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.
http://adventofcomputing.com/
Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 5 days 8 hours 15 minutes
The Jargon File
In this mini-episode we look at the Jargon File, an early primary source about hacker culture. The most recent version of the file lives here: If you want more of my voice, I was also recently on the What Do You Do With That podcast talking...
episode 10: Networking for a Nuclear War, the Americans
In this episode we are going to explore the ARPANET. This is a companion to the last episode, which covered contemporary Soviet attempts to create an early internet. Like with last time, today we are still in the Cold War era. Now, this won't be a...
episode 9: Networking for a Nuclear War, the Soviets
Often times people assume the US is the homeland of the internet. Funded by the US Department of Defence, the first attempts at a large-scale network were started during the height of the Cold War, and a large part of it's design was redundancy and...
episode 8: Acorn and the BBC
The Raspberry Pi had been a huge success at its stated goals, and continues to be. But, this isn't the first time a British company would design and develop a computer as an accessible platform for learning programming. In fact, if you've read much...
episode 7: Attack of the PC Clones
Today, I want to share with you the story of the first PC clones and how they cemented the rise of the x86 chipset. Most of this story takes place between 1981 and 1984, but I think it's fair to say that these 3 years are some of the most...
Edge-Notched
In this byte-sized episode we look at edge-notched cards. A punch card adjacent technology with a strange connection to the early internet.
episode 6: Digital Voices
What are the origins of our modern day text-to-speech systems? In this episode we will dive into the rich history of electronic talking machines. Along the way I will tell you the story of the vocoder, the first singing computer, and a little about...
episode 5: Unix for the People, Part 2
Now, as the name suggests this is the second part of a series on the history of UNIX. Part 1 mainly covers the background leading up to UNIX. If you haven't listened to it yet, I strongly suggest you go do that now. A lot of what was covered in part 1...
episode 4: Unix for the People, Part 1
Many people have never even heard of Unix, an operating system first released in the early 1970s. But that doesn't change the fact that all of the internet, and nearly every computer or smart device you interact with is based on some variant of Unix....