pplpod

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

The Intel 4004 began in April 1969, when Japanese calculator maker Busicom asked Intel, then a small memory-chip startup, to build chips for a programmable desktop calculator to compete with the Olivetti Programma 101, which stored data as acoustic pulses in magnetostriction wire. Busicom's engineers wanted seven custom chips. Marcian Ted Hoff, Intel employee number 12, saw that Intel lacked the staff and that the wiring would be too costly, and proposed four chips instead: a central processor, ROM, RAM and an input-output chip, with software telling the hardware what to do. Busicom agreed. Stanley Mazor joined to help write an interpreter, Busicom engineer Masatoshi Shima suggested an interrupt pin, and to meet the price the processor was squeezed into a 16-pin package by multiplexing addresses and data across the same pins.

When Shima returned in early 1970 he found the chip design had stalled, because Hoff and Mazor were architects, not silicon designers. Intel hired Federico Faggin in April 1970. Using the MOS silicon gate technology he had pioneered, plus buried contacts and bootstrap loads, he doubled density and made the chip five times faster than aluminum-gate designs, working 70 to 80 hour weeks while Shima stayed six months. The first batch in December 1970 was dead because the fab skipped the buried contact step; the January 1971 batch worked. With Busicom struggling in a price war, Faggin pushed Bob Noyce to forgive the $60,000 Busicom owed in exchange for rights to sell the chip for non-calculator uses, and marketing head Ed Gelbach launched it as the MCS-4 in November 1971.

• Intel executives feared selling a processor would drive away the computer makers who bought its memory chips.
• The 4004 had 2,300 transistors and sold for around $60, ending up in bottle loaders, arcade games, microwave ovens and traffic lights.
• Texas Instruments' earlier TMS0100 had its program fixed by a photomask, and the F-14 Central Air Data Computer was multi-chip and classified until 1998.
• Faggin etched his initials, FF, into the corner of the silicon die.
• A programmer recently booted a stripped-down Debian Linux on an emulated 4004, which took five days.

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

Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev in the Russian Empire, where he designed aircraft from the S-1 through the S-27 before the Russian Revolution drove him to the United States. On March 5, 1923 he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation near Roosevelt Field in New York. His projected S-28, a four-engine, 32-passenger biplane, never left the drawing board, so his first American aircraft was the S-29A, a twin-engine cargo biplane. He then bet on amphibious aircraft that could use harbors, lakes and coastlines as runways. The eight-seat S-38, built from 1928 to 1933, helped airlines such as Pan Am set up regular routes, and in 1929 the company reorganized with $5 million in capital as Sikorsky Aviation Corporation, moved to Stratford, Connecticut, and joined United Aircraft and Transport. The 28-passenger S-40 and the four-engine S-42 Clipper followed.

By the late 1930s new concrete runways made heavy, draggy flying boats obsolete, sales collapsed, and United Aircraft merged his division with Vought. Sikorsky turned to rotary-wing flight. His 1939 VS-300, which he flew himself as test pilot, was the first U.S. single lifting rotor helicopter, using a tail rotor on a long boom to cancel the main rotor's torque. In 1942 the R-4, with cyclic pitch control, became the first stable, fully controllable single-rotor helicopter in full-scale production. His company marked its 100th anniversary in 2023.

• Earlier inventors' prototypes would lift off and spin out of control from rotor torque.
• Cyclic pitch changes each blade's angle as it rotates, letting the pilot tilt thrust in any direction.
• Sikorsky has supplied Marine One presidential helicopters since 1957.
• Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky for $9 billion in 2015.
• The $250,000 AHS Sikorsky Prize for human-powered helicopter flight went in 2013 to a University of Toronto team whose AeroVelo Atlas hovered for 64 seconds.

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

Micron Technology started in Boise, Idaho, in 1978, founded by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consultancy. In 1981 they decided to make chips themselves, building a plant called Fab One to produce 64K DRAM, the short-term working memory of a computer. Because a fab needs clean rooms, atomic-scale machinery and vibration-proof buildings, the money came from local Idaho businessmen, most importantly potato billionaire J.R. Simplot. Micron went public in 1984. In 1991 it launched a RISC processor and supercomputer effort with up to a gigabyte of RAM, then scrapped it in 1992 and moved the engineers back to memory. In the 2000s, Micron researchers Gurtej Singh Sandhu and Trung Doan pioneered atomic layer deposition high-k films and pitch double patterning, which let memory keep shrinking.

Joe Parkinson retired in 1994 and Steve Appleton ran Micron until February 2012, when he died piloting an experimental Lancair aircraft at the Boise airport, and Mark Durcan stepped in. In 2017 Micron sued China's state-backed Fujian Jinhua and Taiwan's UMC over DRAM trade secrets; the Justice Department indicted Fujian Jinhua in 2018, and in early 2024 Judge Maxine Chesney acquitted it in a non-jury verdict for insufficient evidence. In May 2023 China's Cyberspace Administration barred major infrastructure firms from buying Micron products. Demand for high bandwidth memory for AI then pushed Micron, under CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, to a $1 trillion market value in May 2026.

