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In 1964 you could step into a booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal and see a live video feed of a friend in Chicago. You also had to reserve the slot in advance, make sure the other person travelled to a matching booth, and pay $27 for three minutes. This episode follows the AT&T Picturephone from a Bell Labs experiment in the 1930s, where Dr. Herbert Ives led more than 200 scientists, engineers, and technicians, through a mid-1950s prototype that sent one still image every two seconds, to the sleek oval Mod I shown off at the New York World's Fair and Disneyland.

The public booths closed by 1968, but AT&T concluded it had simply picked the wrong customer and aimed the redesigned Mod II at corporate offices, launching in Chicago in 1970. The engineering behind that six-inch screen was staggering, and so was the miscalculation. The company predicted one million units in service by 1980 and peaked at under 500. The reasons had less to do with physics than with how people in an office wanted to behave on a phone call, and the lessons shaped the video calling that came later.

• The first transcontinental video call ran between the World's Fair and Disneyland on April 20th, 1964.
• Booths stood in Grand Central Terminal, the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, and the Prudential building in Chicago, with a Washington to New York call priced at $16.
• The Mod II mounted a Plumbicon camera tube on the top lip of the screen to create the illusion of eye contact.
• Each Mod II needed three twisted pairs of telephone cable and an amplifier every single mile, since its one megahertz signal was over 300 times larger than a voice call.
• For long distance, engineers used differential pulse code modulation, sending only the differences between frames over T2 carriers.

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The 8-track tape, formally known as Stereo 8, was a format you could not rewind. Inside its chunky plastic cartridge sat a single spool of quarter-inch magnetic tape running at 3.75 inches per second, pulled from the center and wound back onto the outside of the same reel. Only a graphite lubricant on the back of the tape kept it from strangling itself. A strip of metallic foil spliced into the loop triggered a solenoid that shoved the playback head to the next pair of tracks, producing the famous clunk in the middle of songs.

This episode follows the endless loop from Bernard Cousino's 1952 Audio Vendor and George Eash's Fidelipac to Bill Lear, the Learjet founder who wanted high fidelity sound in the automobile. A small change by his designer Richard Kraus made the cartridge tough enough for the road, and Ford offered factory players in 1966 models. The format became the largest segment of US consumer electronics, was squeezed by quadraphonic sound, found strange second lives in toys and arcades, peaked in 1978, and then fell to the cassette and the Sony Walkman.

• Kraus moved the rubber pinch roller out of the player and into every cartridge, so the dashboard unit no longer had to reach inside and grab the tape.
• In September 1965, Ford offered 8-track players in the 1966 Mustang, Thunderbird, and Lincoln, while RCA Victor launched 175 titles on the format.
• Quadraphonic cartridges cut capacity to roughly 25 minutes, forcing producers to edit songs, fade solos early, or drop tracks entirely.
• Daisuke Inoue's 1971 Juke-8 karaoke machine, Sega's 1968 arcade game MotoPolo, and the 1978 2-XL toy robot all relied on 8-track mechanisms.
• Radio Shack sold blank 8-tracks through its catalogs until 1990, Cheap Trick issued The Latest on 8-track in 2009, and Dolly Parton released a Christmas album on the format in 2020.

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In 1981, Adam Osborne released the Osborne 1, a self-contained personal computer priced at $1,995 with a built-in 5-inch screen and bundled word processing and spreadsheet software. It weighed around 24 pounds and was roughly the size of a sewing machine, but it proved that computing could travel. Two years later the company filed for bankruptcy, and his name became shorthand for a business blunder: announcing a future product so early that customers stop buying the current one.

This episode tests that textbook story against the accounts of people who were there. Osborne did show prototypes of the Osborne Executive and the Vixen to journalists in early 1983, and dealers did cancel orders. But former employees point to a rival, Kaypro, selling a nine-inch screen for $400 less, and Osborne's own memoirs describe a ruinous plan to salvage old motherboards. The episode then follows the Osborne effect through later casualties, including Nokia's burning platform memo, and asks how the same dynamic became the business model of crowdfunding.

• Programmer Mike McCarthy argued that customers did not wait for the $2,495 Executive and its seven-inch screen. They bought the cheaper Kaypro instead.
• A vice president's plan to recover $150,000 worth of obsolete Osborne 1 motherboards by building complete machines around them ended up costing $2 million.
• North Star Computers made the same mistake in 1978 by announcing a floppy disk controller with double the capacity at the same price.
• Talk of high definition television in the early 1990s depressed regular TV sales even though HDTV did not become a household standard for another 15 years.
• Nokia CEO Stephen Elop declared Symbian a burning platform in 2011, a full year before Windows Phone devices were ready, and Nokia sold its phone division to Microsoft in 2013.

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In 2012 alone, 41.45 million 3D televisions shipped worldwide. By 2017, every major manufacturer had stopped making them. This episode follows the full arc of that collapse, starting long before the flat screen: Sir Charles Wheatstone's stereoscope in 1838, John Logie Baird's stereoscopic TV demonstration in London in 1928, the 1950s cinema boom of Bwana Devil and House of Wax, and the 1997 sweeps stunt in which NBC viewers collected cardboard glasses from fast food chains to watch Third Rock from the Sun.

