On October 29th, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA tried to send the first message across a new network to the Stanford Research Institute, more than 300 miles away. He typed L, then O, and the system crashed before the G of login arrived. This episode traces the ARPANET from that stuttering start back to its real origins: the waste of circuit switching, the packet switching ideas of Paul Baran and Donald Davies, J.C.R. Licklider's memos on an intergalactic computer network, and Bob Taylor's

AOL Instant Messenger, released in 1997, was never designed as a consumer hit. It grew out of an internal messaging feature written in the PL/1 language and running on a fault-tolerant Stratus mainframe, built only to move text reliably. Teenagers and college students took it over. By 2006 AIM held 52 percent of the North American instant messaging market, and its away message had turned the family computer into a broadcast tower for song lyrics, inside jokes, and party plans.This episode covers the

In a study spanning 2025 and 2026, judges chatting through a text window identified an AI model as human 73 percent of the time, a higher rate than the real people in the same experiment achieved. This episode asks how that happened by going back to 1950, when Alan Turing, working at the University of Manchester, published Computing Machinery and Intelligence. He thought the question of whether machines can think was too vague to answer, so he replaced it with a parlor game.In the original imitation

In Tunisia before the 2011 revolution, people saw the page not found screen on so many dissident websites that they gave it a name: Ammar 404, the invisible censor. That story frames this episode on the HTTP 404 status code, a three-digit reply built for machines. The first digit, 4, means the client asked for something the server cannot find. The system was borrowed from older protocols such as FTP, and better codes exist, like 301 for moved permanently and 410 for gone, but few webmasters bother

In 1965 the trade magazine Electronics asked Gordon Moore, then director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, to predict the next ten years of semiconductor components. Working from a handful of data points, the chemist noticed that the number of components on a chip at the lowest cost per component was doubling every year. He extended the line and estimated that by 1975 engineers would fit 65,000 components on a single piece of silicon.This episode explains why that guess held,

Steve Jobs does not fit the usual picture of a tech chief executive. Put up for a closed adoption in 1955 and raised by a machinist who gave him a corner of the garage workbench, he grew up in Cupertino, dropped out of Reed College after one semester, and stayed on campus anyway, sleeping on floors, eating free meals at a Hare Krishna temple, and auditing a calligraphy class. He traveled to India, studied Zen, and considered becoming a monk.This episode follows the tension between that seeker and

The View-Master is remembered as a red plastic toy, but its history runs through a Portland drugstore, a player piano workshop, and the War Department. Edwin Eugene Mayer, a pharmacist, bought into a photo finishing business called Sawyer's in 1919 and built it into the nation's largest producer of scenic postcards. In 1938 he met William Gruber, a piano mechanic and photography obsessive who had mounted 16 millimeter Kodachrome film in the sturdy paper stock he knew from piano rolls.This episode

In June 2003, more than 130 people gathered around one expensive rug on the ninth floor of Macy's in Manhattan. Each told the confused salesperson the same story: they lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York and were shopping for a love rug. Then they left. It was the first successful flash mob, and its architect was Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper's Magazine who wanted to see whether downtown trend chasers would show up for something meaningless if it felt exclusive.This

The first ransomware attack arrived by post. In 1989 a biologist named Joseph Popp mailed around 20,000 floppy disks labeled as AIDS information to attendees of a World Health Organization conference. On the 90th boot, the hidden program locked the machine and demanded a $189 cashier's check sent to a P.O. box in Panama for the fictitious PC Cyborg Corporation. Popp never stood trial. He was declared mentally unfit, and at one point wore cardboard boxes on his head.This episode tracks how that crude

Reddit exists because Paul Graham turned down an app for ordering food by text message. In the spring of 2005, University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian pitched him My Mobile Menu after a lecture in Boston. He passed on the idea but invited them into the first class of Y Combinator with a new brief: build the front page of the internet. The site launched that June to an empty room, so the founders created hundreds of fake accounts and held conversations with themselves.This

Anonymous has no face, no leader, and no fixed membership, which makes its life story unusually hard to tell. It began on the image boards of the early 2000s, above all 4chan, where threads vanished quickly and users who posted without a name were all tagged with the same default label. The running joke that this was one hyperactive person gave strangers a shared myth, and in 2006 they tested it by flooding Habbo Hotel with identical avatars and declaring the virtual pool closed.This episode traces

Control-Alt-Delete was never meant for the public. In 1981 in Boca Raton, Florida, IBM engineer David Bradley was writing the ROM BIOS for the IBM PC 5150, and the prototype crashed constantly. Every crash meant a hard reboot and a slow power-on self-test of every kilobyte of memory. Bradley spent five or ten minutes coding a keyboard interrupt that would skip the test and restart the machine, then moved on to the next crisis.This episode follows that hidden shortcut out of the lab and into daily

Bill Gates has been two very different public figures: the desk-pounding monopolist of the 1990s and the sweater-wearing philanthropist trying to eradicate disease. This episode argues that both run on the same engine. It begins in a Seattle household where card games and swims to the dock at Hood Canal were contests with penalties for losing, then moves to the Lakeside School, where a 1968 rummage sale by the Mothers' Club bought computer time and a teletype terminal for a 13-year-old who became

In 1984, Dr. An Wang was the fifth richest person in America, worth about $1.6 billion and employing 30,000 people. Born in Shanghai in 1920, he immigrated to the United States in June 1945, finished a Harvard doctorate in applied physics by 1948, and went to work with Howard Aiken. There he co-invented the pulse transfer controlling device, which solved the destructive readout problem and made magnetic core memory practical for continuous computing.This episode traces how Wang turned that invention

In February 2016, hackers tried to steal roughly $1 billion from the central bank of Bangladesh without ever entering a building. Malware suspected to be a Dridex variant had been sitting inside Bangladesh Bank's systems since January, watching employees and learning the exact syntax of the SWIFT messaging network. Then, on the night of February 4th into the 5th, as the Bangladeshi weekend began, the attackers sent 35 fraudulent transfer instructions to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.This

東海孝媳的故事 本集節目於臺北廣播電臺 (FM93.1、AM1134)115年07月14日晚上9點30分至10點播出 -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

Mainstream presses are hot with the pneumonic plague story out of Russia. Alternative media presses are hot with the Chris Bledsoe ‘white lady’ prophecy about Regulus and what some thought would be the arrival of Christ. Both presses consistently report on the unfolding of a framed armageddon between Israel and its enemies. Could there be a connection between all three? What do Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga have to do with any of it?*The is the FREE archive, which includes advertisements. Subscribe to

Ethiopia's Tigray War killed 600,000 people. Now fighting has erupted again, with rebels forming a powerful multi-faction alliance against the federal government. This conflict threatens to destabilise an already fragile region, potentially drawing in Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan, as rival international coalitions pour weapons into devastating proxy wars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.Pivot’un bu bölümünde; YouTSide CEO’su Olcay Aksoy’un moderatörlüğünde, danışman ve melek yatırımcı Uğur Şeker ile kariyerindeki ilk pivottan yatırım ekosisteminde değişen kurallara uzanıyoruz. Kendi kariyerinde yaşadığı ilk pivot hikâyesini ve örneği olmayan yapıları sıfırdan inşa etme sürecini dinlerken; melek yatırım ekosisteminde doğru ekibin, ilk tutan yatırımların ve "herkes girişimci olmak zorunda mı?" sorusunun yanıtını arıyoruz

How much do you know about the inner chaos of Carvel or Ben Cohen's quest to free Ben and Jerry's? Why are apple trees so different from one seed to the next? In the second part this special two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max explore more of the Ridiculous History they didn't get to in this year's previous episodes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.