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Historical errata for Fire in the Valley

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376TYPO

Several mentions are made of a Shugart 1 1/4" floppy drive. I believe the authors meant 5-1/4" floppy drive.

74TYPO

“Many engineers, including Ed Roberts, thought the 6800 was a better chip than the Altair 8080” - I think the authors meant the “Intel 8080”

117ERROR

There’s a subtitle named “Wildfire grep -nH -e Beyond the Valley”, which looks like an error

178TYPO

Talking about the Borland board demo of Turbo Pascal, in page 178 there’s this sentence:
“In October 1983, Berry got a call from Kahn to come over to his office right away”
and in the next page, talking about the Byte ad, there’s this section:
“a full-page ad for Turbo Pascal, with the $49.95 price and a number to call to place an order, appeared in the November 1985 issue of Byte magazine. To have made the November issue’s ad deadline, Berry ruefully observed, Kahn must have placed the ad listing the $49.95 price well before he showed the program to the board”
The ad was published the month after the board meeting, so I think there’s a typo in one of those two sentences (both should be either 1983 or 1985)

6ERROR

This is based on the current Kindle version from Amazon, so I am unsure which version that maps back to—but it’s the third edition.

In the chapter “Tinder for the Fire” immediately after the heading “The Birth of the Computer”, it says “Spurred by Claude Shannon’s PhD thesis at MIT, which explained how electrical switching circuits could be used to model Boolean logic…”

I believe this was Claude Shannon’s Masters thesis and not his PhD. There’s a neat quote about it being “possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master’s thesis of the century”.

Two sources I know of that cover it being his Masters work rather than PhD work:

- “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation” by Jon Gertner, has quite a bit on Claude, including his Masters thesis.

- The Wikipedia page for Claude Shannon

Regards

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