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
• Texts
  • Folklore
  • Announcements
• Source Code
• License

Videos

Old recordings

• The Mother of All Demos (1968)
• Xerox Parc - Office Alto Commercial (1972)
• 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)
• Erlang: The Movie (1990)

Documentaries

• 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
• Code Rush (2000) - The story of Netscape and the birth of Mozilla ^7.3/10
• 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
• Something Ventured (2011) - The history of early venture capital ^7.0/10
• Silicon Valley (2013) - A PBS "American Experience" documentary about the start of Silicon Valley ^8.1/10
• Birth of BASIC (2014) - Invention of the Basic computer language.

Reflective interviews

• The Great 202 Jailbreak (2013) - David Brailsford
• UNIX Special: Profs Kernighan & Brailsford (2015) - David Brailsford interviews Brian Kernighan

Talks

• 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

Texts

Folklore

• Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL (1982)
• Epigrams on Programming (1982)
• The Story of Mel (1983)
• Unix Recovery Legend (1986)
• The Jargon File (1988)
• UTF-8 history (2003)

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.