The Innovators Quotes

“Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The key to innovation—at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general—was realizing that there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The maker culture in America, ever since the days of community barn raisers and quilting bees, often involved do-it-ourselves rather than do-it-yourself.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“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. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“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

“Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“That was back when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of making it affordable.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“While she slept, her subconscious untangled the knot that her conscious mind had been unable to.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The thing that Von Neumann had, which I’ve noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem, the one crucial thing that’s important.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The culture at Atari was a natural outgrowth of [Nolan] Bushnell’s personality. But it was not simply self-indulgent. It was based on a philosophy that drew from the hippie movement and would help define Silicon Valley. At it’s core were certain principles: authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired and creativity should be nurtured.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Human ingenuity,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose Vitruvian Man became the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and science, “will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don’t know how it works. They don’t fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination.”8”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of “trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”60”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“singularity, a term that von Neumann coined and the futurist Ray Kurzweil and the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized, which is sometimes used to describe the moment when computers are not only smarter than humans but also can design themselves to be even supersmarter, and will thus no longer need us mortals.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“TCP/IP. Kahn and Cerf published them as a paper called “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection.” The Internet was born.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.”

J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor,
“The Computer as a Communication Device,” Science and Technology , Apr. 1968.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on. If”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution