Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Crappy film

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

I call "The Triumph of the Nerds" the best PC history documentary ever made. They talk about everything from your first home built PC, up to the Internet. Along with the people explaining everything were the people who actually had a big part in creating some of this stuff; Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and even the founder of Oracle Larry Ellison.The only thing I don't like about this is that they still haven't made a decade later version that was promised in the documentary. I would have liked to see some of this compared to what's happening now. Something I would have liked to seen because several of Larry Ellison's comments are coming to life.No matter what anyone says, this is truly where a great amount your personal electronics did originate.

The production of the PBS miniseries "Triumph of the Nerds" as documented by journalist and self professed gossip columnist Robert Cringely is a campy trek through the personal computer revolution. The 3-hour narrative covered many of the notable characters responsible for the PC's development such as the inventive geeks, aspiring college hackers, social radicals, corporate marketeers, and leading up to the inevitable war of wills to bring about global, political, and economic change. The miniseries is as much about the personal computer revolution as it is about the one-upmanship ideology of bringing a better mouse trap to market. Piracy is deemed a good thing by the very players that use corporate legal methods to protect themselves from that very end. By means of reverse engineering, misapplications of patent rights, cleverly worded legal disclosure documents, so called `Virgin' engineers and outright theft of intellectual property; it is a sordid affair indeed. The story reads like a checklist in the PDA of Machiavelli's `The Prince'. It seems that `The Prince' is alive and well in the 21st Century.I would highly recommend this film to any geek or geek-in-training. Look also for "The Pirate's of Silicon Valley"

Journalist Robert Cringley's 3-hour saga of the personal computer is a sprawling, gutsy masterpiece that tells it like it is, presenting for viewer approval(or disapproval)the characters, places and anecdotes that are part of the birth, growing pains and refinement of "that damn box", as some folks might call it. It's all there: software, hardware, geeks, nerds, money, power, ambition, hunger, anxiety. Highly recommended viewing, without a doubt.

And we have THEM to thank for all of this.Your humble author can't help but wonder how Bob Cringely got the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen and others in front of the cameras for an honest look inside the slightly twisted minds that begat the personal computer.At 3 hours in length, "Triumph of the Nerds" isn't just a PBS miniseries. On home video, it becomes an epic. And why shouldn't it be? The personal computer has an impact on our lives equal to that of the light bulb and the automobile. But in the case of the PC, most of the people responsible for its creation and worldwide influence are still alive. These are flesh and blood humans, not fading historical sketches like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison."Triumph of the Nerds" was originally produced as a 20-year retrospective on the personal computer. But the PC will be 25 years old in the year 2000. I can't wait to see Bob Cringely's follow up.