After Avatar broke box office records at the end of 2009, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, and LG declared 3D the new baseline at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. What followed was a collision of dim pictures, battery-powered active shutter glasses, punishing live production demands, and a basic conflict with human vision. Viewers reported headaches, eye strain, and motion sickness, and a large share of the population could barely perceive the effect at all. Consumers wanted sharper, brighter 2D pictures, and the industry's bet evaporated within a few years.

• Active shutter glasses used liquid crystal lenses that went opaque and transparent 120 times a second or more, cutting the perceived brightness of an expensive screen.
• Rendering the yellow first down line for a live 3D NFL broadcast took about 1,000 times more processing power than in 2D, and directors could cut between cameras only about one-fifth as often.
• The vergence-accommodation conflict forces the eyes to converge on a floating object while focusing on a screen across the room, decoupling two functions that evolution linked.
• Roughly 12 percent of people cannot properly see 3D images, and up to 30 percent have weak stereoscopic vision.
• The BBC suspended 3D programming and ESPN 3D shut down in 2013, Vizio quit in 2014, and Samsung, Sony, and LG ended production by early 2017.

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In the year 2000, a 105-year-old woman in Oslo received a formal letter offering her a place in kindergarten. The Norwegian citizen registry stored only the last two digits of her birth year, so the computer read 95 and assumed 1995. That same shortcut had spent the previous months driving people to hoard gold, canned food, and generators. This episode traces the Y2K problem back to its origin in the 1960s and 1970s, when a single kilobyte of memory could cost over $100, punched cards had exactly 80 columns, and dropping the 19 from every date was applauded by management.

From there the story splits in two. On one side were survivalists, church flea markets selling wood-burning stoves, and preachers like Jerry Falwell framing the bug as prophecy. On the other was a quiet global audit costing an estimated $300 billion, carried out through date expansion, date windowing, and compliance certificates demanded up and down the supply chain. The glitches that did slip through show the flaw was real, and the backup systems built for it mattered again after September 11th. The year 2038 problem suggests the lesson never fully landed.

• Programmer Bob Bemer spotted the two-digit flaw in 1958 while working on genealogical software and spent 20 years warning IBM, the US government, and standards groups, who ignored him.
• Alan Greenspan said in 1998 that he and other 1960s programmers were proud of squeezing space out of their programs by dropping the 19.
• After midnight, radiation monitoring equipment failed at Japan's Shika nuclear plant, over 900 South Korean apartments lost heating, and a video store billed a customer about 8 million won for a tape it judged 100 years overdue.
• The Deutsche Oper Berlin payroll system calculated employees' children as having negative ages and withheld their childcare subsidies.
• On January 19, 2038, at 03:14:07 UTC, 32-bit systems counting seconds since January 1st, 1970 will roll over and think it is December 1901.

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The blue and yellow can under your sink began as a fix for a frightening aerospace problem. In 1953 the Rocket Chemical Company of San Diego was asked by Convair to stop rust on the Atlas missile, whose thin stainless steel skin doubled as the wall of its balloon tanks. With no internal frame, the rocket held its shape through pressure alone, so even minor corrosion was a threat. The answer had to creep under moisture and lift it off the metal. It took forty tries, which is the whole meaning of the name: water displacement, 40th formula.

This episode sorts out who deserves the credit. Company president Norman B. Larsen has long been named as the inventor, but historian Iris Engstrand points to Iver Norman Lawson, a chemist who mixed the formula at home and was paid 500 dollars. Larsen's contribution was the aerosol can that carried it into garages by 1958. From airline hangars to a public listing in 1973, the story ends with a recipe that was never patented and is still kept secret.

• The Atlas missile would crumple like an empty soda can without internal pressure pushing against its thin steel skin.
• By 1965 Delta and United were using the spray, with United applying it to the joints of Boeing 720s and DC-8s during overhauls.
• The company skipped a patent, which would have forced disclosure, and in 2018 moved the original paper formula by armored vehicle to a bank vault.
• U.S. safety data sheets list 45 to 50 percent isoparaffins, under 35 percent mineral oil, and 2 to 3 percent carbon dioxide as propellant.
• Wired magazine ran the spray through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry in 2009 and found C9 to C14 alkanes and mineral oil, ingredients but not the recipe.

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Gary Kildall wrote the first practical operating system for personal computers, yet he is remembered mostly for a rumor that he went flying instead of meeting IBM. Born in Seattle in 1942 to a family that ran a seamanship school, he planned to teach high school math. Instead he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, earned a doctorate in 1972, and began experimenting with early Intel chips. In 1973 he created PL/M, the first high-level language for microprocessors, and CP/M, which let a microcomputer work with a floppy disk drive.

This episode corrects the legend. Intel passed on CP/M, so Kildall and his wife Dorothy founded Digital Research, and by 1981 the system ran on 3,000 computer models. When IBM came calling in 1980, he was flying to deliver software, and talks stalled over a strict nondisclosure agreement and a flat fee. Microsoft bought a CP/M clone called 86-DOS and the rest followed. The episode also covers his later inventions and his death in 1994 at age 52.

