanted it for was the speakerphone
and it doesn't work and I want my money back!"
We're not allowed to be rude to the customers,
but I so badly wanted to tell them:
"Dude, if you go down to RadioShack,
for about $12,
You can buy a speakerphone
and it always works every time."
[Laughs]
But unfortunately that was not an option to tell them.
But, I so badly wanted
to tell customers that
when they would say that, because I don't know who would spend $3,000 on a speakerphone!
This is kind of a crazy thing. Yani...
During the time I worked there,
we had quite a few different computers
and we were up into the Pentium era.
I think we were selling Pentium II machines,
around '97 if memory serves and
But just as an example,
I gonna use this Pentium 166 as an example
So, say somebody goes out to the store and they buy an AST computer and it had a Pentium 166 in it.
It was the latest and greatest at the time. 
They spent $3,000 on it or whatever,
and now they're happy with it,

English: 
and then I get this call and they would say:
"Well I bought this
AST with this Pentium 166 processor and it was top-of-the-line.
I spent $3,000 on it."
I'd be like:
"Okay, is there something wrong with it?" He's like: 
"Yeah, I went back to the store today,
and now you have a 200 megahertz unit on the shelf!"
and I'm like: "Okay..."
"Well, I
wanted to have the top-of-the-line!
They told me this was the
top-of-the-line when I bought it!
Now it's not, I want my money back
or I want you to upgrade me for free!"
I kid you not!
I received this call hundreds of times
from different people, who thought that for some reason, we were just supposed to stop
innovating and just because they bought
the top-of-the-line!
and I don't know exactly why people would think that,
but that was an extremely common call 
and the other problem,
we had that was sort of similar to this
is people would go out and buy a computer
and then they had these
benchmarking programs that you could go out and buy,
and some of them were actually built into DOS,
I don't remember what it was called. 
There was some DOS command
you could type if you started looking through the folders
and it would bring up a small little
diagnostic program and it would tell you
you know,

Turkish: 
and then I get this call and they would say:
"Well I bought this
AST with this Pentium 166 processor and it was top-of-the-line.
I spent $3,000 on it."
I'd be like:
"Okay, is there something wrong with it?" He's like: 
"Yeah, I went back to the store today,
and now you have a 200 megahertz unit on the shelf!"
and I'm like: "Okay..."
"Well, I
wanted to have the top-of-the-line!
They told me this was the
top-of-the-line when I bought it!
Now it's not, I want my money back
or I want you to upgrade me for free!"
I kid you not!
I received this call hundreds of times
from different people, who thought that for some reason, we were just supposed to stop
innovating and just because they bought
the top-of-the-line!
and I don't know exactly why people would think that,
but that was an extremely common call 
and the other problem,
we had that was sort of similar to this
is people would go out and buy a computer
and then they had these
benchmarking programs that you could go out and buy,
and some of them were actually built into DOS,
I don't remember what it was called. 
There was some DOS command
you could type if you started looking through the folders
and it would bring up a small little
diagnostic program and it would tell you
you know,

English: 
the information like how much RAM your computer had
and what video card it had
and what kind of processor it had
Well, a lot of those programs were older 
and they didn't recognize anything above a 386,
and so they would run these stupid diagnostic programs and it would say they have a 386 CPU.
So then, they would be calling us up at the phone irate, saying that we ripped them off you know.
"I spent $3,000 on this computer..."
How many times have I heard that...
"...and it was supposed to have a Pentium 200 in there and it says I have a 386!"
The only way I could console these guys now,
I would have try to explain to them:
"Well, I'm sorry the program just doesn't recognize newer CPUs other than 386."
I know many of them just flat out
wouldn't believe that and so I had to actually walk them through opening the case on the computer,
which is something they could do.
I mean you doesn't void your warranty to open the case
although a lot of them thought that it would. I'm like:
"No, you got to be able to put like
expansion cards and stuff in there, you know?"
And then I would walk them
through how to remove the heatsink on the CPU,
so that they get access and wipe away the grease,
so that, I could actually see that it is in fact a Pentium CPU
and then usually they would be kind of a

Turkish: 
the information like how much RAM your computer had
and what video card it had
and what kind of processor it had
Well, a lot of those programs were older 
and they didn't recognize anything above a 386,
and so they would run these stupid diagnostic programs and it would say they have a 386 CPU.
So then, they would be calling us up at the phone irate, saying that we ripped them off you know.
"I spent $3,000 on this computer..."
How many times have I heard that...
"...and it was supposed to have a Pentium 200 in there and it says I have a 386!"
The only way I could console these guys now,
I would have try to explain to them:
"Well, I'm sorry the program just doesn't recognize newer CPUs other than 386."
I know many of them just flat out
wouldn't believe that and so I had to actually walk them through opening the case on the computer,
which is something they could do.
I mean you doesn't void your warranty to open the case
although a lot of them thought that it would. I'm like:
"No, you got to be able to put like
expansion cards and stuff in there, you know?"
And then I would walk them
through how to remove the heatsink on the CPU,
so that they get access and wipe away the grease,
so that, I could actually see that it is in fact a Pentium CPU
and then usually they would be kind of a

English: 
little bit consoled and
apologetic at that point.
So yeah, that was something we had to deal with.
Alright, I know I said all of the
technicians we had at AST
were good and knowledgeable
and for the most part that was accurate,
but we did have a handful, which
were not so good and I worked right next to one of them,
the cube next to me and I did not like
what this guy did a lot.
So, he had this habit of
anytime a customer will call in with a
problem that either he didn't know how to solve,
or a problem that he thought
would take him too long to solve,
He would simply tell the customer to run ScanDisk,
and then when that was done to run defrag,
and then reboot the computer and if it didn't work,
call us back.
And of course, it almost never
fixed any
problem and so of course they would call back
and of course guess who
would usually get them on the phone?
The second time they called when there far more angry after waiting on hold to two more hours,

Turkish: 
little bit consoled and
apologetic at that point.
So yeah, that was something we had to deal with.
Alright, I know I said all of the
technicians we had at AST
were good and knowledgeable
and for the most part that was accurate,
but we did have a handful, which
were not so good and I worked right next to one of them,
the cube next to me and I did not like
what this guy did a lot.
So, he had this habit of
anytime a customer will call in with a
problem that either he didn't know how to solve,
or a problem that he thought
would take him too long to solve,
He would simply tell the customer to run ScanDisk,
and then when that was done to run defrag,
and then reboot the computer and if it didn't work,
call us back.
And of course, it almost never
fixed any
problem and so of course they would call back
and of course guess who
would usually get them on the phone?
The second time they called when there far more angry after waiting on hold to two more hours,

Turkish: 
It would usually be me and so I would have to walk them through the correct fix for the computer.
Now, part of the reason this guy did this
is because we were judged
somewhat by our stats, how many calls we took a day.
A lot of people be surprised to find that.
I only took about 20 calls a day
for an eight-hour work shift.
Now, you might think that doesn't sound like very many,
but a lot of the calls that
we had to deal with were
30-40 minute calls, so...
You know, 20 calls was doing good for me,
but this guy had like 40 calls a day
Yeah, and so he always felt like look at my he's always bragging about his stats.
"Look at my stats! I took 40 calls today!"
Fortunately, our boss did listen in to our phone calls.
So, you know that message you hear when you
call a lot of companies about:
"Your call may be monitored or recorded."
We had a similar message,
and so yeah, in many cases
The boss was listening in on the calls
and so he knew
My stats may not looked as good as his,
but he knew, by golly,
when I was done with the customer,
it was fixed or I was sending him apart to get it fixed
or whatever we needed to do,
and I wasn't telling to run ScanDisk and defrag!

English: 
It would usually be me and so I would have to walk them through the correct fix for the computer.
Now, part of the reason this guy did this
is because we were judged
somewhat by our stats, how many calls we took a day.
A lot of people be surprised to find that.
I only took about 20 calls a day
for an eight-hour work shift.
Now, you might think that doesn't sound like very many,
but a lot of the calls that
we had to deal with were
30-40 minute calls, so...
You know, 20 calls was doing good for me,
but this guy had like 40 calls a day
Yeah, and so he always felt like look at my he's always bragging about his stats.
"Look at my stats! I took 40 calls today!"
Fortunately, our boss did listen in to our phone calls.
So, you know that message you hear when you
call a lot of companies about:
"Your call may be monitored or recorded."
We had a similar message,
and so yeah, in many cases
The boss was listening in on the calls
and so he knew
My stats may not looked as good as his,
but he knew, by golly,
when I was done with the customer,
it was fixed or I was sending him apart to get it fixed
or whatever we needed to do,
and I wasn't telling to run ScanDisk and defrag!

Turkish: 
We had this other employee by the way, and he
had a really odd behavior.
So, we had these mute buttons on our phone
and it was a toggle button like you
push it once, the light
comes on and it's muted and then
you push it again and it goes off, you know.
Some of the older mute buttons you have to
physically hold them down while you talked.
We had this thing where he'd be talking
to a customer and he'd be like:
"Okay, click there,
click this and read me what it says there."
and then out of nowhere,
he'd push this button and he'd start yelling like:
"You stupid bleepity bleep idiot!
What a bleepity bleep moron!
Why can't you figure out this bleepity bleep computer?!"
and then he'd let off the mute button said:
"Okay, did you click on that?
Yeah, okay."
and he was so loud!
So, he was three cubes down for me and he was so loud,
sometimes my customers could hear that 
over my headset and he'd be like:
"Is that--- is that some one of your employees
talking to a customer like that?"
and I would always have to cover for him and say:
"No no, no, he was having an argument 
with another employee over there.
Don't worry about him."
You know, let's go on with this.
One day, he did push that mute button.
and I guess he didn't get it good enough.
The light didn't light up,
and he went off on a customer like that.

English: 
We had this other employee by the way, and he
had a really odd behavior.
So, we had these mute buttons on our phone
and it was a toggle button like you
push it once, the light
comes on and it's muted and then
you push it again and it goes off, you know.
Some of the older mute buttons you have to
physically hold them down while you talked.
We had this thing where he'd be talking
to a customer and he'd be like:
"Okay, click there,
click this and read me what it says there."
and then out of nowhere,
he'd push this button and he'd start yelling like:
"You stupid bleepity bleep idiot!
What a bleepity bleep moron!
Why can't you figure out this bleepity bleep computer?!"
and then he'd let off the mute button said:
"Okay, did you click on that?
Yeah, okay."
and he was so loud!
So, he was three cubes down for me and he was so loud,
sometimes my customers could hear that 
over my headset and he'd be like:
"Is that--- is that some one of your employees
talking to a customer like that?"
and I would always have to cover for him and say:
"No no, no, he was having an argument 
with another employee over there.
Don't worry about him."
You know, let's go on with this.
One day, he did push that mute button.
and I guess he didn't get it good enough.
The light didn't light up,
and he went off on a customer like that.

Turkish: 
[Laughs]
Oh boy, oh boy, What a day that was!
Surprisingly, he didn't get fired over that but,
[Laughs]
but, it was quite amusing!
And he wasn't wrong! Don't get me wrong,
I mean, the things he was saying
were correct!
In many cases they were,
bleepity bleep idiots, but you know,
you don't say that kind of thing.
Anyway, that is the end of my presentation!
How much time we got? Ooh, right on schedule, 45 minutes.
Because, I'll tell you what I'll do.
I got three things I'm gonna be giving away.
I have these are literally the last five
of these in existence.
This was a very limited run.
These are vinyl records of the Planet X3 soundtrack.
They're very nice, and I decided to hold these last five
I was going to give them away here,
because there will never be any more.
And then I'm gonna give away five copies of
Planet X3 the boxed set game,
and then whatever is left over after that
I've just got some Planet X3 soundtrack cassettes
I'll give away.
So, since these are far less valuable,
plus the fact,
that you get one of those inside the game anyway...

English: 
[Laughs]
Oh boy, oh boy, What a day that was!
Surprisingly, he didn't get fired over that but,
[Laughs]
but, it was quite amusing!
And he wasn't wrong! Don't get me wrong,
I mean, the things he was saying
were correct!
In many cases they were,
bleepity bleep idiots, but you know,
you don't say that kind of thing.
Anyway, that is the end of my presentation!
How much time we got? Ooh, right on schedule, 45 minutes.
Because, I'll tell you what I'll do.
I got three things I'm gonna be giving away.
I have these are literally the last five
of these in existence.
This was a very limited run.
These are vinyl records of the Planet X3 soundtrack.
They're very nice, and I decided to hold these last five
I was going to give them away here,
because there will never be any more.
And then I'm gonna give away five copies of
Planet X3 the boxed set game,
and then whatever is left over after that
I've just got some Planet X3 soundtrack cassettes
I'll give away.
So, since these are far less valuable,
plus the fact,
that you get one of those inside the game anyway...

Turkish: 
What we'll do is: we'll draw the tickets and then,
I'll let you pick, like, what you want and then I guess,
whoever's first gets to pick first.
We're gonna do it right here, shouldn't take very long.
[Audience member]
Did you ever get the foot-pedal call?
[8-Bit Guy]
Not me!
Now, I didn't get the foot-pedal call,
but one of my co-workers did.
It was actually a really old lady and she...
the tech kept telling her to use the mouse
and she didn't know what that was and
she was trying to get the computer set up,
like she just brought it home from the store
and couldn't figure out how to plug
all the stuff in and
when he finally described to her what it looked like,
she said: "Oh, I thought that was a foot-pedal,
like my sewing machine!"
So he, yeah, he had to tell her what that was for.
So yeah, somebody did get that call not me though.
Any other questions, while, we're waiting on that?
Let's hear.
[Audience member]
Did you ever have to frequently say, have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?

English: 
What we'll do is: we'll draw the tickets and then,
I'll let you pick, like, what you want and then I guess,
whoever's first gets to pick first.
We're gonna do it right here, shouldn't take very long.
[Audience member]
Did you ever get the foot-pedal call?
[8-Bit Guy]
Not me!
Now, I didn't get the foot-pedal call,
but one of my co-workers did.
It was actually a really old lady and she...
the tech kept telling her to use the mouse
and she didn't know what that was and
she was trying to get the computer set up,
like she just brought it home from the store
and couldn't figure out how to plug
all the stuff in and
when he finally described to her what it looked like,
she said: "Oh, I thought that was a foot-pedal,
like my sewing machine!"
So he, yeah, he had to tell her what that was for.
So yeah, somebody did get that call not me though.
Any other questions, while, we're waiting on that?
Let's hear.
[Audience member]
Did you ever have to frequently say, have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?

Turkish: 
[8-Bit Guy]
I don't think I ever said it exactly like that.
I think we would say, you know, 
let's try rebooting it or something of that effect.
But, most of the time customers
usually tried that already.
Before they called in, because
I mean, they're waiting on hold for two hours.
You know, they're usually gonna try
some stuff on their own.
[Audience Member]
I am curious, did anyone ever ask to
how to change the monitor to channel 3
and thought that would fix it?
Did that ever happen?
[8-Bit Guy]
No, no, I don't think, I don't think so.
Any other? It doesn't have to be about AST.
You can ask me about anything
in the few minutes we have left.
Yes sir?
[Audience member]
What was the most esoteric
piece of hardware that you helped someone install?
Like, esoteric expansion cards, or something?
Like something really weird
that someone wanted to install?
[8-Bit Guy]
Well, I usually didn't help people with stuff like that,
because if it didn't come with a computer,
we were not supposed to support it
and then, believe me, we got calls all the time!
People want us to help [them] install, you know,
software that they bought at the store or hardware.

English: 
[8-Bit Guy]
I don't think I ever said it exactly like that.
I think we would say, you know, 
let's try rebooting it or something of that effect.
But, most of the time customers
usually tried that already.
Before they called in, because
I mean, they're waiting on hold for two hours.
You know, they're usually gonna try
some stuff on their own.
[Audience Member]
I am curious, did anyone ever ask to
how to change the monitor to channel 3
and thought that would fix it?
Did that ever happen?
[8-Bit Guy]
No, no, I don't think, I don't think so.
Any other? It doesn't have to be about AST.
You can ask me about anything
in the few minutes we have left.
Yes sir?
[Audience member]
What was the most esoteric
piece of hardware that you helped someone install?
Like, esoteric expansion cards, or something?
Like something really weird
that someone wanted to install?
[8-Bit Guy]
Well, I usually didn't help people with stuff like that,
because if it didn't come with a computer,
we were not supposed to support it
and then, believe me, we got calls all the time!
People want us to help [them] install, you know,
software that they bought at the store or hardware.

Turkish: 
But, our job usually was to say, "No, you need to call that company's tech support for help with that."
Sometimes, they did call us, because like well
I already called them and they said
there's something wrong with my computer,
and so and then they would wind up calling us,
and then, you know,
there's only so much we can do in a situation like that.
So, we would you know, we'd listen
to what their problem was,
but nine times out of ten would say:
Well look, I'm sorry
I mean unless there's something you can physically point out as being wrong with a computer,
other than not working with this product,
there's just not much I can do to help you.
I don't really remember any specifically bizarre piece of hardware anything though, sorry.
Any other questions about anything
AST, 8-Bit Guy or 8-Bit Keys?
[Audience Member]
I am not familiar with this game up here [Planet X3],
bu ne?
[8-Bit Guy]
Oh, It's a game I wrote and I've sold several thousand copies of it already.
I usually sell them for 40 bucks each so
I'm being pretty generous today!
It runs on IBM PCs.
It will run as little as a 4.77 megahertz XT
with CGA, or it'll run on

English: 
But, our job usually was to say, "No, you need to call that company's tech support for help with that."
Sometimes, they did call us, because like well
I already called them and they said
there's something wrong with my computer,
and so and then they would wind up calling us,
and then, you know,
there's only so much we can do in a situation like that.
So, we would you know, we'd listen
to what their problem was,
but nine times out of ten would say:
Well look, I'm sorry
I mean unless there's something you can physically point out as being wrong with a computer,
other than not working with this product,
there's just not much I can do to help you.
I don't really remember any specifically bizarre piece of hardware anything though, sorry.
Any other questions about anything
AST, 8-Bit Guy or 8-Bit Keys?
[Audience Member]
I am not familiar with this game up here [Planet X3],
what is it?
[8-Bit Guy]
Oh, It's a game I wrote and I've sold several thousand copies of it already.
I usually sell them for 40 bucks each so
I'm being pretty generous today!
It runs on IBM PCs.
It will run as little as a 4.77 megahertz XT
with CGA, or it'll run on

Turkish: 
later machines with VGA.
It's a real-time strategy game.
Everybody got a ticket?
What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna hand the...
I'm gonna hand the microphone to Jordan here
And she's gonna call ticket numbers
and you raise your hand and you'll tell me what you want and I will bring it to you.
[Outro Music]

English: 
later machines with VGA.
It's a real-time strategy game.
Everybody got a ticket?
What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna hand the...
I'm gonna hand the microphone to Jordan here
And she's gonna call ticket numbers
and you raise your hand and you'll tell me what you want and I will bring it to you.
[Outro Music]
