Lore in the Machine
Every line of code has a story. Most of us just never hear it.
Episodes
5 episodes
Lipstick and Runes
Look at your phone settings. There's a small angular icon there that you've probably never thought about much. It's a bind rune showing two characters from the ancient Younger Futhark alphabet, fused together. It's on billions of devices worldw...
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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11:22
Down the Rabbit Hole: Drink Me, Eat Me, README
Every software project has one. It's easy to scroll past. Most of the time it's just a manual telling you system requirements, installation steps, and known bugs.But the README file owes a debt to Lewis Carroll, and a quiet trick built i...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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7:39
The Bug, The Cat, and The Wooden Mouse
On December 9th, 1968, a Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable links, and video conferencing, all controll...
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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9:39
UFOs, Model Trains, and Code's 'Sacred Syllable'
Every programmer knows foo. It's the placeholder name, the stand-in variable, the "insert name here" of software development. But where did it actually come from?In this episode, we trace the history of foo and bar in programming ...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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9:10