pplpod

Helvetica began as a business problem. In 1956, Eduard Hoffmann, art director of the Haas type foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, was losing ground to a rival's Akzidenz-Grotesk, the favorite of modernist Swiss designers. He enlisted Max Miedinger, a freelance designer and former Haas salesman, to build a perfectly neutral challenger under the working title Neue Haas Grotesk. The two obsessed o...

For two years, a single missing bounds check sat inside OpenSSL, the open source cryptography library that put the padlock icon on most of the web. The Heartbeat extension, submitted by PhD student Robin Seggelmann and reviewed by core developer Stephen Henson, went live in March 2012. It let a computer ask a server to echo back a short message, but the server never verified the claimed length. An...

In early 2013 a rigid 30 second video format swept the world. One helmeted person dances alone to Baauer's trap track Harlem Shake while everyone nearby ignores them. At 15 seconds the bass drops, the shot cuts, and the whole room erupts in costumes and flailing. YouTube creator George Miller, later known as Joji, sparked it on January 30, and five Australian teenagers fixed the template days late...

The early web had no memory. HTTP was stateless, so every click arrived as if from a stranger. In 1994 the telecom company MCI, working with Netscape on an online store, wanted a shopping cart without the cost of storing every half-finished order on its own servers. Netscape programmer Lou Montulli borrowed a Unix idea called the magic cookie: have the server hand the browser a tiny piece of text,...

Grumpy Cat was born Tardar Sauce on April 4, 2012, in Morristown, Arizona, to an ordinary calico mother. Feline dwarfism, a flattened face, and a pronounced underbite gave her a permanent scowl, though her owner Tabatha Bundesen described a sweet, docile pet. On September 22, 2012, Tabatha's brother Bryan posted a photo to Reddit. Users buried the fluffy kitten under pessimistic captions, and with...

In June 2012, skydivers jumped from a blimp over San Francisco and streamed their descent live to the Moscone Center through the glasses on their faces. Google Glass had arrived. Born in the Google X lab, the 2011 prototype weighed eight pounds. A year later it was a 36 gram titanium frame with a prism that floated a display in the wearer's view, a bone conduction speaker, and a voice command woke...

Before Gangnam Style, Park Jae-sang, known as Psy, was no rookie. He was a veteran South Korean artist working on his sixth studio album, with national hits like Champion and a home audience that expected a fresh, memorable dance every time. To deliver one, he and his choreographer went without sleep for 30 nights, testing panda moves and kangaroo bounces before landing on the invisible horse trot...

In the early 1950s, Santa Clara County was the Valley of Heart's Delight, home to nearly 40 fruit canneries and the largest fruit packing region in the world. This episode explains how that farmland became Silicon Valley. The first ingredient was the military: Moffett Field, commissioned in 1933 as a Navy blimp base, later drew aeronautics research and contractors like Lockheed. The second was Sta...

Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in Mountain View in March 2002, naming it after a mashup of friend and Napster. At a time when people hid behind screen names, his Circle of Friends idea asked users to map their real relationships. It went live in 2003, reached 3 million users within months, landed on magazine covers, and inspired copycats like Dogster and Elfster. That same year, management ref...

In 1985, while most American computers sat disconnected on desks, millions of French households were already online, buying train tickets, checking bank balances, playing games, and chatting with strangers. The network was Minitel, and it grew out of a crisis. In the late 1970s France had fewer than 7 million telephone lines for 47 million people, and the national telecom authority, the PTT, was s...

The 2017 Equifax breach exposed the Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and credit histories of over 147 million Americans, plus more than 1.5 million people in the UK. It was not a brilliant attack. A 2015 internal audit had already found a backlog of unpatched vulnerabilities, no complete inventory of the company's own systems, and a patching process that ran on an honor system. Whe...

In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named a picture its word of the year: the face with tears of joy. The choice makes sense once you see what typing strips away, which is tone of voice, facial expression, and posture. The fix began in 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed a sideways smiley as a joke marker on university message boards. Japanese phone companies then turned the idea into ti...

The original duck tape had no glue at all. The name comes from the Dutch word doek, a heavy woven cloth, and around 1902 strips of it were wrapped around the Manhattan Bridge's steel cables to protect them from salt air. The sticky version arrived in 1943, when ordnance plant worker Vesta Stoudt saw that the wax-dipped paper tape sealing ammunition boxes cost soldiers precious seconds under fire....

