The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow. 

Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator.

For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on my grandma's back porch, and the...

Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy!

The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, ...

Tomorrow we talk about a piece of tech that was millennia in the making. The humble flush toilet. We have a special guest coming in to record on this one to help us with the story.

But you can't make a song about flushing toilets without thinking about the things that water washes away. Physical and emotional. So, this song is all about flushing things away. And the little trap that keeps the bad stuff from coming up and stinki...

Payphones were infrastructure until they weren't. They weren't missed until they were.
At their peak there were about two and a half million of them in America, one on what felt like every corner, and a dime got you anyone in the country. By 2018 there were about a hundred thousand left, most of them dead. The first one turned up in a Hartford bank in 1889. The last public one in Manhattan left ceremoniously in 2022, ...

Tomorrow's episode is on pay phones. A technology that was once essential until mobile phones became ubiquitous. There's a lot of history (and nostalgia) that Marc and Renee love to gab about. So tune in tomorrow for the full episode.

But...you can't talk about pay phones without talking about paying. The scene...small town, unfamiliar territory, sun going down. You need to get out of here and your cousin Susan is the...

First things, first. We have merch. Silly, yes, but available here. Now onto the show...

Have you ever pressed your face to the window in a plane as a kid and stared at the wing thinking flying shouldn't work? Have you ever sat in seat 23B with the baby crying five rows up and perfume getting reapplied three rows over and wished for just forty minutes of respite?

Of course you have. Passenger jet aviation is one of the most tran...

Next episode is all about the development of passenger planes. So, this week our song is about that emotionally stressful situation that air travel has turned into. 

The bare feet where they shouldn't be. Loud talkers. Hogging the arm rests. Passive aggressive travelers. 

It felt like a blues song in A Minor. But mashed together with our Season 2 house band's yacht rock groove.

Lyrics below. 

[Verse 1]
I boarded last, no ...

Have you ever sat at a red light at 2 AM with no traffic in any direction and waited anyway? Have you ever rolled through that same red light 2 AM and felt vaguely guilty about it?
Of course you have. The traffic light is the most obeyed command in human history. Rarely enforced (unless you're in the UK like Marc). No officer in sight. Just a coloured light on a pole, and a near-universal agreement to stop when it's r...

There are songs and poems about the red and green lights. But what about Amber? Shy. Fleeting. Amber has a job too. 

This week's episode is about traffic lights and it felt appropriate to cast our gaze at the glowing amber hue and dedicate this week's song to the lesser-loved traffic light colour. 

[Verse 1]
Three seconds is all I get
Between the start and the stop
You look at me like you know
What I'm ...

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 ass...

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...

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...

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 lant...

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 o...

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, On...

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.

Mar...

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 f...

In 1983, NORAD gave a president four minutes to decide whether to end the world. That was the Cold War's gift to the future: the principle that speed matters more than thought. In part two, we pick up where the missiles left off and follow that logic forward. The four-minute window became millisecond cyberattacks, algorithmic trading crashes, and autonomous systems that act before any human can intervene. The battlefield moved...

We hope you're enjoying the WarGames is a Documentary 2-parter. If the first part was all about that nostalgic glow of the early 80's hacker aesthetic, then the second part is all about the anxiety that came from mounting technological weaponisation. Faster alerting. Faster decisions. More information. The pressure to keep humans in the loop, but operating at machine-speed. So, the song for the episode channels that chopp...