Thursday, February 01, 2007

Why I Like Working Documentaries...

I guess this would be a really good reason to finally make a new blog entry. Today I worked on a documentary where we filmed Peterme.com, the man who coined the term 'blog.'(If you scan down on the left you can see the actual post that started it all there.) Well, it should be a good reason, but really it just made me want to apologize for what I do with the thing he named. Or don't do.

We also met Paul Niquette, who apparently in 1953 first coined the term 'software.' He had to do a little defending and searching, but just found out from the Oxford English Dictionary that he was going to be given credit for the word.

We did this in the Computer History Museum, which doesn't sound like it would be all that much, but was pretty cool. It was interesting to see the Compaq lugable computer I used to have or the Commodore 64 as museum pieces. And of course the game system display. But the coolest was the stuff that I had no idea about. A hard drive about half as big as me, a machine that had the coolest name, Johnniac. Why don't computers have cool names like that? Then there was Kitchen Computer, which no one cold tell me what it was supposed to do or how it was supposed to work. And the original Google server. Oh you hand built finder of porn, trivia, and how many times my name is mentioned on the internet.

Anyway, that is why I like doing documentaries, it's like watching them, but it takes longer and occasionally I get to ask my own question. Peter Merholz even told me what the Sandwich Machine was-something like lazyweb, where people just state the things they want but are too lazy to make it so they put it on the web and hope someone else does it. I like my name.

It implies that I get sandwiches.