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 transcribedNo matter how you cut it the MOS Technology 6502 is an important chip. The chip was cheap, simple, and plentiful. This made it perfect for the home c...
NLS, or the oN-Line System, is often looked at as a mile marker in the development of modern computing. It was the first system to use a mouse, one o...
NLS, or the oN-Line System, is often looked at as a mile marker in the development of modern computing. It was the first system to use a mouse, one o...
Make sure you have some extra batteries for your lamp, this episode we are delving into the depths of Zork. Written in 1977 Zork would quickly become...
This episode I face my greatest fears: computer bugs. We are going to dive into the origin of the term, and examine the origins of debugging. The simp...
It's Spook Month on Advent of Computing! Every October we cover the more spooky, scary, and frustrating side of computers. To kick off this year we a...
In today's episode we take a long hard look at the telegraph, and try to see how character encoding developed. We are dealing with 100% pre-computing...
Today we are talking about computers in space! 1964 saw the launch of Gemini I, the first spacecraft to carry an onboard computer. The aptly named Gem...
This concludes my series on the distinctive shape of early home computers. In this episode we finally cover the Sol-20 itself, the first system on th...
Early home microcomputers have a very distinctive shape to them. From the Apple II and the ZX Spectrum, to the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, wedged wer...
Hypertext has really become a core offering of daily life, and defined the face of the Internet for decades. But the links and formatting we know so...
It's here! My celebratory question and answer episode! Contains ramblings on my checkered past, why computer history is important, and why FOIA is so...
COBOL! Just its name can strike terror in the hearts of programmers. This language is old, it follows its own strange syntax, and somehow still runs...
ALOHANET was a wireless networking project started at the University of Hawaii in 1968. Initially, it had relatively little to do with ARPANET. But th...
This episode we take a look at the earliest days of computing, and one of the earliest forms of computer memory. Mercury delay lines, originally devel...
Where did educational games come from? According to some, the practice of using games in classrooms started in the early 60s with the appearance of th...
The TI TMS9900 is a fascinating microprocessor. It was the first 16-bit microprocessor on the market, it has a unique architecture that makes it well...
Project Xanadu, started in 1960, is perhaps the oldest hypertext system. It's creator, Ted Nelson, coined the term hypertext just to describe Xanadu....
Even after nearly 50 years C remains a force in the programming world. Anytime you brows the web, or even log into a computer, C is somewhere in the...
C is easily one of the most influential programming languages in the world, and it's also one of the most popular languages in the world. Even after c...
