Tesco
Fire in the Valley
Book

Fire in the Valley

The Making of the Personal Computer

Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine
McGraw-Hill, 2000
First Edition: 1984

Read or listen offline

auto-generated audio
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Authors Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine offer the second edition of their extremely popular 1984 chronicle of the birth of the personal computer. They recount how the PC industry began, who fueled its growth and why things happened as they did. The central stories cover the emergence of MITS, IMSAI, Apple, Tandy and Microsoft. This second edition adds the development and maturation of the hardware and software industries. Apple and Microsoft’s sagas still dominate, but new stories emerge, including tales of Dell, Oracle, Netscape and the Internet. The second edition shows how the PC child has grown up. You’ll see how the nerds took a hobby and reformed the world using Boolean logic, integrated circuits, motherboards and chips. getabstract recommends this book to everyone with an interest in the computer industry and particularly to those who are hungry for the real stories behind the growth of the 20th century’s most pivotal industry.

Take-Aways

  • The first "thinking" machines arose from the marriage of electricity and Boolean algebra.
  • Charles Babbage’s analytical engine ran on electricity, though he first considered steam power.
  • The Mark I computer was the first computer introduced and the first rendered obsolete by advancing technology.

About the Authors

Paul Frieberger  is the co-author of Fuzzy Logic , winner of the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has written for the San Jose Mercury News , the San Francisco Examiner and National Public Radio and now works at the Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California. Michael Swaine  is editor at large for Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He is also a popular columnist for print and electronic magazines in the United States, Italy and Germany and maintains Swaine’s World, a Web site that tracks computer industry news, at www.swaine.com.

Comment on this summary or Start Discussion