source control

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

Part one of Sandia National Labs' first-person documentary on the use control, detonation safety and survivability of US nuclear weapons. It covers nuclear sharing in NATO and how control of use was separated from possession, leading to the always/never problem.

An animated short on limits to growth, covering oil formation, peak oil, energy, economic growth and resource depletion. Its central section deals with exponential growth, and the author notes some statistics are dated.

Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

An Al Jazeera investigation into Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, featuring current and former engineers who voice safety concerns. It covers quality control problems at the South Carolina plant and the roots of the battery problems that grounded the plane.

A Gamers Nexus investigative documentary on the black market for Nvidia AI GPUs, following smugglers, middlemen, and buyers, including reporting from China. It examines how export-restricted chips reach their users.

Captain Disillusion's VFXcool episode, led by Alan Melikdjanian, takes a 41-minute nostalgic look at how the visual effects of Flight of the Navigator were made. It covers early computers, motion control, in-camera effects and practical crafts.

A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.

Revolution OS is a feature-length documentary on the history of free software and Linux. It covers Stallman and the GNU project, Torvalds and the kernel, and Raymond and Perens on open source, starting from the era of freely shared hobbyist code.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

The official Kubernetes documentary, part 1, tells how a handful of Google engineers, inspired by Docker's success, built a container orchestrator. It covers the internal resistance to open source and the competition of the container orchestrator wars.

A long documentary-style film on the 1961 SL-1 reactor accident, where a control rod was withdrawn too far and the reactor went prompt-critical. The resulting steam explosion ejected control rods and shield plugs.

A documentary on how GraphQL came to be at Facebook, featuring its co-creators Lee Byron, Dan Schafer and Nick Schrock. It covers the problems it solved and its adoption at companies like Twitter, Airbnb and GitHub.

Veritasium tells the story of the XZ backdoor, how a patient attacker became maintainer and nearly compromised SSH on Linux systems. It also covers free software history and how encryption in SSH works.

Oracle Red Bull Racing follows a single front suspension bolt through its life, from sketch and drawing through machining, testing, assembly and racing.

A 41-minute factory tour showing how the BMW i3 electric car is built from start to finish, in the style of a Megafactories documentary. It shows a highly automated production line with carbon-fiber body construction and robots doing most of the work.

Adam Curtis' multi-part documentary on how Freud's ideas and Edward Bernays' public relations shaped consumer culture and political control. It argues that business and government learned to manufacture desires.

A 1982 Bell Labs film hosted by Victor Vyssotsky on the origins and design philosophy of the UNIX operating system, with appearances by Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie. It shows pipes, filters and a shell one-liner spell checker being built.

Dan Olson's roughly two-hour video essay critiques NFTs, cryptocurrency, and Web3, covering their technical, economic, and ideological flaws. It is heavily sourced and ends with the advice to ask whether a project needs crypto to work.

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

A 98-minute LEMMiNO video reconstructing what happened inside the Texas School Book Depository before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination. It draws on testimony to map people's movements and discrepancies.

The first part of a long two-part video series by historian Sean Munger arguing, with citations, that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and acted alone. It goes through the provable historical facts and addresses conspiracy theories.

A documentary following Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society as they push the Mars Direct plan for sending humans to Mars using current technology and local resources. It also covers the clash with NASA's more expensive approach.

The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.

A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend. It examines visual, physical and anecdotal evidence, traces the story's source, and concludes the game never existed beyond one website entry.

A 1947 US military film that deconstructs how the Nazi regime used divisive propaganda and prejudice to split and control a population. It teaches viewers to recognise demagoguery tactics.

A short documentary about Eric Maundu's Arduino-controlled aquaponics setup in West Oakland, where contaminated soil rules out ordinary farming. Fish and circulating water grow plants without soil.

A long rebuttal arguing that the Wright Brothers truly invented the airplane, responding to other YouTubers who credit others. It walks through the engineering breakthroughs the Wrights achieved, such as control and wind tunnel work.

A 1987 episode of The Computer Chronicles on Apple's HyperCard, showing users building their own applications. Gary Kildall appears and Bill Atkinson discusses the program, with credit given to earlier influences.

A 1957 Walt Disney film in which he explains and demonstrates the multiplane camera, the animation tool that gave 2D films depth. It is a short behind-the-scenes piece from Disney's archives.

Strange Parts builds a working refurbished iPhone 6S entirely from components bought in the Huaqiangbei phone parts markets in Shenzhen. The video explains how the markets work and what the parts cost.

Summoning Salt's roughly two-hour documentary traces the history of Tetris world records, from early play through the modern competitive scene. It is a long, well-researched narrative about the players and techniques that pushed the records.

The official trailer for The True Cost, a documentary on the fast fashion industry and who pays for cheap clothing. It touches on garment worker conditions and the Rana Plaza collapse.

A Bloomberg documentary on how Boeing's failures around the 737 Max crashes followed a shift in company culture and cost-cutting. It covers the grounding, the stock drop and questions about the company's future.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

The 1966 film Walt Disney recorded weeks before his death, laying out his plans for the Florida Project and especially EPCOT, a planned city of the future. It uses models, concept art and animation to describe the circular city, monorails and people movers.

An Empire Files documentary by Abby Martin presenting a critical account of the Afghanistan War, from the CIA's role in the 1980s to the stalemate of the 2010s and 2020. It argues the war was driven by imperial interests.

A dramatization of a hypothetical Soviet first strike that destroys US bombers and Minuteman missiles, filmed with US Air Force cooperation. It is a short version of the 1979 documentary First Strike.

A New York Times Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling William Binney, a 32-year NSA veteran who helped design a secret program he says collects Americans' personal data.