liam_on_linux: (Default)
2014-01-29 12:26 am
Entry tags:

Computers for Cynics: a wise, wry, biased (but fair) history lesson from one of the great prophets

Ted Nelson, creator of Project Xanadu, widely-hailed as the inventor of hypertext. Xanadu never quite happened; what we got was a very watered-down version, the WWW.

Nelson's written several books, none of which I've read - but now, I really want to. In a series of bite-sized, sub-15-min videos, he presents his jaundiced but remarkably perceptive and insightful overview of the history of the personal computer - he's been there since the start.

Videos 0 through 4 are excellent high-level overviews. Number 5 is on hypertext, his specialist field, and he starts letting his bias show a bit; numbers 6 and the concluding N are, with the best will in the world, rants - but amusing ones and still informative as anything you could hope to find.

Strongly recommended viewing.

Read more... )
liam_on_linux: (Default)
2011-10-27 08:13 pm
Entry tags:

Triumph of the Nerds

I went looking for video interviews of Steve Jobs and found rather more. Many years ago, I read Accidental Empires by "Robert X Cringely". I knew it had been made into a US TV series way back in 1996, but I'd never paid much attention - and I never saw a mention of it on UK TV, not that I am a big TV-watcher.

But all three parts of the adaptation, Triumph of the Nerds, are on Youtube as full-length episodes. None of that painful piecing-together-from-chunks.

Stuffed with marvellous clips of many industry pioneers - not just then-youthful big names such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, John Sculley and so on, but some of the techs from behind the scenes as well: Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, John Warnock, Tim Patterson, Gary Kildall and a handful of the IBMers behind the IBM PC.

Well worth 150min of your time.

Sadly, I can't find a single-part version of the sequel, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet.

Embedded videos behind the cut. )

Short links...
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFL9IyJ_qHk
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbRmaIzGTOM
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Bg461mnN8
liam_on_linux: (Default)
2010-06-29 12:27 pm
Entry tags:

Peppermint Linux

Interesting interview on the Inquirer with the creators of this lightweight web-centric desktop distro...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/1653402/peppermint-web-centric-linux