The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
A podcast exploring the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.
Episodes
77 episodes
S3E03 - Chips and Chips
What started out as a text from Marc's brother turned into an investigation into the hundred year history of monosodium glutamate and how that turned into a durable insulating film for high-end processors. The umami taste gave us cr...
S3E03 Bonus - Know MSG
What does MSG have in common with microprocessor coatings? You'll have to listen to our new episode "Chips and Chips" coming this week to find out.Renee and Marc dive into the strange world of food and CPU coatings this week and that's t...
S3E02 - Pins, Machines, and the Perfect Game
A bowling alley looks like the least engineered place you can spend an afternoon. Rented shoes, sticky floors, someone's name spelled wrong (or rudely) on the display. Underneath the grime, neon, noise, and beer stains is four thousand ye...
S3E02 Bonus - Seven Ten!
Tomorrow's episode is all about the history of bowling technology. Pins, pinboys, automatic pinsetters, rubbers, resins, polymers! Oh, so much chemistry and mechanical engineering. But this week's lively soul/funk groove is all abou...
S3E01 - Going Up
For most of history, the top floor was where the poor people lived. Nobody wanted to climb four flights, so the ground floor was the good address and the attic was the punishment. Then a man in Yonkers built a brake, stood on a platform in fron...
S3E01 Bonus - One Floor
Have you ever entered a full elevator car just to ride the elevator one single floor? Did you feel the judgement? Did you feel the shame?This week's song is a begging, pleading, song about that unforgivable sin. The single floor elevator...
S2E26 - Aniversary, B Roll, and Renee as Orca
Happy One Year Anniversary! Marc and Renee want to thank you for a great year of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. We've been on a bit of a holiday with the summer months, but people are still listening. This is just a bit of...
S2E25 - The Box That Ate the Living Room
Renee and Marc grew up in a prime time for television. School House Rock. Newhart. Saturday Morning. Must See TV. Somewhere in the twentieth century, a box arrived and everyone in the house started facing the same direction. For a f...
S2E25 Bonus - Snap Back
Tune in tomorrow for a very special episode of the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. All about Television. But the nerdy science-y television stuff. So, we had to do a song all about the way a tube TV manages to keep the image in sync. Snaps...
S2E24 - Jell-O, America's Most Unsettled Triumph
Shout out to Bruce, from Australia for contacting Renee! Feel free to contact us any time. A perfect moulded jelly used to be a way to show you had money. Someone spent a full day boiling bones and clarifying stock so you could set ...
S2E24 Bonus - Ninety-Five
Have you ever witnessed Jell-O reach that special temperature and just...melt away. Too long in the sun and a once solid, but wiggly, dessert turns liquid once again. That special temperature is a just a bit below average body tempe...
S2E23 - Come Clean
Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened.For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over...
S2E23 Bonus - One Went Missing
Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss to...
S2E22 - Royalty for Pocket Change
For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed.<...
S2E22 Bonus - Level Out
This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry. Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that c...
S2E21 - Keeping it Cool
The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet.Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to ...
S2E21 Bonus - Cold One on the Porch
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 an...
S2E20 - The Royal Flush
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 to...
S2E20 Bonus - Flush Away
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 ...
S2E19 - Ten Cents to Anywhere
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...
S2E19 Bonus - Quarter Thief
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...
S2E18 - Tubes With Wings
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 th...
S2E18 Bonus - 23B
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 ar...
