Fire in the valley: the making of the personal computer PDF
Preview Fire in the valley: the making of the personal computer
Page iii Fire in the Valley The Making of the Personal Computer Second Edition Paul Freiberger Michael Swaine Page iv Disclaimer: Information has been obtained by The McGrawHill Companies from sources believed to be reliable. However, because of the possibility of human or mechanical error by our sources, The McGrawHill Companies or others, The McGrawHill Companies does not guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, or completeness of any information and is not responsible for any errors or omissions or the results obtained from use of such information. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99075973 Copyright © 2000 by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. DOI: 10.1036/0071378138 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: 007135892 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 DOC/DOC 9 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 9 It was set in Fairfield LH Medium by North Market Street Graphics. Printed and bound by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps. McGrawHill eBooks are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums and sales promotions, or for use in corporate training programs. For more information, please contact George Hoare, Special Sales, at Page v To our moms and in memory of our dads: Ida and Norman Freiberger Barbara and Earl Swaine and To Jeanne and Nancy Page vii Contents Foreword xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xix Portents xxiii Time Line xxvi Chapter 1 1 Tinder for the Fire Steam 3 The Breakthrough 11 Critical Mass 15 Breakout 24 Hackers 29 Chapter 2 33 The Voyage to Altair Uncle Sol's Boys 35 Going for Broke 41 All Hell Breaks Loose 50 Putting It Together 55 The Competition 61 The Fall 68 Chapter 3 75 The Miracle Makers After Altair 77 Amateurs and Professionals 83 Building One and Building Two 89 Miracles and Mistakes 94 est and Entrepreneur's Disease 100 Death and Rebirth 104 Page viii Chapter 4 109 Homebrew Power to the People 111 The Homebrew Computer Club 118 Wildfire in Silicon Valley 125 Nostalgia for the Future 130 Sixers and SeventySixers 137 Home Rule 144 Homebrew Legacy 153 Chapter 5 157 The Genie in the Box The Altair's First Recital 159 Pleasure Before Business 164 The First Operating System 170 Getting Down to BASIC 176 The Other BASIC 182 Electric Pencil 186 The Rise of General Software Companies 189 The Bottom Line 193 Software Empires 196 Getting Connected 206 Chapter 6 211 Retailing the Revolution Spreading the Word: The Magazines 213 Word of Mouth: The Clubs and Shows 224 HandHolding: The First Retailers 231 The Sales Representative 239 The McDonald's of Electronics 244 Chapter 7 251 American Pie The Prankster 253 Blue Boxes, Buddhism, and Breakout 258 Starting Apple 263 The Evangelist 271 Magic Times 279 The Disk 284 VisiCalc 289 Page ix The Apple III Fiasco 292 Black Wednesday 299 The Mother of All Demos 303 The Big Leagues 307 Chapter 8 311 The Gate Comes Down Osborne's Portable Computer 313 The HP Way and the Xerox Worm 320 Falling Star 324 IBM 328 The Accidental Entrepreneur 338 IBM Discovers the Woz Principle 345 Chapter 9 355 Fire and Ashes Losing Their Religion 357 Cloning Around 366 Sticking Around for Apple's Endgame 371 Big Business 376 A Different Set of Rules 381 Chapter 10 387 Wealth and War "Billg" and the Bill Clones 389 The Richest Man in the World 395 Back from the Dead 400 Some Bright Young Hacker 407 The Joy of Computers 413 The Browser Wars 418 Epilogue 425 After the Revolution Taming the Electronic Frontier 427 Woz's Way 432 Engelbart 437 Citizen Nelson 441 Index 449 Page xi Foreword Paul Freiberger, Michael Swaine, and I arrived at about the same time in late 1981 at a funky little publication that had recently been renamed InfoWorld. Until the summer of 1981, InfoWorld had been known as the Intelligent Machines Journal, a hobbyist journal written for a small but rapidly growing community of computing enthusiasts. The Intelligent Machines Journal had been founded by Jim Warren, an itinerant former school teacher who had also created the West Coast Computer Faire. When he decided to sell his then quasiacademic publication, he found an eager buyer in Patrick McGovern, the chairman of the International Data Corporation, whose flagship weekly ComputerWorld was the unofficial organ of the mainframe computer industry. McGovern had his ear to the ground, and he had realized early on that a new computer industry was emerging that had little in common with the stuffy East Coast— based computer companies. The transformation of Intelligent Machines Journal was just one in a series of events between 1977 and 1981 that marked the evolution of a hobbyist subculture into the world's most dynamic industry. The three of us couldn't have arrived at a better time. The PC hobbyist era was ending, but in its place was thriving an equally wild, Page xii absolutely outofcontrol group of small businesses—populated by remarkable and quirky characters—on their way to becoming major corporations. Overnight, InfoWorld became a perfect perch from which to watch history take place. Everything was moving rapidly, and the publication we had found ourselves working for was attempting to define itself while the world was being turned upside down by the microprocessor. One moment InfoWorld tried to be a Rolling Stone to the personal computer industry; the next moment it set out to be a Sports Illustrated. Few of us were trained journalists, but like the fledgling industry we were covering, we made it up as we went along. It was soon obvious that the world was taking notice of the PC. On an almost weekly basis, people from around the country would simply appear at our offices in downtown Palo Alto, having made their way to the Mecca of Silicon Valley looking for jobs or connections. At InfoWorld we were close to history in the making—sometimes too close. One day I walked into Paul Freiberger's office, a small windowless corridor, only to find him in a tense conversation with Steven Jobs. Jobs was yelling at him because Paul was about to break the story of the Lisa and the Macintosh, and Jobs was accusing him of helping the Japanese take over the American computer industry. Indeed, it is the proximity of its authors to the enterprises that gave birth to the microcomputer industry that sets Fire in the Valley apart from the now dozens of other attempts to tell the story of the computing revolution. Paul and Michael lived through a remarkable period of history, and their book captures the spirit of the personal computer revolution. Originally published in 1984, Fire in the Valley was the first, and is still the best, account of the people who created what venture capitalist John Doerr has called the "single largest legal accumulation of wealth in the century." More recent histories of the personal computer have tended to devolve into accounts of the legends of William Gates, Steven Jobs, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. What sets Fire in the Valley apart is that it succeeds in telling the story of what came before. Freiberger and Swaine's account of the history of the Homebrew Computer Club still stands as the definitive tale of a remarkable anarchist assembly of Page xiii engineers, hackers, and fellow travelers that began as a genuine counterculture and ended by changing the world. There is also a trend in computer histories today to reject the impact of culture and politics in the development of the personal computer. But even a casual reading of Fire in the Valley clearly demonstrates that the personal computer industry, and its emergence in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, was a direct outgrowth of a remarkable period in the suburban region that surrounds Stanford University. It was a particular chemistry—not just greed and not just engineering, but also a strain of passionate political purity best expressed by young people such as Lee Felsenstein, the inventor of the Sol and designer of the Osborne I—that gave rise to the personal computer industry. Now a decade and a half after its first publication, this new edition of Fire in the Valley has been expanded with both additional reporting and new chapters. This revised edition brings the history of Apple Computer up to date and adds more depth to the life and impact of CP/M designer Gary Kildall. It also explores the contribution of Douglas Engelbart and the researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. This new edition of Fire in the Valley also adds the most recent developments in the history of the personal computer: Sun Microsystems and Netscape and the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Fire in the Valley has stood the test of time well. It remains a great adventure that gives the reader a sense of being close to a historical movement that is still playing itself out. JOHN MARKOFF THE NEW YORK TIMES SAN FRANCISCO, SEPTEMBER 1999
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