Inflection: The Voder, Voderettes, and Voice
In the summer of 1939, at the New York World's Fair, a woman sat beneath a three-story mural of a shouting man and shaped raw electricity into a human voice.In this episode:Homer Dudley: the engineer…
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Episodes
Stories about the surprising origins and hidden histories woven into computing history.
Dead Reckoning: The Globus and Voskhod 2
In March 1965, two Soviet cosmonauts fell out of the sky into a frozen forest in the Urals, trapped inside a cramped capsule hundreds of kilometers from rescue. Their survival, and their journey home,…
Humans of Mortal Kombat
Found in the Margins is a series of mini bonus episodes that will be available to Patreon members every other week alternating with the main show. This first episode is being shared here for all Found…
Cry Wolf: Waiting and Seeing with Camera Traps
Since the 1890s, we've been building machines that wait in our place, in the dark, for something to move. This is the story of how a thread across a trail became a sensor that can feel heat, and what…
Tidal Forces: Calculating D-Day
In 1944 the Allies needed to know exactly what the water would do on a coast called "Position Z." So a deaf mathematician and six young women in a basement near Liverpool calculated the future. In th…
Entropy Hunters: Random Numbers and Chaos Machines
This is the story of how we learned to fake the most natural thing in the world. What it cost us. And the strange places we still go, even now, to steal a little of the real thing back. In this Episod…
Half-Light: Mark Klein and Room 641A
A brutalist fortress in San Francisco serves as a vital artery for the American internet. In 2003, AT&T technician Mark Klein started noticing strange things on the sixth floor of that building. Stran…
Silent Agreement: MIDI and What We Hear in the Wires
Sheet music has always been an invisible treaty. A shared language that belongs to everyone and no one. But fifty years ago, as musicians began shaping sound out of raw electricity, that treaty fell a…
Working in the Dark: Secrets, Silicon, and Light
In 1916, a tired chemist in a Berlin laboratory accidentally dipped his fountain pen into a pool of molten tin and pulled out the foundation of the digital world. He had no idea what he had done. In t…
America on Hold: How the Internet Arrived
She was a copywriter turned marketer who watched focus groups attempt to use computers. She knew the internet wasn't a product you could sell. You needed to give people a way in. Her name was Jan Bran…
The Weavers: Memory and the Moon
In 1965, engineers were building a computer to fly men to the moon. It had to survive a rocket launch and the vacuum of space. It could not be erased by a power failure, a hard landing, or anything sh…
I’m Not a Robot: The Internet's Human Test
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. You’ve done this so many times you don’t thi…
The Silent Duel: David Blackwell and the Math Inside AI
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Two people walk toward each other on a dirt r…
Strangers with Keys: A Ritual to Secure the Internet
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Four times a year, a small group of people fl…
Poison in the Cache: Dan Kaminsky Saves the Internet
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Every time you type a web address, you're tru…
Lipstick and Runes: Hedy Lamarr and the History of Bluetooth
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Look at your phone settings. There's a small…
Drink Me, Eat Me, README: What Programmers Learned from Alice in Wonderland
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Every software project has one. It's easy to…
The Bug, The Cat, and The Wooden Mouse: The Unexpected History of the Computer Mouse
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. In 1968, a researcher named Douglas Engelbart…
UFOs, Model Trains, and Code's 'Sacred Syllable': The Origins of Foo
Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Every programmer knows 'foo' as the "insert n…
Trailer: Human Stories About the Digital World
Every line of code has a story. Most of us just never hear it. Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Each episode…