Story: An enthusiastic but fair retelling of the early days of the personal computer industry, ranging from the days when college geeks competed for mainframe time, to the birth of Microsoft, Sun, Compaq and Apple, to the modern-day internet browser wars (and the litigious atmosphere thereof).
Review: This book first came to my attention as the inspiration for the sometimes lamentably mixed-up TNT movie The Pirates Of Silicon Valley. If anything, Pirates merely served to drive the authors of “Fire In The Valley” to update and re-publish their book – and hopefully the movie drove curious viewers to delve into the whole story in print.
Fire kicks off with a quick overview of the origins of computing devices. While this may seem to have as much bearing on the current state of the computer industry as a Ford Model “T” has on a Porsche 928, it is important as a preamble which demonstrates just how far computing power has grown over the course of a century.
The 1960s and 1970s take up the biggest chunk of the book, dealing with the early hobbyist stages of the computer industry – a time when people such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak just wanted to figure out how to build their own workable home computers, and a time when people such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen and Gary Kildall were mere hackers, cranking out code for the fun of it.
Then, enter such early giants as IMSAI and MITS. Then homebrew companies such as Apple spring up. In their wake follow other companies scrambling to catch some of that lightning in their own bottles – Commodore, IBM, Atari and Tandy. (Curiously, despite the fact that they had large user bases in the early 1980s, Atari and Commodore really struck me as being curiously shortchanged in this book, as if the authors didn’t consider them serious enough contenders since they weren’t producing major business-oriented systems.)
The section of the book covering the 1980s and ’90s – all the way up to the early days of the Department of Justice’s anti-trust case against Microsoft – reveals the cutthroat side of the industry…and the price exacted from those who couldn’t keep up.
The personalities of the players in this sprawling story come across well in interviews and second-hand accounts. The authors also did a very good job of cross-checking their interviewees’ recollections with other facts. After so many years, the “old war stories” of the computer industry have probably taken on some less-than-accurate, almost urban legendary aspects. On a few occasions, the authors call their interviewees’ bluff and point out what really happened.
“Fire In The Valley” is an excellent read, and hard to put down. It’s hard to conceive of so much innovation and technological advancement occurring in just fifty years after getting to the last page. And a reading of Fire also demonstrates that, at most, the aforementioned Pirates Of Silicon Valley was culled from just a few short chapters of the book – there’s enough story in “Fire” to fuel an epic mini-series.
For those with slightly deeper pockets, the hardcover edition comes complete with a CD-ROM containing soundbytes and other media relating to the boom years of the computer industry.
Year: second edition – 1999 (originally published in 1984)
Authors: Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Pages: 466 pages