From ZX Spectrum to AI Agents

An airhacks.fm conversation with Kabir Khan ( @kabirkhan ) about: first computer was a ZX Spectrum 48K with rubber keys, playing Bomb Jack as a memorable early game, growing up in Norway near Oslo with lots of outdoor activities including skiing and swimming in warm fjords, discovering multimedia kiosks at Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus as career inspiration, writing a Java applet dissertation visualizing Motorola 68000 CPU instruction processing with animations, early programming in Basic on the ZX spectrum including a hardcoded cookbook application, learning Pascal and the revelation of understanding what files actually are, first job writing an HTTP server in C++ on Windows NT using Winsock, implementing Real-Time Protocol streaming for multimedia content, working at a consultancy learning multiple programming languages including Active Server Pages ASP and Microsoft Transaction Server MTS , going freelance and building a Java-based exhibition industry booking system, using JBoss with EJB3 for the second version of the exhibition system, getting JBoss support and being impressed by their expertise, contributing to JBoss Mail and JBoss AOP as open source contributions, meeting Sacha Labourey at a JBoss partner event in Norway who advised focusing on AOP, joining JBoss in September 2004 when the company had only about 50 people, meeting Marc Fleury and having pizza at his house in Atlanta, the Red Hat acquisition of JBoss in 2006, leading the JBoss AOP project and standardizing interceptor chains, working on the JBoss microcontainer for JBoss 5 which was over-engineered and slow, joining the team that rethought the server architecture leading to Wildfly , working on WildFly core server management and domain management, the recent move of the runtimes division from Red Hat to IBM, current work on Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, quarkus being the Java reference implementation for the A2A specification published by Google, Agent-to-Agent Protocol as a standardized protocol for agent-to-agent communication using JSON-RPC REST and grpc , agent cards as capability advertisements similar to business cards, benefits of smaller specialized agents over monolithic AI applications including better traceability smaller context windows and flexibility with different LLMs, comparison of agent architecture to microservices where smaller agents are preferable unlike traditional services where monoliths can be better, upcoming episode planned to deep-dive into A2A with Quarkus and opentelemetry for agent traceability Kabir Khan on twitter: @kabirkhan

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From ZX Spectrum to AI Agents is an episode from airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien by Adam Bien.

This episode is 00:48:33 long.

This episode was published on Feb 8, 2026.

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