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 (Sequential Circuits) and Ikutaro Kakehashi in Japan (Roland) looked past corporate rivalry to build a universal standard.
• The Birth of MIDI: How microscopic 1981 microprocessors forced engineers to shrink the musical universe into elegant, lightweight digital sentences.
• Juan Atkins: the Detroit musician whose work sparked the global rise of techno music.

Episode Music

• Johann Sebastian Bach
  • Prelude No. 1 in C major
• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • Bright Lights of Summer
  • Our Ships Line the Ocean Floor
  • Disconnected
• Alfonse
  • Korg MS 10
• Donghyuk Heo
  • Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, on Modular Synthesizer
    
    

Additional Reading

Billias, A. (2024, December 21). MIDI history chapter 6: MIDI begins 1981-1983. The MIDI Association. https://midi.org/midi-history-chapter-6-midi-begins-1981-1983

Doyle, T. (2024, November). Classic tracks: Model 500 'No UFOs'. Sound on Sound. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-model-500-no-ufos

Stewart, D. (2014, December 3). Technical Grammy Award: Ikutaro Kakehashi and Dave Smith. Recording Academy. https://www.grammy.com/news/technical-grammy-award-ikutaro-kakehashi-and-dave-smith/

MIDI Manufacturers Association. (1996, February). MIDI 1.0 detailed specification (Version 4.2.1). https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ewRrvMEFRPlKon6nfSCxqnTMEu70sz0c/view

Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.

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 inescapable
• A 150-pound throne and a museum case: What happened to the AOL discs that didn't go in the trash
• The digital divide: The people who got left behind

Episode Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • There's Garbage in the Mariana Trench
  • Morality Centre
  • Hemiteleia
  • Where There is No Darkness

Additional Reading

McCullough, B. (2014, August). She gave the world a billion AOL CDs: An interview with marketing legend Jan Brandt [Podcast episode]. Internet History Podcast. https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/08/she-gave-the-world-a-billion-aol-cds-an-interview-with-marketing-legend-jan-brandt/

National Telecommunications and Information Administration. (n.d.). Data Central. U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www.ntia.gov/topics/data-central

Ramo, J. C. (1997, September 22). How AOL lost the battles but won the war. Time. https://time.com/archive/6731455/how-aol-lost-the-battles-but-won-the-war/

Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). America Online (AOL) disc [Object record, NMAH catalog no. 2010.3015.05]. National Museum of American History. https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_1395721

Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.

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 and watchmakers recruited to encode Apollo's computer
• The Fairchild Semiconductor plant - Where Navajo women built integrated circuits so men could walk on the moon

Episode Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Those 2 Saints"
  • "Evening Drum"
  • "No History Should Be Silenced"
  • "Behind the Mask"

Additional Reading

CuriousMarc. (2019). Core memory explained and demonstrated [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/AwsInQLmjXc

Nakamura, L. (2014). Indigenous circuits. Computer History Museum. https://computerhistory.org/blog/indigenous-circuits/

Rankin, J. L. (2022, February 18). Core memory weavers and Navajo women made the Apollo missions possible. Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/core-memory-weavers-navajo-apollo-raytheon-computer-nasa

Shirriff, K. (2019). Software woven into wire. Ken Shirriff's Blog. https://www.righto.com/2019/07/software-woven-into-wire-core-rope-and.html

Stark, L. (2018). Hilda wove all those wires [Zine]. https://www.liza-stark.com/projects/zines/hilda.html

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (2017). "Hear my voice" artist profile: D.Y. Begay [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wmz5rf1NU

Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.

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.

Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.

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 else entirely. They were rescuing forgotten history that computers couldn’t read.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test where machines tried to pass as human. Half a century later, a graduate student inverted it. The machine would do the judging. And the humans would get to work.

In this episode

• Turing's imitation game - the thought experiment that set the terms for AI
• Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum - the Carnegie Mellon graduate student and his professor who built the wall between humans and bots
• reCAPTCHA - the internet security test that became the largest digitization project in history
• reCAPTCHA v3 - the invisible version

Episode Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Whispers Invoke Paranoia"
  • "Do Not Look Back"
  • "Artifice"

Additional Reading

Pandey, K. (2022, July 25). History & evolution of CAPTCHA. Masai School. https://www.masaischool.com/blog/history-evolution-of-captcha/

Gugliotta, G. (2011, March 29). Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html

Weintraub, S. (2009, September). Google acquires reCAPTCHA in two-for-one deal. Computerworld. https://www.computerworld.com/article/1331965/google-acquires-recaptcha-in-two-for-one-deal.html

Schwab, K. (2019, June 27). Google's new reCAPTCHA has a dark side. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90369697/googles-new-recaptcha-has-a-dark-side

Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.

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 would you know when to stop walking and take your own?

In 2024, NVIDIA named the most powerful piece of AI hardware ever built after the man who spent his career thinking about this exact problem. His name was David Blackwell.

In this episode

• David Blackwell: brilliant professor and researcher at the RAND Corporation. Seventh African American to earn a PhD in mathematics.
• Kriegsspiel: the blind chess variant that Blackwell played daily.
• Blackwell's silent duel: a thought experiment from Cold War-era game theory, and why related math ended up in machine learning textbooks.
• The economist's question: the most important question in the world at that moment, asked in good faith, and why every mathematician Blackwell knew gave the same useless answer.

Episode Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Anti-Nostalgia"
  • "Who Are You At War With Now?"
  • "Alter Ego"

Additional Reading

AYE Conference. (n.d.). Activity sheet 1: David Blackwell and the theory of duels [PDF]. https://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/gameTheory.pdf

Black, R. (2019). David Blackwell and the deadliest duel. Royal Fireworks Press.

Blackwell, D. (2003). An oral history with David Blackwell [Oral history transcript; conducted by N. Wilmot, 2002–2003]. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.tufts.edu/dist/8/3572/files/2015/11/blackwell.pdf

NVIDIA. (2024). NVIDIA Blackwell architecture. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/technologies/blackwell-architecture/

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Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.

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.

If you build a master key for the internet, who do you trust to hold it?

In this episode

• The Ceremony of the Keys - the 700-year-old nightly ritual at the Tower of London, and what it has to do with cyber security
• The Crypto Officers - who they are, and what they carry
• The Ritual - over 100 scripted steps, a self-destructing lockbox, and a laptop with no memory
• The things that went wrong - because they do

Episode Music

• James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
  • "Like an Empty Kaleidoscope"
  • "Single Lane Tunnel"
  • "The Absurd"
  • "Iconoclast"

Additional Notes

This episode is the follow-up to "Poison in the Cache."

If you want to see this ritual for yourself, you can. The root signing relies on radical transparency, so every step is shared. The list of ceremonies is available via the IANA along with the full list of Crypto Officers.

Additional Reading

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. (2026, February 10). Root Zone KSK ceremony 60 annotated script [Ceremony script]. https://data.iana.org/ksk-ceremony/60/AT60_Annotated_Script.pdf

Internet Hall of Fame. (2014, March 25). Our online safety is protected by one "stubborn lady." https://www.internethalloffame.org/2014/03/25/our-online-safety-protected-one-stubborn-lady/

McCarthy, K. (2020, February 13). Internet's safe-keepers forced to postpone crucial DNSSEC root key signing ceremony. The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/13/iana_dnssec_ksk_delay/

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Support the show

Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Hosted by Daina Bouquin, each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computer history. These are the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine.