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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

20:35

Minitel: How France Built an Online World a Decade...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1985, while most American computers sat disconnected on desks, millions of French households were already online, buying train tickets, checking bank balances, playing games, and chatting with strangers. The network was Minitel, and it grew out of a crisis. In the late 1970s France had fewer than 7 million telephone lines for 47 million people, and the national telecom authority, the PTT, was spending 500 million francs a year on printed phone books and directory operators.This episode explains

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23:34

The Equifax Breach: Admin Passwords, a Missed Patch,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The 2017 Equifax breach exposed the Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and credit histories of over 147 million Americans, plus more than 1.5 million people in the UK. It was not a brilliant attack. A 2015 internal audit had already found a backlog of unpatched vulnerabilities, no complete inventory of the company's own systems, and a patching process that ran on an honor system. When a critical fix for Apache Struts was released on March 7, 2017, Equifax never applied it to its credit

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23:50

Emoji: How Japanese Pager Icons Became a Global...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named a picture its word of the year: the face with tears of joy. The choice makes sense once you see what typing strips away, which is tone of voice, facial expression, and posture. The fix began in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed a sideways smiley as a joke marker on university message boards. Japanese phone companies then turned the idea into tiny 12 by 12 pixel pictures, well before the designer who usually gets the credit.This episode follows

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21:52

Duct Tape: From Vesta Stoudt's Letter to FDR to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The original duck tape had no glue at all. The name comes from the Dutch word doek, a heavy woven cloth, and around 1902 strips of it were wrapped around the Manhattan Bridge's steel cables to protect them from salt air. The sticky version arrived in 1943, when ordnance plant worker Vesta Stoudt saw that the wax-dipped paper tape sealing ammunition boxes cost soldiers precious seconds under fire. Ignored by her supervisors, she wrote directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.This episode follows

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21:23

Douglas Engelbart and the Mother of All Demos:...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In 1946, Douglas Engelbart was a young Navy radar technician in the Philippines when he read Vannevar Bush's essay As We May Think in a Red Cross library. Bush imagined the Memex, a microfilm desk that linked documents by association, the way the mind works. Engelbart carried the idea into a world of punch cards and batch processing and concluded that computers should do more than calculate. They should augment human intellect, so people could manage problems growing faster than their brains

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19:22

Digg: The Site That Invented the Like Button and Lost...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Digg launched in 2004 as an experiment by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky: take the front page away from editors and hand it to the crowd. Users submitted links, then dug them up or buried them. Creative director Daniel Burka's little yellow thumb with a number beside it became the ancestor of every like button. By 2008 the site drew over 236 million visitors a year, and a front page spot could melt a target site's servers.This episode follows the twenty year arc from that

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24:53

The Dark Web: Tor, Ransomware Franchises, and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The dark web is smaller and stranger than its reputation. It accounts for just 3 percent of daily traffic on the Tor network, and its single biggest hidden service is Facebook. This episode starts with the architecture: the difference between the deep web and the dark web, and how onion routing passes data through three servers, each able to unlock only one layer, so that no single node ever knows both who sent a request and where it is going.From there it maps the economy that anonymity produced

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24:00

Creepypasta: How Internet Ghost Stories Became Modern...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Creepypasta takes its name from 4chan slang around 2007: a horror version of copypasta, the blocks of text users copied and pasted across message boards. Its roots run back to 1990s chain emails and to Ted the Caver, a 2001 story formatted as a personal web journal with dates and photographs. By 2005 anonymous users were crowdsourcing a monster called the Rake, inventing fake historical documents such as a 1602 mariner's log to prove it existed.This episode follows the genre from its 2010 peak, when

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23:04

Craig Newmark and Craigslist: The Email List That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In early 1995, Craig Newmark was a newcomer to San Francisco sending a manually typed email list of local tech events to a handful of acquaintances. Inspired by the community spirit of the Well, MindVox, and Usenet, he assumed people wanted parties. Instead, subscribers asked for job postings, then more categories, then a website. By June 1995 he had installed Majordomo to automate subscriptions, and craigslist.org followed when users demanded a web interface.This episode traces how that list became

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21:16

GPS: From Sputnik's Beep to Einstein's Clocks in Your...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The Global Positioning System began with a Soviet satellite and two curious physicists. In 1957, William Guier and George Weiffenbach of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab tuned in to Sputnik 1 and noticed its radio pitch shifting as it crossed the sky. Using the Doppler effect and the lab's UNIVAC computer, they mapped its orbit. Deputy director Frank McClure then asked the inverse question: if you know exactly where a satellite is, can it tell you where you are on Earth?This episode follows

