personal computing

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

A one-minute clip from the film Minority Report showing digital signage that recognizes a passerby and personalizes ads to him by name. It depicts a vision of targeted advertising driven by biometric identification.

A clip from the movie Minority Report showing personalized advertising that recognizes a person as they walk through a mall.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

A short clip of the Harwell Dekatron/WITCH, the world's oldest original working digital computer from 1951, being restarted at The National Museum of Computing in 2012.

A 2017 Apple TV commercial for the iPad Pro in which a kid asks "What's a computer?" while using the tablet. It pitches the all-screen iPad Pro as something that goes beyond what people think of as a computer.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.

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.

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

Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.

The original Amiga Boing Ball demo, written at the Winter CES in January 1984 to show off the Amiga's hardware, with a bouncing, spinning checkered ball running while the system multitasked. It became the Amiga's unofficial emblem.

A one-minute demo at the Computer History Museum's IBM 1401 restoration lab, where a program makes the machine's radio-frequency interference play tunes on an AM radio.

A short clip from the April 1984 Apple IIc rollout presentation at the Moscone Center, uploaded by Alfred DiBlasi. It argues the Apple II line funded the Macintosh's early years.

The first of four short videos from Bill Hammack (engineerguy) introducing and giving the history of a 100-year-old mechanical computer, Michelson's harmonic analyzer. The series goes on to explain Fourier synthesis, analysis and operation of the machine.

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.

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.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

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.

A short demo of a playable Space Invaders game built inside Dwarf Fortress, with a downloadable map. It shows the game's mechanics used as a computing substrate.

A 2012 Onion News Network satire in which HP announces a push into cloud computing and insists it knows what the cloud is.

Promotional video from Zapata Racing showing Franky Zapata flying the Flyboard Air prototype, claiming autonomous flight to 10,000 feet, 150 km/h top speed and 10 minutes of endurance.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.

A scene from the TV drama Halt and Catch Fire in which Gordon Clark meets Joe MacMillan, who is posing as an IBM salesman, on a sales call. It includes the dialogue about IBM being the safe choice and a marketing guru telling an engineer when to stop talking.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

A 1994 Today Show clip in which hosts puzzle over what the Internet is and how to say the at-sign in email addresses. It is a short archival piece from the early days of the web.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

Footage of the failed Mercury-Redstone 1 launch, where the engine cut off almost immediately after liftoff. The escape tower and parachutes then deployed because the rocket thought the flight was over.

A short compilation of NBC Today show clips from 1994-95 in which hosts and guests puzzle over the World Wide Web and email. It includes Bill Gates and the Today anchors.

A short clip of Bill Gates demonstrating Visual Basic in 1991, showing drag-and-drop building of a Windows GUI.

A three-minute Computer History Museum clip showing Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoRs Mercedes van and later VaMP sedan, early self-driving vehicles tested from 1986 to 2003.

A very short clip of Bill Gates hitting a Blue Screen of Death while demonstrating plug and play on Windows 98 on stage.

Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh television commercial, which casts the company as a rebel breaking a Big Brother-style conformity.

The famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Orwell's novel.

Short footage of the General Electric Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine, or Walking Truck, a 1960s quadruped vehicle operated by a human driver using hydraulic limbs. The uploader notes it predates Big Dog by decades.

A one-minute 1986 promo of Microsoft Windows 1.0 presented by Steve Ballmer, with a hyperbolic price pitch ending in the tag line about Nebraska.

A clip from a 1995 Late Show with David Letterman in which Bill Gates discusses Microsoft's origins and the internet while Dave is skeptical of computers.

A recording from real hardware of Tim Follin's multichannel 1-bit music for Agent X on the ZX Spectrum. It shows several voices coaxed out of the single-bit beeper.

A 2006 Saturday Night Live fake infomercial with Steve Martin and Amy Poehler selling the sure-fire way out of debt: don't buy stuff.

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.