pplpod

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 instan...

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, an...

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....

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...

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 Tro...

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, an...

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...

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 tex...

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 B...

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...

In 1994 Microsoft typographic engineer Vincent Connare looked at a beta of Microsoft Bob, a friendly program meant to ease newcomers into computing, and saw a cartoon dog speaking in Times New Roman. So he pulled Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns off his shelf and drew a casual, comic-style alphabet freehand with a mouse. The font missed Bob's deadline but slipped into 3D Movie Maker, the Windo...

Twitter paid a reported 30 million dollars for Vine in October 2012, before the public could even download it. Founders Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll had built the visual equivalent of a tweet: six seconds of looping video, recorded only while a thumb pressed the screen. Launched on January 24, 2013, it was the top free app in the iOS App Store by April. That touch-to-record design put...

In 2004 the Motorola Razr V3 landed among chunky plastic handsets like something dropped from orbit: impossibly thin, clad in anodized aluminum, with a keypad etched from a single sheet of metal and a snap that made hanging up feel like a statement. It turned the phone from a tool into a status symbol people left on restaurant tables. Motorola responded by flooding the market with variations throu...

In 2006 more than a hundred engineers, executives, and designers gathered to hold a funeral for a discontinued gadget. The gadget was Aibo, Sony's robot dog, born in the company's Computer Science Laboratory in the 1990s. Dr. Toshitada Doi and AI expert Masahiro Fujita began with a prototype called Mutant that tracked a yellow ball and threw karate strikes. Fujita's insight was that a robot built...

Winamp greeted new users with a bleating llama and a boast about whipping its backside. Behind the joke was a real fix for a 1997 problem: MP3 playback strained weak desktop processors. University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev wrapped a simple Windows interface around AMP, an efficient decoding engine written by Tomislav Uzelac, and released it as shareware. They asked users...

In 1978 Dan Bricklin sat in a Harvard Business School classroom watching a professor build a financial model in chalk. Every time one number changed, each figure that depended on it had to be erased and recalculated by hand. Bricklin imagined a grid where the computer did that work instantly. With Bob Frankston he formed Software Arts in Arlington, Massachusetts, and the two spent a winter in an a...

In 1983, two teenagers in Edmonds, Washington, lay rigid and face down in the outfield during a baseball game, stayed that way for several innings, then got up and left. Scott Amy and Joel Marshall called it face dancing. The same odd idea surfaced again at a 1986 disco party in Berlin, in an unaired 1994 Tom Green prank in Ottawa, and in 1997 in Taunton, England, where schoolboys Gary Clarkson an...

IBM Watson won a million dollars on national television, tried to become a cancer doctor, drifted through a string of odd jobs, and was finally sold for parts. The idea began in 2004, when an IBM manager at a steakhouse saw diners abandon their meals to watch Ken Jennings on his 74 game winning streak. Under principal investigator David Ferrucci, the 2006 prototype answered about 15 percent of clu...

In late 1994 David Bohnett and John Rezner launched Beverly Hills Internet, a small web host in Southern California with an unusual way of organizing the early web. Pages lived in virtual neighborhoods named for real places, such as Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and each address was a street number with neighbors on either side. By mid 1995 anyone could claim two megabytes of free sp...

Eric Migicovsky took his idea for a smartphone-connected watch through Y Combinator, earned real revenue during the program, and raised $375,000 from angel investors including Tim Draper. Venture capitalists still turned him down, wary of the tooling, inventory, and recall risks of hardware. So in April 2012 he renamed his company Pebble Technology and put the watch on Kickstarter with a $100,000...

The Curta was a mechanical calculator small enough to hold in one hand, nicknamed the pepper grinder and the math grenade. Its inventor, Curt Herzstark, grew up in his family's calculating machine business in 1930s Vienna and set out to shrink a desktop machine to pocket size. His answer was to replace the usual row of ten stepped drums with a single central drum ringed by input sliders, and to ha...

William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, persuaded financier Arnold Beckman to give him $1 million for a lab in Palo Alto, then mostly fruit orchards. He recruited eight young scientists, among them Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Eugene Kleiner, and Jean Hoerni, after putting each through psychological and intelligence tests. Then the dream job soured. Shockley recorded phone calls, forbade s...

John von Neumann's colleagues included Nobel laureates and the founders of quantum physics, and some of them half seriously suspected he was not human. Born in Budapest in 1903 to a wealthy banking family, he knew calculus by age eight and read a 46 volume world history for pleasure. His tutor, Gabor Szego, is said to have wept on seeing the boy's reasoning. At 19 he was publishing work on set the...

Ray Tomlinson created networked email, gave the @ symbol its modern meaning, and then declined to own a cell phone. Born on April 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York, and raised in the village of Vail Mills, he was the son of a carpet mill worker and a dry cleaner's employee. He studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, did a co-op with IBM, and went on to MIT, where the ear...

Life magazine called it the first electronic person in 1970. Shakey was a top-heavy stack of boxes on wheels, built at the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center with DARPA money after a 1964 proposal for intelligent automata aimed at reconnaissance. It carried a television camera, sonar range finders, a radio antenna, and bump detectors. Project manager Charles Rosen watched...