Look here

March 31, 2019 5:21 PM

The first scene from Werner Herzog's 2016 film about the internet’s history and future, “Lo and Behold“:
Prof. Leonard Kleinrock describes how the first message on ARPANET was sent from Boelter Hall 3420, on the UCLA campus, October 29, 1969 .
(Lo and Behold previously)
posted by growabrain (21 comments total)

Heh...”the corridors here look repulsive...”
posted by darkstar at 5:42 PM on March 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

a fresh take on packet sniffing
posted by thelonius at 5:46 PM on March 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

Lo, what thou hath wrought.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:54 PM on March 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

The best part of this movie for me, hands down, was Werner Herzog talking to Ted Nelson. It is simultaneously maximum Herzog and maximum Nelson.
posted by phooky at 5:59 PM on March 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

This is probably the last Herzog movie I liked. It's a good one (well, most of it is. He came across far to uncritical of the psychosomatic wifi folk). And yes, the first scene starts off which such amazing energy and wonder.
posted by thecjm at 6:10 PM on March 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

16 bits an whatta ya get.
another day older cause
Login won't fit.
posted by clavdivs at 6:12 PM on March 31, 2019 [6 favorites]

“Lo” to fifty years later “lol.” My, how far have we come.

The Ted Nelson clip was great. It’s too bad that a lot of the people working in and with computers these days have no clue as to the history of the technology, where things sort of fell by the wayside or got changed into something else not really the same. A manager I had back in the 80’s loaned me Nelson’s books. I thought they were brilliant and that what he proposed could be amazing. But all we got was the World Wide Web. Not the same thing.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:35 PM on March 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm upset he missed his chance to call it "LOL and Behold"
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:39 PM on March 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

After the first crash, they had to wait an hour and then login again.

Starting with L!!

so the first message might have been "lo",
but the first three characters were, indeed,

"lol"

I forget if I read this or realized it when reading about these events but either way, it is pretty damn pataphysical...
posted by albion moonlight at 7:25 PM on March 31, 2019 [8 favorites]

I love this! I first encountered email at Bell Labs in about 1982. My thought was What the heck? why don't you just walk next store and talk to the person? LOL.
posted by bluesky43 at 7:33 PM on March 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

walk next store

Is this an eggcorn, or a mondegreen?
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:48 PM on March 31, 2019

/next DOOR. argh
posted by bluesky43 at 7:51 PM on March 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

I love that movie
posted by nikaspark at 8:25 PM on March 31, 2019

Especially the part where Elon Musk is made to look like a dumbass.
posted by nikaspark at 8:25 PM on March 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

If you drive into the hills above Silicon Valley, in woodsy Portola Valley, there's a hamburger joint that has been there for 150 years--originally a popular place to drink because Leland Stanford insisted on no alcohol in Palo Alto (East Palo Alto was another place you could go, which is why it was nicknamed Whiskey Gultch and became a place for the less wealthy to live, so that even today, driving University Avenue across Freeway 101 takes you from some of the richest houses in the Bay Area to some of the poorest).

So what does the Alpine Inn have to do with this post? SRI engineers took their electronics filled van there in 1976 and sent what is thought to be the first Internet message through Arpanet that went across more than one network, to reach Boston.
posted by eye of newt at 12:02 AM on April 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

How to I go about getting Herzog to narrate my wake and funeral?
posted by danep at 3:47 AM on April 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

I forget if I read this or realized it when reading about these events but either way, it is pretty damn pataphysical...

Nothing propinques like propinquity.
posted by Chitownfats at 4:14 AM on April 1, 2019

I had one undergrad class with Prof Kleinrock, Queueing Theory.

Smart guy who did a decent job of making the tough math of the topic accessible to me.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:29 AM on April 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'll never forget that I got to play with the first node of the Internet when it was sitting in the basement of a library at UCLA for decades unattended. I knew even back in the 90s that someday soon it would be in the Smithsonian behind velvet ropes (btw, it's military equipment and built like a brick shithouse so it could handle people touching it).
posted by mathowie at 3:53 PM on April 1, 2019 [8 favorites]

The internet as a brick shithouse is actually a pretty apt metaphor.
posted by nikaspark at 8:18 PM on April 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

it's military equipment and built like a brick shithouse so it could handle people touching it

It's demonstrated in the linked video, when people learn to RTFA/WTFV before commenting! Does anyone click the links up there?
posted by hat_eater at 3:10 AM on April 2, 2019 [1 favorite]