pplpod

In the 1960s a 4,000 pound, five-axis hydraulic arm rolled onto the stage of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It poured a beer without spilling, knocked a golf ball into a cup, waved a conductor's baton, and played an accordion. The machine was the Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, and the stunt was calculated. Its makers, inventor George Devol and Joseph Engelberger of Unimation, w...

In 1982 the mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey, banned pedestrians from wearing portable cassette players in public. The device behind the panic had started as one executive's complaint. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka was tired of hauling the bulky TC-D5 recorder on long flights to hear classical music, so he asked Norio Ohga for a playback-only machine. Engineers gutted a dictation recorder called the...

In 2007 a user named Wesley Williams, posting as Moto42 on a 4chan paranormal board, described a concrete and rebar statue that snaps your neck the moment you blink. He labeled it SCP-173 and wrote it as a cold containment report. Imitators followed, the community moved to Wikidot in 2008, and by mid-2026 the English branch alone held over 10,400 SCP objects and 6,300 tales, with 15 official inter...

The earliest known recording of a human voice was made in 1860, almost two decades before Thomas Edison, by a Parisian typesetter who never meant anyone to hear it. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built a mechanical ear from a funnel, a membrane, and a boar's bristle that scratched sound waves into lampblack. He wanted to see sound, not replay it. His tracing of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune...

In 1981 portable computing meant dragging a plastic box of nearly 25 pounds, the size of a sewing machine, through an airport and shoving it under the seat. It had no battery. The Osborne 1 was the idea of Adam Osborne, a successful author and publisher of computer books who believed price was the barrier keeping ordinary people from computers. He hired Lee Felsenstein to engineer a machine with t...

At about 8:30 on the evening of November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a program onto the ARPANET from a machine at MIT, a choice that hid where it really came from. Robert Tappan Morris said he only wanted to count how many computers were connected. His father, Robert Morris Sr., was a pioneering cryptographer at the National Security Agency. Within hours the son's creation was cop...

On March 26, 1999, a programmer from Aberdeen Township, New Jersey, used a stolen AOL account to post a Word file called list.doc to the Usenet group alt.sex, promising passwords to paid adult websites. The file carried a macro virus named Melissa. Once opened, it lowered Word's security settings, infected the master template, and told Microsoft Outlook to mail itself to the first 50 entries in th...

In the summer of 2014, for about eight weeks, it seemed everyone with a phone was dumping ice water on their head. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is remembered as a tidy charity triumph, but it began as something else. Versions of a cold water challenge had circulated since 1991 in the northern United States and northern Norway, with no link to any disease. That May, a New Jersey fire department tha...

In the mid-1960s at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum walked into his lab and found his secretary typing at a teletype terminal. She asked him to leave the room. She wanted privacy for a personal conversation with ELIZA, the program he had written between 1964 and 1967 and named after Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion. Weizenbaum had built it to show that conversation between people and machines was a superficial...

On January 19, 2012, Kim Dotcom was marking his 38th birthday in a leased 30 million dollar mansion in Coatesville, New Zealand, with a helicopter on the lawn and a fleet of luxury cars outside. Then local police, acting with the FBI, raided the estate, seized his assets, and froze his accounts. The same day the U.S. Department of Justice took every Megaupload domain offline. The company he had in...

An AI-generated image of Shrimp Jesus sits on Facebook above tens of thousands of comments that all say amen, and the crowd feels empty. That unease has a name. In 2021 a user called IlluminatiPirate posted a sprawling manifesto on the forum Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, claiming that organic human interaction online had been wiped out and replaced by bots as part of a plot by governments and elite...

The Dancing Baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha and the Oogachaka Baby, was never meant to be seen by the public. It was a stress test. In 1995 the company Unreal Pictures was building Character Studio, an animation plugin for Autodesk's 3D Studio Max, and needed sample files to impress developers. Animator Robert Lurye took a file of an adult skeleton dancing the cha-cha, added air guitar and should...

The boombox began as a quiet convenience. In 1966 the Dutch company Philips combined a radio tuner and a cassette recorder in one portable unit, the Radio Recorder, so listeners could tape a broadcast without holding a microphone up to a speaker. This episode treats the machine as a biography subject with a character arc. Japanese makers such as Aiwa, Panasonic, and Sony added stereo sound and Dol...

A season six episode of The Simpsons has a bully scribble Beat up Martin on his Apple Newton, only for the screen to read Eat up Martha. The joke stuck, and with it the idea that the Newton was nothing more than an expensive failure. This episode makes the opposite case. The project began in 1987 with engineer Steve Sakoman, nearly died when he left in 1990, and was revived when Michael Tchao and...

In 1997, IBM scientists with the power to arrange individual atoms built a working calculator at the nanoscale, and the design they chose was an abacus. This episode asks why a tool thousands of years old still looked like the right answer. The word itself traces back to a Semitic term for dust or sand, a reminder that the first version was a table strewn with fine grit where merchants drew lines...

For three centuries, engineers did their hardest arithmetic on a stick with no batteries and no buttons. The slide rule, nicknamed the slipstick in the United States, works because multiplying two numbers is the same as adding their logarithms: slide one logarithmic scale along another and the product appears under the hairline. This episode explains the mechanics and the history, from Edmund Gunt...

On the morning of August 1, 2012, Knight Capital Group was the largest trader in U.S. equities, handling more than $21 billion a day and holding about 17 percent of volume on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. Forty-five minutes after the opening bell it had lost $440 million. This episode reconstructs how a routine software update, copied by hand to seven of eight servers, destroyed...

Around the turn of the millennium, millions of people downloaded a free desktop companion that told jokes, sang songs, recited trivia, and managed downloads. BonziBuddy, from Joe and Jay Bonzi's Bonzi Software, launched in 1999 as a green parrot named Peedy, a stock character from the Microsoft Agent technology the whole program was built on. In May 2000 the parrot gave way to Bonzi, a purple gori...

In 2005, a Craigslist ad offered women $100 to upload videos of themselves to a struggling dating site modeled on Hot or Not. Nobody bit. The site was YouTube, founded by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, and its servers sat nearly empty until the founders dropped the dating angle and let people post anything. This episode traces how that pivot produced a platform w...

A plastic whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal happened to blow at exactly 2,600 hertz, the tone AT&T used to mark a long distance trunk line as idle. Because the phone company sent its control signals down the same channel as callers' voices, anyone who could reproduce that tone could take over the network. John Draper, born in 1943 to an Air Force engineer, learned the trick in 1969 fro...

On July 1, 1970, Xerox chief scientist Jack Goldman founded the Palo Alto Research Center, placing it 3,000 miles from the copier company's East Coast headquarters. Bob Taylor filled its computer science lab with engineers leaving the nearby Stanford Research Institute as government funding dried up. In under a decade that team produced bitmap graphics, the graphical user interface, the Bravo what...

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 lan...

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...

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 te...

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....