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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Tape: Tough, Tested, Tenacious, Renee and Marc explore the humble roll that holds the modern world together.What starts with a  strip of Deltec Purple in an art project turns ...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Renee and Marc dive into the quiet power of batteries. A technology we depend on constantly but almost never think about.From early chemical experiments to modern lithium-ion syste...

Thanks for listening. Please rate and share with friends and family. It really helps!In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, Marc and Renee reflect on the internet we lost and the early promise of a global commons...

Ok, nerds. If you're a consistent listener, you know we've been creating companion songs to the episodes. This episode's song is a longing lament to one of the Internet's lost loves - GeoCities. GeoCities was where the ugly world wi...

In this episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, S2E2 – Blue Boxes, SIM Swaps, and the Myth of Secure Phones, Renee and Marc go from the days when long-distance calls were timed with a stopwatch to a world where your phone...

S2E2 - Blue Boxes, SIM Swaps, and the Myth of Secure PhonesIn this week's episode, Renee and Marc dial through the history of telecom fraud and hacking. But more importantly we even talk about some things you can do to protect yourself.&...

We're back with our first episode of Season 2 - The AI Gigawatt Thirst Trap. It was nice to have a little break, but Marc and Renee are back in the studio recording. Season 2 promises more infrastructure, more laughs, more music, and more nerdi...

The first song for season 2 - The AI Gigawatt Thirst TrapIn our very first episode, we talked about electricity usage in the new class of gigawatt data centres. But we also wanted to talk about the other resource that is being slurped up...

Elastic Hears (Oh, Vulcanised Rubber)[Verse]Born from heat and sulfur’s kissA miracle we can’t dismissTougher than the strongest threadHolds the world where we tread[Chorus]Oh vulcanised rubber you keep us ali...

Quick note - a few audio drop outs here and there. Tried to edit around them, but nothing too serious and you'll get the gist in all the spots with issues. Rubber is one of those materials we almost never think about, right up unti...

Just a bit of fun from Renee and I. If you're a listener, you know that Marc believes that double-entry bookkeeping might be the most important technological innovation ever. But...just maybe...he's willing to concede that the venerable Shippin...

Everyone loves fast delivery, but nobody loves thinking about how it works. In this episode, we dig into the overlooked story of logistics: the steam engines that kicked it off, the wars that reinvented it, the barcodes and warehouses that scal...

Come for the canals and railroads. Stay for the part where Marc and Renee admit AI might just be the next overbuilt mess we rely on.In this episode, we explore the historical patterns of infrastructure bubbles, revealing how emerging tec...