Triumph of the Nerds

The documentary we watched last week, "Triumph of the Nerds" was pretty interesting. I learned that the microprocessor was pivotal in the development of computers. It essentially held millions of transistors and was the beginning of personal computers as we know them today. Before the microprocessor you had to flip a switch to input each byte of information and the microprocessor allowed users to type in programs rather than flipping switches. The story of Steve Jobs and Apple was pretty amazing. His hobby of computer programming escalated so quickly that by the time he was 25 he was worth 100 million dollars. Apple was the leading company of a revolution of smaller computers that became very successful. I also found the idea of reverse engineering really interesting. This is essentially what happened with IBM. The personal computers they began manufacturing were very successful and the name created high demand, so in order for other companies to be successful they would have to clone IBM's technology. In order to do so they would have to work backwards and find out what makes it work. IBM's PC was easily cloneable. Not sure why they would want to do that...