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Babbage’s Difference Engine, which could solve polynomial equations, impressed people in different ways.
mother. “I am not desirous of a place in his lays.
way math was taught there. They formed a club, called the Analytical Society, which campaigned to get the university to abandon the calculus notation devised by its alumnus Newton, which relied on dots, and replace it with the one devised by Leibniz, which used dx and dy to represent infinitesimal increments and was thus known as “d” notation.
Looms create a pattern by using hooks to lift selected warp threads, and then a rod pushes a woof thread underneath. Jacquard invented a method of using cards with holes punched in
These were made possible by the punch-card mechanism. Seventy-five cards were needed to generate each number, she explained, and then the process became iterative as that number was fed back into the process to generate the next one. “It will be obvious that the very same seventy-five variable cards may be repeated for the computation of every
screed
“My Dear Babbage,” she wrote that “withdrawing the translation and Notes” would “be dishonorable and unjustifiable.” She concluded the letter, “Be assured that I am your best friend; but that I never can or will support you in acting on principles which I conceive to be not only wrong in themselves, but suicidal.”42
timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it. For example, the idea of sending a man to the moon was proposed right when the progress of microchips made it possible to put computer guidance systems into the nose cone of a rocket.
A slide rule is analog; an abacus is digital.
fruitful. It would not be until the 2010s that computer scientists, seeking to mimic the human brain, would seriously begin working on ways to revive analog computing.
Machine. Even an irrational number such as π could be calculated indefinitely using a finite table of instructions.
“This same calculation showed that the base that theoretically gives the highest speed of calculation is e, the natural base.”31 But, balancing theory with practicality, he finally settled on base-2, the binary system.
cadge
thinking that his ideas are his own. That is the way the creative process—if not the patent process—works.
the subject more interesting. 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.
Pres Eckert had his quirks. Filled with nervous energy, he would pace the room, bite his nails, leap around, and occasionally stand atop a desk when he was thinking. He wore a watch chain that wasn’t connected to a watch, and he would twirl it in his hands as if it were rosary beads. He had a quick temper that would flare and then dissolve into charm. His demand for perfection came from his father, who would walk around construction sites carrying a large pack of crayons with which to scrawl instructions, using different colors to indicate which worker was responsible. “He was sort of a
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text. A machine was built that could scan two loops of punched paper tapes, using photoelectric heads, in order to compare all possible permutations of the two sequences. The
“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.”
same.”56 In addition, von Neumann grasped, more readily than his colleagues, an important attribute of commingling data and programming instructions in the same stored memory. The memory could be erasable, what we now call read-write memory. This meant that the stored program instructions could be changed not just at the end of a run but anytime the program was running.
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.
The problem was that there was a setting at the end of a “do loop” that was one digit off. She flipped the requisite switch and the glitch was fixed. “Betty could do more logical reasoning while she was asleep than most people can do awake,”
thinking. He swatted away the theological objection that God has bestowed a soul and thinking capacity only upon humans, arguing that this “implies a serious restriction of the omnipotence of the Almighty.” He asked whether God “has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit.” Presumably so. By the same logic, which, coming from the nonbelieving Turing was somewhat sardonic, surely God could confer a soul
cell. Claude Shannon, the eccentric information theorist, would sometimes ride a unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding at colleagues.
He found a nice slab of silicon, put a tiny drop of water on it, coated a piece of wire with wax to insulate it, and jabbed the wire through the water drop and into the silicon. It worked. It was able to amplify a current, at least slightly. From this “point-contact” contraption the transistor was born.
In one of the germanium experiments, the current seemed to flow in the opposite direction from what they expected. But it was amplified by a factor of more than three hundred, far more than they had previously achieved.
“Voltage amplification was obtained with use of two gold electrodes on a specifically prepared germanium surface.”28
August, Shockley invited Beckman to serve on the board of his proposed transistor company. “I asked him a little bit more about who else was going to be on the board,” Beckman recalled, “and it turned out that he was going to have a board composed of almost everyone who was in the instrument business, all of whom would be his competitors.” Beckman realized how “unbelievably naïve” Shockley was, so in order to help him devise a more sensible approach,
He was judged to be an introvert and not a good potential manager, which revealed a lot more about the weaknesses of the tests than of Noyce.58
and he was thirsty. There was a big goddamn bowl of martinis on the table there. Noyce picks up the goddamn bowl, and starts drinking [from] it. Then he passes out. I said to myself, ‘this is going to be a whole lot of fun.’ ”62
One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to heed them.
Shockley crossed the line from being visionary to being hallucinatory, turning him into a case study in bad leadership. In his pursuit of the four-layer diode, he was secretive, rigid, authoritarian, and paranoid.
“The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor, distributed capacitor, transistor.”
history, Kilby gently grumbled, “It doesn’t fit with what I understand to be co-invention, but that’s become accepted.”16
“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
for ordinary consumers.20 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.
There arose at Intel an innovation that had almost as much of an impact on the digital age as any of these. It was the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies. The roots
Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate this, he read 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.
Instead of proposing plans to top management, Intel’s business units were entrusted to act as if they were their own little and agile company. Whenever there was a decision that required buy-in from other units, such as a new marketing plan or a change in a product strategy, the issue would not be bucked up to bosses for a decision. Instead an impromptu meeting would be convened to hash it out, or try to.
romance. Doc Smith “wrote with the grace and refinement of a pneumatic drill,” according to Martin Graetz,
For his part, Bushnell was contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge ten cents a game. “I was surprised at how clueless they were about the business model,” he said. “Surprised and relieved. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I knew they’d be no competition.”
company for his next video game. “Working for Nutting was a great learning experience, because I discovered that I couldn’t screw things up any worse than they did,”
he described the game to Alcorn, sketched out some circuits, and asked him to build an arcade version of it. He told Alcorn he had signed a contract with GE to make the game, which was untrue. Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people. “I thought it would be a
and it took to the next level the casual style of Silicon Valley startups. Every Friday there would be a beer bash and pot-smoking party, sometimes capped by skinny-dipping, especially if that week’s numbers had been made.
He went to Tufts, where in his spare time he built a surveying machine that used two bicycle wheels and a pendulum to trace the perimeter of an area and calculate its size, thus being an analog device for doing integral calculus.
leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages.”
Most important, Licklider was kind. When he worked at the Pentagon later in his career, according to his biographer Mitchell Waldrop, he noticed the cleaning woman admiring the art prints on his wall late one evening. She told him, “You know, Dr. Licklider, I always leave your room until last because I like to have time by myself, with nothing pressing, to look at the pictures.” He asked which print she liked most, and she pointed to a Cézanne. He was thrilled, since it was his favorite, and he promptly gave it to her.17
Licklider sided with Norbert Wiener, whose theory of cybernetics was based on humans and machines working closely together, rather than with their MIT colleagues Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, whose quest for artificial intelligence involved creating machines that could learn on their own and replicate human cognition.
They would get no more funding to buy computers until they were hooked into the network.
“It’s like breaking a long letter into dozens of postcards, each numbered and addressed to the same place,”
“It took ninety-four separate speakers to describe the entire system,” Baran marveled. When it was over, the AT&T executives asked Baran, “Now do you see why packet switching wouldn’t work?” To their great disappointment, Baran simply replied, “No.”
