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Loading... The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014)by Walter Isaacson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Better than Dyson's Turing's Cathedral and just as good as Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood as a history of computing. It benefits from Isaacson's penchant for writing interesting biography and his familiarity with Jobs and Gates. As a kid in the 1980s whose dad brought home a Tandy TRS-80 from Radio Shack around age seven, who played Turtle and Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe at school, who wrote programs in BASIC, and whp had multiple yahoo and hotmail accounts to get around pesky storage limits, who played Trinity on his great-grandma's Commodore 64, and who played Atari and Colecovision, etc., this book hit home for me on a certain level and era. My only wish is that it had a chapter on Radio Shack et al., the entry point for many an amateur in the 1980s. It could also have had more pictures. But, it is an interesting, intriguing, thorough, and important history of computers and the world they made up to 2014. It could be expanded today to include the pervasiveness of the iPhone, social media, wifi, and A.I. text generators. That is another 100 pages that could be now added. ( ) As a lover of history and with a background in the semiconductor industry, I found the first half of this book extremely interesting and engaging. The book follows the chronological progression of invention from the earliest calculating machines through to IBM mainframes, PCs and finally onto the Internet and World Wide Web of today. The insights an observations of the early pioneers such as Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage were truly inspired and prescient. Isaacson’s primary thesis is that true progress is achieved through collaboration, not the sole genius inventor in the basement. He proves his theory by describing some of the greatest technological collaborations in history, Bardeen and Brattain (transistor), Noyce and Moore (Intel), Jobs and Wozniak (Apple) to name a few. The right mix of individuals on a team is also essential, the aforementioned pairings for example having a brilliant inventor or “idea man” and a highly driven and motivated technical manager. Spectacular failures are also borne out by individuals unwilling or unable to share information and cooperate (Atanasoff and Shockley spring to mind). The book really held my attention until the invention of the PC and I enjoyed the Gates and Jobs stories. However, I found the story of the Internet and World Wide Web not as engaging, and I found myself getting a little bored towards the end of the book. Nevertheless, Isaacson does a good job and there are plenty of qualifying notes and references for follow up or more detailed reading. Definitely worth a read if the subject is of interest. Walter wrote a great book. Despite the fact that this book focuses on the digital revolution, Walter did a great job presenting complex concepts (transistors, Turing machines, and etc.) in every elegant way, so that person without any technical background can understand the importance of such innovations. I thouroughly enjoyed general analysis of why certain smart, or even genius innovators failed to populate their innovations.
... even at its most rushed, the book evinces a genuine affection for its subjects that makes it tough to resist. Isaacson confesses early on that he was once “an electronics geek who loved Heathkits and ham radios,” and that background seems to have given him keen insight into how youthful passion transforms into professional obsession. His book is thus most memorable not for its intricate accounts of astounding breakthroughs and the business dramas that followed, but rather for the quieter moments in which we realize that the most primal drive for innovators is a need to feel childlike joy. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)004.092Information Computer Science; Knowledge and Systems Computer science Computer science -- subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography BiographyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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