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Around the turn of the millennium, millions of people downloaded a free desktop companion that told jokes, sang songs, recited trivia, and managed downloads. BonziBuddy, from Joe and Jay Bonzi's Bonzi Software, launched in 1999 as a green parrot named Peedy, a stock character from the Microsoft Agent technology the whole program was built on. In May 2000 the parrot gave way to Bonzi, a purple gorilla with a synthetic voice labeled Adult Male #2. This episode follows how a virtual pet became what one publication called the scourge of the internet.

Keeping the gorilla talking cost money, and the company found it in its users. The software tracked browsing habits, reset the Internet Explorer home page to Bonzi.com, and installed a browser helper object that could watch every address visited. Its ads imitated Windows system alerts to frighten people into buying security products. Lawsuits and federal regulators followed, and so, years later, did an unlikely second life as a meme.

• Clippy ran on the same Microsoft Agent engine, yet BonziBuddy found an audience because it was sold as entertainment for a web that still felt lonely and technical.
• Consumer Reports WebWatch labeled it spyware in 2002, and Trend Micro and Symantec classified it as adware and malware.
• A December 2002 class action targeted pop-ups styled as Windows warnings whose close button was a fake: clicking anywhere led to a sales page for products like InternetALERT. A May 2003 settlement forced the ads to look like ads.
• On February 18, 2004, the FTC ordered Bonzi Software to pay $75,000 for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data from users under 13.
• The software was discontinued in 2004 and the website shut down in late 2008. PC World readers voted it the sixth most annoying tech product of all time in April 2007.

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In 2005, a Craigslist ad offered women $100 to upload videos of themselves to a struggling dating site modeled on Hot or Not. Nobody bit. The site was YouTube, founded by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, and its servers sat nearly empty until the founders dropped the dating angle and let people post anything. This episode traces how that pivot produced a platform with over 2.7 billion monthly users, more than a billion hours watched each day, and 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.

The path ran through viral luck, ruinous bandwidth bills, and a $1.65 billion sale to Google in October 2006 that analysts called reckless. It continued through Viacom's billion-dollar copyright suit, the safe harbor defense that protected user uploads, Susan Wojcicki's push into subscriptions, and a long argument over whether the recommendation algorithm radicalizes viewers. Under Neal Mohan, the fight has turned on the audience itself, with a campaign against ad blockers.

• Steve Chen later admitted the famous dinner party origin story was shaped by marketing. Karim said the real spark was failing to find clips of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and the Indian Ocean tsunami.
• The first upload, Me at the zoo, went up on April 23, 2005, and ran 18 seconds. SNL's Lazy Sunday then drew millions of views and a takedown demand from NBCUniversal.
• Confused visitors kept crashing the website of Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment, owner of utube.com, which sued and eventually changed its domain.
• A $170 million FTC fine in 2019 for collecting children's data stripped targeted ads from kids' videos, cutting creator revenue by up to 90 percent and favoring cheap content farms.
• After YouTube hid public dislike counts in 2021, Karim rewrote the description of his first video in protest. The company later moved to server-side ad injection, stitching ads into the video stream itself.

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A plastic whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal happened to blow at exactly 2,600 hertz, the tone AT&T used to mark a long distance trunk line as idle. Because the phone company sent its control signals down the same channel as callers' voices, anyone who could reproduce that tone could take over the network. John Draper, born in 1943 to an Air Force engineer, learned the trick in 1969 from a circle of blind teenage phone phreaks and then engineered the blue box, a tone generator that mimicked an operator's console.

This episode follows Draper from an Alaska air base, where he rigged a military switchboard so airmen could call home, to a 1971 Esquire profile that brought Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to his door. He gave them the blue box schematics and a philosophy of open systems. The same refusal to accept limits led to FBI arrests, federal prison, corporate dead ends, and a late exile from the hacker community he helped create.

