Triumph of the Nerds - A documentary about the
rise of Personal Computers
Triumph of the Nerds is 3 parts documentary movie on how the
Personal Computer was developed. The movie features interviews with
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Allan Paul and many
other IT veterans who played key roles for the development of the
Personal Computer ,
The movie is an interesting watching for people interested into
Information Technology and gives some minor insights on the
starred interviewed people and their life philosophy. It was
interesting times back then and it seems many of the guys who could
participate in the PCs were very lucky, where others who made key
developments which are de-facto standards today went into history
without much being remembered.
Now the trends which these man set in world's development is not
nice. Even though PC brough a lot of fun in our every lives it
suddenly started taking over our privacy and made the humanity
divided.
The movie is a story of a man motivated by greed arrogancy and
exploitation. Even though the movie has historical value it doesn't
even mention about Free Software Richard Stallman and the free
software movement.
The movie talks about the development of
CP/M the
predecessor of Quick and Dirty DOS (QDOS), MS-DOS Windows 1,2,3,
Windows 95 etc.
It also tries to picture the events around the raise and fall of
IBM and OS/2.
The most notable parts for me in the movie are the showing off of
some old computer hardware and Mainframe servers as well as the
quick explanation on how Mainframes irons predecessed the PC.
Another interesting moment in the movie is displaying
Steve
Jobs demonstrating the Xerox's Alto graphical interface.
Talking about Jobs it was quite shocking for the world his sudden
death just 3 days ago so (R.I.P).
The movie author
Robert X. Cringery stress out in the movie
the great struggle between the so called "the blue Elephant" IBM
and the just emerging early
Microsoft Corporation
Triumph of the Nerds slightly mentions
Digital Equipment
Corporation /
DEC or
COMPAQ as later known. DEC
is company less known in todays world which had historically great
impact on computer market, so its a pity the movie part mentioning
DEC is so short.
What the movie misses is to aforemention About's
Digital
Equipment VMS operating system known under the code name
OpenVMS.
OpenVMS even of today is believed by many to
be the most secure Operating System ever developed.
The movie part that talks about DEC is the second part of movie it
shows a nice COMPAQ portable computer.
One should admit
COMPAQ portable Computer is a really trendy
for its time, Also the way it sticks the keyboard to the screen
does remind seriously the opening and closing of a modern laptop
;)
The movie includes some interesting, so called crash courses where
the movie author gives some insight on elementary computing, so for
those new to informatix the movie will surely be educative as well,
though for a UNIX gurus this elementary computing scenes will look
kinda ridiculous ;)
One serious flaw with this movie is the complete lack of interviews
with
Richard Stallman and the importance of Free Software
for the development of modern PC and the influence of the
free
software culture on todays latest Macintosh and PC
developments.
A related movie which probably most IT geeks already know / seen is
Pirates of the Sillicon Valley
, hence large chunk of
Triumph of the Nerds gives another
point of view on the ideas and stories presented in
Triumph of
the Nerds
Triumph of the Nerds brings back some good memories of the
glorious PC computer past for all of us who had been a
DR-DOS/MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 / 95 users.