You can use long passwords, multi-factor authentication, and prompt updates and still be exposed to a zero-day: a flaw the software vendor has known about for exactly zero days. This episode separates terms that are often blurred. A vulnerability is the opening, like a bank vault air vent built an inch too wide. An exploit is the specialized tool built to get through it. A 2017 RAND Corporation data set found exploits took an average of 22 days to develop and stayed usable for 6.9 years.Around these

On January 10th, 1985, Sir Clive Sinclair, the knighted millionaire behind the pocket calculator and the ZX Spectrum, unveiled what he believed was the future of transport at Alexandra Palace in London. It was a three-wheeled, open-air electric vehicle that looked like a plastic bathtub. This episode follows the Sinclair C5 from his long obsession with electric vehicles, through his sale of about 8.3 million pounds in personal shares to fund a secretive new company, to a launch in snow and ice that

Starting in November 2008, the Conficker worm, also known as Downadup or Kido, infiltrated somewhere between 9 and 15 million computers. It grounded French military aircraft that could not download flight plans, turned up on Royal Navy warships and submarines, and infected over 800 computers in Sheffield hospitals. Its entry point was a Windows flaw cataloged as MS08-067, which Microsoft had patched on October 23rd, 2008. By January 2009 an estimated 30 percent of Windows PCs were still unpatched,

The blue screen of death was not designed by psychologists to calm anyone down. When Windows NT 3.1 introduced the first true critical error screen in 1993, Microsoft developer John Vert wrote it to match what he already stared at all day: a MIPS workstation and the SlickEdit text editor, which defaulted to white text on a blue background. This episode traces the screen from the garbled text of Windows 1.01 and 2.03, through the blue task manager summoned by Control-Alt-Delete in Windows 3.1, to the

On certain legacy servers, the date is still counted as a day in September 1993. The joke commemorates Eternal September, the moment between late 1993 and early 1994 when the early internet lost its small town feel. This episode reconstructs Usenet before the flood: a network of newsgroups reached mostly through universities and tech companies, passed between machines over phone lines by UUCP, where every byte cost someone money. That expense produced netiquette, enforced by flaming, kill files, and

Most of the looping clips people send today are not GIF files at all. They are silent video files wearing an old disguise. This episode tells the story of the real Graphics Interchange Format, released in June 1987 by a CompuServe team led by Steve Wilhite, when customers paid by the minute and a single color image could take minutes to arrive. The solution was a palette of 256 colors chosen from roughly 16.7 million, LZW compression that built a shared dictionary of patterns on the fly, and

Projectionists running 70 millimeter IMAX prints, some weighing over 600 pounds, control the film platters through software that imitates a handheld device from 1997. This episode explains how that came to be by going back to March 10, 1997, when Palm, then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, launched the PalmPilot Personal at $299 and the PalmPilot Professional at $399. Inside was a 16 megahertz Motorola processor, Palm OS 2.0, and either 512 kilobytes or one megabyte of memory, all running for weeks on

Google and Facebook spend fortunes on cybersecurity, yet a single Lithuanian fraudster took $100 million from the two of them over two years. He used no exploit at all. He impersonated a hardware supplier both companies worked with, mocked up official letterheads, sent fake invoices, and was paid. This episode treats that case as the entry point to social engineering, the practice of attacking the human instead of the code, and explains why it is cheaper, faster, and more reliable for an attacker

HD DVD reached stores first, cost less to manufacture, had Microsoft behind it, and carried no region codes. It still ended with Toshiba abandoning the format and absorbing a loss of $986 million. This episode goes back to the problem both camps were trying to solve: high-definition televisions fed by 480p DVDs that topped out around eight and a half gigabytes. Shuji Nakamura's practical blue laser diode, with its 405 nanometer wavelength, made denser discs possible, and the DVD Forum promptly split

The floppy disk was declared obsolete well over a decade ago, yet it coordinated functions of the United States nuclear forces until 2019 and loaded flight software onto British Airways Boeing 747s until that fleet retired in 2020. This episode starts in 1971, when IBM introduced an eight-inch, read-only disk for loading microcode into mainframes, and follows the format as it shrank to the 5.25-inch mini-floppy from Shugart Associates in 1976 and then to the rigid 3.5-inch design, based on a Sony

