Robert X. Cringely hosts Nerd TV, a web-only video series on PBS.org featuring figures from the tech world.
There probably won’t be a lot of Escalades, bling-bling, or 80-room mansions on Nerd TV (unless they interview Larry Ellison), but the new webisodes of the online series will feature people who have had serious impact on the wonderful word of technology.
The PBS.org series had Mac systems programmer Andy Hertzfeld as its first guest. Mr. Hertzfeld was the original Mac hacker, and passionate about his work as this part of the transcript demonstrates:
Andy: “…when I first got my Apple II the first thing I did was turn it on and off, on and off, just because I had the power to do so, which I’d never had on a computer before.
I knew the Apple II was great when I bought it, but as I dug into the details it just completely blew me away the creative artistic approach that the designers had taken. It was written by a sort of madman genius. Although I didn’t know about it at the time, I could just see it in there. That design style was so intoxicating to me that I ended up being drawn to Apple as a moth to a flame. I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.”
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who now runs Slide, and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy will be Mr. Cringely’s next guests. Of interest to the SEO geeks out there will be the November 22 episode, featuring the former Sun and Novell exec, Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Nerd TV will run as a weekly series, with episodes running one hour in length. And, Nerd TV will also be a podcast. Mr. Cringely describes Nerd TV as “A future of television for niche audiences that have deep interest in certain topics.” Recently, the Food Network disclosed it will be running an online only series of video shorts starting in November on Foodnetwork.com, with a focus on, of course, food.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
