Strangers with Keys
Four times a year, a small group of people pack their bags and fly to a secure facility in Virginia or California. They submit to retina scanners and palm readers. They enter a metal cage inside a sig…
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Episodes
Stories about the surprising origins and hidden histories woven into computing history. Every other week, a new chapter.
Poison in the Cache
Every time you type a web address, you're trusting a directory. A vast, invisible system that translates the names you know into the numbers that actually move data across the internet. You trust it t…
Lipstick and Runes
Look at your phone settings. There's a small angular icon there that you've probably never thought about much. It's a bind rune showing two characters from the ancient Younger Futhark alphabet, fused…
Drink Me, Eat Me, README
Every software project has one. It's easy to scroll past. Most of the time it's just a manual telling you system requirements, installation steps, and known bugs.But the README file owes a debt to Lew…
The Bug, The Cat, and The Wooden Mouse
On December 9th, 1968, a Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable…
UFOs, Model Trains, and Code's 'Sacred Syllable'
Every programmer knows foo. It's the placeholder name, the stand-in variable, the "insert name here" of software development. But where did it actually come from?In this episode, we trace the history…
Trailer: Unexpected Stories from Computing History
Every function, framework, and flicker of code has a story. Introducing Lore in the Machine, a new podcast hosted by Daina Bouquin that uncovers the hidden histories and surprising origins woven in…