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.