retro computing

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

A one-minute clip of the Warcraft II sound card test in setup, where the test sample plays and the voice says the sound card works perfectly.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

An episode of REACT in which children try to figure out 1970s-1980s computers, including an Apple II and floppy disks. It was made to promote the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire.

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

Kung Fury is a 30-minute crowd-funded 80s action comedy about a kung fu cop who travels back in time to kill Hitler, packed with retro tropes.

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

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

The first episode of Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker's British sitcom satirizing hip media and startup scenesters in mid-2000s Shoreditch. Cynical writer Dan Ashcroft finds himself idolized by the moronic Nathan Barley.

A two-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley season 2 in which Russ Hanneman shows off his gull-wing car doors. It is a comedic scene about startup excess.

A compilation of the best Gavin Belson moments from Silicon Valley seasons 1 to 5, showing the show's self-absorbed tech CEO.

A short montage from HBO's Silicon Valley of the TechCrunch Disrupt scene, in which founders repeat the phrase 'making the world a better place'.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl scripts using Windows Vista speech recognition, with comically bad results. The footage shows the recognizer repeatedly mangling commands.

A short clip of Alan Kay commenting on Edsger Dijkstra in a humorous, pointed way.

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 short clip from Microsoft's 1995 Judgement Day event in which Bill Gates is inserted into Doom as a promo for Windows 95 and DirectX gaming. It was never publicly released at the time.

Penn and Teller help Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs play a prank on Nobel-winning physicist Arno Penzias. The clip shows the gag and its setup.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodies a retro documentary interview with an Emacs enthusiast, joking about Emacs's endless configuration and devotion.