Robert X Cringely

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The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely

AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, Great Leap Forward, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, TED Talk, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, work culture

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF IBM End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely THE DECLINE AND FALL OF IBM End of an American Icon? Copyright © 2014 by Robert X. Cringely All rights reserved. Certain portions of this book appeared originally on www.pbs.org and are the property of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Used with Permission. All Rights Reserved. Published by NeRDTV, LLC Formatted by Any Subject Books, London Epub edition: ISBN 978-0-9904444-1-1 Mobi (Kindle) edition: ISBN 978-0-9904444-0-4 Paperback edition: ISBN 978-0-9904444-2-8 In memory of Lois Cringely 1924-2014 CONTENTS Preface An 8-year-old boy tries to sell IBM on a dazzling idea, sparking a life-long interest for him in the company.

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I’m not denying that IBM has to change to survive but there are ‘ways’ to do that that do not alienate half the workforce and, in that respect, IBM has missed the boat. The point is that IBM’s customers are not blind either to what is going on. On the plus side, the competition is not a lot different either so what is a hapless customer to do! nobodyimportant / August 27, 2013 / 4:50 am ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert X. Cringely has been a Silicon Valley journalist and character for more than 30 years. An early employee of iconic companies including Apple and Adobe Systems, Cringely began his career as an engineer then transitioned into reporting and analysis, first at InfoWorld and since 1997 as one of the first Internet bloggers, first at pbs.org and now at cringely.com.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Most good software engineers are at a disadvantage in the politeness realm. Robert X. Cringely says that programmers …are expressive and precise in the extreme but only when they feel like it. They look the way they do as a deliberate statement about personal priorities, not because they're lazy. Their mode of communication is so precise that they can seem almost unable to communicate. Call a nerd Mike when he calls himself Michael and he likely won't answer, since you couldn't possibly be referring to him.[5] [5] Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, Addison-Wesley, 1992, ISBN: 0-201-57032-7.

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I really appreciate the many people who provided moral support, anecdotes, advice, and time. Thanks very much to Daniel Appleman, Todd Basche, Chris Bauer, Jeff Bezos, Alice Blair, Michel Bourque, Po Bronson, Steve Calde, David Carlick, Jeff Carlick, Carol Christie, Clay Collier, Kendall Cosby, Dan Crane, Robert X. Cringely, Troy Daniels, Lisa Powers, Philip Englehardt, Karen Evensen, Ridgely Evers, Royal Farros, Pat Fleck, David Fore, Ed Forman, Ed Fredkin, Jean-Louis Gassee, Jim Gay, Russ Goldin, Vlad Gorelik, Marcia Gregory, Garrett Gruener, Chuck Hartledge, Ted Harwood, Will Hearst, Tamra Heathershaw-Hart, J.D.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (New York: William Morrow, 1988). 20 . I take this phrase from Robert X. Cringely’s documentary for the Public Broadcasting System, The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996), which drew from his earlier book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date (New York: Harper Business, 1993). 21 .

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lock screen, premature optimization, profit motive, proprietary trading, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, Tony Fadell, work culture , zero-sum game

“Steve Jobs Introduces Original iPad—Apple Special Event (2010),” YouTube: EverySteveJobsVideo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KN-5zmvjAo. Accessed November 16, 2017. This keynote was presented on January 27, 2010, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Cue to 1h30m to hear Steve talk about the intersection. 3. Robert X. Cringely, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. Furnace, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) (as NerdTV), Oregon Public Broadcasting, John Gau Productions, 2012. Cue to 57m to hear Steve talk about proportionally spaced fonts on the Mac. http://www.magpictures.com/stevejobsthelostinterview/. 4. “Star Wars Blasters Sound Effect.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Playboy, February 1985. Simpson, Mona. Anywhere but Here. Knopf, 1986. ———. A Regular Guy. Knopf, 1996. Smith, Douglas, and Robert Alexander. Fumbling the Future. Morrow, 1988. Stross, Randall. Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. Atheneum, 1993. “Triumph of the Nerds,” PBS Television, hosted by Robert X. Cringely, June 1996. Wozniak, Steve, with Gina Smith. iWoz. Norton, 2006. Young, Jeffrey. Steve Jobs. Scott, Foresman, 1988. ———, and William Simon. iCon. John Wiley, 2005. NOTES CHAPTER 1: CHILDHOOD The Adoption: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Laurene Powell, Mona Simpson, Del Yocam, Greg Calhoun, Chrisann Brennan, Andy Hertzfeld.

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Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out Adobe?” Wired, July 2010; Jean-Louis Gassée, “The Adobe-Apple Flame War,” Monday Note, Apr. 11, 2010; Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Flash,” Apple.com, Apr. 29, 2010; Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Steve Jobs interview, All Things Digital conference, June 1, 2010; Robert X. Cringely (pseudonym), “Steve Jobs: Savior or Tyrant?” InfoWorld, Apr. 21, 2010; Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Valleywag, May 15, 2010; JR Raphael, “I Want Porn,” esarcasm.com, Apr. 20, 2010; Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Apr. 28, 2010. Antennagate: Design versus Engineering: Interviews with Tony Fadell, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson, Tim Cook, Regis McKenna, Bill Campbell, James Vincent.

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

Even Darwinii would nowadays be written darwinii). If ever you see (and you often will) Homo Sapiens or homo sapiens it is always a mistake. Note, by the way, that the word ‘species’ is both singular and plural. The plural of genus is genera. *Judith Flanders has called my attention to the following amusingly relevant story in Robert X. Cringely’s book, Accidental Empires. The story concerns the Apple III, a desktop computer of the generation between the famous Apple II and the even more famous Macintosh, launched in 1980:‘…the automated machinery that inserted dozens of computer chips on the main circuit board didn’t push them into their sockets firmly enough.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

—Steven Levy, author of Hackers, Crypto, and Insanely Great “Beautifully written, What the Dormouse Said does that important job of placing in a historical context the development of modern computer technology. It tells us not only what happened, but why. These people changed our world as much as any group ever and now I understand not only how it came to be but also why it was probably inevitable.” —Robert X. Cringely, author of Accidental Empires and host of the PBS series Triumph of the Nerds “Reviled and demonized, then trivialized by the official culture it so exuberantly opposed, the counterculture of the 1960s nevertheless remains the 2000-pound gorilla in the china closet of recent American history.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

It could do everything wrong for a decade before it started to be in remote danger, and you never know—they could reinvent themselves as a shaved-ice company at the last minute. So don't be so quick to write them off. In the early 1990s everyone thought IBM was completely over: mainframes were history! Back then, Robert X. Cringely predicted that the era of the mainframe would end on January 1, 2000, when all the applications written in COBOL would seize up, and rather than fix those applications, for which, allegedly, the source code had long since been lost, everybody would rewrite those applications for client-server platforms.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

“HPWREN Collaborates with Palomar College and SCTCA’s Tribal Digital Village: Computer Science Class Includes Multicast Technology Experiments,” High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), 4 January 2002, <http://hpwren.ucsd.edu/news/020104.html > (20 February 2002). 63. Kade L. Twist, “Native Networking Trends: Wireless Broadband Networks,” Digital Beat, 20 September 2001, <http://www.benton.org/DigitalBeat/db092001.html > (23 February 2002). 64. Robert X. Cringely, “The 100 Mile-Per-Gallon Carburetor: How Ultra Wide Band May (or May Not) Change the World,” The Pulpit, 24 January 2002, <http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020124.html > (29 January 2002). 65. Tim Shepard, “Decentralized Channel Management in Scalable Multihop Spread-Spectrum Packet Radio Networks” (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1995), <ftp://ftp.lcs. mit.edu/pub/lcs-pubs/tr.outbox/MIT-LCS-TR670.ps.qz> (23 February 2002). 66.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Cortada, “How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market,” IEEE Spectrum, July 21, 2021, https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-personal-computer-market. 33 Dan Bricklin, “National Computer Conference,” Software Arts and VisiCalc, accessed January 20, 2022, http://www.bricklin.com/history/saincc.htm. 34 Fylstra, “Creation and Destruction of VisiCalc,” 8–9; Jennings, “VisiCalc 1979 (Part 3).” 35 Campbell-Kelly and Ceruzzi, “Interview with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston,” 28. 36 Campbell-Kelly and Ceruzzi, “Interview with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston,” 21–22; Jennings, “VisiCalc 1979 (Part 3).” 37 Campbell-Kelly and Ceruzzi, “Interview with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston,” 28. 38 Jennings, “VisiCalc 1979 (Part 3)”; Dan Bricklin, “The First Product,” Software Arts and VisiCalc, accessed January 21, 2022, http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiproduct1.htm. 39 Licklider, “Ten Years of Rows and Columns,” 327. 40 Bricklin, “Ben Rosen’s Reaction.” 41 Robert E. Ramsdell, “The Power of VisiCalc,” BYTE 5, no. 11 (November 1980): 192; John Markoff, “Radio Shack: Set Apart from the Rest of the Field,” InfoWorld, July 5, 1982, 43. 42 Gregg Williams and Rob Moore, “The Apple Story,” BYTE, January 1985, 174. 43 Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 71. 44 Mary Brandel, “PC Software Transforms the PC,” Computerworld, August 2, 1999. 45 Tim Bajarin, “The Application That Birthed The IBM PC,” Forbes, August 18, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2021/08/18/the-application-that-birthed-the-ibm-pc/. 46 John F.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Gates and Jobs were long-time friends as well as rivals: a couple of decades earlier, they had taken girlfriends on double dates together. So what did Gates think of the threat from Cupertino? Speaking in June 1998 to another journalist, Mark Stephens (who writes under the more arresting moniker of Robert X Cringely), he grew ruminative. ‘What I can’t figure out is why he is even trying,’ Gates said to Stephens. ‘He knows he can’t win.’11 (Typically, Gates was being accommodating; typically, Jobs wasn’t. Stephens had been commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine to write an article about the relationship between Gates and Jobs.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

