mainframe

A Bell Labs film in which Dr. J.N. Shive uses a mechanical wave machine to demonstrate reflection, standing waves, resonance and impedance matching. He includes some equations but relies mostly on real-world examples a layperson can follow.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Hennessy and Patterson's 2018 Turing Award lecture at ISCA, A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture. It covers domain-specific hardware, security, open instruction sets and agile chip development.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

A Stanford EE380 seminar by Michael P. Frank of Sandia National Laboratories on generalized reversible computing. It surveys unconventional computing approaches as transistor scaling nears its limits and energy efficiency stops improving.

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.

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.

Part one of Capt. Grace Hopper's 1982 NSA lecture on the future of data, hardware, software and people. It includes her humor, her nanosecond demonstration and views on scaling and resisting old ways of doing things.

David Shaw of D. E. Shaw Research presents Anton, a special-purpose machine that speeds up biomolecular simulations about a hundred-fold. The lecture covers molecular dynamics and how simulation helps understand how drugs bind.

The full 1973 BBC Lighthill debate on artificial intelligence, featuring James Lighthill, Donald Michie, Richard Gregory and John McCarthy. It documents the argument that preceded the 1970s AI winter and includes early robot demos.

A long Mill Computing lecture on the Mill CPU's compiler toolchain, covering the specializer that targets family members, scheduling and latency passes, and the belt. It explains how the compiler handles a wide-issue, exposed-pipeline design.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.