knuth

A five-minute clip from Donald Knuth's Web of Stories interviews in which he gives advice to young people, including being wary when too many people adopt an idea.

A Numberphile interview with Donald Knuth about how he came to write the first book on surreal numbers after a lunch with John Conway. He tells the story casually in about 14 minutes.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, built around three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss including being fired from Apple, and death. It is a 15-minute talk on finding work you love.

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.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It includes the calligraphy class and the 'stay hungry, stay foolish' close.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

A clip from Steve Jobs's 1997 WWDC session, in which he answers a hostile question from an audience member about Apple killing OpenDoc. He says to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and that saying no is part of focus.

Stephen Wolfram gives a 13-minute tour of the Wolfram Language, a symbolic, functional programming language with a built-in knowledgebase. He demos querying large datasets, interactivity and deployment.

Dick Hardt's fast-paced OSCON keynote on Identity 2.0 and the move toward user-centric digital identity. It is also famous for its rapid-fire, many-slide presentation style.

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.

Footage from the Macworld Boston 1997 keynote where Steve Jobs announces Apple's deal with Microsoft, with Bill Gates appearing on the big screen. The almost bankrupt Apple took Microsoft's investment, and the crowd reacted badly, including booing over Internet Explorer as the default browser.

A clean-audio clip from Apple's 1997 WWDC where Steve Jobs answers a hostile question from a developer about OpenDoc. He argues you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.

Clifford Stoll's energetic TED talk, a wandering mix of anecdotes, a science experiment and thoughts on curiosity, education and technology. He is the author of The Cuckoo's Egg.

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 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.

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

An excerpt from Steve Jobs's January 2007 Macworld keynote in which he introduces the original iPhone. It shows the pitch of a phone, music player and internet communicator, along with the live demo.

Louis CK speaks at a 2010 NYPL tribute to George Carlin about how Carlin's habit of discarding material and writing a new hour each year changed his own career. He becomes emotional describing it.

A 1993 interview in which Steve Jobs talks about designer Paul Rand, who created the NeXT logo. He recounts Rand's insistence on presenting a single design and his uncompromising professionalism.

A short CNN clip of Peter Thiel telling Google chairman Eric Schmidt that Google has huge cash reserves and does not know how to invest them. Thiel argues this signals a lack of innovation.

Giant Bomb interviews John Carmack at E3 2012 about his virtual reality head-mounted display prototype. He demos it and talks about latency, depth and focus problems in VR.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut talks with Elon Musk right after Musk's 2019 Starship presentation. Musk discusses Starship's design, why SpaceX favors conventional engines over aerospikes, and how deleting parts and processes speeds up development.

A 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos taped at a Special Libraries conference, where he explains why Amazon started with books and why the web made it possible. He calls it the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce.

First part of a six-part recording of the 1973 Lighthill debate on AI, where Sir James Lighthill's critical report on AI research was contested by figures including McCarthy and Michie.

A restored recording of Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh in 1984, including the moment it is taken out of its bag and speaks. The upload comes from the team that rediscovered and restored the lost footage.

A short Frank Zappa interview clip on the decline of the music business, contrasting old cigar-chomping executives with younger industry people.

Steve Jobs introduces the first iPod at a small Apple event in 2001. He positions it as a music player and ties it to the Apple brand.

Ted Nelson's short eulogy for Douglas Engelbart, delivered at the Computer History Museum in 2013, reflecting on his friend and Engelbart's ideas.

Grace Hopper appears on Letterman and uses a foot-long piece of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond.

A June 1986 CNN interview with physicist Richard Feynman about the Challenger disaster and the management failures he found while serving on the investigating commission.

A 12-minute clip from Joe Rogan's podcast in which former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman describes working for Elon Musk at SpaceX. He discusses Musk's engineering breadth, his Mars-focused decision making and the stress of the job.

A short TFiR clip in which Linus Torvalds explains his view that respect should be earned rather than given, in defense of his blunt and insulting style.

An edited excerpt of Steve Jobs introducing Mac OS X at Macworld San Francisco in 2000. It covers the Aqua interface, Quartz graphics built on PDF, and the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa application environments.

A roughly 14-minute interview with OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt at ruBSD 2013. He talks about making painful changes, getting real feedback, mitigation techniques compared to other OSs, and virtualization.

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 short clip of Leo Laporte interviewing Bill Atkinson about developing HyperCard, including his story that the idea came during an LSD experience.

Ted Nelson, in his Computers for Cynics series, gives a critical history of Xerox PARC's vision of personal computing. He lists what he sees as the limitations and wrong turns in PARC's approach to the desktop and documents.

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.