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.
168 episodes transcribedSpam 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...
I recently got the chance to sit down and talk with Microsoft alumni Brad Chase. He was the product manager for Microsoft Works on the Macintosh, DOS...
Portable computing is now totally ubiquitous. There's a good chance you are listening to this episode on a tiny portable computer right now. But where...
In this episode we finish up our look at the birth of the transistor. But to do that we have to go back to 1880, the crystal radio detector, and exami...
The transistor changed the world. It made small, complex, and cheap computing possible. But it wasn't the first attempt to crack the case. There is a...
In the current day Linux is the most widely used UNIX-like operating system. It's rise to prominence has been an amazing success story. From it's humb...
In this byte sized episode I take a look at a pack in that came with the first Macintosh. Along side Apple stickers, manuals, and the computer itself...
Every day we are inundated with digital audio: phone calls, music, even this podcast. Digitized sound has become so ubiquitous that it often fades int...
It's easy to think of Apple and Microsoft as bitter rivals, but that's not always the case. The two companies have a very complicated relationship, an...
The 1980s were a turbulent and fast-moving decade for the video game industry. There were huge success stories, rapid advancements in technology, and...
The widespread use of the internet has shaped our world, it's hard do imagine the modern day without it. One of the biggest featured would have to be...
The floppy disk is one of the most iconic pieces of technology. While not in use in the modern day there was a period of 40 years where the floppy dis...
The floppy disk was a ubiquitous technology for nearly 40 years. From mainframes to home computers, the plastic disk was everywhere. And in the decade...
Our modern world is full of software, it's what makes everything tick. The sheer amount of code that goes into something like keeping the internet run...
