alan turing

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

A Computerphile video in which Mark Jago of the University of Nottingham explains Turing's halting problem and how it led to the blueprint for the modern computer.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas spends months in the virtual world Decentraland and delivers a long critique of the metaverse, NFTs and DAOs, and why virtual worlds fail as places.

Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.

A nine-minute excerpt from the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent in which Noam Chomsky summarizes how corporate media shapes public discourse.

A one-minute clip of Alan Kay giving his blunt critique of Linux and the Unix approach.

A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.

Alan Kay's 2009 UIUC talk arguing that computing is more a pop culture than a science and that ignoring history and fundamentals leads to inferior solutions. He touches on the history of interactive environments and what the web should have been.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.

Numberphile's Dr James Grime explains the flaw in the Enigma machine, namely that a letter could never be encrypted to itself, and how that helped the Allies break the code. It touches on the Bombe and Alan Turing.

Strange Parts tours JLCPCB's large PCB factory in Huizhou, China, walking through the printed circuit board manufacturing process step by step. It shows the machinery, quality checks and scale behind cheap prototype boards.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

Alan Kay visits Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science in 2007 for an informal conversation with faculty and students. He discusses the state of CS education and criticizes mainstream computing.

A short Last Week Tonight segment where John Oliver stages a statistically representative climate debate, with Bill Nye facing a crowd of dissenters. It satirizes false balance in media coverage.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

Alan Kay argues for rethinking how computer science is taught in schools, drawing on his work on object-oriented programming and GUIs. He discusses how poorly people understand complex systems and what education could do about it.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

Branch Education walks through a semiconductor fab and the dozens of steps used to turn silicon wafers into microchips, with 3D animation. It covers lithography, deposition and etching at a high level.

A 1936 Chevrolet promotional drama, 'Master Hands', showing car manufacturing from foundry to finished vehicle in Flint, Michigan. It is a National Film Registry selection and a record of early mass production.

A Remedy engineer explains how Alan Wake 2 moved to a GPU-driven rendering pipeline built on mesh shaders, culling and rendering meshlets for dense vegetation on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science builds a DIY microbalance from an analog panel meter with an optical servo loop. It reaches about 5 micrograms of precision and is used to weigh a single eyelash at around 35 micrograms.

A short clip of Alan Kay commenting on Edsger Dijkstra in a humorous, pointed way.

A short animated excerpt of Alan Watts describing 'prickles' (rigorous, scientific types) and 'goo' (soft, spiritual types). He argues the real division is between prickly goo and gooey prickles.

A short New Zealand Tourism ad in which comedian Rhys Darby appeals to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to solve why New Zealand keeps being left off world maps. It is a tongue-in-cheek take on a conspiracy theory.

A short excerpt from the 2007 iPhone launch where Steve Jobs quotes Alan Kay: people serious about software should make their own hardware. It explains part of why Apple built the phone itself.

Footage of the US Navy's Phalanx CIWS, a radar-guided 20 mm Gatling gun, firing in live target practice. The Phalanx serves as terminal defense against anti-ship missiles.

Destin Sandlin tours United Launch Alliance's rocket factory with CEO Tory Bruno, showing friction stir welding, structural rocket skins and large milled parts.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tours a Kodak factory to show how photographic film is manufactured. This is part one of a three-part series covering the large-scale coating and production process.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

Stanford Blitzscaling class session where Reid Hoffman interviews Eric Schmidt about structuring teams and scaling Google. Topics include Alphabet, hiring, and how Chrome and Android operated inside the company.

A demo of the Cubli, a 15 cm cube that uses reaction wheels to jump up onto a corner, balance there and fall in a controlled way to move. The video shows these three abilities chained into locomotion.