The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
A podcast exploring the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.
Episodes
70 episodes
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...
S2E34 - 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...
S2E17 - Red Means Stop
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 com...
S2E17 Bonus - Just Amber
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 de...
S2E16 - You Are Here
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?...
(S2E16 Bonus) - Three Wrong Turns Home
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...
S2E15 - Zork to Zelda
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...
Likely To Be Eaten (S2E15 Bonus)
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....
S2E14 - When Your Car Says Subscribe
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 s...
Chrome and Highway (S2E14 Bonus)
Here's the bonus for tomorrow's episode - Chrome and HighwayThe 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 g...
S2E13 - Warm Coke and the Internet of Things
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 gr...