• High bandwidth memory stacks chips vertically and links them with copper through-silicon vias.
• In 2024 a jury ordered Micron to pay $445 million to Netlist, and the patent office later invalidated one of those patents.
• Chinese chipmaker YMTC sued Micron in 2023 over eight patents.
• With CHIPS Act support, Micron committed $15 billion in Boise, $100 billion in Clay, New York, and $250 billion in the U.S. through 2035.
• In December 2025 Micron said it would end its Crucial consumer brand by early 2026 to focus on data centers and AI.

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

Hilton began in 1919 when Conrad Hilton bought the 40-room Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, to house workers in the oil boom. He bought more Texas hotels, opened a Waco property in 1927 with air-conditioned public areas and cold running water, and in 1943 took over the Roosevelt and bought the Plaza in Manhattan, making Hilton the first hospitality company to span the contiguous U.S. The Roosevelt became the first hotel with televisions in guest rooms in 1947, a 1955 program put air conditioning in every room, and in 1959 Hilton opened an airport hotel at San Francisco International. In 1954 it created the first central reservations office, HILCRON, where eight agents worked a chalkboard 30 feet long and six feet high to track all 28 hotels, handling over 6,000 bookings in 1955.

In 1964 Hilton spun off its foreign operations as Hilton International, and for decades the two companies could not compete in each other's territories, so the U.S. company used the name Conrad abroad and the international company used Vista in the U.S. Hilton International passed through TWA, United Airlines and the British gambling firm Ladbroke before Hilton bought it back in 2005 for $5.71 billion. Blackstone took Hilton private in July 2007 for $26 billion with $20 billion in debt, injected $800 million in a 2010 restructuring, and returned it to the public market in 2013. After spinning off its timeshares and real estate in 2017, Hilton owns or leases just 51 of 7,530 properties.

• The piña colada is said to have been invented by a barman at the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico, opened in 1949.
• John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their 1969 bed-in for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton.
• Tina Turner sought refuge at the Statler in Dallas in 1976 after leaving Ike Turner.
• In January 2026 Hilton stripped the franchise from a Minneapolis owner who tried to block ICE agents from lodging, prompting boycott calls and protests.
• In September 2025 a night at the Waldorf Astoria Maldives rose from 190,000 to 250,000 Hilton Honors points.

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

Hasbro began in late 1923 in Providence, Rhode Island, when brothers Herman, Hillel and Henry Hassenfeld, Polish Jewish immigrants from Ulanów, founded Hassenfeld Brothers to sell textile remnants. They used the scraps to line pencil cases, and when their pencil supplier started competing with them, they began making pencils themselves. During World War II they rescued Jewish refugees from their hometown and gave them jobs on arrival. By the 1940s they had moved into modeling clay, doctor and nurse kits and plastic, and in 1952 they bought George Lerner's Mr. Potato Head, which at first came without a potato. Under Merrill Hassenfeld, the 1963 Flubber putty was recalled after children developed rashes, but in 1964 the company coined the term action figure for G.I. Joe, which made up two-thirds of sales by 1965.

The 1970s brought lawn darts later banned by the government, a needle-shaped Hypo-Squirt water gun, oil crisis costs and a feud between toy chief Stephen Hassenfeld and his uncle Harold, who split off the Empire pencil division in 1980. Stephen cut product lines by a third, revived G.I. Joe in 1982 with Marvel Comics and a cartoon, licensed the Transformers from a 1983 Tokyo toy show, bought Milton Bradley in 1984 and grew sales from about $100 million to over $1.4 billion by his death in 1989. Alan Hassenfeld bought Tonka, Parker Brothers and Kenner, and in 1999 paid $325 million for Pokémon toy rights and $325 million for Wizards of the Coast. Brian Goldner, the first CEO from outside the family, turned Hasbro toward film and TV starting in 2008.

• By 2021 Wizards of the Coast earned more operating profit than Hasbro's whole consumer toy segment.
• The rebooted My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic drew a cult following of adult fans called bronies.
• CEO Chris Cox beat a 2022 proxy fight by Alta Fox, which wanted Wizards spun off.
• In 2024 Hasbro laid off 20 percent of its workforce and sold Entertainment One.
• Hasbro is moving its headquarters from Rhode Island to Boston and in 2026 released Blooms, a Play-Doh kit for adults.

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

Hapag-Lloyd grew from two bitter German rivals: HAPAG, the Hamburg-America Line founded in Hamburg in 1847, and Norddeutscher Lloyd, founded in Bremen in 1857. HAPAG went for scale and luxury, starting the Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck in 1912, the first liners above 50,000 gross register tons, a measure of enclosed volume rather than weight. NDL chased volume and speed, carrying about 218,000 passengers across the Atlantic in 1913, running a base in Hoboken, New Jersey, and winning the Blue Riband with the Bremen in 1929. World War I erased both fleets: the U.S. confiscated 32 interned NDL ships and the Hoboken base in 1917, and most of HAPAG's 175 ships went to the Allies, with the Bismarck sailing for White Star as the Majestic. They rebuilt, and World War II wiped them out again; the Bremen dashed to Murmansk in 1939 and burned in 1941.

After buying secondhand ships in the 1950s, the two faced containerization, which demanded new cellular ships and gantry cranes. They formed a joint container line in 1967 and fully merged on September 1, 1970. Tourism group TUI AG acquired Hapag-Lloyd in 1998, alongside a cruise arm and the Hapag-Lloyd Flug charter airline, then began selling its stake around 2009. Hapag-Lloyd then bought CP Ships for $2 billion in 2005, CSAV's container business in 2014, United Arab Shipping Company in 2017, NileDutch in 2021 and DAL in 2022, and announced a $4.2 billion deal for Zim in early 2026. In 2025 it moved 13.4 million TEU with about 301 ships and earned $21.05 billion in revenue.

• NDL's Elbe set an eight-day Southampton to New York record in 1881.
• Its terminals, grouped as Hanseatic Global Terminals, include stakes in Spinelli in Italy and JM Baxi in India and the Florida International Terminal at Port Everglades.
• The Gemini Cooperation with Maersk launched in February 2025 with about 340 ships, Maersk supplying 60 percent of capacity.
• Kühne Holding and CSAV each own 30 percent, the city of Hamburg 13.9, Qatar Holding 12.3 and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 10.2.
• In 2014 the Colombo Express took a 65-foot dent in a collision with the Maersk Tanjong near the Suez Canal.

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

HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, made every other battleship obsolete. Pre-dreadnoughts carried mixed batteries, but as torpedoes pushed engagements out to 6,000 yards, gunners could not tell the splashes of heavy shells from those of the smaller guns. British observers including Captain William Pakenham saw in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 that 12-inch guns did the decisive damage at ranges up to 14,000 yards, while Admiral Togo's faster fleet crossed the T. Italy's Vittorio Cuniberti had described an all-big-gun ship in 1903 and Japan started the Satsuma five months earlier, but Britain built first. First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher demanded only 12-inch guns and at least 21 knots, stacked a Committee on Designs with his own advisers, and had Portsmouth Dockyard finish the 18,000-ton hull in 125 days, with 3,000 men working 69-hour, six-day weeks.

Dreadnought was the first battleship driven by steam turbines, reaching 21.6 knots with 23,000 shaft horsepower, and carried ten 45-caliber 12-inch guns firing 850-pound shells more than nine miles, aimed with a Dumaresq mechanical calculator and Vickers range clocks. The rush left flaws: fully loaded, the 11-inch armor belt sat more than a foot below the waterline, officers were moved forward beside noisy machinery, and the spotting top sat behind the front funnel, engulfed in exhaust, a problem never fixed. In March 1915 in the Pentland Firth she rammed and cut the German submarine U-29 in half, the only time a battleship has deliberately rammed and sunk a submarine. She missed Jutland in 1916 while in refit, went to reserve in 1918, and in 1921 was sold for scrap for 36,630 pounds after costing nearly 1.8 million.

• Engineer Charles Parsons sold the Navy on turbines by crashing Queen Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee review in his yacht Turbinia at 34 knots.
• The ship carried almost 3,000 tons of coal and over 1,000 tons of fuel oil, spraying oil onto the coal to speed the burn.
• King Edward VII christened her with a bottle of Australian wine in February 1906.
• In the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, Horace de Vere Cole and friends including Virginia Woolf posed as Abyssinian royalty and got a full tour.
• The name later went to a guitar shape, Britain's first nuclear submarine and the dinosaur Dreadnoughtus.

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

In the summer of 1971, cable executive Charles Dolan was aboard the Queen Elizabeth II on a family vacation, trying to save his money-losing company. Sterling Manhattan Cable was building the first urban underground cable system in the U.S., trenching wire past water mains, subway lines and gas pipes beneath New York. His idea, first called the Green Channel, was unedited Hollywood movies and live sports with no commercials for a flat monthly fee. Time Inc.'s board gave him a $150,000 development grant, the Sterling Cable Network name was dropped, and Home Box Office launched on November 8, 1972, not in Manhattan but on a system in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with 365 subscribers. Night one was a New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks game from Madison Square Garden followed by the Paul Newman film Sometimes a Great Notion.

