Computer Freaks

By Inc. MagazineSociety & Culture Documentary Technology History

Computer Freaks episodes

April 17, 2025 Season 2, Episode 6: Briefly Famous
This episode looks back at where all of our main characters landed in their lives after the tech boom and bust and what they have learned.
50 min
April 10, 2025 Season 2, Episode 5: Crazy Bill
Goto.com rises to the highest levels of success and even tries to buy Google. But this episode looks at what went wrong.
59 min
April 03, 2025 Season 2, Episode 4: Permissionless Innovation
In this episode, we pivot to Pasadena where the world of e-commerce is taking off to broader audiences. Through our e-commerce characters, we meet Bill Gross who is digging into the radically changing world of paid search
40 min
March 27, 2025 Season 2, Chapter 3: Bad Blood
This episode explores a new protocol war between EIT and Netscape over security.
48 min
March 20, 2025 Season 2, Chapter 2: Marc the Shark
This is the origin story of when Marc Andreessen first arrives in Silicon Valley. This episode paints a picture of the world he arrives in, who he befriends and who he alienates.
52 min
March 13, 2025 Season 2, Chapter 1: Illegal, Immoral and Fattening
Episode One introduces our listeners to the next generation of Computer Freaks who are getting into new technologies like the world wide web and e-commerce - just as these fields are opening up to the masses.
48 min
February 27, 2025 Computer Freaks is back for a second season!
On the heels of Season One of Computer Freaks, Season Two pivots to the dawn of internet entrepreneurship and its broader and irrevocable impact on our culture in the 1990s. Featuring extensive interviews with internet pioneers from companies like Google, Overture, Netscape and more. New episodes are available every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
3 min
July 20, 2023 Chapter Six: Unintended Consequences
We return to speaking to Joseph Haughney about his hopes for the Arpanet. We ask other founders how they feel about what the internet has become. We also speak to internet early founder Hans Werner Braun’s daughters about how they reconcile themselves the world their father helped create.
37 min
July 13, 2023 Chapter Five: The Protocol Wars
It is the late 1970s and early 1980s and the Arpanet is in decline. NSFnet is on the rise in its place. Why did the Arpanet get eclipsed by other networks, and is that OK?
43 min
July 06, 2023 Chapter Four: The French Connection
Louis Pouzin is a French academic who some experts say really invented the Arpanet. But is that true, and should any one person be given all the credit?
42 min

About Computer Freaks

From the publisher's feed

This is the untold history of how the internet almost didn’t happen. It’s an ode to fathers and daughters. And it’s a tale about the origins of the man-computer symbiosis that’s still profoundly relevant to our society today.

Host Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan, an editor-at-large at Inc., is a James Beard Award-winning journalist who has worked for NBC News as well as three of the nation’s largest newspapers, and who created the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Rotten. Dare-Bryan’s connection to the story is deeply personal—her father, Joseph Haughney, was one of the internet’s founding fathers.

Dare-Bryan spent 10 months traveling the nation interviewing these iconic founders about their work, and how it all led to the economy—and society—we inhabit today. In this six-episode series, she explores the invention, the contention, the bragging, the fighting, and the decisions that have led to our digital life.

Just as the book Hamilton explored the founding fathers of democracy in the United States, this project explores the founding fathers of the internet and how their high-stakes battles over ownership, internet privacy, internet protocols, and internet access mirror what we face today.

By looking to the past, Computer Freaks dives into modern debates: Could we have prevented online harm from the start? What is the balance between free speech and online content moderation? How much human work should be delegated to technology and A.I.? And what direction should this growing labyrinthine network of computers take?

The narrative behind Computer Freaks stretches from after World War II through the 1980s, and up to the consequences we face from this technology today. During that early period, the federal government was funding the first workable prototype of the internet, called the Arpanet, but fighting with researchers at MIT about just how far access to the Arpanet should extend.

Computer Freaks tells the dramatic, untold history of the internet straight from the mouths of its pioneering inventors: Len Kleinrock, Robert Kahn, Charley Kline, Steve Crocker, Vinton Cerf, and Bob Metcalfe, among many others. Exclusive interviews uncover hidden stories found nowhere else about the Arpanet, online harm, hacking, authentication, cybersecurity, Ethernet, TCP IP, packet switching, queuing theory, and the early contributions of women in tech.

And, perhaps most important, this series is a love letter from a daughter to an aging father and the world-changing legacy he will leave behind.