BKSVHSPC.RVW 940622 WorldComm Press 65 Macedonia Road Alexander, NC 28701 "History of the Personal Computer", Veit, 1993, 1-56664-030-X, U$27.95/C$32.95 The foreword, by one of Veit's co-publishers, says that Veit has the credentials to do this book because "he was there." As; I suppose "founder" is the most accurate term; of the Computer Mart store in New York City, Veit knows many of the companies involved with early PCs as suppliers. A lot of the resulting anecdotes are interesting and some are quite personal, such as the story of Veit's mother-in-law sewing up the rips in Steve Jobs' jeans at a computer show. Individual companies get individual chapters, usually covering one major project each. There are chapters on MITS (Altair), IMS (Imsai), South West Technical Products (M6800), Apple, Cromemco, Sphere, Ohio Scientific (Challenger), Processor Technology (SOL), the digital group, Tandy (TRS-80), Commodore, Atari, Texas Instruments (TI 99/A), North Star (Horizon), Osborne, Vector Graphic, and Sinclair (ZX80). IBM gets two chapters, one for the PC and one for the PCjr. Four chapters cover miscellaneous other computers, three look at computer magazines, and one looks at printers. Unfortunately, Computer Mart only ran from 1975 to 1979. Veit only seems to have been "there" when he was actually dealing with suppliers. Beyond that, his sources of information are no more "inside" than those of anyone else. The story of the IBM PC is told in a very bare bones fashion; the Macintosh is not mentioned at all. The PCjr "Chicklet" keyboard is mentioned, but not the furor when the PC group originally went with a keyboard *not* modelled on the IBM Selectric typewriter. Bill Gates is mentioned in connection with his early BASIC version, but there is no coverage of the fact that his rise to "Billionaire Bill" status really started with the purchase of the rights to what would become MS-DOS. On the other hand, some of the stories are a bit *too* personal. It gets wearisome to hear, over and over, that such-and-such a supplier did old Stan Veit wrong, and, by golly, if shortly thereafter, they didn't go broke. Not that he holds any grudges, you understand. The histories tend to be, basically, listings of stories and events. As such, the writing tends to be choppy and without much flow. Apparently this material originated as a series of magazine columns, and a number of stories repeat several times in different chapters. Not much attempt has been made at any kind of analysis. Indeed, where there are differing versions of the same story, Veit simply throws them all in. For those simply interested in a computer history, this is generally a handy collection of background for machines you might hear us "oldtimers" talking about. Similarly, it could be of use to those teaching introductory computer courses, as most histories give little coverage to micros. For the serious researcher, it may provide some starting names for developing your own history. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKSVHSPC.RVW 940622 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag