computing history

Bill Wurtz's fast, comedic and musical run through the whole history of Japan in nine minutes.

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.

An Epic Rap Battles of History episode in which Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking trade rap verses. It is a popular comedic music video.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that political motives, including Nixon's, lay behind making marijuana illegal. It mixes comedy with history.

Penn and Teller help Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs play a prank on Nobel-winning physicist Arno Penzias. The clip shows the gag and its setup.

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

An episode of REACT in which children try to figure out 1970s-1980s computers, including an Apple II and floppy disks. It was made to promote the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire.

A one-minute 1986 promo of Microsoft Windows 1.0 presented by Steve Ballmer, with a hyperbolic price pitch ending in the tag line about Nebraska.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment claiming that jaywalking became a crime through campaigns by the auto industry. It is a short, comedic history of how streets were reclaimed for cars.

A 2012 Onion News Network satire in which HP announces a push into cloud computing and insists it knows what the cloud is.

A comedy segment where Eddie Izzard travels to Friesland to try speaking Old English, claiming English originated in Holland and buying a cow to prove it.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that US cannabis prohibition grew out of racially and politically motivated agendas under Nixon and earlier, rather than scientific evidence.

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

A short clip of Steve Ballmer's famous sweaty chant of the word Developers, repeated over and over.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

A roughly one-minute TV clip in which a guest accidentally breaks a rare, one-of-a-kind wax cylinder recording on camera.

Norm Macdonald's 2015 appearance on Letterman's final Late Show, delivering a deadpan bit about Germany and its military history. Jerry Seinfeld reportedly called it Norm's best joke.