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July 16 - July 24, 2021
tools. I also became interested in how the quest for artificial intelligence—machines that think on their own—has consistently proved less fruitful than creating ways to forge a partnership or symbiosis between people and machines. In other words, the collaborative creativity that marked the digital age included collaboration between humans and machines.
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
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Her mother, with motives that only a psychiatrist could fathom, decided it was imperative to tell William about Ada’s attempted elopement with her tutor.
females. 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.
One way to look at innovation is as the accumulation of hundreds of small advances, such as counters and punch-card readers. At places like IBM, which specialize in daily improvements made by teams of engineers, this is the preferred way to understand how innovation really happens. Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps.
But far more important was the by-product of Turing’s proof: his concept of a Logical Computing Machine, which soon came to be known as a Turing machine.
To fo
“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.”
trivial. “Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters,” he once said. “Certainly
Invention implies contributing something to the flow of history and affecting how an innovation developed.
Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments. The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer. “Atanasoff may have won a point in court, but he went back to teaching and we went on to build the first real electronic programmable computers,” Eckert later
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ideas. “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea,” he once told a student. “If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”
approach. In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.64
thoughts. “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?”
The baby machine would therefore have to be tutored some other way. Turing proposed a punishment and reward system, which would cause the machine to repeat certain activities and avoid others. Eventually such a machine could develop its own conceptions about how to figure things out.
The key to innovation—at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general—was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork.
What we have for you today represents a fine example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research in an industrial framework.”
“When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’ ”18
It was the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.
Thus was born the video game, which turned out to be not merely an amusing sideshow but an integral part of the lineage that led to today’s personal computer.
It was one of the advantages of having a true product engineer in charge.
He knew that such a system could help prevent a nuclear exchange, because if one side feared that its communications system could be knocked out it would be more likely to launch a preemptive first strike when tensions mounted. With survivable communications systems, nations would not feel the need to adopt a hair-trigger posture.
Baran came up with two key ideas, which he began publishing in 1960. His first was that the network should not be centralized; there should be no main hub that controlled all the switching and routing. Nor should it even be merely decentralized, with the control in many regional hubs, like AT&T’s phone system or the route map of a major airline. If the enemy took out a few such hubs, the system could be incapacitated. Instead control should be completely distributed. In other words, each and every node should have equal power to switch and route the flow of data. This would become the defining
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Decentralized vs distributed
After describing the informal way RFCs had begun, Cerf continued, “Hiding in the history of the RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work.”100
As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”110
“They would bring the locus of power down to the people,” he later explained.
“My proposition, following Illich, was that a computer could only survive if it grew a computer club around itself,” he explained. Along
Allen’s mind would flit among many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.
edge, “Sometimes Bill’s recollections overstate his own role in ways that are not quite historically accurate.”18
it. 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
He commissioned a study in 1973 which found that, less than two years after it was invented, email accounted for 75 percent of the traffic on the ARPANET. “The
More than most digital-age innovations, the conception of the Web was driven primarily by one person.
The way Sanger remembered the story, he was having lunch in early January 2001 at a roadside taco stand near San Diego with a friend named Ben Kovitz, a computer engineer. Kovitz had been using Cunningham’s wiki and described it at length. It then dawned on Sanger, he claimed, that a wiki could be used to help solve the problems he was having with Nupedia. “Instantly I was considering whether wiki would work as a more open and simple editorial system for a free, collaborative encyclopedia,” Sanger later recounted. “The more I thought about it, without even having seen a wiki, the more it
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Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design.
“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.” That’s
