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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

22:18

Adam Osborne and the Osborne 1: The Portable PC That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1981 portable computing meant dragging a plastic box of nearly 25 pounds, the size of a sewing machine, through an airport and shoving it under the seat. It had no battery. The Osborne 1 was the idea of Adam Osborne, a successful author and publisher of computer books who believed price was the barrier keeping ordinary people from computers. He hired Lee Felsenstein to engineer a machine with the screen, two disk drives, keyboard, and motherboard in one rugged case, and sold it for 1,795

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24:47

Robert Tappan Morris and the 1988 Worm That Broke the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

At about 8:30 on the evening of November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a program onto the ARPANET from a machine at MIT, a choice that hid where it really came from. Robert Tappan Morris said he only wanted to count how many computers were connected. His father, Robert Morris Sr., was a pioneering cryptographer at the National Security Agency. Within hours the son's creation was copying itself across VAX computers and Sun-3 workstations running Berkeley Unix, and administrators were

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20:10

David L. Smith and the Melissa Virus: The Email That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On March 26, 1999, a programmer from Aberdeen Township, New Jersey, used a stolen AOL account to post a Word file called list.doc to the Usenet group alt.sex, promising passwords to paid adult websites. The file carried a macro virus named Melissa. Once opened, it lowered Word's security settings, infected the master template, and told Microsoft Outlook to mail itself to the first 50 entries in the victim's address book under the subject line Important message from, followed by a trusted name.This

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20:44

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: A Messy Dare That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the summer of 2014, for about eight weeks, it seemed everyone with a phone was dumping ice water on their head. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is remembered as a tidy charity triumph, but it began as something else. Versions of a cold water challenge had circulated since 1991 in the northern United States and northern Norway, with no link to any disease. That May, a New Jersey fire department that staged it with fire hoses was disciplined for using township equipment without permission.This episode

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22:19

ELIZA: The 1960s MIT Chatbot That Horrified Its Own...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the mid-1960s at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum walked into his lab and found his secretary typing at a teletype terminal. She asked him to leave the room. She wanted privacy for a personal conversation with ELIZA, the program he had written between 1964 and 1967 and named after Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion. Weizenbaum had built it to show that conversation between people and machines was a superficial trick. Instead, users confided in it, and psychiatrists proposed running it on many terminals to treat

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22:12

Kim Dotcom and Megaupload: The Birthday Raid That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On January 19, 2012, Kim Dotcom was marking his 38th birthday in a leased 30 million dollar mansion in Coatesville, New Zealand, with a helicopter on the lawn and a fleet of luxury cars outside. Then local police, acting with the FBI, raided the estate, seized his assets, and froze his accounts. The same day the U.S. Department of Justice took every Megaupload domain offline. The company he had incorporated in Hong Kong in 2005 had grown to 50 million daily visitors, 25 petabytes of stored data, and

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21:30

Dead Internet Theory: Shrimp Jesus, Bot Traffic, and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

An AI-generated image of Shrimp Jesus sits on Facebook above tens of thousands of comments that all say amen, and the crowd feels empty. That unease has a name. In 2021 a user called IlluminatiPirate posted a sprawling manifesto on the forum Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, claiming that organic human interaction online had been wiped out and replaced by bots as part of a plot by governments and elites. The conspiracy was fiction, but the feeling behind it was real enough that The Atlantic covered it

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20:14

The Dancing Baby: How a Discarded 3D Test Became the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The Dancing Baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha and the Oogachaka Baby, was never meant to be seen by the public. It was a stress test. In 1995 the company Unreal Pictures was building Character Studio, an animation plugin for Autodesk's 3D Studio Max, and needed sample files to impress developers. Animator Robert Lurye took a file of an adult skeleton dancing the cha-cha, added air guitar and shoulder shimmies, and the team forced that motion into a scanned plastic doll sold as Toddler with Diaper,

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18:04

The Boombox: How a Dutch Tape Recorder Became...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The boombox began as a quiet convenience. In 1966 the Dutch company Philips combined a radio tuner and a cassette recorder in one portable unit, the Radio Recorder, so listeners could tape a broadcast without holding a microphone up to a speaker. This episode treats the machine as a biography subject with a character arc. Japanese makers such as Aiwa, Panasonic, and Sony added stereo sound and Dolby noise reduction, and in the late 1970s the youth of New York, Los Angeles, and Washington turned the

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25:28

Apple Newton: The $100 Million Flop That Gave the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

A season six episode of The Simpsons has a bully scribble Beat up Martin on his Apple Newton, only for the screen to read Eat up Martha. The joke stuck, and with it the idea that the Newton was nothing more than an expensive failure. This episode makes the opposite case. The project began in 1987 with engineer Steve Sakoman, nearly died when he left in 1990, and was revived when Michael Tchao and Steve Capps pitched it directly to CEO John Sculley, who coined the term personal digital assistant and

