Following on from Episode 1 & Episode 2

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet continues with Episode 3 – Wiring the World:

Following on from Episode 1

Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet continues with Episode 2 – Serving the Suits:

Click to Watch Episode 3

The sequel to Triumph of the Nerds – The Rise of Accidental Empires, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet documents the development of ARPANET, the Internet, the World Wide Web and the dot-com bubble of the mid- and late-1990s.

Join Robert X Cringely in this much-anticipated sequel to Triumph of the Nerds, as he turns his well-informed and irreverent eye on the intriguing history of the Internet. Go deep into the bowels of the Pentagon to witness the birth of the Internet and follow its rapid rise to the cutting edge of the World Wide Web. On his journey, Cringely interviews the unknown nerds who laid the Internet’s foundations, visits the Silicon Valley of India and grills the founders of the networking companies who have made millions from this fascinating new technology.

Click to Watch Episode 2

Following on from Episode 1 & Episode 2 – Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires continues: “Great Artists Steal” Episode Outline:

• Steve Jobs, having viewed a demonstration of Xerox’s Star graphical user interface, developed a desktop manager for the Macintosh with an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Cringely suggested that Xerox had the potential to be one of the key companies in the up and coming PC industry, had they managed to protect the intellectual property rights of Star GUI.

• Apple agreed to license parts of the Mac OS GUI to Microsoft who went on to develop Windows. Upon the release of Windows 2.0, Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 over the “look and feel” of the Mac OS. Apple lost the lawsuit in 1994, leaving Microsoft dominant in the operating system business.

• Steve Jobs had recruited Pepsi-Cola executive John Sculley to become CEO of Apple, saying to the latter “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

• The Apple Macintosh pioneered many of the features now standard in the PC, particularly ease of use. However, the Macintosh was considerable more expensive, so it was rapidly overtaken by the IBM PC, with some pundits not only saying that IBM had won, but also that Apple could potentially go out of business.

• Chris Espinosa described Sculley’s ouster of Jobs saying “The grandiose plans of what Macintosh were going to be was just so far out of whack with the truth of what the product was doing and the truth of what the product was doing was not horrible it was salvageable but the gap between the two was just so unthinkable that somebody had to do something and that somebody was John Sculley”.

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.