How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

by Matt Ridley

The innovations came rolling off the silicon, digital production line: the microprocessor in 1971, the first video games in 1972, the TCP/IP protocols that made the internet possible in 1973, the Xerox Parc Alto computer with its graphical user interface in 1974, Steve Jobs’s and Steve Wozniak’s Apple 1 in 1975, the Cray 1 supercomputer in 1976, the Atari video game console in 1977, the laser disc in 1978, the ‘worm’, ancestor of the first computer viruses, in 1979, the Sinclair ZX80 hobbyist computer in 1980, the IBM PC in 1981, Lotus 123 software in 1982, the CD-ROM in 1983, the word ‘cyberspace’ in 1984, Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (Well) in 1985, the Connexion machine in 1986, the GSM standard for mobile phones in 1987, Stephen Wolfram’s Mathematica language in 1988, Nintendo’s Game Boy and Toshiba’s Dynabook in 1989, the World Wide Web in 1990, Linus Torvald’s Linux in 1991, the film Terminator 2 in 1992, Intel’s Pentium processor in 1993, the zip disc in 1994, Windows 95 in 1995, the Palm Pilot in 1996, the defeat of the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, by IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, Apple’s colourful iMac in 1998, Nvidia’s consumer graphics processing unit, the GEForce 256, in 1999, the Sims in 2000. And on and on and on.

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