distributed computing

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

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

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.

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 short vintage film clip of Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on using computers to spark children's imagination and learning.

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

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.

James Houston's entry to Radiohead's Nude remix contest, performing the 6/8, 63bpm song on obsolete hardware such as hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner and a ZX Spectrum.

The original Amiga Boing Ball demo, written at the Winter CES in January 1984 to show off the Amiga's hardware, with a bouncing, spinning checkered ball running while the system multitasked. It became the Amiga's unofficial emblem.

Historian Doron Swade tells the story of Charles Babbage's quest to build the Difference Engine and the construction of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum. The talk covers Babbage's motivation, his machines and Ada Lovelace's insight into the Analytical Engine.

A 1971 DEC LAB-8/e (PDP-8/e) minicomputer plays music by inducing noise into a nearby AM radio. The software is Richard Wilson's 1975 Music Compiler running under OS/8.

A Talks at Google visit by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. He presents his lifelong aim of augmenting collective human intelligence, followed by a Q&A.

A one-minute demo at the Computer History Museum's IBM 1401 restoration lab, where a program makes the machine's radio-frequency interference play tunes on an AM radio.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

A short clip from the April 1984 Apple IIc rollout presentation at the Moscone Center, uploaded by Alfred DiBlasi. It argues the Apple II line funded the Macintosh's early years.

A 2008 CES demo of the original Microsoft Surface, a smart table with multi-touch interaction. It shows touch manipulation of photos and objects on a tabletop display.

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 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.