Peter Hosey noticed that Apple recently published the session videos from the 2004-2008 WWDCs. Although I can’t be certain, this seems to include all sessions from 2004-2007. For 2008, the first year the iPhone SDK was available, only the Mac-specific sessions and those that deal with both Mac and iPhone are available. Whether the absence of the iPhone-only session videos is an oversight or intentional, I don’t know.

Together with the freely available WWDC 2010-2012 sessions, Apple developers now have a huge archive of knowledge available to them. Watching some of these old videos can be interesting just for the sake of it or to get an insight into the development of certain APIs over time. For instance, it could be useful to see how Apple explained the design of Core Data when it was first introduced in 2005.

Despite the Mac-centric nature of the videos, it seems that both registered Mac and iOS developers can download them. To access the videos, go to developer.apple.com/videos/ and click the OS X Videos link. This will open iTunes with this page:

Now click through to the categories under “Foundation Videos”. Each category contains a separate tab for each year between 2008 and 2004. So you’ll have to visit all five sections in order to download all the sessions for a particular year.

Beware: the full set of videos and slides for 2004-2008 is a whopping 176 gigabytes so be sure to bring some time for the download.