Every line of code has a story. Most of us just never hear it.
Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computing history or internet lore to surface the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.
If you've ever wondered who actually made something you use every day, and why you've never heard their name before, you'll feel at home here. This show is for the curious, not the credentialed. You don't need a technical background to follow along. You just need to be the kind of person who pulls on threads.
New episodes every other week.
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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
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.
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.
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.
Trailer: Unexpected Stories from Computing History
Season 1
Tuesday, February 24, 2026 • Duration 01:47
Every line of code has a story. Most of us just never hear it.
Found in the Machine is a narrative technology podcast about the forgotten history of computing, software, and the internet. Each episode uncovers the true story behind a piece of computing history or internet lore to surface the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.
If you've ever wondered who actually made something you use every day, and why you've never heard their name before, you'll feel at home here. This show is for the curious, not the credentialed. You don't need a technical background to follow along. You just need to be the kind of person who pulls on threads.
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.
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
The Silent Duel: David Blackwell and the Math Inside AI
Season 1 · Episode 7
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 • Duration 11:08
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.
Strangers with Keys: A Ritual to Secure the Internet
Season 1 · Episode 6
Tuesday, March 31, 2026 • Duration 11:34
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
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 along with the .
Poison in the Cache: Dan Kaminsky Saves the Internet
Season 1 · Episode 5
Tuesday, March 17, 2026 • Duration 08:18
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.
Every time you type a web address, you're trusting a directory. A vast, invisible system that translates the names you know into the numbers that actually move data across the internet. You trust it the way a town trusts its well.
In 2008, a security researcher named Dan Kaminsky discovered that the well had no lid.
In this episode
DNS - the Domain Name System and why it matters
Dan Kaminsky - security researcher and internet advocate
Cache poisoning - the class of attack Dan found hiding in the internet's foundation
The patch - a secret meeting, a deadline, and a synchronized fix
Choi, S. G. (n.d.). Remote DNS attacks and DNS defenses [Lecture notes, IT432 Advanced Computer and Network Security]. U.S. Naval Academy.
Lipstick and Runes: Hedy Lamarr and the History of Bluetooth
Season 1 · Episode 4
Tuesday, March 3, 2026 • Duration 11:22
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.
Look at your phone settings. There's a small angular icon there that you've probably never thought about much. It's a bind rune showing two characters from the ancient Younger Futhark alphabet, fused together. It's on billions of devices worldwide.
How that symbol ended up there is two stories separated by half a century. One starts with a Hollywood actress listening at a dinner table full of fascists. The other starts with two engineers bombing a pitch meeting and ending up in a Canadian pub.
In this episode
Hedy Lamarr - after the cameras and the dinner parties
The patent - a collaboration and what the Navy said about it
Two engineers in a pub - a failed pitch meeting and a conversation about Vikings and a Danish king
Drink Me, Eat Me, README: What Programmers Learned from Alice in Wonderland
Season 1 · Episode 3
Tuesday, March 3, 2026 • Duration 07:39
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.
Every software project has one. It's easy to scroll past. Most of the time it's just a manual telling you system requirements, installation steps, and known bugs.
But the README file owes a debt to Lewis Carroll, and a quiet trick built into its name that has been manipulating computers for decades.
In this episode, we follow the README from its earliest appearances through the conventions that made it a standard, and to the programmers who decided it could be much more than documentation.
In this episode
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - the literary origin programmers point to as inspiration
The ASCII trick - the quiet reason README is written in all capitals
The printer in the woods - a README that went somewhere unexpected
Raymond, E. S. (Ed.). (2003). README file. In (Version 4.4.7).
The Bug, The Cat, and The Wooden Mouse: The Unexpected History of the Computer Mouse
Season 1 · Episode 2
Tuesday, March 3, 2026 • Duration 09:39
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.
In 1968, a researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable links, and video conferencing, all controlled by a small wooden block with a wire trailing out the back.
But the mouse didn't begin with Engelbart. In this episode, we follow the tangled history of the world's most common computer peripheral and its origins as a Cold War secret. We'll also find out why your cursor is tilted 45 degrees.
In this episode
The Mother of All Demos - the 1968 presentation that changed computing
DATAR - a classified Cold War radar project, and an unlikely contribution to computing history
The Rollkugel - a German parallel invention and a patent rejection
Xerox PARC and Apple - how the mouse finally reached the world
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
