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Tech Tales is a podcast exploring the technology world's epic failures, forgotten successes, and everything in between. Hosted by Corbin Davenport. Made without generative AI.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Tech Tales makes technology history approachable by pairing researched context with lively conversation about the decisions, incentives, and cultural artifacts behind it.
Tech Tales reconstructs the decisions behind familiar technology, with Corbin Davenport supplying the history before opening the discussion to other voices.
Robot Lincoln on one tab, Tron on another: your curiosity has found its people.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A sharp, amused take on Tron Ares that pairs franchise history with pointed criticism and real affection for the visuals.
Tech Tales treats Tron Ares as part of a long franchise story, moving from the 1982 original to Tron Legacy and the sequel plans that never made it to production.
A funny, skeptical look at Silicon Valley mythmaking, with pirate analogies, quotable lines, and a good eye for the movie's oddball tone.
Tech Tales turns a 1999 TV movie into a brisk tour through Apple and Microsoft's origin-story mythology, and it keeps returning to how strange, funny, and oddly watchable that mythology is.
A strange internet-time episode becomes a lively tech history story.
Tech Tales turns Swatch's internet time and the Sputnik 99 satellite into a tidy, oddball product history. It moves from Swatch's 1983 origins and affordable early models to internet time's wider spread on CNN, Pioneer Electronics, smaller sites, and personal pages, with PHP…
A plainspoken look at the exploit that helped turn one bug into a global crisis.
Tech Tales treats WannaCry as a clear, grounded account of how a leaked Windows exploit and an older network protocol helped fuel a ransomware attack that spread across nearly 100 countries.
A robot Lincoln becomes a sharp look at how technology performs history in public.
Tech Tales turns a strange premise into a crisp technology story: a machine built to make Abraham Lincoln speak before an audience. Corbin Davenport and Mason Conrad start with their own uncertainty about Lincoln, then follow the idea toward Walt Disney's figure for the Illinois…
A relaxed Tron Legacy discussion is strongest when it follows Daft Punk's soundtrack through the sequel's long Disney path.
Tech Tales frames Tron Legacy as a Disney action movie with an unusually winding path, reaching back to 1982's Tron and the long gap before Disney seemed ready to take a sequel seriously after the original's cult status had settled in.
A clear, lively review of Apple's PowerPC-to-Intel shift and what it meant for Mac software.
Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel is framed here as more than a processor swap: it is a practical opening of the Mac to a broader software world.
A brisk AMP history that turns faster pages into a story about Google's control over visibility.
Google AMP is framed as a story of the mobile web getting heavier, more tangled, and then trying to correct for its own bloat. Corbin Davenport and Adam Conway follow that shift toward AMP's promise of faster loading, while keeping room for the practical irritation of building…
Apple details, software habits, and everyday technical friction.
Jason Snell and Myke Hurley debate Apple's product roadmap, leadership, and rumors weekly.
Apple decisions, examined down to the window corner.
Tech Tales’ “Microsoft Kin” follows Jay Allard’s Project Pink from its pre-2008 start through the April 12, 2010 reveal of a Verizon-exclusive phone built around Kin Loop, Kin Studio, and the Spot sharing button.
Tech Tales opens Tron Ares with a blunt question about whether anyone could last 29 minutes against Jared Leto for a million dollars, then frames the 2025 movie as a sequel to Tron Legacy rather than a fresh start.
Tech Tales's Movie Club episode on Pirates of Silicon Valley opens with the film's Apple BASIC contract line and identifies the movie as a TNT TV premiere from June 20, 1999.
Tech Tales' Corbin Davenport and Cody Toombs trace Swatch's 1998 internet time, a system that split each day into 1,000 beats, fixed noon at 500, and ignored time zones and daylight saving time.
Tech Tales' "WannaCry" traces the May 12, 2017 ransomware outbreak back to EternalBlue, the Windows exploit Shadow Brokers leaked on April 14, 2017 and Microsoft patched on March 14, 2017.
Tech Tales hosts Corbin Davenport and Mason Conrad trace Walt Disney’s development of a lifelike Abraham Lincoln audio animatronic for the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair.
Tech Tales hosts Corbin Davenport, Joe Fidua, and Zachary Wander examine Disney’s 2010 film Tron Legacy, from its development after the 1982 original to its digital effects and Grid design.
Tech Tales hosts Corbin Davenport and Cody Toombs trace Apple's move from the PowerPC architecture, created with Motorola and IBM in 1991, to Intel processors announced at WWDC 2005.
Tech Tales hosts Corbin Davenport and Adam Conway trace Google AMP from its October 2015 launch as a faster mobile-web framework to its later decline.
This episode explores the history of the General Motors EV-1, one of the first mainstream electric cars, and the context of air quality regulations.
Corbin and Cody recap the history of Apple's failed Copeland OS and the road to acquiring NeXTSTEP for Mac OS X.
Corbin and Cody discuss the second part of Apple's long journey to develop OS X, starting from a 1988 project to create a new Mac OS from scratch.
This episode discusses the history and failure of Intel's Itanium processor architecture, starting with HP's PA RISC in 1986.