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 the last half of the 70s there was one gold standard in home computing: S100. This was a standardized bus that was the heart of many computers. It...
What language has two stacks? What language is used on satellites and in home computers? What language deals in words? Why, Forth, of course! Forth...
Digital animation has really become an artform in and of itself. In the current epoch these animations play out on fancy bitmapped displays, but it's...
Can a computer be creative? Can we program a machine to make art? It turns out the answer is yes, and it doesn't even take artificial intelligence. T...
What is a computer? A miserable pile of electrons! But... not necessarily. I have yet to find a fully satisfying definition for "computer" that encomp...
More Visi-fun ahead! Today we are looking at Visi On, a visionary user interface developed for home computers. Along the way we will discuss smalltal...
Today we are looking at VisiCalc, the original killer app. Hitting the market in 1979, VisiCalc was the first computer spreadsheet program. Through i...
The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer was built by the National Bureau of Standards in 1948. It started crunching numbers in 1950 and stayed in co...
In this episode I talk with Aaron Reed, author of 50 Years of Text Games. We discuss the history of computer games, interactive fiction, business "gam...
Multitasking: we all do it. For a feature of modern computing multitasking has surprisingly old roots. It started out as timesharing on vacuum tube b...
There's power in music, but not all tones are created equal. During the reign of Bell Telephone there was one tone in particular that opened up a wor...
When people talk about early computers Babbage's Analytical Engine is bound to come up. Designed back in the 1830's it's definitely older than any ot...
We're getting back to my hypertext series with a big of an obscure tale. ZOG is a hypertext system what was first developed in 1972 at Carnegie-Melon...
Programming doesn't have to be a very serious discipline. In fact, sometimes it's better if it's a little silly. Today we are talking about INTERCAL,...
It's no secret, I'm a big fan of memory. Not only is memory crucial for the functioning of a computer, it's also plain weird. This episode we are loo...
This episode we blast off at warp speed! We're looking at Star Trek, a game written in BASIC in 1971. Examining this game gives us some insight into...
Cybernetics is broadly defined as the study of control and communications, with a special emphasis on feedback-based systems. Put another way: cybern...
This is the conclusion to my exploration of why LISP is the "mother tongue of artificial intelligence". We pick up from the end of last episode and c...
I'll let you in on a secret: I've never understood why LISP is so closely associated with artificial intelligence. I've decided to fix this. In this...
Viatron's System 21 was the computer of the 1970s! ...At least that's what their marketing claimed. Started in 1967 Viatron was set to be one of the...
