Notes from Triumph of the Nerds
I’m always interested in documents from past technological revolutions since they echo so strongly in the current ones. [Triumph of the Nerds](http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Triumph_of_the_Nerds/70014652) is a great example of this, a film that shows how characters change (except for Steve Jobs) but the script so often stays the same…
### Part 1
Hey, it’s Art Walker, my old cycling coach! – 5:00
Definition of a “nerd”:
> I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer. – Douglas Adams, 6:18
Poetry in products, a la Steve:
> To me the spark of that was that there was something beyond sort of what you see every day. It’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers. And I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I think that that same spirit can be put into products, and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit. – Steve Jobs, 30:00
### Part 2
A good test for your beauracracy: how long would it take for your company to ship an empty box?
> At one point somebody kind of looked at the process to see well, you know, what’s it doing and what’s the overhead built into it, what they found is that it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box. – 6:00
“DOS” comes from “QDOS”–“Quick and dirty operating system”. So did that make DOS just dirty? – 22:00
### Part 3
What PARC was really about:
> People came there specifically to work on five year programs that were their dreams. – Adele Goldberg, former Xerox PARC Researcher
How to design, a la Steve:
> Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. – Steve Jobs, 26:00
Though that doesn’t guarantee success; the importance of innovating in business strategy as well:
> The problem was the industry wasn’t measured by who has the best selling personal computer or who has the most innovative technology. The industry was measured by who had the most open system that was adopted by the most other companies and the Microsoft strategy ultimately turned out to be the better business strategy. – John Sculley, 39:00