Whether you played it in the back of your classroom or on your computer at home, if you were a kid in the last 30 years you almost certainly grew up playing Oregon Trail. David Pierce is joined by gaming journalist Chris Grant and Philip Bouchard, the designer and team leader of the game’s most iconic version, to talk about the academic origins of Oregon Trail, the game’s complicated legacy, and whether anyone ever really died of dysentery.

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From The Vergecast, this episode takes a look back at one of the earliest chapters in the history of AI.

Before Alexa and Siri, there was ELIZA. The first chatbot ever was the creation of a man named Joseph Weizenbaum, who built the bot almost as a magic trick — and then couldn't believe how many people fell for it. David Berry and Mark Marino, two members of a team dedicated to restoring and understanding ELIZA, explain how Weizenbaum created the virtual conversant, why he came to regret it, and what ELIZA can teach us about life in the AI age.

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Clap on. Clap off. The Clapper may not have been a very good product, but it came with one of the all-time great marketing campaigns. And it might have even been a great, ahead of its time idea. The Verge's David Pierce and Victoria Song are joined by Allison Marsh, a writer and professor at The University of South Carolina, to talk through the Clapper's whole history. It involves lawsuits, broken gadgets, and a pioneering idea about laziness and the smart home.

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The humble light bulb might be the ultimate success story in the smart home. Our connected, adaptable homes are supposed to be customizable, connected to everything, and incredibly easy to use, and nothing has made that work quite like Philips Hue lights. In this episode, The Verge's David Pierce and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy are joined by smart home journalist and expert Richard Gunther to tell the Hue's story. We trace the product's history from its origins in the smartphone revolution, try to figure out how Philips managed to turn a staggeringly expensive lightbulb into a must-have gadget, and look at whether there's even more invention left in the future of lighting.

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The Keurig is a simple idea – what if it was really easy to make pretty good coffee, one cup at a time? — with a wildly complicated history. David Pierce is joined by Eater editor Melissa McCart and champion barista and author Morgan Eckroth to discuss the whole history of Keurig, from its creation in a Boston apartment to its invasion of seemingly every house, doctor's office and conference room in the US. Keurig was certainly a success, but was it a good thing? For coffee, for the world? That's more complicated.

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Thermostats were ugly. Best case scenario, you never had to think about it. Then a couple of Apple legends decided they could make something better, and set out to turn changing the temperature into a high-tech experience. On this episode, David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy tell the full story of the Nest Learning Thermostat, from its complex development to its huge debut. The Nest was the beginning of a crucial era in the smart home — could it have been something even bigger? We have some ideas.

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The team of engineers and researchers that created iRobot didn’t set out to build a vacuum cleaner. They built robots — a lot of robots, with a lot of jobs — before realizing that people might actually want a robot that could help clean their house. And thus was born Roomba. The Verge’s David Pierce and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy are joined by iRobot co-founder Colin Angle to tell the whole story of all those robots, the pivot to vacuums, and why the Roomba was so easy to love even when it couldn’t really clean.

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The Harmony Universal Remote was supposed to be the only controller you needed for all the devices in your life. So what happened? David Pierce is joined by The Verge’s Nilay Patel and John Higgins, as well as Nest co-founder (and current Harmony user) Matt Rogers, to follow the Harmony's timeline from its origins as the "Easy Zapper," through Logitech's acquisition, all the way to its slow death at the hands of smart TVs. And their vastly inferior remotes.

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For years, even decades, virtually everyone in the United States had the same telephone. You didn't even think about it — it was just The Phone. Well, The Phone was called the Western Electric 500, and it was the result of nearly a century of AT&T's monopoly over the US phone system. It was also a really great phone. In this episode of Version History, David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and author and professor Tim Wu explain how AT&T's monopoly grew, how the phone system worked, and how it happened that there was really only one phone in the country. Until the whole system started to fall apart.

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For years, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos knew the computer he wanted to build. He wanted it to be cheap, accessible everywhere, and controlled entirely by voice. It took Amazon a number of years, a lot of false starts, and some deeply strange focus groups, but the company eventually turned the Amazon Echo into something like the voice computer Bezos wanted, powered by an assistant called Alexa. (Even though Bezos kind of hated the thing along the way.) In this episode, we tell the story of the development of Alexa and the Echo, and try to figure out what Amazon got right and wrong about the voice-based future — and whether AI could make it come true for real.

Further reading: The Secret Origins of Amazon's Alexa

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