Lore in the Machine: Forgotten Tech History

In 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 landing, or anything short of physical destruction. They needed to make the code permanent. They needed to weave it. In this episode Hilda Carpenter - MIT technician who assembled the first magnetic-core memory planeThe Raytheon weavers - Textile workers and watchmakers recruited to encode Apollo's computerThe Fairchil...

Listeners, 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 many times you don’t think about it anymore. A box appears. You squint at some blurry letters, type them out, check the box. It takes about ten seconds. You probably didn’t know that those ten seconds were going somewhere. For years, millions of people solving these security tests were quietly doing something els...

Listeners, 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 small group of people fly to a secure facility in either Virginia or California. They submit to retina scanners and palm readers. They enter a metal cage in a signal-proof room. They turn keys in unison. These people are volunteers, and they're there to perform a ritual to secure the internet's core directory.&nb...

Listeners, 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. 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 worldwide. How that symbol ended up there is two stories separated by half a century. One starts w...

Listeners, 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. In 1968, a 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 controlled by a small wooden block with a wire trailing out the back. But the mouse didn't begin with Engelbart. In this ep...

Every line of code has a story. Most of us just never hear it. Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computing history or internet lore to surface the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world. If you've ever wondered who actually made something you use every day, and why you've never heard their name b...