Audio recording

Dave says::

This is an old-style Morning Coffee Notes, the kind we did before we were doing audio blog posts, before they were called podcasts, back when we couldn't find any software to record our voices (seriously, PCs came with microphones, but search high and lo, hither and yon, there was no software to actually use the microphones in a most basic way).

Dave, you should have asked, instead of searching. Here's some free code to record audio using QuickTime from any Windows device. The code dates back to 1992, and was working on Windows in 1997.
This is what AOL use to do the Audio/Video chat in the latest AIM releases (that iteroperates with iChat).