computing history

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

A Stanford EE380 seminar by Michael P. Frank of Sandia National Laboratories on generalized reversible computing. It surveys unconventional computing approaches as transistor scaling nears its limits and energy efficiency stops improving.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

Part one of Capt. Grace Hopper's 1982 NSA lecture on the future of data, hardware, software and people. It includes her humor, her nanosecond demonstration and views on scaling and resisting old ways of doing things.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

Dan Britt lectures on the history of climate, covering orbital cycles, ice ages and conditions millions of years ago. It frames current climate debate with deep-time context.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

Sean Carroll gives a Royal Institution talk tracing the history of quantum mechanics from Einstein and Bohr to today. He covers the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds interpretation.

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.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

A Bell Labs film in which Dr. J.N. Shive uses a mechanical wave machine to demonstrate reflection, standing waves, resonance and impedance matching. He includes some equations but relies mostly on real-world examples a layperson can follow.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy introduces his series on Michael Faraday's lectures on The Chemical History of a Candle. He describes the free companion book and the commentary and caption features that help modern viewers.

An ESOTERICA episode tracing Yahweh from a warrior-storm god near Mt Seir to the god of the Israelites in the Judean highlands. It examines how Yahwism absorbed and contended with Canaanite religion.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

The first class of Timothy Snyder's Yale course on the making of modern Ukraine. It introduces the course and asks what it means for a nation to exist in light of the Russian invasion.

Simon Peyton Jones gives Churchill College's annual computer science lecture on Haskell's birth and evolution. He covers the most influential ideas, from laziness to monads and type system evolution, plus current developments and guesses about the future.

A detailed 40-minute explanation of the ultraviolet catastrophe, covering Rayleigh and Jeans' classical treatment of blackbody radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. It follows the Eisberg and Resnick textbook treatment.

A December 2005 guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard's CS50, discussing Facebook's early days, its technical choices and computer science. It captures him as a 21-year-old founder before Facebook's rise.

A long Mill Computing lecture on the Mill CPU's compiler toolchain, covering the specializer that targets family members, scheduling and latency passes, and the belt. It explains how the compiler handles a wide-issue, exposed-pipeline design.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

A 2018 lecture, with subtitles available, by former Finnish intelligence colonel Martti J. Kari on Russian strategic culture. He walks through the historical layers of Russia and explains why the country behaves as it does.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

Archaeologist Eric Cline lectures on the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1177 BC, when interconnected Mediterranean empires fell in rapid succession. He discusses the Sea Peoples and the combined causes of the collapse.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

A 78-minute Richard Feynman lecture of anecdotes about working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, followed by about ten minutes of audience Q&A in which he tells three safe-cracking stories.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

Hillsdale historian Burt Folsom lectures at a 2011 seminar on the 'robber barons' of the Gilded Age. He argues that figures like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller were market entrepreneurs rather than monopolists.

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.

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker gives the 2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture at Illinois. He discusses the gap between academic research and industry problems, publishing incentives, and the influence of large industry users on research.

The first episode of John Vervaeke's lecture series on the modern meaning crisis, tracing its history through philosophy, cognitive science, religion and psychology. It introduces the series and its themes.