I have not been listening to them in the past but stumbled upon this episode "Multicast and the Markets" and I feel this has a lot of stuff about hardware and network than the software. Highly recommend to check it out.
You are probably right, wrong recollection then, or it might've been an episode where some time was spent on talking about other important points - culture, life, etc.
Podcasts (not only this one) have evolved a lot! (another fav of mine is "Go Time" and many others).
There was a good one about NTP and microsecond precision that had programming but was more a discussion of how hard time is to get right at great precision.