Found in the Machine
by Daina Bouquin
Latest episode
Out of Sync: The Internet and Father Time
Out of Sync: The Internet and Father Time
About this podcast
Found in the Machine is a narrative podcast about the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.
If you've ever wondered who actually made the technology you use every day, and why you've never heard their name before, you'll feel at home here. This show is for the curious, not the credentialed. You don't need a technical background to follow along. You just need to be the kind of person who pulls on threads.
New episodes unearth human stories from computing history every other week.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 25 episodes
- Out of Sync: The Internet and Father Time · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 22Every computer keeps its own imperfect clock, and every message between them takes time to arrive. Dave Mills spent four decades working out how they could agree on the time…
- Inheritance: The Arctic Code Vault · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 21Deep inside an abandoned coal mine in the Arctic, there are 186 reels of photographic film holding millions of software projects. Some of that code runs the internet. Some of it…
- Page Turner: Mary Jameson and the Optophone · 18 min · Season 1 Episode 20Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe invented the optophone, then Mary Jameson spent six decades proving what it could do and helping shape what it became. In this episode: The…
- With Heart: Emoji Interpreters · 15 min · Season 1 Episode 19In 1995, a tiny pixelated heart on a Japanese pager became the most important thing on the screen. When it disappeared, young people left. One man never forgot and went on to…
- Inflection: The Voder, Voderettes, and Voice · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 18In the summer of 1939, at the New York World's Fair, a woman sat beneath a three-story mural of a shouting man and shaped raw electricity into a human voice. In this episode…
- Dead Reckoning: The Globus and Voskhod 2 · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 17In March 1965, two Soviet cosmonauts fell out of the sky into a frozen forest in the Urals, trapped inside a cramped capsule hundreds of kilometers from rescue. Their survival…
- Humans of Mortal Kombat · 7 min · Season 1Found in the Margins is a series of mini bonus episodes that will be available to Patreon members every other week alternating with the main show. This first episode is being…
- Cry Wolf: Waiting and Seeing with Camera Traps · 19 min · Season 1 Episode 16Since the 1890s, we've been building machines that wait in our place, in the dark, for something to move. This is the story of how a thread across a trail became a sensor that…
- Tidal Forces: Calculating D-Day · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 15In 1944 the Allies needed to know exactly what the water would do on a coast called "Position Z." So a deaf mathematician and six young women in a basement near Liverpool…
- Entropy Hunters: Random Numbers and Chaos Machines · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 14This is the story of how we learned to fake the most natural thing in the world. What it cost us. And the strange places we still go, even now, to steal a little of the real…
- Half-Light: Mark Klein and Room 641A · 17 min · Season 1 Episode 13A brutalist fortress in San Francisco serves as a vital artery for the American internet. In 2003, AT&T technician Mark Klein started noticing strange things on the sixth floor…
- Silent Agreement: MIDI and What We Hear in the Wires · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 12Sheet music has always been an invisible treaty. A shared language that belongs to everyone and no one. But fifty years ago, as musicians began shaping sound out of raw…
- Working in the Dark: Secrets, Silicon, and Light · 16 min · Season 1 Episode 11In 1916, a tired chemist in a Berlin laboratory accidentally dipped his fountain pen into a pool of molten tin and pulled out the foundation of the digital world. He had no idea…
- America on Hold: How the Internet Arrived · 15 min · Season 1 Episode 10She was a copywriter turned marketer who watched focus groups attempt to use computers. She knew the internet wasn't a product you could sell. You needed to give people a way in…
- The Weavers: Memory and the Moon · 14 min · Season 1 Episode 9In 1965, engineers were building a computer to fly men to the moon. It had to survive a rocket launch and the vacuum of space. It could not be erased by a power failure, a hard…
- Found · 1 min · Season 1The show has a new name. Starting with this episode, Lore in the Machine is now Found in the Machine. Same stories, same voice. The name just finally says what the show actually…
- I’m Not a Robot: The Internet's Human Test · 9 min · Season 1 Episode 8Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. You’ve done this so…
- The Silent Duel: David Blackwell and the Math Inside AI · 11 min · Season 1 Episode 7Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Two people walk toward…
- Strangers with Keys: A Ritual to Secure the Internet · 12 min · Season 1 Episode 6Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Four times a year, a…
- Poison in the Cache: Dan Kaminsky Saves the Internet · 8 min · Season 1 Episode 5Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. Every time you type a…
