Found in the Machine

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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Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotte...

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...