The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast

Renee Murphy, Marc Massar

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TECHNOLOGY

The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.

2 DAYS AGO

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 games taught you how to play them just by existing. No tutorials. No pop-ups. No onboarding flow. Pinball did it with physics. Zork did it with a parser. Mario did it with a question mark block. The machine showed you what it was. You figured out the rest. This episode is about fifty years of that. Coin-op arcades to twelve million monthly subscribers. Quarters in a diner to modern open worlds that sell the absence of hand-holding as a feature. The hardware changed. The business model changed. The core loop stayed the same. Here is a world. Here are the rules. Figure it out. If you ever mailed Activision a photograph of your Pitfall score, still picture a small white house west of an open field, or held a Galaga high score at a pizza parlour long enough that you'd drop in just to check no one had knocked you off, this one's for you. And if you got eaten by a Grue, we forgive you. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

55 min
3 DAYS AGO · BONUS

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. So, this week's song is an ode to Zork. Resource management. Wandering the unknown. Maps. Frustration. Triumph. Self-evident gameplay. See if you can catch all the Zork references. [Verse 1] Brass lantern on the counter Half an hour left to burn Mailbox near the white house Nowhere left to turn Words in phosphor green You are likely to be eaten [Pre-Chorus] Hello sailor, hello darkness Hello everything that waits I can feel the Great Underground Through the hinges in the gates [Chorus] Likely to be eaten Likely to be gone Likely to be lost before the light comes on But I'm walking anyway With a dying match in hand Likely to be eaten And I want to understand [Verse 2] Elven sword is glowing blue Something's moving in the dark Thief was here and left the trophy case Empty as my lantern's spark I can picture how it happens I can see the lantern drop Standing in the empty hall Will I make it out at all [Pre-Chorus] But the cursor keeps on blinking And the verb will come to mind All the nouns are in the inventory Every one I need to find [Chorus] Likely to be eaten Likely to be gone Likely to be lost before the light comes on But I'm walking anyway With a dying match in hand Likely to be eaten And I want to understand [Bridge] The game gave me a name And a room I couldn't leave I held a lantern high To the edge of everything Rules arrived the moment That the silence learned to sing I'm the one who knows the words now I'm the one walking on [Final Chorus] Likely to be eaten Likely to be gone Likely to be lost before the light comes on But I'm walking anyway With a dying match in hand Likely to be eaten Now I understand We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

5 min
16 APR

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 system. The car was never the product. The car was a device that generated demand for his platform. The battery failed. Gasoline won. And for about a century, the car became the most personal object in American life. You chose the colour. You chose the engine. You turned a key and everything under the hood was yours. Plum crazy purple. Grabber blue. Chrome that caught sunlight and threw it back at you. Nobody was charging you a monthly fee to use your own heated seats. Marc and Renee trace the full arc, from Baker Electric runabouts marketed to women in the 1890s through Spindletop and the Model T, the muscle car era and its death by regulation, the oil crisis that killed horsepower overnight, and the return of electric with Tesla and lithium-ion solving a chemistry problem that had been open for ninety years. Then the economics. Dealer margins compressing from 4% to 2%. Software subscriptions running at 40% margins. BMW charging $18 a month to turn on a heating element already wired into the seat. Tesla selling acceleration boosts by removing software restrictions on hardware you already paid for. GM projecting $25 billion in annual software revenue by 2030. Edison figured out the model 130 years ago. The rest of the industry is just catching up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F Documentary about the EV1 for those interested. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

1hr 1min
15 APR · BONUS

Chrome and Highway (S2E14 Bonus)

Here's the bonus for tomorrow's episode - Chrome and Highway The 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 got (in the US at least) was a car culture. A century of cars representing freedom and self-expression. And now? Cars are becoming the mechanisms to sell recurring revenue. Heated seats, OnStar, performance upgrades, intelligent features...all come with a monthly price now. But after a century of "I bought it; it's mine" will people reject the new car business model? Only time will tell. So, this week's song is a manifestation of the open road, the muscle car adrenaline, the idea of owning the car and making it your own...but seeing the end of that road as the soft lights and touchscreens ask us to upgrade our transportation experience. [Verse 1] Hand on the shifter Leather still warm Window cracked open Smell of the storm Eight cylinders turning Slow as a pulse Nothing behind me Nothing I owe [Verse 2] Blacktop is humming Under the wheels Dashboard is empty Nothing but dials Needle is climbing Past what it should Foot on the floor now God it feels good [Chorus ] Chrome and highway Wind in my teeth Nobody asking Where I will be Chrome and highway Burn through the miles Every mile is mine [Verse 3 ] Painted the hood In flames and fire Laid every stripe Down the centre line Rumble so loud Every plug every wire The road shakes with it [Chorus] Chrome and highway Wind in my teeth Nobody asking Where I will be Chrome and highway Burn through the miles Every mile is mine [Bridge ] A light on the dash I don't recognise Soft little chime Asking me to subscribe The road just stopped Somewhere I can't see And the key in my hand Doesn't feel like it's mine [Final Chorus ] Chrome and highway Wind in my teeth Nobody asking Where I will be Chrome and highway Somewhere behind Every mile was mine We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

4 min
9 APR

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 grad students wired a Coke machine to ARPANET because they were tired of walking down the hall to find warm soda. Two questions. Is there Coke? Is it cold? That was the entire revolution. Marc and Renee trace the line from that hallway to the world we live in now. Mark Weiser's dream of calm, invisible computing at Xerox PARC. RFID tags giving products identities they never asked for. The cloud removing every reason not to collect data. The moment your thermostat stopped being an appliance and became a temperature node in a global behavioral dataset. Along the way, the Internet of Things went from reporting to deciding. Traffic grids reroute themselves. Buildings adjust before you walk in. Sensors feed models. Models trigger actions. Actions reshape your environment. And somewhere between convenience and autonomy, something changed. It used to be "is the soda cold?" Now it's "who chose the objective function your house is optimizing for, and what does it know about you that you haven't figured out yet?" Notes - For android users that want to detect smart glasses nearby - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses&hl=en_GB&pli=1 For Apple users - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nearby-glasses-original/id6761056896 We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

1hr 15min
8 APR · BONUS

Every Room I Left (S2E13 Bonus)

New episode this week - "Warm Coke and the Internet of Things." This weeks episode is all about the Internet of Things...it starts with warm Coke at Carnegie Mellon and promised a future where technology has faded into an invisible mesh supporting humans with quiet technology. What we got was a surveillance state where our habits and choices are product-ised and sold back to us. But...there's something to be said for the promise of a smart home where the comforts of home learn and adapt to you. So, this week, the song is about walking away from learning devices and missing them. What happens when you wave goodbye to your Ring camera for the last time? No more coffee machine sync'd to your phone alarm clock. No more curated music. A song about losing the comforts of a connected space that adapts to you. What better way to convey that loss than with a sad cowboy waltz...but yacht rock style? Lyrics down below: [Verse 1] Pulled the thermostat off the wall Left a pale square where it hung It used to know when I was cold Before I knew it in my bones The hallway light won't come alive I'll have to find the switch alone Funny how a thing that small Can feel like losing someone known [Chorus] Every room I left behind Knew the space I need Knew the hour I'd come home Knew how to keep me warm Now the walls don't move And the lights don't learn Every room I left behind Went quiet when the last plug turned [Verse 2] Wrapped the speaker in its cord Tucked it in a cardboard box It never once got my name right But it listened round the clock The kettle won't know six a.m. The doorbell won't see who's there I keep reaching for a voice That isn't there no more [Chorus] Every room I left behind Knew the space I need Knew the hour I'd come home Knew how to keep me warm Now the walls don't move And the lights don't learn Every room I left behind Went quiet when the last plug turned [Bridge] Last thing was the camera By the door that watched the yard I caught my face inside the lens Standing in the dark I waved at it like someone Who was leaving for a while And the little red light blinked off Without returning the smile [Final Chorus] Every room I left behind Knew the space I need Knew the hour I'd come home Knew how to keep me warm Now the walls are just walls And the dark is only dark Every room I left behind Is just a room now in the dark [Outro] Every room I left... We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

4 min
1 APR

S2E12 - WarGames Is A Documentary Part 2

In 1983, NORAD gave a president four minutes to decide whether to end the world. That was the Cold War's gift to the future: the principle that speed matters more than thought. In part two, we pick up where the missiles left off and follow that logic forward. The four-minute window became millisecond cyberattacks, algorithmic trading crashes, and autonomous systems that act before any human can intervene. The battlefield moved from silos to servers, but the core problem is the same one WarGames posed in 1983. The machines are faster than we are. Forty years later, the teenager is gone. The speed isn't. The systems we built to protect us now operate faster than we can supervise them, and nobody's built a failsafe for that. We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

1hr 3min
1 APR · BONUS

Light Speed (S2E12 Bonus)

We hope you're enjoying the WarGames is a Documentary 2-parter. If the first part was all about that nostalgic glow of the early 80's hacker aesthetic, then the second part is all about the anxiety that came from mounting technological weaponisation. Faster alerting. Faster decisions. More information. The pressure to keep humans in the loop, but operating at machine-speed. So, the song for the episode channels that choppy, rapid-fire, feeling, and a longing for the Phosphor Glow of the earlier era. Lyrics down below: [Verse 1] Twelve tabs and I've lost the thread Screen so bright it hums Something pings across the room My thumb already runs Glass is warm beneath my hands Warmer than it should be Every line arrives at once None of it can hold me [Pre-Chorus] I remember when the signal Had to travel to arrive Had to cross the miles of copper Just to know you were alive [Chorus] Light speed Everything is now Light speed Faster than I think it I can't wait for anything Nothing waits for me All that noise inside my head Running all at light speed [Verse 2] Fourteen warnings on the screen Gotta answer right now Systems on alert Red badges flashing Something tripped a wire somewhere Half a world away By the time I've read the first Three more are on their way [Pre-Chorus] I remember when the cursor Used to blink and hold its ground When the space between the words Was where the meaning could be found [Bridge] Close the screen Let the room go dark Sit here long enough To feel the smallest spark A dial tone waiting A handshake on the line A cursor blinking patient One green letter at a time [Final Chorus] Light speed Everything is now Light speed Faster than I think it I can't wait for anything Nothing waits for me Somewhere past the brightness There's a glow I can't feel [Outro] Light speed We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes. Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential. email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

3 min

The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.

Creator

Renee Murphy, Marc Massar
Years Active

2025 - 2026
Episodes

50
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2026 The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
Show Website

The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast