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.
171 episodes transcribedLIVE 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...
Originally presented at VCF SoCal in February of 2024. The cryotron, a superconductive switch, almost revolutionized computing. It's one of those fasc...
This is going to be a wild rambling ride. In 1939 a computer called Nimatron was made. It was one of the earliest digital electronic computers in the...
This episode wraps up the System/360 trilogy by taking things back to where they started for me. We will be looking at System/360 clones, how they co...
My coverage of the IBM System/360 continues! In this episode we look at US v IBM, and the fallout that surrounded the release of the System/360. By 1...
In this episode I sit down and talk with Micki and Steve about VCF SoCal, a new Vintage Computer Festival! The event is taking place in Orange, Califo...
The release of the IBM System/360 represents a major milestone in the history of computing. In 1964 IBM announced the 360 as the first family of comp...
Released in 1982, the Jupiter Ace is a fascinating little computer. It's hardware isn't much to write home about. It's just an 8-bit microcomputer ve...
Tools are the most important programs in the world. Without quality tools it's impossible to write quality software. One of those most important of t...
Most accounts of the early history of programming languages all share something in common. They all have a sentence or two explaining how there was g...
Have you ever opined for a simpler time? Have you ever wanted a computer that you can understand all the way down to the silicon? Then RCA's COSMAC m...