In September 1975 HBO became the first channel in the world to transmit nationally by satellite, letting any cable operator with a dish carry it. To fight churn it launched Cinemax as a 24-hour sister channel in August 1980, and in 1991 became the first subscription service to multiplex, giving away extra feeds at no charge and later adding family, comedy and Latino channels. In the early 1980s it dropped exclusive studio deals because VHS rentals reached viewers first, then returned to multibillion-dollar exclusive deals with Warner Bros., TriStar and Columbia as Showtime competed, and the 1989 Time Warner merger locked in pay cable rights to Warner Bros. films. In 2015 its CEO defended weekly releases over binge drops.

• HBO launched a high-definition feed in 1999 but waited until early 2001, the third-season premiere of The Sopranos, to show a first-run original in HD.
• Its first video on demand service launched in South Carolina in 2001.
• Inside the NFL debuted on HBO in 1977, years before similar weekly shows on sports cable networks.
• The family multiplex channel limited its content to PG-13 and below to build trust with parents.
• The slogan "It's not TV, it's HBO" caught on in 1999.

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

George Lucas founded Lucasfilm in December 1971 in Marin County, Northern California, deliberately far from the Los Angeles studio system. After THX 1138 and the 1973 hit American Graffiti, Universal rejected his space fantasy script, but 20th Century Fox took Star Wars. In 1977 he set up a subsidiary, the Star Wars Corporation, to hold the copyrights, sequel rights and merchandising rights, accepting a lower directing salary in exchange. Fox saw it as a bargain because studios then treated movie merchandising as an afterthought. Lucas wanted the licensing money so he would never again need a studio executive to finance his films.

Independence turned Lucasfilm into a corporation of nearly 100 people. In 1980 his executive Charles Weber proposed raising $50 million by selling Skywalker Ranch, and Lucas fired him, cut half the Los Angeles staff and folded the Star Wars Corporation into Lucasfilm. He built Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, Lucasfilm Games and the THX certification program, then stepped back from directing for a decade until a 1992 ILM test for Jurassic Park convinced him CGI could deliver the prequel trilogy. In January 2012 he announced his retirement, named Kathleen Kennedy co-chair that June, and on October 30, 2012 sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05 billion in cash and stock, making him one of Disney's largest individual shareholders.

• Lucas created THX after a dim, muddy screening of Return of the Jedi in 1983, setting rules for speaker angles, wall baffles, background noise and projector brightness.
• The computer graphics division he funded was sold to Steve Jobs in 1986 and became Pixar.
• He first raised the idea of selling to Bob Iger in 2011 at a Florida theme park surrounded by stormtroopers.
• Lucasfilm and Disney had partnered since the 1980s on attractions like Star Tours and the Indiana Jones rides.
• In early 2026 Kathleen Kennedy stepped down and Dave Filoni, Lucas's Clone Wars collaborator, became president and chief creative officer.

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

The company most recently known as WarnerMedia began far from Hollywood. In the 1960s Kinney National Services ran parking lots, office cleaning and funeral homes, a conglomerate built on countercyclical cash flow. Steve Ross used that money to buy the struggling Warner Bros.-Seven Arts studio in 1969, and by 1972 the company spun off its service businesses and renamed itself Warner Communications Inc. Under Ross it bought DC Comics, built Warner Cable, formed a joint venture with American Express that launched MTV and Nickelodeon, and acquired Atari in 1976, only to nearly go bankrupt when the video game market crashed in 1983. In 1990 it merged with Time Inc., but a $12.2 billion hostile bid from Paramount forced Time to restructure the deal as a cash acquisition and load the new Time Warner with debt.

The 1996 purchase of Turner Broadcasting brought CNN, Cartoon Network, New Line Cinema and Castle Rock under one roof. Then in 2000 AOL announced a $183 billion merger in which AOL shareholders controlled 55 percent of the combined company. By 2002 AOL Time Warner reported a $99 billion loss, the largest annual corporate loss on record, and in 2003 it dropped AOL from its name. Over the next 15 years it sold Warner Music, its book division, Time Warner Cable and Time Inc. until only HBO, Warner Bros. and Turner remained. AT&T bought the company for $85.4 billion in 2016, beat a Department of Justice suit against the vertical merger, renamed it WarnerMedia in 2018, launched HBO Max in 2020, and in 2021 spun it into a $43 billion deal with Discovery that created Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022.

• Warner Bros. had once sold its pre-1950 film library, so buying Turner meant paying billions to regain access to its own classic movies.
• Time Warner bought the Six Flags parks in the early 1990s, filled them with Looney Tunes and DC characters, and sold them by 1998.
• HBO became the first digitally transmitted TV service in 1993, and Warner Bros. led the rollout of the DVD in 1996.
• Jeff Bewkes later called the AOL merger the biggest mistake in corporate history.
• Rupert Murdoch offered $80 billion for Time Warner in 2014, and the board rejected it.