"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." — Halt and Catch Fire
Many facets of human ingenuity combine to build new systems, make new discoveries, and generally to try to improve ourselves. To that end, this is a living collection of particularly interesting and relevant content related to computing, tools, media, design, science and the history of these things.
If you have any suggestions or contributions, please do reach out on Twitter or via email, I'd love to see what you've learned.
Links not working? — try the Wayback Machine. Not sure where to start? Look for the ⭐️.
Thanks to Ziyad Basheer, Tinnei Pang and Anna Wang.
Other places with various pieces of relevant content.
Computer Utopias (Chris Novello - RISD) ⭐️
Alan Kay's Reading List (See Also: Forgotten Books) ⭐️
Bret Victor’s Bookshelf (See Also: Transcription) ⭐️
Quotes (Bret Victor)
Ted Nelson's YouTube Channel ⭐️
Folklore (Andy Hertzfeld)
Bookshelf (Patrick Collison)
Labs (Patrick Collison)
Progress (Patrick Collison)
Silicon Valley History (Patrick Collison)
The All Things Tech History List (David Pierce)
Future of Coding (Steve Krouse)
What Should You Do with Your Life? (Alexey Guzey)
What, if anything, made Xerox PARC and Bell Labs unique? What structures and cultural attributes support great work?
TAOR: A History (Vi Hart) ⭐️ — This elegantly captures the feeling of groups like these.
"What made Xerox PARC special? Who else today is like them?" (Alan Kay) ⭐️
Excerpts from Alan Kay's Emails (Bret Victor) ⭐️
How To Invent The Future Part I (Alan Kay) ⭐️
How To Invent The Future Part II (Alan Kay) ⭐️
CHI 2016 Plenary: Alan Kay in conversation with Vishal Sikka ⭐️
Mervin Kelly, A Biography (John Pierce) ⭐️
Reviving Patronage and Revolutionary Industrial Research (Alexey Guzey)
The Art of Research (Vi Hart)
Art-Based Research (eleVR) ⭐️
Art as Research (eleVR)
Musical User Interfaces (Arthur Carabott)
“Would you like to see an invisible sculpture?” (eleVR)
Talk: Art-Based Research for Immersive Media (Vi Hart)
CDG Research Agenda (Bret Victor)
Crit at CDG ⭐️
The Crit (Kurt Ralske) ⭐️
See Also: The Pixar Braintrust
The Power of The Context (Alan Kay) ⭐️
STEPS Research Proposal (VPRI, Alan Kay)
A Brief History of Industrial Research (Ink & Switch)
Alan Kay Interview (Ambitious) ⭐️
Lunch with Alan Kay (Steve Krouse) ⭐️
eleVR (Vi Hart)
CDG (Bret Victor)
HARC (Y Combinator Research)
VPRI (Alan Kay)
Learning Day (OpenAI)
OpenAI Fundraising (NYT)
#define CTO OpenAI (Greg Brockman) ⭐️
My path to OpenAI (Greg Brockman)
The OpenAI Mission (Greg Brockman)
Greg (Sam Altman)
Creative Thinking (Claude Shannon)
A Rubric on Rubik Cubics (Claude Shannon) ⭐️
Realtalk Tech Preview (Bret Victor) ⭐️
The Risk of Discovery (Paul Graham)
Local-first software (Ink & Switch)
Muse Prototype Challenges (Ink & Switch)
We Need a New Science of Progress (Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen)
Science is Getting Less Bang for its Buck (Michael Nielsen & Patrick Collison)
How Life Sciences Actually Work (Alexey Guzey)
The Independent Researcher (Nadia Eghbal)
Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums (Stewart Brand)
Recreating ARPA, the most successful research agency in history
Still need to categorize these.
