I will admit, the title here is a bit of click bait. In the early 1950s a researcher named Nils Aall Barricelli started in on a bold project. His goal was to simulate evolution on a computer and, in doing so, create a perfect lab to study evolutionary processes. What he found was astonishing. Given a simple rule set these interesting patterns emerged. He called them symbioorganisms. Despite being simple numeric constructs, they exhibited many properties of living things. Did Barricelli create a digital form of life?

Selected Sources:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/BF01556771 - Numerical Testing of Evolution Theories. Please, just read this paper and be amazed!

This episode is simply a reading of the Story of Mel. I opened last episode with an excerpt, but didn't feel right leaving it at that. So, I present, the Story of Mel as written by Ed Nather and preserved in the Jargon file.

I'm wrapping up my dive into Prolog with... Prolog itself! This episode I'm actually covering the development of Prolog, using all the natural language processing lore we covered last time. Along the way we will see how Prolog developed from a set of tools, and how those tools were generalized into a useful language.

Selected Sources:

http://alain.colmerauer.free.fr/alcol/ArchivesPublications/PrologHistory/19november92.pdf - The Birth of Prolog

https://archive.org/details/introductiontoma0000hutc/mode/1up?q=%22q-systems%22&view=theater - An Introduction to Machine Translation

I don't usually cover video games. When I do, you know it's for a weird reason. This episode we are looking at the Atari VCS 2600, it's strange hardware, and how it fits into the larger story of the rise of microprocessors. These new tiny chips were already changing the world, but they brought along their own problems.

Selected source:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/atari-2600 - Inventing the Atari 2600

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/09/102658257-05-01-acc.pdf - Al Alcorn Oral History

https://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_bob_whitehead.html - Bob Whitehead Interview

What really is the deal with microcontrollers? Are they just little computers... or are they something totally different? This episode we are looking at the development of the microcontroller through the history of the TMS1000.