title: Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer (Second Edition)
author:  Paul Freiberger 
description: In the early 1970s, while Silicon Valley was designing the latest generation of digital wristwatches and pocket calculators, a ragtag group of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics hobbyists were busy creating the future in their garages. What they built was the personal computer, but what they were aiming for was something much more ambitious: a revolution. <i>Fire in the Valley</i> is the story of their efforts, and in particular, the contributions of an informal think tank called the Homebrew Computer Club. Its technically gifted community, comprising sci-fi aficionados and Berkeley counterculturists, believed computers could usher in an age of human empowerment, perhaps even a utopia.
zlib_text: **THE MACHINERIES OF JOY**
  
   **Â© 1984 by Greg Bear. All rights reserved.**
  
   **Introduction:**
  
  In October of 1983, I traveled from San Diego to Los Angeles and San
  Francisco, researching a proposed article for OMNI Magazine. What I saw
  astonished me.... and influenced me heavily when I went on to write the novel-
  length Blood Music and Eon. Here was not the beginning of the computer
  graphics revolution, which had occurred decades earlier, but the beginning of
  the flowering of that revolution. I could hardly restrain my enthusiasm. I
  suspect the last few pages of this piece will date badly as time goes by, but
  they show my frame of mind. And the frames of mind of dozens of other authors,
  as well; the information age has taken science fiction by storm.
  
  OMNI never used this piece, although they paid me for it. Nor did they use the
  hundreds of pictures I gathered, a selection from which would have accompanied
  it. Many people gave generously of their time, yet never saw their names or
  id