520 Pages Per Hour

Plumbing the depths of computer history for The Big OOPs and The Root of the Root of All Evil consistently proved to be deeply rewarding. Of course, given the limited time budget for preparation, whenever it came time to make the slides, it was a daunting task to create coherent presentations from such large volumes of material. But putting the stress of that aside, spending time with so many enlightening historical artifacts was an otherwise wonderful experience that completely changed the way I think about the history of programming.

I wanted to share this part of the process in some way, so I originally planned to record myself scrolling through the papers I used in The Big OOPs. I figured I could comment on each paper as I paged through them, and then edit that into a series of videos to post here. My goal was to do all of the papers that were used in the talk - a subset of everything I had read, but still a large number of papers.

However, when I tried doing this, the result was completely unworkable. Going through even asubset of just the Bjarne Stroustrup papers by themselves yielded over eight hours of recorded material. Editing aggressively might have cut it to four at best.

At a loss for what to do, I took a page from the modern TikTok playbook and tried going through the Stroustrup papers again, this time challenging myself to talk as fast as humanly possible. Anna then did an editing pass on it to remove the pauses in between phrases.

The result is arguably the most-ridiculous-100%-serious video I have ever made, but it does “successfully” walk through over 520 pages of historical material in only one hour of runtime! Whether or not it’s actually useful in relaying the “feel” of going through a large volume of material or not… well, you all will have to be judge of that!

For those of you who like doing follow-up reading, I have included a linked bibliography below that lists all the materials shown, in order of their first appearance in the video: