Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, Collector's Edition
by Paul Freiberger, Michael Swaine

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Book Reviews of Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, Collector's Edition

Book Review: Apparently I'm going to be the only contrarian here...
Summary: 2 Stars

While this book certainly has lots of interesting tidbits, the best word I can use to describe it is TEDIOUS. The authors write in almost a sing-songy style and repeat themselves over and over (and over, and indeed, over). The constant parade of 4-page "chapterlets" is annoying. The book could clearly be half its size if the paper were used even mildly efficiently. Clearly the authors (and/or publishers) were looking for "heft appeal" on the shelves of those brick-and-mortar bookstores. In another appeal to the shelf-shopper, four photos sections appear - yet they don't add much more than one well-organized set would have. The photos are almost entirely unorganized. Many (if not most) or the topics and events in them are not referenced in the text other than discussions of the people in them. And some of the people in them aren't even mentioned in the text, for that matter (Who are these people - like Seymour Papert - and what are they doing in this book? You'll never know...)

Further, it is hard to gauge the audience they are writing for. In many cases, they introduce terms without explanations that a novice reader would need, probably leaving them confused. At other times yet, in addressing an apparently already-knowledgable audience (based on my previous observation), they fail to "go deep" in technology explanations that are in many cases necessary and germain to the story line. For example, the coverage of the emergence of networks is comically weak. The result screams "pop history" to me.

This is not to say the book isn't a nice trip down memory lane. I'm old enough that while I didn't ever own an early Apple or... (TRS-80), my friends did. Most of the stuff in this book is stuff of memories. We lived the fascination. (I purchased an IBM PC within its first year of life - Oooh! 128K and TWO floppy drives! Oooh!). There were some seriously fun times and memorable experiences from those days, and there are certainly some fun anecdotes in this book. But don't look for a well-written serious history here!

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