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Here I go again writing a review of a book you can’t buy—at least not in a book store. I think I ordered my copy from Computer Shopper magazine when it was first published. Since then I’ve seen it offered on eBay. There are several used book stores on the web that might have it as well. Now you know that I don’t review books I don’t like (I don’t read them myself, so why should you?) so you want to start searching for this book now. The book is subtitled “From Altair to IBM, A History of the Personal Computer” Most of the chapters in this book originally appeared as Stan’s monthly column in Computer Shopper magazine back when Computer Shopper was tabloid sized and over an inch thick. Stan had retired from his position as Editor-in-Chief and wrote a monthly column of his own experiences in the early computer industry. Each chapter is a first hand account told in Stan’s own inimitable, matter of fact style. One of the things I find so interesting about these stories is that Stan’s recollections of events do not always agree with the ‘well researched’ accounts published in many of the books I’ve read over the years. Regardless of who remembers what, the stories cover the early days of the personal computer industry from the perspective of someone who helped build the industry one customer at a time. Stan Veit opened and ran the first computer store, The Computer Mart, in New York City way back in 1976. From this vantage point— the retail end—Stan met both the enthusiasts and the big-wigs who built the foundation of today’s personal computer industry. In Chapter 1 Stan tells about the various people who worked in the store. All were computer enthusiasts who began hanging out in the store except his secretary, the purple-haired punk rock-singer girl friend of a programmer. Chapter 2 is all the versions of how the Altair came to be all rolled into one–—with credits! The Altair 8800, produced by MITS, Inc., of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was the first “ready to build” personal computer ever. For $397 you got a box of parts that included a power supply, a bunch of lights and switches, an 8080 microprocessor, and 256 bytes of RAM —yes, 256 bytes, not kilobytes! Even if you were successful in assembling the computer and didn’t bridge any of the hundreds of solder points, the computer did nothing. The input was the row of switches on the front panel and the output was the row of lights just above the switches. Programming was accomplished by entering the program into memory in machine code, one byte at a time. If you wanted something that we might recognize as a computer, you were going to spend more money. You would need a memory board, a serial interface, and a Teletype terminal. If you had 4K of RAM you could run the BASIC that Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote at Harvard after seeing the Altair on the cover of Popular Electronics. In page after page, Stan tells of products that just plain didn’t work and others that were years ahead of their time. Many of Stan’s stories speak fondly of people he calls friends and how these people cooperated even though they were really competitors. This attitude carried through much of the early industry. Of course there were also the shady deals and a few stabs in the back. It’s all there in the book. The book has 28 chapters plus a remembrance of George Tate, the founder of Ashton-Tate. Like almost everyone in the early PC industry, George Tate started as an enthusiast and a founding member of the Southern California Computer Society. After several ventures of varying success, George met Wayne Ratliff who had written a database he called Vulcan. George, in a streak of marketing genius, renamed it dBASE II, so it would appear to be a more refined version (dBASE I never existed). He wanted a quality image for his company so he called it Ashton-Tate because he thought Tate alone was too short. There was no one in the company named Ashton. George simply liked that sound of the name. All this is the kind of detail that Stan Veit brings to all of the stories in every chapter of this book. In chapter 25 Stan talks about how magazines like Creative Computing, BYTE and Personal Computing created the marketing channels that allowed the industry to prosper. Stan Veit is also known as the Editor-In-Chief Emeritus of Computer Shopper, the “worlds largest” magazine. He participated in several online ventures for Computer Shopper and Ziff-Davis. Acording to several other reviews I found online, Stan still maintains www.pc-history.org, but the site appears to be inactive. A quick search (is there any other kind?) of Google found several possible sources for the book so you have no excuse. This is a fun read. Take it to the beach and become a nerd with a tan! StanVeit’s History of the Personal Computer by Stan Veit, published by WorldComm, 1993, 304 pages including index. |
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