Tim Harford

speaker

636 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 5d ago

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Talent, Time and Money: The Curse of General Magic · 11 Sep 2026 podcast

This was available in the Magic Links game room.

Anytime you wanted to toss a coin, you'd just click over to the game room on the touchscreen.

It might take a second to render all the graphics on this 1994 microprocessor.

There we are.

Now just click on the coin.

Wait a second.

Second more.

There we are.

Tails.

Wasn't that fun?

Wasn't that whimsical?

The coin flip, by the way, was programmed by General Magic's co-founder Andy Hertzfeld, one of the greatest software engineers ever born, and a man who at that moment clearly felt that he had all the time in the world.

Speaking of all the time in the world, the calendar function is a story in itself.

It originally ran from 1904 to 2096.

It was just a few lines of code.

But what if someone writes a historical app that needs to go further back in time?

So the calendar was reprogrammed to go all the way back to year one, and much further forward too.

Then it was realised that human history is longer than that.

The calendar was reprogrammed again to go back to the beginning of astronomical time.

That sort of time-wasting, gold-plated feature creep is how to make a product that's late and expensive and somehow, despite being full of delightful little Easter eggs, doesn't really deliver on the basic promise of being useful.

Showing 541–560 of 636 · page 28 of 32