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.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
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
- Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial (1984) - Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer
- 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)
- What would you like to see most in minix? (1991) - First public mention of what would later become Linux
- UNIX (1972) - Continuous Unix commit history from 1972 until today
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