Computer wars

What Hacker News says

1. kristopolousApr 2025
   try Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World. By Charles H. Ferguson from 1993. The author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ferguson_(filmmaker) this one
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2. kristopolousJul 2023
   Check out Computer Wars by Ferguson for probably a better version of that.

   The Ferguson book sent me down a lot of historical rabbit holes that didn't have wikipedia pages yet and I had to pull up things on like newspapers.com or archive.org to find out more information.

   No shade on Cringley though, it's a fine book.

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3. blueyesJul 2021
   I highly recommend Charles Ferguson's "Computer Wars" on this topic, as well as his other book (about startups and the early Web), "High Stakes, No Prisoners."
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4. kristopolousMay 2021
   The book is pretty great. I'll put it with "The soul of a new machine", Ferguson's "Computer Wars" and Lapsley's "Exploding the phone" as top narrative tech books.
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5. blueyesMar 2020
   Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer

   High Stakes, No Prisoners - history of the birth of the Internet written by the founder of FrontPage, with a keen critique of Netscape's history - Charles Ferguson

   Computer Wars - a look at the decline of IBM by the early 90s - Charles Ferguson

   Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley - An oral history of the Valley in the 80s and 90s.

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6. mslaNov 2018
   Here's another web page on the subject which links to still more:

   https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

   That has an interesting quote:

   > Note the coverage of FS and what they describe as its "toxic aftereffects" on the corporation in Chapter 3 of Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris, Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, Times Books, 1993. An excerpt:

   >> Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive."

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