Digital_nation is an eye opening documentary from PBS which explores how the Web and digital media are changing the way we think, work, learn, wage war and interact. The film examines the major differences between the Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives who are growing up digital.

A digital native is a person for whom digital technologies already existed when they were born, and hence has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3 players.

A digital immigrant is an individual who grew up without digital technology and adopted it later.

This is a must watch documentary for anyone with an interest in the digital world we all inhabit.

Following on from Episode 1 & Episode 2

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet continues with Episode 3 – Wiring the World:

Following on from Episode 1

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet continues with Episode 2 – Serving the Suits:

Click to Watch Episode 3

The sequel to Triumph of the Nerds – The Rise of Accidental Empires, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet documents the development of ARPANET, the Internet, the World Wide Web and the dot-com bubble of the mid- and late-1990s.

Join Robert X Cringely in this much-anticipated sequel to Triumph of the Nerds, as he turns his well-informed and irreverent eye on the intriguing history of the Internet. Go deep into the bowels of the Pentagon to witness the birth of the Internet and follow its rapid rise to the cutting edge of the World Wide Web. On his journey, Cringely interviews the unknown nerds who laid the Internet’s foundations, visits the Silicon Valley of India and grills the founders of the networking companies who have made millions from this fascinating new technology.

Click to Watch Episode 2

Following on from Episode 1 & Episode 2 – Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires continues: “Great Artists Steal” Episode Outline:

• Steve Jobs, having viewed a demonstration of Xerox’s Star graphical user interface, developed a desktop manager for the Macintosh with an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Cringely suggested that Xerox had the potential to be one of the key companies in the up and coming PC industry, had they managed to protect the intellectual property rights of Star GUI.

• Apple agreed to license parts of the Mac OS GUI to Microsoft who went on to develop Windows. Upon the release of Windows 2.0, Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 over the “look and feel” of the Mac OS. Apple lost the lawsuit in 1994, leaving Microsoft dominant in the operating system business.

• Steve Jobs had recruited Pepsi-Cola executive John Sculley to become CEO of Apple, saying to the latter “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

• The Apple Macintosh pioneered many of the features now standard in the PC, particularly ease of use. However, the Macintosh was considerable more expensive, so it was rapidly overtaken by the IBM PC, with some pundits not only saying that IBM had won, but also that Apple could potentially go out of business.

• Chris Espinosa described Sculley’s ouster of Jobs saying “The grandiose plans of what Macintosh were going to be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing and the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible it was salvageable but the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something and that somebody was John Sculley”.