Found in the Machine

This 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 thing back. 

In this Episode

• Bernice Brown: the RAND statistician whose job was to hunt for a pattern inside a million digits and sign her name only when she could not find one
• The electronic roulette wheel: RAND's random number making machine and why its...

A 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 of that building. Strange things about Room 641A.

This is a story about the infrastructure we look past, government mass surveillance, and why the machine Mark discovered never actually turned off.

In this Episode

• Mark Klein: An AT&T technic...

Sheet 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 electricity, that treaty fell apart.

In this episode

• The Broken Treaty: Why early synthesizers from different manufacturers couldn't talk to each other, and the resulting landscape of incompatible voltages.
• The Unlikely Alliance: How Dave Smith in the US (S...

In 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 what he had done. 

In this episode

• Jan Czochralski: The Polish chemist whose mistake became the method used to grow nearly every silicon crystal wafer on Earth. 
• The occupation of Poland: The violent suppression of the Polish people by the Nazis ...

She 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. Her name was Jan Brandt, and she decided to mail it to them.

In this episode

• Jan Brandt: The architect of America Online's carpet bombing strategy that put a billion discs in American hands
• Omaha Steaks, airlines, and grocery stores: how the discs became ...

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 plane
• The Raytheon weavers - Textile workers a...

The 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 does. 

If you're subscribed, your feed will keep updating automatically. If you want to share the show with someone new, the new home is foundinthemachine.com.

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This show is independently produced. If you would like to help cover th...

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...

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. 

Two people walk toward each other on a dirt road. One bullet each. In a normal duel, a missed shot makes a sound. But in a silent duel, a miss would be invisible. You wouldn't know if your opponent was holding their fire, or had already taken their one shot. How ...

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, an...

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. 

Every time you type a web address, you're trusting a directory. A vast, invisible system that translates the names you know into the numbers that actually move data across the internet. You trust it the way a town trusts its well.

In 2008, a security researcher na...

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. 

Every programmer knows 'foo' as the "insert name here" of software development. But where did it come from? And what does it have to do with 'bar'?

In this episode, we trace the history of foo in programming back through three unlikely chapters: a Depressi...

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 tra...

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. 

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 into its name that ha...

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...

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 somethin...