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June 8, 2025 13 mins

Ming Johanson - Tech History

Tetris and UX Design

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
On per six PR. This is remember when with Harvey
Degan and ming.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Joe Hanson from a marketing Jumpstart is in the studio
with me right now and she would love to have
a chat to you. By the way, thank you for
David in Morley who has sent us to email. I
owed nothing to do per se with your segment, but
he said please that we're back to normal show tonight.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
Nice first time this show has been described as normal.
And David says, go Cleamont and the Fred Dockers. Well,
the Dockers didn't play, they got to buy.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
But Clermont had a nice little win yesterday OVERSUBI, so
I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
You'd be very happy about that, David. Right. So the
history of what is Tetris.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
So, Tetris is sort of one of the original video
games really, and it came out originally it was built
in the Soviet Union in Russia. It's one of the
Russian exports and it was in the eighties, in nineteen
eighty four it came out and then it's so it's

(01:10):
basically a bunch of shapes that drop down from the top,
made up of four squares and you have to fit
them all together and in order to fit them all
together in one row so that the road clears, and
if all of the squares don't clear, it sort of
builds up to the top and then you lose the level.

Speaker 5 (01:33):
Shake.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
You've given me a very strange, perturbed look.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
I'm trying to work out because I'm hopeless of those.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
So I even I stress very seriously when I have
to have my annual I examinations from the before homologist
and because they sit in front of this video game thing. Yeah,
and I don't like that sort of but I do

(02:01):
have a pretty good beripheral vision, apparently with more good
luck than good.

Speaker 4 (02:04):
I don't like the eyeblowy thing thing that blows the air
in your eye.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
I love it.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
That doesn't worry me.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
It's just I don't like having to click on things
when you see you know, the light click yep. And
so apparently that was okay last time.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
So you can still play this game for free on
the Tetris dot com website.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
What do you get if you get it?

Speaker 3 (02:27):
If it happened to solve it? Do you win a
prize or something?

Speaker 1 (02:31):
I think it's just about getting to the highest level.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
And yeah, I've wasted many hours in my playing this game.
So they celebrated their forty first birthday this week on
the sixth of June.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
What's been going for forty one years? That same game?

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yes?

Speaker 5 (02:50):
Real?

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yep, No, I was going to say one. I hadn't
heard about it.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
But it was a puzzle game.

Speaker 4 (02:55):
Basically, it was about fitting pieces together and there were
lots of different colored squares.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
I must still keep doing the crossword in the west.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, okay, have you played mind Sweeper on your computer?

Speaker 2 (03:07):
No?

Speaker 3 (03:07):
All right, I don't play anything on the computer.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
I don't think on the computer.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
I'm on it fun.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
No misspent youth for you.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Then I had a misspent youth, but there were no
computers in those days to misspend it upon.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
No.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
I use the computers a hell of a lot for work,
and I just can't be bothering. My eyes are usually
dropping out by the time nighttime comes around and got
to go to bed.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Had enough of the computer.

Speaker 4 (03:31):
So if anybody is interested in playing it, it is
available on tetris dot com for slash Tetris hyphen e sixty.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
So can you join Tetris clubs and like you play
against one another?

Speaker 3 (03:44):
And do you have Tetris socials?

Speaker 4 (03:46):
You know, you go to the pub and no, no, no,
it's a bit of a bit of a lonesome game.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Really, it's very very popular.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
Trying to find out something appealing about that.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
My dead call is just to proof that it was
popular and that they played.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
The game, because my mum gave a very similar reaction
to yours, like, what's Tetris with you?

Speaker 2 (04:08):
We'll let these young kids play you and are go
and have a nice quiet dinner together somewhere. Well, they're
playing Tetris. Tetris.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
So it ended up.

Speaker 4 (04:20):
Reaching the masses when it joined the Nintendo Game Boy,
and it was sold into the hands of impressionable young
millennials around the world.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
So I guess I fall.

Speaker 4 (04:32):
So coming thinking about how Tetris didn't Well, it didn't
invent user experience, which is a thing that we talk
about a lot in the web industry and websites and
app development as well. It embodies many of the modern
UX principles, so it was minimalist. It was simple and
uncluttered in design. The psychological state of complete immersion allowed

(04:55):
for flow, so it wasn't overwhelming, it wasn't a difficult
game to play, and you got immediate feedback so fast
reactions to player input was really helpful for the game.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
So it's the same thing for websites.

Speaker 4 (05:09):
Like I think a lot of the time we talk about,
you know, is it easy to navigate a website?

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Why is it?

Speaker 4 (05:15):
If we have a saying in our business where we
talk about a Franken wife, is your website a Franken wife?
Which is basically Frankenstein's wife, Where you know, the website
has just sort of slowly evolved and you're like, oh,
the website's missing this bolt that on, Oh it's missing
this bolt, another thing on, and then you kind of
get to this behemoth of a website that you can't
find anything on because you kept bolting stuff on, and

(05:38):
so that whole navigation he became a thing.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
Foks, you want to talk to me? Now's the time? One,
double three A to eighty two is the number? And
I see Tetris was not a GUI application. I've heard
of DUI. What's GUO?

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Some n like d UI.

Speaker 4 (05:52):
G UI is graphical user interface. So it was built
in DOS for any of any of the nerds out
there listening to this that are going yeah DOS yeah,
before Windows, before Windows acronym for what that's good quick,
Mom might know doctor Google, Doctor Google, Doctor Google knows.

(06:15):
So it was a text character based platform and it
wasn't like so nothing. You didn't have buttons or things
to click on on the X to close the window.
It was basically text based commands.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Disc operating system and there we go. Yeah, Matt came
flying in with that, did he? Yep, you beat doctor
Google by a short half head.

