interface builder

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

A 1982 Xerox PARC film, presented at CHI '90, in which Star designers David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby give an overview of the Xerox Star interface. It shows the document-centric, icon-and-window office system.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.

A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.

A three-minute Emacs Rocks screencast demonstrating Magit, the Git interface inside Emacs, including staging and other everyday operations.

A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

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

A short Italian-language clip about the Canon Cat, a text-oriented personal computer from Canon designed by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. It shows the machine in use.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

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.

Matthaeus Krenn presents a concept for car touchscreen UI where the screen controls only one thing at a time, designed to suit driving. A tablet prototype accompanies the short demo.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.

A video tour of Magnasanti, a SimCity city built to hold six million residents, pushed to the absolute maximum and inspired by Kowloon Walled City.

Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

Scott Forstall demonstrates Siri on stage at Apple's October 2011 iPhone 4S event, showing the voice assistant handling natural requests like checking the weather and getting things done by asking.

A Computer History Museum recording of the final demonstration of the Xerox Star, the early graphical user interface workstation. It is a long demo session that shows the design thinking behind desktop, icons and windows.

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

The full recording of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, which introduced the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, word processing, and real-time collaborative editing. It runs about 100 minutes.

The Thought Emporium builds a homemade multi-electrode array, grows human neurons on it and attempts to take readings. It is the first part of a series aimed at connecting living neurons to a computer.

A demonstration of SymbOS, a multitasking operating system for 8-bit Z80 machines, running on a real MSX turboR with an MP3MSX card and a CF IDE interface. It shows the OS playing audio and running a graphical desktop on very old hardware, captured from the real machine and not an emulator.

Builder Matt Risinger freezes water-filled copper and PEX piping capped with SharkBite fittings to see which survives. The video compares how each pipe type handles freezing.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

A one-minute archive video of the 2Advanced Studios v2 website from 2001, a showcase of the elaborate futuristic Flash interfaces the agency was known for.

Ashley Feniello demonstrates VimSpeak, a voice-controlled interface for Vim inspired by Tavis Rudd's voice programming talk. The demo includes working through a VimGolf challenge by speech.

A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.

A silent demo of the ETH Lilith Modula-2 workstation running its Comdex demo program, captured from the Emulith emulator.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.