Jeff Rothschild

On this episode of On the Metal, we interview Jeff Rothschild. Jeff has had a fascinating journey solving all sorts of fun problems at various levels of the stack. He is most widely known as being a co-founder of Veritas Software and the first VP of Engineering at Facebook, but his story does not start there. Join us as we hear Jeff’s stories from his impressive technical endeavors including disassembling MS-DOS, editing machine code in an octal editor, trolling coworkers in error messages, the origin story of ftruncate, and more.

Show Notes

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• Dis-assembling MS-DOS on an IBM PC: https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
• PC Interface: allowing a MS-DOS program to use a unix host as its remote filesystem
• AT&T 3B2 Machine: http://www.unixwiz.net/3b2.html http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/westernElectric/3b20s/234-301-910WE_3B20S_System_Index_and_Description_Jul81.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B_series_computers
• 32-bit Sigma 7 Machine: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sds/sigma/sigma7/900950J_Sigma7_RefMan_Oct73.pdf https://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/profess/SDSigma7.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series 
• Teletype 110: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Corporation
• PDP-10: http://www.bitsavers.org/www.computer.museum.uq.edu.au/pdf/DEC-10-HMAA-D%20PDP-10%20KA10%20Central%20Processor%20Maintenance%20Manual%20Volume%2

What is On The Metal?

As a part of starting Oxide Computer Company, Bryan Cantrill and Jess Frazelle decided to also create the podcast that they always wanted. Joined frequently by their boss, Steve Tuck, Bryan and Jess interview incredible guests retelling stories of adventure at the hardware/software interface. It’s unapologetically technical and as Jess says, “the nerdiest podcast on the face of the planet” -- but if you're their kind of nerd, you'll find yourself hanging on every word!