Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet

1998, Technology  -   16 Comments
6.63
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Ratings: 6.63/10 from 19 users.

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the InternetNerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (1998) is a three-hour documentary film written and hosted by Mark Stephens under the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely and produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting for PBS.

A sequel to Triumph of the Nerds, Nerds 2.0.1 documents the development of ARPANET, the Internet, the World Wide Web and the dot-com bubble of the mid and late 1990s. Episodes included: Networking the Nerds, Serving the Suits, and Wiring the World.

It was broadcast two years prior to the collapse of the dot.com bubble. The documentary was later turned into a book of the same title by series director Stephen Segaller.

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16 Comments / User Reviews

  1. Daniel Michael Abraham (Myster

    One of the greatest documentaries I have ever seen, I would recommend anyone watch this to understand modern life and communications and information technologies and how it all came about.

  2. Jake Cooke

    It amazes and dumbfounds me simultaneously as to how they lionize software developers and merit only the metaphysical side of networking. They don't mention the physical commonality between two nodes that is not only critical but mandatory for communication. They could have mentioned the heavy duty ISDN modem....

    1. wewantthefunk

      Not exactly true. Starting at around 30:00 they go into the intricacies of the hardware wide of building a world wide network.

      Fascinating to me.

  3. Jake Cooke

    So who noticed the pentagram?

  4. Mark

    Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographical information program that was originally called EarthViewer 3D, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded company acquired by Google in 2004...

  5. Mark

    Let's see we had 75 out of 100 incompetent nerds, and about the same clueless con artists who knew nobody new tihs about technology, and some good hypsters and the rest is history.

    Many former geeks simply got stuck in paradigms that have since been replaced, America pushed a housing bubble and India, Malaysia and the Philippines and others were wallpapered with free libraries from sun, Microsoft and others, while America fell behind 10 years, all their internet monsters and software monsters funded by US intel slush funding empowered by the main DNA, such as Google's Stanford connection.

    No reason to have any real competition when the whole point is tracking and profiling everyone and his mother, and keeping that development cutting edge and dirt cheap at the same time.

    America was relegated the rust bucket literal and mental, and it's bloated penal system is the only labor pool that can out compete China, and due to being able to apply cutting edge everything in these emerging markets America is going to be a martial law fish in the barrel shoot out, and the major capital has gone overseas along with the scheisters pushing it over there from the academic consultant to the Motza munching money mongers, LOL, so the rest is as they say, history, America didn't miss the boat, it is the boat, SS Titanic, LOL.

    It's a done deal folks, when America takes on just enough water, the weak fish will get sucked down as well, in fact even the big competitors in emerging economies will be stunted to the stump.

  6. Joe WIlson

    Great video.. I also like the one called history of the BBS.
    I use to run one back in the days when I was in High School, had 2 phone lines , people would call my computer, chat, check their email, download, play games etc.. my system would hook to other computers getting message bases from all over the world every morning. that was back in the late 80s , early 90s.. granted it was slow, but files where alot more slower then.

  7. Voroman

    I wish I could go back to that time with a IPhone and make Steve Jobs' head explode xD

  8. Voroman

    This is like watching something from a parallel universe. :)

  9. Gray

    @Balaji

    Because this documentary was made in the year Google first came online, Google was not yet relevant. There is plenty of other information covering Google's rise out there, this is about the foundations that made companies like Google possible.

  10. Balaji

    3 hour documentary about internet without much about Google???

  11. Philip

    How funny how Excite is no longer relevant. If not for this documentary, I wouldn't even know them, and it turns out that they turned down an opportunity to buy Google in 1999.

  12. Philip

    AOL - a company now worth nearly nothing thanks to their merger with Time Warner.

  13. Philip

    Internet Explorer chopped off Netscape's head.

    1. Gregory Young

      no internet explorer forced netscape business heads to rethink the brower market open source the navigator code and it became firefox under netscapes open source offshoot mozilla.