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 transcribedOne 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...
Hacker hasn't always been used to describe dangerous computer experts will ill intent. More accurately it should be sued to describe those enamored w...
BASIC is a strange language. During the early days of home computing it was everywhere you looked, pretty much every microcomputer in the 70s and earl...
In 1946 John Eckert and John Mauchly left the Moore School, patented ENIAC, and founded a company. One of those discussions would have consequences th...
Completed in 1945, ENIAC was one of the first electronic digital computers. The machine was archaic, but highly influential. But it wasn't a totally n...
This episode is not about the IBM PC. In 1981 the Personal Computer would change the world. Really, it's hard to talk about home computing without div...
It's time to round out spook month with a return to one of last year's topics: the computer virus. Malicious code traveling over networks is actually...
Spam emails are a fact of modern life. Who hasn't been sent annoying and sometimes cryptic messages from unidentified addresses? To understand where s...
We've all played the Oregon Trail, but what do you know about it's origins? First developed as a mainframe program all the way back in 1971, the Oreg...
The creation of FORTRAN and early compilers set the stage to change computing forever. However, they were just the start of a much longer process. Jus...
Is there a more iconic duo than the IBM PC and MS-DOS? Microsoft's Disk Operating System would be the final success that turned the company into what...
The IBM PC and MS-DOS, the iconic duo of the early 80s. The two are so interconnected that it's hard to mention one without the other. But in 1980 DOS...
A lot of the technology we associate with the modern day started on anachronistic machines. I'm not talking about mainframes, I'm talking older. Today...
In 1974 Intel released the 8080 processor, a chip long in the making. It was the first microprocessor that had the right combination of power and pric...
