interfaces

Lex Fridman interviews Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and previously Braintree, about brain-computer interfaces and Kernel's non-invasive brain monitoring hardware. It covers what the devices can do today and the company's plans.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

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 compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

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.

A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

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.

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.

The opening episode of Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics series, in which he casts doubt on conventional accounts of computer basics. He argues that conventions and packaging are mistaken for technology.

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.

Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer formerly at Apple and Google, argues that the 'UX/UI' split pits programmers against designers and narrows ambition in open source. He makes the case that desktop UX has stagnated and that open source projects could lead experimentation beyond current interaction models.

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.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

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

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

Bret Victor's 2013 MIT Media Lab talk argues that the media we think with determine which thoughts are possible. He demos new representations for scientific papers, circuits, filters and signal processing.

Accursed Farms' hour-plus critique of the modern desktop GUI. It argues that current interfaces are a regression from older designs such as Windows 7 and proposes principles for better ones.

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.

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 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 one-minute clip of the Jurassic Park scene where a girl navigates the FSN 3D file manager on an SGI system and declares it a Unix system.

A Community clip in which Dean Pelton explores a virtual reality environment, including a blooper moment.

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.

An episode of the BSD Now podcast in which Bryan Cantrill joins the hosts to rant about Linux interfaces, alongside the week's BSD headlines. The conversation also touches on containers and related systems topics.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

Gary Wilson's TEDxGlasgow talk argues that internet pornography hyperstimulates the brain's reward system and can cause symptoms that reverse when people stop. TED notes that several claims are not supported by respected academic studies.

Andrew Huberman's long Huberman Lab episode is a masterclass on dopamine. It covers the neural circuits, peaks and baselines, dopamine depletion, and 14 tools for motivation, focus and avoiding addiction.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

A Google Tech Talk by sleep researcher Dr. William Dement on healthy sleep and performance. He argues sleep debt must be repaid and describes the three characteristics of healthy sleep.

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.