Ultimate Nerds : ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES; How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, <i> By Robert X. Cringely (Addison-Wesley Publishing: $19.95; 336 pp.)</i>

As in the movie business, gossip about who’s hot and who’s not in the computer business has a significant effect on money-raising and product success. And there has been plenty of success, in a very short time. It was only 15 years ago that a few smart young people invented a computer small enough to put on a desk and gave it some addicting games, a form in which to type a term paper without spelling errors, and a spread sheet to figure out how much money you’d gain or lose next year if you closed the Cleveland office.

Robert X. Cringely is the nom de plume of a weekly gossip columnist for Info World, the Variety of the personal-computer biz. Cringely is probably one person, late 30s, graduate of a small college in Ohio and indebted to someone named Pammy, the woman of his dreams.

In “Accidental Empires,” Cringely writes about the boys of Silicon Valley (and in his book, they are almost all boys) in a tone that’s part Spy magazine, part Newsweek and part “The Wonder Years.” Up until now, the phrase computer book has pretty much meant 900-page manuals, or dense treatises on artificial intelligence that can be fully understood by two people at MIT and one at Stanford. But this Snidely Whiplash of the computer world is entertaining, engaging, irreverent, boyishly profane. His title could have been: “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in Silicon Valley Again.” In his way of writing, Bummer by itself often constitutes a transitional sentence.

He tells us what we secretly want to hear--that these software programming geniuses who made millions are inferior to us in certain ways. They’re less threatening than we thought (they stumbled onto their discoveries) and less enviable (they can’t get a date because, like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, they don’t wash their hair often enough).

The whole enterprise is based on less than noble principles, as Cringely describes it: “There was no urge to fly, to see the world, to win a war, to cure disease, or even to get rich that explains how the personal computer business came to be or even how it runs today. Instead the game was started to satisfy the needs of disenfranchised nerds like Bill Gates who didn’t meet the macho standards of American maleness and so looked for a way to create their own adolescent alternative to the adult world, and, through that creation, gain the admiration of their peers.”

Cringely’s goal is to tell the tale of the disenfranchised nerds amusingly, and along the way, explain the business to outsiders whose investment in the personal-computer industry amounts to no more than a computer and an out-of-date word-processing program. He succeeds in making the industry accessible by supplying lots of cozy touches. One of the earliest personal computers was called the Gzunda because, its creator said, “It gzunda the desk.”

There’s plenty of drama in the personal-computer story; it’s “Dallas” with chips. Most start-up companies begin with a feud; 90% of them fail, and those that succeed can sell out for millions.

The whole industry began in 1957 when an engineer named Bob Noyce quit work at Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley, I who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, would soon be remembered only for his bizarre theories on race and his idea of a Nobel sperm bank.) Noyce is one of the heroes of Cringely’s story. Noyce enjoys his money, but at work he kept a cubicle, not a fancy office.

The defining Noyce story that Cringely tells sounds as if it could easily be apocryphal, and he never gives his source. “There was the time,” Cringely writes, “he stood in a long line at his branch bank and then asked the teller for a cashier’s check for $1.3 million from his personal savings, confiding gleefully that he was going to buy a Learjet that afternoon.”

Cringely can, however, swamp the stories with too much insider language. General readers may have difficulty with this not untypical sentence, in the story of a “code god” named Gary Kildall: Kildall’s job, says Cringely, was “to write the emulator, called Interp/80, followed by a high-level language called PL/M, which was planned as a microcomputer equivalent of the XPL language developed for mainframe computers at Stanford University.” The part of the Kildall story that really gets our attention comes a little later: “He made millions of dollars, essentially without trying.”

Cringely also has the goal of getting the people in the Silicon Valley to behave sensibly. The business, which amounted last year to some $70 billion in hardware and software worldwide, is still run by a bunch of amateurs. The programmers are smart, but they can’t manage a company. The few people who can manage often send out programs too fast (one had 600 bugs in it) and consumers get stuck with lemons.

Cringely’s third intention clearly is to get back at William Gates, head of Microsoft Corp., for something; we don’t know what. Maybe for being, at age 36, America’s wealthiest person. Gates, a “pencil-necked billionaire” with “greasy blond hair and bratwurst skin,” is “a man so determined to be unique in his own organization that Microsoft had more than 500 employees before hiring its second William.” We take away the impression that William Gates specifically excluded other Williamses, which makes a great story. (We start thinking, what about Guillermo, Wilhelmina?) But this absence of employees named William could have just happened. What about a control group? How many people named Steve, aside from Jobs and Wozniak, worked at Apple in the early days?

According to Cringely, Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, is as mean as Gates, but he dresses much better. “Jobs has only three ways of dealing with people. He seduces them, castigates them, or ignores them. In fact, everyone in Jobs’s life eventually runs through all three modes, sometimes more than once.”

This is all very amusing, and some of us could usefully compare our ex-boyfriends with Jobs, but Cringely shirks a reporter’s responsibility. He paints himself as the ultimate insider, and thus makes it seem as if he gathered every story and every quote himself. The reader, for example, has the impression that Cringely chatted with Bill Gates’ father, when the elder Gates’ quote comes--uncredited--from a Wall Street Journal story.

Cringely ends with some flag-waving; he may be sarcastic but he’s not cynical. For all their painstaking craftsmanship, the Japanese can’t ever take over the personal-computer business because they move too slowly. They’re “too grown-up.” The real wealth in the computer business lies in the brains of creative people, and that means good old American--infantile, hyperactive--mavericks.

But for all the psychologizing about Gates’ relationship to his parents, and Jobs’ Angst about being adopted, Cringely doesn’t say enough about how these valuable all-American-nerd brains work when applied to a specific problem. Programmers make up algorithms, he says. I had to look that up and was relieved to learn that an algorithm is simply “a predetermined set of instructions for solving a specific problem in a limited number of steps.”

In one atypical half-chapter of quite beautiful writing, Cringely describes how a programmer named John Warnock, founder of Adobe Systems, created a ship’s pilot-training simulator. Cringely takes us through the process by which Warnock solved the problem of how to present on a video monitor an image of New York harbor as seen from the bridge of a ship. We could have used more of this.

So some of the nerds don’t wash their hair every day. So the software industry got started by a series of accidents. If the word of Stephen Jay Gould is anything to go by, all of evolution is a series of accidents. The cure for AIDS will probably be stumbled on by some assistant professor in Minnesota studying retroviruses in the Northern Pike. Whether he or she washes his or her hair regularly will not be significant.