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June 13 - December 11, 2015
this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration.
“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.
“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it,
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
a system of open networks connected to individually controlled computers tended, as the printing press did, to wrest control over the distribution of information from gatekeepers,
the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,
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.
When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.
“poetical science,
The marriage was a match made in rational calculus.
“I have a peculiar way of learning, and I think it must be a peculiar man to teach me successfully,
“constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world,
“the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator’s works.
Ada believed she possessed special, even supernatural abilities, what she called “an intuitive perception of hidden things.
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.
such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.
Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight.
One way to look at innovation is as the accumulation of hundreds of small advances,
In the case of computers, there were many such incremental advances made by faceless engineers at places like IBM.
Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.
“Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience.”
On Turing
he surmised that the seclusion of a mediaeval monastery would have suited him very well.
He believed (at least while he was young) that this uncertainty and indeterminacy at the subatomic level permitted humans to exercise free will—a
Like many pioneers in the digital age, Zuse grew up fascinated by both art and engineering.
Unlike most innovators of the digital age, he was a lone inventor, drawing his inspiration during solo car trips and in discussions with one graduate student assistant.
The fastest would be vacuum tubes, but they were expensive.
Like others whose work required tedious calculations, Mauchly yearned to invent a machine to do them.
“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.”
- Einstein
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. All ideas are born that way.
Many of the paramount technological feats of that era—computers, atomic power, radar, and the Internet—were spawned by the military.
great conceptions are worth little without precision execution
“Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters,”
“You have to have a whole system that works.”
Who, if anyone, ended up with the patents? In the case of the first computers, nobody did.
great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large number of sources.
the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources.
“It has been said that computing machines can only carry out the purposes that they are instructed to do,” he explained in a talk to the London Mathematical Society in February 1947. “But is it necessary that they should always be used in such a manner?”
“You’re better off to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years. But that wasn’t true in the 1950s. It must’ve been scary as hell.”
he was as joyful spending it as he had been making it.
Jack Kilby was another of those boys from the rural Midwest who tinkered in the workshop with his dad and built ham radios.
He began to read every new patent issued. “You read everything—that’s part of the job,” he said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.”
There are often different paths to the same innovation. Noyce and his Fairchild colleagues had been pursuing the possibility of a microchip from another direction.
“I don’t remember any time when a light bulb went off and the whole thing was there,” conceded Noyce. “It was more like, every day, you would say, ‘Well, if I could do this, then maybe I could do that, and that would let me do this,’ and eventually you had the concept.”
The market for microchips had exploded so rapidly that the businesslike folks at Fairchild and Texas Instruments realized that the stakes were too high to leave to the legal system.
“Kilby heaped praise on Noyce and said the semiconductor revolution came from the work of thousands, not from one patent.”
