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5.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage Internet, Aug 2 2001
By A Customer
Parts of these tapes already look like the old Volkswagen in the Woody Allen movie "Sleeper." For instance, the students who started Excite are all caught in their gloriously self-centered success, which didn't last long, it turns out, but did stoke them each with millions.Cringely is eloquent, in words and in deeds. The shot of him driving in a convertible along a freeway, while holding forth about the internet as a big pipeline, is a great way to cast an image. His patient tracing of how the internet emerged from simple attempts to hook one computer to another, and get them to communicate meaningful information is also very well done, and penetrates to the level of the PhD thesis written in 1959 that laid out the binary math basis for it all in the first place.\ The tension between the hippie beginnings of the communitarian internet, and the later proprietary commercialization of the medium is also profiled, with subthemes like how to lose control of your company, played out in interviews with 3Com's Metcalfe, who also articulated "Metcalfe's law." These videos stand on their own feet, but also on the shoulders of the book, written by Stephen Segaller, who wrote it, amazingly, for PBS. So look, some good things can come out of PBS after all(!). Segaller's book is, as you might suspect, much more detailed, but only the video takes you to Microsoft's campus, or shows you the inventor of an early wireless internet, Norm Abramson, years later standing on a beach holding a surfboard with his current corporate logo plastered in dead-center. Perhaps another symbol of hippie-goes-Ferrari. The book and the video also touch on the fascinating history of Cisco, and the bitterness of former husband and wife Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack, toward their first V.C., Don Valentine. The video has Sandy sitting in front of her English country mansion, and also Len, speculating on the existence of sentient beings elsewhere in the universe. So most of these people were and still are complete nerds, and but for their work, we too would have to be nerds to use our computers. So thanks, nerds, for being nerds, so I don't have to be.
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