The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

The letter would seem surprising were it not like so many others that she wrote. It was an example of how her grandiose ambitions sometimes got the best of her. Nevertheless, she deserves respect as a person who, rising above the expectations of her background and gender and defying plagues of family demons, dedicated herself diligently to complex mathematical feats that most of us never would or could attempt. (Bernoulli numbers alone would defeat many of us.) Her impressive mathematical labors and imaginative insights came in the midst of the drama of Medora Leigh and bouts of illness that would cause her to become dependent on opiates that amplified her mood swings.

Babbage got no more funding for his machines; they were never built, and he died in poverty. As for Lady Lovelace, she never published another scientific paper. Instead her life spiraled downward, and she became addicted to gambling and opiates. She had an affair with a gambling partner who then blackmailed her, forcing her to pawn her family jewels. During the final year of her life, she fought an exceedingly painful battle with uterine cancer accompanied by constant hemorrhaging. When she died in 1852, at age thirty-six, she was buried, in accordance with one of her last requests, in a country grave next to the poet father she never knew, who had died at the same age.

The reality is that Ada’s contribution was both profound and inspirational. More than Babbage or any other person of her era, she was able to glimpse a future in which machines would become partners of the human imagination, together weaving tapestries as beautiful as those from Jacquard’s loom. Her appreciation for poetical science led her to celebrate a proposed calculating machine that was dismissed by the scientific establishment of her day, and she perceived how the processing power of such a device could be used on any form of information. Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.

Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

Aiken, who initially balked at having a woman on his officer corps, soon made Hopper not only his primary programmer but his top deputy. Years later he would recall fondly the contributions she made to the birth of computer programming. “Grace was a good man,” he declared.

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Adele,” Jennings said. “She ambled into class with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, walked over to a table, threw one leg over its corner, and began to lecture in her slightly cleaned up Brooklyn accent.” For Jennings, who had grown up as a spirited tomboy bristling at the countless instances of sexism she faced, it was a transforming experience. “I knew I was a long way from Maryville, where women had to sneak down to the greenhouse to grab a smoke.”

Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: “Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer.” It happened because a lot of women back then had studied math, and their skills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: the boys with their toys thought that assembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a man’s job. “American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today,” Jennings said. “If the ENIAC’s administrators had known how crucial programming would be to the functioning of the electronic computer and how complex it would prove to be, they might have been more hesitant to give such an important role to women.”

There is a wealth of stories about young von Neumann’s prodigal genius, some of them probably true. At age six, it was later said, he would joke with his father in classical Greek, and he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head. As a party trick, he would memorize a page of the phone book and recite back the names and numbers, and he could recall verbatim pages from novels or articles he had read, in any of five languages. “If a mentally superhuman race ever develops,” the hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller once said, “its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann.”

Jennings had another complaint that was more personal: “Betty and I were ignored and forgotten following the demonstration. We felt as if we had been playing parts in a fascinating movie that suddenly took a bad turn, in which we had worked like dogs for two weeks to produce something really spectacular and then were written out of the script.” That night there was a candle-lit dinner at Penn’s venerable Houston Hall. It was filled with scientific luminaries, military brass, and most of the men who had worked on ENIAC. But Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder were not there, nor were any of the other women programmers.74 “Betty and I weren’t invited,” Jennings said, “so we were sort of horrified.”75 While the men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made their way home alone through a very cold February night.

Mauchly also hired the dean of them all, Grace Hopper. “He let people try things,” Hopper replied when asked why she let him talk her into joining the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. “He encouraged innovation.”78 By 1952 she had created the world’s first workable compiler, known as the A-0 system, which translated symbolic mathematical code into machine language and thus made it easier for ordinary folks to write programs. Like a salty crew member, Hopper valued an all-hands-on-deck style of collaboration, and she helped develop the open-source method of innovation by sending out her initial versions of the compiler to her friends and acquaintances in the programming world and asking them to make improvements. She used the same open development process when she served as the technical lead in coordinating the creation of COBOL, the first cross-platform standardized business language for computers.79 Her instinct that programming should be machine-independent was a reflection of her preference for collegiality; even machines, she felt, should work well together. It also showed her early understanding of a defining fact of the computer age: that hardware would become commoditized and that programming would be where the true value resided. Until Bill Gates came along, it was an insight that eluded most of the men.

That is what happened in the 1970s. The microprocessor spawned hundreds of new companies making hardware and software for personal computers. Intel not only developed the leading-edge chips; it also created the culture that inspired venture-funded startups to transform the economy and uproot the apricot orchards of Santa Clara Valley, the forty-mile stretch of flat land from south San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose. The valley’s main artery, a bustling highway named El Camino Real, was once the royal road that connected California’s twenty-one mission churches. By the early 1970s—thanks to Hewlett-Packard, Fred Terman’s Stanford Industrial Park, William Shockley, Fairchild and its Fairchildren—it connected a bustling corridor of tech companies. In 1971 the region got a new moniker. Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began writing a series of columns entitled “Silicon Valley USA,” and the name stuck.55

Alan Kay struggled to make sure that he got to Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. He had a 102-degree fever and strep throat, but he was able to drag himself onto a plane from Utah, where he was a graduate student. “I was shivering and sick and could barely walk,” he recalled, “but I was determined to get there.”44 He had already seen and embraced Engelbart’s ideas, but the drama of the demonstration struck him like a clarion call. “To me he was Moses opening the Red Sea,” Kay said. “He showed us a promised land that needed to be found, and the seas and rivers we needed to cross to get there.”45 Like Moses, Engelbart would not actually make it to that promised land. Instead it would be Kay and a merry band of colleagues at the research center of a copier company who would be at the forefront of bringing the ideas of Licklider and Engelbart into the paradise of personal computing.

