Welcome to Advent of Computing, the show that talks about the shocking, intriguing, and all too often relevant history of computing. A lot of little things we take for granted today have rich stories behind their creation, in each episode we will learn how older tech has lead to our modern world.
161 episodes transcribedIn 1961 Texas Instruments unveiled the Molecular Electronic Computer, aka: Mol-E-Com. It was a machine that fit in the palm of your hand, but had all...
The Z4, completed by Konrad Zuse in 1945, is a computer with a wild story. It was made from scrounged parts, survived years of bombing raids, moved al...
In 1933 Konrad Zuse, a German civil engineer, caught the computing bug. It would consume the rest of his life. According Zuse he invented the world's...
Have you ever felt like a computer just refuses to work? Like a machine has a mind of it's own? In 1970 a hard drive at the National Farmers Union Cor...
This time we are diving back into the Jargon File to take a look at some hacker folklore. Back in the day hackers at MIT spent their time spying on on...
In 1962 Food Center Wholesale Grocers Inc installed a new IBM 305 RAMAC. That's when things started to go wrong. The faulty machine seemed to have a m...
Programming, as a practice and study, has been steadily evolving for the past 70 or so years. Over the languages have become more sophisticated and us...
The early history of computer games is messy, weird, and surprising. This episode we are looking at HUTSPIEL, perhaps one of the oldest games ever pla...
I'm finally back to my usual programming! This time we are taking one of my patent pending rambles through a topics. Today's victim: the humble type-i...
LIVE from VCF West 2024, my talk on edge notched cards! Since this is a live recording from an auditorium the audio is a little boomy, so be warned. A...
I've gotten busy preparing for VCF West, so this time you get a short one! In this byte-sized episode we are looking at a short and strange story: tha...
Have you ever formed a bad first impression? Way back when I formed a hasty impression of this language called TRAC. It's been called a proto-esoteric...
In 1984 SCO released PC XENIX, a port of UNIX that ran on an IBM PC. To understand why that's such a technical feat, and how we even got here, we have...
This episode I'm opening up my research vault to present some interesting pre-digital technology. Back before computers us humans used to write everyt...
I'm currently out traveling. Due to my poor planning I managed to score back to back trips, for both business and leisure. While I'm not able to get a...
In 1959 the world bore witness to a new type of computer: the PDP-1. It was the first interactive computer to really make a dent in the market. Some s...
I've been feeling like rambling, so it's time for a classic ramble. This time we are looking at the origins of books about computers. More specificall...
This is a hefty one. I usually try to keep things as accessible as possible, but this time we have to get a little more technical than usual. We are p...
ALGOL is one of those topics that's haunted the show for a while. It comes up any time we talk about programming languages, and with good reason. Many...
