Discussion Questions
- Levy makes an interesting claim about the spreadsheet as technology that
changed business in profound ways during the 1980s. What makes it really
interesting is the way he examines specific details of this specific
technology and ties them to social results. What does he say changed, and
how did the spreadsheet make this happen? Do you believe him (and could his
idea ever be tested?)
- In chapter 4, Cringley gives us the story of what happens to the amateur
computer businessmen when the money starts rolling in. How do they cope as
their businesses grow? What does this tell us about the differences between
hacker culture and business culture? (This is an interesting question in
part because of its parallels with the late 1990s internet firms, where the
two were supposed to have been blended).
- What did the entry of IBM mean for the microcomputer business? Why was the
machine a departure from normal IBM practice?
- How come the PC could be cloned so easily? Why did IBM design it that way?
What was the importance of the PC clone market? (Hint: think chipsets).
- Cringley's account puts a great deal of emphasis on personalities. For
this reason, serious historians are often a bit snooty about his book. Do
personalities matter as much as he says? Did they matter more then than they
do now -- if so why?
Key Topics
 | The Apple II -- differences between this machine and the Altair. |
| The spreadsheet -- reasons why this is the application that makes the PC
useful for business. |
| The IBM-PC. As above -- its reliance on standard components, the
importance of the BIOS, the concept of a "chipset". How it move from
proprietary design to industry standard. |
Additional Resources
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Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the spreadsheet, has a great site on VisiCalc.
Includes a downloadable version. For a slightly stranger first person story,
John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) tells how
he wrote the EasyWriter word from prison.
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Although this tends to get overlooked, IBM actually created a number of other
small, microprocessor based computers before striking it lucky with the PC.
These are shown in this
on-line exhibit at the IBM archives. These include specialist
word-processing and administrative machines, an important kind of
computer in the late 1970s.
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The Apple story is one of the most famous pieces of recent corporate history,
and has been told to death. In fact, this
site lists dozens of books on the subject with little summaries of each one
(plus links to a lot of web sites). The best book is an old one, Moritz,
Michael, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer. New
York: William Morrow and Company, 1984.
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There are dozens of websites. www.applehistory.com
is nicely presented. It includes a condensed version of the company history and
a page on each of its machines. http://www.archaic-apples.com/
is harder to navigate, but includes an enormous amount of content, papers,
engineering documents and so on. Steve Wozniak, the guy who actually designed
the early Apple computers, has his own site at http://www.woz.org/.
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There are also a bunch of Apple II emulators around, if you want to try the
machine for yourself. Here
is a good page of resources and links. Apple software can be found at ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images.
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