program analysis

A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.

The first video in Photon of Scoopex's Amiga hardware programming series. It shows how to set up an assembler and write a minimal 68000 program that waits for a left mouse click.

A short Global News report on the Pentagon confirming a $22 million UFO investigation program and releasing Navy infrared footage from the 2004 Nimitz encounter.

A short clip of a TiVo paid-programming broadcast from the early 2000s, which TiVo used to send guide data and service updates to DVRs over cable TV before broadband was common.

A one-minute Rheinmetall promotional demo of Oerlikon Ahead air burst ammunition, which throws a cloud of sub-projectiles to destroy small air targets.

A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.

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

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.

The Academy's 2014 Sci-Tech Awards segment honoring Matt Pharr, Greg Humphreys and Pat Hanrahan for their physically based rendering work and book. The authors give a short acceptance speech that thanks Donald Knuth for literate programming.

A short 2007 demo of Pizza Party, a command line program that orders Domino's pizza from a UNIX-like terminal. The video shows the designers placing an order using the software.

A short excerpt of Rob Pike's Lang.NEXT 2014 talk where he describes Go's target audience as young Google programmers who are not researchers. The language has to be easy for them to understand and adopt.

Find the Longest Path is a comedic song by Daniel J. Barrett, a Billy Joel parody that describes the NP-hard longest path problem in informal terms.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

A 3-minute demo of a tiny IOCCC 2012 winning C program that simulates fluid dynamics in an 80x25 terminal, using any text (including its own source) as input. The video shows the simulation running to Handel's Water Music.

A short unscripted demo of writing FizzBuzz in JavaScript with a generator function on a steno keyboard, typos included. It gives a feel for what real coding in stenography looks like.

A fan-made music video for Jonathan Coulton's song 'Code Monkey', about the life of a programmer, using World of Warcraft footage. It was made by Mike Spiff Booth.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

A four-minute programmer rap by stdout about abandoned side projects and the promise to finish them someday. The lyrics poke fun at dev procrastination and big app ideas.

A short tribute video to Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, titled as a claim he made about himself.

A one-minute NCIS scene in which two characters type on the same keyboard to fight off a hacker. It is widely mocked as absurd TV hacking.

A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.

A one-minute clip from Barack Obama's 2008 Google visit in which Eric Schmidt asks him the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama answers that bubble sort would be the wrong choice.

A short CGP Grey bonus video explaining the shortest-splitline algorithm, which draws electoral districts by repeatedly splitting a state along its shortest dividing line while balancing population. It is offered as a neutral, algorithmic fix for gerrymandering.

Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.

A one-minute capture of Tim Clarke's 1993 'Mars' DOS demo, a roughly 5 KB program that renders a navigable terrain landscape in real time.

Dylan Beattie's parody of 'You Give Love a Bad Name' about hypermedia APIs and REST, performed with his band at developer conferences.

Totally Gridbag is a short humorous animation about the frustrations of Java Swing's GridBagLayout, originally made as a Flash cartoon.

A Commodore 64 demo by Linus Akesson that fits video and music into 256 bytes, winning the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. A technical write-up accompanies it.

A three-minute Emacs Rocks screencast by Magnar Sveen demonstrating paredit, which edits Lisp code structurally as a tree of s-expressions rather than characters.

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.

Memories is a 256-byte MS-DOS demo that packs eight effects and MIDI soundscapes into a tiny program. It won first place at Revision 2020.

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.

Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.

Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word piece, in an official audio upload. It contrasts the Apollo moon program with poverty and neglect at home.

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.

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.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow on Game Boy Color that uses glitches and frame-precise inputs to make the game execute an arbitrary program. It was later obsoleted by an improved run.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper vehicle's 744 m test hop, filmed from a hexacopter that gets closer than earlier flights. Grasshopper was a vertical takeoff and landing rig built to test returning rockets to the pad.

A short clip from the Dutch program Nieuwsuur in which Julian Assange appears to suggest that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the WikiLeaks DNC emails.

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.