interfaces

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

Eric Bier, a PARC research scientist, demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language, an evolution of Mesa from Xerox PARC. The demo shows the Tioga editor, garbage collection, and a full graphical workstation environment.

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

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

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 excerpt from Werner Herzog's film Lo and Behold in which Ted Nelson lays out his ideas about hypertext and interconnection. Herzog concludes that Nelson is the only sane person in computing.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

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.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

A 1990 Lotus sales demo of Improv, a spreadsheet built for the NeXT computer that rethought the grid with named categories and multiple views. The uploader, who tested it at Price Waterhouse, presents it as an early, innovative vision of the spreadsheet.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

Bret Victor's talk "Inventing on Principle" argues that creators should find a guiding principle to fight for. He shows demos of immediate-feedback tools, such as live-updating code and animation editors.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.

A dialogue with Gary Weber on the default mode network, meditation and non-dual awakening, with discussion of psychedelics, thought and time. It is part of the Non-Dual Couch series.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

John Carmack's keynote at Oculus Connect 2014 about the Gear VR and development stories from building it. He discusses mobile GPU optimization, latency, and display ideas like programmable interlacing.

Ted Nelson, the originator of hypertext and Project Xanadu, gives a personal account at age 80 of his ideals, his career, and how a poor career plan led to discoveries and adventures. It works as an alternative history of personal computing and hypertext.

A 1984 Computer Chronicles segment in which Susan Kare explains the ergonomics and interface design of the original Macintosh. She introduces the interface step by step for newcomers.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A MIX08 session from Microsoft's Office team on how the Office 2007 ribbon was designed. It explains the user-feedback and telemetry behind it and the alternatives that were rejected.

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.