There's Netflix, here we are. And our Posemuckel transmitters. Sometimes, however, the high-end program of the heavy streaming giant boots from the wrong drive, so to speak, and then a Netflix series broadcast around the world starts with an excerpt from a television report by Hessischer Rundfunk from 1958. And that is anything but incidental, on the contrary , it shows that two potent showrunners - Oliver Ziegenbalg (book) and Robert Thalheim (director) - can add one and zero together. Because the eight-second excerpt, in which the Z 22, the seventh calculating machine by Konrad Zuse using tube technology for the first time, is referred to, is not so much the starting shot for a fast run through the computer age to the supergrass party rammer "Alright" ("we are young , we run green "): Commodore 64, Klumphandy,Windows, iPhone (otherwise advertising clips for new Sparkasse apps start in a similar way). What we have in front of us is rather something like the algorithm of this rousing miniseries.
It all started with the owl Zuse
Because with the solitaire Zuse everything that is now being told was already there eighty years ago: the ingenious German owl who invented the computer while fiddling with living room, but then did not know how to keep up and was rudely pushed aside by extremely wealthy American office machine companies, until he gave up over-indebted and kept his head above water with expressionist oil painting.
But he found enough time to at least cultivate his own myth (“father of the computer”).
It looks like this story has recently been repeated on a different level, including the mythization of which the series "The Billion Dollar Code" itself belongs.
In the wild Berlin of the nineties - Thalheim goes all out aesthetically;
if nostalgia, then so - some young, green-nosed students had such a wacky idea for a media art project that they were laughed at by professors for it (“Pac-Man shit”), but with irrepressible will found a financier, namely the one at Hackers of the Chaos Computer Club decried Deutsche Telekom as an archenemy.
What is the "Pac-Man shit" about?
Delicious to look at: Bernhard Schütz as a post office clerk 1.0, who actually relies on the screen text (think of Wilhelm II's commitment to the horse, "the automobile is a temporary phenomenon"), but then loosens one million Deutschmarks. This is how the Terravision software was created over many hurdles and technical difficulties. Using a giant globe, the earth could be rotated in all directions on a screen. Satellite images interconnected by a complex algorithm made it possible to zoom in at any point down to street level. Anyone who is reminded of a widespread application from Google has grasped the dimensions of the project, because the developers have had a patent on this form of digital visualization since 1995.It is one of the great inventions of the Internet age, one of those billion dollar ideas, so the series starts: “We were cheated on it. But we're going to change that now. ”So says one of those involved, who has been doing art for a long time - and far more successfully than Zuse. At least the myth is now wanted back. With a lot of vigor, the story plunges into the development of the idea, which is said to have been born half in the ecstasy of the roaring techno nights, half in the brain of an outsider. The initially very classic looking nerd setting - the hacker Juri Müller (Marius Ahrendt and Mišel Matičevič) is the typical sociopath between “Mr. Robot "and" A Beautiful Mind "- the series makers gain their very own, excellently played dynamic,because it is about the friendship between Juri and the artistic visionary and hobby programmer Carsten Schlüter (Leonard Scheicher and Mark Waschke). This is subjected to years of endurance. Both feel betrayed by the other.