"Accidental Empires"
by Bob on September 1, 2007
I just picked up this book the other day and read it.
"Accidental Empires: how the boys of Silicon Valley make their millions, battle foreign competition, and still can't get a date" by Robert X. Cringely, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1992.
Although quite techno-gossipy in many senses, which Mr. Cringely freely admits, it is a brilliant book on the history of the computer tech industry in Northern California's Silicon Valley, especially in the early days. The author was a professor at Stanford University and a foreign correspondent. He also writes a regular techno-gossip column in Silicon Valley.
Just think, I myself was in Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. And Intel was a tiny company. Everyone was in open floor cubicles, even the founders. And as was told to me, to keep production up to high yields (after all, some wafers were bad) they ran the clean room around the clock. And they had a sleeping room for tired workers. And they told me there were some interesting romantic assignations in there.
And you could use the circuit diagram of the Intel 4004 as a road map to the local vicinity. So that's my prequel. But that was a very long time ago. And that all changed later.
There are so many parts of the book worth mentioning. But we will confine ourselves to a few areas.
He says the we are now a nation of shoppers. We used to be a nation of baseball players, arguers, people who made dinners at home, voters, and readers of books. Touchy-feeling real paper books.
In saying that we are a nation of shoppers, the implication is that we do it for fun only and that we are seemingly strictly consumers, a nation of buyers of entertainment and such things.
This is in contradistinction to a nation of producers and actively engaged people.
So his message is conspicuous consumption or rampant consumerism has overtaken the nation.
He then refects on how this home computer business came about in Northern California and what its context was. There were a bunch of kids and they played into making an industry. A huge industry. Hence, the book title: accidental empires.
He defines three types of computer programmers. A lumpenprogrammer who works on a mainframe computer, a nerd, and a hippie. The hippie is clever, sloppy and gets all the girls. The nerd is cautious, knows all the reference manuals by heart, and doesn't have any girlfriends. The lumpenprogrammer of the mainframe is not in the creative loop, and so is not very well defined except for his banality.
The admixture of the nerds and the hippies started the personal computer revolution. And that was a very strange adventure.
Cringely says that the personal computer is to blame for our passivity and consumerism, at least, the modern flavour of consumerism.
We quote Professor Cringely:
"Think about it for a minute. Personal computers came along in the late 1970s and by the mid-1980s had invaded every office and infected many homes. In addition to being the ultimate item of conspicuous consumption for those of us who don't collect fine art, PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27 -year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his boss into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out".
"Personal computers both created the longest peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history and ended it".
"Personal computers made it possible for businesses to move further and faster than they ever had before, creating untold wealth that we had to spend on something, so we all became shoppers".
Professor Cringely continues.
"And I'm here to tell you three things: It all happened more or less by accident, the people who made it happen were amateurs, and for the most part they still are".
This man most definitely has a point of view. And an acerbic yet softly sarcastic sense of humour.
And I'll bet very few people realise that "Silicon Valley" is a metonym. Or that seven is a really magical psychological number, as especially written up in a famous paper by the psychologist, Dr. George A. Miller, in 1956 called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". And that's why our phone numbers are seven digits long -- or used to be. Most people can only reliably remember seven simultaneous things in their short-term memory. Or perceive seven things at once, maybe.
No wonder the ancients found seven to be a really interesting number. And just think, they never needed a laptop or a personal computer. And a hundred years ago or so, and perhaps before and beyond, if you said you had a computer, it meant you had a person with you who was able to do computations, a human computer. Not so anymore.
I found Cringely's book to be a good read.