• A phreak known as Joybubbles had perfect pitch and could whistle 2,600 hertz himself, dropping the billing while the line stayed open.
• After a 1972 wire fraud arrest and probation, Draper boasted to an FBI informant in 1975 about tapping the bureau's own lines. He served four months at Lompoc, the first phone phreak to do federal time.
• On work furlough from an Alameda jail in 1979, he wrote code in pencil in his cell at night and typed it into an Apple II by day. The result was EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II.
• Hired by Wozniak in 1977, Draper built the Charlie Board, a phone interface that worked like a computerized blue box. Apple's Mike Markkula canceled it.
• In 2017, DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth banned Draper after reports alleging decades of unwanted physical contact, which he denied carried sexual intent.

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On July 1, 1970, Xerox chief scientist Jack Goldman founded the Palo Alto Research Center, placing it 3,000 miles from the copier company's East Coast headquarters. Bob Taylor filled its computer science lab with engineers leaving the nearby Stanford Research Institute as government funding dried up. In under a decade that team produced bitmap graphics, the graphical user interface, the Bravo what you see is what you get editor, Smalltalk and object-oriented programming, Ethernet, and the laser printer, then fused them into one machine: the Xerox Alto.

This episode is the biography of an institution that drew the blueprint for personal computing and watched others sell it. Executives who made fortunes leasing giant copiers to purchasing departments had no way to market a desk-sized computer to individuals. The distance that freed the researchers also left them speaking a language headquarters could not hear, and the talent walked out the door to Apple and beyond.

• The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI. PARC's contribution was weaving it into the Alto's overlapping windows, networking, and printing.
• Xerox's own attempt, the 8010 Star workstation of 1981, was expensive and aimed at office administrators. It sold only about 25,000 units.
• David Liddle and Charles Irby left in 1982 to found Metaphor Computer Systems, which reached nearly $40 million in annual revenue by 1987 before IBM acquired it. Other researchers took the interface work to the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.
• The great fumble story is incomplete: Xerox understood the laser printer immediately and built a multibillion dollar business on it, alongside PARC advances in LCDs and optical discs.
• PARC later pursued ubiquitous computing with the location-aware PARCTAB, became a subsidiary in 2002, and was donated to SRI International in April 2023, returning to the institution it once recruited from.

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In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton wrote a word processor for a Data General minicomputer owned by the city of Orem, Utah, and kept the rights. Their company, Satellite Software International, moved the program to the IBM PC in 1982, and because no C compiler existed for the machine, they wrote it entirely in x86 assembly language. That forced choice made WordPerfect faster than WordStar and, by 1990, the owner of 60 percent of the word processing market.

This episode follows the rise, the collapse, and the odd afterlife. WordPerfect won devotion with Reveal Codes, function key commands, safe macros, and free phone support, then stumbled badly when the world moved to Windows. A sale to Novell and a fire sale to Corel followed. Yet the software endures in law offices and government agencies, where exact formatting and decades of backward compatibility still matter more than fashion.

• The founders each held 49.9 percent of the company and gave office manager Pete Peterson 0.2 percent to act as tiebreaker.
• Reveal Codes split the screen to show every formatting tag in the text stream, much like HTML, so a stray bold code could be found and deleted instead of guessed at.
• WordPerfect macros lived outside the document, so files could not carry the macro viruses that later plagued Word. Support callers were entertained by hold jockeys while they waited.
• The first Windows version in 1991 was unstable and had to be installed from DOS, and Alt F4, a text blocking command in WordPerfect, closed the program in Windows. The company claimed Microsoft withheld API specifications.
• Novell paid $1.4 billion in 1994 and sold to Corel for $186 million in 1996. Corel closed the Orem offices in 1998 and moved development to Ottawa.

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Teachers and librarians once warned that a website anyone could edit was where facts went to die. Two decades later, federal courts cite it and scientific journals ask authors to update it. This episode goes back to the year 2000 and Nupedia, a slow, expert-reviewed encyclopedia that demanded credentials and a multi-step peer review. In January 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia as a feeder project, a public scratch pad for rough drafts. The scratch pad swallowed the encyclopedia it was built to serve.

