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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Technology, Computers, Business, Biography, Computer Science

423 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.0) Was expecting it to be more entertaining

Okay, decent stab at a comprehensive history of the personal computer. Definitely achieves the breadth of that ambitious goal, so I give it credit there. I've been wanting to read this for a while, so still glad that I have.

I don't know quite what it was missing. Wasn't as good as Hackers, though certainly covered a lot of the same ground (at times, felt like I was rereading sections from Hackers, and kind of wonder if one of the two books borrowed from the other? -- Fire in the Valley doesn't seem to give any sources, bibliographies or suggest when/who was interviewed, kinda weird). For the times that overlapped, I felt that we got more in-depth in Hackers, though at least Fire in the Valley did get it right that Microsoft bought first version of PC-DOS and Bill Gates didn't write it.

Think the way this was told was unfortunate as well. He tried to pick someone important for each section/chapter and do a quick bio from early on till their heyday and fade away. This resulted in really short narratives and also people being formally introduced into the narrative many pages after they first appear. The way it reads like we hadn't actually read about someone till the chapter that actually focuses on them. This was most apparent to me when I reached the Gary Kildall section.

Another stylistic thing were his 'cliffhangers' at the end of almost every section. It was his segue device, to drop a hint that something momentous would change the course of the current subject's life/livelihood. And then we jump way back in time to the next entrepreneur's early career, build back up to the event that the previous section/chapter hinted at. It's pretty gimmicky, and in a book this large, it eventually got very tiresome.

I guess what I'm thinking is that I'd much rather read 10 separate books that each focus on a single thread of narrative. We'd get much more into the meat of it. For example, far more enjoyed reading Steve Jobs than this. I do admit Jobs is probably one of the more colorful stories to tell here of course. ;)

Bugs:
* p65: seems to get MIT and MITS confused (typo)
* p230 (or so): cued up instead of queued up
* 359: "...could Scully bring himself demote [Steve Jobs]..." (missing a "to" in there, I think)
(otherwise not bad, but seems these could've been caught, especially in a fancy new edition)

[Murilo Queiroz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another great book about the history of personal computers. Every time I start a new book on this subject I fear that it may sound repetitive, but until now all of them complemented each other in a very interesting way. This one has a deeper focus on innovation, the first microcomputer companies and operating systems.

I really liked the details about the history of MITS (producers of the pioneer microcomputer Altair 8080), IMSAI, the importance of magazines like Popular Electronics, Byte and Dr. Dobbs, the details about the creation of CP/M (the dominant operating system for microcomputers before Microsoft DOS) and origins of companies like Microsoft, Borland and Oracle.

This new edition also have chapters on the "post-personal computer" era, describing how they were replaced - at least f0r the common user - by smart phones and tablets, and how the old saying "the computer is the network" became true with the ascension of cloud computing and the web browser as the operating system.

Curiously the book "ends" by 2014, asking about what would be the "new big innovation" and its consequences, which in 2020 certainly seems to be the massive application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and how besides the obvious advantages they also multiplied the concerns about privacy and the "post-truth" world.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A year was a lifetime in those days.—Lee Felsenstein (SOL and Osborne 1 designer)

Since I lived in Michigan at the time most of these events took place, I was isolated from them. I had a TRS-80 Model I from 1980 through 1987. The Tandy computers were the top-sellers from the moment it came out in 1976 through at least 1980 and probably 1982. Since Tandy was not a west coast business, it figures little in these pages, however: the “valley” of the title is Silicon Valley, and the stars of this book are people I heard about only in passing in my corner of the nascent computer industry. (For very personal, and Michigan-centered, history of the TRS-80 corner, I highly recommend David & Theresa Welsh’s Priming the Pump: How TRS-80 Enthusiasts Helped Spark the PC Revolution.)

This is a big book; it covers a lot of ground, but still manages to miss some things that I think are important, especially to the authors’ focus on the free-wheeling, open character of the west coast hobby community. For example, Bob Albrecht comes up as a prominent early proponent of BASIC and one of the founders of Dr. Dobb’s Journal. He called himself “the dragon”, the authors write. They leave out—or perhaps don’t know—that Albrecht was a figure in another west coast phenomenon, Dungeons & Dragons. He wrote about fantasy roleplaying both in the context of computers, in Rainbow Magazine (a magazine for owners of Tandy’s Color Computer), and on their own, for example, The Adventurer's Handbook: A Guide to Role Playing Games. The gaming community back then was very similar to the computer hobbyist community, and shared many of the same values (much to TSR’s chagrin).

And there are, as far as I can tell, outright mistakes.

In 1980, Radio Shack introduced a spate of new machines. Its Pocket Computer, slightly larger than an advanced calculator with four times the memory of the original Altair, sold for $229. Its Color Computer, at $399, offered graphics in eight colors and up to 16K of memory. And the TRS-80 Model II was an upgrade of the Model I.

