Command Line Heroes - Introducing Season 4 of Command Line Heroes

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

No one ever said hardware was easy. In Season 4, Command Line Heroes is telling 7 special stories about people and teams who dared to change the rules of hardware and in the process changed how we all interact with technology. The first episode drops January 28, 2020. Subscribe today and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates and bonus content.

In the world of modern technology, we open our laptops, scroll endlessly on our smartphones, send tons of data to the cloud, and we don't think twice about it. But have you ever wondered how we got to now with our personal devices and what it took to get here? There was this blue box on a table and he said, well, here it is. I said, well, what is it? He said, it's a microcomputer. What it took were teams of engineers and programmers who had the vision and audacity to build new machines. These machines, they revolutionized our lives and blew the doors open to what was possible. How many people here had a computer versus how many people intended to get one? Only one or two people actually had them.

And they would bring them to the club meeting. What are you going to do with it? And nobody had an answer. The key thing about timesharing was that the computer needed some way of being able to sort of stop its own clock. The creators of the floppy drives are not household names by any means. If it wasn't for that, PCs would have been adopted much more slowly. This January 28th, we launched season four of Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. And this season, it's all about the hardware. We'll hear the stories behind some iconic machines and the people who dared to create them. I was the kid that always took things apart, took my older sister's toys apart.

This is just another bag on the side of the eclipse, a skin job. Nope, this is a whole new machine. The process of passing the tapes around and encouraging and building upon each other's results is really what made the personal computer industry. We're exploring many computers, mainframes, the first personal computers, floppies, early smartphones, and game consoles. And we're also going to hear how the community ethos that drove those early hardware heroes to build those machines still exists today in the open source hardware movement. The values of sharing are still there.

I mean, it's in the entire open source community. The machine, in a way, was kind of a bit character. It was the people who were the real guts of what it was about. I'm Saranya Tbarek. Join me for an incredible new season of the podcast. And keep on coding. So thank you and eat your sandwiches.