pplpod

In November 1992 there were exactly 26 websites in the world. By August 1995 there were more than 10,000. The difference was NCSA Mosaic, a browser begun in December 1992 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a lab funded through the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, but it was the first to place ima...

On June 26, 1974, a cashier at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. That beep ended a 20-year struggle. It began in 1948 at the Drexel Institute of Technology, where graduate student Bernard Silver overheard a food chain president begging for automated checkout. Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland first tried ultraviolet ink, which was costly and faded....

In 2014, Mac Miller made fans build a virtual sandwich before they could download Faces. He could get away with it because Faces was a mixtape, not an album. This episode traces how that label came to carry so much freedom. It begins in the Bronx in the 1970s, where DJs like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa ran cables from their mixers into cassette decks and sold copies from car trunks and...

On October 21, 2016, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, GitHub, and Airbnb went dark for millions of people. The weapon was an army of baby monitors, cheap webcams, and home routers infected by malware called Mirai. Its creators were three young men: Paras Jha, known online as Anna-senpai, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman. Jha ran ProTraf Solutions, a company that sold protection against the very kind of at...

In 1985, Microsoft asked Encyclopaedia Britannica to partner on a CD-ROM edition. Britannica said no. Its business rested on door-to-door salesmen persuading parents to spend $1,000 to $1,500 on leather-bound prestige, and a cheap plastic disc looked like a toy that would eat its own profits. So Microsoft licensed the text of Funk and Wagnalls, the encyclopedia sold volume by volume at the grocery...

Microsoft Bob arrived in early 1995 as the answer to a real problem: home computers were moving into living rooms, and nested gray folders scared beginners. Code-named Utopia, designed by researcher Karen Fries and marketed by Melinda Gates, it drew on the Stanford theory of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves that people treat computers like real people in real places. So Bob replaced the desktop with...

In May 2017, a 22-year-old on a week off sat in his childhood bedroom in Ilfracombe, Devon, and stopped the WannaCry ransomware attack, which had hit more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries and forced UK hospitals to turn away patients. Marcus Hutchins noticed the worm tried to contact a long, gibberish, unregistered domain. He registered it for about $10 to track infections, and the spread s...

In February 2000, Yahoo, Amazon, CNN, eBay, and Dell were knocked off the internet within days of each other. Authorities feared sophisticated cyber terrorism. The culprit was Michael Calce, a 15-year-old from the Montreal area who went by Mafiaboy. This episode starts with his childhood: his parents separated when he was five, and at six his father gave him a computer to fill the weekends at the...

Type the year 1900 into Microsoft Excel and it still treats it as a leap year. The error is deliberate, copied from Lotus 1-2-3 so that imported spreadsheets would not drift by a day. This episode traces how Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs launched the program in 1983, outpacing a complacent VisiCalc with a spreadsheet, charting, and database package written in x86 assembly that wrote straight to t...

Linus Torvalds was named after both Nobel chemist Linus Pauling and the blanket-carrying kid from Peanuts, and this episode argues the pairing fits. Born in Helsinki in 1969 to journalist parents in Finland's Swedish-speaking minority, he started on a VIC-20 at age 11 and, because software was so hard to buy, taught himself to write machine code directly. After 11 months in the Finnish Navy as an...

Chemist Leo Baekeland sold a new photographic paper to Eastman Kodak in a $750,000 buyout, with about $215,000 as his personal share. He never needed to work again. Instead he went back to the laboratory at his home in Yonkers, New York, to attack a supply problem. The booming electrical industry depended on shellac as an insulator, and shellac was scraped from tree branches in Asia, where it was...

In December 1978, in Atlanta, Georgia, MCA launched a home video format called DiscoVision with Jaws as its first title. It arrived two years after VHS and four years before the audio CD, and it read a 12 inch disc with a laser. The earliest players used a glass tube filled with helium neon gas. Yet the format was analog: the microscopic pits and lands on the disc modulated a continuous wave, with...

