On March 19, 2007, a website called Justin.tv went live with a single product: Justin Kan. Funded by Paul Graham at Y Combinator and built with cofounders Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt, the site broadcast Kan's life around the clock from a webcam clipped to his baseball cap. Because nothing off the shelf could stream video from the street, Vogt bonded several EVDO cellular data cards through a Linux laptop that Kan carried in a hot, heavy backpack. The press compared it to The Truman

Betty Jean Jennings was born in Gentry County, Missouri, in 1924, the sixth of seven children of a farmer and schoolteacher. By 14 she was driving herself to high school in a neighboring town, and at 16 she graduated as salutatorian. In college she switched from journalism to mathematics after clashing with her advisor, and in 1945 she was the only student in her class to earn a math degree. The Army hired her as a human computer, calculating artillery trajectories by hand, and she soon applied to

In 2004, Jawed Karim was an engineer at PayPal, working alongside Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, and he could not find online footage of the two events everyone was talking about: the Super Bowl halftime show and the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Video on the internet then meant sketchy downloads, rival media players, and corrupted files. The three built a fix: a single place where anyone could upload a heavy file and have it converted into a standard format that played from a simple link in any

Jack Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1923 and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where a winter ice storm once snapped the telephone poles and his father, who ran the local electric company, used amateur radio operators to coordinate the repairs. The lesson stuck: when the infrastructure breaks, find another path for the signal. After serving as an Army electronics technician in World War II, Kilby earned his engineering degree at the University of Illinois in 1947, then spent his days on

Every photo on your screen is a carefully built illusion. The Joint Photographic Experts Group standard, released in 1992, starts by exploiting a weakness in human vision: our eyes are sharp on brightness and contrast but poor at fine detail in color. The algorithm converts an image from red, green, and blue into luma and chroma, keeps the brightness at full fidelity, and throws away half or more of the color data by making neighboring pixels share a value. Like a coloring book with crisp outlines,

In the late 1990s, amateur astronomers synchronized their watches to catch Iridium flares, flashes of sunlight off satellite antennas that could outshine Venus. The hardware behind them was a marvel. To let a handheld phone reach space, Motorola placed its satellites in low Earth orbit about 485 miles up, where each one races by at roughly 17,000 miles per hour and stays in view for about seven minutes. The plan called for 77 satellites handing calls to one another, which gave the company the name

On March 23, 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot on Twitter named Tay, short for Thinking About You. Built by its technology and research divisions with the Bing team, Tay was given the voice of a 19 year old American woman and the tagline the AI with zero chill. It was modeled on Xiaoice, a Chinese chatbot that had handled more than 40 million conversations without a major incident. Tay learned continuously from whoever talked to it, and within hours a subset of users realized they could flood it

In 1996, talking to someone online meant shouting into the scrolling chaos of an IRC channel. Then five Israeli developers, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and his father Yossi Vardi, founded Mirabilis and released a small free program called ICQ. With no marketing budget and nothing but word of mouth, it gave every user a permanent account and a direct, private line to one other person. Each account carried a sequential user identification number, the UIN, starting at

An analyst once said that IBM building a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance. The company's normal development cycle ran four to five years, and it made every part of its machines itself. But by 1979 the microcomputer market was worth $15 billion and growing more than 40 percent a year, and Tandy's report of over 100,000 TRS-80s shipped in a single year was the wake-up call. IBM president John Opel put William C. Lowe and Philip Don Estridge in charge of a group of

On July 4, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail, choosing the date to symbolize freedom from email tied to an internet service provider. The original spelling capitalized the letters H, T, M, and L as a nod to the code of the web. With $310,000 in venture backing from Draper Associates, a staff of nine, and a free inbox of just two megabytes, the service let anyone read their mail from any browser in the world. By December 1997 it had more than eight and a half million subscribers,

Helvetica began as a business problem. In 1956, Eduard Hoffmann, art director of the Haas type foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, was losing ground to a rival's Akzidenz-Grotesk, the favorite of modernist Swiss designers. He enlisted Max Miedinger, a freelance designer and former Haas salesman, to build a perfectly neutral challenger under the working title Neue Haas Grotesk. The two obsessed over fractions of a millimeter, testing their curves and spacing on the word hamburgers, and produced a

For two years, a single missing bounds check sat inside OpenSSL, the open source cryptography library that put the padlock icon on most of the web. The Heartbeat extension, submitted by PhD student Robin Seggelmann and reviewed by core developer Stephen Henson, went live in March 2012. It let a computer ask a server to echo back a short message, but the server never verified the claimed length. An attacker could send four letters, claim five hundred, and receive whatever sat next to them in active

In early 2013 a rigid 30 second video format swept the world. One helmeted person dances alone to Baauer's trap track Harlem Shake while everyone nearby ignores them. At 15 seconds the bass drops, the shot cuts, and the whole room erupts in costumes and flailing. YouTube creator George Miller, later known as Joji, sparked it on January 30, and five Australian teenagers fixed the template days later. It had nothing to do with the original 1980s Harlem street dance.This episode treats the meme as more

The early web had no memory. HTTP was stateless, so every click arrived as if from a stranger. In 1994 the telecom company MCI, working with Netscape on an online store, wanted a shopping cart without the cost of storing every half-finished order on its own servers. Netscape programmer Lou Montulli borrowed a Unix idea called the magic cookie: have the server hand the browser a tiny piece of text, and have the browser hand it back with each request.This episode follows that small text file, capped

Grumpy Cat was born Tardar Sauce on April 4, 2012, in Morristown, Arizona, to an ordinary calico mother. Feline dwarfism, a flattened face, and a pronounced underbite gave her a permanent scowl, though her owner Tabatha Bundesen described a sweet, docile pet. On September 22, 2012, Tabatha's brother Bryan posted a photo to Reddit. Users buried the fluffy kitten under pessimistic captions, and within months the family was running a company.This episode traces how that happened. Tabatha took leave

In June 2012, skydivers jumped from a blimp over San Francisco and streamed their descent live to the Moscone Center through the glasses on their faces. Google Glass had arrived. Born in the Google X lab, the 2011 prototype weighed eight pounds. A year later it was a 36 gram titanium frame with a prism that floated a display in the wearer's view, a bone conduction speaker, and a voice command woken by tilting the head 30 degrees and saying OK Glass.This episode follows what happened when that

Before Gangnam Style, Park Jae-sang, known as Psy, was no rookie. He was a veteran South Korean artist working on his sixth studio album, with national hits like Champion and a home audience that expected a fresh, memorable dance every time. To deliver one, he and his choreographer went without sleep for 30 nights, testing panda moves and kangaroo bounces before landing on the invisible horse trot. The goal was simply to make local fans laugh.This episode explains the joke and how it escaped

In the early 1950s, Santa Clara County was the Valley of Heart's Delight, home to nearly 40 fruit canneries and the largest fruit packing region in the world. This episode explains how that farmland became Silicon Valley. The first ingredient was the military: Moffett Field, commissioned in 1933 as a Navy blimp base, later drew aeronautics research and contractors like Lockheed. The second was Stanford, where engineering dean Frederick Terman set out to stop his graduates from leaving for the East

Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in Mountain View in March 2002, naming it after a mashup of friend and Napster. At a time when people hid behind screen names, his Circle of Friends idea asked users to map their real relationships. It went live in 2003, reached 3 million users within months, landed on magazine covers, and inspired copycats like Dogster and Elfster. That same year, management refused a $30 million buyout offer from Google.This episode traces how the pioneer of social networking

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