Accidental Empires

Cringely — the pen name of InfoWorld's gossip columnist — wrote the most entertaining and sharpest history of early Silicon Valley, covering the period from the Homebrew Computer Club through the rise of Microsoft. He knew the founders personally and was willing to describe them as they actually were: obsessive, socially awkward, often ruthless, and frequently lucky. The book's taxonomy of Silicon Valley personalities into "commandos, infantry, and police" remains one of the better frameworks for understanding how startups evolve into bureaucracies. Cringely understood that the personal computer revolution was driven less by technical brilliance than by the specific psychological profiles of the people who happened to be in the right rooms at the right time. It is history written with the sharpness of journalism and none of its amnesia.