The Model II wasn’t an upgrade of the Model I; it was a completely different machine aimed at a completely different market, and sold concurrently with the Model I line. This is somewhat important, and plays into the overall thesis of the book, which is that this was all completely new. We see consecutive model numbers today and we think, of course, the second was a newer model of the first. But this was a new industry with new players, and many of them, Radio Shack included, were flying by the seat of their pants. They may well have figured they’d keep the Model I for consumers and the II for businesses and treat their computers like any other appliance, always selling the same model with slight upgrades. As it turned out, they soon created the Model III to replace the I, and renumbered their business line entirely.

Similarly, there’s a photo of “Michael Shrayer with his pioneering word processor, Electric Pencil, in 1976”. But Shrayer is clearly showing off his software on a TRS-80 Model III—which wasn’t released until 1980.

I know about these errors because I’m familiar with the computers; I can’t know if similar errors exist in the rest of the book.

Another flaw is that each chapter is written as a sort of mini-essay, sometimes repeating what we already know from previous chapters but not nearly redundant enough for each to stand on their own.

Those are the flaws. The book is otherwise fascinating, explaining figures I’ve otherwise heard of only in passing or not at all: Ted Nelson, Gary Kildall, the Homebrew Computer Club, the early Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen.

There’s a great anecdote about Paul Allen flying to Albuquerque to show off his and Bill Gates’s newly-created BASIC to MITS (the makers of the Altair 8080) and realizing while on the flight that they had neglected to write a “loader program” to load their software onto someone else’s Altair. All he had was a bunch of paper tape and no way to show it off to MITS. So he wrote a loader program on paper while flying, and switched it in (the Altair had no keyboard—it used switches to enter machine code in binary) cold. It worked.

One of the undercurrents running throughout the book is that these things were built because the people building them wanted to use them. Nobody else was making them, so they had to do it themselves. Writing about Steve Wozniak in high school, before the Apple I:

He knew that he was going to design computers himself one day—he hadn’t the slightest doubt of that. Only one thing bothered him: he wanted to design them now.

He didn’t have a college degree, or even a high school degree yet. In order to design computers, he had to do it on his own.

As big as it is, the book also feels very unfinished. It ends with Apple acquiring NeXT and Steve Jobs ousting Gil Amelio to become Apple’s interim CEO. The iMac has just become a success, but there is no iPod, no iPhone, not even OS X: Apple’s future is still very much in doubt. Netscape has just gone open source and been bought by AOL and Sun, but it is still a viable competitor to Internet Explorer. Dr. Dobb’s Journal still existed. And Java, running code downloaded from the Internet, was still considered secure.

Google, which would fit right into their thesis, is nowhere here, though the company had been founded a year or two before publication. The book is copyrighted 2000, but may have been finished in 1999: there is no date later than 1999. Page and Brin began developing Google in 1996; Google started in 1997, and the web site was running no later than December of 1998, according to the Internet Archive.

The book is most useful for the early years; even by 1980 when I discovered that a teenager could own a computer, names like Altair, MITS, and even IMSAI were only vague memories. There were references to them in one old computer magazine I picked up (Hobby Computer Handbook) but by the time I started reading current magazines, they were gone.

Despite its flaws, if you’re interested in the period, I do recommend this book.

Why are video games so much better designed than office software? Video games are designed by people who love to play video games. Office software is designed by people who want to do something else on the weekend.—Ted Nelson

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fire in the Valley : The making of the Personal Computer (1984-2000-2014) by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine is a book that primarily charts the early history of the personal computer in the 1970s until 1984. The later editions very rapidly chart the history of the computer industry from 1984 onwards.

The book covers the Altair, the Homebrew Computer Club, the start of Apple, the start and rise of the IBM PC and also a number of other companies that are now historical footnotes. But it is all interesting, it’s well worth being reminded about how many different computers there were in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There are also descriptions of early computer magazines, trade shows and some of the important software of the era. The people involved are really interesting to read about.

The two later sections on the growth of the PC market, the comeback of Apple, the rise of the consumer internet and the creation of the iPhone cover much more ground than the earlier chapters and other books that cover this history in more detail has an advantage.

Fire in the Valley is very much worth a read for anyone interested in the early history of personal computing. It’s terrific that there is such a good book about this time. It’s not quite as much fun to read as Accidental Empires but it is definitely a valuable book for anyone interested in the history of computers.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book! I read it back when it was first published and during the time I was working at my first job after graduating from Cal...Apple. The mid-late 80's at Apple were the best of times (Mac intro, the "1984" commercial, huge profit margins, brilliant & creative colleagues, and wildly over the top parties) and the worst of times (Black Friday layoffs of '85, the rebellious black pirate flag hanging atop the Mac building (Steve's lair), the bitter and acrimonious dethroning and departure of Steve (Jobs), Gil Amelio, and more layoffs.
For anyone that worked in Silicon Valley then, and now, this is a fascinating and accurate portrayal of the leaders and visionaries who helped shape the technology industry.

