#1840 - Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Have you done a podcast before?

Marc Andreessen (0:16)

I've done podcasts before. Nothing with this reach, though, so that's exciting.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

You can't think about that.

You can't think about the reach part. First of all, very nice to meet you.

Marc Andreessen (0:24)

Yeah, you too.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

You're a tech OG, when it comes to the tech people, you're at the forefront of it all. You were one of the co-founders, you were one of the co-creators of Mosaic, right?

Marc Andreessen (0:38)

Yeah, that's right.

Joe Rogan (0:40)

What was it like before there were web browsers? How do you know a time before web browsers?

Marc Andreessen (0:46)

I do. So I'm an OG now, but when I first started, I thought I missed the whole thing.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

Really?

Marc Andreessen (0:52)

I thought I missed the whole, because I missed the personal computer. I missed the whole thing.

Joe Rogan (0:55)

You missed the original use of the personal computer.

Marc Andreessen (1:00)

Yeah, the personal computer. And before that, all the other computers came before that. So the computer revolution kind of happened over the 50 years, right before I showed up.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

What was the first personal computer?

Marc Andreessen (1:09)

The first personal computer, the first true personal computer, they were like kits in the early 70s that you could build.

The first interactive computer that you could use the way you use a PC was all the way back in the 50s. It was a system called Play-Doh at the University of Illinois where I went. And it was really, there was a great book called The Bright Orange Glow, and it was a black screen with only orange graphics.

And they built it by hand at the time, and they had the whole thing working. And so these ideas are all old ideas. They had email. They had all these ideas kind of way back when.

Joe Rogan (1:42)

They had email?

Marc Andreessen (1:43)

Yeah, they had email and messaging and multiplayer video games and all that stuff back in the 50s.

Joe Rogan (1:47)

Really?

Marc Andreessen (1:48)

Yeah, it just was only in a couple places.

It was really hard to get it working. It was expensive.

Joe Rogan (1:53)

When you say multiplayer video games, it wasn't like a graphic video game.

Marc Andreessen (1:57)

They had like very simple, very simple graphics, very simple, like space war games or whatever. I mean, really, remember like Asteroids?

Joe Rogan (2:02)

Yeah.

Marc Andreessen (2:03)

Yeah, like that quality of stuff or even simpler than that.

Joe Rogan (2:06)

So what year was Asteroids?

Marc Andreessen (2:07)

Asteroids would have been in the late 70s, 77, 78, 79, somewhere in there. Pong was 74, I think, which was the big, the first console, the first arcade video game was Pong.

Joe Rogan (2:18)

Yeah, we had one somewhere around that time, and I remember thinking it was the most crazy thing I've ever seen in my life, that you could play a thing that's taking place on your television, you could move the dial and the thing on the television would move. I mean, it was magic.

It's so crude and dumb for kids today, they would never believe the impact that it had on people back then.

Marc Andreessen (2:41)

So before the one you had on your TV set, that was later on, before they had the arcade game, the console in the arcade, and the story there is as crazy as this guy, Nolan Bushnell, who's the founder of this company Atari, that basically created the video game industry and he developed this game Pong. So he literally built one, like they had no idea if anybody wanted to play a video game at that point. So they built one, they built this console, they put it in a bar in Mountain View in Silicon Valley and the guy, the owner of the bar called up three days later and he's like, your thing is broke, like come get it.

And, you know, Nolan's like all depressed and he goes in and realizes the thing, it's so jammed with quarters.

It was so popular, right, that people just like kept jamming quarters in it, right. And literally like it couldn't take any more quarters. And literally he was like, aha, you know, proof people actually want to play video games. Like that's how, like even that was not obvious at the time.

Joe Rogan (3:30)

Yeah, I remember the first video game arcades and like a complex game was that there was like a Dungeons and Dragons game. What was it called?