In the middle of all this, an Albuquerque, N.M., entrepreneur named Ed Roberts had a scheme to produce a personal computer kit that would sell for under $500. The task was considered impossible - there really were no personal computers, after all - and Roberts was broke, but Popular Electronics, a big deal in those days, had promised him the cover if only he could deliver.

Somehow, Roberts and his band created a prototype, but the shipping company supposedly lost it en route to New York, so all parties held their noses and a mock-up was slapped together for the photo shoot. Then the magazine made like Gabriel: "Project Breakthrough!" trumpeted the January 1975 cover of PE. "World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models ... Altair 8800."

Beneath that innocuous-looking machine, the earth shook. Small computers in those days were the size of a stove, but this one was the size of - well, what people now think of as a computer. And it sold for $397, an unheard-of price.

It wasn't perfect, of course. There was no display and no real storage. Input was via a series of switches (a program might require thousands of error-free toggles), and output was in the form of flashing lights, something like the computers on old TV shows. (Altair was where the Enterprise (ETP) was headed one night on Star Trek.) The machine didn't even come assembled.

Nonetheless, the kit was an overnight sensation. Unfortunately, Altair's makers were selling a product they couldn't immediately deliver or support. When the marketplace rejected the Altair's uniformly defective memory boards, Roberts forced them on his customers by bundling boards with the machine's crucial Basic software - created, incidentally, by a couple of brash young fellows named Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They had naturally pitched the software to Roberts before it even existed.

Reading Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, it's hard not to conclude that maybe the computer business hasn't changed as much as we think it has, the original Altair's 256 bytes of memory notwithstanding.

First published in 1984 and out of print for years, Fire in the Valley has now been updated and reissued, complete with what surely must be bar mitzvah pictures of Gates, Steve Jobs and others looking younger, skinnier and hairier than any human could possibly be. Although the book takes a stab at comprehensiveness, these gawky youngsters are really the focus of the story, and the authors tell their tale with surprising human as well as technological insight. Of course, Freiberger and Swaine are blessed with a remarkable tale to tell; if you don't already think so, you'll probably be bored at times by the comings and goings of so many nerds so badly in need of shampoo. But even nongeeks need to understand what happened here, because it subverts the funereal narrative of recent American history that both liberals and conservatives seem so readily to embrace.

Fire in the Valley proves that old-fashioned American ingenuity wasn't dead; it had just moved out West. Nor were the 1960s and '70s merely a time of self-indulgence and license, as some conservatives have contended. Aside from such gains as civil rights, the era's hallmark openness and sense of play - the preference for tie-dye over gray flannel, so to speak - has paid big dividends. The computer revolution "had its genetic coding in the '60s," observes Jim Warren, an industry pioneer and self-described "chair-being" of an early industry computer fair - "antiestablishment, antiwar, profreedom, antidiscipline attitudes."