Nototo - a virtual memory palace
Tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest (Alan Kay)
The Center of "Why?" (Alan Kay) ⭐️
Panel with Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee & Doug Engelbart ⭐️
A Few Words on Doug Engelbart (Bret Victor)
Utopian UI Architect (Medium)
Spatial Interfaces (John Palmer) ⭐️
Leon Sans: Dynamic Typeface Made with Code (Jongmin Kim) ⭐️
Magazine Interview with Alan Kay
Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System (Ivan Sutherland)
The Future of Programming (Bret Victor) ⭐️
Active Essays on the Web (VPRI)
Programs with Common Sense (John McCarthy)
A Visit to Fujitsu Laboratories
Diary of a Disaster: General Magic Goes Poof (Richard Doherty)
The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (John Truby) - Recommended by Brianna Wolfson
The Creative Habit (Twyla Tharp) - Recommended by Brianna Wolfson
Twelve Tones (Vi Hart)
Alan Kay is Not Impressed (Fast Company)
Recreating the Magic of Xerox PARC (Fast Company) ⭐️
Restoring the Xerox Alto (Ken Shirriff)
Creation Myth (New Yorker)
Experiment.com - Kickstarter for Scientific Research
Explorable Explanations (Vi Hart & Nicky Case)
Parable of The Polygons (Vi Hart & Nicky Case)
Bicycle for the Mind Thread (Steven Sinofsky)
Andy Hertzfeld (Tools & Craft)
Stu Card (Tools & Craft)
Ted Nelson (Tools & Craft)
LOT2046 (Vadik Marmeladov)
Lapka (Vadik Marmeladov)
Airbnb Samara (Vadik Marmeladov)
Saul Griffith Profile (Wired)
Stripe’s Negative Emissions Commitment ⭐️
Project Wren ⭐️
The Arc of Collaboration (Kevin Kwok)
Introducing Mercury OS (Jason Yuan)
The Desktop Metaphor Must Die (Jason Yuan)
Chromachron, A Radically New Approach to Time (Hodinkee)
The Secret Lab in Tuxedo Park (HV Mag)
How to Work Together (Kevin Hale)
Research Progress Report 1 (Oscar Rosello)
How to make almost anything (Oscar Rosello)
Buster's Timeline (Buster Benson)
Interview with Greg Brockman & Szymon Sidor (YC Podcast)
McMaster-Carr - Recommended by Alexander from The Long Now
The Calculus of Bad Driving (Vi Hart)
Nonprofit Explorer (ProPublica)
Google AI Bets on Canada (TechCrunch)
The Whole Code Catalog (Future of Coding)
Rethinking Education (Alan Kay)
Education That Takes Us To The 22nd Century (Alan Kay)
Upgrade Your Cargo Cult (Meaningness)
Augmenting Cognition (Michael Nielson) ⭐️
At Dynamicland, The Building is The Computer (Carl Tashian)
Cloudflare's Approach to Research
Laser Socks (Dynamicland)
Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated? (Alan Kay)
Creating Delightful Events (Jessie Char)
Richard Hamming: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (Lectures)
How do people get new ideas? (Issac Asimov)
The Neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI (Wired)
How can we develop transformative tools for thought? (Michael Nielsen & Andy Matuschak)
Monogram: Productivity tools for creative pros
Futureland (InternetVin) ⭐️
Tools that help us channel thought in new or novel ways.
The 1968 Demo (Doug Engelbart)
Enlightened Imagination for Citizens (Alan Kay)
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction (Bret Victor)
An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" (Bret Victor)
Stop Drawing Dead Fish (Bret Victor)
Responses to A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (Bret Victor)
Abstraction Email (Bret Victor)
Magic Ink (Bret Victor)
The Social Dynamics of Programming Together in Dynamicland (Toby Schachman)
Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit (Omar Rizwan)
The Next Big Thing is a Room (Steve Krouse)
Personal Dynamic Media (Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg)
Doing with Images Makes Symbols (Alan Kay)
Fireflies (Nicky Case)
Muse (Ink & Switch)
As We May Think (Vannevar Bush) ⭐️
Augmenting Human Intellect (Doug Engelbart) ⭐️
Computer Lib / Dream Machines (Ted Nelson) ⭐️
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (Richard Hamming) ⭐️
Interview with Bob Taylor (Computer History Museum)
The Dream Machine (JCR Licklider) ⭐️
The Senses: Design Beyond Vision ⭐️
A Mind at Play (Claude Shannon) ⭐️
The Idea Factory (Bell Labs)
You and Your Research (Richard Hamming) ⭐️
Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) ⭐️
The Soul of A New Machine (Tracy Kidder)
Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull)
Mindstorms (Seymour Papert) ⭐️
The Humane Interface (Jef Raskin)
Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program (Craig Harris)
The Qualities of Great Design (WWDC)
Designing for Wonder (Linda Dong) ⭐️
Weird Technology (Lia Napolitano)
The Future Has Hips (May-Li Khoe)
Designing with Empathy (May-Li Khoe)
Humanities and Technology (Ashley Nelson-Hornstein)
Dieter Rams Documentary: Overview
Graduals (Tori Hinn)
What are the limitations of our existing tools and systems, and how can they harm us?
What are examples of ways of thinking (e.g systems thinking) that can help us think and consider beyond the defaults of our "bad brains"?
Exploring efforts attempting to map, understand and accelerate developments in various domains.
Literature Review: Progress Studies (Jasmine Wang)
Progress Studies as Civic Duty (Jason Crawford)
Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down? (Tyler Cowen & Ben Southwood) ⭐️
Engineering the natural world.
Plants with self-sustained luminescence (Planta) ⭐️
Hortum machina, B (Interactive Architecture) ⭐️
Elowan: A plant-robot hybrid (MIT Media Lab) ⭐️
Cyborg Botany: Augmented plants as sensors, displays, and actuators (MIT Media Lab)
Remaking “Sharing Human Technology with Plants” with HEXA (Vincross)
Silk Pavilion (Mediated Matter Group)
How can a group of people work together most effectively?
How can we recapture the magic of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs?
What structures and cultural attributes support great work?
What is the best way to fund long-term endeavors that focus on research?