[CountZeroOr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book significantly underestimates gaming's role in promoting the adoption of computing technologies. I'm to get more into this in depth with my video review.

[Joe Pickert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wish I could give this book a higher rating, but the fact that it took me 5 months to finish makes anything above 2 stars hard to justify. To be fair, Fire in the Valley offers some fascinating insights into the evolution and rapid explosion of the PC industry. But each time that it feels like the book is finally getting interesting, Freiberger abruptly changes focus and loses whatever narrative momentum he'd been building.

Another unfortunate limitation of this book is its age. At nearly 20 years old, it offers no insight into the changes that have unfolded and re-revolutionized the computing industry since 2000. Though this is absolutely no fault of Freiberger's, it does diminish the contemporary reader's experience of the book. As the saying goes, "hindsight makes Fire in the Valley a far less interesting read than it otherwise might have been."

If you're looking for a myopic, scatterbrained review of the early days of Microsoft and Apple, this book might be a good starting place. In the end though, it left me wanting so much more.

[Jim Roscovius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read!!

This book starts before the microprocessor boom of the '70s, and goes right up to the present day. My only complaint is that there's too much on Apple while other companies and companies are glossed over. I can find more on Wikipedia about a number of machines. But the book is fascinating.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have time or interest to read only one book about the history of the personal computer, this is that book. I have read and reviewed many related titles; this is one of the few to to encapsulate both the PC's technical and entrepreneurial history. The building blocks: the first microprocessors in the early 1970’s, the release of the CP/M operating system in 1974, and the the Altair BASIC programming language and Altair 8800 in 1975. Swaine and Freiberger ask and effectively answer relevant questions including why the PC revolution was sparked by individuals, while business-orientated suppliers such as Hewlett Packard, initially resisted PC initiatives. The authors also point to the release of the Apple iMac in 1998 as the crowning achievement in PC development - following this laptop computers and smaller devices increasingly became popular. Added chapters for the third edition include discussion about mobile platform development and cloud-based storage. The personal insights of computer scientists and engineers turned entrepreneurs including the late Gary Kildall, Lee Felsenstein and Ed Roberts, help make this book a very engaging read.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fire in the Valley is one of the seminal books on the history of personal computing and still has value. Over time, most books on the subject have tended to focus on the chosen few who have become household names (especially Jobs and Gates), but at the time when this book was first written, it was not yet obvious who would be canonized in the long run. Thus, Fire in the Valley, describes the key contributions of dozens and dozens of individuals whose names have mostly been forgotten. The book reminds us how communal and democratized the early days of personal computing were. Hundreds of hobbyists, from around the country (not just Silicon Valley), contributed to the development of the computer.

That said, the book's comprehensive nature leaves it somewhat diffuse, and some readers might, by the end, find themselves longing for something simpler (a biography of Jobs), even if it means missing out on the many heroes of the early computing revolution. I recommend it more for its value as a history than as a pleasant read.

[Jan Ryswyck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing storytelling about the birth and rise of the personal computer. Required reading for anyone in the IT industry.Favorite quote from the book: "Let's not worry about conformity and tradition. Let's just do whatever works and let's have fun doing it."

[Greg Stearns · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent addition to the canon of computing history.

Written by 2 journalists from Infoworld and published in the early 80s, this book takes us from the bold gamble by a memory company hired to build a calculator that ended up being the first integrated microprocessor through all the ripples that buggy little chip made. Through the early calculator boom and bust of the 70s and the PC revolution until it was unseated by the mobile devices of the 2010s. This book covers the life of the PC in ways that other books like Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and When Computing Got Personal: A history of the desktop computer missed. Some well-known stories are covered, such as the deal that made Bill Gates a rich man or the argument that got Steve Jobs fired, but there are so many stories about so many forgotten champions.

Even if you think you know the stories, this book is well worth the read.

[John Harvard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast-paced narrative documenting the development of the PC industry, from the emergence of the Altair computer in the seventies to the arrival of the internet and AOL in the late nineties. The book is not technical and does not need any formal understanding of computers to be enjoyed. It is the story of the PC revolution and the personalities behind it.

The book spends a fair bit of time portraying key personalities who were behind the PC revolution and how they incrementally built on each others efforts to continually improve the PC and make it more affordable. The title of the book is wholly appropriate, it was really a wildfire of ideas and efforts in Silicon Valley that led to the PC revolution. A similar revolution seems to be occurring in Silicon Valley in Artificial Intelligence, or AI, today where every company seems to be taking incremental steps and learning from others to make AI ever more powerful and accurate in its predictive capability.

