Four TidBITS 30th Anniversary Podcasts

Perhaps my favorite part of big TidBITS anniversaries is that they’re great excuses to venture down memory lane and dredge out the best stories from the early days of TidBITS. Our recent 30th anniversary resulted in a slew of podcast invitations, all of which were tremendous fun. If you’ve got some time on your hands (and let’s face it, many people do right now) and want to relive some of the early days of the Mac world, I’d encourage you to give them a listen. There are surprisingly few overlaps in content.

• MacBreak Weekly: I always enjoy my sporadic virtual visits to the set of Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly, and this show with Leo, Rene Ritchie, and my old friend and birthday buddy Andy Ihnatko was even more fun than usual. It’s the least focused on the TidBITS anniversary since MacBreak Weekly has so much other news to talk about, but there was still time to talk about content from our first issue, including the After Dark screensaver, the Outbound Macintosh portable, and refilling DeskWriter ink cartridges.
• The Talk Show: This was my first time as a guest on John Gruber’s podcast, and while it clocks in at almost 2 hours of talking, I tremendously enjoyed trading stories about the early days of the Mac and TidBITS with John. If you’ve been using the Mac since the late 1980s or early 1990s, try to find the time to listen to this conversation. We got into so many wonderful details about an era that was, as it turns out, more special than any of us could have realized then.
• Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite: Allison Sheridan and I have traveled in roughly similar circles for many years, but it wasn’t until we found ourselves sitting next to each other at last year’s MacTech Conference that we got a chance to connect for real. While this podcast discussion starts at the founding of TidBITS, it then ranges widely, touching on topics like my current favorite Apple hardware, problems with Apple’s annual operating system update schedule, and why I pay no attention to rumors anymore.
• MacVoices (Part 1 and Part 2): Chuck Joiner and I have been recording podcasts for many years, and I take inordinate pleasure in saying things to get a rise out of Chuck since his on-air persona is always so measured. We ended up talking about the publication Tonya and I worked on at Cornell when we were undergrads, how we’ve guaranteed that all TidBITS article links from the past continue to work, and why email is the cockroach of Internet technologies, among much else.

I hope you like listening to these conversations as much as I enjoyed having them. For others out there in the podcast world, I’m happy to chat, particularly if we can uncover stories or topics that have long been buried by the avalanche of time.