The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1] That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market. A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment (multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the time comes. [1]The video(100% worth watching) ▶ this video Wikipedia: link

For "how things work", I recommend the book Code by Charles Petzold. After that, Jon Stokes's Inside the Machine will give a lot of details on CPU architectures up to Intel's Core 2 Duo. You can also try following along a computer engineering book if you want to go that low in detail with exercises, Digital Fundamentals by Floyd is a common textbook (I have an old 8th edition). History-wise, enjoy learning slowly because there's so much that even if you dedicated yourself to it you wouldn't be "done" any time soon! Some suggestions in order though: Watching The Mother of All Demos: ▶ this video A short clip of Sketchpad presented by Alan Kay: link An article from the 40s that also inspired Engelbart: link The Information by James Gleick What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg Lastly, to mix up in whatever order you please, some paper collections: Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective edited by Andreas Paepcke History of Programming Languages papers for various langs you're interested in, here's the set from the second conference in 1993 link but there have been further conferences to check out too if it's interesting Also all of the Turing Award winners' lectures I've read have been good link All that and some good recommendations others have given should keep you busy for a while!

I can give you the names of a handful of books that might be useful. Some are more technical, some less so. Some are more about personalities, some about the business aspects of things, some more about the actual technology. I don't really have time to try and categorize them all, so here's a big dump of the ones I have and/or am familiar with that seem at least somewhat related. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering - link Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - link The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage - link Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet - link Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing - link Decline and Fall of the American Programmer - link Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer - link Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date - link Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle - link Winners, Losers & Microsoft - link Microsoft Secrets - link The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture - link Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age - link Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire - link Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - link The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and The Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer - link

Top of my head, here are some books on specific histories I enjoyed. All old, but there are timeless nuggets in them. Soul of a new machine, previously mentioned. Where I first learned about mushroom management. Just for Fun: the story of an accidental revolutionary [0] was fun bio on Torvalds from 2001 The Mythical Man Month [1] offers some insight into the management and thinking that went into OS/360 Masters of Doom [2]: offers an enjoyable history of the shareware years and the rise of id software The multicians site [3]: is a collaborative history of Multics, one the most influential operating systems. The Mother of All Demos [4]: even better than Steve Jobs keynotes Steve Jobs iPhone introduction [5]: I’m not a huge fan of Mr Jobs, but this is one of the best presentations ever. It’s not history, per se, but very interesting through our eyes. 0: link 1: link 2: link 3: link 4: ▶ this video 5: link

If you enjoy reading documents, BITSAVERS.ORG is a treasure mine full of lost knowledge. link Here you will find Xerox PARC, DEC, Burroughs, Apple, Sun, Borland,... old research documents, papers, manuals. In the context of static compilation, for example in MS-DOS, take Turbo Pascal 6.0 programmer's guide. link For some 8 bit love you can check ZX Spectrum and Atari archives. link link Next step is to get an emulator for any of those old OS/computers and try to follow along one of those books. Also there are some videos on YouTube showing those systems. "The Smalltalk-80 Programming System" link "NeXT vs Sun" link "Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3" link "Amiga Programming" link "Amiga Hardware Programming" link The Mother of All Demos" ▶ this video Just a very tiny sample of videos

First, the "Mother of all Demos" by Doug Engelbart: ▶ this video This was in 1968, at a time when most people thought about computers as being machines for solving computation problems, like processing payrolls or calculating rocket trajectories. Engelbart and his students had the radical idea that computers could be used for human "knowledge worker" productivity. In one 90 minute presentation, he introduces everything from the idea of a GUI, to the mouse, to word processing, hypertext, computer graphics, and (simulated) videoconferencing. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that has never seen this stuff before, and it'll blow you away. Something more recent: Martin Fowler's great introduction to NoSQL: link Not so technical, this is a great overview of the reasons why (and when) NoSQL is valuable. He crams a lot into a short speech, so it's one of the rare videos I've required students in my database classes to watch. Now, really getting away from the technical, I have to recommend watching the IDEO shopping cart video: link This is the classic introduction of Design Thinking to the world, in 1999. If you're using the Lean Startup or an Agile method, but have never heard of IDEO's shopping cart, you may be able to get along fine at work, but you should be kind of embarrassed like a physicist who's never read Newton.