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

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

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

More than a decade before the World Wide Web, two graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, linked Unix machines at Duke and the University of North Carolina over ordinary phone lines. Locked out of the government-funded ARPANET, they used the UUCP protocol and late-night modem calls to pass messages from server to server, a store and forward design that worked like a digital bucket brigade. This episode tells how that poor man's ARPANET became the first global town square, with no CEO, no

In January 2026, someone cleaning out a closet at the University of Utah found a nine-track magnetic tape holding a surviving copy of Unix version 4. This episode treats that discovery as the opening of a biography: the life of an operating system that began as an unsanctioned project at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna had grown tired of Multics, the overbuilt time-sharing system from MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, and retreated to a

In 1995, connecting a printer, modem, or joystick to a PC meant a tangle of parallel ports, serial ports, PS/2 plugs, and game ports, plus driver floppies and hand-assigned IRQ channels that crashed the machine when two devices collided. Seven companies, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, DEC, NEC, and Nortel, set out to replace all of it with one plug and play, hot-swappable port that carried its own power. This episode traces the Universal Serial Bus from that fix to the cable that now runs nearly

In 2007, David Karp and Marco Arment built Tumblr in a two-week gap between consulting contracts, and it gained 75,000 users in two weeks. By 2011, half its users were under 25. With no public follower counts and a tag field that people filled with rambling private commentary, it became a haven for niche communities, especially LGBTQ youth. In May 2013, Yahoo bought it for 1.1 billion dollars in cash. Six years later it sold for less than 3 million.This episode traces how that value vanished. Yahoo

The transistor is the most manufactured artifact in human history: by 2018, more than 13 sextillion had been made. It replaced the thermionic triode, a glass vacuum tube invented in 1907 that had to boil electrons off a heated plate, ran hot, and burned out like a light bulb. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a solid-state alternative in Canada in 1925, but the pure semiconductor crystals needed to build it did not exist. The breakthrough came at Bell Labs in December 1947.This episode

Before the transistor, a portable radio was a heavy box of hot, fragile vacuum tubes that needed two separate batteries, one just to heat the filaments. That changed after December 1947, when William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen demonstrated the first working transistor at Bell Laboratories. The first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, arrived in November 1954 from an unlikely partnership between Texas Instruments and an Indianapolis maker of TV antenna boosters. It cost

In 1991, a 13-year-old Tom Fulp cut and pasted together a fanzine about the Neo Geo console called New Ground and mailed it to about 100 members of a Prodigy club. By 1995 he had moved the idea online, and as a Drexel University student he began making crude games such as Club a Seal and Assassin. In 1999 he released Pico's School, a Flash game far more polished than the web of that era was used to, and gathered his scattered projects under a single domain with a page he called the Portal.This

The Pirate Bay began in late 2003 as a project of Piratbyrån, a Swedish anti-copyright think tank whose name means the Piracy Bureau. Its founders, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, described it as a long-running piece of performance art. The site hosted no movies or music at all. Using the BitTorrent protocol, it worked like a card catalog for an empty library, pointing users to one another's files. Early servers and bandwidth were paid for in part by Carl Lundström, heir to a

Around 1990, German researcher Karlheinz Brandenburg sat in a lab listening to Suzanne Vega's a cappella recording of Tom's Diner thousands of times. He was tuning an algorithm built on a quirk of human hearing called auditory masking, first documented in 1894 by physicist Alfred M. Mayer: a loud tone makes a quieter neighboring tone inaudible. Brandenburg's idea, finalized in his 1989 doctoral thesis, was that a computer need not store sounds the brain throws away.This episode traces the MP3 from

Stuxnet was the first malware found to spy on and sabotage industrial control systems, and the first to carry a rootkit for a programmable logic controller. It surfaced in June 2010 after a programming error in an update let it spread from an engineer's laptop to the open internet, where a researcher at the Belarusian antivirus firm VirusBlokAda flagged it. At half a megabyte, it was enormous for malware. It used four zero-day exploits at once and drivers signed with keys stolen from Realtek and

In February 1981, Steve Wozniak crashed a small plane shortly after takeoff from a California airport and woke with anterograde amnesia. For five weeks his brain could not form new memories, and he did not know his own name. He recovered in part by playing games on the Apple II, the computer he had designed. When his memory returned, he looked at his wealth and the corporate grind at Apple and stepped away, re-enrolling at UC Berkeley under the alias Rocky Raccoon Clark to finish his engineering

In 1964, DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek produced a polymer solution that looked like a failure. It was thin, cloudy, and reminded her of buttermilk, the kind of mixture standard practice sent down the drain. She kept it. Stirring revealed an odd opalescence, a sign that the rigid aramid molecules had lined up in a liquid crystal state. The technician who ran the spinneret, Charles Smullen, refused to test it for fear of clogging his equipment, until she talked him into it. The fiber that emerged

In 1976, a small team at Texas Instruments led by Paul Breedlove began a side project with a budget of just 25,000 dollars. Two years later, at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1978, they unveiled the Speak and Spell, the first educational toy to store whole spoken words in solid state memory with no moving parts. Earlier talking toys relied on tiny phonograph records and tape loops. This one ran on the TMC0280, the world's first single-chip voice synthesizer.This episode explains the

Sophia was activated on Valentine's Day in 2016 by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, with a face modeled on Queen Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, and founder David Hanson's wife, Amanda. Built as a social robot meant to draw out empathy, she can produce more than 60 facial expressions, and cameras in her eyes let her track faces and hold eye contact. After a debut at South by Southwest in March 2016, she appeared on 60 Minutes, The Tonight Show, and the cover of Elle Brazil.This episode treats her story

In 1985, a 61-year-old woman at a clinic in Marietta, Georgia, lay down for routine radiation after a lumpectomy and felt a searing blast of heat tear through her chest. The technician checked the screen and told her a burn was impossible. She had in fact absorbed between 15,000 and 20,000 rads instead of the prescribed 200. Her case was the first in the worst series of radiation accidents in the history of medical accelerators, all traced to one machine: the Therac-25, built by Atomic Energy of

Seymour Cray designed the fastest computers on Earth and unwound by digging a tunnel beneath his house, joking that elves visited him there with engineering answers. Born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, he built a device from an erector set at age ten that turned punched paper tape into Morse code. After working on Japanese naval codes as a radio operator in World War II, he joined Engineering Research Associates in 1950 and co-founded Control Data Corporation with William Norris in 1957.This

Graphene is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb. It is about 200 times stronger than structural steel, absorbs only 2.3 percent of visible light, and conducts heat ten times better than copper. For decades physicists believed such a two-dimensional crystal could not survive in the real world. Then, in 2004 at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated it by peeling graphite with sticky tape, work that earned the 2010 Nobel Prize in