PC Roadkill

by Michael I. Hyman

An insider's guide to the computer industry provides revealing profiles of the medium's top gurus, exposes the marketing tactics that are used to draw customers, explains business trends, and provides humorous anecdotes. Original. (All Users).

Genres: Computers, Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

Reviews

[Dannan Tavona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was published in 1995. At the time this book came out, rotary phones were still around. Bulletin boards were a major means of chatting with friends with a text-based interface over dial-up connections. Computer games were just moving past four colors to 16 and 32 color palettes. Many mid-size cities struggled to make internet access even possible, much less affordable. Computers at the time were pushing 100 megabytes, and RAM was just breaking the 1 megabyte barrier, and special software was needed to handle it because DOS (which is now hidden by graphical interfaces) didn't have the capability to natively handle these new developments.

PC Roadkill is a decent time capsule of the PC culture, including some stories of the author's own experiences or from co-workers -- stories of working for giants like Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, and a few that were huge in their day but are now either defunct or purchased and absorbed. It documents a time pretty close to the midway point from when PCs first became available to our modern machines.

There are many amusing anecdotes within the book, and it's an easy read. For example, it discusses several important historical phenomena, such as ComDex, *the* US premiere computer convention held annually in Las Vegas from 1979 to 2003; it used to be an important means of showcasing new software, new hardware, and new PCs or Macs.

It would be easy to dismiss this book as dated, but as someone who has lived with computers, worked as both a programmer while trained as a historian, this book is part of that high-tech transition period. Remember, the first PC came out in 1982, and by the time this book came out, computers were already revolutionizing both their own industry but also nearly every other industry they touched. Computers continue to roundly impact movie special effects, with some of them (in 2021), being so good they are hard to tell they are fake.

Michael Hyman documented this world and the people who lived with its sometimes isolated culture with a pretty accurate eye. Recommended.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you started in the computer industry during the 70's (like I did) or 80's, this is a fun book to read.

[Bryan]

This book is probably quite dated, but I heard good things. It mentions a terrific prank in which someone hacked their boss's machine to receive keyboard input slightly out of order - but only when typing quickly! So if he had a stream of thought and was typing fast, the letters would be out of place. If he then slowed down to try and figure out the problem, everything was fine.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice trip through geek past