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© 2026 Daina Bouquin
Description
Found in the Machine is a narrative podcast about the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world.
If you've ever wondered who actually made the technology 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 unearth human stories from computing history every other week.
24 Episodes
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Deep inside an abandoned coal mine in the Arctic, there are 186 reels of photographic film holding millions of software projects. Some of that code runs the internet. Some of it is unfinished homework. In 2020, GitHub put it all there, hoping it would survive for a thousand years. But how do you preserve software for someone who may never have seen a computer? And why go to such extraordinary lengths to save it in the first place? In this episode The Arctic Code Vault: How an abandoned...
Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe invented the optophone, then Mary Jameson spent six decades proving what it could do and helping shape what it became. In this episode: The exploring optophone: Fournier d’Albe’s 1912 selenium device for “hearing” lightMary Jameson: The blind reader who tested, taught, and tuned the optophone by ear, then helped shape the reading machines that followed.Reading by absence: Why the first optophone readers listened for the notes that disappeared.The bl...
In 1995, a tiny pixelated heart on a Japanese pager became the most important thing on the screen. When it disappeared, young people left. One man never forgot and went on to draw the original 176 emoji. In this episode: Pocket Bells and goroawase: how Japanese teenagers turned numbers on pagers into a language of their ownThe heart: the small symbol on NTT Docomo's Pocket Bell, and what happened when a new business model took it awayShigetaka Kurita: the former pager sa...
In the summer of 1939, at the New York World's Fair, a woman sat beneath a three-story mural of a shouting man and shaped raw electricity into a human voice. In this episode: Homer Dudley: the engineer who reimagined the human voice as a handful of numbers at Bell Telephone LaboratoriesThe Voder: The human-driven machine built to imitate the effects of the human vocal tractThe Voderettes: 24 telephone operators chosen from hundreds who practiced for more than a year to play the V...
In March 1965, two Soviet cosmonauts fell out of the sky into a frozen forest in the Urals, trapped inside a cramped capsule hundreds of kilometers from rescue. Their survival, and their journey home, relied on an intricate mechanical computer made of aluminum, clockwork, and paper. In this Episode Laboratory 47: the branch of the Soviet Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky, run by engineer Sergei DarevskyThe Globus: the indicator of position in flight, a paper-wrapped aluminum globe ...
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