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Fire In The Valley

The Making of the Personal Computer,
Second Edition

by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine

Reviewed by Jim Scheef

 

IMAGE: Fire In The Valley - The Making of the Personal Computer,  Second Edition CoverThe first edition of this book was published in 1984 and is a classic of personal computer history. The second edition updates many chapters and adds several significant stories about the industry from ’85 to the end of the Nineties. The authors make each segment interesting and eventually link everything together.

While Fire In The Valley is ostensibly the story of the computer industry that grew up in Silicon Valley, it begins at the beginning with the first computer designer and the first programmer. Charles Babbage worked most of his life designing the "Analytical Engine", a mechanical computer that could perform integrals.

Babbage’s patron was Lord Byron, the poet, and his assistant was Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada Byron, the future Lady Lovelace. Ada was the first programmer, as she defined the procedures needed for the analytical engine to solve mathematical problems. The reason I’m telling you all this is that I think Babbage and Steve Wozniak would have been best friends. See if you don’t agree.

Fast forward to 1943 with the world at war: the U.S. Navy needs to compute artillery trajectory tables. At that point in time a "computer" was (typically) a young woman with a Monroe calculator. The state of the art for automated computing was a room-sized machine using mechanical relays to perform arithmetic operations. Two men at the Moore School of Engineering proposed an all-electronic calculating machine. The ENIAC was completed too late for the war effort but proved the concept and moved computing forward.

Of course ENIAC was years before a series of events made it possible for ordinary people to own their own computers. It is that series of serendipity that produced the personal computer and the information revolution that is the key story of Fire In The Valley. I read the first version of this book back in the late 80’s and have read many books on industry history since then, and I am amazed at how complete this book really is. From the development of the first microprocessor by Ted Hoff at Intel (for a Japanese calculator), to Ed Roberts and the Altair 8800 (and the industry it spawned), to Jobs and "The Woz" and the emergence of Apple as a Fortune 500 company. Not to mention the growth of the software companies. Bill Gates was not the only person to realize that software was the key to making personal computers useful.

The book covers the many failures as well. IMSAI, ComputerLand, VisiCalc, Radio Shack Computer Centers, CP/M and Osborn Computers are all gone - and all for different reasons. There were other failures and fiascos like the Apple III and Next Computers.

The Second Edition updates many of these stories with what happened in the 90’s. Like how come Steve Jobs is still rich after the failure of Next Computer? Hint: it has more to do with movies than the fact that he sold Next to Apple a few years ago so it could become the basis of OS-X. Who could forget the browser wars of the late 90’s? From the day Microsoft became the standards setter, Gates has had the fear that "some clever hacker" could undo it all. Of course this fear was based on what Gates himself had done to build Microsoft, and when Marc Andreessen created Mosaic and then morphed it into Netscape, Gates saw his nightmare unfolding. Of course we are still living the end-game of this particular story with the Microsoft anti-trust case.

Ok, so what’s missing? Well, I would have liked to see more about how IBM blew it with the PS/2 computer series and the OS/2 operating system. This was a turning point in the computer industry.
Perhaps the best feature of this book is that each story is related in enough detail to give you a sense of what is happening without bogging you down in minutia. If you can only read one book on the history of the personal computer, this is the book. Read it!

Published by McGraw-Hill, 2000, paper back, 463 pages including index.


Jim Scheef is the Mad Scientist at Telemark Systems Inc. where he develops custom software using Visual Basic and SQL Server and provides networking services using Windows NT/2000. He has been a DACS member since the day DOG became WC/MUG.

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