BBC Radio Podcasts from Codes that Changed the World

The Tower of Babel

Aleks Krotoski explores how today's digital world is a reverse Tower of Babel.

Java

The language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other.

Basic

As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, Basic became iconic.

Cobol

Deeply unpopular, but 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in it. Why?

Fortran

Aleks Krotoski explores the language that helped put men on the moon and harness the atom.