Triumph of the Nerds and Nerds 2.0.1 Double Review

By far the best documentary about the early PC and Internet revolutions.

Robert Cringely writes a comic and serious nerd story for the ages.

In Triumph we are confronted with the beginnings of the first commercial PCs.

We meet Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen.

The founders of Apple and Microsoft.

We discover two unknown heroes: Ed Roberts and Gary Kildall.

Roberts developed the first commercial PC: the Mits Altair.

Kildall developed the first PC operating system.

Never heard of them?

Well, you’re in good company.

History only remembers the winners.

Triumph is a tour de force.

It vividly illustrates the speed and consolidation of a new multi-billion dollar industry and a new kind of human civilization.

We see how Xerox and IBM helped to create this new civilization, but then dropped the ball through an astonishing lack of vision.

The ultimate winner was Bill Gates, who outsmarted IBM and Steve Jobs to become the richest man on the planet and the Rockefeller of the Information Age.

Gates was ambitious, cunning, and lucky.

Now, with Nerds 2.0.1, the second shoe drops.

The birth of the internet enabled these PCs to be connected.

The internet was the child of the Cold War.

DARPA was the sacred vessel of its birth.

We meet the true Internet giants who connected the first mainframes when there were no PCs.

Vint Cerf and Larry Roberts.

Their triumph was completely overshadowed by NASA’s moon landing in 1969.

Only when the internet went commercial with the first Netscape browser did this earlier triumph become public knowledge.

Nerds and 2.0.1 vividly illustrate a new kind of economic reality ushered in by the start-up culture of Silicon Valley.

An economic reality centered around computer coding that can turn losers into winners and vice versa in the blink of an eye.

We are still adapting to this new economic reality. One that we barely understand.

Bill Gates came out on top in the early Internet era when he crushed Netscape, but Amazon and Google were just being born and Facebook was not even on the horizon yet.

Nerds and 2.0.1 show the birth of a new class of robber barons making their money even faster than the older class of the industrial machine age.

Hold your breath.

This story is not even close to being over.

AI is now disrupting this older nerd world.

This story may not end well.