dot-com

A 1968 Firing Line interview in which Milton Friedman explains the negative income tax, a proposal to replace welfare bureaucracy with direct payments.

A short clip of Stephen Fry explaining the differences between American and British comedy. He attributes them to cultural attitudes such as optimism versus pessimism.

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.

Robert Scoble interviews Paul Graham at Y Combinator's Mountain View headquarters as 36 new startups debut. They discuss what YC is, and Graham's no-assholes rule.

A fireside chat at LAUNCH Festival 2014 where Paul Graham tells Jason Calacanis why he is handing Y Combinator's presidency to Sam Altman. He also shares startup advice drawn from nine years and 500+ startups.

A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.

Lex Fridman interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang and Swift, about compilers, Swift for TensorFlow, TPUs and ML accelerators. The talk covers how hardware and software meet to produce efficient code.

A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

Second half of a 2017 Computer History Museum live event in which former Apple software chief Scott Forstall is interviewed by John Markoff about creating the original iPhone. He tells stories about Steve Jobs and the team and the origins of the iPhone software.

Brian Kernighan explains how grep came to be, written overnight by Ken Thompson, and how it got its name from the ed command g/re/p. He also covers the lineage from QED to ed that led to it.

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.

Part two of EEVblog's visit to the NASA/CSIRO Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, showing the control room and how operators contact Voyager 2. It includes live data and spectrum displays.

Brian Kernighan interviews Unix co-creator Ken Thompson at VCF East 2019. Thompson recounts how he was hired at Bell Labs, writing the Unix kernel in about three weeks, the origins of B and TMG, pipes, and other anecdotes.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

A roughly three-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview of Donald Knuth by Edward Feigenbaum, recorded in 2007. Knuth covers his family, music, early programming, his thesis, The Art of Computer Programming, and the detour into TeX and METAFONT.

A Startup School 2013 session where Paul Graham and Sam Altman hold live office hours with startups including CodeCombat, Flexport and others. The founders pitch and get on-the-spot feedback.

The Centre for Computing History reunites Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser to rewatch the BBC drama Micro Men on its tenth anniversary. They reminisce about Acorn and the early British home computer era.

Grady Booch interviews John Backus, who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN in 1957, for the Computer History Museum in 2006. Backus describes the development of the first successful high-level language and its compiler. The interview runs 88 minutes.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Bill Mensch, designer of the 6502 and 65816, covering his path from a Pennsylvania farm through Motorola and later work.

A Computer History Museum interview in which John Markoff of the New York Times talks with Douglas Engelbart about his life and research. It covers the influences and struggles behind his work on the mouse, hypertext and collaborative computing, and his aim of helping humanity tackle complex problems.

A BBC Politics Live interview in which Andrew Neil presses conservative commentator Ben Shapiro on his past statements and an incident involving Corey Lewandowski and a reporter. It is a tense, widely shared exchange.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

In a New York Times interview, Jerry Seinfeld describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

A 20-minute Y Combinator interview in which Sam Altman asks Elon Musk how to build the future. Topics include which problems a 22-year-old should work on, such as AI, genetics, and brain interfaces, and general advice for founders.

Part two of a Computer History Museum oral history with Gary Davidian, covering his work on the 68000 emulator for PowerPC at Apple, Power Computing, clean-room contracting and later performance optimization work. It is nearly three hours long.

Y Combinator's Geoff Ralston interviews Paul Graham about startups and founders in a Startup School conversation. It touches on Viaweb, Robert Morris and what makes founders effective.

YC partner Michael Seibel discusses his essay on real product-market fit, why founders wrongly believe they have it, and how building a company is not a single-variable problem, drawing on Justin.tv and Socialcam.

All six episodes of the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine, in which Richard Feynman muses on jiggling atoms, fire, rubber bands, magnets, electricity and more. He explains how to think about nature and why imagination is fun.

A three-minute excerpt of a Steve Jobs interview in which he describes how monopolies let sales and marketing people displace product people, rotting a company's product sensibility, with Xerox as the example.

Jordan Peterson's roughly 50-minute interview with James Damore, the fired Google engineer, going through his diversity memo nearly line by line. The description links the scientific literature behind the claims.

A short clip of Steve Jobs explaining how sales and marketing people take over mature companies from product people, leading to product decline.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian responds in a short interview to Anderson Cooper's on-air criticism of Reddit over child exploitation content.

A short clip in which Carl Icahn tells the story of his first activist investment and of firing 12 floors of people, arguing activism need not be short term.

A one-minute clip from the All Things D conference in which Steve Jobs says Apple is fundamentally a software company, with iPod, Mac and iPhone all being software. He says the hardware is where the money is but the value is in the software.

A fireside chat at TNW Conference where Reddit CEO Steve Huffman discusses Reddit's growth, user engagement and monetisation plans.

A Computer History Museum oral history interview with Dave Cutler, covering his youth, early work on operating systems at DuPont and Digital Equipment, and his path toward VMS and Windows NT. This is part one of a long-form interview.

A two-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, conducted by Paul McJones in 2015. It covers his youth, education at Aarhus and Cambridge, his career at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and the design and evolution of C++.