The Internet Documentary by Werner Herzog -- "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World"

I really enjoyed the new documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, and for those of you that appreciate the history of the net, I think you will as well.

The history of the title is captured here at NPR:

"We should have prepared a wonderful message," says Kleinrock, who headed UCLA's computer lab then. "Certainly Samuel Morse did, when he prepared 'What hath God wrought,' a beautiful Biblical quotation. Or Alexander Graham Bell: 'Come here, Watson. I need you.' Or Armstrong up in the moon — 'a giant leap for mankind.' These guys were smart. They understood public relations. They had quotes ready for history."

On Oct. 29, Kleinrock says, "All we wanted to do ... was to send a simple login capability from UCLA to SRI. We just wanted to log into the SRI machine from UCLA."

And so the first computer network communication was — well, it was supposed to be the word "login."

"The first thing I typed was an L," Kline says. Over the phone, Duvall told Kline he had gotten it. "I typed the O, and he got the O."

Then Kline typed the G. "And he had a bug and it crashed."

And that was it. The first-ever communication over a computer network was "lo." The ARPANET was born."



It shows both the positive and negative side of the Internet.

Werner Herzog is the director and I did know of his work, but when I read his background, I thought it would be worth renting -- and it certainly was. I rented this at Amazon. 

Here is the description:

"In LO AND BEHOLD: REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD, the Oscar-nominated Herzog chronicles the virtual world from its origins to its outermost reaches, exploring the digital landscape with the same curiosity and imagination he previously trained on earthly destinations as disparate as the Amazon, the Sahara, the South Pole and the Australian outback. Herzog leads viewers on a journey through a series of provocative conversations that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works - from business to education, space travel to healthcare, and the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships."