Triumph of the Nerds

Journalist Robert Cringley's 3-hour saga of the personal computer is a sprawling, gutsy masterpiece that tells it like it is, presenting for viewer approval(or disapproval)the characters, places and anecdotes that are part of the birth, growing pains and refinement of "that damn box", as some folks might call it. It's all there: software, hardware, geeks, nerds, money, power, ambition, hunger, anxiety. Highly recommended viewing, without a doubt.

The production of the PBS miniseries "Triumph of the Nerds" as documented by journalist and self professed gossip columnist Robert Cringely is a campy trek through the personal computer revolution. The 3-hour narrative covered many of the notable characters responsible for the PC's development such as the inventive geeks, aspiring college hackers, social radicals, corporate marketeers, and leading up to the inevitable war of wills to bring about global, political, and economic change. The miniseries is as much about the personal computer revolution as it is about the one-upmanship ideology of bringing a better mouse trap to market. Piracy is deemed a good thing by the very players that use corporate legal methods to protect themselves from that very end. By means of reverse engineering, misapplications of patent rights, cleverly worded legal disclosure documents, so called `Virgin' engineers and outright theft of intellectual property; it is a sordid affair indeed. The story reads like a checklist in the PDA of Machiavelli's `The Prince'. It seems that `The Prince' is alive and well in the 21st Century.

I would highly recommend this film to any geek or geek-in-training.

Look also for "The Pirate's of Silicon Valley"

This 2 parts documentary tells the history of the PC and how it developed from big limited box to small advance GUI based machine. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Xerox P.A.R.K researchers all speak about the PC. With the excellent host of Bob :)

Very well made. A must see if you love computers.

I call "The Triumph of the Nerds" the best PC history documentary ever made. They talk about everything from your first home built PC, up to the Internet. Along with the people explaining everything were the people who actually had a big part in creating some of this stuff; Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and even the founder of Oracle Larry Ellison.

The only thing I don't like about this is that they still haven't made a decade later version that was promised in the documentary. I would have liked to see some of this compared to what's happening now. Something I would have liked to seen because several of Larry Ellison's comments are coming to life.

No matter what anyone says, this is truly where a great amount your personal electronics did originate.

If you're a woman watching this, be prepared to be discounted. You will be repeatedly reminded that your gender disqualifies you from being interested in computing.