pirates of silicon valley

[Gerard J Snitselaar]

On  0, keith smith <klsmith2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Ever watch "pirates of silicon valley"?  I've watched it maybe 4 or 5 times.  Several months ago I watched it 3 times in 2 days.
> 
> I do not know how accurate it is.
> 

It is a decent adaptation of Robert Cringley's book 'Accidental Empires'.
The problem with it is that is focuses solely on the Apple/Microsoft fight,
but completely ignores the other people that played equally important roles
in the rise of the personal computer and this version of history has pretty
much become gospel. There is a good book that discusses the history of
Commodore in this timeframe called 'On the Edge'. I really liked how it talked
about the people and designs of the computers. Jack Tramiel, CEO of Commodore until
about 1984, managed to kill off a lot of his competitors, and also managed to
pretty much ruin Commodore, and later Atari. Irving Gould was the main money
backer of Commodore and also played a role in its final fall after he booted
Jack from the company. The engineers that worked for these guys were responsible
for the 6502 chip (Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch I think as well), the Pet, the
VIC-20, the C64, the Atari ST, and the Amiga. For the longest time the engineers
were trying to get Commodore to do a high end computer, but Tramiel wanted cheap
computers to compete with the Timex Sinclairs. As a result of those disagreements,
Chuck Peddle left, and later the teams that designed the Vic-20 and C64 left as well.

Interesting thing I learned was that at one point Commodore was working on a system
in the early-mid 80s that was a Unix system running Coherent (C900 was the designation
I think). It is a shame that Commodore ended the way it did after showing so much promise.
At one point towards the end they had the opportunity to have Jean Louis Gasse run the
company (former Apple whiz, and creator of the BeBox and BeOS), but Gould wouldn't give
him the level of control he wanted. Also learned was that the valley played a fairly
large role in the Commodore. A lot of the people responsible for the designs worked
for GE and/or Motorola at some point. Jay Miner, who designed the Amiga was from
Prescott. Bill Mensch who designed a lot of the chips is still in the valley running
the Western Design Center and still selling chips based on the 6502 design.

It would be interesting to read the history of other companies that were around in
that period, but I have yet to find other books covering the subject.
 
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