#legacy-systems
18 episodes
#1374: The Invisible Gate: How Airline Security Decides Your Fate
Your boarding pass is a digital handshake between airlines and governments. Discover why that handshake sometimes fails at the gate.
#1237: Ghost Flights and Legacy Code: Why Travel Tech is Broken
Ever wondered why that flight vanished while booking? Explore the 1960s mainframes and cryptic protocols holding the travel industry together.
#1228: The $30 Billion Blog Post: Can AI Finally Kill COBOL?
A single blog post wiped $30 billion off IBM’s value. Discover why the world’s oldest code still runs our banks and if AI can finally replace it.
#1223: Cracking the COBOL Code: Agentic AI and Legacy Systems
Discover how agentic AI is finally solving the billion-dollar crisis of aging legacy codebases like COBOL and FORTRAN.
#1222: The Rust Revolution: How AI is Rewriting the World
Discover how AI agents and the Rust "truth machine" are transforming legacy code into high-performance, memory-safe infrastructure.
#1177: The Race Against the Digital Dark Age
As vintage hardware goes extinct, archivists race to save film and tape from a "Digital Dark Age." Discover the engineering behind preservation.
#1052: Coding the Cosmos: The Hebrew Calendar vs. Unix Epoch
Discover why the Unix Epoch fails when it meets the Hebrew calendar and how developers solve the "Sunset Problem" in modern software.
#1048: The Keepers: How the Samaritans Outlasted Empires
Discover how a community of 950 people used ancient scripts and "survival engineering" to outlast empires for over two millennia.
#1016: The Immortal Airframe: Why 70-Year-Old Planes Still Fly
Explore how 70-year-old bombers and tankers stay flight-ready using digital twins, 3D printing, and cutting-edge structural engineering.
#968: Breaking the Air Gap: The Truth About Industrial Cyber War
Beyond the "hacker in a hoodie" myth, we explore how state actors breach air-gapped systems to sabotage critical physical infrastructure.
#920: Giving AI the Credit Card: The Rise of Agentic Payments
AI can plan your trip, but can it book it? Explore the new frameworks giving autonomous agents the power to spend money securely.
#849: Web 3.0 in Practice: Beyond the Hype to Hybrid Reality
Explore the shift from location to content-addressing as we dive into the real-world state of Web 3.0 and distributed systems in 2026.
#730: The Language of Chips: Decoding x86 vs. ARM
Why can’t you just "copy and paste" software between devices? Explore the hidden language of CPU architectures like x86 and ARM.
#729: Kernels and Cousins: The DNA of Modern Operating Systems
Why does Linux rule servers while Windows dominates the desktop? Explore the architectural DNA and kernel designs of the world's most popular OSs.
#527: Who’s Really Flying? The Evolution of Aircraft Controls
From steel cables to digital signals: Herman and Corn explore how flight controls evolved and why some modern jets still use 1960s technology.
#486: Ink and Power: The Hidden World of Diplomatic Letters
In an era of instant messaging, why do world leaders still rely on physical letters? Discover the secret art of high-stakes diplomacy.
#434: The Great Sunset: Why Your Old Tech is Going Dark
Why is your GPS tracker now a paperweight? Explore the global 2G/3G sunset and the rise of 5G's new "invisible infrastructure."
#425: The Arc of Deprecation: Why Old Tech Still Rules the World
Why do floppy disks and fax machines still power our most critical systems? Explore the surprising reasons behind the "arc of deprecation."