Tools for thought: from Engelbart to Bret Victor

Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse and creator of NLS, visits Google in 2007 for a Talks at Google session. He presents his ideas about augmenting human intellect with slides, followed by a Q&A.

A full-length documentary on the life and ideas of Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse and the creator of the 1968 Mother of All Demos. It includes interviews with people such as Alan Kay and Vint Cerf.

Alan Kay's keynote at OOPSLA 1997, arguing that the computer revolution has not happened yet. He talks about how to build large systems and think about objects, how ideas and learning scale, and where the web and software had gone wrong.

A full-length lecture by Alan Kay from the 1980s, Doing with Images Makes Symbols, on how people learn through doing, images and symbols. It includes demos of Smalltalk and other interactive systems, among them programs written by children.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, a version of a lecture he gave several times. He argues that computing has not yet found its fundamental rules, as physics found Maxwell's equations, and that much software complexity is accidental and avoidable.

Alan Kay's first lecture in a two-part Stanford startup series on how to invent the future. He draws on how Xerox PARC found its ideas to discuss choosing problems and seeing past the present.

The opening episode of Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics series, in which the hypertext pioneer talks straight to the camera about what 'technology' really means. He argues that much of what we call technology is packaging and arbitrary historical decisions, not inevitability.

Hyperland is a 1990 BBC documentary written by and starring Douglas Adams, in which a software agent played by Tom Baker guides him through hypertext and hypermedia. Ted Nelson and other computing figures appear to show early ideas of interactive media.

A 1987 episode of the TV series The Computer Chronicles on Apple's HyperCard, the Macintosh tool for building stacks of linked cards. It shows people building their own applications with it, including a used-car salesman's custom tool.

Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, tells the story of how he came up with the electronic spreadsheet and shows the first version in a short TED interview. He explains the idea behind it and how the design took shape.

Bret Victor's talk argues that creators need an immediate connection to what they are creating. He demonstrates tools where code, animation and drawings respond live as you change them, then turns to the idea of living by a guiding principle.

Bret Victor's talk Stop Drawing Dead Fish argues that digital tools make people draw static, lifeless things. He shows alternatives in which the artist works with live, dynamic pictures directly.

Bret Victor argues that tools for thinking should use the whole human body, with movement, touch and spatial memory, instead of reducing everything to pictures under glass. The talk is the context for his Dynamicland and RealTalk work.

Bret Victor's talk on how the media and representations we think with limit or open up what we can think. He draws on the history of mathematical notation and on dataflow visualization work done for Nile to argue for richer tools for thought.

Bret Victor's talk looks at where programming has been and where it might go, staged as if it were given in 1973. He argues that the field keeps repeating its assumptions and that it should explore very different ways of programming.

Bret Victor's 2014 talk Seeing Spaces argues that creators need to see inside what they are building, and imagines physical workspaces equipped for that. It ties into his work on room-scale, physical computing and the thinking behind the RealTalk project.

Bret Victor of Dynamicland on Computational Public Space, the idea of computing that lives in shared physical rooms instead of behind private screens. He shows people programming with pieces of paper in a room.

Chris Granger, creator of the Light Table editor, on what programming could look like in ten years. He walks through iterations of his research prototypes for a more human-friendly programming environment, the work that became Eve, ending with a demo of a semantic wiki and personal knowledge tool.

Chris Granger's Strange Loop 2015 talk on Eve, his project to rethink programming for humans after Light Table. It shows early prototypes, including a table-based one that the project later moved away from.

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming is stuck in a batch, edit-compile-run model, and that programs should be live and modifiable while they run. He draws on Lisp and Smalltalk-style environments and REPL-driven work to show what better programming could look like.

Geoffrey Litt gives a talk expanding on his essay about malleable software in the age of LLMs. He shows demos of dynamic documents that people can reshape into their own personal software.