silicon graphics

Dodoid gives an in-depth look at an SGI Onyx RealityEngine2, a $250,000 graphics supercomputer from 1993, covering its history, a physical overview, a teardown and some demos and games.

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

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.

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 two-minute clip from Silicon Valley season 1, episode 7 featuring the human heater idea that is rejected in a startup competition scene.

A short Silicon Valley clip in which Jian Yang copies popular apps and launches a new Pied Piper, and Seppen listens.

A clip from Silicon Valley season 3 episode 2 about Pied Piper's product, satirizing startups and stock-driven companies.

A demo of the Symbolics Graphics Division's S-Packages, a Lisp-based 3D color graphics and animation system from the 1980s. It was later used in developing for the Nintendo 64.

PBS Space Time considers whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon, comparing the two elements' chemistry and why silicon is the most plausible alternative.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains why PlayStation 1 graphics warped and jittered, comparing it with the Nintendo 64. The causes are affine texture mapping and the lack of sub-pixel vertex precision.

A short demo reel of the 1985 Silicon Graphics IRIS 2400 workstation animating flat-shaded polygons on a 68010 CPU. It shows the early SGI graphics that preceded their later fame.

The 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.

A two-minute explainer of 3D Gaussian Splatting, the rendering technique from a 2023 research paper. It outlines why it could change how 3D graphics are made.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

LGR looks at the Silicon Graphics Indigo2, a UNIX workstation that cost about $86,000 in 1995, covering its pros and cons, games it can run, and whether it is worth owning today.

minimme traces the timeline of 3D graphics engines on the Game Boy Advance, from early experiments to commercial 3D games, covering techniques such as voxel rendering. It is a history and showcase of what developers coaxed out of the limited hardware.

Chamath Palihapitiya talks with Jason Calacanis about how he bought into the mythology of Silicon Valley, which he calls a Ponzi scheme, and about rebuilding Social Capital. He urges founders to grow slowly and build what matters.

An HBO clip from Silicon Valley season 4 in which the 'Not Hotdog' app is demoed. The app classifies food photos as hot dog or not hot dog.

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 short clip from the show Silicon Valley in which the Pied Piper team meets a money guy who offers advice about having no revenue.

A three-minute scene from season 2, episode 4 of Silicon Valley in which Jared is excited after the company hires a woman engineer. It satirizes tokenism in tech hiring.

John Gruber interviews Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak after WWDC 2020 about the Mac transition to Apple silicon, macOS Big Sur and iOS 14.

A scene from Silicon Valley season 4 episode 8 featuring Keenan Feldspar's VR product.

A short scene from the film Pirates of Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs confronts Bill Gates after the Macintosh announcement over Windows copying Apple's work, and Gates replies that it doesn't matter.

A short scene from Silicon Valley season 1 episode 5 satirizing scrum and agile meetings. The characters mock how process rituals turn simple things into a job.

A short clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which a focus group savages a product by calling it as bad as Apple Maps. It satirizes tech product launches.

A short clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson fires the Nucleus team.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

Y Combinator partners Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell discuss how startups shifted from attracting outsiders to status- and money-seeking conformists. They give advice for nonconformist founders.

A one-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson comments on sycophants. It satirizes executives surrounded by yes-men.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.

A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.

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.

Masagin is a realtime demoscene production by Farbrausch and Neuro with music by paniq, using animated recursive SVG graphics made in Inkscape. It is a psychedelic, nested-dials audiovisual piece.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.

PolyMatter's first part of a series on China's demographic collapse, covering the effects of the one-child policy, shrinking workforce and economic consequences.

Apple's WWDC 2020 keynote covering iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, privacy, tvOS and macOS, and the announcement of the move of Macs to Apple silicon. It includes demos of Rosetta translation and virtualization on ARM.