Speaker 4 (06:42):
So the history of UX design, like the first ever
website was actually which I was surprised about this.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
I actually thought this happened a lot, a lot earlier.

Speaker 4 (06:52):
It was nineteen ninety one, so Tim Berner Lee Berners
Lee launches the first ever website text only know him,
no CSS, which is sure for cascading script. It was
purely informational and coded and basic HTML. So which hypertext
markup language?

Speaker 3 (07:12):
So what do you do with.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Sorry?

Speaker 3 (07:15):
So he was the only one that had that.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
I remember the first website I looked at was the
Star Wars website and it took forever to load because
obviously we had dial up internet back then.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah, I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
What I would have probably the Hawthorne homepage.

Speaker 4 (07:34):
So Mosaic, which was the first graphical web browser was
released in nineteen ninety three, and this allowed for the
display of images in line with text, and it was
hugely for visual design. If you have a look if
you look up Amazon in the nineties and what their
website looks like comparatively to what it looks like now,

(07:55):
it's a thousand times easier to navigate and not eleven
billion links to click on to.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Find your thing.

Speaker 4 (08:04):
So we're looking at the birth of visual design in
the nineties where we started to have tables. And this
was when I built my first website to impress a
boy because it was the only way I could think
about how to talk to him. No, not at all.

(08:24):
I mean I managed to talk to him, but yeah, no,
I don't think.

Speaker 5 (08:28):
I impressed much. Next time, I was a strange kid.
Next no, he was.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
He was a bit of a computer WHI is that
kid anyway? And so we like we've kind of progressed
from there. We had flash for a moment that obviously
we don't have that anymore on websites, but that allowed
for animation and graphics and effects to happen on websites
where things sort of slide from the left.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
All right, James has got a question for you. Go on,
I got a question for the lovely lady that will
be you.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
Thanks James.

Speaker 4 (09:09):
Yes, yeah, I mean you're making a lot of assumptions
about me being lovely.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
I will endorse what you have said as one hundred
percent correct.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
James. Okay, and I should know. Do you think NBN
will bring back dial up? Is it being funny?

Speaker 1 (09:25):
Yes? I think so.

Speaker 4 (09:29):
NBN was was promised to be this wonderful well wind
of fast internet, and unfortunately we have slower, slower internet
than some third world countries. Part of that is because
we are, especially in Western Australia, we have quite a
lot of urban sprawl and we're sprawled out quite far

(09:51):
and a lot of the infrastructure and I only know
this because I used to work for Telstra in my lifetime.

Speaker 1 (09:56):
Ago was was the infrastructure.

Speaker 4 (10:00):
It wasn't built properly in a lot of suburbs in
Western Australia because it was subcontracted and you had one
phone line that was servicing a whole area instead of
a singular house. And so when the NBN rolled out,
this was a bit of a problem for certain areas
and we still have.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Like when it was originally being brought out.

Speaker 4 (10:23):
It was about having fiber to the direct to the home,
and then they were like no, no to the node,
which is the box before you get.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
To the home, and then it's split out to all
the homes.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
So all the wiring that's still going to your home
is copperwerring and isn't very particularly faster for anything.

Speaker 1 (10:39):
So I'm just speed. I'm looking for speed man NBN.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
I'm still on one of.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Those tell on the eighty of cells and.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
It seems to work most of the time. We got
to let you go soon, but I just do want
to comment on this. I can't believe, but I do
know how time is flying by twenty four years since
when he started using mobiles. And they were those big bricks.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
Weren't they.

Speaker 4 (11:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had My first mobile was a
motoroller and it had a bloody big battery and then
it had a bloody big charger that you had to
slide it in in order to charge it, and you
charge it for it.

Speaker 1 (11:16):
But mind you, it lasted forever because it didn't do anything.
It didn't have any apps.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
You can only make phone calls, which you know, shocking
a phone making phone call.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
I was going to say, fancy inventing a device to
make phone calls. The worst thing that ever happened was
just directing people to text at all costs.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yes, that's start me.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Now you must tell us about marketing, jumpstart, because you've
had some magnificent successes lately, and I refer usually to
the one I know about, and that's Jeffrey Thomas, of course,
with his aviation not only his YouTube channel which you've
set up, but also he's got a fantastic website forty
two k.

Speaker 4 (11:55):
Is it forty two kft dot com, which is all
about airline new news and aviation news and M three
P seventy and all of that, all that sort of
ref rauff and we have been helping him and he
is our greatest advocate, well, one of our greatest advocates,
runs around telling everybody how wonderful I am, you are.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
You are quite seriously, you do a fantastic Here's.

Speaker 4 (12:18):
YouTube has absolutely done tremendously and I cannot tell people
enough about it because it's one of the most underutilized
tools in Australia in terms of marketing or even like
creating an income for yourself. And they're doing great guns
they're doing really, really wonderful. So what marketing job Start

(12:39):
does is about removing barriers to technology and making it
easier for your business to succeed online and also translate
what your business actually is to the Internet. Because a
lot of the time, when I go to a website
and I've met the person and I know the person
and I know the business, if I go to the

(13:00):
website and the website does not really represent who they are,
it's quite a jarring experience. And so I'm looking to
solve that. Really is because I want people to meet
you online and then meet you in person and go, ah,
I'm not surprised you're exactly the same person you are
online as you are on the internet.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
Fantastic, alright, fantastic, And we'll reconvene this meeting in a
few weeks.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
All right, I'll see you then.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Jolly good, We're

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Going to take a break and then Matt Woods will
see stars.
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