Podcast Episodes
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It's Spook Month on Advent of Computing! Every October we cover the more spooky, scary, and frustrating side of computers. To kick off this year we …
4 years, 11 months ago
Teletype, Teleprint, and Telegrams
In today's episode we take a long hard look at the telegraph, and try to see how character encoding developed. We are dealing with 100% pre-computin…
4 years, 11 months ago
Gemini's Tiny Machine
Episode 64
Today we are talking about computers in space! 1964 saw the launch of Gemini I, the first spacecraft to carry an onboard computer. The aptly named Ge…
5 years ago
What's With The Wedge, Part 2
Episode 63
This concludes my series on the distinctive shape of early home computers. In this episode we finally cover the Sol-20 itself, the first system on t…
5 years ago
What's With The Wedge? Part 1
Episode 62
Early home microcomputers have a very distinctive shape to them. From the Apple II and the ZX Spectrum, to the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, wedged we…
5 years ago
FRESS and Practical Hypertext
Episode 61
Hypertext has really become a core offering of daily life, and defined the face of the Internet for decades. But the links and formatting we know so…
5 years, 1 month ago
Q&A
It's here! My celebratory question and answer episode! Contains ramblings on my checkered past, why computer history is important, and why FOIA is so…
5 years, 1 month ago
COBOL Never Dies
Episode 60
COBOL! Just its name can strike terror in the hearts of programmers. This language is old, it follows its own strange syntax, and somehow still runs…
5 years, 1 month ago
ALOHANET
Episode 59
ALOHANET was a wireless networking project started at the University of Hawaii in 1968. Initially, it had relatively little to do with ARPANET. But t…
5 years, 2 months ago
Mercury Memories
Episode 58
This episode we take a look at the earliest days of computing, and one of the earliest forms of computer memory. Mercury delay lines, originally deve…
5 years, 2 months ago