Part 2 of the documentary series deals with how PCs became more prevalent outside hobbyist circles. It's interesting to me how different groups needed what the other had to make this possible. If you took the Homebrew Computer Club and threw a lot of money behind it, getting it all tangled up in legal and financial issues, it might look something like this. Microsoft needed IBM and vice versa. They also needed CPM, but in the end the company with the botht eh most knowledge and the most cutthroat attitude toward business (post incorporation) won. In that sense, sharing was vital. It's just that that sharing happened duplicitously.

IBM-Big Blue-Biggest computer company in the world (at the time of the doc)

Conservative, Conservative, Conservative

Goes on about conservative dress code, company songs, etc.

Huge bureaucracy, everything had to be verified and approved by committees

“It would take 9 months to ship an empty box.”

1980 IBM decided they wanted to control the PC market

“We were losing the hearts and minds.”

IBM plan—open architecture. Using other companies’ components, software, sales, and service. Something IBM never did.

Who would they buy their software from?

Bill Gates did languages, Gary Killdall did operating systems.

Killdall is described as a techie and less of a business man.

Gates was extremely competitive. Killdall was behind the best selling OS, CPM. Gates was selling Basic, most popular programming language. IBM contacted Microsoft. They wanted the language and an OS. They didn’t know Microsoft didn’t have an OS to sell them.

When CPM said no, Microsoft jumped on it. Tim Patterson basically ripped off the CPM API to make his OS. He called it QDos. As usual, the prize didn’t go to the inventor, but the exploiter of the invention. 22:30

Bought QDos for $50k

IBM’s name carried a seal of approval for other type of companies. Lotus 123 (based on VisiCalc) was the PC’s killer app.

IBM had no control over Microsoft’s licensing. Microsoft really didn’t make much money comparatively. Other companies had to clone IBM’s PC to be successful.

1982 Compaq. Used reverse engineering to design their PC. Rom Bios was the only thing IBM invented, so Compaq had to copy it without breaking the law.

Computer industry backwards compared to others. Things getter better and cheaper. Because so many clones were getting into it, prices were going down and down. IBM’s share of the pie was going down. Microsoft’s was going up.

Gates was changing the culture of Microsoft to be more competitive and somewhere between traditional corporation and something else. Emergence of Microserfs. Setting up his own cult of personality.

IBM’s glacial pace put them behind clone makers. Moved toward closed hardware and their own operating system (OS 2). They asked Microsoft to code OS 2. One issue had to do with culture clashes based on view of size/complexity and value. Microsoft was for leaner coding. IBM felt coding should be paid based on amount of code not how well the code worked.

Windows created in parallel to OS 2. Tried to get IBM to move toward Windows.

Bill has an incredible desire to beat other people and put people under. 46:30

Gates is extremely paranoid and controlling. How does this transfer into education and his beliefs about education. It certainly fuels a really oppressive notion of lifelong learning.

Microsoft didn’t develop the first GUI. Apple did. 

On Triumph of the Nerds: Impressing Their Friends
PBS Documentary Series, Part 1 (1996)

I'm particularly interested in how these folks talk about collaboration, organizational structures and relationships, and their attitudes toward their work. Warren's comments about sharing, the Homebrew Computer Club, and the descriptions of work at Intel and early on in Microsoft are of particular interest. I'm curious what gets left out of these narratives, particularly those folks who get squished as these ventures incorporate, moving from invention to codification as a business. I'm also curious how a company like Microsoft moves from such sharing practices and collaboration described in the series which Gates remembers fondly) to supporting policies like stacked ranking. 
Documentary hosted by Robert Cringley who describes himself as the premiere gossip columnist of Silicon Valley. "Institutions in constant change like the PC industry are driven by rumor and gossip, and I thrive on both."

Structure of how coders/programmers work—They've turned the myth of the Jobs/Wozniak camp and the Allen/Gates camp into a lifestyle. This includes the myth that every early, important Silicon Valley company began in a garage.

Intel and the development of the microprocessor

Attributes the "laid back Silicon Valley working style" to Intel. "Everyone was on a first-name basis. There were no reserved parking spaces. No offices, only cubicles. It's still true today[,]" which includes the chairman and co-founder, Gordon Moore's cubicle, even though, as Cringley declares, "he's worth $3 billion.

14:30ish, Moore: "In a business like this, the people with the power are the ones who that have the understanding of what's going on, not necessarily the ones on top. It's very important that those people that have the knowledge are the ones that make the decisions, so we set up something where everyone who had the knowledge had an equal say in what was going on."

cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800—attributed to Ed Roberts, founder of MITS—Albuquerque

First Personal Computer

"Like every other PC pioneer, Ed Roberts built his just because he wanted something to play with."

16:30ish, Roberts: "Nobody had access to computers then."

Personally driven by lack of access to a mainframe. Financially driven when MITS, a calculator company, was going out of business.

Altair was an invention in search of a purpose. It didn't do much without a lot of extensive, physical programming. Cringley "a solution in search of a problem"

Homebrew Computer Club formed to discuss electronics and what people were dong with their work. Held in a Stanford classroom. Mostly from electronics industry, home radio folks, and physicians.

Paul Allen–first completion of the microcomputer Basic

Paul and Bill were students at Harvard?

wrote the code without having tested in (loaded it in with paper tape?)

weren't sure if i would work, but it did

Allen and Gates moved into a hotel across from MITS in Albuquerque. They worked writing Basic on the Altair. They invited their high school friends to come down and work on starting Microsoft. They all lived together in one apartment.

Gates: 27:30 "That kind of craftsmanship paid off."

By the end of 1975 dozens of companies were building microcomputers.

"Enter in the flower children of California."

Jobs: "There was something beyond what you see every day. It's the same thing that makes someone want to be a poet instead of a banker."



West Coast Computer Faire, Jim Warren

The California counterculture was crucial to the PC's development.

30:30ish, Warren: "And the whole spirit there was working together, was sharing. You shared your dope. You shared your bed. You shared your life. You shared your hopes. A whole bunch of us had the same community spirit and that permeated the whole Homebrew Computer Club. As soon as somebody would solve a problem, they'd coming running down to the Homebrew Computer Club's next meeting and say 'Hey everybody, you know that problem that all of us have been trying o figure out how to solve, here's the solution. Isn't this wonderful? Aren't I a great guy? And it's my contention that that is a major component of why Silicon Valley was able to develop the technology as rapidly as they did. Because we were all sharing, everybody won."

Founders of Apple were members of the homebrew computer club. Woz made his own computer and added to it in order to show it off at every meeting. A group started growing around Woz, and Jobs approached him to start a business. Jobs s called a visionary, but only in the sense that he thought it was profitable. He did little of the technical work. It was his idea to sell "packaged computers" rather than kits. The Altair was a kit, for example. Jobs found the venture capital to invest n it, specifically Arthur Rock ("the guy who invented venture capital"). 35:00

First marketed computer by Apple was Apple II. There's vey little mention of Apple I. (Was it Woz's personal computer from the Homebrew Computer Club?)

The Apple II was launched at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1978, one of the first big, west coast microcomputer shows. Most displays were from the Homebrew Computer Club.

Many of Apple's founders were in their twenties, but some were even in high school, e.g., Chris Espinosa who would demo computers at Apple after school. Largely, the market was still hobbyists. Microcomputers had to serve practical purposes in order to reach a larger audience. They needed a "killer application." For the Apple II, it was VisiCalc.

40:00ish VisiCalc was invented by students in Harvard's Business School. It was a spreadsheet program.

Dan Bricklin didn't want to do hand calculations. Up to this point, spreadsheets didn't exist as a concept.

44:00 "It gave people who were obsessed with numbers...the ability to play with scenarios....what if I do this?" It connected numbers and abstractions. Thus began the dominance of data?

44:15ish, Cringley: "The spreadsheet was every business man's crystal ball. It answered all those what if questions. What if I fire the engineering department? What if I invest $10 million in pantyhose futures? Look, I'll be rich in under a year and have slimmer thighs at the same time, the computer says so. The effect of the spreadsheet was enormous. Armed with an Apple II running VisiCalc, a twenty-four year old MBA with two pieces of dubious data could convince his corporate managers to allow him to loot the corporate pension fund and do a leverage buyout. It was the perfect tool for the 80s, the Me decade, when money was everything and greed was good."

Bricklin didn't patent spreadsheets.