Rod Canion

An interesting if one-sided look at how the personal computer industry developed during the 80s. Canion's obviously knowledgable — as founder and CEO of Compaq, his company led the charge against IBM's various attempted machinations to control the computer industry. There's more than a bit of rose-tinted hue around this tome (literally only one "bad decision" is ever discussed, hesitantly at that, and ultimately turns into a big company-rousing win anyway), but it's an interesting part of computer history nonetheless.

The completely unnecessary add-on of a section about the iPad/iPhone/iPod is both completely unnecessary (as evidenced by this sentence's preface), self-serving and even then judging it wrong. It's a really bizarre jump from the end of the book (1991) to the introduction of the iPad (2010) in the span of a page turn.… (mer)