In 1970 a little language called BLISS emerged from Carnegie Mellon University. It was a systems language, meant for operating systems and compilers. It was designed, in part, as a response to Dijkstra's famous Go To Considered Harmful paper. It had no data types. It used the most bizzare form of the pointer I've ever seen. And it was a direct competitor to C. Sound interesting, yet?

Selected Sources:

https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/dec/decus/pdp10/DECUS-10-118-PartII_BlissReadings_Dec71.pdf - Readings on BLISS

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/ronald-brender/bliss.pdf - A History of BLISS

In 1961 Texas Instruments unveiled the Molecular Electronic Computer, aka: Mol-E-Com. It was a machine that fit in the palm of your hand, but had all the power of a much larger computer. This was in an age of hefty machines, which made the achievement all the more marvelous. How was this even possible? It was all thanks to the wonders of molecular electronics, and a boat load of funding from the US Air Force.

Selected Sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160304071831/http://corphist.computerhistory.org/corphist/documents/doc-496d289787271.pdf - Invention of the Integrated Circuit, Kilby

https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0411614/page/n15/mode/2up - Investigation of Silicon Functional Blocks, TI

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0273850.pdf - Silicon Semiconductor Networks, TI

The Z4, completed by Konrad Zuse in 1945, is a computer with a wild story. It was made from scrounged parts, survived years of bombing raids, moved all around Berlin, and eventually took refuge in basements and stables. In this episode we will follow the Z4's early days, and look at how it fits into the larger picture of Zuse's work. Along the way there is looting, rumors, and even... IBM!

Selected Sources:

The Computer, My Life - Konrad Zuse's autobiography

https://web.archive.org/web/20090220012346/http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/370000/361515/p678-bauer.pdf?key1=361515&key2=3342588511&coll=&dl=acm&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618 - Plankalkul, F.L. Bauer and H. Wossner

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9787324 - Architecture of the Z4, Rojas

In 1933 Konrad Zuse, a German civil engineer, caught the computing bug. It would consume the rest of his life. According Zuse he invented the world's first digital computer during WWII, working in near total isolation within the Third Reich. How true is this claim? Today we are looking at Zuse's early machines, the Z1, Z2, and Z3.

Selected Sources:

The Computer -- My Life, by Konrad Zuse

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.1886 - Z1 Architecture paper by Rojas

https://sci-hub.se/10.1109/85.707574 - Z3... Turing Complete? also by Rojas

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Have you ever felt like a computer just refuses to work? Like a machine has a mind of it's own? In 1970 a hard drive at the National Farmers Union Corp. office decided to do just that. That year it started crashing for apparently no reason. It would take 2 years and 56 crashes to sort out the problem. The ultimate solution would leave more questions than answers. Was the hard drive haunted? Or was something else at play?

Selected Sources:

https://archive.org/details/computercrime0000mckn/page/98/mode/2up - Computer Crime

https://archive.org/details/sim_computerworld_1972-08-02_6_31/mode/1up?view=theater - Computer World article

This time we are diving back into the Jargon File to take a look at some hacker folklore. Back in the day hackers at MIT spent their time spying on one another's terminals. That is, until some intrepid programmer found a way to fight back.

Selected Sources:

http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/os-and-jedgar.html - OS and JEDGAR

https://github.com/PDP-10/its - ITS restoration project

In 1962 Food Center Wholesale Grocers Inc installed a new IBM 305 RAMAC. That's when things started to go wrong. The faulty machine seemed to have a mind of it's own, and would spread chaos to grocery stores all around Boston.

Selected Sources:

https://archive.org/details/computerinsecuri0000norm - Computer Insecurity

https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/magazines/Computers_And_Automation/196805.pdf - Computers and Automation article

https://archive.org/embed/sim_computerworld_january-01-08-1969_3_1 - Computerworld