[Farid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cada capítulo cuenta un aspecto de la evolución de la industria de la microinformática: los microprocesadores, los ordenadores personales, el software, los sistemas operativos, las grandes compañías como Apple, Microsoft o IBM, la comunidad, etc.

Cada parte se cuenta de forma cronológica y por tanto acabas un capítulo en los noventa y en el siguiente vuelves otra vez a los setenta. Se repiten muchas cosas en diferentes capítulos, para dar contexto. Ese ir y venir adelante y atrás en el tiempo a mí me ha mareado un poco. No sé si era la mejor forma de contar la historia.

Aparte de eso, interesante recopilación de contenido, aunque no hay nada demasiado novedoso o que no puedas encontrar en otra parte.

[K Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compelling read for those interested in the history of computing. The book is highly regarded for its thorough research and detailed accounts. It effectively captures the excitement, challenges, and pivotal moments of the early days of personal computing.

However, while the dry, factual tone and chronological approach provide an objective perspective, it may not appeal to readers who prefer a more narrative-driven or dramatic storytelling style. Some readers might find the tone a bit too detached.

Overall, this book is a must-read for tech enthusiasts and anyone interested in the history of how personal computers came to be. It offers a comprehensive and accurate look at the era, making it an essential addition to any tech history collection.

[djcb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked this book on the early days of the PC, starting in the 1970s with the Altair and various other attempts (like the Apple I an II), and then the IBM PC in the early 80s.

This is mostly about those early days, but in this later editions there's an overview about what happened after 1984, such as Apple's decline and rise, GNU/Linux, Java, the browser wars etc. All rather US-centered.

I liked the little "business adventure story" esp with some very unlikely un-business-like visionaries. What I would have like more was some more technical background on all those machines, the underlying tech etc.; there's some of that, but more would be better. Wonder if there's a book for that?

[Dan Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent account of the fascinating few years that saw the birth of the PC industry. I was impressed by the fact that the author kept a wide angle view and so did not neglect to write about the journals, fairs, clubs, retailers and other key elements of the scene, in addition to the obvious players (hardware and software vendors). Perhaps a little overly US-centric for my taste (although the title of the book means I can't say I wasn't warned). I might have found the book a little easier to follow if it had been structured more by date and less by, say, company, but that's a quibble. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in the subject.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulls together well known, and many less-known, stories of the founders and companies that built the modern computer and internet world we now live.

It did surprise me how the book did not carry as much of the excitement and enthusiasm of the creators of these tech devices as would be expected. Even some of the well known exciting stories seemed a bit tepid. Nevertheless, it gets so much of the big stories in one place, and does excellent work in cataloguing the less-known stories that laid the foundation for the better known stories (Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc.) For that reason alone this is necessary reading for anyone interested in this topic.

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This likely isn't the most detailed and accurate history But it brought back many memories for me. I was in still in middle-school when Popular Electronics announced the Mits Altair 8800 which started many of US on a craze to learn and work with computers. I jumped in with both feet. Had I realized the business/social significance, I was in a position to become a titan... instead I had a long, enjoyable and entertaining career (at IBM) and saw much of technology come, go and later return many times!

[Jonathan Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

You might think a history of personal computers would be dry, but I had a hard time putting this book down. The authors wrote for major industry magazines throughout the period covered by the book, so they saw and analyzed the phenomenon of the personal computer first hand. Moreover, they really focused on the individuals who ideated, developed, and marketed the personal computer, their interactions, their hopes, and even their disappointments.

[John Hart · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book contain some new info to me but the story line jumped around a bit. I listened to the audio book version and that is where everything fell apart for me. The narrator has absolutely no emotion in his voice.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read many books that covered the history of computers, with Steven Levy's Hackers being a favorite. This book had anecdotes of never seen before. It was an exciting read even knowing large portions of the history it covers.

[Joe Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid but slightly dull history of the PC and Silicon Valley. Definitely worth the read though it might help if you have at least a mild understanding of something of the tech nature or computer hardware and software as I do. It covers the subject well.

[Michelle Padley Masson · Rating 5 out of 5]

an interesting account of how it all began.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting contemporary account of the development of personal computers

[Dan Rozanski · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books...movie wasn't bad either (Pirates of Silicon Valley)

[Jennifer M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read just how much banditry and piracy really went into the formation of Silicone Valley. These guys were brilliant but were also really assholes.

[Connor Van Ooyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super interesting, just so dense

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

It wasn't as interesting as I was anticipating :( A lot, a lot of technical details that weigh down the narrative.

[Tyler Burns · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can check out my review here:

https://youtu.be/raBDeol_TkY