I’m sure i don’t need to point you to the original SICP video lectures (or do i?). As any good university, Berkeley’s a course on computer programming based on Abelson and Sussman’s book. The nice bit is that they have recorded the lectures and made them into webcast lectures.
I have yet to watch most of them, but i won’t be surprised if they’re good. For starters, look for the Alan Kay videos in there: they’re from the mid 80s (when Alan was at Apple), and he reviews the history of user interfaces. He shows really amazing videos of the late 60s and early 70s, with rarities like, for instance, a lecture by Douglas Engelbart featuring his futuristic (and working!) NLS system (the full demo is also available elsewhere), or the first SmallTalk system.
I am deeply surprised by the amount of sophistication these people had reached thirty years ago: several of the things they were able to do look pretty advanced even by today standards. One cannot help but wondering what have we been doing during the later decades!
Tags: computer science, programming, smalltalk, teaching, tutorials
February 16, 2008 at 10:29 am
I am not at all surprised with the level of sophistication we have not achieved after the original Smalltalk, the Xerox Star family, Lisa or the Lisp machines.
We live in a world where diversity, in stark difference to that “golden age” you refer to, is no longer the norm. Those days, people built computers with the goal of being the best computer possible and were prepared to develop computer and software to match each other. Today people build computers not to be the best computers possible, but to be able to run the current incarnation of Windows.