Accidental Empires, Chapter 17 — Do the Wave

surf_board-legAnd so our two month retrospective comes to an end with this 17th and final chapter, circa 1996. I hope you have enjoyed it. Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about the eBook version of this work as well as what I’ve been up to for the last eight weeks. It’s more than I ever expected… and less.

ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DO THE WAVE

We’re floating now on surfboards 300 yards north of the big public pier in Santa Cruz, California. As our feet slowly become numb in the cold Pacific water, it’s good to ponder the fact that this section of coastline, only fifteen miles […]

By |April 3rd, 2013|2013, Books, Business, Companies, Computing, Entrepreneurship, history, Internet, Software, Technology|42 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 16 — But Wait, There’s More!

MoreFive years after Accidental Empires was published in hardcover and four years after the paperback, we got a chance to do a somewhat revised paperback edition to go with Triumph of the Nerds, my Channel 4/PBS miniseries based on the book. Revision may be too strong a word, because all I was allowed to do was add two extra chapters at the end. This gave me a chance to catch up with some of the major characters, correct a few mistakes, explain what had happened in the intervening half-decade and — oh by the way — finally say something about the Internet.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

January […]

By |March 31st, 2013|2013, Books, Companies, Computing, Entrepreneurship, Gadgets, history, Internet, Software, Technology|16 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 15 — Future Computing

minority-reportThere is so much wrong and yet a lot that’s right in this chapter, which was the last one in the original hardcover edition. I don’t know whether to be embarrassed by it or proud. How does computing today compare with my predictions from 1992? 

ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FUTURE COMPUTING

Remember Pogo? Pogo was Doonesbury in a swamp, the first political cartoon good enough to make it off the editorial page and into the high-rent district next to the horoscope. Pogo was a ‘possum who looked as if he was dressed for a Harvard class reunion and who acted as the moral conscience for the first […]

By |March 28th, 2013|2013, Books, Business, Companies, Computing, Cringely's Rules, Gadgets, history, Predictions, Software|35 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 12 — On the Beach

tropicthunderGiven The Startup Channel this chapter on startups is very important. We also cover shareware and I want to point out that Buttonware founder Jim Knopf asked me to respect his pseudonym “Jim Button.” Who was I to argue with that? 

ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER TWELVE

ON THE BEACH

America’s advantage in the PC business doesn’t come from our education system, from our fluoridated water, or, Lord knows, from our tax structure. And it doesn’t come from some innate ability we have to run big companies with thousands of employees and billions in sales. The main thing America has had going for it is the high-tech start-up, and, […]

By |March 18th, 2013|2013, Books, Computing, Cringely's Rules, Entrepreneurship, How To's, Product Development, Software, Startups, Venture Capital|22 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 5 — Role Models

altost1ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER FIVE

ROLE MODELS

This being the 1990s, the economy is shot to hell and we’ve got nothing much better to do, the personal computer industry is caught up in an issue called look and feel, which means that your computer software can’t look too much like my computer software or I’ll take you to court. Look and feel is a matter of not only how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but what dance it is they are doing and who owns the copyright.

Here’s an example of look and feel. It’s 1913, and we’re at the Notre Dame versus Army football game (this is all taken straight from the film Knute […]

By |February 20th, 2013|2013, Books, Companies, Computing, history, Software|39 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 4 — Amateur Hour

PE_Jan_1975_CoverACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER FOUR

AMATEUR HOUR

You have to wonder what it was we were doing before we had all these computers in our lives. Same stuff, pretty much. Down at the auto parts store, the counterman had to get a ladder and climb way the heck up to reach some top shelf, where he’d feel around in a little box and find out that the muffler clamps were all gone. Today he uses a computer, which tells him that there are three muffler clamps sitting in that same little box on the top shelf. But he still has to get the ladder and climb up to get them, and, worse still, sometimes the computer lies, and there […]

By |February 18th, 2013|2013, Books, Companies, Computing, Internet, Software|43 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Chapter 3 — Why They Don’t Call It Computer Valley

Intel-logoACCIDENTAL EMPIRES

CHAPTER THREE

WHY THEY DON’T CALL IT

COMPUTER VALLEY

Reminders of just how long I’ve been around this youth-driven business keep hitting me in the face. Not long ago I was poking around a store called the Weird Stuff Warehouse, a sort of Silicon Valley thrift shop where you can buy used computers and other neat junk. It’s right across the street from Fry’s Electronics, the legendary computer store that fulfills every need of its techie customers by offering rows of junk food, soft drinks, girlie magazines, and Maalox, in addition to an enormous selection of new computers and software. You can’t miss Fry’s; the building is painted to look like a block-long computer chip. The front […]

By |February 14th, 2013|2013, Books, Business, Companies, Computing, history, Technology|84 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Part 8 (Chapter 2) — The Tyranny of the Normal Distribution

the_normal_curve

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. The chapters will be posted late on Sunday and Wednesday nights so you will have several days to read and comment.

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 […]

By |February 10th, 2013|2013, Books, Computing, history, People, Software|96 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Part 5 (Chapter 1b)

 

accidental-195x300

ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES — CHAPTER 1B

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.

Why demonstrate it at all? The idea was to keep all these folks, and the thousands of people […]

By |February 6th, 2013|2013, Books, Business, Computing, history, Software|38 Comments
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Accidental Empires, Part 4 (Chapter 1a) — The Demo God

accidental-195x300ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES CHAPTER ONE

THE   DEMO-GOD

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.

Shopping is what we do; it’s entertainment. Consumers are what we are; we go shopping for fun. Nearly all of our energy goes into buying—thinking about what we would like to buy or earning money to pay for what we have already bought.

We invented credit cards, suburban shopping malls, and day care just to make our consumerism more efficient. We sent our wives, husbands, […]

By |February 6th, 2013|2013, Books, Companies, Computing, Entrepreneurship, history|15 Comments
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