Reviews
In the early 1970s, while Silicon Valley was designing the latest generation of digital wristwatches and pocket calculators, a ragtag group of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics hobbyists were busy creating the future in their garages. What they built was the personal computer, but what they were aiming for was something much more ambitious: a revolution. Fire in the Valley is the story of their efforts, and in particular, the contributions of an informal think tank called the Homebrew Computer Club. Its technically gifted community, comprising sci-fi aficionados and Berkeley counterculturists, believed computers could usher in an age of human empowerment, perhaps even a utopia.

The club's most famous member is Steve Jobs of Apple, whose story is told here, as is Bill Gates's, who was strongly influenced by Homebrew. What sets Fire in the Valley apart from the many other books about early days at Apple and Microsoft, though, is its focus on the brilliant engineers and coders who built the foundation that would eventually support those two companies. They included ex-Berkley Barb editor and hardware designer Lee Felsenstein, who was adamant about using computers for populist ends; Adam Osborne, who took PCs to the next level by making them portable; hacker legend John "Captain Crunch" Draper, who used telephony for his own mischievous purposes; and activist Ted Nelson, the Thom Paine of the computer revolution.

The cast of characters is sometimes tough to keep track of, and authors Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine have wisely included a graphic timeline in the first pages of the book that readers will find useful. It stretches from 1800 to 1999, encompassing events that have occurred since Fire in the Valley's original 1984 publication. This second edition includes new chapters and photographs to document the last 15 years, but they serve as more of an epilogue than a new act in this drama. The Homebrew Club's mark on personal computing history is cemented, and Fire in the Valley is an engaging account of it, one that should inspire readers everywhere.


From The Industry Standard
Think back to 1974, if you're old enough. Vietnam was still a raw wound. Richard Nixon had ended the Watergate crisis by resigning from office. Inflation was rampant, oil was running out and the Japanese would soon seem to be taking over everything. Surely the years ahead would be a humbling time of irreversible national decline.In the middle of all this, an Albuquerque, N.M., entrepreneur named Ed Roberts had a scheme to produce a personal computer kit that would sell for under $500. The task was considered impossible - there really were no personal computers, after all - and Roberts was broke, but Popular Electronics, a big deal in those days, had promised him the cover if only he could deliver.Somehow, Roberts and his band created a prototype, but the shipping company supposedly lost it en route to New York, so all parties held their noses and a mock-up was slapped together for the photo shoot. Then the magazine made like Gabriel: "Project Breakthrough!" trumpeted the January 1975 cover of PE. "World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models ... Altair 8800."Beneath that innocuous-looking machine, the earth shook. Small computers in those days were the size of a stove, but this one was the size of - well, what people now think of as a computer. And it sold for $397, an unheard-of price.It wasn't perfect, of course. There was no display and no real storage. Input was via a series of switches (a program might require thousands of error-free toggles), and output was in the form of flashing lights, something like the computers on old TV shows. (Altair was where the Enterprise was headed one night on Star Trek.) The machine didn't even come assembled.Nonetheless, the kit was an overnight sensation. Unfortunately, Altair's makers were selling a product they couldn't immediately deliver or support. When the marketplace rejected the Altair's uniformly defective memory boards, Roberts forced them on his customers by bundling boards with the machine's crucial Basic software - created, incidentally, by a couple of brash young fellows named Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They had naturally pitched the software to Roberts before it even existed.Reading Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, it's hard not to conclude that maybe the computer business hasn't changed as much as we think it has, the original Altair's 256 bytes of memory notwithstanding.First published in 1984 and out of print for years, Fire in the Valley has now been updated and reissued, complete with what surely must be bar mitzvah pictures of Gates, Steve Jobs and others looking younger, skinnier and hairier than any human could possibly be. Although the book takes a stab at comprehensiveness, these gawky youngsters are really the focus of the story, and the authors tell their tale with surprising human as well as technological insight. Of course, Freiberger and Swaine are blessed with a remarkable tale to tell; if you don't already think so, you'll probably be bored at times by the comings and goings of so many nerds so badly in need of shampoo. But even nongeeks need to understand what happened here, because it subverts the funereal narrative of recent American history that both liberals and conservatives seem so readily to embrace.Fire in the Valley proves that old-fashioned American ingenuity wasn't dead; it had just moved out West. Nor were the 1960s and '70s merely a time of self-indulgence and license, as some conservatives have contended. Aside from such gains as civil rights, the era's hallmark openness and sense of play - the preference for tie-dye over gray flannel, so to speak - has paid big dividends. The computer revolution "had its genetic coding in the '60s," observes Jim Warren, an industry pioneer and self-described "chair-being" of an early industry computer fair - "antiestablishment, antiwar, profreedom, antidiscipline attitudes."At the same time, the industry that these crazies founded is a powerful rebuff to the strange cult of pessimism and nostalgia that characterizes recent liberal economic cant. It turns out that growth isn't over, and there are even signs that our huge investment in computer technology is showing tangible results now that the machines finally work and people have some idea what to do with them.More mundanely, Fire in the Valley offers comfort to the parents of smart but difficult boys everywhere. (I myself have stopped shopping for an exorcist for one of my sons; we'll give him an old laptop instead.) It gives comfort but also pause, because nowadays such boys are often medicated, the rough spots of childhood and adolescence smoothed out by Ritalin until the kids get old enough for Prozac.Back in the 1970s, though, it was still possible to be young, male and different without being slapped with a prescription. Consider Steve Wozniak, the early technical genius behind Apple. A whiz all through his Silicon Valley childhood, in high school he planted an electronic metronome in a friend's locker, taped to some unlabeled battery cylinders and wired with a switch that accelerated the ticking when the locker door was opened. Upon discovering the device, the authors report, "the principal bravely snatched the metronome from the locker and ran out of the building with it."A book like this really is kind of a boys' story; its heroes, virtually all men, inspired Robert X. Cringely in his book Accidental Empires to attribute the computer industry to mass sublimation by a collection of nerds who couldn't get laid. With its star-studded cast of unwashed, unwed brainiacs, Fire in the Valley offers unwitting support for that thesis. Of his own nerdity, for example, Bill Gates says: "I tried to be normal, the best I could."The personal computer revolution was driven by these brilliant and individualistic misfits, and their legacy - who could have foreseen it? - is a revitalized U.S. economy in which no one talks enviously anymore of Japanese firms that have 100-year plans and put their employees in what look like Jiffy Lube uniforms.Fire in the Valley offers many nerd pleasures, not the least of which is a stroll down memory lane, back to a sunny time of youth and innocence and endlessly whirring floppy drives. All the highlights are covered. You'll read about the earliest BBS, the rise of the Phoenix BIOS, the creation of computer magazines, and the unhappy life and death of poor Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M. Remember Adam Osborne? Peachtree Software? Wordstar? It's all here, enough to give any aging computer freak a lump in his throat.Here too is the incomparable Doug Englebart, who in 1968 took the stage at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco to give what the authors say was by all accounts "one of the most impressive technology demonstrations since the atomic bomb test at Alamogordo." He showed off hyperlinked text, remote video conferencing (including live document sharing), cursor control via mouse (he made the first one of wood) and the mixing of text, graphics and video."Englebart is justly credited with the invention of the computer mouse, hypermedia, multiple-window screens, groupware, online publishing and electronic mail," the authors write. Another high-tech visionary, Alan Kay, wasn't kidding when he said, "I don't know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug's ideas."One of the strengths of this fine book is that it isn't tendentious about its subject matter. If Fire in the Valley has any thesis, it's that, like Englebart, the very earliest players weren't much motivated by money. Some were simply visionaries. Others just loved computers. Others still couldn't fit in anywhere else.The plutocrats are here too, of course, but most of them come later and get relatively short shrift. So do the chip engineers, who are mentioned only at the beginning. Like indulgent gods, Freiberger and Swaine seem to love all of Silicon Valley's children, but their hearts are clearly with the hobbyists and hackers, gifted weirdos and insanely curious oddballs, the ones they show us most clearly.The classic examples may be Alan Cooper and Keith Parsons, who created a bookkeeping program and actually sold a copy for $995. The, uh, corporate culture at their impressively named Structured Systems Group differed somewhat from the average business organization."The atmosphere was giddy," the authors write. "Parsons paced the office shirtless, while Cooper, hair down to midback, guzzled coffee that would dissolve steel. The two of them, wired on caffeine and the excitement of the $995 check, wrangled about potential markets and dealer terms. Parsons' girlfriend made phone sales while sunbathing nude in the backyard."Cooper, by the way, had a ready explanation for why he started a software company: "My unemployment had run out."Daniel Akstis a writer teaching this semester at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.


Byte
Swain and Freiberger capture the communal spirit, the brilliance and blundering, the assortment of naivete, noble purpose and greed, and the inevitable transformation of all this into a major industry. Must Reading


The New York Times
A book not to be missed, just plain good reading about the drama of the Kids next door turning their dreams into millions.


Book Description
A book not to be missed, just plain good reading about the drama of the Kids next door turning their dreams into millions.--The New York Times Swaine and Freiberger capture the communal spirit of the early computer clubs, the brilliance and blundering of some of the first start-up companies, the assortment of naivete, noble purpose and greed that characterized various pioneers, and the inevitable transformation of all this into a major industry. Must reading.--Philip Lemmons, editor-in-chief, BYTE Magazine


Book Info
Presents the frenetic early days of the rise of the Personal Computer from its inception in the form of the Altair, a screenless, keypadless, built from a kit, odd metal box with common switches and blinking lights. Softcover.


From the Publisher
Fire in the Valley, Updated Edition, tells the colorful and sometimes hilarious stories of the personal computer pioneers. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steve Wozniak, Ed Roberts, Ted Nelson are all there and more. The book also captures the medley of influences of the times-the wild risk-taking, the 60s consciousness, rebellion against bureaucracy, the kitchen-table engineering that were essential to the making of the personal computer. Fire in the Valley, Updated Edition, explores these topics with the insights from today's vantage point. It put the events that shaped two short decades into an historical context. The book explains the technological advances that made the PC possible and reveals how software came to play a more central and profitable role. It explores the politics of inventors and innovation and shows how the race to create the PC lit a fire of excitement in Silicon Valley--a fire that ultimately changed our society forever.


From the Back Cover
"A great adventure that gives the reader a sense of being close to a historical movement that is still playing itself out."--From the foreword by John Markoff, The New York Times. In January 1975, Popular Electronics magazine published a cover story on the Altair, an odd metal box with switches and blinking lights that proved to be the progenitor of today's personal computer. Inspired by possibilities that the leaders of the electronics and mainframe computer industries couldn't see, unlikely entrepreneurs--hippies, dropouts, phone phreaks, and electronics hobbyists--seized the opportunity. How those personal computer pioneers went from side street garages to Wall Street's graces, and how their brilliance, enthusiasm, camaraderie, and competition changed the world is all here in Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's classic, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. First released in 1984, it uniquely captures the explosive, frenetic energy of those early days. This updated edition features interviews with the major players, new chapters, dozens of new photos, and updates throughout that carry the story forward into the Internet era. The authors convey the exciting development of companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Netscape, Lotus, and Oracle. Itself a milestone in the fascinating history of the personal computer, Fire in the Valley is the definitive account of how it all happened and why.


About the Author
Paul Freiberger is the coauthor of Fuzzy Logic, winner of the 1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and has written for the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Examiner, and National Public Radio. He currently works at the Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto. 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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

First released in 1984, Fire in the Valley remains one of the most sought-after and widely revered testaments to the dynamic visionaries of the PC era. Now updated and expanded, the second edition contains more photos and new chapters, revealing how the PC came to transform the world today and will shape the century ahead. The authors look at recent developments at Apple, Microsoft, and IBM and convey the exciting development of other companies such as Sun, Netscape, Lotus, and Oracle in the Internet age. Itself a milestone in the fascinating history of the personal computer, Fire in the Valley is the definitive account of how it all happened and why.

FROM THE CRITICS

Philip Lemmons - BYTE Magazine

Swaine and Freiberger capture the communal spirit of the early computer clubs, the brilliance and blundering. Must reading.

The New York Times

A book not to be missed, just plain good reading about the drama of the kids next door turning their dreams into millions.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING