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

by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

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 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.

423 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 20, 2014

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun walk down memory lane.

I would have liked to see a little more coverage of the Commodore 64, the Amiga and the Atari ST, but he does mention BeOS. In the later chapters it becomes highly Apple-centric. Likewise, Linux on the desktop. This is where a lot of the innovation and hacker spirit was going on after the hardware had squared off into the two Mac and PC camps. He mentions Linux but leaves the reader with the impression that Linux is mostly for servers.

Compare with Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

[Conscious Senses · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to the 2017 audiobook version alongside reading the 1984 text version. The older has a real charm, is beautifully put together, and holds up very well now four decades later. The new edition is very close but is a good update, with exactly the same shape up till chapter 9 and on, which is all new content. For the first 8 chapters, minor edits have been made to fill in details or tweak fact-framing, presumably with info that came to light after publication. Everything added after chapter 8 in the new edition is good, though at times the pacing feels breakneck. Overall, extremely readable prose while still covering a wide range of stories and folks key to the movement and period. I hope they will update again with new chapters soon.

[Kyle Mahaney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does a really great well-researched job of telling the story of basically every player in the early personal computer revolution with great detail, but it jumps around a lot in a way that is distracting.

Also this latest update is just a bit depressing at the end when the tone suddenly shifts to the rise of social media, cloud computing, and general enshitification of software as a service experiences.

[Marc Henrickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book that kept me interested for the entire read. I thought it would focus mostly on Apple v Microsoft, but it really had some depth on the entire history of the PC. I enjoyed it and would recommend.