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25:41

The Abacus: From Sumerian Dust to a Calculator Made...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1997, IBM scientists with the power to arrange individual atoms built a working calculator at the nanoscale, and the design they chose was an abacus. This episode asks why a tool thousands of years old still looked like the right answer. The word itself traces back to a Semitic term for dust or sand, a reminder that the first version was a table strewn with fine grit where merchants drew lines and set pebbles. The Sumerians were using boards and counters in a base 60 system between 2700 and 2300

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21:47

The Slide Rule: The Analog Computer That Reached the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

For three centuries, engineers did their hardest arithmetic on a stick with no batteries and no buttons. The slide rule, nicknamed the slipstick in the United States, works because multiplying two numbers is the same as adding their logarithms: slide one logarithmic scale along another and the product appears under the hairline. This episode explains the mechanics and the history, from Edmund Gunter's fixed scale in the 1620s to the moment William Oughtred set two of them side by side and let them

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22:42

Knight Capital: The $440 Million Software Glitch of...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On the morning of August 1, 2012, Knight Capital Group was the largest trader in U.S. equities, handling more than $21 billion a day and holding about 17 percent of volume on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. Forty-five minutes after the opening bell it had lost $440 million. This episode reconstructs how a routine software update, copied by hand to seven of eight servers, destroyed a firm founded in 1995 and built over 17 years.The cause was old code nobody had deleted. To support a

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19:39

BonziBuddy: The Purple Gorilla That Spied on Early...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Around the turn of the millennium, millions of people downloaded a free desktop companion that told jokes, sang songs, recited trivia, and managed downloads. BonziBuddy, from Joe and Jay Bonzi's Bonzi Software, launched in 1999 as a green parrot named Peedy, a stock character from the Microsoft Agent technology the whole program was built on. In May 2000 the parrot gave way to Bonzi, a purple gorilla with a synthetic voice labeled Adult Male #2. This episode follows how a virtual pet became what one

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24:00

YouTube: From Failed Dating Site to the Ad-Blocker Wars

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 2005, a Craigslist ad offered women $100 to upload videos of themselves to a struggling dating site modeled on Hot or Not. Nobody bit. The site was YouTube, founded by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, and its servers sat nearly empty until the founders dropped the dating angle and let people post anything. This episode traces how that pivot produced a platform with over 2.7 billion monthly users, more than a billion hours watched each day, and 500 hours of video

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20:48

John Draper: Captain Crunch, the Phone Phreak Who...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

A plastic whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal happened to blow at exactly 2,600 hertz, the tone AT&T used to mark a long distance trunk line as idle. Because the phone company sent its control signals down the same channel as callers' voices, anyone who could reproduce that tone could take over the network. John Draper, born in 1943 to an Air Force engineer, learned the trick in 1969 from a circle of blind teenage phone phreaks and then engineered the blue box, a tone generator that

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23:04

Xerox PARC: The Lab That Invented the Modern PC and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

On July 1, 1970, Xerox chief scientist Jack Goldman founded the Palo Alto Research Center, placing it 3,000 miles from the copier company's East Coast headquarters. Bob Taylor filled its computer science lab with engineers leaving the nearby Stanford Research Institute as government funding dried up. In under a decade that team produced bitmap graphics, the graphical user interface, the Bravo what you see is what you get editor, Smalltalk and object-oriented programming, Ethernet, and the laser

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23:28

WordPerfect: The Word Processor Microsoft Beat but...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton wrote a word processor for a Data General minicomputer owned by the city of Orem, Utah, and kept the rights. Their company, Satellite Software International, moved the program to the IBM PC in 1982, and because no C compiler existed for the machine, they wrote it entirely in x86 assembly language. That forced choice made WordPerfect faster than WordStar and, by 1990, the owner of 60 percent of

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24:02

Wikipedia: How a Scratch Pad for Experts Became the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Teachers and librarians once warned that a website anyone could edit was where facts went to die. Two decades later, federal courts cite it and scientific journals ask authors to update it. This episode goes back to the year 2000 and Nupedia, a slow, expert-reviewed encyclopedia that demanded credentials and a multi-step peer review. In January 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a feeder project, a public scratch pad for rough drafts. The scratch pad swallowed the encyclopedia

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24:07

Lolcats: From Victorian Cat Photos to I Can Has...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the early 1870s, British portrait photographer Harry Pointer posed his cats roller skating and sitting at tiny tea tables, then printed joke captions beneath them on souvenir cards people traded in their parlors. This episode argues that his Brighton Cats series holds the full DNA of the internet meme, and follows the idea across 150 years to the lolcat: a cat photo stamped with blocky white text in a deliberately broken dialect. The format is sillier than it looks and more rule-bound than anyone

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14,604 results

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