Behind the growth sat a theory and a license. Wales, then running the web portal Bomis, drew on Friedrich Hayek's idea of spontaneous order, betting that scattered local knowledge would organize itself. Richard Stallman's GNU Free Documentation License made sure nobody could wall the work off. The episode then examines what came after the boom: stalled editor growth, edit wars settled without a boss, a damaging hoax, structural bias, and a co-founder turned critic.

• By 2007 the English edition passed two million articles, overtaking the Yongle Encyclopedia compiled in Ming dynasty China in 1408. Today there are over 68 million articles in more than 300 languages.
• Growth then plateaued as the obvious topics ran out, anti-vandalism bots and formatting rules scared off newcomers, and search engines began answering questions without sending visitors to the site.
• Researchers map conflict through mutually reverting edit pairs. English editors fought hardest over George W. Bush, anarchism, and Muhammad, while German editors clashed over Croatia, Scientology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories.
• In May 2005 an anonymous editor falsely linked journalist John Seigenthaler to the Kennedy assassination, and the claim stood for four months. The scandal produced strict rules for biographies of living persons.
• A draft page for physicist Donna Strickland was rejected in May 2018 for lack of media coverage, five months before she won the Nobel Prize. In October 2025 Larry Sanger published his Nine Theses, arguing the site has abandoned neutrality.

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In the early 1870s, British portrait photographer Harry Pointer posed his cats roller skating and sitting at tiny tea tables, then printed joke captions beneath them on souvenir cards people traded in their parlors. This episode argues that his Brighton Cats series holds the full DNA of the internet meme, and follows the idea across 150 years to the lolcat: a cat photo stamped with blocky white text in a deliberately broken dialect. The format is sillier than it looks and more rule-bound than anyone expected.

Linguists who assumed lolspeak was baby talk found consistent grammar instead, with regularized verbs, phonetic spelling, and fixed templates such as the cat in your fridge eating your food. The episode traces the form from Caturday threads on the anonymous image board 4chan to the January 2007 launch of I Can Has Cheezburger, and then to its strangest offspring: a crowdsourced Bible translation, a working programming language, and a taxidermy sculpture in a major museum.

• Victorian taxidermist Walter Potter built dioramas of stuffed kittens attending a wedding, part of a craze for animals staged in human scenes.
• After Time journalist Lev Grossman dated the earliest lolcat to 2006, readers pushed him to correct it to 2005. Caturday.com was registered on April 30, 2005.
• The American Dialect Society named lolcat a runner-up for 2007 Word of the Year. It lost to Googleganger.
• Fans built a mythology around Ceiling Cat as a watching god and Basement Cat as his dark rival, then cast them as God and Satan in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project.
• LOLCODE is a functioning esoteric programming language with commands like I HAS A and KTHXBYE, and a 2016 taxidermy sculpture of Ceiling Cat now sits in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.

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More than a decade before the World Wide Web, two graduate students, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, linked Unix machines at Duke and the University of North Carolina over ordinary phone lines. Locked out of the government-funded ARPANET, they used the UUCP protocol and late-night modem calls to pass messages from server to server, a store and forward design that worked like a digital bucket brigade. This episode tells how that poor man's ARPANET became the first global town square, with no CEO, no central servers, and no advertising algorithms.

Usenet gave the internet words like flame, spam, and sock puppet, turned the FAQ into a tool for saving bandwidth, and hosted the first announcements of the World Wide Web, Linux, and the Mosaic browser. Then users bent a text-only system into a file-sharing giant. The episode follows the encoding tricks that made that possible, the 2008 pressure campaign that pushed major providers to drop it, and the paid, hidden network that now moves more data than ever.