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20:58

Clippy: How Microsoft's Hated Paperclip Became a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Inside Microsoft, the developers building the Office Assistant gave it a code name, TFC, whose first word is unprintable and whose last word was clown. This episode is a full biography of Clippit, the paperclip everyone called Clippy. His roots lie in 1990s Stanford research by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, who showed that people treat computers as social actors. Microsoft took the finding literally and put a face on its software. Designer Kevan Atteberry drew the googly-eyed winner, and Bayesian

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22:24

Claude Shannon: The Playful Genius Who Invented the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Claude Shannon's garage held a flame-throwing trumpet, rocket-powered frisbees, a Rubik's Cube solving robot, and foam shoes for walking on water. The same man laid the mathematical foundation of the digital world. Born in 1916 in Gaylord, Michigan, he strung a half-mile telegraph along barbed wire fences as a boy. At MIT, working on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, he saw that a switch being open or closed matched the true and false of George Boole's algebra. His 1937 thesis turned circuit

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25:21

Lorem Ipsum: How a Mangled Cicero Text Became the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Lorem ipsum fills design templates, broken WordPress themes, and brochure mockups everywhere, and it reads like a mystical Latin incantation. It is in fact a butchered passage from a first century BC treatise in which Cicero weighs the extremes of good and evil and argues that people must sometimes rationally accept pain for a greater good. This episode explains why designers need dummy text at all: readers recognize whole words by reflex, so real copy pulls attention away from typeface, spacing,

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20:31

Charlie Bit My Finger: The Davies-Carr Family and a...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In May 2007 in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, Howard Davies-Carr filmed his sons in an armchair. One-year-old Charlie nibbled three-year-old Harry's finger, bit harder the second time, and both boys were giggling again within seconds. The 56-second file was too large to email to the boys' grandfather in the United States, so Howard uploaded it to YouTube as a simple way to pass it along. By the time he thought to delete it or make it private, it had escaped. By late 2009 it had passed Evolution of Dance

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27:32

The Compact Cassette: From Office Dictation Tool to...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

The compact cassette began as a way to make office dictation less tedious and ended up in pockets, car dashboards, and revolutions. This episode starts with the clumsy reel-to-reel machines of the postwar years and the failed RCA tape cartridge of 1958, then follows Philips as it set two design teams against each other. Lou Ottens and his group in Hasselt, Belgium won with a two-hole design unveiled at the Berlin Radio Show in August 1963. Pressed by Sony, Philips licensed the format free of charge,

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22:56

CB Radio: How Truckers Turned 27 MHz Into America's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

In the late 1970s you could twist a dial through the static and hear Betty Ford signing off as First Mama, or Mel Blanc doing Bugs Bunny for random kids. This episode explains how citizens band radio got there. The FCC set aside spectrum for personal use in 1945, inventor Al Gross built early handhelds, and expensive UHF parts sank the idea until the 23-channel Class D service opened at 27 MHz in 1958. For years it served electricians and the Coast Guard. Then the 1973 oil crisis brought a 55 mile

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20:31

CAPTCHA: How Proving You're Human Trained the AI That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Cloudflare estimates the average person spends about 32 seconds solving a single CAPTCHA, which adds up to centuries of collective human time every day. This episode traces how that came to be. Early software read letters as rigid pixel maps and failed when text was tilted or stretched, so around 2000 developers began using distorted words as a lock only human eyes could pick. PayPal adopted the approach in 2001 under Max Levchin, and in 2003 Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and colleagues coined the

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25:50

Bulletin Board Systems: The Dial-Up Underground That...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

Before the World Wide Web, getting online meant ordering a desktop computer to dial a local phone number, sitting through a minute of screeching static, and hoping no one else in town was already connected. This episode traces the bulletin board system from Community Memory, a coin-operated public terminal project that began in Berkeley in August 1973, to CBBS, built by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess while they were snowed in during the Chicago blizzard of 1978. It went online on February 16th,

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20:58

Boo.com: The 3D Fashion Site That Burned $135 Million...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

At the turn of the millennium, when most people reached the internet through a screeching dial-up modem, three Swedish entrepreneurs set out to build a 3D interactive fashion store for wealthy 18 to 24 year olds. Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander, and Patrik Hedelin had already built Bokus.com into the third largest online bookseller in the world, so investors assumed clothing would be no harder. This episode follows Boo.com from its Carnaby Street headquarters to its liquidation on May 18th, 2000,

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24:54

The Blue Box: How a Toy Whistle Hacked AT&T and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/08

A blind seven-year-old with perfect pitch and a plastic whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch could both do the same astonishing thing: reset a long distance line on the world's most powerful phone network. This episode explains why. AT&T's automated switches talked to each other with musical tones sent down the same channel as the caller's voice, and a single 2600 hertz tone told a distant machine that the caller had hung up. Bell Labs even printed the frequencies in the Bell System Technical

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14,604 results

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