In 1946, Douglas Engelbart was a young Navy radar technician in the Philippines when he read Vannevar Bush's essay As We May Think in a Red Cross library. Bush imagined the Memex, a microfilm desk that linked documents by association, the way the mind works. Engelbart carried the idea into a world of punch cards and batch processing and concluded that computers should do more than calculate. They...

Digg launched in 2004 as an experiment by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky: take the front page away from editors and hand it to the crowd. Users submitted links, then dug them up or buried them. Creative director Daniel Burka's little yellow thumb with a number beside it became the ancestor of every like button. By 2008 the site drew over 236 million visitors a year, and a...

The dark web is smaller and stranger than its reputation. It accounts for just 3 percent of daily traffic on the Tor network, and its single biggest hidden service is Facebook. This episode starts with the architecture: the difference between the deep web and the dark web, and how onion routing passes data through three servers, each able to unlock only one layer, so that no single node ever knows...

Creepypasta takes its name from 4chan slang around 2007: a horror version of copypasta, the blocks of text users copied and pasted across message boards. Its roots run back to 1990s chain emails and to Ted the Caver, a 2001 story formatted as a personal web journal with dates and photographs. By 2005 anonymous users were crowdsourcing a monster called the Rake, inventing fake historical documents...

In early 1995, Craig Newmark was a newcomer to San Francisco sending a manually typed email list of local tech events to a handful of acquaintances. Inspired by the community spirit of the Well, MindVox, and Usenet, he assumed people wanted parties. Instead, subscribers asked for job postings, then more categories, then a website. By June 1995 he had installed Majordomo to automate subscriptions,...

The Global Positioning System began with a Soviet satellite and two curious physicists. In 1957, William Guier and George Weiffenbach of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab tuned in to Sputnik 1 and noticed its radio pitch shifting as it crossed the sky. Using the Doppler effect and the lab's UNIVAC computer, they mapped its orbit. Deputy director Frank McClure then asked the inverse question: i...

Inside Microsoft, the developers building the Office Assistant gave it a code name, TFC, whose first word is unprintable and whose last word was clown. This episode is a full biography of Clippit, the paperclip everyone called Clippy. His roots lie in 1990s Stanford research by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, who showed that people treat computers as social actors. Microsoft took the finding liter...

Claude Shannon's garage held a flame-throwing trumpet, rocket-powered frisbees, a Rubik's Cube solving robot, and foam shoes for walking on water. The same man laid the mathematical foundation of the digital world. Born in 1916 in Gaylord, Michigan, he strung a half-mile telegraph along barbed wire fences as a boy. At MIT, working on Vannevar Bush's differential analyzer, he saw that a switch bein...

Lorem ipsum fills design templates, broken WordPress themes, and brochure mockups everywhere, and it reads like a mystical Latin incantation. It is in fact a butchered passage from a first century BC treatise in which Cicero weighs the extremes of good and evil and argues that people must sometimes rationally accept pain for a greater good. This episode explains why designers need dummy text at al...

In May 2007 in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, Howard Davies-Carr filmed his sons in an armchair. One-year-old Charlie nibbled three-year-old Harry's finger, bit harder the second time, and both boys were giggling again within seconds. The 56-second file was too large to email to the boys' grandfather in the United States, so Howard uploaded it to YouTube as a simple way to pass it along. By the time he...

The compact cassette began as a way to make office dictation less tedious and ended up in pockets, car dashboards, and revolutions. This episode starts with the clumsy reel-to-reel machines of the postwar years and the failed RCA tape cartridge of 1958, then follows Philips as it set two design teams against each other. Lou Ottens and his group in Hasselt, Belgium won with a two-hole design unveil...

In the late 1970s you could twist a dial through the static and hear Betty Ford signing off as First Mama, or Mel Blanc doing Bugs Bunny for random kids. This episode explains how citizens band radio got there. The FCC set aside spectrum for personal use in 1945, inventor Al Gross built early handhelds, and expensive UHF parts sank the idea until the 23-channel Class D service opened at 27 MHz in...