Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

21:00: shows inside The Pentagon. The way the dude who works there opens a his locked office door with an electric switch is just amazing. Cringely also mentions that there's an actual official speed limit in the corridors as he rides a carrier bike slowly through them.
21:45: the universities weren't enthusiastic, because people from other locations would be able to use your precious computer time. But finally ARPA forced the universities' hands, and they joined.
24:24 mentions that some of the guys who created ARPANET were actually previously counting cards at Casinos in Las Vegas, just like in the 21 (2008) film
one of the centerpieces of development was at UCLA. The other was the BBN company. 33:55 shows the first router, then called them Interface Message Processor
the first message was from UCLA to Stanford University. He was trying to write "Login", and it crashed at the 'g'. Epic. They later debugged it.
towards the end talks about ALOHAnet, the first wireless computer communication done

Part 2 - Serving the Suits

Robert Metcalfe. He's nice. Xerox PARC. Ethernet.
Explains what is a "Workstation", notably showing one by Sun Microsystems. This is now an obscure "passé" thing in 2020 that young people like Ciro Santilli have only heard of in legend (or in outdated university computer labs!). Funny to think that so many people have had this idea before, including e.g. the Chromebook
10:46 mentions that all of Cisco, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems and where founded at Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, at Stanford University.
he then talks a lot about Sun. Sun became dominant in Wall Street.
19:05: Novell, from Utah. How they almost went bust, but were saved at the last moment by Ray Noorda, who refocused them to their NetWare product which was under recent development. It allowed file and printer sharing in IBM PCs. 22:55 shows how they had a live radio host for people waiting on customer support calls!
33:56 mentions how The Grateful Dead had in impact on the Internet, as people wanted computers to be able to access The WELL online forum. They still own the domain as of 2022: www.well.com/. It is interesting how Larry Page also liked The Grateful Dead as mentioned at The Google Story, his dad would take him to shows. Larry is a bit younger of course than the people in this documentary.
37 show McAfee
43:56: fantastic portrait of Cisco

Part 3 - Wiring the World:

Berners-Lee at CERN and the invention of the URL.
1992: US Government allow commerce on the Internet
Web browser history, Mosaic and Marc Andresseeen.
20:45: America Online
23:29: search engines and Excite. Google was a bit too small to be on his radar!
25:50: porn
27: The Motley Fool and advertising
30: Planet U grocery shopping
31:50: Amazon
33:00: immigrant workers, Indians playing cricket, outsourcing, Wipro Systems
41:25: Java
46:30: Microsoft joins the Internet. The Internet Tidal Wave Internet memo. Pearl Harbour day talk.
56:40: Excite Tour. If they had survived, they would have been Google with their quirky offices.

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RISC-V MSTATUS.MIE field Updated 2025-07-16

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Open access Updated 2025-07-16

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Science communicator Updated 2025-07-16

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Visual math HTML book Updated 2025-07-16

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When you see some tagged examples, you will immediately know what this means.

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Correspondence principle Updated 2025-07-16

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Basically the same as classical limit, but more for quantum mechanics.

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DEF CON Updated 2025-07-16

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EC2 instance store volume Updated 2025-07-16

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Large but ephemeral storage for EC2 instances. Predetermined by the EC2 instance type. Stays in the local server disk. Not automatically mounted.

docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/InstanceStorage.html (archive) notably highlights what it persists, which is basically nothing
serverfault.com/questions/433703/how-to-use-instance-store-volumes-storage-in-amazon-ec2 mentions that you have to mount it

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Definite matrix Updated 2025-07-16

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The definition implies that this is also a symmetric matrix.

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Nuclear magnetic resonance Updated 2025-07-16

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Ciro Santilli once visited the chemistry department of a world leading university, and the chemists there were obsessed with NMR. They had small benchtop NMR machines. They had larger machines. They had a room full of huge machines. They had them in corridors and on desk tops. Chemists really love that stuff. More precisely, these are used for NMR spectroscopy, which helps identify what a sample is made of.

Basically measures the concentration of certain isotopes in a region of space.

Video 1.

Introduction to NMR by Allery Chemistry

. Source.

only works with an odd number of nucleons
apply strong magnetic field, this separates the energy of up and down spins. Most spins align with field.
send radio waves into sample to make nucleons go to upper energy level. We can see that the energy difference is small since we are talking about radio waves, low frequency.
when nucleon goes back down, it re-emits radio waves, and we detect that. TODO: how do we not get that confused with the input wave, which is presumably at the same frequency? It appears to send pulses, and then wait for the response.

Video 2.

How to Prepare and Run a NMR Sample by University of Bath (2017)

Source. This is a more direct howto, cool to see. Uses a Bruker Corporation 300. They have a robotic arm add-on. Shows spectrum on computer screen at the end. Shame no molecule identification after that!

Video 3.

Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance by Royal Society Of Chemistry (2008)

Source.

This video has the merit of showing real equipment usage, including sample preparation.

Says clearly that NMR is the most important way to identify organic compounds.

youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=41 lists some of the most common targets, including hydrogen and carbon-13
youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=124 ethanol example
youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=251 they use solvents where all protium is replaced by deuterium to not affect results. Genius.
youtu.be/uNM801B9Y84?t=354 usually they do 16 radio wave pulses

Video 4.

Introductory NMR & MRI: Video 01 by Magritek (2009)

Source. Precession and Resonance. Precession has a natural frequency for any angle of the wheel.

Video 5.

Introductory NMR & MRI: Video 02 by Magritek (2009)

Source. The influence of temperature on spin statistics. At 300K, the number of up and down spins are very similar. As you reduce temperature, we get more and more on lower energy state.

Video 6.

Introductory NMR & MRI: Video 03 by Magritek (2009)

Source. The influence of temperature on spin statistics. At 300K, the number of up and down spins are very similar. As you reduce temperature, we get more and more on lower energy state.