Tonight's broadcasts

A dramatisation: the characters are imaginary, the facts are the ones in this article. Voices are synthetic (Kokoro); the music and effects were made by The Nerd Net.

Announcer: The Nerd Net Radio Theatre presents... The Art of the Stalk.

Announcer: October 1978. A small independent film opens in Kansas City. John Carpenter's Halloween. For better and worse, horror would never be quite the same.

Miss Dalton: Professor, how much did it cost?

Professor: Around 300,000 dollars, Miss Dalton. Filmed in 20 days, in May 1978. Carpenter co-wrote it with Debra Hill, who also produced.

Miss Dalton: And it made about 70 million worldwide. One of the most successful independent films ever made.

Professor: Listen to how it opens. One long single take, from the killer's point of view... creeping around a house and up the stairs.

Miss Dalton: The camera is the killer.

Professor: Looking, waiting and choosing. Much of it shot with a Panaglide, so the camera could float rather than rattle along on rails.

Miss Dalton: And that piano tune. It sounds... uneven.

Professor: An unusual rhythm, usually described as five-four time. Carpenter wrote the score himself. He said the rhythm came from an exercise his father taught him on bongos, at 13.

Miss Dalton: The story goes that an early cut shown with no music wasn't scary.

Professor: With it, much scarier.

Announcer: A masked, near-unstoppable killer. A group of teenagers. A holiday setting. Scholar Adam Rockoff calls it the blueprint for the slasher.

Miss Dalton: And the girl who survives?

Professor: Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first film. Film scholar Carol J. Clover later coined a term for her kind: the final girl.

Miss Dalton: In 2006 the Library of Congress chose it for the National Film Registry.

Professor: So if you're watching it this Halloween, Miss Dalton... turn the lights down, and listen for that piano.

Announcer: You have been listening to a dramatisation. The characters are imaginary. The facts are real, and the sources are listed with the article. Read the full story at thenerdnet.com. This has been the Nerd Net Radio Theatre.

A dramatisation: the characters are imaginary, the facts are the ones in this article. Voices are synthetic (Kokoro); the music and effects were made by The Nerd Net.

Announcer: The Nerd Net Radio Theatre presents... A Lot of Turnips.

Announcer: The last night of October. Ask around, and you'll hear the same tale. Halloween is the old Celtic festival of the dead, with a saint's day painted on top.

Miss Dalton: Professor, isn't that true?

Professor: It's a good story, Miss Dalton. It is also much shakier than it sounds.

Miss Dalton: Then what was Samhain?

Professor: A Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of the darker half of the year. It began at sunset on the last day of October, because the Gaelic day ran from sunset to sunset.

Miss Dalton: Bonfires, offerings for spirits, divination games with apples and nuts...

Professor: And the historian Ronald Hutton argues the earliest sources show a harvest festival, with no clear link to the dead.

Miss Dalton: And the Christian half?

Professor: All Hallows' Day falls on the first of November. The evening before is All Hallows' Eve... which shrank over time into Hallowe'en.

Miss Dalton: And trick-or-treating?

Professor: From at least the 15th century, poor people went door to door for soul cakes, in return for prayers for the dead.

Miss Dalton: And the jack-o'-lanterns?

Professor: In 19th-century Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, they were hollowed-out turnips. Still called tumshie lanterns in Scotland.

Announcer: Across the Atlantic, Irish and Scottish immigrants carried their customs with them. Pumpkins, bigger and softer than turnips, took over the carving.

Miss Dalton: So it's not an ancient rite at all?

Professor: Neither a fossil pagan rite nor a purely Christian invention, Miss Dalton. Less tidy than the legend. But better... and the turnips are real.

Announcer: You have been listening to a dramatisation. The characters are imaginary. The facts are real, and the sources are listed with the article. Read the full story at thenerdnet.com. This has been the Nerd Net Radio Theatre.

A dramatisation: the characters are imaginary, the facts are the ones in this article. Voices are synthetic (Kokoro); the music and effects were made by The Nerd Net.

Announcer: The Nerd Net Radio Theatre presents... Lo and Behold.

Announcer: October 29, 1969. About half past ten at night, Pacific time. At UCLA, a student named Charley Kline sits at a terminal, about to send the first message over ARPANET... to a computer at Stanford Research Institute.

Professor: Miss Dalton, you're on the phone to Stanford?

Miss Dalton: I am, Professor. They'll confirm every letter as it arrives. The word is LOGIN.

Professor: Very well. He types L.

Miss Dalton: L arrived!

Professor: He types O.

Miss Dalton: O arrived!

Professor: And now... G.

Miss Dalton: Professor... Stanford says their system has crashed.

Professor: Then the first message ever sent over what would become the internet... is LO.

Miss Dalton: As in, lo and behold.

Professor: If you're inclined to read poetry into a system crash. About an hour later, LOGIN went through properly.

Announcer: By December 5, four nodes were running: UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Miss Dalton: And then it grew. 213 host computers by 1981.

Professor: In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email. On January 1, 1983, the switch to TCP/IP... the protocols the internet still runs on.

Miss Dalton: All from two letters and a crash.

Professor: Every great network has to start somewhere, Miss Dalton. This one started with LO.

Announcer: You have been listening to a dramatisation. The characters are imaginary. The facts are real, and the sources are listed with the article. Read the full story at thenerdnet.com. This has been the Nerd Net Radio Theatre.

A dramatisation: the characters are imaginary, the facts are the ones in this article. Voices are synthetic (Kokoro); the music and effects were made by The Nerd Net.

