Episode Notes * American museum of natural history in Manhattan * Ham radio operators * QST magazines * Vacuum tube * IBM 650/620 computers * Joel Moses at Columbia * Drum memory * Biquinary encoding * IBM 709 Vacuum tubes computer * Marvin Minsky * Claude Shannon * IPL V interpreter by Carnegie Mellon * Bill Gosper * Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual * PDP-6 * MacLisp * Macsyma, symbolic manipulation software * Compacting garbage collector by Minsky * Massachusetts watchmakers association * George Daniels and the co-axial escapement * Analog circuit design * Synthetic Biology making creatures "to order". * Tom Knight synthetic biologist and former student * Formal specification of software