Mitch Waldrop on The Dream Machine: Part 1 – 1940s to 1970s

Posted in: Season 2 Posted on

Our second season launches with a three-part series featuring the preeminent Mitch Waldrop. We discuss the history, ideas, and origins of computing, software, the internet – and of course, the pioneers and unsung heroes who made it all a reality. It’s hard to imagine a better place to start exploring the more modern notions of change, technology, and software.

Mitch is the author of The Dream Machine, a seminal contribution to the history of modern computing and the internet. Mitch was previously an editorial page and features editor at Nature magazine and has published books on a wide range of topics, including artificial intelligence and complexity.  We tried doing justice to the content of the Dream Machine in one sitting, which quickly expanded into three discrete recording sessions over a handful weeks. We are forever grateful to Mitch.

This first episode touches on Mitch’s journey writing The Dream Machine and the period from the 1940s through the 1970s, which includes: The philosophy underlying hardware and software, the work of intellectual contributors such as Vannevar Bush, Von Nuemann, and Claude Shannon; interactive computing, the Arpanet, World war II as a catalyst for computing, timesharing, JCR Licklider’s intergalactic network, Arpa’s woodstock moment, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, also known as PARC. 

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