software testing

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.

GreatScott! tests ProLogium lithium ceramic batteries, a solid-state design. He measures their volumetric and gravimetric energy density, compares them to Li-ion and LiPo, and runs durability tests at the end.

Builder Matt Risinger freezes water-filled copper and PEX piping capped with SharkBite fittings to see which survives. The video compares how each pipe type handles freezing.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

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.

Linus Tech Tips tests a large batch of DisplayPort cables with a Total Phase cable tester, checking bandwidth and signal quality. Many cables did not meet their claimed specs.

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.

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.

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.

A short video of a Boeing 777 wing being tested to destruction, finally breaking at 154 percent of its designed limit load. The wing is flexed upward until it fails.

A 49-minute demo of Palantir Foundry by its chief architect. It walks through data integration, ML and AI workflows, analytics, and application building across the platform.

Gameplay footage of the original 1986 Macintosh version of Dark Castle by Silicon Beach Software. The uploader argues the original is a great game that was tarnished by inferior ports.

Tested explains how Apple's Touch ID recognizes fingerprints, then tries to defeat it using fake fingers and prints, retracing methods claimed by a German computer club.

Archival 1978 Sandia footage testing shipping containers for spent nuclear fuel, including trucks ramming walls, a locomotive hitting a truck-borne cask and a rocket-propelled train crash, plus a fire test.

A short Microsoft promo comparing classic Teams with the rewritten new Teams side by side, claiming faster startup and better performance. The new version is shown taking around nine seconds to launch.

Fully Charged gets an exclusive first drive of the Porsche Taycan, running 0-200 km/h launch control repeatedly. It covers the car's twin-motor 800-volt specs, claimed range and fast charging.

A short demo of real-time sparse voxel octree rendering, shown by Jon Olick at Siggraph 2008. It shows a detailed model rendered by ray casting through the octree.

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.

Mark Rober tests whether self-driving cars can be fooled, comparing a lidar-equipped car with a camera-only Tesla in scenarios including a painted Wile E. Coyote wall and smoke.

CNLohr explains how he made an ESP32 produce valid LoRa packets without a LoRa radio, using aliasing and clever signal tricks. It walks through the RF math and shows how far the signals reach.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether chaining many PCIe riser extensions causes loss of GPU performance. They keep adding extensions to see how far the signal will go.

JerryRigEverything puts the iPhone Air through scratch, bend and durability tests and is surprised that the ultra-thin phone proves very tough. The video is sponsored by dbrand cases.

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 from Insider showing an Airbus airliner's wings flexing far more than most people expect during a wing load test. It is meant to reassure nervous flyers about turbulence.

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

LockPickingLawyer cuts through a LiteLok flexible bike lock with cable cutters in about 16 seconds, one of several videos defeating the product.

Additional camera angles of the 1988 Sandia National Laboratories rocket-sled test in which an F-4 Phantom was crashed at about 500 mph into a block of reinforced concrete. The footage shows the aircraft disintegrating against the wall.

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.

A Fifth Gear segment in which Tiff Needell tests autonomous emergency braking systems in the Mercedes S Class, Volvo V40 and VW up!. The cars are driven toward an inflatable dummy car to see how each system performs.

Danny MacAskill tries to destroy carbon fiber bike wheels by riding trials tricks through downtown Glasgow, including on bare rims on concrete.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

Microsoft's March 2023 launch highlights for Microsoft 365 Copilot, showing AI features in Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. The demo includes using it to draft a graduation party speech.

Toyota's short promo clip showing a Mirai carbon-fiber hydrogen tank shot with a .50 caliber round at point blank range. The bullet pierces the tank, which does not burst, and the gas simply escapes and disperses.

Project Farm tests six penetrating oils, including WD-40, PB Blaster, Liquid Wrench and an ATF and acetone mix, on rusted bolts. Liquid Wrench placed first and the homemade mix second.

A short 2001 Tom's Hardware clip that runs Quake 3 on several popular CPU and motherboard combinations of the era, then removes the CPU cooler to see which chips survive. It shows how different processors handle losing their heatsink or fan.

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.

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.