# Awesome Computer History

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
  - Reflective interviews
  - Talks & Lectures
  - Movies
  - Commercials
- Audio
  - Podcasts
- Texts
  - Folklore
  - Announcements and Memos
- Source Code
- Websites
- License

## 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

## License

To the extent possible under law, Thomas Watson has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.