To Understand the Present, You Have to Know the Past
Matt Rocker, a documentary filmmaker who focuses on stories about music, technology and subculture; Daniel Krasner, a technologist, photographer and former research mathematician with a focus on topology and homological algebra; and Eric Gade, a historian and programmer, are creating a documentary that explores questions such as: Has personal computing lived up to its promise? Has this ever-present technology increased our potential as human beings?
The film will provide a unique perspective gathered from interviews with the pioneers who helped to invent personal computing and the role of computers in society. As Matt says, “No documentary has comprehensively examined this history from the perspective of the key contributors.”
Matt and his team filmed their first three interviews in November of 2019 and created a “teaser” that is being used as a proof of concept and as fundraising material for further filming. In this teaser, M. Mitchell Waldrop, PhD., author of “The Dream Machine”; Michael Grisham, PhD., Psychologist and former head of Human Factors research at Bell Labs; and Diana Merry-Shapiro, programmer and member of the legendary Learning Research Group (LRG) at Xerox PARC were all interviewed. Diana Merry-Shapiro was key to the development of the Smalltalk programming environment that revolutionized software development.
- Watch below for an exclusive teaser of this film or click here.
UPDATE: 180 backers pledged $27,001 to help bring this project to life.