Advent of Computing

I will admit, the title here is a bit of click bait. In the early 1950s a researcher named Nils Aall Barricelli started in on a bold project. His goal was to simulate evolution on a computer and, in d...

27 Aug 20231h 8min

This episode is simply a reading of the Story of Mel. I opened last episode with an excerpt, but didn't feel right leaving it at that. So, I present, the Story of Mel as written by Ed Nather and prese...

26 Aug 202311min

In 1956 Librascope released the LGP-30, a truly wild machine. It was, for the time, the most simple and cheap machine that could actually be useful. It was the size of a desk when contemporary machine...

15 Aug 20231h 6min

I'm wrapping up my dive into Prolog with... Prolog itself! This episode I'm actually covering the development of Prolog, using all the natural language processing lore we covered last time. Along the ...

30 Juli 20231h 10min

I've been told I need to do an episode about Prolog. Well, here's the start of that process. To talk about Prolog we first need to come to grips with natural language processing, it's tools, and it's ...

16 Juli 20231h 8min

Space is cool, in all meanings of the word. Not only is it wondrous, vast, and fascinating, it can also be a cold place. It's also a very useful place to put things. This episode we are looking at the...

2 Juli 20231h 3min

I don't usually cover video games. When I do, you know it's for a weird reason. This episode we are looking at the Atari VCS 2600, it's strange hardware, and how it fits into the larger story of the r...

18 Juni 20231h 7min

What really is the deal with microcontrollers? Are they just little computers... or are they something totally different? This episode we are looking at the development of the microcontroller through ...

4 Juni 20231h 2min