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

Between early 2001 and early 2002, a Scottish systems administrator working from his girlfriend's aunt's house in London wandered through nearly a hundred U.S. military and NASA computers. Gary McKinnon, born in Glasgow in 1966 and using the alias Solo, was not after money or secrets to sell. Inspired by the Disclosure Project, he wanted proof of suppressed free energy, anti-gravity technology, and alien spacecraft. American authorities called it the largest military computer intrusion in history

Wallace Hume Carothers created the most famous synthetic material of the 20th century and died 16 months before the public heard its name. In 1927 DuPont's Charles Stine lured the young Harvard instructor into a pioneering research group with the promise of pure science. His task was to test Hermann Staudinger's radical idea that materials like rubber and silk were long, unbroken molecular chains. Carothers proved it, and in 1930 his team produced neoprene and a strange elastic paste. Then

What connects a rugged trail on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, a pop song called Dragostea Din Tei, and an American vlogger named Gary Brolsma? The answer is two repeated words. This episode takes a single Wikipedia disambiguation page for Numa Numa and treats it as a map of how human knowledge gets sorted. A disambiguation page is a departure board: it does not rank a geographic landmark above a webcam video, it only routes each searcher to the meaning they had in mind.From there

In April 2019 a journalist followed a tip from an obscure internet forum to a market stall in Manila, where a quiet man was repairing mobile phones. He was Onel de Guzman, and nearly two decades earlier he had brought much of the world's email to a halt. As a broke student at AMA Computer College in the late 1990s, de Guzman believed internet access was a human right. His thesis proposal was a Trojan that would steal other people's dial-up logins. The faculty rejected it as illegal, he dropped out,

On Friday, May 12, 2017, screens around the world turned red with a padlock and a demand: pay 300 dollars in Bitcoin within three days or lose your files. WannaCry was a crypto worm, ransomware that needed no one to click a link. It spread on its own using EternalBlue, an exploit for a flaw in Microsoft's Server Message Block protocol that the National Security Agency had found and kept secret, and DoublePulsar, a backdoor that held the door open. A group called the Shadow Brokers leaked both tools

At midnight on December 31, 2008, thousands of first-generation Zune 30 players froze at once. A clock driver written by Freescale could not handle day 366 of a leap year and trapped the processor in an infinite loop. Microsoft's fix was to wait a day. That frozen screen sealed the Zune's reputation as a punchline, but this episode argues the brown brick deserves a second look. Born in 2006 after Microsoft scrapped MSN Music and its PlaysForSure licensing model, the Zune was built by the Xbox team

Decades before the World Wide Web, millions of people pulled up news, weather, and sports scores on demand from data hidden inside their television signal. Teletext exploited the vertical blanking interval, the brief gap when a cathode ray tube's electron beam resets from the bottom of the screen to the top. In the early 1970s John Adams at Philips Laboratories worked out how to pack digitized text into those unused lines, and a decoder chip in the set turned it into a grid of 24 rows by 40

Before the smartphone and the personal computer, the device driving the semiconductor industry was the calculator. This episode starts with the mechanical ceiling: Blaise Pascal building the Pascaline in 1642 at age 19 to ease his father's tax work, and the Curta of the 1940s, a hand-cranked cylinder shaped like a pepper grinder that delivered 11 digits of precision. Then electronics arrive. The British ANITA Mk 8 of October 1961 weighed roughly 33 pounds, ran on vacuum tubes, and showed its answers

The most famous two words in computer science began as the on-air catchphrase of a 1950s New York disc jockey, William B. Williams. They entered computing through Brian Kernighan, whose 1972 tutorial for the B language used the greeting to teach a hard lesson about memory. On machines like the PDP-11 a character constant held only four ASCII characters, so printing the phrase meant stitching three variables together. His 1974 Bell Labs memo and the 1978 book The C Programming Language, written with