pplpod

In January 2026, someone cleaning out a closet at the University of Utah found a nine-track magnetic tape holding a surviving copy of Unix version 4. This episode treats that discovery as the opening of a biography: the life of an operating system that began as an unsanctioned project at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna had grown tired of Mul...

In 1995, connecting a printer, modem, or joystick to a PC meant a tangle of parallel ports, serial ports, PS/2 plugs, and game ports, plus driver floppies and hand-assigned IRQ channels that crashed the machine when two devices collided. Seven companies, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, DEC, NEC, and Nortel, set out to replace all of it with one plug and play, hot-swappable port that carried its own...

In 2007, David Karp and Marco Arment built Tumblr in a two-week gap between consulting contracts, and it gained 75,000 users in two weeks. By 2011, half its users were under 25. With no public follower counts and a tag field that people filled with rambling private commentary, it became a haven for niche communities, especially LGBTQ youth. In May 2013, Yahoo bought it for 1.1 billion dollars in c...

The transistor is the most manufactured artifact in human history: by 2018, more than 13 sextillion had been made. It replaced the thermionic triode, a glass vacuum tube invented in 1907 that had to boil electrons off a heated plate, ran hot, and burned out like a light bulb. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented a solid-state alternative in Canada in 1925, but the pure semiconductor crystals...

Before the transistor, a portable radio was a heavy box of hot, fragile vacuum tubes that needed two separate batteries, one just to heat the filaments. That changed after December 1947, when William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen demonstrated the first working transistor at Bell Laboratories. The first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, arrived in November 1954 from an un...

In 1991, a 13-year-old Tom Fulp cut and pasted together a fanzine about the Neo Geo console called New Ground and mailed it to about 100 members of a Prodigy club. By 1995 he had moved the idea online, and as a Drexel University student he began making crude games such as Club a Seal and Assassin. In 1999 he released Pico's School, a Flash game far more polished than the web of that era was used t...

The Pirate Bay began in late 2003 as a project of Piratbyrån, a Swedish anti-copyright think tank whose name means the Piracy Bureau. Its founders, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, described it as a long-running piece of performance art. The site hosted no movies or music at all. Using the BitTorrent protocol, it worked like a card catalog for an empty library, pointing users to...

Around 1990, German researcher Karlheinz Brandenburg sat in a lab listening to Suzanne Vega's a cappella recording of Tom's Diner thousands of times. He was tuning an algorithm built on a quirk of human hearing called auditory masking, first documented in 1894 by physicist Alfred M. Mayer: a loud tone makes a quieter neighboring tone inaudible. Brandenburg's idea, finalized in his 1989 doctoral th...

Stuxnet was the first malware found to spy on and sabotage industrial control systems, and the first to carry a rootkit for a programmable logic controller. It surfaced in June 2010 after a programming error in an update let it spread from an engineer's laptop to the open internet, where a researcher at the Belarusian antivirus firm VirusBlokAda flagged it. At half a megabyte, it was enormous for...

In February 1981, Steve Wozniak crashed a small plane shortly after takeoff from a California airport and woke with anterograde amnesia. For five weeks his brain could not form new memories, and he did not know his own name. He recovered in part by playing games on the Apple II, the computer he had designed. When his memory returned, he looked at his wealth and the corporate grind at Apple and ste...

In 1964, DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek produced a polymer solution that looked like a failure. It was thin, cloudy, and reminded her of buttermilk, the kind of mixture standard practice sent down the drain. She kept it. Stirring revealed an odd opalescence, a sign that the rigid aramid molecules had lined up in a liquid crystal state. The technician who ran the spinneret, Charles Smullen, refuse...

In 1976, a small team at Texas Instruments led by Paul Breedlove began a side project with a budget of just 25,000 dollars. Two years later, at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1978, they unveiled the Speak and Spell, the first educational toy to store whole spoken words in solid state memory with no moving parts. Earlier talking toys relied on tiny phonograph records and tape loops. This o...

Sophia was activated on Valentine's Day in 2016 by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, with a face modeled on Queen Nefertiti, Audrey Hepburn, and founder David Hanson's wife, Amanda. Built as a social robot meant to draw out empathy, she can produce more than 60 facial expressions, and cameras in her eyes let her track faces and hold eye contact. After a debut at South by Southwest in March 2016, sh...

In 1985, a 61-year-old woman at a clinic in Marietta, Georgia, lay down for routine radiation after a lumpectomy and felt a searing blast of heat tear through her chest. The technician checked the screen and told her a burn was impossible. She had in fact absorbed between 15,000 and 20,000 rads instead of the prescribed 200. Her case was the first in the worst series of radiation accidents in the...

Seymour Cray designed the fastest computers on Earth and unwound by digging a tunnel beneath his house, joking that elves visited him there with engineering answers. Born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, he built a device from an erector set at age ten that turned punched paper tape into Morse code. After working on Japanese naval codes as a radio operator in World War II, he joined Engineeri...

Graphene is a sheet of carbon one atom thick, arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb. It is about 200 times stronger than structural steel, absorbs only 2.3 percent of visible light, and conducts heat ten times better than copper. For decades physicists believed such a two-dimensional crystal could not survive in the real world. Then, in 2004 at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin N...

On May 17, 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley released a screensaver that let ordinary computers sift radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The data came from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which had no connection fast enough to send it, so recordings were mailed to California on hard drives and chopped into 350 kilobyte work units of about 107 sec...

In 1989, MIT engineer Joe Jones built a robotic vacuum out of Lego bricks and nicknamed it Dust Puppy. Corporate America wanted nothing to do with it. Denning Mobile Robot Company said no, Bissell passed, and the idea stalled for a decade until S.C. Johnson funded development through a young company called iRobot in 1999, then pulled out just before manufacturing. iRobot pressed on alone, renamed...

In the late 1940s, a Grinnell College student stole a 25-pound pig for a campus luau. The farm belonged to the mayor, and Robert Noyce faced expulsion, a felony charge, and at least a year in state prison. His physics professor, Grant Gale, paid for the pig and negotiated a one-semester suspension. When Noyce returned, Gale showed him two of the first transistors from Bell Labs. This episode follo...

In 1987, a 21-year-old Rick Astley released a debut single that hit number one in the US, the UK, and Australia, its booming baritone at odds with the boyish singer shuffling in a trench coat. The video was shot in a week, and he wore his own clothes. By 1994, worn down by the pop machine, he retired at 28 to raise his family. This episode tells what happened next: 14 quiet years, then a bait-and-...

On a train in the American West, engineer Herman Hollerith watched a conductor punch holes in a ticket to record a passenger's hair color, height, and nose, a trick used to stop ticket fraud. Hollerith saw something bigger: if holes could describe a person, a standardized card could encode any statistical fact. This episode follows that idea to the 1890 United States Census, which faced a crisis a...

You read a post so outrageous you cannot tell whether its author is a sincere fanatic or a deadpan comedian. That confusion has a name. In 2005, during a heated argument about creationism on a Christian forum, a user called Nathan Poe observed that without a blatant display of humor, no parody of a creationist could avoid being taken by someone as the real thing. This episode traces Poe's Law from...

On July 15, 2020, the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple all promised to double any Bitcoin sent their way. The mastermind was a 17-year-old who broke no encryption. He and his accomplices phoned Twitter employees working from home, posed as the IT help desk, and sent them to a fake VPN site, netting about $117,000. This episode uses that breach to explain phishing a...

The first telephone pager system was patented in 1949 by Al Gross, and the first practical service launched in 1950 for doctors in the New York City area. The device weighed 200 grams, cost $12 a month, and reached 40 kilometers from a single tower. It could only buzz, and physicians hated it, because it invented the condition of being permanently on call. This episode follows the pager from that...

In April 2011, Christopher Torres, a 25-year-old artist in Dallas, Texas, was taking drawing requests during a charity livestream for the Red Cross. One viewer asked for a Pop-Tart, another for a cat. He merged them, then animated the result flying through space with a rainbow trail, partly as a tribute to his Russian Blue, Marty. Days later a YouTube user paired his loop with a Japanese song made...