But to those who knew him, Gates was more than merely nerdy or bratty. Intense and whip smart, he also had a sense of humor, loved adventures, took physical risks, and liked to organize activities. At sixteen he got a new red Mustang (he still had it more than forty years later, preserved in the garage of his mansion), and he took it on high-speed joy rides with his friends. He also brought his pals to his family compound on the Hood Canal, where he would kite-ski on a thousand-foot line behind a speedboat. He memorized James Thurber’s classic story “The Night the Bed Fell” for a student performance, and he starred in a production of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy. Around that time, he started informing people, in a matter-of-fact way, that he would make a million dollars before he turned thirty. He woefully underestimated himself; at age thirty he would be worth $350 million.

Born with a risk-taking gene, Gates would cut loose late at night by driving at terrifying speeds up the mountain roads to an abandoned cement plant. “Sometimes I wondered why Bill drove so fast,” Allen said. “I decided it was his way of letting off steam. He’d get so wound up in our work that he needed a way to stop thinking about the business and the code for a while. His breakneck driving wasn’t so different from table stakes poker or edge-of-the-envelope waterskiing.” Once they had made a little money, Gates splurged on a green Porsche 911, which he would race along the freeway after midnight. At one point he complained to his local dealer that the car’s top speed was supposed to be 126 miles per hour, but he could get it up only to 121. Late one night he was caught speeding and got into an argument with the cop about why he wasn’t carrying a driver’s license. He was thrown into jail. “Got arrested,” he said when Allen picked up the phone. He was released in a few hours, but his mug shot from that night became a memorable icon of geek history.

At the end of 1978 Gates and Allen moved their company from Albuquerque back home to the Seattle area. Just before they left, one of the twelve staffers won a free photo shoot from a local studio, so they posed for what would become a historic photograph, with Allen and most of the others looking like refugees from a hippie commune and Gates sitting up front looking like a Cub Scout. On his drive up the California coast, Gates was slapped with three speeding tickets, two from the same policeman.

By writing the operating system, the two of them helped determine the look and feel of the personal computer. “Paul and I decided every stupid little thing about the PC,” Gates said. “The keyboard layout, how the cassette port worked, how the sound port worked, how the graphics port worked.”103 The result reflected, alas, Gates’s nerdy design taste. Other than causing a cohort of users to learn where the backslash key was, there was little good that could be said about human-machine interfaces that relied on prompts such as “c:\>” and files with clunky names such as AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS.

The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC. Until then, most computers, including the Apple II, would merely generate numerals or letters on the screen, usually in a ghastly green against a black background. Bitmapping allowed each and every pixel on the screen to be controlled by the computer—turned off or on and in any color. That permitted all sorts of wonderful displays, fonts, designs, and graphics. With his feel for design, familiarity with fonts, and love of calligraphy, Jobs was blown away by bitmapping. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” he recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.” As Jobs drove back to Apple’s office in Cupertino, at a speed that would have awed even Gates, he told his colleague Bill Atkinson that they had to incorporate—and improve upon—Xerox’s graphical interface in future Apple computers, such as the forthcoming Lisa and Macintosh. “This is it!” he shouted. “We’ve got to do it!” It was a way to bring computers to the people.

Macintosh and Gates was announcing Windows, another approach to the creation of software emerged. It was pushed by one of the diehard denizens of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Tech Model Railroad Club, Richard Stallman, a truth-possessed hacker with the looks of an Old Testament prophet. With even greater moral fervor than the Homebrew Computer Club members who copied tapes of Microsoft BASIC, Stallman believed that software should be collaboratively created and freely shared.

Torvalds admitted to “not exactly being a huge fan” of Stallman, explaining, “I don’t like single-issue people, nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there aren’t just two sides to any issue, there’s almost always a range of responses, and ‘it depends’ is almost always the right answer in any big question.”144 He also believed that it should be permissible to make money from open-source software. “Open source is about letting everybody play. Why should business, which fuels so much of society’s technological advancement, be excluded?”145 Software may want to be free, but the people who write it may want to feed their kids and reward their investors.

Instead Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely, shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web, and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration. CERN issued a document declaring that it “relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.”29 Eventually CERN joined forces with Richard Stallman and adopted his GNU General Public License. The result was one of the grandest free and open-source projects in history.

Sergey went to a Montessori school, where independent thinking was nurtured. “It’s not like somebody is telling you what to do,” he said. “You have to plot your own path.”127 It was something he shared with Page. When asked later whether having parents who were professors was a key to their success, they both cited going to Montessori schools as a more important factor. “I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently,” Page contended.

Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard.