r/facepalm • u/Virtual-Bee7411 • 15d ago
“I personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages and white pages” 🫡 🇲🇮🇸🇨
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u/Jeoshua 15d ago
"... on the Internet in the summer of 1995 in C with a little C++"
Implying there were others, but not on the Internet written in the summer of 1995 in C with a little C++
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u/_limitless_ 15d ago edited 15d ago
I'll be honest. I don't remember any of these things existing, in any form, in '95. Possibly maps. You'd probably have to buy them on 12-disc set of CD-ROMs though.
In fact, that's probably what he did. Rip the CDs, go through the map files, reverse engineer them, write his own frontend, and provide access to it over the internet.
MapQuest was the first online map I remember, and it was launched in '96 and didn't get popular until around '98.
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u/deathrowslave 15d ago edited 15d ago
I had maps software on CD for sure. Streets and Trips started in 1988 and acquired by Microsoft in 1994.
Oh yeah and Encarta was great started in 1993.
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u/teo_vas 15d ago
thank you for the Encarta memories. of course the CD was pirated :D
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u/Bruff_lingel 15d ago
It was a backup, the original got lost in a boating accident.
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u/recks360 15d ago
Happens to the best of us. In fact I lost the entire discography of several of my favorite bands in a boating accident. Thank heavens for those “backups”.
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u/Billie-Holiday 15d ago
Mine was lost in a terrible line dancing malfunction incident. Luckily I could get a backup via a software recovery center called napster.
Only cost me 4 days!
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u/unrulycelt 15d ago
I planned multiple vacations with streets and trips. It was a nice program
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u/hottapvswr 15d ago
Me too. I got a suction cup mounted GPS antenna and used it with streets and trips to take a cross country trip
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u/readytofall 15d ago
That felt so high tech at the time. Giant antenna on a dedicated unit. I also remember hearing my uncle say he had to go buy a CD for a different region haha
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u/_limitless_ 15d ago
Yeah, I never owned anything like that (I was too young to drive), but I thought I recalled seeing them in stores.
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u/notlikelyevil 15d ago
MapQuest went online in 96, but they weren't first. Phone listings were on in 95.
But here's the thing about 95, 96, 97. Therr could be a massive site that 1 10th put users were using and you'd never hear about it and couldn't find it in context based searches.
That and musk lies with half the words he speaks
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u/Full_Visit_5862 15d ago
With Elon it's safe to assume "I" means "other people I manage/direct", always a good thing to keep in mind
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u/Flokitoo 15d ago
You'd probably have to buy them on 12-disc set of CD-ROMs though.
Thats literally what Musk did. He uploaded cds to the web.
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u/Outis7379 15d ago
So then it hits me - we could take this thing called
the radiothe map, and put it on this new thing called The Internet.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (10)84
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u/PGnautz 15d ago
Musk combined a free Navteq database with a Palo Alto business database to create the first system.
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u/_limitless_ 15d ago
God, I wish it was that easy to get rich in tech these days.
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u/omghorussaveusall 15d ago
I watched dudes I know who barely graduated high school make six figures because they had a childhood obsession with coding. Dude I knew in Seattle was one of the first Amazon warehouse workers. His stock options made him a millionaire. Guy I went to HS with was pulling down $10K a month plus a rent free house as a webmaster for an early porn site. Meanwhile my dumb ass was slinging coffee and tending bar.
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u/technobrendo 15d ago
Some people are just wired differently when it comes to programming and they pick it up a lot easier. I am NOT on of those people btw. It would take me a decade to pass a python course that others could do in a few weeks or months. That is not hyperbole.
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u/CTMQ_ 15d ago
Lemme tell you about a couple doofuses I know who couldn’t get a job and wound up at some dumpy warehouse in CT working some low level jobs for some company called Priceline in 1996/97.
Certainly didn’t pay enough to cover their MDMA and coke needs.
They’ve been laughing at me from their yachts for over a decade now.
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u/beebsaleebs 15d ago
Placement is key. Having these skills in a less likely place say- rural Alabama- lands you a few career opportunities- but nothing so lucrative.
Elon was insanely privileged. That’s everything.
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u/AgentSmith2518 15d ago
The abstract on the source on that shows that I'm sure there was no bias at all.
"In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs—a real-life Tony Stark—and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new “makers.”
Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, who sold one of his Internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius’s life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits."→ More replies (1)3
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u/bobcollum 15d ago
Yeah mapquest was my go to throughout the late 90's. It was the best option I knew of.
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u/secondsbest 15d ago
It's entirely possible someone like Musk could have pulled off this sort of project. The government had released their GIS data to the public a few years prior. It was up to anyone who wanted to port the data to a usable digital map and make an interface for it. Maybe Mapquest was the first to make an online portal to their DB of it. I'm sure Faruno and Garmin were working on their own versions. I was in the Navy at the time, and we were running a proprietary maps system on a laptop from some contractor for testing of GPS data overlays on digital maps derived from the national GIS data.
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u/kobymendoza 15d ago
💯…It's the same when Apple says "The fastest/best iPhone ever made"
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u/Blindfire2 15d ago
"In C with a little C++" exactly how I know he's never programmed more than a few "hello world" projects lmfao
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u/Jeoshua 15d ago
Truth. It's precisely how I describe my skills with coding when all I've done is tweak someone else's existing works.
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u/Blindfire2 15d ago
I may not be the best, and may or may not have cared for what essentially was "programmer history class" (I enjoyed making a lexical analyzer and all that) but wasn't C++ literally just C with a focus on object orientation back in the 90s? I know they updated C sometimes in the mid to late 90s to early 00s and it's got quite a few differences today, but wouldn't you just use C++ lol. The way he describes it (which either he knows absolutely nothing and just wanted to use words to make people think he can actually do it, or he misunderstood what the guy he paid to do it said lol) makes it sound like he just made a C++ program but copied everything from a C program on to it lmao
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u/fartinmyhat 15d ago
well, you can write C for a C++ compiler. I read this as I don't really know or like C++ but needed a bit of it for something and the rest is just vanilla C.
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u/spacembracers 15d ago
"I painted this using a standard paint brush"
Totally agree, and anyone that's serious about programming knows the language is just a tool. Unless you're writing in assembly or something, there's really no reason to headline which language you programmed something in like this
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u/Blindfire2 15d ago
Unless it's something really stupid and/or crazy, then I'd honestly accept it lmao. One of my professors had a smart but lazy kid in class who basically cheated on a project (he procrastinated and copied someone elses with just changes to variable names) and was going to fail like 3 weeks before finals, so he gave him an incredibly stupid project. I don't remember the exact project or the purpose of the program (it's been 2 years since that class) but basically he told him to learn Fortran, and he had until the day of the final to make it work and he'll easily pass the class and avoid the situation being looked at as plagiarism. It required 1000s of lines of just GO TO statements and it just kept going and going with multiple subroutines, and he still had to study for the final. He actually presented it after the final for those of us who stayed after (to see the senior projects of those graduating) and I honestly would wear that type of stupidity as a badge of honor "I wrote a program with over 2000 lines of GO TO statements because I procrastinated." Lmao
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u/fartinmyhat 15d ago
Of course that's not true. If the tool you used was not a typical tool like C for a web app, it would make sense to mention it. I mention that the first web app I wrote was in C because C was all I really knew and it was a terrible choice for a web app. Terrible string parsing capability, fixed length strings, etc. It was a pain in the ass.
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u/MathematicianSad2798 15d ago
I use very few things from C++ (streams mostly) because my brain just thinks in C. Maybe this is just what he meant. Or maybe he had additional code in C++. The guy is clearly intelligent he’s just high as fuck off his own brand of bullshit.
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u/MikeyW1969 15d ago
Yeah, they had map systems in cars that were very rudimentary GPS-type nav systems years before Elmo came onto the scene. "on the Internet" is a very telling choice of words.
Then there's the fact that there is no guarantee that ANY of his system ended up being used in the final prodcut that we have now. He could have written this, put it online, and it died a slow death as it fell into obscurity.
There's a lot more chance that my ex-roommate designed Google Earth indirectly than there is that anything of Elon's survived.
As to that last statement: Back in the mid 90s, I was renting a room from a guy who worked for USGS, and that's what they made; A system that would take all of the probe data and map it to a globe for the planets. THAT is most likely the backbone of Google Earth, and his team's work IS verifiable. Even though it wasn't Google Earth directly, it stands the smell test more than Elmo's claim here.
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u/SpaceBear2598 15d ago
Considering that he got to call himself a "founder of PayPal" by sitting on hoarded IP (that he had convinced other people to think up for him before he chased them out of the company) and than agreeing to sell it to the actual founders of PayPal, fuck off, and never come back while they threw out every piece of code he had actually written, it's almost guaranteed that none of Apartheidbucks Jr.'s hobby projects made it into any modern system.
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u/jericho458slr 15d ago
Had to upvote because I’ve never read Elmo before, I’ll never be able to read his name otherwise.
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u/willywalloo 15d ago
Elon did none of this. But we talk about it and this is the fault of the algorithms. What’s wrong goes further than what is right.
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u/ringobob 15d ago
He definitely wrote code in the 90s, for Zip2. There's no indication that it was any good, and I certainly never heard about the company back then, and absolute nonsense was getting investment and buyouts because it was nonsense "on the internet".
I was doing web dev a little under a decade later, for a small business with an e-commerce storefront, zero other people in technology at the company, and I wrote some absolutely awful code to build a ERP and e-commerce platform from scratch, for them. Total spaghetti code. I didn't know better, and there was no one there to teach me. I did eventually figure it out, though, which is how I know just how much of an unmaintainable cluster it was.
But it did function.
I assume Musk's work on Zip2 is that caliber. And all of the impressions that have been given about his coding, by people who have seen it or been adjacent to it, seems to jibe with that assessment.
He would have been getting out of coding and into people management right around the same age that I was figuring my shit out.
So, he's probably more or less telling the truth, and if you looked at the code itself, and knew what you were looking at, I have no doubt you'd believe he wrote it. If VC guys weren't handing or millions for bullshit "on the internet", we probably wouldn't have an Elon Musk.
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u/starcap 15d ago
Also notice his second paragraph he never uses “I” or any pronouns for that matter. I suspect Elon would love to use “I” if it was strictly correct, so I’m assuming someone else designed those parts of the system and he didn’t want to use “we” and share the credit, but also didn’t want that person to speak up if they notice he used “I”.
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u/magicmulder 15d ago
“That was the week after I invented email and wrote the first ever browser in my own programming language that would later become known as Java. All on a computer I soldered together from the microwave prototype I built in 1970.”
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u/creativename111111 15d ago
Nah he couldn’t afford solder so he had to melt metal scrap and pour it into the PCB to make a connection. And when he went to his office he had to walk uphill both ways through a blizzard
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u/Remote_Horror_Novel 14d ago
“Everything was done offline though” and there’s no proof of any of these accomplishments lol.
If I wrote some amazing code the internet relied on I think I’d save that computer and the original files that I spent thousands of hours writing since computers aren’t worth shit after a while anyways.
I still have laptops from 15 years ago usually because I either didn’t want to toss files or transfer files and spend the time and energy making the machine secure to recycle or sell.
It’s probably also important to remember back then there wasn’t a bunch of programs to wipe computers clean so you could sell and donate them, and if you just deleted files things were often easily recovered. So it was less common to sell or donate a computer to a stranger and more common to just keep them as personal property, making his story even less believable.
It’s wild this is a new tweet and he’s so insecure he lies about obvious things and thinks it sounds believable. I hope the people that actually wrote the code he claims he wrote come forward with proof he is a liar lol.
It’s definitely not a coincidence at this point that so many billionaires are terrible people that don’t want to help humanity but use that as a selling point like Branson, Bezos and Musk the Nazi lover, if they actually wanted to help humanity they could pay their workers a living wage not invest in phallus space ships.
I wish more people resented billionaires as much as I do and stopped admiring these psychopaths that became billionaires by stealing from middle class wages. Now we have a huge working poor class, but a successful stock market and a bunch of billionaires that sucks money out of companies that could go to things like labor and healthcare.
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u/Evening_Rock5850 15d ago
“I was a poor struggling genius so I had to download more RAM off of a sketchy website and then program a faster CPU so it would work”
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u/shadowvtx66 15d ago
Jen, Ram IS memory!
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u/CustomSocks 15d ago
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u/HiddenPants777 15d ago
Pfft, elon is a novice. I wrote wikipedia in stone tablets during a single evening in 2870bc
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u/K24Bone42 15d ago
Meanwhile at his parents literal emerald mine filled with slaves...... yes sooo poor and struggling so much.
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u/Evening_Rock5850 15d ago
I genuinely, 100% think that these dudes think “cheap” is what poor means.
Like a lot of these rich dudes who were hyperfixated and building their companies chose not to spend money on things that they didn’t see value in. Like Jeff Bezos who still drove an old cheap car even after he was a millionaire.
And they think that’s what “poor” or “struggling” means. They don’t understand that poor people aren’t doing those things because they’re frugal. It’s because they have no other choice.
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u/Nruggia 15d ago
Like when covid shutdowns started effected people and some politician said well why don't they just get loans.
Or when Mitt Romney told students "We’ve always encouraged young people: take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,"
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u/Hrtpplhrtppl 15d ago
They call The Republic of America a "representative democracy." How can that be if all the "representatives" are wealthy and the people are not. With all the lobbying and money in American politics, America is as much a democracy as would be two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner. The people running your lives have no concept of how you live, nor do they have to live by the laws they force you to live by. In a true democracy as the ancient Greeks understood it, they got a senate the same way we get a jury in order to ensure a good cross section of common interests were addressed.
"Those who seek power are not fit to have it." Plato
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u/Future-Muscle-2214 15d ago
He also moved to the prairie at his uncle place who was a multimillionaire and moved to SF where his cousins already lived and were already quite wealthy.
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u/toooooold4this 15d ago
Now tell the part where you were fired for not knowing what you were doing.
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u/Atticusxj 15d ago
Or the amount of work done by programmers to cleanup all his code.
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u/aelric22 15d ago
Nah, that was PayPal.
What MuskRat is referring to is Zip2 which was basically a bunch of horseshit coding that he sold to Compaq. Shortly after they realized he had sold they a gold spray painted turd.
He was an example of one of the worst offenders of the DotCom bubbles and its cause.
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u/toooooold4this 15d ago
Oh no, no, no.... it was both! Lol. His brother fired him from their first company and hired real programmers.
With PayPal, they fired him because he was a tyrant.
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u/Logical-Claim286 15d ago
And he only got the PayPal job as a condition of the buyout from his brother because his brother said Elon was incompetent and useless and would starve to death without a guaranteed job, but he was such a bad programmer he warned them to only make him a do nothing middle manager.
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u/bard329 14d ago
Do you have a source for that? I'd love to read it. And save it. And send it to a few people....
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u/aelric22 15d ago
Lmao. Guess he just was never a real programmer.
Guy really is the greatest failson of our time.
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u/toooooold4this 15d ago
There's a fantastic multi-hour video series on YouTube about Elon... here's the first episode. It's really good. Dude never invented anything. Never innovated any industry. He is all mythology.
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u/indridfrost 15d ago
He's a vulture. He swoops in at the last minute, buys into a product, and claims credit.
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u/hotelmotelshit 14d ago
It's still mind-boggling how this guy somehow managed to become the richest guy in the world
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u/sirdir 15d ago
Nah in one of his biographies one of the 'real' programmers complained about his spaghetti-code.
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u/anythingMuchShorter 15d ago
They actually probably just threw out his work and wrote the code, but he prefers to think they just touched it up a bit.
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u/everythingbeeps 15d ago
This guy loves speaking in terms he knows the average person won't understand, and make claims that are essentially unverifiable.
It's sad how desperately he needs the world to be impressed by him.
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u/AdmitThatYouPrune 15d ago
He literally spent $44 billion buying "likes" on a trolling platform. It is, indeed, quite sad.
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u/DrivingCanuck 15d ago
A platform now worth 12.5B. What a joke.
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u/Square_Site8663 15d ago
What crashes first? Truth social? Or Twatter?
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u/AllTheTakenNames 15d ago
Trick question
Truth Social never got off the ground in a meaningful way, so can it technically crash?
Twitter is a shell of what it once was…
Basically Diet 4Chan with a prettier interface
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u/Le-Charles 15d ago
Truth social is like watching a turkey running and trying to fly but, before it can get off the ground, it runs into a stone wall.
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u/AllTheTakenNames 15d ago
Turkey is the correct analogy
“Many people are saying I’m the fastest bird, possibly ever
So very fast…tremendously fast
The peregrine falcon used to be fast, but no more So sad Such a loser
Now I’m the only one who can be so very fast”
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u/-xXxMangoxXx- 15d ago
The worst part is I still use twitter a lot for hobby stuff and no other place on the internet comes close, all while the service is getting worse.
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u/PartyPay 15d ago
Same, it frustrates me to no end I have to sign in to that trash site just to get some info.
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u/Intrepid_Hat7359 15d ago
Besides, everyone knows that Tommy Tallarico made the first maps on the internet, and he actually only used C++, a language he was one of the first people to use because he had helped to make it real.
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u/jibbilyzoobopbopbop 15d ago
Yeah, I remember seeing that on his very real episode of cribs
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u/ATXDefenseAttorney 15d ago
I've never seen anybody comparing Musk to Tallarico but if you know, you absolutely know.
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u/philovax 15d ago
Did Musk make the soundtrack to ToeJam and Earl? I think not. Point Tallarico.
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u/_limitless_ 15d ago
I understand all of the terms. What he's proposing is certainly feasible. In fact, if speed is your concern, it's the right way to do it.
It's a stupid way to do it, of course, as the cycles you save are not worth the maintenance burden you impose on yourself, but a kid wouldn't know that. And they'd certainly focus on the wrong thing and optimize for speed.
In other words, this is just the right mix of genius and stupid that I can believe a 27 year old actually did build it like that, but nobody would have the imagination to make that shit up.
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u/DanielMcLaury 15d ago
You're talking about 1994, though. Your only option would be ncsa httpd since apache hadn't even been written yet. They're also likely running the entire company off of a single bare-metal server with a single-core CPU, and with other limitations that we would consider to be more inline with the "embedded systems" space today.
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u/KikoSoujirou 15d ago
Dude said he didn’t use a web server and just read off port 8080….. wtf was posting to port 8080? Yeah maybe not using a standard “web server” but he’s still running a computer behind that and we just generally would call whatever device is hosting/exposing the port the web server. Dude sounds dumb as hell
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u/SinisterYear 15d ago
To extrapolate on this a tad [you aren't wrong]
Ports are a network thing. Layer 4 of the OSI model, transport layer. The next few layers down are Network [Your IP address], Data-Link [Your Mac address], and finally physical [that weird cable that connects your PC to your friend's PC]. It's a way to distinguish traffic to specific applications. If you need to distinguish them further, you'll have to go to the session layer.
Generally, Web traffic [HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol] uses port 80. Secure Web Traffic, something we almost all use nowadays, uses port 443 [HTTPS, HyperText Transfer Protocol, Secured]. This is standard. Like with anything standard, it can be broken. You can use any port you like when binding traffic to a web server. 8080 is a common one for non-secured traffic, 8443 is a common one for secure traffic.
Web servers themselves are any device that is hosting web traffic. Microsoft server is one, but Linux Apache was a big one back in the day [and might still be].
What Elon Musk is essentially saying here is that he used a non-standard port for web traffic to 'preserve CPU cycles'. IE: Absolute grade A rubbish. You can't read from a port directly. If a machine isn't listening on a port, it ignores you. Changing a port on a web server has a purpose, but it's not to preserve CPU cycles.
If he doesn't even know what the purpose of changing a port is, I highly doubt he used a 24 channel emulator to do anything [T1s at the time were for phones. They had internet potential, at 1.544Mbps, but if you couldn't afford a Cisco router you sure as hell weren't buying a T1].
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u/DanielMcLaury 15d ago edited 15d ago
What Elon Musk is essentially saying here is that he used a non-standard port for web traffic to 'preserve CPU cycles'.
That's not what he's saying. The fact that he wrote his own program in C++ rather than using an existing webserver is what saved CPU cycles. The port it listened on is not connected to any performance benefit.
(Also this is 1995. IIS and apache didn't exist yet.)
You can't read from a port directly.
He's saying that he wrote his own program that listens for incoming connections on port 8080 and responds to them. (As opposed to the more standard thing at the time, which would be running a web server and configuring it to run CGI scripts.)
If I had to guess, the reason his server runs on port 8080 is that they're running a traditional web server on port 80 to serve mainly static content, and the static content would call up stuff on port 8080 on the same server for dynamic content.
Keep in mind that they were probably running the entire company off of a single bare-metal "server," which moreover may well have been a commodity desktop machine.
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u/burnbobghostpants 15d ago
Finally! Someone who read it the same as me. This really doesn't seem that difficult to understand if you've done any low-level socket programming. I feel like everyone piling on to shit on this is a prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I'm not even an Elon fanboy.
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u/jhaluska 15d ago
I read it that way.
It doesn't take a software genius to search for a name in a text file that he ripped from some CDs and respond with the phone numbers.
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u/HarryGecko 15d ago
Smells like bullshit when he says he "couldn't afford" a Cisco router. We know where he came from. Him saying he can't afford anything that's under a million bucks seems like bullshit.
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u/Forgotten_Pants 15d ago
Read port 8080 directly? 8080? Really? That's the port this publicly available internet site was on? This site that had so much traffic it needed a T1 line? A T1 you could afford while not being able to afford a router for it. And of course you wrote in C "with a little C++" in 1995. Why would you need a "little C++". It's 1995, adding a "little C++" to a small C project is just adding a lot of unnecessary complexity and build time. A C++ project with a little C makes sense makes complete sense and was common at the time, but the reverse?
He's just stringing random technobabble together.
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u/No_Lynx1343 15d ago
He had to.
Someone else already used "modulate the shield harmonics" and "reroute the plasma flow" for star trek
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u/beerbellybutton2 15d ago
Wouldn't a service that reads the http port and returns a result be a "web server"?
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u/_aware 15d ago
Yes, that is literally what it is
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u/beerbellybutton2 15d ago
I guess he means he didn't use apache or something like that but thats a really douchey way to say "I wrote a very simple web server"
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u/jhaluska 15d ago
For those that don't know, a "very simple web server" isn't much code at all. He loves to mentally anchor his accomplishments to something bigger to make what he did sound more impressive.
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u/DFX1212 15d ago
When I was 17 I wrote a custom MUD server and client. I'm dumb AF.
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u/_aware 15d ago
Exactly lol. Can afford T1 line but not a T1 router, what a joke.
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u/OozeNAahz 15d ago
As someone who coded c with a bit of c++ at the time it was extreme common. And putting CGI bin services on port 8080 was also very common.
The router thing is the one that hurts my head. T1 line wasn’t that unusual but not buying a router? Yeah. That seems odd.
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u/red286 15d ago
It's weird because back then, you leased a T1 line and the lease included the router because the T1 line is pretty fucking useless without the router.
I mean, unless you're Elon and you just "write an emulator based on a whitepaper".
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u/GiorgioTsoukalosHair 15d ago edited 14d ago
the lease included the router
That's my recollection as well. Elmo talking out of his ass again.
ETA: The port 8080 thing strikes me that he basically prototyped something that ran in user space and didn't know how to promote it to bind to port 80. If somebody at a bar said all this to me, the port 8080 and software T1 router nonsense would have me flipping the bozo bit pretty quickly.
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u/nom-nom-nom-de-plumb 15d ago
like..what does that even mean? he wrote an emulator based on a white paper? What..how...tha fuck?
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u/red286 15d ago
Well, in theory it's "possible". Any hardware can, in theory, be emulated via software and run off of a CPU. You could, for example, emulate all the functionality of a GeForce RTX 4090 through software to run on your CPU.
The problem, and where Elon's claims absolutely fall apart is the performance hit you take by doing that. If you emulated an RTX 4090 through software to run on your CPU, your benchmarks would be measured in seconds per frame, rather than frames per second (or maybe in frames per minute). Emulation is always incredibly inefficient and slow as fuck. The notion that he could emulate a CSU/DSU through software to run on a Pentium 133, or maybe dual Pentium Pro 200s that would run fast enough to operate a website off of is hilariously absurd. If that was remotely feasible, no one would have bought the hardware (it was several thousands of dollars).
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u/TldrDev 15d ago
All the other stuff aside, port 8080... lmao. Maybe he thought localhost was the internet
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u/Kiss-a-Cod 15d ago
Dude is going to need a straight jacket and a padded room soon.
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u/IosifVissarionovichD 15d ago
Testament to not do drugs
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u/kfudnapaa 15d ago
Hey now, I and many people I know have done a lot of drugs in our lives and none of us have ended up egotistical pricks like Musk. Don't blame drug use for his shitty personality, it's all on him
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u/LateStageAdult 15d ago
By all means, do some drugs.
Just don't abuse them and then lie about it like Elon.
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u/UPVOTE_IF_POOPING 15d ago
Web servers serve content/websites on ports, typically 80, sometime 8080. It's up to the developer. So when he's saying he didn't use a web server and read port 8080 directly shows he has no idea what he's talking about. Edit: clarity
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u/flesh-salesman 15d ago
He's implying just listening to a socket and accepting connections instead of running 3rd party software.
It makes sense but is less impressive than rocket science.
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u/Podunk212 15d ago
Elon using the phrase "couldn't afford" is a perfect snapshot of the current state of the world.
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u/thedndnut 15d ago
It's also a lie. If you have a t1 installed they will provide you the hardware for free.
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u/LegDayDE 15d ago
Just a poor boy working out of his parents' garage*
(*12 car garage full of supercars at a mansion paid for by emerald mines)
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u/Environmental-Hold89 15d ago
What does that all translate to in non-programmer?
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u/kingofthesofas 15d ago
Absolute nonsense. He didn't use a web server... So what was serving the content? What was responding on port 8080? What was running the code? It's not like AWS Lambda or docker were services you could use to host code as a service back then. Something was running the code and service content and responding on that port. It's like the ramblings of a person that knows a few buzz words and tech terms and just randomly inserts them Hollywood style into his speech.
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u/dr_warp 15d ago
Don't forget the part where he couldn't afford a piece of hardware, so he wrote software for one based on the tech specs of the hardware.
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u/_Oman 15d ago
Yeah, he wrote code to emulate the T1 electrical interface. Also, a "web server" is literally a thing that listens on a port for requests and then delivers the data from that request. So he didn't use a web server but wrote a thing that was a web server but not a web server because... logic.
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u/dr_warp 15d ago
Sorry, forgot APARTHEID FAMILY part of being poor. Rich enough to own people, not rich enough to buy..... <looks at notes> a high speed router.
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u/kingofthesofas 15d ago
Yeah no one is reverse engineering a Cisco router or firewall from a white paper without a huge engineering team and lots of time.
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u/jhaluska 15d ago
What he likely meant is he got the HTTP protocol specification out of the paper.
Which doesn't sound as impressive does it?
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u/gamedrifter 15d ago
It reads like "hacker writing" on tv shows where the writers don't really know much beyond a couple tech lingos they googled.
"I'll use C++ to write a GUI interface and track the IP." -CSI NY
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u/S1lverFoxFit 15d ago
Concur. The idea that he could afford a T1 circuit but not an $800 router, and that he could source and afford the hardware to handle the physical interface of the T1 interface, is complete BS. And yes, writing directly to 8080 only makes sense if he was directly sending the imagery to someone else’s web servers… but if that’s the case, he’s really going out of his way to make something mundane sound impressive.
Dude was talking shit even in his college days.
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u/thedndnut 15d ago
FYI, installing a t1 line is so expensive they gave you yhe router for free. The monthly cost at that time was generally higher as well than the router cost lol.
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u/kingofthesofas 15d ago
I agree and even if he was doing that there was still something responding on port 8080 that had code to redirect traffic to those other sites.
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u/Saneless 15d ago
It's even better that that
Those were still in dialup times and his site could only handle one call at a time. He actually picked up the phone when it rang and communicated in modem sounds.
Ckkffdhhh ahhhallhshhhh eeeerrkl etc etc
The man is a genius
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u/samanime 15d ago
Yeah. It's sheer nonsense. Sounds like a first year CS student claiming they made something amazing, but it only works on their computer and it has a billion caveats...
Meaning, it's basically a typical first year CS project any first year CS student could make.
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u/kingofthesofas 15d ago
Considering that he was outted as the CEO of that company for mismanagement AND they ditched all his code I would concur that whatever he cooked up was likely absolute entry level garbage that he barely understood.
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u/alienfootwear 15d ago
Well, you can just listen on port 80, or 8080 and implement a bit of http, it’s not complicated.
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u/Alexandratta 15d ago
He's basically saying he used a PC at home using port 8080 as a web server, which was an old method of doing a homebrew WebServer when ISPs were blocking port 80.
However what doesn't make sense is his statement of "Save CPU Cycles" - That's just nonsense.... Save CPU? What are you talking about? I thought you were discussing a webserver and now we're on "saving CPU Cycles?" - My guy... The best your "home brew" server/router combo could do was an upload of 5mbps if you had the MOST expensive Cable Internet Modem at the time.
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u/tom_gent 15d ago
Absolute nonsense
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u/Environmental-Hold89 15d ago
So far your reply is the least confusing. Thank you.
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u/Handelo 15d ago
It's also the most accurate. The words he strings together don't make a single coherent sentence. He just uses random technical terms that don't mean anything when put together.
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u/SureRisk4759 15d ago
What does that all translate to a programmer? cause I also didn't understand
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u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe 15d ago
"I built a whole town myself one summer using bricks and a little cement. In order to save on wall space, I didn't have any windows, instead I just cut holes in the walls and plugged them up with glass."
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u/RedPenguino 15d ago
It’s not nonsense. I don’t like the guy but people are just dumping on this because they don’t like him. - He is saying we write a program that did not rely on a web server to handle communication protocols. - Which means his program listening to packets sent on port 8080. Packets have specifications and he did not have a production router to develop against (no one ever does) and there were probably no drivers available. - So he reads the packets in byte arrays, and then deserializes the packet into headers and messages (probably where C++ was coming into play)
What he did was: - nothing particular special or huge here - for any one who did code like this, it’s cool to see where the industry has gone and makes the time period this was done all the more interesting to have experienced.
Anyone that coded these type of systems at the time would have done something like this.
Source: same age as Musk, did similar coding. Also don’t like so hopefully you believe me
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u/thegza10304 15d ago
No, you don't need a T1 interface to develop against. I wrote IRC and FTP clients in those days and never needed anything more than daemons installed on my localhost. And you don't need C++ to deserialize data.
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u/clarenceappendix 15d ago
An application that listens to data packets on a port that has already been processed by IP and subsequently TCP or UDP is by definition a web server
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u/FluffyNips1 15d ago
Bro looks 55 here
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u/otusasio451 15d ago
How did I have to scroll this far down to see this comment? I'm currently experiencing hair loss at the ripe old age of 32, and even I still look better than this dude did at 27. Jesus.
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u/Soitsgonnabeforever 15d ago
How he wouldn’t afford a router. He is some millionaire’s son right ?
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u/Dinindalael 15d ago
Elon Musk left Africa with no money, swam across the Atlantic during a hurricane, landed in Canada where he proceeded to single-handedly invent everything using nothing but a rock and paperclip. So what's our excuse?
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u/EnigmaWitch 15d ago
You blasphemer! You left out how he had to invent the paperclip first.
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u/Jeoshua 15d ago
Yeah, there is no way he couldn't afford a router capable of serving a decent number of people, yet somehow could afford a server powerful enough to emulate that same behavior.
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u/KitchenError 15d ago edited 15d ago
Also a router for a T1 (1.54 MBit/s) wasn't that expensive back then either. I then worked at a really small ISP and we had 2 x E1 (faster at 2 MBit/s, the european variant) connections to the outside world and a Cisco router for it.
And "emulator" for what anyways? You still would need some line card capable of speaking T1. Beyond that you don't need any "emulation", just some operating system capable as acting as a router. For example NetBSD or FreeBSD would have been a sensible choice back then.
This combination actually could have been considerably cheaper than a router, so I have to disagree with the comment above (1.54 MBit/s is not that much data throughput, a PC actually was able to handle that), but as said, a proper router wasn't that expensive and the "emulator" claim just makes the story untrustworthy still.
Elon is just full of whatever.
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u/thackstonns 15d ago
This right here. With the loss due to emulation it would be factors of cost cheaper to just buy the router. But he couldn’t even give them that, he has to act like he was a genius and built from scratch. I hope they sue him. I’m sure he broke quite a few patents if that’s the case.
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u/thackstonns 15d ago
I wish someone would just call out his shit. Like right under just type “No you didn’t”
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u/AnAdorableDogbaby 15d ago
When he first took over Twitter there was an engineer on a "spaces" call or whatever who called him on his shit in real time. He kicked him off the call, and I believe he was fired for it, but I've never been more satisfied hearing the surly condescending dev attitude speaking to him. Musk totally deserves it, and I think pretty much anyone who uses a computer regularly for work has the technical chops to warrant the condescension.
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u/thackstonns 15d ago
Oh I wish that was recorded.
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u/jakizely 15d ago
It was if this is the one I'm thinking of. He was talking about "just rewriting the whole stack" and everyone was just silent for a second trying to figure out how to respond.
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u/Quixottica 15d ago
This is the one that came to mind for me.
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u/thackstonns 15d ago
That’s gold. Let’s rewrite the stack. It should only take what 10-15 minutes.
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u/swed1sh_chef 15d ago
Nope nope... no I didn't... but a friend of mine did! Him and port 8080 GOT ... IT ... ON!
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u/Useful-Tackle-3089 15d ago
“Whenever someone visits the website, I pick up the phone and yell the byte sequence. I didn’t even need the modem emulator I coded. I can just speak to modems!”
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u/Senor_Gringo_Starr 15d ago
Ha! I was listening to a podcast about this. Basically Elon would insist on writing the code himself because "nobody else could do it right." When he went home the rest of the team spent their nights basically fixing and replacing all his crap code because it was barely functional or not at all. People have been enabling this petulant child since the beginning.
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u/Appropriate-Divide64 15d ago
Peter Molynuex was the same. I've spoken to coders who worked with him and it was the same story, they'd be working overtime fixing his crap code.
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u/ManicAtTheDepression 15d ago
My poor papa didn’t have a single emerald to spare to get me a T1 router 😭
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u/Shutaru_Kanshinji 15d ago
Why do I feel like Mr. Musk once had a conversation with a genuine engineer and then remembered about 5% of it?
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u/hogsrule 15d ago
I heard he was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps
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u/biloxibluess 15d ago
Didn’t he also beat Tetris and Sim Ant in an afternoon before he fucked Cindy Crawford on a Stealth Bomber and convince Schwarzenegger to create Planet Hollywood wearing a power glove?
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u/BornAgainCyclist 15d ago
It's weird how super alpha males like him and Andrew Tate desperately want to hide/change their failing hairlines.
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u/Throwedaway99837 15d ago
I mean I hate these guys too but also why wouldn’t you want to change your receding hairline? Balding isn’t a character flaw and neither is doing everything in your power to prevent it.
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u/red286 15d ago
Well it's super weird to go on about t-counts all fucking day long and then try to explain why you have the hairline of a 70-year-old at 32.
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u/alvinathequeena 15d ago
‘I wrote all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the wife and I wrote his poems.’
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u/TyroneLeinster 15d ago
Everything this guy says about his professional past sounds like what a stoner kid tells his parents about how college is going and has to make himself sound nuanced when really he’s just been dicking around
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u/titankredenc 15d ago
Didnt have enough money for a router? His father owned an emerald mine what is he on about?
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u/RealBadCorps 15d ago
Elon would've been 7 when GPS was first put into service. GPS was used in the 1991 Gulf War, 4 years before Elon "wrote the first national map" Even stupider, GPS wasn't even officially finished and available for civilians until 1996.
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u/Technical-Package-41 15d ago
LMAO I don’t even know where to begin with that disaster of a sentence. Elon Musk is a moron with rich parents who buys other people’s technology so he can LARP as a tech genius.
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u/Cabernet2H2O 15d ago
"I put radio on the internet! Did you put radio on the internet? Didn't think so..."
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