analog computing

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

Ben Heck modifies a keyboard with magnets, Hall effect sensors and an Xbox controller so the WASD keys give analog control. He walks through the hardware build.

A 1953 US Navy training film on the basic mechanisms in fire control computers: shafts, gears, cams and differentials. It shows how these mechanical parts compute ship and target firing solutions.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

Technology Connections shows a cheap method for capturing analog video: a composite-to-HDMI upscaler feeding an HDMI capture dongle, aimed at digitizing home movies and VHS tapes.

Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

A short demonstration of the MONIAC, Bill Phillips' hydro-mechanical economic computer, at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand museum. It shows how water flows model an economy's money flows.

CuriousMarc runs the program 'Edith' on a 1959 IBM 1401 mainframe at the Computer History Museum. The program prints a famous line-printer image on the vintage machine. The video is part retro-computing demo and part joke.

A short Google video introducing the Quantum AI Lab, a partnership between Google, NASA, USRA and a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer. It covers the lab's early goals and some potential applications of quantum computing.

The opening episode of Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics series, in which he casts doubt on conventional accounts of computer basics. He argues that conventions and packaging are mistaken for technology.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

PBS Infinite Series explains how Shor's algorithm lets a quantum computer break RSA encryption, building on earlier episodes about cryptography and the math of quantum computers. It works through the idea step by step.

Dave Ackley presents robust-first computing and the ULAM programming language for the Movable Feast Machine, a cellular-automata-like architecture. It was a short video for the Future Programming Workshop 2015.

A demonstration of SymbOS, a multitasking operating system for 8-bit Z80 machines, running on a real MSX turboR with an MP3MSX card and a CF IDE interface. It shows the OS playing audio and running a graphical desktop on very old hardware, captured from the real machine and not an emulator.

LGR looks at the 1988 Canon Xap Shot, a still video camera that records photos to a floppy disk as analog NTSC signal rather than digital data.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

A documentary by Stuart Brown (XboxAhoy) on the history of first-person shooters on the Amiga and how Doom's arrival affected the platform.

A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.

A short Art of the Problem clip explaining Diffie-Hellman key exchange, using a paint mixing analogy for one-way functions and touching on modular arithmetic and discrete logarithms.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

Freespin is a demo that runs on a Commodore 1541 floppy drive. It makes sound by vibrating the drive head and video by toggling the serial bus lines, and it keeps running after the C64 that booted it is disconnected.

A short video of the first TRON Smart House, built in 1989 as a demonstration of ubiquitous and ambient computing in the home. It comes from the uID Center, which promoted the TRON architecture.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

Technology Connections follows up on his analog TV video to clear up the debate over whether CRT phosphor dots are pixels. He explains the shadow mask, color triads and how they relate to the scanned picture.

Ted Nelson, in his Computers for Cynics series, gives a critical history of Xerox PARC's vision of personal computing. He lists what he sees as the limitations and wrong turns in PARC's approach to the desktop and documents.

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.

Microsoft's 2015 concept video imagining how ubiquitous computing, collaboration services and data analytics might change work 5-10 years later.

A short demo reel of the 1985 Silicon Graphics IRIS 2400 workstation animating flat-shaded polygons on a 68010 CPU. It shows the early SGI graphics that preceded their later fame.

Highlights from Doug Engelbart's December 1968 demonstration at SRI, the first public showing of the mouse, hypertext, windows, real-time collaborative editing and shared-screen teleconferencing. This is a roughly six-minute condensed version of the full demo.

A pieced-together clip of the Agent Smith interrogation scene from The Matrix (1999), where Smith delivers his monologue about humanity.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) presents a deliberately trollish computer architecture built on IEEE-754 floating point, using NaN and infinity to define logic gates. He builds working hardware around the idea.

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.