Following on from Episode 1, – Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires continues:
“Riding The Bear” Episode Outline:

• Compaq’s successful reverse-engineering of the IBM PC, which led to many competitors producing IBM-clones that undercut IBM’s own offering. While IBM was one of the key companies that fostered the growth of the PC industry and initially dominated it, by 1990 it had lost its lead.

• IBM’s unsuccessful attempt to recapture a dominate share in the PC market with the PS/2 and OS/2, the latter being the successor to MS-DOS. The proprietary nature of the PS/2 and exclusivity of OS/2 was intended to drive sales of IBM’s own hardware and made it difficult for other manufacturers of PC compatibles to compete.

• Microsoft had originally profited from the initial success of the IBM PC. It did even better with the proliferation of clones as IBM’s own market share shrunk, so Microsoft saw no business sense in following IBM’s lead. Microsoft saw more potential in developing Windows, a project they pursued parallel to their cooperating with IBM on OS/2, and Windows 3.0 proved to be a great success (along with MS-DOS) bundled with new PCs. This led to the split between the two titans, with Microsoft setting the standard for PCs, while IBM concentrated on its mainframe and services businesses.

These days everywhere we look there is a huge amount of buzz about “The Digital Revolution”. We ourselves recognise daily the impact that cutting edge technology plays in our lives. The following tag cloud has many of the terms we associate with the Digital Revolution…

Technology has changed the way we live our lives, communicate, work, shop, educate, in fact there has been such a shift that we barely remember what life was like before the Internet.

We recognise that the digital revolution started way before Web2.0 and even the invention of the Internet. But yet we are all talking about this revolution as if it is a recent phenomena. Just stop for a moment and think about the history of the life changing technology we have at our fingertips today. The invention of the home computer, the Internet and the Visionaries/Founding Fathers of the TRUE Digital Revolution. Their dream envisioned a personal computer on every desk in every home… Wow, with the world more and more becoming a global village, we are pretty much there and beyond. Where will it take us next?

SO, in homage to the “nerds” the next few blog posts tell their story via the 3 part documentary series, Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996) which tells the important role they play in our history. The documentary film was written and hosted by Robert X. Cringely and produced for British television by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The documentary itself is based on Cringely’s book Accidental Empires. The documentary chronicles the rise of the personal computer/home computer beginning in the 1970s with the Altair 8800, Apple I and Apple II and VisiCalc. It continues through the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh revolution through the 1980s and the mid 1990s, ending at the beginning of the Dot-com boom with the release of Windows 95.

The documentary cites the several major milestones in the PC industry: It includes interviews with many influential figures in the PC industry, including Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and Oracle’s Larry Ellison.

Watch the first episode below. “Impressing Their Friends” Follows the story of the pure genius techies (Nerds) who could get excited about a box with flashing lights, flicking switches and binary code. Through to the development of the first mass produced personal computer which the non techies could get excited about.

Enjoy!