fire control computer

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

Jon Stewart appears as a guest on CNN's Crossfire in 2004 and criticizes hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for turning political debate into partisan theater that hurts America.

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.

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 Little Britain sketch featuring the 'Computer says no' catchphrase, in which a clerk refuses requests by deferring to her computer.

A clip of Frank Zappa appearing on CNN's Crossfire in 1986, debating censorship and copyright. Zappa argues his position against record labeling and content restrictions.

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.

The official music video for Firestarter by The Prodigy, the 1990s electronic hit featuring Keith Flint.

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 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 short 2009 amateur video showing an HP MediaSmart webcam whose face tracking follows a white face but fails to track a black face. The uploader presents it as humorous.

The Computer History Museum's 25th anniversary celebration of the Commodore 64, recorded in December 2007, with a panel including Jack Tramiel and Steve Wozniak. It recounts the machine's launch and history.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

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.

A short clip from the film Idiocracy showing a hospital reception computer where staff pick a condition from a board of simple pictorial buttons.

The official music video for Billy Joel's 1989 song We Didn't Start the Fire, a rapid-fire list of historical events.

A WiebeTech marketing demo of HotPlug, a device that moves a running computer onto battery or another power source so it can be transported without shutting down.

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.

A three-minute demo of ProFORMA, a system from Cambridge that builds textured 3D models live from a video of an object.

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.

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.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

Short US Missile Defense Agency footage of the December 2008 free-flight hover test of Lockheed Martin's Multiple Kill Vehicle. The test showed it hovering for 20 seconds while tracking a simulated target.

'Pipe Dream' is the best-known piece from the first Animusic DVD, a computer-animated music video in which fantastical machines play music. The animation is driven by MIDI data.

John Chowning's 1977 computer music piece Stria, composed with FM synthesis, which he discovered in 1967. It unifies timbre and scale structure around the Golden Mean.

Air traffic audio of a pilot slurring and incoherent while declaring an emergency due to extreme hypoxia, with controllers at Cleveland Center struggling to understand him.

Kraftwerk's 'Pocket Calculator' from the album Computer World, a synth-pop track built around a handheld calculator as an instrument.

A one-minute clip from Barack Obama's 2008 Google visit in which Eric Schmidt asks him the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama answers that bubble sort would be the wrong choice.

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 2007 Computer History Museum conversation in which Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang interviews TSMC founder Morris Chang. Chang recounts his career and the creation of the dedicated silicon foundry model.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of Linux in a 2001 talk at the Computer History Museum, from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon of open source. It covers the project's origins, its growth, and his views on licensing and kernel design.

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

Amateur footage of a Thomsonfly 757 ingesting a bird on takeoff from Manchester, with a flaming engine and a safe return, with 233 people aboard.

A fan-made video of the Simpsons Stonecutters Song, in which a secret society takes credit for controlling world affairs, with lyrics and stills from the show.

A 1957 Walt Disney film in which he explains and demonstrates the multiplane camera, the animation tool that gave 2D films depth. It is a short behind-the-scenes piece from Disney's archives.

An IIHS crash test pitting a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Malibu in a frontal offset collision for the institute's 50th anniversary. The old car's occupant space collapses while the modern car's protects its driver.