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

by Walter Isaacson

most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.

their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.

a machine such as the Analytical Engine could store, manipulate, process, and act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols: words and logic and music and anything else we might use symbols to convey.

This insight would become the core concept of the digital age: any piece of content, data, or information—music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video—could be expressed in digital form and manipulated by machines.

There was one other significant concept that she introduced in her “Notes,” which harked back to the Frankenstein story produced by Mary Shelley after that weekend with Lord Byron. It raised what is still the most fascinating metaphysical topic involving computers, that of artificial intelligence: Can machines think? Ada believed not.

punch cards, like those Babbage saw on Jacquard’s looms and proposed incorporating into his Analytical Engine. Perfecting the use of punch cards for computers came about because Herman Hollerith, an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau, was appalled that it took close to eight years to manually tabulate the 1880 census. He resolved to automate the 1890 count.

Big Data vs innovation: an early example

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.

“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.

It became the basis for most subsequent computers. That last attribute is important. When we ascribe credit for an invention, determining who should be most noted by history, one criterion is looking at whose contributions turned out to have the most influence. Invention implies contributing something to the flow of history and affecting how an innovation developed. Using historic impact as a standard, Eckert and Mauchly are the most noteworthy innovators. Almost all computers of the 1950s trace their roots to ENIAC. The influence of Flowers, Newman, and Turing is somewhat trickier to assess. Their work was kept top-secret, but all three men were involved in the British computers built after the war. Zuse, who was isolated and under bombardment in Berlin, had even less influence on the course of computer development elsewhere. As for Atanasoff, his main influence on the field, perhaps his only influence, came from providing a few inspirations to Mauchly when he visited.

The essence of "influence"

the true birth of the digital age, the era in which electronic devices became embedded in every aspect of our lives, occurred in Murray Hill, New Jersey, shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday, December 16, 1947. That day two scientists at Bell Labs succeeded in putting together a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of semiconducting material, and a bent paper clip. When wiggled just right, it could amplify an electric current and switch it on and off. The transistor, as the device was soon named, became to the digital age what the steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution.

Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right.

For much of the twentieth century, venture capital and private equity investing in new companies had been mainly the purview of a few wealthy families, such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Phippses, and Warburgs. After World War II, many of these clans set up firms to institutionalize the business.

the hard-core hackers who believed in “the hands-on imperative” and loved pranks, clever programming tricks, toys, and games.

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.

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 trait of the Internet, the ingrained attribute that would allow it to empower individuals and make it resistant to centralized control.

Cf bitcoin blockchains

The decentralized and distributed architecture meant that the network would be more reliable. It could even withstand a nuclear attack. Building a resilient and attack-proof military command-and-control system was not what motivated the ARPA researchers. It wasn’t even in the back of their minds. But that was one reason they ended up getting a steady stream of Pentagon and congressional funding for the project.

Jobs would later say that he learned some important lessons at Atari, the most profound being the need to keep interfaces friendly and intuitive. Instructions should be insanely simple: “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.” Devices should not need manuals.

The essence of simplicity

Born in 1958 and raised in Hawaii, with a placid temperament that made it seem as if he had been nurtured by dolphins, Steve Case had a pacific fa