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

by Walter Isaacson

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences. They believed that beauty mattered. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

Eckert’s social triumph at Penn was creating what he called an “Osculometer” (from the Latin word for mouth), which purported to measure the passion and romantic electricity of a kiss. A couple would hold the handles of the device and then kiss, their lip contact completing an electric circuit. A row of bulbs would light up, the goal being to kiss passionately enough to light up all ten and set off a blast from a foghorn. Smart contestants knew that wet kisses and sweaty palms increased the circuit’s conductivity.

Eckert became so dedicated to the project that he would sometimes sleep next to the machine. Once, as a joke, two engineers picked up his cot and gently moved him to an identical room one floor up; when he awoke he briefly feared the machine had been stolen.69

The construction of ENIAC.

“Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters,” he once said. “Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters.”70

Eckert oral history,Charles Babbage Institute

Innovation requires articulation.

When the program was punched into a tape and the moment came to test it, the Mark I crew, as a joke that became a ritual, would pull out a prayer rug, face east, and pray that their work would prove acceptable.

“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.”36

“The thing that Von Neumann had, which I’ve noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem, the one crucial thing that’s important.”

Jean Jennings reflected upon Von Neumann.

There was value to getting together in person rather than just reading each other’s papers: the intense interactions allowed ideas to be kicked into higher orbits and, like electrons, occasionally break loose to spark chain reactions.

There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.

One of his key investment maxims was to bet primarily on the people rather than the idea. In addition to going over business plans, he conducted incisive personal interviews with those who sought funding. “I believe so strongly in people that I think talking to the individual is much more important than finding out too much about what they want to do,” he explained.

Arthor Rock

Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action.

In contrast to Noyce’s sweet gentility, Grove had a blunt, no-bullshit style. It was the same approach Steve Jobs would later use: brutal honesty, clear focus, and a demanding drive for excellence.

Grove’s mantra was “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”

Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.

It was based on a philosophy that drew from the hippie movement and would help define Silicon Valley. At its core were certain principles: authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.

Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.

The Internet was born of an ethos of creative collaboration and distributed decision making, and its founders liked to protect that heritage.

During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

“We were looking for nonviolent weapons, and I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information flow.”89

Lee Felsenstein

In his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, one of the seminal theorists of the open software movement, propounded what he called “Linus’s Law”: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”138

As Case understood, the secret sauce was not games or published content; it was a yearning for connection. “Our big bet, even back in 1985, was what we called community,” he recounted. “Now people refer to it as social media. We thought the killer app of the Internet was going to be people. People interacting with people they already knew in new ways that were more convenient, but also people interacting with people they didn’t yet know, but should know because they had some kind of shared interest.”

There was a second childhood memory that lingered: that of a Victorian-era almanac and advice book in his family home with the magical and musty title Enquire Within Upon Everything. The introduction proclaimed, “Whether You Wish to Model a Flower in Wax; to Study the Rules of Etiquette; to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper; to Plan a Dinner for a Large Party or a Small One; to Cure a Headache; to Make a Will; to Get Married; to Bury a Relative; Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make, or to Enjoy, Provided Your Desire has Relation to the Necessities of Domestic Life, I Hope You will not Fail to ‘Enquire Within.’ ”9

We and other media companies repurposed our print publications into Web pages to be passively consumed by our readers, and we relegated the discussions to a string of reader comments at the bottom of the page. These were often unmoderated rants and blather that few people, including us, ever read.

“You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set,” he later told a group of Israeli students. “There is a phrase I learned in college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.”

Larry Page

Artificial intelligence need not be the holy grail of computing. The goal instead could be to find ways to optimize the collaboration between human and machine capabilities—to forge a partnership in which we let the machines do what they do best, and they let us do what we do best.

First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This was true of every era of creative ferment.

The collaboration was not merely among contemporaries, but also between generations. The best innovators were those who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators who preceded them.

The most productive teams were those that brought together people with a wide array of specialties.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial.

Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles.

Visions without execution are hallucinations.

Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34

We discern patterns and appreciate their beauty. We weave information into narratives. We are storytelling as well as social animals.

At his last such appearance, for the iPad 2 in 2011, he stood in front of that image and declared, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Steve Jobs