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Dec 14, 2021

The Industrial Revolution gave us the rise of factories all over the world in the 1800s. Life was moving faster and we were engineering complex solutions to mass produce items. And many expanded from there to engineer complex solutions for simple problems. Cartoonist Heath Robinson harnessed the reaction from normal...


Dec 3, 2021

A honeypot is basically a computer made to look like a sweet, yummy bit of morsel that a hacker might find yummy mcyummersons. This is the story of one of the earliest on the Internet.

Clifford Stoll has been a lot of things. He was a teacher and a ham operator and appears on shows. And an engineer at a radio...


Nov 26, 2021

The Friday after Thanksgiving to the Monday afterwards is a bonanza of shopping in the United States, where capitalism runs wild with reckless abandon. It’s almost a symbol of a society whose identity is as intertwined with with rampant consumerism as it is with freedom and democracy. We are free to spend all our...


Nov 24, 2021

In the previous episodes, we looked at the rise of patents and software and their impact on the nascent computer industry. But a copyright is a right. And that right can be given to others in whole or in part. We have all benefited from software where the right to copy was waved and it’s shaped the computing industry...


Nov 21, 2021

Perl was started by Larry Wall in 1987. Unisys had just released the 2200 series and only a few years stopped using the name UNIVAC for any of their mainframes. They merged with Burroughs the year before to form Unisys. The 2200 was a continuation of the 36-bit UNIVAC 1107, which went all the way back to 1962. Wall was...