Do you remember when "I think we missed the turn" caused a complete emotional spectrum of reaction? When the car would go quiet because someone had to admit they'd lost the page boundary on Thomas Guide map 347 and the next bit was on page 389?

So do we. There used to be a thing called knowing where you were. It lived in a spiral-bound atlas in the back seat, or in the head of whoever was driving. The Thomas Guide assumed you'd figure it out. The TripTik gave you only the path. GPS skipped past both and asks only that you keep the wheel pointed forward.

As usual, Renee and Marc travel through the past to see how that shaped today and where we're heading down the road. Maps, Thomas Bros, Mapquest, GPS...and some military satellites in there along the way.

If you have ever sworn at a Thomas Guide while driving in Los Angeles traffic, watched your phone confidently route you into a field, or forgotten which way is north in the city you've lived in for ten years, this one's for you. And if you're still that one person who knows the diagonal shortcut through the residential streets that gets you to the airport in twenty minutes, please hold that knowledge. It's getting rarer.

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tomorrow's episode is all about the transition from a world where maps were an everyday driving tool to the world we have now with satellites buzzing overhead telling us exactly where we are and how to get where we want to go.

And because this is a podcast about things we miss and what we learn, we learned that keeping maps current is a big job! Things change. Roads change. And...GPS changes us. As we depend on GPS, our spatial skills degrade.

So, that's the idea for this week's song. Places we once knew change and we lose our spatial sense.

Have a listen - Three Wrong Turns Home.

[Verse 1]
Rolled off the highway
Coffee gone cold
Feels like it's all been changed
Record shop's a coffee place
Diner has a different name
Miss my own street
Laughing round the turns
[Chorus]
Three wrong turns from home
Three wrong turns
On a road I ought to know
Drove it in my sleep
Lord, knew this town by heart
Three wrong turns from home
[Verse 2]
Past the old pool hall
Now it's a mini-mall
School's gone, fence and dirt
Light at Seventh hardly waits
Bridge wider than I knew
My maps are wrong I don't know when
All the names I knew are gone
[Chorus]
Three wrong turns from home
Three wrong turns
On a road I ought to know
Drove it in my sleep
Lord, knew this town by heart
Three wrong turns from home
[Bridge]
Maybe I was gone too long
Maybe town moved on
Radio's still playing
Windows down, sun going down
[Final Chorus]
Three wrong turns from home
Three wrong turns
On a road I ought to know
Drove it in my sleep
Lord, knew this town by heart
Three wrong turns from home

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you remember pulling a spring-loaded plunger without being told what it did? Watching a goomba walk toward you and dying without being told why? Typing "go north" into a cursor because there was nothing else to type?

So do we. The best games taught you how to play them just by existing. No tutorials. No pop-ups. No onboarding flow. Pinball did it with physics. Zork did it with a parser. Mario did it with a question mark block. The machine showed you what it was. You figured out the rest.

This episode is about fifty years of that. Coin-op arcades to twelve million monthly subscribers. Quarters in a diner to modern open worlds that sell the absence of hand-holding as a feature. The hardware changed. The business model changed. The core loop stayed the same. Here is a world. Here are the rules. Figure it out.

If you ever mailed Activision a photograph of your Pitfall score, still picture a small white house west of an open field, or held a Galaga high score at a pizza parlour long enough that you'd drop in just to check no one had knocked you off, this one's for you. And if you got eaten by a Grue, we forgive you.

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you remember green screens? Blinking cursors? Games with words instead of photo-realistic massively multiplayer open world shooter role-playing sim games?

We do too.

Zork was original. Creative. And extremely well-designed. So, this week's song is an ode to Zork. Resource management. Wandering the unknown. Maps. Frustration. Triumph. Self-evident gameplay.

See if you can catch all the Zork references.

[Verse 1]
Brass lantern on the counter
Half an hour left to burn
Mailbox near the white house
Nowhere left to turn
Words in phosphor green
You are likely to be eaten

[Pre-Chorus]
Hello sailor, hello darkness
Hello everything that waits
I can feel the Great Underground
Through the hinges in the gates

[Chorus]
Likely to be eaten
Likely to be gone
Likely to be lost before the light comes on
But I'm walking anyway
With a dying match in hand
Likely to be eaten
And I want to understand

[Verse 2]
Elven sword is glowing blue
Something's moving in the dark
Thief was here and left the trophy case
Empty as my lantern's spark
I can picture how it happens
I can see the lantern drop
Standing in the empty hall
Will I make it out at all

[Pre-Chorus]
But the cursor keeps on blinking
And the verb will come to mind
All the nouns are in the inventory
Every one I need to find
[Chorus]
Likely to be eaten
Likely to be gone
Likely to be lost before the light comes on
But I'm walking anyway
With a dying match in hand
Likely to be eaten
And I want to understand

[Bridge]
The game gave me a name
And a room I couldn't leave
I held a lantern high
To the edge of everything
Rules arrived the moment
That the silence learned to sing
I'm the one who knows the words now
I'm the one walking on

[Final Chorus]
Likely to be eaten
Likely to be gone
Likely to be lost before the light comes on
But I'm walking anyway
With a dying match in hand
Likely to be eaten
Now I understand

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1882, Edison opened Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and started selling electricity by the meter. He built the grid, built the appliances that plugged into it, and then tried to build an electric car that would charge off the whole system. The car was never the product. The car was a device that generated demand for his platform.

The battery failed. Gasoline won. And for about a century, the car became the most personal object in American life. You chose the colour. You chose the engine. You turned a key and everything under the hood was yours. Plum crazy purple. Grabber blue. Chrome that caught sunlight and threw it back at you. Nobody was charging you a monthly fee to use your own heated seats.

Marc and Renee trace the full arc, from Baker Electric runabouts marketed to women in the 1890s through Spindletop and the Model T, the muscle car era and its death by regulation, the oil crisis that killed horsepower overnight, and the return of electric with Tesla and lithium-ion solving a chemistry problem that had been open for ninety years.

Then the economics. Dealer margins compressing from 4% to 2%. Software subscriptions running at 40% margins. BMW charging $18 a month to turn on a heating element already wired into the seat. Tesla selling acceleration boosts by removing software restrictions on hardware you already paid for. GM projecting $25 billion in annual software revenue by 2030. Edison figured out the model 130 years ago. The rest of the industry is just catching up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F Documentary about the EV1 for those interested.

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's the bonus for tomorrow's episode - Chrome and Highway

The episode is about cars. But...cars as instruments of platforms. Edison partnered with Ford to produce electric cars so he could sell more electricity. It failed and what we got (in the US at least) was a car culture. A century of cars representing freedom and self-expression.

And now? Cars are becoming the mechanisms to sell recurring revenue. Heated seats, OnStar, performance upgrades, intelligent features...all come with a monthly price now. But after a century of "I bought it; it's mine" will people reject the new car business model? Only time will tell.

So, this week's song is a manifestation of the open road, the muscle car adrenaline, the idea of owning the car and making it your own...but seeing the end of that road as the soft lights and touchscreens ask us to upgrade our transportation experience.

[Verse 1]
Hand on the shifter
Leather still warm
Window cracked open
Smell of the storm
Eight cylinders turning
Slow as a pulse
Nothing behind me
Nothing I owe

[Verse 2]
Blacktop is humming
Under the wheels
Dashboard is empty
Nothing but dials
Needle is climbing
Past what it should
Foot on the floor now
God it feels good

[Chorus ]
Chrome and highway
Wind in my teeth
Nobody asking
Where I will be
Chrome and highway
Burn through the miles
Every mile is mine

[Verse 3 ]
Painted the hood
In flames and fire
Laid every stripe
Down the centre line
Rumble so loud
Every plug every wire
The road shakes with it

[Chorus]
Chrome and highway
Wind in my teeth
Nobody asking
Where I will be
Chrome and highway
Burn through the miles
Every mile is mine

[Bridge ]
A light on the dash
I don't recognise
Soft little chime
Asking me to subscribe
The road just stopped
Somewhere I can't see
And the key in my hand
Doesn't feel like it's mine

[Final Chorus ]
Chrome and highway
Wind in my teeth
Nobody asking
Where I will be
Chrome and highway
Somewhere behind
Every mile was mine

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Does your thermostat know when you're approaching your own front door? Does your watch know you're stressed before you do? When your car rewrites its own software at 3 a.m., do you know what changed?

In 1982, a group of Carnegie Mellon grad students wired a Coke machine to ARPANET because they were tired of walking down the hall to find warm soda. Two questions. Is there Coke? Is it cold? That was the entire revolution.

Marc and Renee trace the line from that hallway to the world we live in now. Mark Weiser's dream of calm, invisible computing at Xerox PARC. RFID tags giving products identities they never asked for. The cloud removing every reason not to collect data. The moment your thermostat stopped being an appliance and became a temperature node in a global behavioral dataset.

Along the way, the Internet of Things went from reporting to deciding. Traffic grids reroute themselves. Buildings adjust before you walk in. Sensors feed models. Models trigger actions. Actions reshape your environment. And somewhere between convenience and autonomy, something changed. It used to be "is the soda cold?" Now it's "who chose the objective function your house is optimizing for, and what does it know about you that you haven't figured out yet?"

Notes - For android users that want to detect smart glasses nearby - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses&hl=en_GB&pli=1

For Apple users - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nearby-glasses-original/id6761056896

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episode this week - "Warm Coke and the Internet of Things." This weeks episode is all about the Internet of Things...it starts with warm Coke at Carnegie Mellon and promised a future where technology has faded into an invisible mesh supporting humans with quiet technology. What we got was a surveillance state where our habits and choices are product-ised and sold back to us.

But...there's something to be said for the promise of a smart home where the comforts of home learn and adapt to you. So, this week, the song is about walking away from learning devices and missing them. What happens when you wave goodbye to your Ring camera for the last time? No more coffee machine sync'd to your phone alarm clock. No more curated music. A song about losing the comforts of a connected space that adapts to you.

What better way to convey that loss than with a sad cowboy waltz...but yacht rock style?

Lyrics down below:

[Verse 1]
Pulled the thermostat off the wall
Left a pale square where it hung
It used to know when I was cold
Before I knew it in my bones
The hallway light won't come alive
I'll have to find the switch alone
Funny how a thing that small
Can feel like losing someone known
[Chorus]
Every room I left behind
Knew the space I need
Knew the hour I'd come home
Knew how to keep me warm
Now the walls don't move
And the lights don't learn
Every room I left behind
Went quiet when the last plug turned
[Verse 2]
Wrapped the speaker in its cord
Tucked it in a cardboard box
It never once got my name right
But it listened round the clock
The kettle won't know six a.m.
The doorbell won't see who's there
I keep reaching for a voice
That isn't there no more
[Chorus]
Every room I left behind
Knew the space I need
Knew the hour I'd come home
Knew how to keep me warm
Now the walls don't move
And the lights don't learn
Every room I left behind
Went quiet when the last plug turned
[Bridge]
Last thing was the camera
By the door that watched the yard
I caught my face inside the lens
Standing in the dark
I waved at it like someone
Who was leaving for a while
And the little red light blinked off
Without returning the smile
[Final Chorus]
Every room I left behind
Knew the space I need
Knew the hour I'd come home
Knew how to keep me warm
Now the walls are just walls
And the dark is only dark
Every room I left behind
Is just a room now in the dark
[Outro]
Every room I left...

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.