Advent of Computing

We've approach the beast itself: SQL. Or, as it used to be known, SEQUEL. In this episode we will discuss how early navigational databases failed, and how we were able to move past them into a relatio...

13 Dec 20221h 7min

I've fallen into a bit of a data rabbit hole, and you get to join me. In this episode I'm starting my journey to understand where databases came from, and how they started to evolve. This will serve a...

28 Nov 20221h

So far I've strayed away from hypermedia in my larger hypertext coverage. This episode helps to fix that. Today we are looking at Aspen Movie Map, a project from 1978 that created a virtual Aspen, Col...

14 Nov 20221h 6min

Robots have always fascinated and horrified humanity in equal measure. The prospect of a synthetic lifeform is at times exciting, but can quickly turn south. Luckily we've never gotten that far... or ...

30 Okt 20221h 14min

Anybody up for a fright? This episode we are looking at 3 of the earliest horror video games I can find. Over this journey we will look at different programmatic ways to instill fear, how platforms ca...

16 Okt 20221h 4min

It's Spook Month 2022! To kick things off we are diving into the frustrating depth of copy protection, piracy, and the origins of commercial software. In 1969 the Great Unbundling made the software ma...

2 Okt 20221h 25min

Whirlwind represents a fascinating story of transition. The project started in the middle of the 1940s as an analog machine. As times changed it became a digital device. By 1951 it was perhaps the fas...

18 Sep 20221h 23min

In the last half of the 70s there was one gold standard in home computing: S100. This was a standardized bus that was the heart of many computers. It allowed for the interchange of parts from differen...

4 Sep 20221h 20min