August is notorious for being the doldrums for tech news. On the Mac side, any tech announced at WWDC is two months in the past and we’re still a month away from the traditional Fall (iPhone) announcement/event. I went to my local Apple Store last week, in part, because my (Intel) MacBook Pro is getting a bit long in the tooth. But I can’t invest in any new gear until I have a better idea of how I’m going to make ends meet post-teaching career. So I left. It was kind’a boring. Yikes. It’s easy to get complacent and bored with tech when one is trying to be just a little bit disciplined and not give in to the impulse to buy. You don’t even have to go to the store. It’s all just a button click away. 

I can’t justify big purchases (like a new MacBook Pro), but I have been finding myself buying DVDs and Blu-ray Discs of SciFi classics like The Andromeda Strain or Night of the Comet or The Day After, to add to my collection on my PLEX media server. Thinking of movies and book, here’s a list of one Nerd History Media FAIL and couple Nerd History Media wins. 

Pirates of Silicon Valley: FAIL

pirates of silicon valley
pirates of silicon valley

I cringe when I hear that the movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley, is listed by some tech-personalities as their favorite geek movie about tech history. “Pirates” is as close to a historical depiction of tech history as A Hard Day’s Night is an accurate depiction of the Beatles’ experiences touring in the early years. Not so much. I was going to include a trailer from the movie, but the clips I found on YouTube were mostly fan-clips and the one studio trailer made the story out to be a personal fight between creepy Bill Gates and ego-maniacal Steve Jobs. I can’t tell if it was a bad script, bad direction or bad acting, but Gates and Jobs come off as evil stereotypes and everyone else is background furniture. I know it’s just a movie and “based on true story” movies are not “history,” but there’s a scene midway through when Microsoft is negotiating to get IBM to buy the MS-DOS operating system and Steve Balmer breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience how stupid IBM is for making this deal. What?! How the deal came about is a pretty interesting story, so much so that you shouldn’t have to resort to having a character talk directly to the audience. I can’t even… Understandably this movie is NOT in my collection and is a hard PASS. 

Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer – Second Edition: WIN

Fire in the Valley- The Making of the Personal Computer - Second Edition - by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine (2000)
Fire in the Valley- The Making of the Personal Computer – Second Edition – by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine (2000)

This is book that Pirates was loosely based, Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. I found the original 1984 version when I was writing and researching for an article on IBM’s OS/2 initiative in 1987. I was happy when they issued a collectors edition in 2000, because it meant that I could buy my own copy. That said, I feel like the 1984 version was a better, “less hip” version. 

There are so many things that had to fall into place, way beyond the Gates/Jobs rivalry, for the Personal Computer revolution to happen that it’s unacceptable to reduce the story down to the two caricatures presented in Pirates. There were the electronics engineers in the 1950s and 60s who developed the micro-chip that made desktop computing a possibility and then broke away and created their own  companies. There were the hippies and hobbyists in the Bay Area, Seattle and Albuquerque building systems from scratch and writing the software that would run them. There were the entrepreneurs and suits who saw the opportunities and created a market where there was none. There was the guy at Seattle Computing Company who wrote an operating system to run on the new Intel chips, who sold his operating system to Microsoft for $50,000 and then Microsoft turned around and sold it as MS-DOS to IBM (and the world) for many, many millions of dollars. The history is right there and it is fascinating without the need for any embellishment or manufactured drama. 

Triumph of the Nerds/Accidental Empires: WIN

triumph-of-the-nerds
Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely (1996)

For those of you who prefer to get your history in video form, one of the best is the three-part Triumph of the Nerds by Robert X. Cringley. The PBS produced mini-series was based on Cringely’s book Accidental Empires, which followed the PC evolution from it’s semi-conductor pre-history to IBM’s OS/2 debacle, the rise of the PC clones and fading of Apple in the early 1990s. I read some criticism about the series, in part because Cringley started out as a gossip writer and we all know that documentaries have a lesser journalistic standard than would be required with traditional news broadcasting. That said, what’s portrayed here is way better than the “based on real events” that Pirates tried to pass itself off as.

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet: WIN

Nerds 2.0.1- A Brief History of the Internet by Stephen Segaller (1998)
Nerds 2.0.1- A Brief History of the Internet by Stephen Segaller (1998)

A follow-up mini-series Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet, also hosted by Cringley, was based on the Stephen Segaller book of the same name. This three-part series followed the 1960s DARPA beginning of what would become the Internet to the commercial emergence in the late 1990s.  The series begins with the computer scientists trying to develop a non-centralized national computer network, because in this Cold War era they felt like a centralized network would be vulnerable to nuclear attack from the Soviets. The story about founding couple behind what would become Cisco systems and the journey of a search engine start-up called Excite are also explored in this series. Oddly there has never been a DVD or Blu-ray version of this documentary made available. It can only be purchased in VHS. Weird. I got the book version. 

Revolution in the Valley: WIN

Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld (2004)
Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld (2004)

In 2005 Macintosh co-creator, Andy Hertzfeld, gave us an insider view with the book, Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. The book had it’s origins in the folklore.org website that Hertzfeld setup in order to gather anecdotes going back to the beginning of the creation of the Macintosh. Hertzfeld and friends supplied illustrations and notes from the planning stages of the macintosh and, of course, a few more tales that involved crying (one revelation from the Steve Job Biography by Walter Issacson was how often Jobs and others were reduced to tears… in the office…. Who knew?). 

This is list is neither definitive nor exhaustive list of Nerd History Media (The Soul of A New Machine comes to mind), but before one wants to weigh in on my opinion of the sadly hailed Pirates of Silicon Valley, it might be a good thing to be a bit more versed in our Nerd Heritage and History. Don’t limit your nerd-history knowledge to a made-for-TV movie that compressed the participants down to caricatures and decided that the whole story needed to rest on the competition between Jobs and Gates. Please. No.

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