pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The most famous two words in computer science began as the on-air catchphrase of a 1950s New York disc jockey, William B. Williams. They entered computing through Brian Kernighan, whose 1972 tutorial for the B language used the greeting to teach a hard lesson about memory. On machines like the PDP-11 a character constant held only four ASCII characters, so printing the phrase meant stitching three variables together. His 1974 Bell Labs memo and the 1978 book The C Programming Language, written with Dennis Ritchie, carried it to a generation of programmers.

This episode uses Hello World as a lens on the whole history of computing. The phrase gives beginners an early psychological win, and it gives engineers proof that the compiler, the environment, and the machine all work. It also became a benchmark, Time to Hello World, that measures how much friction stands between a developer and a first result. Along the way it mutated: a blinking LED on a microcontroller, a factorial in Haskell, a colored triangle in OpenGL.

• Python prints the greeting in a single line, while C++ demands library imports, a main function, an output stream, and a return of zero.
• Malbolge, designed in 1998 and named for the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, took two years to yield a Hello World, and only through a Common Lisp code generator.
• Functional programmers start with a factorial because printing text counts as a side effect, something their languages try to avoid.
• Go's version prints English alongside Chinese or Japanese characters to show off native Unicode support, and Rust's Cargo generates the program automatically.
• Researchers Mark Guzdial and Elliot Soloway argue that a text greeting no longer impresses students raised on rich graphics and sound.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1994 Microsoft typographic engineer Vincent Connare looked at a beta of Microsoft Bob, a friendly program meant to ease newcomers into computing, and saw a cartoon dog speaking in Times New Roman. So he pulled Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns off his shelf and drew a casual, comic-style alphabet freehand with a mouse. The font missed Bob's deadline but slipped into 3D Movie Maker, the Windows 95 Plus pack, Internet Explorer, and Publisher. From there Comic Sans escaped onto millions of desktops, where adults used it for things its creator never imagined.

This episode follows the font from angry open letters and political resignations to a war memorial in the Netherlands, and into the organized backlash from designers who campaigned to ban it. Then comes the reversal. Its uneven, asymmetrical letters turn out to help dyslexic readers, a 2010 study on disfluency found harder-to-read fonts improved retention, and writers swear it cures writer's block. What designers call an aesthetic crime, teachers and accessibility advocates call a lifeline.

• Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert published his furious 2010 open letter about LeBron James leaving Cleveland entirely in Comic Sans.
• A Dutch city engraved the names of fallen military personnel in the font, scraped the stone after complaints, then engraved them again in the same typeface.
• Filmmaker Errol Morris ran an experiment showing readers were less likely to believe a statement set in Comic Sans than in Helvetica or Baskerville.
• Because each letter was drawn by hand, the b and d are not mirror images, and the capital I carries crossbars, giving dyslexic readers clear landmarks.
• The discovery of the Higgs boson was presented at CERN in 2012 on slides set in Comic Sans, and Connare received no royalties for his creation.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Twitter paid a reported 30 million dollars for Vine in October 2012, before the public could even download it. Founders Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll had built the visual equivalent of a tweet: six seconds of looping video, recorded only while a thumb pressed the screen. Launched on January 24, 2013, it was the top free app in the iOS App Store by April. That touch-to-record design put jump cuts and stop motion in anyone's hands, and soon Vine was pushing an obscure rap track to number 35 on the Billboard Hot 100 and documenting the Ankara embassy bombing and the Ferguson protests.

This episode follows the rise, collapse, and strange afterlife of the app. Vine minted memes and stars at a furious pace but never built a way to pay the people making them. When Instagram and Snapchat offered longer video and advertisers followed, more than half of its top creators left in the first six months of 2016. Twitter ended uploads that October and later shut down the archive. The story closes with Divine, a decentralized revival announced by Jack Dorsey that restores up to 200,000 original Vines.

• Artist Angela Washko sold a Vine to a collector for 200 dollars in March 2013, delivered on a thumb drive, the first Vine sold as fine art.
• Kayla Lewis coined the phrase eyebrows on fleek in 2014 and watched celebrities and brands use it while she saw none of the profits.
• Brandon Moore, whose What Are Those video drew 40 million loops, felt sick when the joke appeared in Black Panther; he died in 2018 at age 31.
• Dom Hofmann launched a successor called Byte in 2020, which was renamed Clash and then Huddles before shutting down in May 2023.
• Divine, built by Evan Henshaw-Plath and launched in April 2026, runs on the Nostr protocol and uses Proof Mode to verify that videos were shot by humans.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2004 the Motorola Razr V3 landed among chunky plastic handsets like something dropped from orbit: impossibly thin, clad in anodized aluminum, with a keypad etched from a single sheet of metal and a snap that made hanging up feel like a statement. It turned the phone from a tool into a status symbol people left on restaurant tables. Motorola responded by flooding the market with variations through 2005 and 2006, then perfected the clamshell with the Razr 2 in 2007, just as touchscreens and the iPhone changed what a phone was for.

