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Awesome Computer History Awesome Build status

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.

Videos

Old recordings

  • United States Navy Training Media: Basic Mechanisms in Fire Control Computers (1953)
  • Timesharing: A Solution to Computer Bottlenecks (1963)
  • The Mother of All Demos (1968)
  • Xerox Parc - Office Alto Commercial (1972)
  • Computer Networks - ARPANET (1972) - The developers of the ARPANET talk about their new network:
    • Part 1
    • Part 2
  • A Computer Animated Hand (1972) - One of the earliest examples of computer animation
  • The Computer Literacy Project (1980-1989) - In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project (all episodes)
  • KRON San Francisco: Primitive Internet report (1981) - KRON San Francisco news segment on how early home computer users could read their morning newspapers online
  • The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive (1982)
  • The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use (1982)
  • The Computer Chronicles (1983-2002) - All episodes 8.6/10. A few of the notable episodes are:
    • Simulator Software (1983)
    • Artificial Intelligence (1985)
    • The Internet (1993)
  • We Are Apple (1984) - Corporate song that was used during the Macintosh rollout in January, 1984
  • Thinking Allowed - Artificial Intelligence (1989) - Interview with John McCarthy, creator of Lisp and one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence
  • Erlang: The Movie (1990)
  • Net Cafe (1996-2002) - All episodes ?/10. A few of the notable episodes are:
    • Hackers (1996) - Looks at the hacker culture and their influence on the early growth of the internet
    • Politics on the Web (1996) - Institute for Global Communications, Cyperpunks and Anarchists Press
  • Steve Jobs: The Crazy Ones (1997) - Steve Jobs talks about The Crazy Ones marketing campaign on internal Apple meeting

Documentaries

  • Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (1984) - Documentary about a 1984 hacker conference 7.6/10
  • The KGB, the Computer, and Me (1990) - With computer scientist Clifford Stoll 8.0/10
  • Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996) - History of the personal computer 8.5/10
  • The Internet: Behind the Web (2000) - Documentary about development of internet from 1950-60's to 21st century.
  • Code Rush (2000) - The story of Netscape and the birth of Mozilla 7.3/10
  • The Code (2001) - The Histroy of Linux & FOSS 7.5/10
  • Revolution OS (2001) - The story of GNU/linux and Open Source Movement 7.3/10
  • The Secret History Of Hacking (2001) - History of early hackers 7.6/10
  • BBS The Documentary (2005) - History of the Bulletin Board System 8.5/10
  • The Codebreakers (2006) - Documentary about how poor countries are using free and open source software (FOSS) for development purposes.
  • Hackers Are People Too (2008) - Documentary about what hackers are 6.0/10
  • Download: The True Story of the Internet (2008) - A documentary television series about Internet history 7.8/10
    • 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 2000 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 (2011) - The history of early venture capital 7.0/10
  • Code 2600 (2011) - Documents the Info-Tech Age, told by the events and people who helped build and manipulate it 7.4/10
  • We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists (2012) - A documentary on the workings and beliefs of the self-described "hacktivist" collective, Anonymous 7.3/10
  • Silicon Valley (2013) - A PBS "American Experience" documentary about the start of Silicon Valley 7.9/10
  • TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard (2013) 7.6/10
  • DEFCON: The Documentary (2013) - Documentary about DEFCON, the biggest hacker conference 5.8/10
  • Downloaded (2013) - The Napster Revolution, a documentary that explores the downloading revolution 6.9/10
  • Birth of BASIC (2014) - Invention of the Basic computer language.
  • The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) - The story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz 8.1/10
  • Rise of the Hackers (2014) - Harnessing cryptography to stay a step ahead of cybercriminals 7.5/10
  • Silicon Cowboys (2016) - Documentary detailing the story of Compaq, its three founders and how it took on IBM at the height of its PC dominance. 6.8/10

Reflective interviews

  • Steve Jobs - The Lost Interview (2012) - A conversation with Steve Jobs as he was running NeXT, the company he had founded after leaving Apple 8.1/10
  • The Great 202 Jailbreak (2013) - David Brailsford
  • UNIX Special: Profs Kernighan & Brailsford (2015) - David Brailsford interviews Brian Kernighan

Talks & Lectures

  • Computers From The Inside Out (1985) - Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture. Not about computer history per se, but about how computers work
  • The Origins of Linux - Linus Torvalds (2001) - 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 (2008) - Talk by Steve Blank at the Computer History Museum
  • Crockford on JavaScript - Volume 1: The Early Years (2011) - Not actually about JavaScript, but about early computing history
  • Bret Victor - The Future of Programming (2013..ehh 1973) - Humorous talk about the future of programming as seen from 1973

Movies

Dramatized versions of real events

  • Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) - History of Apple and Microsoft 7.3/10
  • Micro Men (2009) - History of Acorn Computers and Sinclair Research 7.6/10
  • The Social Network (2010) - The history of the birth of Facebook 7.7/10
  • Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017) - Set in the 1980s, this series dramatizes the personal computing boom 8.4/10
  • Steve Jobs (2015) - The story shows Steve Jobs behind the scenes of Apple's iconic product launches. 7.2/10

Commercials

  • Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial (1984) - Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer 7.8/10

Audio

Podcasts

  • Internet History Podcast (subscribe)

Texts

Folklore

  • The Humble Programmer (1972) - Dijkstra's overview of the programming universe as he saw it in 1972
  • Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)
  • Epigrams on Programming (1982)
  • The Story of Mel (1983)
  • Unix Recovery Legend (1986)
  • The Conscience of a Hacker (1986) - The Hacker Manifesto
  • The Jargon File (1988)
  • The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto (1992)
  • A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993)
  • The Story of Getting SSH Port 22 (1995)
  • In the Beginning…Was the Command Line (1999)
  • The case of the 500-mile email (2002)
  • UTF-8 history (2003)
  • 20 Years — One Standard: The Story of TCP/IP (2003)
  • How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch (2014)
  • The Story of the PING Program (undated)

Announcements and Memos

  • What would you like to see most in minix? (1991) - First public mention of what would later become Linux
  • The Internet Tidal Wave (1995) - Bill Gates' memo to all executive staff within Microsoft on assigning the Internet the highest level of importance
  • A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass... (1999) - Poul-Henning Kamp coining the term bikeshedding

Source Code

  • Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (1969) - Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) source code for the command and lunar modules
  • C compiler (1972) - The earliest known versions of Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler (GitHub code mirror)
  • UNIX (1972) - Continuous Unix commit history from 1972 until today
  • MS-DOS (1982, 1983) - Version 1.25 and 2.0
  • Adobe Photoshop (1990) - The first version of Adobe Photoshop (written in Pascal)

Websites

  • First website ever made (1990) - CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research Organisation) website
  • The Amazing FishCam (1994) - The Fishcam was the second live camera on the web and is the oldest camera site still in existence