Kopec Explains Software

Grace Hopper is one of the most iconic people in the world of software. Her career as a mathematician, software innovator, computer science advocate, programmer, and technical leader spanned the early era of computing...

The creation of BASIC was one of the most important steps in the democratization of computing. BASIC, coupled with the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, was developed by math professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz along...

Many large sophisticated machine learning models, like those employed in generative AI, are trained on immense amounts of copyrighted images or text. How is that legal? In this episode we delve into the exceptions to...

In 2020 the Trump administration and eleven state attorney generals initiated an antitrust lawsuit against Google for its alleged anti-competitive behaviors in the search engine market. Last month, the lawsuit went to...

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. But where does all of the revenue come from to support that? In this episode we analyze Alphabet's third...

In this episode, originally published in 2020, we discuss the similarities and differences between iOS and Android. We delve into their history, business models, developer ecosystems, and user experiences. Does it...

In software, a sandbox is an isolated environment that limits the resources that a particular application can access. Sandboxes are used to protect the security and privacy of the user. All Web apps and much consumer...

We explain what caches are, and where they're typically used. We can think of a cache as a piece of temporary fast memory used for the retrieval of pre-computed expensive calculations or high latency resources. Caches...

Hash tables are some of the most widely used and powerful data structures. They allow for the efficient storage of key-value pairs. Keys are identifiers that we want to lookup data by, while values are the actual data...

Understanding open source licenses is critical if you're a software developer. What are your rights and responsibilities when you incorporate an open source library in your program? In this episode we explain why we...

Shareware was a major distribution model for consumer software and games from the 1980s through to the 2000s. We’re privileged to be joined on the show by journalist and tech historian Richard Moss, the author of...

We’re out this week, so we remastered a classic episode from 2020. It’s our third episode—a layperson’s introduction to bytes! Original description below: What is a Byte? In this episode we go down to the fundamentals...

FreeBSD is probably the most popular operating system that most people have never heard of. Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, FreeBSD is a performant, secure, Unix-like operating system with many advanced...

There are many misconceptions about open source software, even amongst those who think they understand it. In this episode we dispel five of the most common myths about open source software: Open Source Software is...

ChatGPT and other tools based on large language models (LLMs) have taken the software world by storm. While their capabilities are incredible, they have also sparked a lot of fear, doubt, and hyperbole. In this episode...