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.
207 episodes transcribedAt the end of the 1940s IBM stood at a crossroads. The punch card company had yet to enter the electronic computer market. Forces within and without w...
Who can't resist Librascope hardware? Well, me, for one. And David from Usagi Electric is in the same boat. In this episode we sit down to talk about...
How did you learn about computers? And how in depth was your education? For some the answer is the Bi-Tran Six: an educational machine released in 196...
Binary is synonymous with digital computing. But is it the only way to crunch numbers? The short answer is no. The long answer, well, that's today's t...
It's no secret that I've been fascinated by odd UNIX clones for a while. When I got invited back to speak at VCF West this year I decided to share tha...
In 1950 Northrup unveiled their MAgnetic Drum DIgital Differential Analyser. The machine is a wild piece of technology; a rendering of an analog compu...
EMUL-8 is a fascinating programming language. It's described in just one paper from 1977. It's a mix of features from APL, LISP, ALGOL, and SNOB...
I mean that both in the specific and the abstract. This episode we are looking at APL, which stands for A Programming Language. APL was develope...
Dale Biagio(author of Hello, World!) got in touch with me recently. He said he had a book full of short histories of programming languages. Better sti...
I've been browsing old compur surveys and trying to build up a comprehensive data set. What I've found is a little surprising: between late 1945 and 1...
What connects IBM, the NSA, the Third Reich, and high fidelity recordings of symphonies? The answer is: magnetic drum memory. Join me as I lose all tr...
In 1947 Raytheon signed a contract to make their first computer. It would be their last... at least for many many years. The fruits of this contract w...
The image of a mainframe is almost always accompanied by it's companion: the magnetic tape drive. For decades magnetic tape served as the medium of ch...
In which we discuss GPSS: the General Purpose Simulation Language. As for as languages go, this is a unique one. It's designed for certain types of si...
The Olivetti Programma 101 isn't quite like any other machine. On first glance it looks like a big desktop calculator. Inside, it's a purebred compute...
Dan Temkin has been a long time friend of the show. I finally got the chance to sit down and talk with him about one of his latest projects. Fort...
Who wants to hear me make incorrect assumptions about old software? RSX is a system that, from the outside, can sound like it has a similar story to t...
UNIX is beloved by many. It's the classic minicomputer operating system. It's big, it's powerful, it's multitasking, and it has some very specific mem...
Today we are talking about one of the most unique languages I've ever come across. SNOBOL emerges from the early days of programming. It's first compi...
We 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...
