Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic! A must see for anyone using a Mac or Wintel Pc.
Review: This is the history of computers condensed. You get a good grasp of what happened between Microsoft and Apple. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are interviewed. Key players at Xerox and Ibm are also interviewed. This is a very informative documentary but lacks, the personal story telling appeal of the Pirates of Silicon Valley (a must have vhs tape that dramaticizes this documentary). This Dvd pretty much explains how it is we came to using mice and file folders and pictures instead of boring command line text entries. It's a great documentary. Buy it. You won't be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: The most educational educational tape I have seen.
Review: This is the most interesting educational videotape that I have ever seen. It irreverently, but accurately, chronicles the rise of the PC as a force in the modern world. Quite naturally, much of the focus is on Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, as they are the four most widely known individuals in the personal computer field. However, a great deal of time is also spent in explaining the role of others, so that it could be more accurately titled, "Triumph of Some of the Nerds." While the actions of Gates, Jobs and gang are important, some of the most significant events are those of others, who missed incredible opportunities.
It is astonishing to learn that the program that became MS-DOS was purchased for $50,000 with no residuals. This should become a story to rival the purchase of Manhattan for the fabled $... in beads. Representatives from IBM went to the creator of CPM, which was the best-selling microcomputer operating system at the time. Their goal was to obtain an operating system that could be used in their upcoming line of personal computers. Unbelievably, they were kept waiting and those representatives gave up and went back to Microsoft where they
signed the deal for MS-DOS.
The scientists at Xerox Palto Alto Research Center (PARC) created many of the modern principles of computing such as the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Steve Jobs is passionate in his description of his reaction when he saw it for the first time. However, Xerox gained nothing but prestige from their inventions. The last of these stories is that the creators of the spreadsheet receive no royalties at all from their invention.
Two very powerful personalities, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, have been instrumental in taking ideas from others and turning them into billion dollar products. While Gates keeps his intensity under wraps in public, not so with Steve Jobs. Towards the end of the tapes, he describes his feelings towards Microsoft. He does not complain about their business practices, but about their lack of vision and style. From his mannerisms, tone of voice and eye expressions, you see a man who cares deeply about the quality of human-machine interactions. It is a powerful piece of video.
This is a tape that should be in every library, from the small-town public to that of the biggest universities. In a few hours, you learn the history of how the personal computer was made personal. Cringely does a superb job in describing events that simply would never have occurred to a writer of fiction. It should be mandatory viewing in all computer science and introduction to business classes. Published in Mathematics and Computer Education, reprinted with permission.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome Comptuer History from PBS
Review: This is very interesting computer history lesson from a PBS documentary. Hear the famous Gary Killdell went flying when IBM came story as well as how Steve Jobs got successfull and then lost it.
Rating:
Summary: Requisite viewing for geeks and technophiles
Review: Tracing back to the days before Microsoft even existed (and ending just before the Internet boom) Bob Cringely's candid interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Steve Wosniak, and many others make this tape set very enjoyable to watch. An absolute must for those in the computing world, particularly the engineers. Bob's humor, style, and wit make this set stand the test of repeated viewings. Note: lacking the same charm and charisma the follow-up - Nerds 2.0.1 - takes a back seat to this video. Bob's non-techie video "Plane Crazy" is worth a watch on its own merits, if not simply for the scene when he experiences an emotional meltdown and assaults the cameraman.
Rating:
Summary: Still a great show, but the Ambrose edition is not complete!
Review: Triumph of the Nerds is still one of the best public level documentaries about the origins and development of personal computers from their beginnings in the mid-70's on through the IBM/Apple years and into the mid-90's with the launch of Windows 95. It is dated somewhat, especially at the end with the forecasts about the future growth of the internet and what it would mean to PC and Mac development and the world. Nothing was truer then than remains today, predicting the long-term future of the computer and internet industry is simply impossible.
What troubles me with this edition by Ambrose is that they have apparently sacrificed bits and pieces here and there for some unfathomable reason. The main points are all still there, but some of the side stories and flavors have been cut. Examples include Steve Wozniak's description of his early interest in electronics in finding an old AT&T phone company manual to learn to hack into the phone system to call the Pope. It cuts Steve Jobs' description of his early experiences with Bill Gates, saying that the original version of Word was "just terrible but they kept at it...", and someone whose name I can't remember describing the early mainframes and trying to use one as "you were lucky if your entire city had one mainframe, and, if your company had it, there would only be one." These are the ones I noticed right off, I'm sure there are others and they are minor things, but it's troubling that a company buys the rights to a show and edits it for whatever reason rather than simply giving us the whole deal.
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