armish / awesome-computer-history

An Awesome List of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore

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
  • Movies
  • Commercials
• Texts
  • Folklore
  • Announcements
• Source Code
• 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)
• 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. 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
• Erlang: The Movie (1990)
• Net Cafe (1996-2002) - All episodes. 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 ^7.4/10
• The KGB, the Computer, and Me (1990) - With computer scientist Clifford Stoll ^8.3/10
• 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 ^7.6/10
• 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 ^7.5/10
• BBS The Documentary (2005) - History of the Bulletin Board System ^8.6/10
• 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 ^6.1/10
• 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 ^7.6/10
• Silicon Valley (2013) - A PBS "American Experience" documentary about the start of Silicon Valley ^8.1/10
• TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard (2013) ^7.6/10
• DEFCON: The Documentary (2013) - Documentary about DEFCON, the biggest hacker conference ^5.6/10
• Downloaded (2013) - The Napster Revolution, a documentary that explores the downloading revolution ^6.8/10
• 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 ^7.8/10

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

• 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 ^7.8/10

Commercials

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

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)
• A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993)
• In the Beginning…Was the Command Line (1999)
• 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)

Announcements

• What would you like to see most in minix? (1991) - First public mention of what would later become Linux

Source Code

• UNIX (1972) - Continuous Unix commit history from 1972 until today

License

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