Книга повествует о бурном начале эпохи массово доступных персональных компьютеров. Рекомендована Н.Н. Безруковым, редактором СофтПанорамы:

The initial years of Norton commander development (1984-1988) were years of triumphant ascent of MS-DOS as the most widely used operating system on the planet, which rapidly replaced CP/M starting from late 1983. And rising tide lifts all boats: many programming products created for DOS became dominant in their class and even served as de-facto standards for porting to other OSes. And that was not limited to spreadsheets, word processors and computer games. Utilities were also a fast growing field. Crazy, high stress and high pressure atmosphere of the first commercial software start-ups is now semi-forgotten. But it was the first commercial software "gold rush" which later in a slightly different manner it was replayed during dot-com bubble.

The larger then life figures of superheroes of this DOS revolution and subsequent "gold rush" rivals the best of science fiction. Now such intense atmosphere can probably be found only in game companies. They did not invent any major new software but they had the unique blend of the ability to do high-quality programming, along with the ability to market the product and gradually make it better so that it becomes a successful, profitable business. The most successful of them possessed the unique blend of the qualities of an software developer plus a drive of a construction foreman, and a deep understanding of the market typical for a stock broker.

Personal computers for sale in the late 70's just before DOS did not come with anything other than a very rudimentary software. IBM mainframe software was very expensive and time of those computer time was sold per hour (say, $70 per hour). That situation changed forever with the launch of DOS. Personal computer and associated DOS software represented a revolt against the establishment and the first DOS software entrepreneurs in this sense were revolutionaries that destroyed old order. You can read more about this period in the book Hard Drive Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson published in 1993 when the memory about this period still did not dissipate irrevocably.

All early players in this new industry were hands-on Swiss-knife type of personalities able to work extremely long hours as programmers. and simultaneously be a good technical leaders/technical architects. The crazy, rat race atmosphere in many of software development startups was well described in Hard Drive, the book about early years of Microsoft.