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PODCAST

pplpod

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends.Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

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All Episodes

23:14

Winamp: The Llama, the Lawsuits, and the Leak That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Winamp greeted new users with a bleating llama and a boast about whipping its backside. Behind the joke was a real fix for a 1997 problem: MP3 playback strained weak desktop processors. University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev wrapped a simple Windows interface around AMP, an efficient decoding engine written by Tomislav Uzelac, and released it as shareware. They asked users to mail a $10 check if they liked it, and by 1998 those checks brought in roughly $100,000 a month.This

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25:05

VisiCalc: The First Killer App and Its Seven Year...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1978 Dan Bricklin sat in a Harvard Business School classroom watching a professor build a financial model in chalk. Every time one number changed, each figure that depended on it had to be erased and recalculated by hand. Bricklin imagined a grid where the computer did that work instantly. With Bob Frankston he formed Software Arts in Arlington, Massachusetts, and the two spent a winter in an attic writing the program in 6502 assembly language for the Apple II.This episode follows VisiCalc from

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20:25

Planking: How Lying Face Down Became a Deadly Global...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1983, two teenagers in Edmonds, Washington, lay rigid and face down in the outfield during a baseball game, stayed that way for several innings, then got up and left. Scott Amy and Joel Marshall called it face dancing. The same odd idea surfaced again at a 1986 disco party in Berlin, in an unaired 1994 Tom Green prank in Ottawa, and in 1997 in Taunton, England, where schoolboys Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon named it the lying down game.This episode traces how that pointless act of stillness

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23:20

IBM Watson: From Jeopardy Champion to Billion Dollar...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

IBM Watson won a million dollars on national television, tried to become a cancer doctor, drifted through a string of odd jobs, and was finally sold for parts. The idea began in 2004, when an IBM manager at a steakhouse saw diners abandon their meals to watch Ken Jennings on his 74 game winning streak. Under principal investigator David Ferrucci, the 2006 prototype answered about 15 percent of clues correctly. The finished machine ran on 90 servers with 16 terabytes of RAM and had to play completely

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22:04

GeoCities: How Yahoo Bought and Buried a City of 38...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In late 1994 David Bohnett and John Rezner launched Beverly Hills Internet, a small web host in Southern California with an unusual way of organizing the early web. Pages lived in virtual neighborhoods named for real places, such as Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and each address was a street number with neighbors on either side. By mid 1995 anyone could claim two megabytes of free space and build a home page. The company called its users homesteaders and soon renamed itself

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22:45

Eric Migicovsky and Pebble: The Smartwatch That Died...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Eric Migicovsky took his idea for a smartphone-connected watch through Y Combinator, earned real revenue during the program, and raised $375,000 from angel investors including Tim Draper. Venture capitalists still turned him down, wary of the tooling, inventory, and recall risks of hardware. So in April 2012 he renamed his company Pebble Technology and put the watch on Kickstarter with a $100,000 goal. It hit that mark in two hours and went on to raise more than $10.2 million from nearly 69,000

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23:46

Curt Herzstark: The Pocket Calculator Designed Inside...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The Curta was a mechanical calculator small enough to hold in one hand, nicknamed the pepper grinder and the math grenade. Its inventor, Curt Herzstark, grew up in his family's calculating machine business in 1930s Vienna and set out to shrink a desktop machine to pocket size. His answer was to replace the usual row of ten stepped drums with a single central drum ringed by input sliders, and to handle subtraction by adding a nine's complement. He secured a key patent in 1938, the year Nazi Germany

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29:32

The Traitorous Eight: The 1957 Mutiny That Created...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, persuaded financier Arnold Beckman to give him $1 million for a lab in Palo Alto, then mostly fruit orchards. He recruited eight young scientists, among them Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Eugene Kleiner, and Jean Hoerni, after putting each through psychological and intelligence tests. Then the dream job soured. Shockley recorded phone calls, forbade staff from sharing results, mailed their reports to Bell Labs to be checked, and demanded that everyone

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21:13

John von Neumann: The Mind That Built Computers and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

John von Neumann's colleagues included Nobel laureates and the founders of quantum physics, and some of them half seriously suspected he was not human. Born in Budapest in 1903 to a wealthy banking family, he knew calculus by age eight and read a 46 volume world history for pleasure. His tutor, Gabor Szego, is said to have wept on seeing the boy's reasoning. At 19 he was publishing work on set theory, and he later earned a chemical engineering degree in Zurich and a mathematics PhD in Budapest at

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21:17

Ray Tomlinson: The Secret Side Project That Invented...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Ray Tomlinson created networked email, gave the @ symbol its modern meaning, and then declined to own a cell phone. Born on April 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York, and raised in the village of Vail Mills, he was the son of a carpet mill worker and a dry cleaner's employee. He studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, did a co-op with IBM, and went on to MIT, where the early video game Spacewar showed him that computers could respond to people in real time.This episode

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18:07

Shakey the Robot: The Wobbly 1960s Machine That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Life magazine called it the first electronic person in 1970. Shakey was a top-heavy stack of boxes on wheels, built at the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center with DARPA money after a 1964 proposal for intelligent automata aimed at reconnaissance. It carried a television camera, sonar range finders, a radio antenna, and bump detectors. Project manager Charles Rosen watched it tremble across the floor, said it shakes like hell, and the name stuck.This episode tells Shakey's

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23:26

Honda ASIMO: The Four Foot Robot That Ran, Fell, and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 2008 a guest conductor four feet three inches tall, dressed like a small astronaut, led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra through The Impossible Dream. It was ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and it was never meant to be sold. The project began in 1986 at a research center in Wako, Japan, with a single goal: make a machine walk on two legs. The early E series models were little more than heavy mechanical legs trailing thick cables, and the hulking P series followed before ASIMO was unveiled in October

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17:43

Ask Jeeves: The Butler Who Taught the Internet to Ask...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In November 1999, stickers on grocery store bananas asked how many calories were in the fruit and pointed shoppers to a web address. That was Ask Jeeves, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1996 on a simple bet: people should be able to type a question in plain English instead of learning keyword and Boolean syntax. A cartoon valet borrowed from P.G. Wodehouse made the idea obvious to novices, and by July 1999 the company was trading on the NASDAQ.This episode follows three decades of reinvention,

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21:43

Adobe Flash: How a Failed Pen Tool Built the Web and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Adobe Flash began in 1993 as SmartSketch, a drawing program FutureWave built for pen computers running the doomed PenPoint operating system. When that platform failed, the company added frame by frame animation and relaunched it in 1995 as FutureSplash Animator. Because it drew with vector math instead of heavy pixel files, it could stream full color animation over a dial-up modem. Adobe passed on buying it, Macromedia grabbed it in December 1996, and a free player plug-in put Flash on nearly every

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24:15

Albert Gonzalez: The Secret Service Informant Who...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Albert Gonzalez looked like an ordinary IT guy from Miami. He bought his first computer at 12, reportedly hacked NASA at 14, and by his early twenties ran Shadow Crew, an online marketplace where about 4,000 members traded 1.5 million stolen credit and ATM cards along with fake passports and Social Security cards. When the Secret Service's Operation Firewall caught him in Newark carrying 15 fake cards, he avoided prison by becoming a paid informant.This episode follows the double life that came

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20:08

The Homebrew Computer Club: The Garage Meeting That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On March 5, 1975, a group of electronics hobbyists gathered in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park, California, to look at an Altair 8800. The machine had no screen and no keyboard. It came as a kit of loose parts, was programmed by flipping toggle switches, and answered in blinking red lights. Its manuals were poor and its parts often defective, so anyone who wanted one to work needed other people. French and Fred Moore gave them a place to meet.This episode follows the Homebrew Computer Club from

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22:15

The QR Code: From a Go Board and a Car Parts Factory...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1994 the Japanese auto parts company Denso Wave had a bottleneck. A standard barcode held about 20 characters, so workers sometimes scanned up to ten labels on a single box of parts. Engineer Masahiro Hara was asked for one label that could hold far more, handle kanji, and scan in a fraction of a second. Playing Go on his lunch breaks, he saw that a two-dimensional grid of black and white could carry vastly more information than a row of bars.This episode explains what a phone actually computes

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25:13

The Rotary Dial: How a Spring-Loaded Wheel Shaped...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

We still say we are dialing a number, though the dial itself is long gone. In 1892 Almon Brown Strowger's automatic exchange in La Porte, Indiana, removed the human operator but made callers tap out each digit on three push buttons, one press at a time. The rotary dial, introduced around 1907, handed that counting to a machine. Pulling the wheel forward only wound a spring. The signal went out on the return trip, as a switch broke the line current once per pulse.This episode treats the dial as an

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24:07

The PDF: Frozen PostScript, Honor System Passwords,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the early 1990s a formatted document sent from one computer to another often arrived scrambled, with shifted paragraphs, broken fonts, and missing images. In 1991 Adobe co-founder John Warnock launched the Camelot Project to fix that with a simplified form of PostScript, the page description language Adobe had built for printers. The result was the Portable Document Format, released as a free specification in 1993 and made an open ISO standard in 2008.This episode opens the container. PostScript

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19:27

Simon: How Ralph Baer Turned an Atari Flop Into a Toy...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1978 Milton Bradley launched a beeping plastic saucer at Studio 54, the most exclusive nightclub in New York. The toy was Simon, and its origin lay in someone else's failure. At a 1976 trade show, inventors Ralph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison of Marvin Glass and Associates saw Touch Me, an Atari arcade memory game with four identical black buttons and harsh, rasping sounds. Baer liked the gameplay and hated everything else about it.This episode explains how they rebuilt the idea around a

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