Josh Bressers
49 episodes listed below
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Hacker History: Explore where it all began, interviews with retro hackers, the pioneers and forefathers of yesteryear. The true old school hackers amongst our societies have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We will dive into fascinating stories that made hacker history.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Personal hacker histories make technical change legible through the machines, jobs, communities, and improvised paths that shaped it.
Hacker History Podcast lets hackers explain how they found their way into computing, security work, and the communities built around both. Josh Bressers guides each conversation through a guest's personal chronology, with brief questions that keep the account moving without…
Josh Bressers hears how Slashdot began when JPEG support was a marvel; your browser nostalgia has company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A freestyle rap story about practice, repetition, and flow.
Thugshells reads as a Canadian freestyle rapper and DJ who treats rap like something you can practice into shape. The conversation stays on the work: repetition, setup-and-punchline drills, cutting filler, and the frustration that sits next to progress.
An engaging IoT Village conversation that turns playful hacks into a clear lesson about attack surfaces.
Laura Scherling, Ben Schmerler, and Rachel Tubbs turn IoT Village into a grounded look at connected devices and the security risks they carry.
A chemist's shift into security unfolds as a grounded career story shaped by SOC work, visual analysis, and cyber threat research.
This story follows a chemist who moves into security after one software tweak makes it clear that behavior can be changed on purpose. From there, it tracks a route through SOC shifts, anomaly spotting, graph-based analysis, and later cyber threat research.
A scrappy hacker origin story that turns dumpster runs and SOC shifts into a single, grounded arc.
Wade Wells's story reads like a scrappy origin tale from the margins: a trailer park upbringing, dumpster diving with his dad, and early improvisation that makes hardware feel more like salvage than gear.
A hacker story built from theaters, libraries, and the people who taught him the work.
Cyberpunk Librarian is really more about the job path behind the persona than about hacking in any technical sense. The episode works best when it stays with that drift through theater shifts, live concerts, library pages, and the people who showed him how the place actually…
A loose, vivid security-history conversation that makes old exploit battles feel immediate.
H.D. Moore's story works as a scrappy origin tale: boredom, long walks to school, dumpster-dived electronics, and the stubborn drive to turn spare parts into a working computer.
A hacker origin story that starts on a Sinclair ZX81 and ends in a hard-edged political turn.
The Gibson's story begins on a Sinclair ZX81, with BASIC at age five and a family TV doing the work of a screen. That opening gives the episode its best momentum: small, specific, and rooted in real hardware.
A brisk oral history of Slashdot, early web weirdness, and the browser fight.
Rob Malda's story has the feel of an internet attic: tables passed for design, JPEG support felt exotic, and cookies still needed explaining. The strongest stretch follows Slashdot's early polling experiments into the Netscape browser fight, where Malda describes how one public…
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Josh Bressers introduces Thugshells, a Canadian freestyle rapper and DJ who says his hacker story is really about hacking his own brain.
Josh Bressers opens the mic with H.D.
Josh Bressers talks with Gibson about a hacker life that starts very early.
Paul Asadorian traces his hacker story back to learning to program at seven.
Josh Bressers hosts the conversation.
Josh Bressers opens the conversation by asking Mark Borstein for his hacker story, and Mark goes back to the original Doom shareware, where the first instinct was not just to play but to poke at the software.
Josh Bressers sits down with Wade Wells, a board member of B-Side San Diego, to trace a hacker path that starts in Southern California and runs through junkyards, service trucks, and a trailer park upbringing.
Josh Bressers welcomes Emily Fox, also known online as Moxie Fox.
Josh Bressers talks with Indra Karasek, whose hacker story starts in university chemistry work.
An interview with a hacker who recounts his early childhood memories of electronics repair and his father's work in cybernetics in East Germany.
An interview with David Bernstein about his hacker story, from EMT to cybersecurity incident management.
Cyberpunk Librarian starts by saying he does not fit the modern hacker mold.
Rob walks through the origins of Slashdot and the awkward technical limits of the early web.
Dana Morrison shares his hacker origin story on the Hacker History podcast, from getting a Commodore 64 in 1983 as a preacher's kid to building war dialers, hacking a school BBS with fake FBI social engineering, and eventually becoming a school IT coordinator.
Josh Bressers opens with one question, and Johnny Xmas answers by reaching back into childhood.
Host Josh Bressers opens with Pyro's pitch for SaltCon, a history-of-hacking conference at Carolina Beach, North Carolina, running May 30 to June 2 with 14 main-stage slots and a 300-person cap.
Host Josh Bressers interviews Kyle Rankin about how he accidentally got into tech publishing through his involvement with a Linux users group.
An interview with a retro hacker about his early computing experiences in the 1980s.
Host Josh Bressers interviews Harish Pillay about his early childhood experiences that sparked his hacker curiosity.
An interview with a hacker about his origin story, starting with childhood curiosity and hex editing shareware games.
An interview with retro hacker Lars Varzinius about his early experiences with computers in 1980s Finland.
An interview with Bill Degnan about his early career as an ice cream man turned IBM intern during the launch of the AS400, PS2, and OS2.
An interview with a retro hacker about his early experiences with computers and hacking in the 1980s.