Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:33 — 11.9MB) | Embed
Before microchips, before solid state transistors, early electronic computers had to hold information somewhere… somehow… Join us as we look at some old methods of storing electronic memory.
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We started with the stone age, back in episode 270. Today, we finally get to look at an all electronic, Turing complete, programmable computer. We also take a short side trip to more or less fail to explain what “Turing complete” means.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:32 — 13.1MB) | Embed
War grips the globe, twice. Technology pushes forward, including the specialized calculating machines to encrypt messages on the one hand, and break the encryption of the enemy on the other.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:37 — 12.0MB) | Embed
We talk about vacuum tubes, how they work and how they made radio and telephone work so much better. We also spend some time talking about the very first computer programmer, the mother of steam punk, and enchantress of number—Ada Lovelace.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:58 — 14.9MB) | Embed
It took a little over two years, what with the one episode a week format and all, but this is Phil’s one-hundredth time as our co-host extraordinaire! We share some of the things that we couldn’t squeeze into previous episodes, become baffled by Benford’s law, and otherwise relax and shoot the breeze.
Take that, you filthy air currents!
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:12 — 12.1MB) | Embed
We spend some time with the ships and subs of the American Civil war, take our hats off to George Boole, and watch the beginning of radio.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:27 — 13.7MB) | Embed
After the battery was invented, people began using electricity to do things like discover new elements and create new and better materials. Meanwhile, the punch card became a way to record information so that a machine could read and write it. Companies such as IBM were founded to keep track of it all. Wires stretched around the world to send messages fast enough to coordinate the new railroads, and new machines were invented to read and write faster than any human operators could manage.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:35 — 15.2MB) | Embed
From water wheels to steam engines, to the taming of electricity, join us for another instalment in our episodes about where computers came from.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:47 — 13.3MB) | Embed
We rewind slightly to cover the beginnings of automated logic. Then we have a look-see at the mechanical calculators of the 17th century, and the people who made it happen. Along the way, we find the birth of binary.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:23 — 17.3MB) | Embed
We’d planned to get a bit further, but there was just too much nifty history. Water wheels, paper mills, the fall of Rome, the golden age of Islam, and the spread of the number zero, more than enough for one episode.
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