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John von Neumann's colleagues included Nobel laureates and the founders of quantum physics, and some of them half seriously suspected he was not human. Born in Budapest in 1903 to a wealthy banking family, he knew calculus by age eight and read a 46 volume world history for pleasure. His tutor, Gabor Szego, is said to have wept on seeing the boy's reasoning. At 19 he was publishing work on set theory, and he later earned a chemical engineering degree in Zurich and a mathematics PhD in Budapest at the same time.

This episode follows that mind to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked in a three-piece suit with German march music blaring. It covers the stored-program design that still underlies every phone and laptop, his self-replicating cellular automata, and his calculations for the implosion bomb at Los Alamos. It also faces the contradiction of a cheerful party host who became a fiercely anti-communist advocate of the hydrogen bomb, and who met his own death with fear.

• Early machines like ENIAC had to be rewired by hand for each new task. Von Neumann proposed keeping instructions and data in the same memory.
• He showed mathematically how a pattern on a grid could copy itself, years before biologists found the structure of DNA.
• At Los Alamos he treated compressed metal as a fluid to arrange the explosive lenses, and he calculated the altitude at which the bomb should detonate.
• When George Dantzig brought him an unsolved linear programming problem, he answered with an hour-long impromptu lecture introducing the theory of duality.
• Diagnosed with cancer in 1955, he ran ICBM committee meetings from his bed at Walter Reed and turned to Catholicism, reasoning along the lines of Pascal's wager.

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Ray Tomlinson created networked email, gave the @ symbol its modern meaning, and then declined to own a cell phone. Born on April 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York, and raised in the village of Vail Mills, he was the son of a carpet mill worker and a dry cleaner's employee. He studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, did a co-op with IBM, and went on to MIT, where the early video game Spacewar showed him that computers could respond to people in real time.

This episode follows him to Bolt, Beranek and Newman in 1967, the firm building the ARPANET. In 1971 he was asked to make a routine update to SNDMSG, a program that could only leave messages for users on the same machine. Instead he grafted it onto his CPYNET file transfer code so a message could cross the network. Nobody had asked for it, and he told a colleague not to tell anyone. The episode also covers his work on the TCP three-way handshake and his dry, unhurried view of the world he helped wire.

• Tomlinson picked the @ sign from his Model 33 Teletype keyboard because it was an obscure bookkeeping symbol unlikely to appear in a username or system command.
• The first networked email traveled between two machines sitting side by side in the same room at BBN, and he never saved the forgettable test text.
• In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art acquired the @ sign for its architecture and design collection and credited Tomlinson for its modern use.
• He insisted on spelling email without a hyphen, joking that he wanted to conserve the world's supply of hyphens.
• He died of a heart attack on March 5, 2016, at age 74 in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and an asteroid, 10108 Tomlinson, carries his name.

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Life magazine called it the first electronic person in 1970. Shakey was a top-heavy stack of boxes on wheels, built at the Stanford Research Institute's Artificial Intelligence Center with DARPA money after a 1964 proposal for intelligent automata aimed at reconnaissance. It carried a television camera, sonar range finders, a radio antenna, and bump detectors. Project manager Charles Rosen watched it tremble across the floor, said it shakes like hell, and the name stuck.

This episode tells Shakey's story as a biography of a machine. The clumsy body mattered less than the mind inside it: software written in Lisp and a planner called STRIPS that reasoned backward from a goal to the steps required. Told to push a block off a platform, Shakey found a ramp, moved it into place, rolled up, and finished the job. The project ended in 1972, but the mathematics invented to make it work now guides map apps, video game characters, and self-driving cars.

• Shakey lived in a carefully prepared world of mapped rooms, corridors, doors, and light switches, with painted baseboards to help its camera find the edges of a room.
• The original design included two retractable arms, which the team scrapped because the robot could barely stay upright.
• The A* search algorithm was created to route Shakey efficiently by adding the cost already traveled to an estimate of the distance remaining.
• The Hough transform, developed so Shakey could turn camera pixels into straight lines and shapes, remains a staple of computer vision.
• Shakey now sits in a glass case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and joined Carnegie Mellon's Robot Hall of Fame in 2004 alongside ASIMO and C-3PO.

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In 2008 a guest conductor four feet three inches tall, dressed like a small astronaut, led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra through The Impossible Dream. It was ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot, and it was never meant to be sold. The project began in 1986 at a research center in Wako, Japan, with a single goal: make a machine walk on two legs. The early E series models were little more than heavy mechanical legs trailing thick cables, and the hulking P series followed before ASIMO was unveiled in October 2000.

This episode treats the robot's career as a biography. It explains why Honda chose a height of 130 centimeters, why the processor sits in the waist, and how cameras, lasers, infrared, and ultrasonic sensors fed one system at once. It follows the world tour, from the New York Stock Exchange bell to a soccer kick with Barack Obama, and the viral stair falls that made people love him more. Honda ended development in 2018, but the engineering lives on in walking assist devices and disaster response machines.

• ASIMO's height put his hands at the right level for standard doorknobs and light switches in human homes.
• Placing the heavy processor in the waist lowered his center of gravity so turning and stopping would not topple him.
• Between 2000 and 2011 his movable joints grew from 26 to 57 degrees of freedom, enough to unscrew a bottle cap and pour water into a paper cup.
• By 2011 he ran at nine kilometers per hour, with both feet off the ground for 0.08 seconds on each stride.
• He scored 32 points to win an episode of the British quiz show QI in 2011, after serving water to host Stephen Fry.

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In November 1999, stickers on grocery store bananas asked how many calories were in the fruit and pointed shoppers to a web address. That was Ask Jeeves, founded in Berkeley, California, in 1996 on a simple bet: people should be able to type a question in plain English instead of learning keyword and Boolean syntax. A cartoon valet borrowed from P.G. Wodehouse made the idea obvious to novices, and by July 1999 the company was trading on the NASDAQ.

This episode follows three decades of reinvention, from the Teoma acquisition and a $1.85 billion sale to IAC in 2005, through the 2006 decision to retire the butler and become Ask.com. It covers the privacy tool AskEraser, the purchase of Dictionary.com, a NASCAR sponsorship, and the 2010 surrender in the search wars. What kept the site alive for another 16 years was a quieter business built on old query logs, ad-heavy answer pages, and Google's own rankings, until the servers went dark on May 1, 2026.

• The original system was not thinking at all. It stripped a question down to its core terms and intent, then matched it to answers and links organized by human editors.
• A giant Jeeves balloon floated in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade every year from 2000 to 2004.
• Teoma, developed by researchers at Rutgers University, ranked pages by links from sites on the same subject instead of by raw popularity.
• AskEraser launched in December 2007, letting users opt out of having their queries, IP addresses, and cookies recorded.
• In 2010 Ask.com shut down its web crawler and laid off 130 search engineers, then bought About.com in 2012 and Ask.fm in 2014 to turn curiosity into ad revenue.

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Adobe Flash began in 1993 as SmartSketch, a drawing program FutureWave built for pen computers running the doomed PenPoint operating system. When that platform failed, the company added frame by frame animation and relaunched it in 1995 as FutureSplash Animator. Because it drew with vector math instead of heavy pixel files, it could stream full color animation over a dial-up modem. Adobe passed on buying it, Macromedia grabbed it in December 1996, and a free player plug-in put Flash on nearly every computer on earth.

This episode traces the rise and the coordinated execution. ActionScript arrived with Flash 5 in 2000 and let teenagers build games in a weekend, feeding Newgrounds, Kongregate, and early YouTube. Adobe then paid $3.4 billion for Macromedia in 2005. But more than 1,000 documented vulnerabilities, battery drain, and Steve Jobs's 2010 letter banning Flash from the iPhone and iPad turned the industry against it. By January 2021 a built-in kill switch stopped the player for good.

• FutureWave offered FutureSplash to Adobe in 1995 and was turned down, a decade before Adobe bought the same technology through its Macromedia acquisition.
• Early adopters included Microsoft for MSN, Disney for Disney's Daily Blast, and Fox for interactive Simpsons content.
• Sites built entirely in Flash gave designers pixel-perfect control but broke the browser's back button and shut out screen readers.
• Adobe wrote logic into the final player that checked the system clock and refused to render any content after January 12, 2021.
• The Internet Archive adopted the Ruffle emulator, and the Flashpoint Archive saved more than 160,000 Flash games and animations from disappearing.

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Albert Gonzalez looked like an ordinary IT guy from Miami. He bought his first computer at 12, reportedly hacked NASA at 14, and by his early twenties ran Shadow Crew, an online marketplace where about 4,000 members traded 1.5 million stolen credit and ATM cards along with fake passports and Social Security cards. When the Secret Service's Operation Firewall caught him in Newark carrying 15 fake cards, he avoided prison by becoming a paid informant.

This episode follows the double life that came next. While working with the Secret Service by day, Gonzalez and his crew cracked weak store Wi-Fi from parked cars, planted sniffer programs, and took 45.6 million card numbers from TJX and other retailers. Then he went bigger, using SQL injection to pull 130 million cards from Heartland Payment Systems. A sloppy return trip to a Dave and Buster's finally exposed him, and the story ends with buried cash, a 20 year sentence, and a retail industry forced to rethink security.

