Advent of Computing

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 did it all come from? As it turns out the first p...

28 Kesä 202051min

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 examine the development of semiconductor devices. Once ...

14 Kesä 202046min

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 long and strange lineage of similar devices leadin...

31 Touko 202050min

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 humble beginnings Linux has grown to power everything ...

17 Touko 202046min

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 there was a single cassette tape labeled "A Guided...

10 Touko 20209min

Every day we are inundated with digital audio: phone calls, music, even this podcast. Digitized sound has become so ubiquitous that it often fades into the background. What makes this all possible is ...

3 Touko 202045min

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, and a very long history. This connection goes all th...

19 Huhti 202039min

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 North American Video Game Crash. Caught up in ...

5 Huhti 202043min