lisa

Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroids taken during Lisa development, documenting how its graphical interface evolved. Recorded at the Computer History Museum.

Jason Perkins's talk at Vintage Computer Festival East 2020 compares the user interface of the Xerox Star with that of the Apple Lisa. It covers editing documents, the Star's mouse and a Q&A.

A 30-minute edit of a conversation between Adam Curtis and Russell Brand in which Curtis explains HyperNormalisation and his ideas on individualism, power and real change.

Astronaut Mike Mullane explains normalisation of deviance, where teams gradually come to accept violations of their own safety standards. He uses the Challenger shuttle disaster as the main case, drawing on NASA's ignored warnings before the launch. It is the first part of a talk given to a fire-fighters' association.

Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett presents her research on what emotions are, arguing that the brain constructs them rather than reading them off faces. She says this means we have more control over our emotions than we think.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary arguing that politicians, financiers and technologists retreated into a simplified, fake version of the world because reality became too complex. It ranges across Trump, Brexit, Syria, Surkov's Russia and more.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary argues that since the 1970s governments, financiers and technologists have retreated into a simplified fake world. It ranges from Syria and Libya to the road to Trump.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

Adam Curtis's 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, about 160 minutes long. It cuts together roughly forty years of politics, finance and technology to argue that people have retreated into a simplified fake world.

Soup Emporium's deep dive argues that Yellowstone is not a ticking timebomb. It goes through uplift and subsidence, earthquakes and what the caldera really is, to rebut supervolcano doom claims.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

A short video telling how Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface and how Steve Jobs's 1979 visit influenced Apple's Lisa.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

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.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

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

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.

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.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

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.

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.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

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.

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.

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.