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.
188 episodes transcribedWe are getting back to the actual digital family tree. In 1937 George Stibitz built a tiny binary adding circuit on his kitchen table using scraps he...
I recently had the chance to talk to Ben Zotto about his upcoming book: Go Computer Now! - The Story of Sphere Computers. It's all about an obscure ma...
I'm back to normal episodes, and I'm running out the gate with a weird one. Thoroughbred/OS was a multi-user and multi-tasking operating system for th...
Last episode I said that Fourth Generation Languages were a topic for another time. Well... this counts as another time. Today we are trying to figure...
In 1945 the first electronic digital computers sparked to life. Number crunching was instantly changed forever! The perfect technology had arri...
In 1981 Joe Dellinger attempted to create the perfect computer program: a virus that spread silently. In 1982 a revision of that virus broke co...
Imagine a secret number that could be used to bring your computer to a screeching halt. In 1977 Gerry Wheeler discovered an interesting feature...
Have you ever had a computer do something you can't explain? Have you ever thought a machine had a mind of its own? In 1971 Met Life was faced...
My trilogy on the PDP-11 concludes with a look at the far flung places this computer can take us. In this episode we look at some issues with c...
This episode we continue my series on the PDP-11 by examining how DEC adapted to the advent of the microprocessor. Along the way we will see ho...
Last weekend I had the chance to talk about the LGP-30 and my emulation project at VCF West in Mountain View, CA. The showrunners will be posting a fu...
The DEC PDP-11 is one of the most influential minicomputers of all time. Some would even call it the most influential computer of all time. Bu...
In 1949 CSIRAC sprung to life in a lab in Sydney, Australia. It was a very early stored program computer. All machines of the era were unique. But CSI...
The first batch of digital computers emerge directly following WWII. The hallmark of this generation is uniqueness: no two computers are the same. How...
Lunar Lander is one of the best loves video games of all time. The game was created in 1969 as an homage to the recent Apollo 11. From there it would...
In 1982 Intel released the iAPX 286. It's was the first heir to the smash-hit 8086. But the 286 was developed before the IBM PC put an Intel chip on e...
In 1973 the world caught it's first glimpse of INTERCAL. It's a wild and wacky language, somewhere between comedy and cutting satire. But the compiler...
The S1 operating system can do it all! It can run on any computer, read any disk, and execute any software. It can be UNIX compatible, DOS compa...
How do you make a computer act less like a computer? It sounds like some kind of riddle, but in the early 1960s it was an actual problem. As IBM custo...
In the early 1960s a neat little machine came out of MIT. Well, kind of MIT. The machine was called LINC. It was small, flexible, and designed to live...
