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April 1996
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/ Good Old Days
Stanford Diehl
PC ROAD KILL
by Michael Hyman, IDG Books Worldwide, 466 pages, ISBN 1-56884-348-8, $19.95
It's part of BYTE's storied folklore: Philippe Kahn, unable to finance his fledgling software company, hoodwinks a BYTE advertising representative into giving him ad space on credit he didn't have. Kahn ends up booking an ad for
an innocuous product called Turbo Pascal, the orders pour in, and Borland is catapulted into software's top tier.
So go the anecdotes of an infant industry finding its legs, chronicled in Michael Hyman's
PC Road Kill
. Hyman tells history through a series of tales, figures, lists, quotes, and original memos. Whether all the stories are strictly true is sort of beside the point. These are the fables you will tell
your children when they ask about the early days of the computer revolution.
The book includes lists you've probably seen posted on the Net or tacked up near the office coffee pot: Intel's Top Ten post-bug Pentium slogans (#7.9999414610: Nearly 300 Correct Opcodes!); the greatest all-time vapor software (headed by dBase for Windows, 40 months from announcement to shipment; in comparison, Windows 95 was whipped out in a mere 21 months); light-bulb jokes (Q: How many OS/2 programmers does it take to change a light bulb? A: I think that's a device-driver problem.). Appropriately dubbed "Nerd Humor," they are in fact snippets that could make only a nerd LOL.
Matthew Wilson more...
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Good Old Days
