The Innovators Quotes

“That’s a big thing with an invention,” Eckert later said, contrasting their machine with Atanasoff’s. “You have to have a whole system that works.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Computers today are brilliant idiots,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“the biggest way to deliver an effect to the world is not by writing a paper but by taking technology you believe in and making something of it.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“people who expect deference because they have a PhD and don’t want to deal with ordinary people tend to be annoying.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in “L.” The guy at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in “O.” That, too, was confirmed. When he typed in “G,” the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it wasn’t as eloquent as “The Eagle has landed” or “What has God wrought,” it was suitable in its understated way: “Lo.” As in “Lo and behold.” In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.”101”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“En lugares como IBM, que se especializa en mejoras cotidianas realizadas por equipos de ingenieros, esta es la forma preferida de entender cómo se produce realmente la innovación.”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“War mobilizes science.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The digital age could not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“On October 29 the connection was ready to be made. The event was appropriately casual. It had none of the drama of the “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” that had occurred on the moon a few weeks earlier, with a half billion people watching on television. Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The people who received RFC 1 felt that they were being included in a fun process rather than being dictated to by a bunch of protocol czars. It was a network they were talking about, so it made sense to try to loop everyone in.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the postal system. (There was no such thing as email, since they hadn’t invented the network yet.)”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“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.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our hands on a computer and make it respond to us in real time,” said Russell.10”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Invention implies contributing something to the flow of history and affecting how an innovation developed.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“ARPA should not force the research computers at each site to handle the routing of data, Clark argued. Instead ARPA should design and give each site a standardized minicomputer that would do the routing.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“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.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“De hecho, se estableció una relación simbiótica entre la aparición de la radio de transistores y la irrupción del rock and roll. La primera grabación comercial de Elvis Presley, «That’s All Right», salió a la venta al mismo tiempo que la radio Regency.”
― Walter Isaacson, Innovadores (Innovators-SP): Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“His paper, titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” was published in the April 1965 issue of Electronics magazine.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“values of commons-based sharing and of private enterprise often conflict, most notably over the extent to which innovations should be patent-protected. The commons crowd had its roots in the hacker ethic that emanated from the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Wozniak was an exemplar. He went to Homebrew meetings to show off the computer circuit he built, and he handed out freely the schematics so that others could use and improve it. But his neighborhood pal Steve Jobs, who began accompanying him to the meetings, convinced him that they should quit sharing the invention and instead build and sell it. Thus Apple was born, and for the subsequent forty years it has been at the forefront of aggressively patenting and profiting from its innovations. The instincts of both Steves were useful in creating the digital age. Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones. Sometimes people advocate one of these modes of production over the others based on ideological sentiments. They prefer a greater government role, or exalt private enterprise, or romanticize peer sharing. In the 2012 election, President Barack Obama stirred up controversy by saying to people who owned businesses, “You didn’t build that.” His critics saw it as a denigration of the role of private enterprise. Obama’s point was that any business benefits from government and peer-based community support: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“then “man-computer symbiosis,” as Licklider called it, will remain triumphant. Artificial intelligence need not be the holy grail of computing. The goal instead could be to find ways to optimize the collaboration between human and machine capabilities—to forge a partnership in which we let the machines do what they do best, and they let us do what we do best. SOME LESSONS FROM THE JOURNEY Like all historical narratives, the story of the innovations that created the digital age has many strands. So what lessons, in addition to the power of human-machine symbiosis just discussed, might be drawn from the tale? First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The combination of GNU and Linux created an operating system that has been ported to more hardware platforms, ranging from the world’s ten biggest supercomputers to embedded systems in mobile phones, than any other operating system. “Linux is subversive,” wrote Eric Raymond. “Who would have thought that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet,”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Gates’s “Letter to Hobbyists,” complaining about the unauthorized sharing of Microsoft BASIC, asked in a chiding way, “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?” Torvalds found that an odd outlook. He and Gates were from two very different cultures, the communist-tinged radical academia of Helsinki versus the corporate elite of Seattle. Gates may have ended up with the bigger house, but Torvalds reaped antiestablishment adulation.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Cuando Einstein se sentía bloqueado mientras trabajaba en la relatividad general, cogía su violín y tocaba música de Mozart hasta que volvía a conectar con lo que él denominaba la «armonía de las esferas».”
― Walter Isaacson, Los innovadores: Los genios que inventaron el futuro

“When one early employee wanted to see the company’s organization chart, Noyce made an X in the center of a page and then drew a bunch of other Xs around it, with lines leading to each. The employee was at the center, and the others were people he would be dealing with.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“New ideas occur when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“When it came time to renegotiate the price, Hoff made a critical recommendation to Noyce, one that helped create a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel would remain a driver of the digital age. It was a deal point that Bill Gates and Microsoft would emulate with IBM a decade later. In return for giving Busicom a good price, Noyce insisted that Intel retain the rights to the new chip and be allowed to license it to other companies for purposes other than making a calculator.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution