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The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.
Academics and participants often view this balance differently. “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces,” Henry Kissinger told reporters during one of his Middle East shuttle missions in the 1970s. “But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.”1
In other words, the collaborative creativity that marked the digital age included collaboration between humans and machines.
Similar to thoughts in the Second Machine Age
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.
. . Once the process was thus simplified, it could be reversed and the tasks parceled out to untutored laborers.
The Analytical Engine was the product of what Ada Lovelace, in her essay on imagination, had called “the Combining Faculty.” Babbage had combined innovations that had cropped up in other fields, a trick of many great inventors.
This was done, she wrote, by “the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs.” Even more than Babbage, Ada realized the significance of this. It meant that the machine could be like the type of computer we now take for granted: one that does not merely do a specific arithmetic task but can be a general-purpose machine.
Drawing on the way that railway conductors punched holes in various places on a ticket in order to indicate the traits of each passenger (gender, approximate height, age, hair color), Hollerith devised punch cards with twelve rows and twenty-four columns that recorded the salient facts about each person in the census.
Boole revolutionized logic by finding ways to express logical statements using symbols and equations. He gave true propositions the value 1 and false propositions a 0. A set of basic logical operations—such as and, or, not, either/or, and if/then—could then be performed using these propositions, just as if they were math equations.
(In parts of the Harvard faculty club, calling someone practical rather than academic was considered an insult.)
When people take insights from multiple sources and put them together, it’s natural for them to think that the resulting ideas are their own—as in truth they are.
Mauchly. “A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.”
Eckert and Mauchly served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision; Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved.
that great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large number of sources.
Innovation requires articulation.
Because of her ability to communicate precisely, Aiken assigned her to write what was to become the world’s first computer programming manual. “You are going to write a book,” he said one day, standing next to her desk. “I can’t write a book,” she replied. “I’ve never written one.” “Well, you’re in the Navy now,” he declared. “You are going to write one.”6
Every evening Hopper read to Aiken the pages she had written that day, which helped her learn a simple trick of good writers: “He pointed out that if you stumble when you try to read it aloud, you’d better fix that sentence. Every day I had to read five pages of what I had written.”8 Her sentences became simple, crisp, and clear.
The difference between Hopper’s version of history and IBM’s ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit. It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovation. Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM’s Endicott facility. This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the Eureka moment—are actually the result of an evolutionary
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Such episodes gave Hopper the reputation of being irreverent. That she was. But she also had a software hacker’s ability to combine irreverence with a collaborative spirit. This pirate crew camaraderie—something Hopper shared with subsequent generations of coders—actually liberated rather than restrained her. As Beyer wrote, “It was Hopper’s collaborative abilities rather than her rebellious nature that created
In fact, it was the calm Bloch rather than the spunky Hopper who had the more contentious relationship with Commander Aiken. “Dick was always getting in trouble,” Hopper claimed. “I would try to explain to him that Aiken was just like a computer. He’s wired a certain way, and if you are going to work with him you must realize how he is wired.”15 Aiken,
“A subroutine is a clearly defined, easily symbolized, often repeated program,”
Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck in their ways. The same traits that make them inventive, such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along.
“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.”
The tips of the vacuum tubes in the ENIAC accumulators, which were arranged in 10 x 10 grids, poked through holes in the machine’s front panel. But the faint light from the neon bulbs, which served as indicator lights, was barely visible. So Eckert got Ping-Pong balls, cut them in half, wrote numbers on them, and placed them over the bulbs. As the computer began processing the data, the lights in the room were turned off so that the audience would be awed by the blinking Ping-Pong balls, a spectacle that became a staple of movies and TV shows.
With its flashing lights and Hollywood aura, UNIVAC became famous when CBS featured it on election night in 1952. Walter Cronkite, the young anchor of the network’s coverage, was dubious that the huge machine would be much use compared to the expertise of the network’s correspondents, but he agreed that it might provide an amusing spectacle for viewers. Mauchly and Eckert enlisted a Penn statistician, and they worked out a program that compared the early results from some sample precincts to the outcomes in previous elections. By 8:30 p.m. on the East Coast, well before most of the nation’s
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“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain,” declared a famous brain surgeon, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, in the prestigious Lister Oration in 1949.92 Turing’s response to a reporter from the London Times seemed somewhat flippant, but also subtle: “The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”
geniuses. By its nature, the transistor required a team that threw together theorists who had an intuitive feel for quantum phenomena with material scientists who were adroit at baking impurities into batches of silicon, along with dexterous experimentalists, industrial chemists, manufacturing specialists, and ingenious tinkerers.
Like Xerox PARC and other corporate research satellites that followed, Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they could have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters. That was the upside. The downside was that these were big bureaucracies under corporate thumbs; Bell Labs, like Xerox PARC, showed the limits of industrial organizations when they don’t have passionate leaders and rebels who can turn innovations into great products.
Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions.
In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.
There are often different paths to the same innovation. Noyce
These massive and predictable sources of demand from the government caused the price of each microchip to fall rapidly. The first prototype chip for the Apollo Guidance Computer cost $1,000. By the time they were being put into regular production, each cost $20. The average price for each microchip in the Minuteman missile was $50 in 1962; by 1968 it was $2. Thus was launched the market for putting microchips in devices for ordinary consumers.
The first consumer devices to use microchips were hearing aids because they needed to be very small and would sell even if they were rather expensive. But the demand for them was limited. So Pat Haggerty, the president of Texas Instruments, repeated a gambit that had served him in the past. One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is inventing popular ways to use these devices. Haggerty and his company were good at both. Eleven years after he had created a huge market for inexpensive transistors by pushing pocket radios, he looked for a way to do the same for microchips. The
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flattened. During the 1950s this approach merged with the casual lifestyle of California to create a culture that included Friday beer bashes, flexible hours, and stock options.33 Robert Noyce took this culture to the next level. To understand him as a manager, it’s useful to recall that he was born and bred a Congregationalist.
It also helps to remember that, from his early days as a student, Noyce loved madrigal singing. Every Wednesday evening he attended rehearsals of his twelve-voice group. Madrigals don’t rely on lead singers and soloists; the polyphonic songs weave multiple voices and melodies together, none of them dominant. “Your part depends on [the others’ and] it always supports the others,” Noyce once explained.
He did not try to impose a hierarchal command on what Noyce had wrought. Instead he helped to instill a culture that was driven, focused, and detail-aware, traits that would not naturally have arisen from Noyce’s laid-back, nonconfrontational style.
In addition to being a recruiting tool, the culture at Atari was a natural outgrowth of Bushnell’s personality. But it was not simply self-indulgent. 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. Unlike at East Coast corporations, there were no fixed working hours and no dress code, either for the office or the hot tub.
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.
said. “Engineering the game was easy. Growing the company without money was hard.”
Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an underlying truth.
At MIT Licklider joined the eclectic circle of engineers, psychologists, and humanists gathered around Professor Norbert Wiener, a theorist who studied how humans and machines worked together and coined the term cybernetics, which described how any system, from a brain to an artillery aiming mechanism, learned through communications, control, and feedback loops.
Unlike some of his MIT colleagues, Wiener believed that the most promising path for computer science was to devise machines that would work well with human minds rather than try to replace them.
The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking. Licklider became an adherent of this approach, which he later called “man-computer symbiosis.”
Roberts was not as genial as Licklider, nor as extroverted as Taylor, nor as congregational as Bob Noyce. “Larry’s a cold fish,” according to Taylor.47 Instead he had a trait that was just as useful in promoting collaborative creativity and managing a team: he was decisive. More important, his decisiveness was based not on emotion or personal favoritism but rather on a rational and precise analysis of options.
There are many ways of sending data through a network. The simplest, known as circuit switching, is the way a phone system does it: a set of switches creates a dedicated circuit for signals to go back and forth for the duration of the conversation, and the connection remains open, even during long pauses. Another method is message switching or, as the telegraph operators called it, store-and-forward switching. In this system, an entire message is given an address header, sent into the network, and then passed along from node to node as it wends its way to its destination. An even more
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As Paul Baran later explained to the technology writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, using a beautiful image that applies to all innovation: The process of technological development is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, “I built a cathedral.” Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, “Well, who built the cathedral?” Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con
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But Engelbart bought into Bush’s vision that someday people would have their own terminals, which they could use to manipulate, store, and share information. This expansive conception needed a suitably grand name, and Engelbart came up with one: augmented intelligence.
He was designing a computer as if he were a humanist as well as an engineer. He drew inspiration from an Italian printer in the early sixteenth century named Aldus Manutius, who realized that personal books would need to fit into saddlebags and thus produced ones of the size now common. Likewise, Kay recognized that the ideal personal computer had to be no larger than a notebook. “It was easy to know what to do next,” he recalled. “I built a cardboard model of it to see what it would look and feel like.”52
That is why Engelbart, even though he was a prescient theorist, was not truly a successful innovator: he kept adding functions and instructions and buttons and complexities to his system. Kay made things easier, and in so doing showed why the ideal of simplicity—making products that humans find convivial and easy to use—was central to the innovations that made computers personal.
circuits. One of the many hackers who grew up building Heathkits and other solder-it-yourself electronic projects, he later worried that subsequent generations were growing up with sealed devices that couldn’t be explored.III “I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”87
