Book Title: Accidental Empires

Author: Robert X. Cringely

Publisher: Harper Business

ISBN: 0-88730-855-4

Review by Barbara De Vries

Paperback - 1993 370 pages

This is the book basis for Public TV’s “Triumph of the Nerds”.

Accidental Empires recounts the story of the rise of PC’s, the software industry giants and failures, evolution, extinction and rebirth.

This book is a cautionary tale in the vein of George Santayana’s admonition,

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” from The Life of Reason (1906).

Just as we study genealogy to know our roots, so “Accidental Empires” reveals our roots of software development and the infancy of the computer industry.

Some notable excerpts include:

(page 23) Back in the 1950’s, a Harvard psychologist named George A. Miller wrote “ The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” a landmark journal article. Miller studied short-term memory, especially the quick memorization of random sequences of numbers.

(page 25) 3 out of every 1,000 people … can remember either fewer than five numbers or more than nine.

(page 26)  It is the 0.15 percent on the other side of the bell curve that we’re interested in – the 3 out of every 2,000 people who can remember more than nine numbers.  There are approximately 375,000 such people living in the United States, and most of them would make terrific computer programmers, if only we could find them.

(page 27) being able to remember more than nine numbers at a time is probably a prerequisite for writing a really good computer program.

Charles Simonyl, one of the world’s truly great programmers said, “ When I was young, I could easily imagine a castle with twenty rooms with each room having ten different objects in it.  I can’t do that anymore.”

(page 13)  Average populations will always achieve only average results, but what we are talking about are exceptional populations seeking extraordinary results.

(page 361)  People care about people.

More than 80 percent of our brains are developed to processing visual information, because that’s how we most directly perceive the world around us.

The characters are real, and compelling.

The stories are real, and have brought us where we are today.

The science is real, pushing us ever forward to dramatic evolution.

The economics are as breathtaking as a rollercoaster ride through John Nash’s brain.

We also should pause a moment to remember our forgotten heroes, who should NOT be forgotten:

Gary Kildall who invented the first microcomputer operating system.

Doug Englebart, the first computer scientist to pay attention to user interface.

Tim Paterson, who wrote QDOS, which was purchased by Bill Gates to become DOS on which foundation Microsoft was built.

Dan Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet.

I salute all of you, wherever you are.