• Shadow Crew ran like a legitimate marketplace, with moderators who forced sellers to refund buyers when stolen card numbers turned out to be invalid.
• His crew went war driving along US Route 1 in Miami, cracking the outdated WEP encryption on store networks within minutes from the parking lot.
• Before releasing his malware, Gonzalez tested it against 20 leading antivirus programs to make sure it would go undetected.
• Agents arrested him in May 2008 at the National Hotel in Miami Beach and found $1.6 million in cash, $1.1 million of it buried in a drum in his parents' backyard.
• In 2011 he tried to withdraw his guilty plea by claiming his informant status meant he had acted under public authority. The court rejected it, and he was released in September 2023.

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On March 5, 1975, a group of electronics hobbyists gathered in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park, California, to look at an Altair 8800. The machine had no screen and no keyboard. It came as a kit of loose parts, was programmed by flipping toggle switches, and answered in blinking red lights. Its manuals were poor and its parts often defective, so anyone who wanted one to work needed other people. French and Fred Moore gave them a place to meet.

This episode follows the Homebrew Computer Club from that garage to an auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, a Safeway parking lot where members traded chips from car trunks, and a pub called the Oasis. Steve Wozniak left the first meeting inspired to design the Apple I. The club's newsletter spread schematics and code across the country, and it also carried the argument over free versus paid software that still divides the industry.

• Lee Felsenstein moderated the formal meetings. Because hardware could not be sold on campus, the real marketplace formed afterward under the lights of a grocery store parking lot.
• Members included Jerry Lawson, creator of the cartridge-based Fairchild Channel F, Liza Loop, the first female member, and John Draper, the phone phreak known as Captain Crunch.
• Li-Chen Wang published the source code for Tiny BASIC, a language pared down to fit machines with only a few kilobytes of memory, for anyone to use and modify.
• Bill Gates answered the copying of his Altair BASIC with an open letter to hobbyists that accused them of theft, while Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop ordered the first 50 Apple I computers on condition that they arrive assembled.
• The club met until December 1986. The Oasis closed on March 7, 2018, over unaffordable rent, and in 2019 the building became the headquarters of venture firm Pear VC.

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In 1994 the Japanese auto parts company Denso Wave had a bottleneck. A standard barcode held about 20 characters, so workers sometimes scanned up to ten labels on a single box of parts. Engineer Masahiro Hara was asked for one label that could hold far more, handle kanji, and scan in a fraction of a second. Playing Go on his lunch breaks, he saw that a two-dimensional grid of black and white could carry vastly more information than a row of bars.

This episode explains what a phone actually computes when it reads a QR code. The three corner squares follow a 1 to 1 to 3 to 1 to 1 ratio of black and white chosen because it almost never appears in ordinary print. An alignment pattern lets software flatten a tilted or curved image, masking breaks up confusing clusters, and Reed-Solomon error correction rebuilds missing data. That toughness carried the code into payments, pandemic check-ins, currency, and crime.

• Hara's team fed magazines, newspapers, and packaging into a computer to find a pattern that would not occur by accident, which produced the corner marker ratio.
• Reed-Solomon math was first developed to protect data from deep space probes. At the highest setting, level H, a code still reads with up to 30 percent of its data destroyed.
• Logos in the middle of QR codes work only because the scanner treats them as damage and repairs around them.
• Singapore's SGQR replaced a counter full of payment stickers with one unified code, and monument makers in Japan, Uruguay, and Wisconsin carve codes into gravestones that link to memorials.
• Scammers have pasted fake codes over real ones on parking meters in Austin, San Antonio, and Boston, and phishing emails use QR images because security filters scan text, not pictures.

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We still say we are dialing a number, though the dial itself is long gone. In 1892 Almon Brown Strowger's automatic exchange in La Porte, Indiana, removed the human operator but made callers tap out each digit on three push buttons, one press at a time. The rotary dial, introduced around 1907, handed that counting to a machine. Pulling the wheel forward only wound a spring. The signal went out on the return trip, as a switch broke the line current once per pulse.

This episode treats the dial as an early mechanical modem sending about ten pulses per second, and shows how its quirks hardened into national standards. Western Electric and Automatic Electric built rival speed governors to keep the timing steady. Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom each encoded digits differently, with lasting effects on their emergency numbers. The story ends in 1980s Washington, D.C., where old dials became a weapon against drug dealing.

• Western Electric slowed the return spin with a centrifugal governor whose weights rubbed inside a metal cup. Automatic Electric used a worm gear arrangement much like the speed regulator in a wind-up music box.
• Off-normal contacts shorted the earpiece whenever the dial left its resting position, sparing callers a burst of loud electrical pops in the ear.
• Britain chose 999 because pay phones already had a cam that let a zero through without a coin. Extending it slightly made the neighboring nine free as well.
• New Zealand dials sent ten minus the digit in pulses and fed British exchanges that expected 999, so the public dialed 111 to produce the same signal.
• In Washington's Anacostia neighborhood, the Fairlawn Coalition had pay phones switched back to rotary dials. Without tones, buyers could not punch a number into a dealer's pager.