The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
Episodes
55 episodes
S2E18 Bonus - 23B
Next episode is all about the development of passenger planes. So, this week our song is about that emotionally stressful situation that air travel has turned into. The bare feet where they shouldn't be. Loud talkers. Hogging the ar...
S2E17 - Red Means Stop
Have you ever sat at a red light at 2 AM with no traffic in any direction and waited anyway? Have you ever rolled through that same red light 2 AM and felt vaguely guilty about it?Of course you have. The traffic light is the most obeyed com...
S2E17 Bonus - Just Amber
There are songs and poems about the red and green lights. But what about Amber? Shy. Fleeting. Amber has a job too. This week's episode is about traffic lights and it felt appropriate to cast our gaze at the glowing amber hue and de...
S2E16 - You Are Here
Do you remember when "I think we missed the turn" caused a complete emotional spectrum of reaction? When the car would go quiet because someone had to admit they'd lost the page boundary on Thomas Guide map 347 and the next bit was on page 389?...
(S2E16 Bonus) - Three Wrong Turns Home
Tomorrow's episode is all about the transition from a world where maps were an everyday driving tool to the world we have now with satellites buzzing overhead telling us exactly where we are and how to get where we want to go.And because...
S2E15 - Zork to Zelda
Do you remember pulling a spring-loaded plunger without being told what it did? Watching a goomba walk toward you and dying without being told why? Typing "go north" into a cursor because there was nothing else to type?So do we. The best...
Likely To Be Eaten (S2E15 Bonus)
Do you remember green screens? Blinking cursors? Games with words instead of photo-realistic massively multiplayer open world shooter role-playing sim games?We do too. Zork was original. Creative. And extremely well-designed....
S2E14 - When Your Car Says Subscribe
In 1882, Edison opened Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and started selling electricity by the meter. He built the grid, built the appliances that plugged into it, and then tried to build an electric car that would charge off the whole s...
Chrome and Highway (S2E14 Bonus)
Here's the bonus for tomorrow's episode - Chrome and HighwayThe episode is about cars. But...cars as instruments of platforms. Edison partnered with Ford to produce electric cars so he could sell more electricity. It failed and what we g...
S2E13 - Warm Coke and the Internet of Things
Does your thermostat know when you're approaching your own front door? Does your watch know you're stressed before you do? When your car rewrites its own software at 3 a.m., do you know what changed?In 1982, a group of Carnegie Mellon gr...
Every Room I Left (S2E13 Bonus)
New episode this week - "Warm Coke and the Internet of Things." This weeks episode is all about the Internet of Things...it starts with warm Coke at Carnegie Mellon and promised a future where technology has faded into an invisible mesh support...
S2E12 - WarGames Is A Documentary Part 2
In 1983, NORAD gave a president four minutes to decide whether to end the world. That was the Cold War's gift to the future: the principle that speed matters more than thought. In part two, we pick up where the missiles left off and follow that...
Light Speed (S2E12 Bonus)
We hope you're enjoying the WarGames is a Documentary 2-parter. If the first part was all about that nostalgic glow of the early 80's hacker aesthetic, then the second part is all about the anxiety that came from mounting technological weaponis...
S2E11 - WarGames Is A Documentary Part 1
Remember when the scariest thing a computer could do was call another computer? In 1983, WarGames handed a teenage hacker a modem and a direct line to NORAD. Ronald Reagan watched the film at Camp David and asked his Joint Chiefs if it could ac...
Phosphor Glow (S2E11 Bonus)
S2E11 is out tomorrow. Here's the theme song for the episode "Phosphor Glow."Renee and Marc both love the movie WarGames and since we're going to break the episode into two parts - a part about the movie and a part about how the movie is...
S2E10 - You Killed Your Tamagotchi and Now You Trust AI
The Tamagotchi (たまごっち) was a three-button egg that beeped when it was hungry, beeped when it was bored, and beeped when it was dying. Renee killed three of them. She's not proud of it. But somewhere between the guilt and the tiny pixelated tomb...
Egg Friend (S2E10 Bonus)
It must be kismet, because we didn't plan to talk about digital Egg Friend's right around the beginning of spring and Easter right around the corner. Just a little love song to our Egg Friends. That we let die. Be sure to listen to ...
S2E9 - CAPTCHA Stolen Cognition
CAPTCHA was supposed to keep the bots out. A simple lock on a simple door. Instead, it became one of the largest unpaid labour operations in the history of the internet.Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009, and every time you cli...
I Clicked For You (S2E9 Bonus)
The song conveys that angst of clicking CAPTCHA and feeling neglected, feeling used. At the end, we had to prove we were real. But our work wasn't to prove our humanity, it was to fuel someone's product. Betrayal and anguish are appropriately e...
S2E8 - Neural Nets: The Assembly Line of Thought
Henry Ford didn't invent the car. He turned building one into a series of motions so simple that no single worker needed to understand the whole machine. Frederick Taylor went further, timing every bend and lift until the factory floor ran like...
Punch That Card (S2E8 Bonus)
For this episode, how could we not write a song about punchcards? But, the whole episode is about patterns, optimisation, and mostly reduction. Commands, programs, data...all reduced to holes on card stock. So, the lyrics hit at that concept of...
S2E7 - The Age of Tiny Lights (LEDs)
In S2E7, The Age of Tiny Lights, Renee and Marc trace the story of LEDs from a childhood electronics kit with a single red indicator to the decades-long effort to make blue light viable. What began as dim, specialised components requir...
Blue Underneath (S2E7 Bonus)
As with most of our songs, the point is to be a bit absurd. Who writes a song about Vulcanised Rubber, or Shipping Containers? Nobody. But that's why it's fun.So, this week's theme song had to be about Blue LEDs. The Blue LED is harsh an...
Six O'Clock News (S2E6 Bonus)
Episode 6's bonus track. When we started recording the episode about News tech, Renee called for a moment of silence for Dan Rather. And I found it sort of funny and silly at the time. Which was fine. But when it came time to write the lyrics a...
S2E6 - Who Controls the News?
In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, S2E6 – Who Controls the News?, Renee and Marc examine the machinery behind the headlines.There was a time when the news arrived at a predictable hour, delivered by a familiar face, framed b...
