COLTON OGDEN: All right, and we're live.

Hello, world.

This is CS50 on Twitch.

And I'm joined by CS50's own David Malan.

DAVID MALAN: Nice to see everyone again.

Hello to the viewers in the chat room right now.

We've got a few people in there.

We got to see [? Bavick ?] [? Knights. ?]

Scotty529 says, I don't have SQL experience but I'm excited to learn.

Excited to teach some SQL today.

Or I'm going to be learning some SQL today.

Yeah, Colton is going to be pretending not to know much about SQL.

So--

COLTON OGDEN: Pretend.

DAVID MALAN: --you can experience vicariously

what it's like to learn a little bit of structured query language today.

COLTON OGDEN: Sure.

Andre's here in the chat, says hello.

Hello, Andre.

Good to see you.

Good to see [? Bavick ?] [? Knight, ?] Zodiac.

And [? Nuwanda, ?] that's [INAUDIBLE] from last when

we did the concentration game.

DAVID MALAN: Yes, good to see some familiar usernames here.

Some of which are a little hard to pronounce,

since they're not exactly words.

But I hope you'll forgive just a little wave from us here.

COLTON OGDEN: All right, and so what are we going to be talking about today?

DAVID MALAN: So why don't we just talk about databases?

We actually, in CS50, of course every semester talk about SQL

and databases more generally.

But we tend to move through it really quickly.

We don't necessarily get too much into the weeds of doing things hands on.

And in fact, even when we do, we tend to use CS50 IDE.

But for the more comfortable audience that might be tuning in via Twitch,

thought we could play a little more hands on the terminal window

on my own Mac, which you can certainly do on your own PC

as well, so that it feels a little more real-world representative and less

classroom like.

COLTON OGDEN: Cool.

Yeah, sounds great to me.

Do you want me to move on into your laptop on the screen?

DAVID MALAN: Yeah, if you don't mind.

I pulled up a little throwback from 1999.

COLTON OGDEN: Oh, are we--

DAVID MALAN: Let's see if we're plugged in here.

Give us just one moment.

COLTON OGDEN: Should be plugged in.

DAVID MALAN: So what you're about to see is a screenshot from a website

that I think I first created back in, like, 1997.

I was a sophomore or junior in college at the time.

And I was part of the freshman intramural sports program,

or Frosh IMS program.

This--

COLTON OGDEN: I think you might need to-- are you on--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]?

COLTON OGDEN: Are you on 720p?

DAVID MALAN: Ah, let's take a look.

Pardon me.

We're just going to go into my system preferences here on Mac OS

and make sure I'm in the right resolution.

SPEAKER 1: Or you can just mirror it.

DAVID MALAN: Let me go ahead and mirror my display here.

All right.

COLTON OGDEN: Appreciate it.

DAVID MALAN: Now that we have that, let's go ahead and give you 720p.

COLTON OGDEN: Awesome.

DAVID MALAN: There we go.

Cool.

COLTON OGDEN: There we go.

DAVID MALAN: No movie magic here.

Everything is happening incorrectly here in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

as you see it.

No post-production.

So what you're seeing on the screen now behind me and Colton is Frosh IMS,

the freshman intramural website.

COLTON OGDEN: Who designed that great background?

DAVID MALAN: Well, obviously I did.

Though to be fair, it was probably something we found on Google images

before there was even Google images back in the day.

COLTON OGDEN: How did you find images back then, if it--

were there like user groups, or?

[LAUGHTER]

DAVID MALAN: I think I had to call someone on the phone

to get an image back then.

COLTON OGDEN: Send a floppy over the--

DAVID MALAN: Yeah, pretty much.

The [INAUDIBLE] too.

Someone would deliver it to you in the mail.

Yeah, no, I don't remember where the image came from.

But clearly it's all in its 1990s glory here.

And at the time, like, so Harvard for the students

had an internal sports program, which just

means sports for those of us like myself who

couldn't compete at the varsity or junior varsity or really any level.

And was really just for fun.

But at the time, if you wanted to sign up for sports,

you would literally fill out a piece of paper, walk across campus,

and then hand it to someone physically or slide it under their door.

And then you were registered for the sport.

So nowadays, you would clearly think that you could at least use a Google

form for this.

But back in the day, there was no Google.

There were no Google forms.

And even then, there was no website even for the intramural program.

So my first foray into web programming was just to learn it on my own.

I mean, I did not learn how to do web programming in CS50 or another class

here called CS51.

So I was completely self-taught.

And frankly, to this day I think the best way to learn something new

is just force yourself to do it and pick it up--

COLTON OGDEN: Almost feels like the--

DAVID MALAN: --along the way.

COLTON OGDEN: --Wild West of the web in a way.

DAVID MALAN: Yeah.

You were alive at the time, I think.

It wasn't all that long ago.

COLTON OGDEN: Ashley says thanks for remembering my name, Colton.

Thanks, Ashley, for joining us today.

DAVID MALAN: Yeah, indeed.

Good to see everyone.

And interject at any point over the chat with questions

about this or really any other topic.

So we always talk about Frosh IMS, not just so

that I can relive my glory days, but so that we

can use it as a point of departure for talking about where the data actually

goes.

So the whole point of the Frosh IMS website,

besides being informational and telling people about the website,

about the sports that were upcoming, was to allow

students to click a link, type in their name, their dorm, maybe their phone

number, although no one really had cell phones back then, their email address,

and then click submit so as to register.

And at the time, I had no idea what to do with the data

once someone actually clicked submit.

So I pretty much found a library, which did exist at the time,

and I just sent an email to the person who was running the sports program so

that he or she could just have in their inbox

a list of all the kids who had registered.

So this is clearly an opportunity for a database.

And like, what would you have done maybe back in the day

if you needed to store something elsewhere than someone's inbox?

COLTON OGDEN: Probably written it down on a piece of notebook paper.

But that's probably not a sustainable solution.

DAVID MALAN: No, that's essentially what people did there.

And let's see, actually, Andre's noting back

in the 1990s we used smoke signals for internet transfer.

The big breakthrough happened when Morse code was invented.

Wow, that's very, very, very well--

very appreciated comment, Andre.

I'm pretty sure that's not entirely true, for those of you who

were born in the 90s or after.

COLTON OGDEN: JP Guy's rating with a party of five.

So I believe that means, and I'm somewhat new to Twitch myself,

but JP has actually brought his channel's chat into our chat.

DAVID MALAN: Oh, nice.

COLTON OGDEN: That's what that-- the connotation of that.

So thanks so much, JP, for that.

Dr. [? Profedo ?] says raid, raid.

Heard you had cool hair, says [? Tangora. ?] Thanks.

Appreciate that.

JP Guy has his emoji there.

DAVID MALAN: No.

In fact, we'll be having an upcoming Livestream about Colton's hair.

So be sure to tune in later this week on that.

COLTON OGDEN: Oh man, oh man.

[INAUDIBLE] you want to read-- maybe read some of the other ones

below Andre's there too?

DAVID MALAN: Yup.

Whip Streak, nice to see you as well.

So what of course might you do with something like this?

So back in the day, what I would do is actually store