Articles about Tech History

Ninth in a series. Robert X. Cringely's brilliant look at the rise of the personal computing industry continues, explaining why PCs aren't mini-mainframes and share little direct lineage with them.

Published in 1991, Accidental Empires is an excellent lens for viewing not just the past but future computing.

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Eighth in a series. I don’t think posting pieces of chapters is working for any of us, so I’m changing the plan. We have 16 chapters to go in the book so I’ll be posting in their entirety two chapters per week for the next eight weeks.

Down at the Specks Howard School of Blogging Technique they teach that this is blogging suicide because these chapters are up to 7000 words long! Blog readers are supposed to have short attention spans so I’ll supposedly lose readers by doing it this way. But I think Specks is wrong and smart readers want more to read, not less -- if the material is good. You decide.

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Seventh in a series. Editor: Classic 1991 tome Accidental Empires continues, looking at a uniquely American cultural phenomenon.

The founders of the microcomputer industry were groups of boys who banded together to give themselves power. For the most part, they came from middle-class and upper-middle-class homes in upscale West Coast communities. They weren’t rebels; they resented their parents and society very little. Their only alienation was the usual hassle of the adolescent -- a feeling of being prodded into adulthood on somebody else’s terms. So they split off and started their own culture, based on the completely artificial but totally understandable rules of computer architecture. They defined, built, and controlled (and still control) an entire universe in a box -- an electronic universe of ideas rather than people -- where they made all the rules, and could at last be comfortable. They didn’t resent the older people around them -- you and me, the would-be customers -- but came to pity us because we couldn’t understand the new order inside the box -- the microcomputer.

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Sixth in a series. Serialization of Robert X. Cringely's classic Accidental Empires makes an unexpected analogy.

The Airport Kid was what they called a boy who ran errands and did odd jobs around a landing field in exchange for airplane rides and the distant prospect of learning to fly. From Lindbergh’s day on, every landing strip anywhere in America had such a kid, sometimes several, who’d caught on to the wonder of flight and wasn’t about to let go.

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Fifth in a Series. Editor: Serialization continues of landmark 1991 book Accidental Empires, looking at younger Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Microsoft Word 3.0 for Macintosh -- proverbial vaporware at the time.

Several hundred users of Apple Macintosh computers gathered one night in 1988 in an auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to watch a sneak preview demonstration of a new word processing application. This was consumerism in its most pure form: it drew potential buyers together to see a demonstration of a product they could all use but wouldn’t be allowed to buy. There were no boxes for sale in the back of the room, no "send no money, we’ll bill you later". This product flat wasn’t for sale and wouldn’t be for another five months.

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Fourth in a series. Editor, with one, two, three introductions behind, Robert X. Cringely's serialized version of 1991 classic Accidental Empires begins.

Years ago, when you were a kid and I was a kid, something changed in America. One moment we were players of baseball, voters, readers of books, makers of dinner, arguers. And a second later, and for every other second since then, we were all just shoppers.

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Third in a series. Editor: In parts 1 and 2 of this serialization, Robert X. Cringely presents an updated intro to his landmark rise-of-Silicon Valley book Accidental Empires. Here he presents the original preface from the first edition.

The woman of my dreams once landed a job as the girls’ English teacher at the Hebrew Institute of Santa Clara. Despite the fact that it was a very small operation, her students (about eight of them) decided to produce a school newspaper, which they generally filled with gossipy stories about each other. The premiere issue was printed on good stock with lots of extra copies for grandparents and for interested bystanders like me.

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Second in a series. Editor: Robert X. Cringely is serializing his classic Accidental Empires , yesterday with a modern intro and today with the two past ones. The second edition of the book coincided with release of documentary "Triumph of the Nerds". The intros provide insight into a past we take for granted that was future in the making then. Consider that in 1996, Microsoft had a hit with Windows 95 and Apple was near bankruptcy.

The first edition of Accidental Empires missed something pretty important -- the Internet. Of course there wasn’t much of a commercial Internet in 1990. So I addressed it somewhat with the 1996 revised edition, the preface of which is below. Later today we’ll go on to the original preface from 1990.

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First in a series. February, 2013 -- We stand today near the beginning of the post-PC era. Tablets and smart phones are replacing desktops and notebooks. Clouds are replacing clusters. We’re more dependent than ever on big computer rooms only this time we not only don’t own them, we don’t even know where they are.  Three years from now we’ll barely recognize the computing landscape that was built on personal computers. So if we’re going to keep an accurate chronicle of that era, we’d better get to work right now, before we forget how it really happened.

Oddly enough, I predicted all of this almost 25 years ago as you’ll see if you choose to share this journey and read on. But it almost didn’t happen. In fact I wish it had never happened at all…

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