software stack

A short clip of the Super Mario Bros 3 proof-of-concept PC port built by id Software's founders to pitch Nintendo on a PC version. Nintendo passed, and the same technology led to Commander Keen.

A short screen recording of the flight simulator Easter egg hidden in Excel 97, with the steps to trigger it. The uploader notes the mouse controls are hard to handle.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

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.

A 1990 Lotus sales demo of Improv, a spreadsheet built for the NeXT computer that rethought the grid with named categories and multiple views. The uploader, who tested it at Price Waterhouse, presents it as an early, innovative vision of the spreadsheet.

A Gource visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, condensed into eight minutes. Each dot is a file, folders are links, and developers fly around zapping files as they work on them.

A one-minute clip of Microsoft's Clippy, the Office assistant character, in action.

Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.

Technology Connections gives first impressions of using an Onyx Boox Max2 e-ink tablet for productivity, including using it as an external display. He shows what the device can and cannot do.

A recording of .the .product by Farbrausch, the first-place 64k intro at The Party 2000. It fits an 11-minute 3D demo with music into 64 kilobytes.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

A one-minute clip of Rochus Keller performing as a one-man band: slap bass with the left hand, Rhodes and lead guitar with the right, and drums with the feet.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

A short Bookeen R&D demo showing smooth H.264 video playback on a Pearl E Ink panel, driven by a TI OMAP3621 chip and custom controller software.

An LGR Oddware episode looking at Sony's MDH-10 MD Data drive from 1995, which used MiniDisc for computer storage years before Hi-MD. The host tries out the drive with its original drivers and software.

Stuntman Gary Connery jumps from a helicopter at 2,400 feet in a wingsuit and lands without a parachute on a runway of stacked cardboard boxes, the first such landing.

TheRasteri upgrades a single PC through every Windows version, from early releases through Windows 10, testing that old software keeps running. It is an updated version of the Chain of Fools experiment.

LGR reviews the Danmere Backer16, a 1996 backup system that stored a PC's data on ordinary VHS tapes through a VCR. He shows the hardware and software on Windows 3.1 and 95.

Ben Katz's custom robot solves a Rubik's Cube in 0.38 seconds. The description links to the hardware and software write-ups.