Hacker Cinema
The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires
1996 · Film · documentary · 165 min
Directed by Paul Sen
It happened more or less by accident; the people who made it happen were amateurs; and for the most part they still are. From his own Silicon Valley garage, author Bob Cringley puts PC bigshots and nerds on the spot, and tells their incredible true stories. Like the industry itself, the series is informative, funny and brash.
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10 comments on Hacker News
Very cool! This reminds me of ARDI Executor [1] - a piece of (discontinued) commercial software first released in 1990 that took the same API-level reimplementation approach used here. And it did so jaw-droppingly fast considering that it was running on 90s PC hardware. As a little kid using it to play a few Mac games on my Windows PC, it was genuinely inspiring to me to see that this was possible at a time when I was first learning how to code. :) Great to see something with a more modern implementation doing this as well!
It was discontinued in 2005, but the developers subsequently open sourced it and put the code on GitHub a couple years later. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executor_(software)
[2] https://github.com/ctm/executor
Bonus: One of the engineers from ARDI, the startup that created Executor, was very briefly featured in Bob Cringely's 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds talking about the lifestyle of working at prototypical mid-90s Silicon Valley startup.
In the documentary Triumph of the Nerds they show how to write a program with the Altair. No keyboard, no monitor - a truly humble machine!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toSRmKKiosQ&t=1224
> no date
I think this is from an interview made for the documentary Triumph of the Nerds, so 1995.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDqQcmVqAm4
Folklore.org is such a wonderful read, I'd love to see a faithful TV adaptation.
I also really enjoyed Accidental Empires (which was later made into a documentary, Triumph of the Nerds).
I learnt about this technique in Triumph of the Nerds[0] long time ago.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398
Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903013/
The Atomic Cafe (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083590/
At Sea (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1829648/
The Vietnam War (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877514/
Lessons of Darkness (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104706/
Tim's Vermeer (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
Weiner (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5278596/
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379357/
The Art of Japanese Life (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7002974/
The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493420/
The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398/
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4299972/
Not a book but excellent history nontheless "Triumph of the Nerds" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398/
This documentary captures the early dotcom era
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds
Define success. I watched Triumph of the Nerds last night that somebody linked to here at hn. Sculley led Apple to 10x sales increase and left the company with $2 billion in cash and $200 million of debt. Sounds like a success to me, considering Macintosh was not a sales success people think it was (from the horses mouth from the documentary).
Gil Amelio on the other hand... but at least he brought (bought) Jobs back into Apple, who ousted him soon afterwards.
I would go for some documentaries -
Triumph of the Nerds, Hackers : Angels or Daemons History of Video Games
another one on hacking from National Geographic, i can't recall the name
Antitrust too :P