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.
180 episodes transcribedMy 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...
The LGP-30 is one of my favorite computers. It's small, scrappy, strange, and wonderous. Among its many wonders are two obscure languages: ACT-I and A...
When I was down at VCF SoCal I ran into a strange machine: the Keypact Micro-VIP. It's a terminal without a keyboard, covered in dials, with a speaker...
A special treat from VCF SoCal. While visiting I had the chance to host a panel on restoration and preservation. I was joined by: David from Usagi Ele...
Have you ever looked at an old computer and seen a weird typewriter thing tacked on? In most cases that's a device called a Flexowriter. It's hal...
In the modern day Windows is a power house, but that wasn't always the case. In this episode we are looking at the fraught development of Windows 1.0....
This episode we are taking a trip back to UNIX world. We're looking at IDRIS, the first clone of UNIX. It was supposed to be highly compatible, but us...
In 1970 a little language called BLISS emerged from Carnegie Mellon University. It was a systems language, meant for operating systems and compilers....
In 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...
