At 3:10 AM 6/13/96, Blake Wehlage wrote:
Hey did any of you guys(and ladies) see the PBS show called, Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires in Silicon Valley. I thought it was very interesting and informative. (That's coming from a 13 year with the teachers say have no future) If you saw it I was wondering your feeling on the show.
I caught the show and thought it was pretty good, all in all. I personally despise the term "nerd," but I won't get into that here. (Except to say that "nerds," "geeks," and "dweebs" are terms of insult, and anyone who accepts this labelling by the media and by "jerks" (a comparable term, by the way) is proably just a dweeb anyone, so I guess the term is accurate.) Most of the portrayals of Silicon Valley history was pretty accurate, especially the 1975-78 "Homebrew Computer Club" days. (I used to go to about every other one of these, mainly in '77-78, where I sometimes passed out free samples of the 8080 and stuff like that. A friend of mine at the time was one of the Apple II motherboard designers, and another was the first employee hired by Jobs and Woz. Personally, my first personal computer was a Processor Technology SOL, as I thought the Apple II looked too much like a toy. Shows you what I knew.) The first "Byte Shop" opened in late '75 or early '76, a few miles from my apartment, so I used to go there to see the new machines. This is the store that bought the first batch of Apple Is (not IIs). Mainly I remember the Altair, the IMSAI 8080, the Cromemco Dazzler, and so on. Those were exciting times. But, having worked at Intel during those heady days, and being pretty active these days on the Net, I'd have to say the Web, Net, Java, etc. are *just as exciting* (if not more so) than those days. So, the best years are probably yet to come. (BTW, I also had an ARPANET account in 1973, when there were only several sites as nodes.) Back to the show... Cringely (actually, Stephens) is pretty good at doing sidebars explaining computers. So, a pretty fair history of the industry. Probably the best such show I've seen. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."