The fax machine is older than the telephone. Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a British patent in 1843 for his electric printing telegraph, and by 1865 Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph was running a commercial service between Paris and Lyon, 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell's invention. This episode traces how synchronized pendulums, copper plates, and insulating ink turned images into electrical pulses, and why bankers and lawyers prized the result: a signature they could see, not a

In 1964 you could step into a booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal and see a live video feed of a friend in Chicago. You also had to reserve the slot in advance, make sure the other person travelled to a matching booth, and pay $27 for three minutes. This episode follows the AT&T Picturephone from a Bell Labs experiment in the 1930s, where Dr. Herbert Ives led more than 200 scientists, engineers, and technicians, through a mid-1950s prototype that sent one still image every two seconds, to

The 8-track tape, formally known as Stereo 8, was a format you could not rewind. Inside its chunky plastic cartridge sat a single spool of quarter-inch magnetic tape running at 3.75 inches per second, pulled from the center and wound back onto the outside of the same reel. Only a graphite lubricant on the back of the tape kept it from strangling itself. A strip of metallic foil spliced into the loop triggered a solenoid that shoved the playback head to the next pair of tracks, producing the famous

In 1981, Adam Osborne released the Osborne 1, a self-contained personal computer priced at $1,995 with a built-in 5-inch screen and bundled word processing and spreadsheet software. It weighed around 24 pounds and was roughly the size of a sewing machine, but it proved that computing could travel. Two years later the company filed for bankruptcy, and his name became shorthand for a business blunder: announcing a future product so early that customers stop buying the current one.This episode tests

In 2012 alone, 41.45 million 3D televisions shipped worldwide. By 2017, every major manufacturer had stopped making them. This episode follows the full arc of that collapse, starting long before the flat screen: Sir Charles Wheatstone's stereoscope in 1838, John Logie Baird's stereoscopic TV demonstration in London in 1928, the 1950s cinema boom of Bwana Devil and House of Wax, and the 1997 sweeps stunt in which NBC viewers collected cardboard glasses from fast food chains to watch Third Rock from

In the year 2000, a 105-year-old woman in Oslo received a formal letter offering her a place in kindergarten. The Norwegian citizen registry stored only the last two digits of her birth year, so the computer read 95 and assumed 1995. That same shortcut had spent the previous months driving people to hoard gold, canned food, and generators. This episode traces the Y2K problem back to its origin in the 1960s and 1970s, when a single kilobyte of memory could cost over $100, punched cards had exactly 80

The blue and yellow can under your sink began as a fix for a frightening aerospace problem. In 1953 the Rocket Chemical Company of San Diego was asked by Convair to stop rust on the Atlas missile, whose thin stainless steel skin doubled as the wall of its balloon tanks. With no internal frame, the rocket held its shape through pressure alone, so even minor corrosion was a threat. The answer had to creep under moisture and lift it off the metal. It took forty tries, which is the whole meaning of the

Gary Kildall wrote the first practical operating system for personal computers, yet he is remembered mostly for a rumor that he went flying instead of meeting IBM. Born in Seattle in 1942 to a family that ran a seamanship school, he planned to teach high school math. Instead he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, earned a doctorate in 1972, and began experimenting with early Intel chips. In 1973 he created PL/M, the first high-level language for microprocessors, and CP/M, which let

Kathleen Rita McNulty was born in February 1921 in an Irish-speaking village in County Donegal, on the night British forces arrested her father, an Irish Republican Army training officer. The family emigrated in October 1924 to Philadelphia, where she arrived speaking no English and found her footing in mathematics. She graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women in 1942 as one of a handful of math majors in a class of 92, just as the Army began advertising for women with math degrees. Her job

In 2015 Finland released a set of national emojis: a couple in a sauna, heavy metal rockers, and a phone officially named the unbreakable. That phone was the Nokia 3310. Launched in late 2000 by a development team in Copenhagen, it abandoned the angular business handset for a rounded candy bar shape meant to be run with one thumb. Its screen was 84 by 48 monochrome pixels, its C button gave instant tactile certainty, and its engineers budgeted every kilobyte and milliwatt. It went on to sell 126