small string optimization

Ruby developer Avdi Grimm gives a seven-minute tour of Pharo Smalltalk's development environment, focusing on tools like search-by-example and the integrated, live coding experience.

A Computer History Museum demonstration with Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk-76 running on a Xerox Alto, recorded in 2017. He shows the live environment and discusses the system.

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

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

Huygens Optics experiments with etching tiny patterns in glass, covering hydrofluoric acid risks, buffered oxide etch, photoresist and chromium masks, and laser-induced etching. It ends with attempts at microscopic Tesla valves.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

IBM's record-setting stop-motion film made by moving individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, illustrating atomic-scale memory research.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.

A 2013 research demo of simulated bipedal creatures whose natural gaits are found by optimizing muscle-based controllers, with no motion capture or keyframe animation. It shows physics-based walking and running emerging from musculoskeletal models.

A short live demo of Dental Wings' Virtuo Vivo intraoral scanner at IDS 2019. It shows a fast color scan with a small, lightweight handpiece.

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.

AvE tears down a roughly $500 Dyson hair dryer, examining how its motor, airflow and electronics fit into a small body. He runs tests along the way and ultimately decides whether the engineering justifies the price.

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

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.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the Sand Flea, an 11-pound RC-car-style robot that can jump about 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented in flight and for landings.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

Footage of Notch (Markus Persson) live-coding his Minicraft game in Java during a Ludum Dare 48-hour game jam. It shows a working game developer building a complete small game from scratch.

A demonstration from UPenn's GRASP Lab of an autonomous quadrotor performing flips, flying through windows and perching on surfaces. It shows precise aggressive maneuvering control of a small UAV.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

Samuel Falvo II live-codes a text preprocessor and blog engine in Forth over about an hour. It shows Forth's dictionary being snapshotted and restored in place of mutation, and how a small Forth system gets real work done.

Episode 2 of Corridor Digital's Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors, a short film made with AI-assisted animation techniques such as Stable Diffusion and DreamBooth. The story follows King Philip facing his twin brother and a barbarian king.

A run through the 32 factory presets of the Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer, with timestamps for each patch such as brass, strings, pianos, bass and tubular bells. It is a straight audio demo of the sounds.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether USB Type-C connectors are more durable than Micro-B by repeatedly plugging and unplugging them. In the test, Micro-B failed at around 8000 insertions while USB-C kept working.

Declassified footage of 1950s tests of Project Orion, the nuclear pulse propulsion concept, including the Hot Rod prototypes flown on conventional high explosives. It shows the pusher-plate idea working in small scale.

A compilation of hover tests of exoatmospheric kill vehicles, the small rocket-propelled interceptors used in missile defense, including early prototypes from the late 1980s. It shows the vehicles maneuvering with thrusters in test facilities.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robot performing a gymnastics and parkour routine, using optimization-generated motions and a model predictive controller.

Amateur footage from 2014 of small airplanes being lifted and blown around during a microburst. It is a three-minute clip showing how violent the gusts can be.

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 Rheinmetall promo clip of its truck-mounted Skynex air defence system engaging a swarm of eight small drones with a 35mm revolver gun.

Boston Dynamics unveils a new, smaller Atlas humanoid robot that is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It balances with body sensors and uses lidar and stereo vision to navigate and manipulate objects.