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.
174 episodes transcribedToday 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...
One of the great things about the modern Internet is the wide range of services and content available on it. You have news, email, games, even podcast...
Released in August 1981, the IBM PC is perhaps one of the most important computers in history. It originated the basic architecture computers still u...
The Intel 8086 may be the most important processor ever made. It's descendants are central to modern computing, while retaining an absurd level of bac...
Saga II was a program developed in 1960 that automatically wrote screenplays for TV westerns. Outwardly it looks like artificial intelligence, but tha...
Sometimes an idea is so good it keeps showing up. Electronic ping-pong games are one of those ideas. The game was independently invented at least twic...
Lars Brinkhoff has been spearheading the effort to keep the incompatible Timesharing System alive. Today we sit down to talk about the overall ITS re...
Modern operating systems adhere to a pretty rigid formula. They all have users with password-protected accounts and secure files. They all have restri...
