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June 15, 2016
Do you really know how we got here? How the personal computer was born in a humble garage, took over the world, and ended up in your pocket?
Find out what really happened in the new audio book edition of Fire in the Valley, available in m4b, mp3, and ogg formats from pragprog.com/audio_book/a-fsfire.
And if you're starting up a new team, don't just order donuts and start scrawling on the whiteboard. Start with a proper liftoff, in the aptly named Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams, now in print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/liftoff.
Read on for Q&A with the authors of Fire in the Valley and five quick tips from the authors of Liftoff right here...
Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer, Third Edition
Fire in the Valley is the definitive history of the personal computer, drawn from interviews with the people who made it happen, written by two veteran computer writers who were there from the start. Working at InfoWorld in the early 1980s, Swaine and Freiberger daily rubbed elbows with people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were creating the personal computer revolution.
A rich story of colorful individuals, Fire in the Valley profiles these unlikely revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, such as Ed Roberts of MITS, Lee Felsenstein at Processor Technology, and Jack Tramiel of Commodore, as well as Jobs and Gates in all the innocence of their formative years.
This completely revised and expanded third edition brings the story to its completion, chronicling the end of the personal computer revolution and the beginning of the post-PC era. It covers the departure from the stage of major players with the deaths of Steve Jobs and Douglas Engelbart and the retirements of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; the shift away from the PC to the cloud and portable devices; and what the end of the PC era means for issues such as personal freedom and power, and open source vs. proprietary software.
Narrated by Don Azevedo, now available in m4b, mp3, and ogg formats from pragprog.com/audio_book/a-fsfire.
Q & A with Authors Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger:
Q: The New York Times reporter John Markoff’s Foreword to your book says that your location is what sets your book apart from dozens of others that attempt to tell the story of the computer revolution. Do you agree?
Mike: Absolutely. Paul and I were working and living in Palo Alto, a few blocks from Stanford University and 20 minutes from Apple headquarters. Each day we would be on the phone discussing the latest events in the field and we’d visit the companies and talk to the founders at their headquarters and their favorite watering holes.
Q: So you wrote Fire in the Valley so you could go drinking with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?
Mike: Well, maybe. But that’s not the only reason. We did spend a lot of time at the Oasis, a pub where the Homebrew Computer Club members would congregate each week to discuss their startup companies and the latest technology developments, and to deal.
Q: Why did the two of you write Fire in the Valley?
Paul: We saw the personal computer industry emerging and we thought it just might have a major impact on society. We also were super impressed with the founders of the hardware and software companies who were smart and highly ambitious. We believed that this field might change the world and we wanted to document it for others and give you a sense of being close to an amazing movement.
Mike: I had been working in one of the first computer stores as a programmer. When I got my first computer, a TRS-80 Model 1 and I was seeing all these crazy people trying to run their business on these computers, I wanted to be as close to the industry as I could get.
Paul: We were working on news stories each day and after talking about new products we would ask the company founders about how they started their companies and ….
Mike: And they would reminisce about two years ago.
Q: What does the subtitle of the book mean, “The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer?”
Mike: The image of what a computer was back in the 1970s was a dream of unlimited power. Today the capabilities that were in the PCs are fragmented into different devices. The devices don’t feel like computers, and they are not intended to.
Q: Are there surprises in Fire in the Valley?
Paul: I think it’s full of surprising and sometimes hilarious events.
Mike: Such as the time Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built blue boxes to make free long distance phone calls. Woz was especially a practical jokester and we recount some hilarious tricks that he played on friends and colleagues. He told us about them when we visited him in his dorm room when he went back to college to finish his degree.
Paul: And the personal computer company founders made every possible business mistake you can imagine. It’s kind of refreshing to remember the innocent idealism of those days of a lot of the industry’s founders. This book is about an amazing group of people and we should appreciate them—those that succeeded, like Jobs and Gates, and others who didn’t but still played a key role.
Q: What will a reader come away with from reading Fire in the Valley?
Mike: We hope you come away from the book with a feeling that these folks changed the world—not just in a technological way. I hope you ask yourself what we have learned from this era and were there values introduced that are worthy of preserving. Are there lessons that we’ve all learned?
Narrated by Don Azevedo, now available in m4b, mp3, and ogg formats from pragprog.com/audio_book/a-fsfire.
Liftoff, Second Edition: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams
Every team needs a great start. If you're a business or product leader, team coach or agile practice lead, project or program manager, you'll gain strategic and tactical benefits from liftoffs.
Discover new step-by-step instructions and techniques for boosting team performance in this second edition of Liftoff. Concrete examples from our practices show you how to get everyone on the same page from the start as you form the team. You’ll find pointers for refocusing an effort that’s gone off in the weeds, and practices for working with teams as complex systems. See how to scale liftoffs for multiple teams across the enterprise, address the three key elements for collaborative team chartering, establish the optimal conditions for learning and improvement, and apply the GEFN (Good Enough for Now) rule for efficient liftoffs. Throughout the book are stories from real-life teams lifting off, as seasoned coaches describe their experiences with liftoffs and agile team chartering.
Focused conversations help the team align, form, and build enough trust for collaborating. You’ll build a common understanding of the teams’ context within business goals. Every liftoff is unique, but success is common!
Now in print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/liftoff.
A Handful of Liftoff Design Principles
by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies
Each development effort is unique, so every liftoff is unique. As a planning group member, design your liftoff for the combination of attributes at hand. Consider the nature of the product, the nature of the work, and the people. Take into account the knowns and unknowns. Think about the work environment and the circumstances driving delivery.
Here’s where it gets tricky and where you’ll need to get agile when you’re working on a liftoff design. There is no cookie-cutter approach, standard recipe, or a best practice template. Your unique team characteristics will drive many of the design decisions.
When you design a liftoff, your planning outcomes guide format choices. Planning influences how you develop the flow. You design how to start and how to end, and make other format choices that fit in-between. Select design elements to establish a rich atmosphere for effective communication. Base your selections on your planning group’s intention for the liftoff. Use the following handful of design principles to guide your handiwork.
Thumb:
The best liftoffs create a sense of ownership of the outcomes. Create a liftoff design where all participants engage as owners in the process. Their sense of ownership helps sustain commitment to outcomes. It influences the work until final delivery.
Index Finger:
Only include activities in the liftoff that have a real work purpose. Liftoff participants engage best when they focus on relevant activities. Choose agenda items related to achieving the liftoff intentions and outcomes.
Third Finger:
Every liftoff needs a sponsor or executive introduction. Every team needs to hear directly and unambiguously from the top. Team members need to know they have organizational support and commitment for their effort. If your sponsor can’t make time to show up, maybe the product launch isn’t a top priority, after all. Their presence or absence sends a message.
Ring Finger:
Every work group and team needs agile chartering. It accelerates common understandings. Sooner or later, team members and the business wrestle with defining the work in the same way. Including chartering in the liftoff gains understanding early and precludes time wasted later on.
Pinkie:
Take the time to include participants in design decisions. You’ll get a better liftoff outcome if you ask for and include their opinions. Seek ideas about training topics, planning needs, and other uses of their time.
Now in print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/liftoff.
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