vintage computing

CuriousMarc runs the program 'Edith' on a 1959 IBM 1401 mainframe at the Computer History Museum. The program prints a famous line-printer image on the vintage machine. The video is part retro-computing demo and part joke.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

The first episode of the BBC's 1982 television series The Computer Programme, introducing home computing to a general audience. It surveys mainframes, early personal computers such as the BBC Micro and Commodore PET, and the changing computer market of the time.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

A Stanford EE380 seminar by Michael P. Frank of Sandia National Laboratories on generalized reversible computing. It surveys unconventional computing approaches as transistor scaling nears its limits and energy efficiency stops improving.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Jason Perkins's talk at Vintage Computer Festival East 2020 compares the user interface of the Xerox Star with that of the Apple Lisa. It covers editing documents, the Star's mouse and a Q&A.

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.

Dave Ackley demonstrates the Demon Horde Sort, an inherently robust sorting machine running in his Movable Feast Machine simulator. This is the uncut version with all details and side thoughts.

Techmoan demonstrates the Tefifon, a vintage German audio player that combines elements of record and tape with a grooved elastic loop. He shows how it works and plays it.

Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing talks at a Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetup about using Common Lisp for quantum computing. He covers the technical, sociological and psychological sides of working across disciplines.

A vintage demo video of the BeOS operating system running on mid-90s hardware. It shows media playback and window manipulation staying smooth at the same time.

A review of the Symbolics Space Cadet keyboard, with its Honeywell Hall effect switches, including how it sounds and feels, and a typing demonstration. It is part of a series of vintage keyboard reviews.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

Dave Ackley gives a high-level introduction to robust-first computing, which prioritizes robustness over efficiency in computer architecture. A sorting demo illustrates the idea.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

Mike of mikeselectricstuff shows his heavily modified old BBC Micro system in a 28-minute tour of 8-bit hardware archaeology.

CuriousMarc's Apollo Guidance Computer restoration series looks at core rope memory, the ROM that held the Moon landing programs. Mike Stewart builds a custom reader to recover lost AGC programs.

A demonstration of SymbOS, a multitasking operating system for 8-bit Z80 machines, running on a real MSX turboR with an MP3MSX card and a CF IDE interface. It shows the OS playing audio and running a graphical desktop on very old hardware, captured from the real machine and not an emulator.

A demonstration of loading Altair 4K BASIC on an Altair 8800 clone, using a front-panel bootloader and an ASR-33 Teletype. It shows the full sequence of entering boot code, loading BASIC and running a program.

A 1971 DEC LAB-8/e (PDP-8/e) minicomputer plays music by inducing noise into a nearby AM radio. The software is Richard Wilson's 1975 Music Compiler running under OS/8.

A one-minute demo at the Computer History Museum's IBM 1401 restoration lab, where a program makes the machine's radio-frequency interference play tunes on an AM radio.

An 88-minute Microsoft Research talk that explains how quantum computers beat classical ones using basic linear algebra, qubits, superposition and gates. It works through the Deutsch oracle problem and ends with entanglement, teleportation and a live demo.

Cory Doctorow's Talks at Google lecture on the coming civil war over general-purpose computing. He argues that locked-down devices, DRM, and surveillance threaten user control of computers.

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

Lyle Bickley of the PDP-1 restoration team tours the 1959 DEC machine at the Computer History Museum and plays the original Spacewar! He covers its graphics display and the MIT student programs written for it.

CuriousMarc and colleagues at the Computer History Museum try to compile and run a FORTRAN II program on a 1959 IBM 1401. The machine has only 16k of memory and a CPU not meant for scientific work, so success is far from guaranteed.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

A short clip of the Harwell Dekatron/WITCH, the world's oldest original working digital computer from 1951, being restarted at The National Museum of Computing in 2012.

A short Google video introducing the Quantum AI Lab, a partnership between Google, NASA, USRA and a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer. It covers the lab's early goals and some potential applications of quantum computing.

A documentary by Stuart Brown (XboxAhoy) on the history of first-person shooters on the Amiga and how Doom's arrival affected the platform.

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.

Freespin is a demo that runs on a Commodore 1541 floppy drive. It makes sound by vibrating the drive head and video by toggling the serial bus lines, and it keeps running after the C64 that booted it is disconnected.

Tech Tangents sets up original Doom's three-screen multi-monitor mode, which required a separate networked computer for each monitor. The video covers the hardware and setup work and the result.

Alan Kay's 2009 UIUC talk arguing that computing is more a pop culture than a science and that ignoring history and fundamentals leads to inferior solutions. He touches on the history of interactive environments and what the web should have been.

The opening episode of Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics series, in which he casts doubt on conventional accounts of computer basics. He argues that conventions and packaging are mistaken for technology.

A 1979 CBC radio interview in which Ted Nelson tries to explain how computers could serve as tools for thinking and visualizing. The interviewer keeps failing to grasp the idea, and Nelson patiently answers again and again.