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Jan 30, 2021

I’ve been struggling with how to cover a few different companies, topics, or movements for awhile. The lack of covering their stories thus far has little to do with their impact but just trying to find where to put them in the history of computing. One of the most challenging is Apple. This is because there isn’t...


Jan 21, 2021

We mentioned John Locke in the episode on the Scientific Revolution. And Leibniz. They not only worked in the new branches of science, math, and philosophy, but they put many of their theories to use and were engineers. 

Computing at the time was mechanical, what we might now think of as clockwork. And clockwork was...


Jan 17, 2021

Let’s oversimplify something in the computing world. Which is what you have to do when writing about history. You have to put your blinders on so you can get to the heart of a given topic without overcomplicating the story being told. And in the evolution of technology we can’t mention all of the advances that lead...


Jan 15, 2021

Robert Taylor was one of the true pioneers in computer science. In many ways, he is the string (or glue) that connected the US governments era of supporting computer science through ARPA to innovations that came out of Xerox PARC and then to the work done at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center....


Jan 8, 2021

We’ve covered Xerox PARC a few times - and one aspect that’s come up has been the development of the Bravo word processor from Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, and team. Simonyi went on to work at Microsoft and spearheaded the development of Microsoft Word. But Bravo was the first WYSIWYG tool for creating...