Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod.

In honor of Will's birthday, this week we traveled back to the heady days of 1975 to see what was big in science and tech in the year of his birth. Our impromptu retrospective features everything from the Altair 8800 to Space Mountain, the Homebrew Computer Club, the Apollo/Soyuz handshake in space, Benoit Mandelbrot, Jaws, Betamax, and a little history-making company from Bill Gates and Paul Allen called... wait, does this say Traf-O-Data? Operating an Altair 8800 is not for the faint of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_6DtwmQXs [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh_6DtwmQXs] Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon [https://patreon.com/techpod] and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod [https://patreon.com/techpod]

Very special guest Vinny Caravella joins us this week for a wide-ranging chat about his years of video production, juggling cameras in the early days of Whiskey Media, a love letter to analog signals, the infamous List of Terminated HDMI Adopters, a consideration of codecs and protocols past and present, and more. From logging tapes to crimping SDI cables, there's a lot in here! These HDMI adopters have been... terminated: https://www.hdmi.org/adopter/terminated [https://www.hdmi.org/adopter/terminated] Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon [https://patreon.com/techpod] and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod [https://patreon.com/techpod]

Six-ish months since launch, the next-gen consoles are now officially current-gen, so we thought it was time for a check-in on the state of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X platforms. How has the user experience matured so far? What system software issues are still lingering? When will games start shipping at 30Hz? Will they ever be easy to actually buy? These questions and more, discussed! Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon [https://patreon.com/techpod] and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod [https://patreon.com/techpod]

Email time! In this month's Q&A, we talk about Spring cleaning and strategies for organizing electronics with limited storage space, overusing ellipses and other Internet chat habits, long-lost Usenet posts, the great turn-of-the-century capacitor calamity, a mea culpa and backgrounder on the McDonald's coffee lawsuit, and more. Check out Gretchen McCulloch's linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm, referenced on this episode: https://gretchenmcculloch.com/podcast/ [https://gretchenmcculloch.com/podcast/] Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon [https://patreon.com/techpod] and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod [https://patreon.com/techpod]

Kishore Hari--Tested.com correspondent, noted science communicator, and steak-product connoisseur--rejoins us for a check-in on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic one year after his first appearance. Topics include where we're at with vaccination rates and efficacy, outreach efforts to combat vaccine skepticism, the pause on the Johnson & Johnson shot, how IP ownership is hindering vaccination in the Global South, what a new "normal" might look like, and... what's this feeling? Is that... optimism? * CDC COVID Data Tracker [https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions] * NYT Article About Kati Kariko [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html] Support the Pod! Contribute to the Tech Pod Patreon [https://patreon.com/techpod] and get access to our booming Discord, your name in the credits, and other great benefits! You can support the show at: https://patreon.com/techpod [https://patreon.com/techpod]