“Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer, Third Edition (http://tinyurl.com/n3skw3d) 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.
In the 1970s a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands. They launched a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution: not just the personal computer, but a watershed in the relationship between man and machine. This is their story.
Working at “InfoWorld” in the early 1980s, “Fire in the Valley” authors Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger daily rubbed elbows with people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were creating the personal computer revolution. A rich tapestry of colorful individuals, the book 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 of “Fire in the Valley” from Pragmatic Bookshelf 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.
“Fire in the Valley” is available for e-readers in epub, mobi, and PDF formats direct from the publisher and in paperback from fine bookstores worldwide. The cost is US$34 for a paperback edition and $20 for an ebook.