This episode traces the full arc of the brand. Motorola slashed prices, sold tens of millions of cheap units, starved its own research budget, and by 2011 saw its cellular division split off as Motorola Mobility. The name survived on Kevlar-backed Droid Razr slabs until flexible displays made a true folding Razr possible in 2020. From water drop hinges and split batteries to wood-backed models and a book-style Razr Fold in 2026, it is a story of hubris, survival, and design nostalgia.

• Motorola treated the V3 like a hit song it kept remixing, releasing pink, black, and Miami Ink editions instead of inventing a successor.
• The Razr 2 was two millimeters thinner, added an external touch-sensitive screen, Crystal Talk noise cancellation, and Ferrari editions, yet sales cratered against the original.
• The Motorola Razr i ran on an Intel Atom chip, a hot, power-hungry choice that struggled with Android apps written for ARM.
• The foldable Razr loops its screen into a teardrop recess inside the hinge and splits its battery into two cells, one in each half of the phone.
• LTPO displays that drop to one frame per second made a 4.0-inch always-on cover screen practical on the Razr 50 series in 2024.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2006 more than a hundred engineers, executives, and designers gathered to hold a funeral for a discontinued gadget. The gadget was Aibo, Sony's robot dog, born in the company's Computer Science Laboratory in the 1990s. Dr. Toshitada Doi and AI expert Masahiro Fujita began with a prototype called Mutant that tracked a yellow ball and threw karate strikes. Fujita's insight was that a robot built for entertainment could fail and still be loved, because owners would read its mistakes as personality.

This episode tells Aibo's life as a biography. The first model, the ERS-110, launched in May 1999 at $2,500, and all 5,000 units sold online in 20 minutes. Owners raised their dogs from a wobbly puppy stage, hackers taught them to dance, and universities fielded them in RoboCup soccer. Then new chief executive Howard Stringer cut the project, repairs ended, and aging robots began to fail. The story closes with the 2018 return of a cloud-connected Aibo that needs a monthly subscription.

• The Life software made each Aibo start as a helpless puppy and mature according to how its owner praised or scolded it through touch sensors.
• Composer Nobukazu Takemura blended animal noises with synth sounds so Aibo would seem like its own species instead of a fake dog.
• In October 2001 Sony sent a DMCA cease and desist notice to a user known as AiboPet over custom dance code, then backed down and released programming kits.
• After Sony stopped repairs in 2014, owners watched worn neck clutches cause what they called droopy head syndrome.
• The ERS-1000 has OLED eyes and can recognize up to 100 faces, but its processing happens on Sony's servers over LTE or Wi-Fi.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Winamp greeted new users with a bleating llama and a boast about whipping its backside. Behind the joke was a real fix for a 1997 problem: MP3 playback strained weak desktop processors. University of Utah students Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev wrapped a simple Windows interface around AMP, an efficient decoding engine written by Tomislav Uzelac, and released it as shareware. They asked users to mail a $10 check if they liked it, and by 1998 those checks brought in roughly $100,000 a month.

This episode follows the player from dorm project to 60 million users and into its long decline. It covers the cease and desist from Uzelac's PlayMedia Systems, the botched in-house decoder called Nitrane, the thousands of skins and the Milkdrop visualizer, and the $80 million sale to AOL in 1999. Then come the failed Winamp 3 rewrite, the founders' exit, a 2022 feature for music NFTs, and a 2024 source release that exposed other companies' code.

• Nullsoft answered the PlayMedia claim by swapping in Nitrane, a rushed decoder that ignored ISO standards and made music sound distorted, before licensing a proper one from the Fraunhofer Society.
• Winamp 3 was rebuilt on the Wasabi framework and broke compatibility with existing skins and plugins, so users went back to Winamp 2.
• Winamp 5 combined the version 2 engine with version 3 skinning, and the name was simple addition: two plus three.
• The 2024 code release on GitHub barred sharing modified versions and accidentally included proprietary code from Microsoft, Intel, Dolby, and Shoutcast before the repository was deleted.
• The planned Winamp 2027 is described as a subscription streaming service built on a white label platform from Deezer.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1978 Dan Bricklin sat in a Harvard Business School classroom watching a professor build a financial model in chalk. Every time one number changed, each figure that depended on it had to be erased and recalculated by hand. Bricklin imagined a grid where the computer did that work instantly. With Bob Frankston he formed Software Arts in Arlington, Massachusetts, and the two spent a winter in an attic writing the program in 6502 assembly language for the Apple II.

This episode follows VisiCalc from its June 1979 launch to its end in 1985. Businessmen walked into hobby shops and bought $2,000 computers just to run a disk that cost under $100, and the phrase killer app was born. Then publisher VisiCorp spread the program across every 8-bit machine, shipped a deliberately limited version for the IBM PC, and left room for former employee Mitch Kapor to launch Lotus 1-2-3 in 1983. Within months the pioneer was collapsing.

• Advisers told Bricklin that mainframe financial programs already existed, missing that his idea was instant, personal interaction.
• The design nearly failed at 16 kilobytes of memory until falling RAM prices led Apple to ship the Apple II with 48 kilobytes.
• In 1979, more than 25 percent of all Apple II computers sold were bought for the sole purpose of running VisiCalc.
• Lotus 1-2-3 used the full power of the IBM PC and copied VisiCalc's menu structure and keyboard commands so users could switch without relearning.
• Monthly sales fell from nearly 40,000 copies in January 1983 to 5,700 that December, and Lotus later bought Software Arts and discontinued VisiCalc.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1983, two teenagers in Edmonds, Washington, lay rigid and face down in the outfield during a baseball game, stayed that way for several innings, then got up and left. Scott Amy and Joel Marshall called it face dancing. The same odd idea surfaced again at a 1986 disco party in Berlin, in an unaired 1994 Tom Green prank in Ottawa, and in 1997 in Taunton, England, where schoolboys Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon named it the lying down game.

This episode traces how that pointless act of stillness turned into planking once cameras and Facebook arrived. A 2007 fan page set off a contest for the craziest photo, three friends in Adelaide coined the name in 2008, and the hunt for attention pushed people toward riskier spots. The story runs through suspended hospital workers, a fatal balcony fall in Brisbane, a peak of pop culture saturation in 2011, and the moment a prime minister's thumbs up made the whole thing uncool.

• Seven night shift staff at Great Western Hospital in Swindon were suspended in September 2009 for playing the lying down game on duty and posting the photos.
• In May 2011, 20 year old Acton Beale died after falling from a seventh floor balcony in Brisbane while attempting a plank.
• The cast of The Office planked across the Dunder Mifflin set, Jay-Z and Kanye West mentioned it in Gotta Have It, and fighter Pat Barry planked in the octagon after a knockout.
• New Zealand Prime Minister John Key appeared giving a thumbs up behind his planking son Max, then said the fad was fine if done safely.
• Successors included owling, Batmanning, Dufnering, and teapotting, the last invented on purpose by teachers at Mortlake College in Australia.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

IBM Watson won a million dollars on national television, tried to become a cancer doctor, drifted through a string of odd jobs, and was finally sold for parts. The idea began in 2004, when an IBM manager at a steakhouse saw diners abandon their meals to watch Ken Jennings on his 74 game winning streak. Under principal investigator David Ferrucci, the 2006 prototype answered about 15 percent of clues correctly. The finished machine ran on 90 servers with 16 terabytes of RAM and had to play completely offline.

This episode tells Watson's story like the biography of a child star. It explains the DeepQA system, in which hundreds of algorithms voted on hypotheses until a confidence score triggered the buzzer, and it revisits the 2011 match against Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then it follows the push into health care with Memorial Sloan Kettering and MD Anderson, where messy medical records defeated a system built for clean text. The verdict offered here is that the engineering was real and the marketing promised far too much.

• Producers made IBM build a mechanical finger to press a physical buzzer, yet Watson could still react in about eight milliseconds.
• Watson could not hear its opponents, so it once repeated the exact wrong answer Ken Jennings had just given.
• In a Final Jeopardy category on US cities, Watson answered Toronto with five question marks when the answer was Chicago, home of O'Hare and Midway.
• The MD Anderson pilot was discontinued after a reported $65 million investment without ever being used on active patients.
• Later assignments included personal shopping for an outdoor clothing brand, recipes like Peruvian potato poutine, and tax deductions, before the health unit was sold to a private equity firm in 2022.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In late 1994 David Bohnett and John Rezner launched Beverly Hills Internet, a small web host in Southern California with an unusual way of organizing the early web. Pages lived in virtual neighborhoods named for real places, such as Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and each address was a street number with neighbors on either side. By mid 1995 anyone could claim two megabytes of free space and build a home page. The company called its users homesteaders and soon renamed itself GeoCities.

This episode traces the boom and the demolition. A forced floating watermark broke hand-coded pages in June 1998 and set off user protests just before an IPO that sent shares from $17 past $100. Yahoo bought the site in January 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, then claimed rights to user content, scrapped the neighborhoods, and throttled free pages. When Yahoo announced the shutdown of the United States service in 2009, volunteer archivists raced to copy what they could before it vanished.

• By 1999 GeoCities was the third most visited site on the web, behind only AOL and Yahoo.
• The Federal Trade Commission found GeoCities had sold members' personal data to marketers after promising not to, including information collected from children.
• Yahoo's new terms of service asserted ownership of everything users posted, and the backlash forced a reversal within days.
• Free accounts were capped at roughly 4.2 megabytes of data transfer per hour, so a few visitors at once could knock a page offline.
• Archive Team released a 641 gigabyte torrent of rescued pages a year after the shutdown, while the Japanese version of the service survived until 2019.