Announcer: The Nerd Net Radio Theatre presents... Ninety Minutes in 1968.

Announcer: December 9, 1968. San Francisco. About a thousand computer scientists take their seats. On stage, at a custom console, sits a researcher named Douglas Engelbart.

Miss Dalton: Professor, what's that little wooden box in his hand?

Professor: His own invention, Miss Dalton. A computer mouse, carved from wood.

Miss Dalton: And on the screen... windows you can resize and rearrange?

Professor: And hypertext links connecting documents. And real-time editing with colleagues at his lab in Menlo Park.

Miss Dalton: There's his own face on the screen, live, over his work. A video call!

Professor: Carried by two microwave links. The data went at 1,200 baud down a leased line.

Miss Dalton: This is 1968. Most computers fill entire rooms and run on punch cards.

Professor: And none of this is a trick or a mockup. His team at the Stanford Research Institute had built working versions of nearly every piece. They called it NLS, the oN-Line System.

Miss Dalton: Why build all this?

Professor: Because Engelbart believed computers should be tools for augmenting human thought and collaboration... not just number-crunching machines for specialists.

Announcer: Ninety minutes later, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

Miss Dalton: So why didn't we all have a mouse soon after?

Professor: It took many years, by way of Xerox PARC and then Apple. The name came later too: the Mother of All Demos, from Steven Levy's 1994 book.

Miss Dalton: Half the things on my desk, shown once, by a single team.

Professor: Live, Miss Dalton. Demoed live, once.

Announcer: You have been listening to a dramatisation. The characters are imaginary. The facts are real, and the sources are listed with the article. Read the full story at thenerdnet.com. This has been the Nerd Net Radio Theatre.

A dramatisation: the characters are imaginary, the facts are the ones in this article. Voices are synthetic (Kokoro); the music and effects were made by The Nerd Net.

Announcer: The Nerd Net Radio Theatre presents... The Message in the Bottle.

Announcer: Out beyond the planets, a small machine is still flying. Voyager 1. Launched in September 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn. Today it is the most distant human-made object in existence... and it is still transmitting.

Professor: Miss Dalton! Come in. You have the figures?

Miss Dalton: I do, Professor. Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles out.

Professor: And its power?

Miss Dalton: Fading. Its power cells lose about 4 watts a year.

Professor: Yet bolted to its side is the thing I truly care about. The Golden Record.

Miss Dalton: A 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc, Professor.

Professor: Designed by a committee led by Carl Sagan, to describe Earth to whoever... or whatever... might find it someday.

Miss Dalton: 115 images, encoded as analog data. Greetings in 55 human languages. The sounds of surf... wind... thunder... and whales.

Professor: And 90 minutes of music. Bach. Chuck Berry. Traditional recordings from Senegal, Peru, and Java.

Miss Dalton: But Professor, how would anyone know how to play it?

Professor: The cover is the instruction manual. A diagram explains how to play the disc, in symbols intended to require no shared language at all.

Miss Dalton: And where is it headed?

Professor: Nowhere in particular. In about 40,000 years it will pass within roughly 1.6 light-years of a star called Gliese 445.

Miss Dalton: Forty thousand years. Will anyone ever find it?

Professor: Nobody expects it to be found. It was built anyway.

Announcer: You have been listening to a dramatisation. The characters are imaginary. The facts are real, and the sources are listed with the article. Read the full story at thenerdnet.com. This has been the Nerd Net Radio Theatre.

A dramatisation: the characters are imaginary, the facts are the ones in this article. Voices are synthetic (Kokoro); the music and effects were made by The Nerd Net.

Announcer: The Nerd Net Radio Theatre presents... The Moth in the Machine.

Announcer: September 9, 1947. Operators working on the Harvard Mark II, a room-sized electromechanical computer built from thousands of relays, went looking for the cause of a malfunction.

Miss Dalton: Professor! We found it. A moth. Wedged inside one of the relays, physically blocking it from switching.

Professor: Then tape it into the logbook, Miss Dalton. With a note: "First actual case of bug being found."

Miss Dalton: But the word bug already existed for a technical fault. Thomas Edison used it in letters in the 1870s.

Professor: True. But this is the moment the term got attached, quite literally, to computing. And the logbook page survives today in the Smithsonian's collection.

Miss Dalton: And Grace Hopper? Did she find the moth?

Professor: No. She was part of Howard Aiken's team. She did not find the moth, and she did not coin the word bug, though she is often credited with both. She simply told the story so often, and so well, that it became computing folklore.

Miss Dalton: Then what was her real contribution?

Professor: By 1952 she had finished the A-0, an early program she called a compiler. She recalled that nobody believed it could be done. Colleagues insisted computers could only do arithmetic.

Miss Dalton: And after that?

Professor: From 1954 her department released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including FLOW-MATIC. She championed the idea that people should write programs in something closer to English rather than raw machine code.

Miss Dalton: Which led to COBOL.

Professor: At a two-day conference in spring 1959, experts from industry and government met to design a common business language, with Hopper as a technical consultant. COBOL extended her FLOW-MATIC with ideas from IBM's COMTRAN.

Miss Dalton: I hear she was a teacher with props.

Professor: To show what a nanosecond means, she handed out lengths of wire 11.8 inches long. The distance light travels in one billionth of a second.

Announcer: She retired from the Navy in 1986, at 79, as a rear admiral.

Professor: The moth, not the metaphor, is what made it into a museum.

Announcer: You have been listening to a dramatisation. The characters are imaginary. The facts are real, and the sources are listed with the article. Read the full story at thenerdnet.com. This has been the Nerd Net Radio Theatre.