• Kildall invented the BIOS, a layer of code that absorbed each machine's hardware quirks so one program could run on many different computers.
• He found that the first 26 system calls in PC DOS were virtually identical to CP/M, but his attorney warned that software law was too weak to guarantee a win.
• IBM agreed to offer CP/M-86 alongside PC DOS, then priced it at 240 dollars against 40 dollars for the Microsoft system.
• He went on to build the GEM graphical interface in 1985, put Grolier's encyclopedia on a CD-ROM, and sold animation technology to Pixar.
• In 1992 the University of Washington invited him to its computer science anniversary as a guest while Bill Gates gave the keynote, prompting his unpublished memoir Computer Connections.

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Kathleen Rita McNulty was born in February 1921 in an Irish-speaking village in County Donegal, on the night British forces arrested her father, an Irish Republican Army training officer. The family emigrated in October 1924 to Philadelphia, where she arrived speaking no English and found her footing in mathematics. She graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women in 1942 as one of a handful of math majors in a class of 92, just as the Army began advertising for women with math degrees. Her job title was computer.

This episode follows her from hand-cranked calculators at the Moore School of Engineering, where a single artillery trajectory took 30 to 40 hours, to the differential analyzer in the basement and then to ENIAC, which did the same work in 10 seconds. Chosen in June 1945 as one of its first programmers, she had to learn the machine from blueprints before she was allowed to see it. When ENIAC was shown to the press, she and her colleagues were asked to act as hostesses.

• As a civil service computer at grade SP-4 she earned 1,620 dollars a year and taught herself numerical integration on the job under supervisor Lila Todd.
• She is credited with proposing the subroutine, worked out with Jean Bartik, so that ENIAC's limited hardware could reuse one block of logic.
• The classified equations the programmers ran turned out to include feasibility calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
• After marrying ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly in 1948 she resigned her post but kept working on software design for the BINAC and UNIVAC I from home.
• She joined the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997, and in 2019 the Irish public voted to name the national supercomputer Kay.

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In 2015 Finland released a set of national emojis: a couple in a sauna, heavy metal rockers, and a phone officially named the unbreakable. That phone was the Nokia 3310. Launched in late 2000 by a development team in Copenhagen, it abandoned the angular business handset for a rounded candy bar shape meant to be run with one thumb. Its screen was 84 by 48 monochrome pixels, its C button gave instant tactile certainty, and its engineers budgeted every kilobyte and milliwatt. It went on to sell 126 million units worldwide.

This episode explains why the 3310 mattered far beyond phone calls. Its Chat feature stitched three text messages into one long conversation, Snake 2 and Space Impact made mobile gaming a habit, and Xpress-On covers and a ringtone composer turned a handset into a statement of identity. It also looks at the regional variants built for different networks, the stress-test videos that fed the indestructible legend, and what the jokes say about today's fragile glass phones.

• Nokia made two batteries, 133 grams and 115 grams, and only the heavier one supplied enough power to show the startup animation of two hands touching.
• The phone let users type up to 459 characters, split the text into three SMS packets with hidden tags, and reassembled them on the receiving handset.
• The ringtone composer had users enter notes on the number keypad, with the asterisk and pound keys setting duration and octave, across seven custom slots.
• North American versions needed bulkier radio hardware to work with older analog and TDMA networks, which made them slightly heavier.
• HMD Global revived the 3310 in 2017 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for about 49 euros, with a 2.4-inch color screen and a 2-megapixel camera.

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Between early 2001 and early 2002, a Scottish systems administrator working from his girlfriend's aunt's house in London wandered through nearly a hundred U.S. military and NASA computers. Gary McKinnon, born in Glasgow in 1966 and using the alias Solo, was not after money or secrets to sell. Inspired by the Disclosure Project, he wanted proof of suppressed free energy, anti-gravity technology, and alien spacecraft. American authorities called it the largest military computer intrusion in history and said it cost over 700,000 dollars to repair.

This episode covers how he got in, what he claimed to find, and the ten-year extradition fight that followed. A Virginia grand jury indicted him on seven counts carrying up to 70 years. Britain's Extradition Act of 2003 let the United States request him without presenting contestable evidence, and the House of Lords let the case proceed. Then a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome and severe depression turned a hacker into a cause, and in late 2012 the Home Secretary blocked his extradition.

• McKinnon used simple scripts to scan military networks for administrator accounts that had been left with no password at all.
• U.S. officials said he knocked 2,000 computers in the Washington area offline for 24 hours and wiped weapons logs at a naval weapons station.
• He claimed he saw a raw NASA image of a cigar-shaped craft, but his dial-up connection dropped before he could save it.
• Prosecutors offered three to four years if he surrendered and pleaded guilty, a tactic his lawyers called an abuse of process.
• Pink Floyd's David Gilmour recorded a charity track for the campaign, and his mother Janis Sharp ran for parliament to keep the case in the news.