The teenagers heard about a guy who had made a pirated phone off a flaw in AT&T’s network, using a device called a “blue box.” Once they understood that they could create something capable of tapping into a huge infrastructure, Jobs and Wozniak built their own blue box in three weeks. In a 1995 interview with documentary filmmaker Robert X. Cringely, Jobs said, “I don’t think there would have ever been an Apple Computer if there had not been blue boxing.” Like Gates, Jobs dropped out of college. The course he took at Reed College that impacted him the most was calligraphy. He changed the world by revolutionizing the personal computer, the laptop, the mouse, and the touch screen.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

If networks appear to open channels previously barred—and it's not clear how having to put ink on paper ever prevented sending a message to top management—they also make it possible to read files surreptitiously, monitor activities, and even trace message traffic to discover clusters of malcontents. Aside from such ethical lapses, a collegial style doesn't necessarily mean a flattening of power. The Info World magazine columnist "Robert X. Cringely" suggested not so long ago that the casual culture of Microsoft masked a management style that was at heart not so different from the hard-driving ways of the robber barons. ("You can work any eighty hours a week you want.") Of course, an authoritarian organization can be extremely productive, whether or not the iron fist is in a faded denim glove, but there is no evidence that networks as such make managers different.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Richard Brandt, “A Tricky Tack for Borland,” Business Week, August 2, 1993: 44–45. 69. Interview with Gordon Eubanks in Jager and Ortiz, In the Company of Giants. 70. Ibid., p. 55. 71. Steve Lohr, Go To: The Story of The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (Basic Books, 2001). 72. Ibid., pp. 96–97. 73. Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Made Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date (Addison-Wesley, 1992). 342 Notes to pp. 272–283 Chapter 9 1. Ralph Watkins, A Competitive Assessment of the US Video Game Industry (US International Trade Commission, 1984); Yankee Group, Software Strategies; Creative Strategies International, Computer Home Software (1983); Creative Strategies International, Cartridge-Based Software: Further Developments (1984). 2.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Stan Veit’s History of the Personal Computer (1993) is full of anecdotes and insights on the early development of the industry to be found nowhere else; Veit participated in the rise of the personal computer, first as a retailer and then as editor of Computer Shopper. The later period is covered by Robert X. Cringely’s Accidental Empires (1992); although less scholarly than some other books, it is generally reliable and is written with a memorable panache. Fred Turner’s Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) provides a scholarly examination of the “New Communalists’” connections with and contributions to personal computing and online communities.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

See also Internet advertising and “Akamaized” Exponential Backoff and malicious wedding seating plan Wedgwood, Emma weighted strategies Welch, Ivo Whitney, Hassler Whittaker, Steve Whittle, Peter Wikipedia Wilkes, Maurice Williams, Robin Win-Stay, Lose-Shift wireless networking wisdom wishful thinking Wittgenstein, Ludwig work hours World War II worst-case analysis Wright, Steven X-Files, The (TV show) Yeltsin, Boris Yngve, Victor Young, Dean Zelen, Marvin Zelen algorithm Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig) Zen of Python, The zero-sum zero-zero option Zijlstra, Peter Z-order Acknowledgments Thank you, first, to the researchers, practitioners, and experts who made time to sit down with us and discuss their work and broader perspectives: to Dave Ackley, Steve Albert, John Anderson, Jeff Atwood, Neil Bearden, Rik Belew, Donald Berry, Avrim Blum, Laura Carstensen, Nick Chater, Stuart Cheshire, Paras Chopra, Herbert Clark, Ruth Corbin, Robert X. Cringely, Peter Denning, Raymond Dong, Elizabeth Dupuis, Joseph Dwyer, David Estlund, Christina Fang, Thomas Ferguson, Jessica Flack, James Fogarty, Jean E. Fox Tree, Robert Frank, Stuart Geman, Jim Gettys, John Gittins, Alison Gopnik, Deborah Gordon, Michael Gottlieb, Steve Hanov, Andrew Harbison, Isaac Haxton, John Hennessy, Geoff Hinton, David Hirshliefer, Jordan Ho, Tony Hoare, Kamal Jain, Chris Jones, William Jones, Leslie Kaelbling, David Karger, Richard Karp, Scott Kirkpatrick, Byron Knoll, Con Kolivas, Michael Lee, Jan Karel Lenstra, Paul Lynch, Preston McAfee, Jay McClelland, Laura Albert McLay, Paul Milgrom, Anthony Miranda, Michael Mitzenmacher, Rosemarie Nagel, Christof Neumann, Noam Nisan, Yukio Noguchi, Peter Norvig, Christos Papadimitriou, Meghan Peterson, Scott Plagenhoef, Anita Pomerantz, Balaji Prabhakar, Kirk Pruhs, Amnon Rapoport, Ronald Rivest, Ruth Rosenholtz, Tim Roughgarden, Stuart Russell, Roma Shah, Donald Shoup, Steven Skiena, Dan Smith, Paul Smolensky, Mark Steyvers, Chris Stucchio, Milind Tambe, Robert Tarjan, Geoff Thorpe, Jackson Tolins, Michael Trick, Hal Varian, James Ware, Longhair Warrior, Steve Whittaker, Avi Wigderson, Jacob Wobbrock, Jason Wolfe, and Peter Zijlstra.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

., IN, AROUND and online, Jan. 6, 1995 (“America Online announced an expanded agreement with Time, Inc. that will bring the ‘Entertainment Weekly’ magazine to America Online. The press release from America Online also stated that the agreement extends their exclusive arrangement with Time Magazine—that Time couldn’t be offered on any other online service.”). 43. See Robert X. Cringely, That Does Not Compute!, PBS, Sept. 17, 1997, http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/1997/pulpit_19970917_000543.html (“Compuserve [sic], which couldn’t decide whether it was a stodgy online service or a stodgy network provider doesn’t have to be either. AOL, which couldn’t decide whether it was an on-the-edge online service or an over-the-edge network provider, gets to stick to content and stop pissing off users by pretending to know what a modem is….

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

One engineer, Doug Ihde, was famous for his prowess as a software engineer—and for the mountainous collection of empty Diet Coke cans that populated his office. Levchin, too, guzzled coffee. Later in his life, during an interview for NerdTV, a short-lived PBS program, he’d expound on the virtues of late nights. The interviewer, Robert X. Cringely, had arrived at Levchin’s office before ten in the morning. Levchin had been there all night. “You’ve just been up all night. Why?” Cringely asked. “I’m having fun, and that’s what you do when you have fun, you just don’t want to stop,” Levchin replied, matter-of-factly. Then Levchin offers a lengthy meditation on the wonders of the wee hours.

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

The history of early computers has tended to focus on Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, snubbing contributions made by Commodore. “There is a lot of revisionism going on and I don’t think it’s fair,” says Commodore 64 designer Robert Yannes. “People wanted to ignore Commodore.” An early-popularized story of the microcomputer revolution was Accidental Empires, by Robert X. Cringely (born Mark Stephens). The former Apple employee perpetuated a select view of the microcomputer revolution—a view that not everyone accepts as accurate. In Infinite Loop, Michael Malone writes, “The pseudonymous Cringely is notorious for his sloppy way with facts.” In his book, Cringely said, “Commodore wasn’t changing the world; it was just trying to escape from the falling profit margins of the calculator market while running a stock scam along the way.”

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

In the past two decades digitalization has brought convenience and personalization throughout the world of entertainment and communication. Chapter 13 COMPUTERS AND THE INTERNET FROM THE MAINFRAME TO FACEBOOK If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine INTRODUCTION The improvement in the performance of computers relative to their price has been continuous and exponential since 1960, and the rate of improvement dwarfs any precedent in the history of technology. The wonders achieved by computers and, since the mid-1990s, by the Internet have misled many analysts into believing that the current rate of economy-wide progress is the fastest in human history and will become even more rapid in the future.