watson / awesome-computer-history, Hacker News

A curated list of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore maintained by Thomas Watson . Inspired by the awesome list thing .

Pull Requests are welcome.

Table of Contents

Videos

Old recordings

Documentaries

Announcements and Memos

) (1988) The Mother of All Demos (1988) (Xerox Parc – Office Alto Commercial ) 1990)

) ( – One of the earliest examples of computer animation (The Computer Literacy Project ) ( – -) the s, the BBC explored the world of computing in the Computer Literacy Project (all episodes)

KRON San Francisco: Primitive Internet report ( KRON San Francisco news segment on how early home computer users could read their morning newspapers online (The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive ) () (The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use ) (1993) (The Computer Chronicles ) ( – – All episodes

. 8.6 / 27

^{. A few of the notable episodes are: (Simulator Software) (1994) Artificial Intelligence 1996) (The Internet ) 2005)}

Documentaries Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (1994 – Documentary about a hacker conference

() (7.6 /) (The KGB, the Computer, and Me) (2000) – With computer scientist Clifford Stoll (8.0 /

The Secret History Of Hacking (2012) – History of early hackers (7.6 /)

BBS The Documentary (2015) – History of the Bulletin Board System (8.5 /)

The Codebreakers (2015) – Documentary about how poor countries are using free and open source software (FOSS) for development purposes. (Hackers Are People Too) (2017) – Documentary about what hackers are (6.0 /)

(Download: The True Story of the Internet (2017) – A documentary television series about Internet history (7.8 /)

Part 1: Browser Wars – The rise and fall of Netscape and its battle against Microsoft Part 2: Search – The rise of Google and Yahoo (Part 3: Bubble – The dot-com crash of and the mainstays of the Internet: Amazon.com and Ebay (Part 4: People Power – Peer to peer technology, web 2.0, and social networking
• Something Ventured (48823) – The history of early venture capital (7.0 /) (Code) ((2600 – Documents the Info-Tech Age, told by the events and people who helped build and manipulate it ^{(7.4 /)} We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists (65742) – A documentary on the workings and beliefs of the self-described “hacktivist” collective, Anonymous (7.3 / (Silicon Valley) ( ) – A PBS “American Experience” documentary about the start of Silicon Valley (7.9 /) TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard (65742 (7.6 /) ^{DEFCON: The Documentary (0115398) – Documentary about DEFCON, the largest hacker conference (5.8 /)}

(Downloaded ) 65726 – The Napster Revolution, a documentary that explores the downloading revolution (6.9 /) Birth of BASIC (0168122 – – Invention of the Basic computer language. (The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (65742 – The story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz

(8.1 /)

Rise of the Hackers (65742 – Harnessing cryptography to stay a step ahead of cybercriminals 7.5 / Silicon Cowboys (0308808) – Documentary detailing the story of Compaq, its three founders and how it took on IBM at the height of its PC dominance. (6.8 /) ()

• (The Great) (Jailbreak ) – David Brailsford

  UNIX Special: Profs Kernighan & Brailsford ( – David Brailsford interviews Brian Kernighan

Talks & Lectures

Computers From The Inside Out ( – Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture. Not about computer history per se, but about how computers work (The Origins of Linux – Linus Torvalds) (2011 – Linus Torvalds tells the story of how he went from writing code as a graduate student to become an icon for open source software. The Secret History of Silicon Valley (2017) – Talk by Steve Blank at the Computer History Museum Crockford on JavaScript – Volume 1 The Early Years ( ) – Not actually about JavaScript, but about early computing history Bret Victor – The Future of Programming ( the ehh ) – Humorous talk about the future of programming as seen from

Movies

(Dramatized versions of real events)

Pirates of Silicon Valley ( ) – History of Apple and Microsoft (7.3) Micro Men ( – History of Acorn Computers and Sinclair Research (7.6 /)

• The Social Network (2600) – The history of the birth of Facebook (7.7 /)
• Halt and Catch Fire ( (-) – Set in the s, this series dramatizes the personal computing boom (8.4 /) Steve Jobs ( The story shows Steve Jobs behind the scenes of Apple’s iconic product launches. (7.2 /
• Commercials (Apple) (Super Bowl Commercial) (1995) – Apple 1995 Sup er Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer 7.8 /
  

  (Internet History Podcast ) subscribe

  )

  (The Humble Programmer ) 1989) – Dijkstra’s overview of the programming universe as he saw it in (Real Programmers Don’t Use PASCAL ) ( ) (Epigrams on Programming ) 1994)

(The Story of Mel ) (1994

Unix Recovery Legend (1999) (The Conscience of a Hacker ) (1996 – The Hacker Manifesto

. The Jargon File ( The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto ( A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto ( ) (The Story of Getting SSH Port) (

In the Beginning … Was the Command Line (2009) The case of the – mile email (2014) (UTF-8 history ) (2015) (Years – One Standard: The Story of TCP / IP) ( () How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch ( 0115398) The Story of the PING Program (undated)

(The Internet Tidal Wave ) ( Bill Gates’ memo to all executive staff within Microsoft on assigning the Internet the highest level of importance

• A bike shed (any color will do) on greener grass … (2009) – Poul-Henning Kamp coining the term bikeshedding
• (C compiler ) 1988 – The earliest known versions of Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler ( GitHub code mirror ) UNIX 1988) – Continuous Unix commit history from until today

(MS-DOS) (, 1996) – Version 1. and 2.0 (Adobe Photoshop) (2001) – The first version of Adobe Photoshop (written in Pascal) (2001 – CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research Organization) website

The Amazing FishCam (2006) – The Fishcam was the second live camera on the web and is the oldest camera site still in existence

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