Fire in the Valley is Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's history of the personal computer, drawn from extensive interviews with the founders, hackers, and operators who built the industry — first published in 1984, updated in 2000 as The Making of The Personal Computer, and again in 2014 as The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer.
Working as journalists at InfoWorld in the early 1980s, Freiberger and Swaine were on the ground for the formative years of the industry, sharing rooms with 📝Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ed Roberts of MITS, Lee Felsenstein of Processor Technology, Jack Tramiel of Commodore, and the broader cast of hobbyist-revolutionaries who turned the personal computer from a club-meeting hack into a global industry. The book traces the arc from the Homebrew Computer Club through the rise of Apple, Microsoft, IBM, and Commodore, and in its third edition through the post-PC pivot into mobile, cloud, and tablet computing.
The book is the basis for the 1999 TNT film Pirates of Silicon Valley and was named to Business 2.0's list of the 100 best business books of all time. As a primary source on the personal-computer revolution it remains unusually well sourced — much of the institutional memory of the era runs through these two writers' reporting.