In 1984, in Spokane, Washington, a bored Charlie Schmidt dressed his cat Fatso in a light blue infant's shirt, sat him at an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard, and worked the animal's paws from below while a VHS camcorder rolled. Then the tape went into a drawer. Schmidt did not upload it to YouTube until June 2007, under the title Charlie Schmidt's Cool Cat, and even then it drew little notice. The interne...

In the late 1990s, federal authorities persuaded a judge that an inmate named Kevin Mitnick could start a nuclear war by whistling tones into a prison pay phone. He spent eight months in solitary confinement on the strength of that fear. Mitnick was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, where amateur radio taught him that systems run on protocols and that protocols ca...

On May 24, 2024, an 18 year old rescue dog named Kabosu died of leukemia at home in Japan, stroked by the owner who had loved her for more than a decade. By then her face had been cast in bronze, wrapped around a NASCAR race car, and attached to a cryptocurrency worth billions. It began in 2010, when kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started a simple blog about her pets and posted a photo of her Sh...

On March 19, 2007, a website called Justin.tv went live with a single product: Justin Kan. Funded by Paul Graham at Y Combinator and built with cofounders Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt, the site broadcast Kan's life around the clock from a webcam clipped to his baseball cap. Because nothing off the shelf could stream video from the street, Vogt bonded several EVDO cellular data cards...

Betty Jean Jennings was born in Gentry County, Missouri, in 1924, the sixth of seven children of a farmer and schoolteacher. By 14 she was driving herself to high school in a neighboring town, and at 16 she graduated as salutatorian. In college she switched from journalism to mathematics after clashing with her advisor, and in 1945 she was the only student in her class to earn a math degree. The A...

In 2004, Jawed Karim was an engineer at PayPal, working alongside Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, and he could not find online footage of the two events everyone was talking about: the Super Bowl halftime show and the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. Video on the internet then meant sketchy downloads, rival media players, and corrupted files. The three built a fix: a single place where anyone coul...

Jack Kilby was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, in 1923 and raised in Great Bend, Kansas, where a winter ice storm once snapped the telephone poles and his father, who ran the local electric company, used amateur radio operators to coordinate the repairs. The lesson stuck: when the infrastructure breaks, find another path for the signal. After serving as an Army electronics technician in World Wa...

Every photo on your screen is a carefully built illusion. The Joint Photographic Experts Group standard, released in 1992, starts by exploiting a weakness in human vision: our eyes are sharp on brightness and contrast but poor at fine detail in color. The algorithm converts an image from red, green, and blue into luma and chroma, keeps the brightness at full fidelity, and throws away half or more...

In the late 1990s, amateur astronomers synchronized their watches to catch Iridium flares, flashes of sunlight off satellite antennas that could outshine Venus. The hardware behind them was a marvel. To let a handheld phone reach space, Motorola placed its satellites in low Earth orbit about 485 miles up, where each one races by at roughly 17,000 miles per hour and stays in view for about seven mi...

On March 23, 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot on Twitter named Tay, short for Thinking About You. Built by its technology and research divisions with the Bing team, Tay was given the voice of a 19 year old American woman and the tagline the AI with zero chill. It was modeled on Xiaoice, a Chinese chatbot that had handled more than 40 million conversations without a major incident. Tay learned co...

In 1996, talking to someone online meant shouting into the scrolling chaos of an IRC channel. Then five Israeli developers, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser, Amnon Amir, Arik Vardi, and his father Yossi Vardi, founded Mirabilis and released a small free program called ICQ. With no marketing budget and nothing but word of mouth, it gave every user a permanent account and a direct, private line to one...

An analyst once said that IBM building a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance. The company's normal development cycle ran four to five years, and it made every part of its machines itself. But by 1979 the microcomputer market was worth $15 billion and growing more than 40 percent a year, and Tandy's report of over 100,000 TRS-80s shipped in a single year was the wake-u...

On July 4, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail, choosing the date to symbolize freedom from email tied to an internet service provider. The original spelling capitalized the letters H, T, M, and L as a nod to the code of the web. With $310,000 in venture backing from Draper Associates, a staff of nine, and a free inbox of just two megabytes, the service let anyone read their mail f...