Fire in the Valley

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Fire in the Valley
		Fire in the Valley

In the 1970s, while their contemporaries were protesting the computer as a tool of dehumanization and oppression, a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were engaged in something much more subversive. Obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands, they launched from their garages a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution. What they did was invent the personal computer: not just a new device, but a watershed in the relationship between man and machine. This is their story. Fire in the Valley is the definitive history of the personal computer, drawn from interviews with the people who made it happen, written by two veteran computer writers who were there from the start. Working at InfoWorld in the early 1980s, Swaine and Freiberger daily rubbed elbows with people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were creating the personal computer revolution. A rich story of colorful individuals, Fire in the Valley profiles these unlikely revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, such as Ed Roberts of MITS, Lee Felsenstein at Processor Technology, and Jack Tramiel of Commodore, as well as Jobs and Gates in all the innocence of their formative years. This completely revised and expanded third edition brings the story to its completion, chronicling the end of the personal computer revolution and the beginning of the post-PC era. It covers the departure from the stage of major players with the deaths of Steve Jobs and Douglas Engelbart and the retirements of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; the shift away from the PC to the cloud and portable devices; and what the end of the PC era means for issues such as personal freedom and power, and open source vs. proprietary software.

作者简介

Best known as the editor of Dr. Dobb's Journal, Michael Swaine created or helped launch a dozen magazines, from InfoWorld to PragPub. He has written more than a thousand articles and columns for publications ranging from the Farmer's Almanac to MacUser. He currently edits books for the Pragmatic Bookshelf and is working on a mystery novel set in the mythical Northwest State of Jefferson. Paul Freiberger is an award-winning author, inventor, and former journalist. His books include Fuzzy Logic, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has written thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and columns, as well as speeches, white papers, and op-eds for top publications such as the Wall Street Journal.

网友对Fire in the Valley的评论

After reading the book, I feel like I have completed a college course I've long wanted to take. I appreciate the names, the general history, the telling the technical story of the development of the smart-machine itself, the demonstration in the telling of how to screw up a business and how not to screw it up--really, I appreciate all the information this book has given me. It must have taken forever to write. What an incredible effort. You definitely get your money's worth!

The first half is fairly boring but stick with it for a great second half.

thanks for ebook edition

In Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer, authors Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger provide a thoroughly enjoyable read of the history and development of the PC.

As timing would have it, Michael Swain was editor of Dr. Dobb's Journal, which this week announced it would be ceasing publication in 2015 after nearly 40 years in print. The valley in the title is Silicon Valley, where both authors worked at InfoWorld during the 1980s, and their knowledge of the events comes from being there with the key players. Their vantage point provides a unique perspective to the story.

This is the third edition of the book; with the first two editions coming out in 1984 and 2000. While the historical facts are pretty much the same from the first edition; the third edition adds to the story by putting the facts into a historical perspective from a 2014 perspective.

The book details the many individuals who were responsible for the development of the PC. Names you have likely not heard of such as Ted Hoff of Intel, Lee Felsenstein of Processor Technology, Ed Roberts from MITS, to the more prominent names like Douglas Engelbart, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

The book details the major people players involved in the early and middle yeas of the PC revolution, and also provides a historical background to historically important computer firms such as Altair, Commodore, Compaq, Digital and many more.

Some books have downplayed the role Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates of Microsoft played in the overall development of the PC. The book notes that their role was not just being in the right place at the right time, but having the skills to make it work.

For those looking for the history of the birth, development and revolution of the PC, Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer is an easy and enjoyable read, and a fascinating one at that.

This is the first edition of this book to be published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, which I believe is an excellent fit as a company for the book's content. The second edition was published back in 2000 by a publisher who specializes these days in a different sort of content. Plus, I love The Pragmatic Programmers series by Pragmatic Bookshelf and this history contained here belongs in this series. Good move for both the authors and the publisher.

Fire in the Valley, Third Edition is subtitled The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer, and for good reason. The book is a history of the types of computers that people bring into their homes, starting at the very beginning when this was just a dream for a few stalwart hobbyists willing to build their own computers. It continues through the usual suspects like MITS and Apple all the way to the present day when computing power has been grafted in to so many different devices that the meaningfulness of having "my own computer" isn't quite the same as it once was.

The book covers not only historic events and figures, but also issues and philosophies that had an impact of the birth, growth, life, and death of many companies along the way. It also includes a ton of first-hand accounts from key players that make the story rich, interesting, and fun to read.

While this is being sold quite rightly as a history book, perhaps it should receive more fanfare as a chronology of a revolution, of a sweeping cultural shift. I lived through much of the era described in the book (I bought my first computer in 1981) and can easily remember a time when there were only three or four people in my school who had a computer at home, when there was no computer lab, or when the first computer labs were created and filled with Commodore PET computers that had no software other than an operating system, so there was nothing for students to do with or on them. Society is indeed different, and this book describes integral and foundational reasons why and how that change occurred. If this sounds interesting to you, this book is easily the best one I have encountered on the topic. That was true of the previous edition, and is even more true today with the third edition. Pick it up!

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