There is so much content about IBM online that it became quite complicated to pick an entry for the Vidéothèque section this month. We are talking about a company with monthly marketing budgets bigger in absolute numbers than the average yearly payroll of a small or medium enterprise; and with more than 100 years of history, there are quite a few stories to be told about it.

Since the first Turing Award in 1966 (Alan J. Perlis) until the last one at the time of this writing (Robert Metcalfe), there have been four laureates related to database technology. First, Charles W. Bachman in 1973, for "his outstanding contributions to database technology." Then, Ted Codd in 1981, for "his fundamental and continuing contributions to the theory and practice of database management systems." Third, Jim Gray in 1998 for "seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation." Finally, Michael Stonebraker in 2014, for "fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems."

Philosophy is a weird subject. Many of us have had to learn some of it in high school, but we quickly dismissed it as we move forward in life, only to rediscover it as soon as we hit some midlife crisis along the way. Or, at least, that was the experience of this author. Yet philosophy is the only real bridge uniting all sciences, and as such deserves a much brighter spot on it. In particular, the road that led us to the computer was primarily built by philosophers, and in particular, by Bertrand Russell, whose 1959 interview is the subject of this month's Vidéothèque article.

In August 2014, Dartmouth College published a video commemorating the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language, the subject of this month's Vidéothèque section. It features original footage from the 1960s and interviews of former students and team members, including Professor Thomas Kurtz, who was 85 years old at the time. But the heart and soul of the video is, without any doubt, Professor John Kemeny himself; not only his technical contributions, which were outstanding by every standard, but also his open personality and progressive spirit.