Sitting in the passenger seat, Terry Wehe Ryan ’69 grabs the steering wheel and veers the car off to the side of a country road. Her husband, Rob Ryan ’69, has just broken the news that he’s firing her from their tech startup—so he can afford to keep another female employee on the payroll.
It’s a scene dramatic enough to be in a movie—which is exactly where it appears.
Titled The Man Who Saved the Internet with a Sunflower, the independent film depicts the personal and professional lives of the Cornellian couple (who remain happily together to this day, after 55 years of marriage)—focusing on the role Rob played in producing some of the Web’s early critical infrastructure.
“Think of the possibilities if people were better connected,” the actor portraying Rob tells his team in one scene. “They could work from home instead of going to an office; they could buy goods on their computer without having to drive all the way to the store.”
The drama—which is not yet available to stream but has played at numerous film festivals—begins its tale in 1983.
Provided
In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
