Get Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal PDF

By Michael Swaine

ISBN-10: 1937785769

ISBN-13: 9781937785765

In the Nineteen Seventies, whereas their contemporaries have been protesting the pc as a device of dehumanization and oppression, a motley number of university dropouts, hippies, and electronics fans have been engaged in whatever even more subversive. keen about the belief of having desktop strength into their very own arms, they introduced from their garages a hobbyist circulate that grew into an undefined, and finally a social and technological revolution. What they did was once invent the private desktop: not only a brand new gadget, yet a watershed within the courting among guy and computing device. this can be their story.

Fire within the Valley is the definitive background of the non-public machine, drawn from interviews with the folks who made it ensue, written via veteran desktop writers who have been there from the beginning. operating at InfoWorld within the early Nineteen Eighties, Swaine and Freiberger day-by-day rubbed elbows with humans like Steve Jobs and invoice Gates once they have been growing the private computing device revolution.

A wealthy tale of colourful contributors, Fire within the Valley profiles those not likely revolutionaries and marketers, similar to Ed Roberts of MITS, Lee Felsenstein at Processor know-how, and Jack Tramiel of Commodore, in addition to Jobs and Gates in the entire innocence in their formative years.

This thoroughly revised and multiplied 3rd variation brings the tale to its of entirety, chronicling the tip of the private machine revolution and the start of the post-PC period. It covers the departure from the level of significant avid gamers with the deaths of Steve Jobs and Douglas Engelbart and the retirements of invoice Gates and Steve Ballmer; the shift clear of the computer to the cloud and conveyable units; and what the top of the computer period potential for matters corresponding to own freedom and tool, and open resource vs. proprietary software.

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Extra resources for Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer

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The Breakthrough Inventing the transistor meant the fulfillment of a dream. –Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald, Revolution in Miniature In the 1940s, the switching units in computers were mechanical relays that constantly opened and closed, clattering away like freight trains. In the 1950s, vacuum tubes replaced mechanical relays. But tubes were a technological dead end. They could be made only just so small, and because they generated heat, they had to be spaced a certain distance apart from one another.

It was a step in the marriage of electricity and logic, and this capability to change one current by means of another would be essential to EDVAC-type computer design. At the time, though, researchers saw that the triode’s main application lay in telephone switching circuits. Naturally, people at AT&T, and especially at its research branch Bell Labs, became interested in the triode. William Shockley was working for Bell Labs at the time and looking at the effect impurities had on semiconductor crystals.

In 1945, it performed calculations used in the atomic-bomb testing at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Figure 9. John von Neumann Von Neumann was a brilliant polymath who made foundational contributions to programming and the ENIAC and EDVAC computers. (Courtesy of The Computer Museum History Center, San Jose) A new industry emerged after World War II when the secret labs began to disclose their discoveries and creations. Building computers immediately became a business, and by the very nature of the equipment, it became a big business.

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Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine


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