Name: Accidental empires
ISBN: 9780887308550

Accidental empires

Computer manufacturing is--after cars, energy production and illegal drugs--the largest industry in the world, and it's one of the last great success stories in American business. Accidental Empires is the trenchant, vastly readable history of that industry, focusing as much on the astoundingly odd personalities at its core--Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor, etc. and the hacker culture they spawned as it does on the remarkable technology they created. Cringely reveals the manias and foibles of these men (they are always men) with deadpan hilarity and cogently demonstrates how their neuroses have shaped the computer business. But Cringely gives us much more than high-tech voyeurism and insider gossip. From the birth of the transistor to the mid-life crisis of the computer industry, he spins a sweeping, uniquely American saga of creativity and ego that is at once uproarious, shocking and inspiring.

What Hacker News says

mscarpinoOct 2026

I loved the book Accidental Empires, and it inspired me to become a programmer. RIP Bob. You were the best.

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burntcaramelOct 2026

I greatly enjoyed his book Accidental Empires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires

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iceeOct 2026

I was a big fan of this guy's work. Great documentaries. Triumph of the Nerds was a great watch — I gifted this to several people. I also watch the lost Steve Jobs documentary every few years for inspiration. Accidental Empires was a great read — I always think of Larry Ellison doing the NYT Crossword puzzle when I read about all the Paramount drama. He'll be missed.

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musha68kOct 2026

I remember my mother buying me "Accidental Empires" from a bargain bin at the local bookstore as a tween. I must have read it multiple times. Dot product that with "The Cuckoo's Egg" and any technical books and magazines I could get hold of, and you have the formative reading of my career.

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tjansenOct 2026

Damn. I've loved Bob and his writings ever since I read Accidental Empires as a kid. He went through some crazy shit over the last few years (lost his house, almost blind). And when he started blogging again this year (https://www.cringely.com/2026/05/27/where-the-heck-have-i-be...), the stories got even worse (lost his son, heart attack, stroke). RIP.

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ndiddyOct 2026

I don't really understand what your comment is trying to say, but I read through the last few pages of his blog and all the posts after the first one from 2026 announcing his return seem AI generated. I think it's a shame, as I loved his writing style in "Accidental Empires" and in his earlier blog posts and columns. It's strange to me that someone who had spent most of his life writing either didn't notice or didn't care about the drop in quality from using LLMs to write.

> Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search".

I found the patent for his company's technology (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250259069A1). I always have trouble reading patents, but as far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around commodity LLMs. The reliability improvements come from prompting the LLM to only source its data from an external database that you provide rather than from whatever it was trained on, and from prompting multiple LLMs simultaneously then doing semantic analysis on the responses to make sure they all agree. I imagine that doing this would probably reduce hallucinations, but there's no hard constraint to prevent them entirely and I'm not sure what the moat is.

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