IF you haven't seen Bob Cringely's three-part series on the history of the personal computer industry, which comes to an end tomorrow on Channel 4, don't make the same mistake when RTE starts showing it on Wednesday evening - it shouldn't be missed.
Triumph Of The Nerds, or How The Boys Of Silicon Valley Invented The Personal Computer, Made Their Millions And Still Can't Get A Date (as if that wasn't enough, on RTE the series is confusingly called Accidental Empires) tells the remarkable story of the PC, from the early years of the mid-197Os to the multi-billion-dollar industry of today.
Cringely, a writer and gossip columnist for a computer magazine in Los Angeles, was one of the first employees of Apple, at a time when the company was run out of a suburban garage in Silicon Valley. When Apple's founders found themselves short of cash at one stage, they offered to pay Cringely in shares. He turned them down, which is why they're astonishingly rich and he's a gossip columnist.
"This is a boy thing," explains Cringely, surveying the Weird Stuff Warehouse, a Saturday morning market in California where pimply adolescents come to trade gadgets. Indeed, there's hardly a woman to be seen in the entire series. Nerds are defined by author Douglas Adams as people who "use the telephone to talk about telephones" and most of the key protagonists endearingly match the stereotype of thick glasses and bad haircuts.
The computer geek lifestyle of stale pizza, body odour and spilt cola is glorified in the series. "Eating, bathing, having a girlfriend gets in the way of code time," declares a young enthusiast.
To illustrate his point about the 1970s pioneers, Cringely visits their modern equivalent, a bunch of college friends who have just set up their own company. It's all there - the crash-out couch, the fridge full of Coke, the take-away food. Hours are flexible - "you can work any 80 hours of the week you like." The impression one gets is that the nerd lifestyle, in classic US fashion, has become fetishised over the years, and is now as rigorously defined as the rulebook for a McDonaIds franchise.
The first programme covers the pioneering years of the PC industry in the mid-1970s, a time when a computer scientist was a man in a white coat who tended a machine the size of an Irish bungalow. The Altair 8800, the first personal computer, is an unimpressive-looking object - no screen, no keyboard, just an unprepossessing metal box with a line of switches on one side. To calculate two plus two, you had tub flick nine switches to indicate two, another nine for plus, then another nine for two again. If you got it right, a little light would flicker.
But, within a couple of years, Apple had taken this unpromising starting point and produced something that still looks like a computer to our modern eyes.
Programme two describes the rise of Bill Gates's Microsoft, and the failure of IBM to keep pace with the rapidly changing market, outstripped by "clone" makers like Dell and Compaq, while the final episode takes us up the Information Superhighway and beyond. Along the journey, some characters fall by the wayside. Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair 8800 that started it all, is now a rural doctor in Georgia.
But the speed at which some accumulated money is breathtaking. "At the age of 23 I was worth $1 million," says Steve Jobs of Apple. "At 24 it was $10 million and at 25 it was $100 million."
Cringely describes these super-nerds as the great figures of our time, and revels in how extraordinarily rich they are. There's rather too much gushy talk about how the new industry was based on the principles of hippy counterculture, but this largely seems to mean that employees were let wear T-shirts and listen to Fleetwood Mac in the office.
What the nerds did do was reinvigorate American capitalism at a time when it seemed to be irretrievably on the rocks. The series shows how the arrival of the first "killer application" - the spreadsheet - changed the way that people organised money at the beginning of the 1980s, and led directly to the leveraged buyouts, junk bond kings and "greed is good" ethos of that decade.
Just as importantly, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates revealed how elephantine US corporate culture had become, and demonstrated a new way of doing business that could compete with the Japanese. Most of all, more than any other invention of the 20th century, the PC revolutionised the way we live and work, and continues to do so.
With increasing predictions that the PC will soon he made obsolete by new, multi-purpose devices, it's astonishing that it has taken so long for television to take on the history of the personal computer, but Cringely is a witty, well-informed narrator with an inside track on the minutiae of the business. Fortunately, you don't have to be a nerd yourself to find Triumph Of The Nerds one of the most fascinating and entertaining series on television in quite some time.