Tech History

Some remarkable, and hilarious, predictions in this video. Especially interesting from a socio-economic perspective.

The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.

Delve into the historical significance of the UNIX operating system through this archival footage from AT&T, showcasing the development and features of this pioneering technology. Let Brian Kernighan explain the UNIX OS to you, and it's many uses.

Neil Postman talk in LA 1993/7/28 (VPRI-0131)

Robert X. Cringely (formerly of InfoWorld), produced this documentary for PBS after leaving the magazine.

In 1996, PBS aired a documentary of Accidental Empires called Triumph of the Nerds, and on camera, the players who had previously whispered their secrets to Cringely began to shout them. An IBM lifer, Sam Albert, sang a hearty IBM company fight song in duet with Cringely - and, famously, Steve Jobs bluntly declared that he thought Microsoft made mediocre products, a salvo that caused a rift between Jobs and Gates. By last year, the two men had mended fence. Gates gave Apple $150 million, and Apple and Microsoft shook on a joint licensing agreement. Yet in Cringely's new PBS documentary, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, which premieres November 25, Jobs again spoils for trouble, saying the Web is "exciting" chiefly because "Microsoft doesn't own it, so there's an incredible amount of innovation going on." Why do they all open up to a man who concedes that he is "just a little bit dangerous"? Cringely knows why. "I've been on the periphery of the room in every room they've ever been in, and I've been asking questions for 20 years," he says. Besides, he explains, "Bill likes our interviews because I don't bore him, and that probably is true for Steve as well." This is not to say that Cringely doesn't sometimes get on people's nerves. He has been flamed by WebTV grannies who resent his dismissal of their high tech toy, and by "very, very fervent" Macintosh users who resent any criticism at all. Cringely was thrilled when Gates tried to disprove an anecdote from Accidental Empires. In the book, Gates goes to a convenience store in 1990 (net worth at the time: $3 billion) to get a tub of butter pecan ice cream. At the checkout counter, he can't find a 50-cents-off coupon he had brought, and as he searches and searches, a frustrated customer farther back in line finally tosses him two quarters, which Gates takes. The customer calls out, "Pay me back when you earn your first million." Gates told Cringely the story couldn't be true because coupons come in the daily newspaper, and he doesn't get a daily newspaper. "He wanted me to buy it!" Cringely marvels. "Why? Who am I to him?" As it happens, Bob Cringely is not really Robert X. Cringely - or rather, he is not the only Robert X. Cringely. He was born Mark Stephens, and grew up in Apple Creek, Ohio. His mother was a librarian, his father was a labor union organizer, and he has an older brother and a younger sister, who both work in the computer industry today. Cringely built two small planes with his father before he was 14, and as a teenager, he decided he wanted to study in England, and found himself a scholarship to a tony old boarding school near Liverpool called the Merchant Taylors' School. He got his pilot's license there as part of the school's compulsory military training. "British tax dollars paid to teach me to fly," he gloats.

From March of 1998 to April of 1999 an independent documentary film crew followed a team of software engineers at Netscape Communications as they lived through a watershed moment in the brief history of their company, and the Internet. The documentary follows the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last-minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31, 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin. A little less than three years later the "dot com bubble" would pop, and the entire landscape on the internet would change forever. There are many hints of that impending doom in this video, and the makers didn't even know they'd included them. After Andy Baio uploaded the documentary to his personal website for the release of Mozilla Firefox 3 in 2009, director David Winton requested it be taken down, pending his decision about future distribution under a free content license. It has since been released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license.

While Microsoft may be the biggest software company in the world, not every computer user is a fan of their products, or their way of doing business. While Microsoft's Windows became the most widely used operating system for personal computers in the world, many experts took issue with Microsoft's strict policies regarding licensing, ownership, distribution, and alteration of their software. The objections of many high-profile technology experts, most notably Richard Stallman, led to what has become known as "the Open Source Movement," which is centered on the belief that computer software should be free both in the economic and intellectual senses of the word. Eventually, one of Stallman's admirers, Linus Torvalds, created a new operating system called Linux, a freely distributed software which many programmers consider to be markedly superior to Windows. Revolution OS is a documentary that examines the genesis of the Open Source Movement, and explores and explains the technical and intellectual issues involved in a manner understandable to computer aficionados and non-techheads alike.

Finnish-made documentary about GNU/Linux, featuring some of the most influential people of the free software (FOSS) movement.

A Pseudo-Documentary about the competition between Sinclair and Acorn over the contract with the BBC for a new microcomputer. It's amped up for dramatic entertainment's sake, and seem to have invented a rivalry between Curry and Clive Sinclair, but the basic idea of the history is all still there. The guy they got to play Clive Sinclair is terribly cartoonish, and the bald-cap is ridiculous. But if you can look past that, it's not bad.