personal computing

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.

A roughly three-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview of Donald Knuth by Edward Feigenbaum, recorded in 2007. Knuth covers his family, music, early programming, his thesis, The Art of Computer Programming, and the detour into TeX and METAFONT.

The Centre for Computing History reunites Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser to rewatch the BBC drama Micro Men on its tenth anniversary. They reminisce about Acorn and the early British home computer era.

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 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.

Alan Kay visits Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science in 2007 for an informal conversation with faculty and students. He discusses the state of CS education and criticizes mainstream computing.

A five-minute clip in which Erich Fromm asks whether the purpose of work is just making money. He argues that white-collar workers end up selling their personality, relating to others the way goods relate to each other on a market, and he points to creative pleasure, participation and usefulness to society as what work could offer instead.

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.

Part two of a Computer History Museum oral history with Gary Davidian, covering his work on the 68000 emulator for PowerPC at Apple, Power Computing, clean-room contracting and later performance optimization work. It is nearly three hours long.

Grady Booch interviews John Backus, who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN in 1957, for the Computer History Museum in 2006. Backus describes the development of the first successful high-level language and its compiler. The interview runs 88 minutes.

A Computer History Museum interview in which John Markoff of the New York Times talks with Douglas Engelbart about his life and research. It covers the influences and struggles behind his work on the mouse, hypertext and collaborative computing, and his aim of helping humanity tackle complex problems.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

A Computer History Museum oral history interview with Dave Cutler, covering his youth, early work on operating systems at DuPont and Digital Equipment, and his path toward VMS and Windows NT. This is part one of a long-form interview.

A 1974 talk-show-style interview with the original developers of APL, including Iverson, Falkoff and Breed. They discuss how the language originated.

A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.

A Computer History Museum oral history with Bill Mensch, designer of the 6502 and 65816, covering his path from a Pennsylvania farm through Motorola and later work.

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.

A 24-minute interview with Edsger Dijkstra, the Dutch computer scientist, including his views on writing programs by hand and keeping errors out of them. It is part of a longer Dutch TV interview.

A two-hour Computer History Museum oral history interview with Bjarne Stroustrup, conducted by Paul McJones in 2015. It covers his youth, education at Aarhus and Cambridge, his career at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and the design and evolution of C++.

Computer History Museum oral history of Steve Naroff, an engineer at Stepstone, NeXT and Apple who worked on Objective-C. This first session covers his childhood, music background and early career.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the D8 conference discussing the post-PC era, including his analogy of PCs as trucks that will remain for a minority of users.

A short NYT Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling NSA veteran William Binney, who says a program he helped design collects Americans' personal data.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs in 2010 saying companies should ask users before tracking them, and that people's personal data is like their diary.