• The Big Eight hierarchies, including comp, sci, rec, and talk, organized discussion. Tim Berners-Lee announced his hypertext project on alt.hypertext in 1991, and Linus Torvalds asked for feedback on comp.os.minix.
• To push 8-bit files through a 7-bit ASCII network, users converted binaries to text with uuencode and later yEnc, split them into hundreds of posts, and repaired missing pieces with PAR files built on Reed-Solomon error correction.
• In 2008, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo pressed internet providers over illegal material, and Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and Sprint cut or restricted their Usenet feeds.
• Google bought Deja News in 2001 and folded its archive into Google Groups, then ended support for new Usenet content in February 2024.
• Daily traffic grew from roughly 4.5 gigabytes in December 1996 to more than 274 terabytes by February 2024. Commercial providers now advertise over 12 years of retention on more than 60 petabytes of storage.

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In January 2026, someone cleaning out a closet at the University of Utah found a nine-track magnetic tape holding a surviving copy of Unix version 4. This episode treats that discovery as the opening of a biography: the life of an operating system that began as an unsanctioned project at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna had grown tired of Multics, the overbuilt time-sharing system from MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, and retreated to a spare PDP-7 to build something small enough to understand.

What they made spread for reasons both technical and accidental. Rewriting the kernel in C in 1973 freed it from any one machine, and a philosophy of small tools, plain text, and pipes made it endlessly reusable. Because a consent decree kept AT&T out of the software business, universities got the source code for $150. The episode follows the Unix Wars, the trademark lawsuits, and the free descendants that finally carried the design everywhere.

• Brian Kernighan coined the name as a pun on Multics: Unics, for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, later respelled Unix.
• Writing a kernel in a high-level language was considered impractical in 1973, and C itself was still evolving. The payoff was the first truly portable operating system.
• AT&T charged companies $20,000 for a license but gave universities the source for $150, which let Illinois researchers tie Unix to the ARPANET and Berkeley build BSD.
• After the Unix Wars among System V, BSD, Xenix, AIX, SunOS, and HP-UX, the rights passed to Novell in 1992 and the trademark ended up with The Open Group, while the name itself appeared on diapers and hairdryers.
• Richard Stallman launched GNU in 1983 and Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel in 1991. In a 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie called the Linux phenomenon delightful.

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In 1995, connecting a printer, modem, or joystick to a PC meant a tangle of parallel ports, serial ports, PS/2 plugs, and game ports, plus driver floppies and hand-assigned IRQ channels that crashed the machine when two devices collided. Seven companies, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, DEC, NEC, and Nortel, set out to replace all of it with one plug and play, hot-swappable port that carried its own power. This episode traces the Universal Serial Bus from that fix to the cable that now runs nearly everything on your desk.

The story turns on a design choice: a tiered star topology with a single host in charge and up to 127 peripherals that speak only when spoken to. Putting all the intelligence in the computer made mice and keyboards almost free to build, and that economics let USB outlast the technically superior FireWire. The same trusting, low-cost design also left an opening for BadUSB sticks that pose as keyboards and USB killers that fry a motherboard with its own electricity.

• USB 2.0 reached 480 megabits per second in 2000 but ran half-duplex, like a walkie-talkie. USB 3.0 arrived in 2008 with five extra wires, full duplex, and 5 gigabit SuperSpeed.
• The 8b/10b encoding in USB 3.0 kept sender and receiver clocks in sync at a cost of 20 percent overhead. A later 128b/132b scheme cut that to about 3 percent.
• Names like USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 were engineering descriptions, not marketing, and the standards body eventually switched to plain speed labels such as USB 20Gbps.
• USB-C dropped the old Type-A and Type-B roles in favor of configuration channel pins that negotiate who is host and who supplies power, scaling from 2.5 watts in the original spec to 240 watts at 48 volts.
• A USB killer charges internal capacitors from the port's 5 volts, steps up past 200 volts, and fires it back down the data lines. Unlike Ethernet, USB was built with little electrical isolation to keep chips cheap.