Những Người Tiên Phong Reviews

Originally airport reading - amazed me in the end. Once I came over an article on the Internet; I guess it was on Fortune speaking about the fortune 500 CEOs which book they value most. It was saying that about 30% of them named Good to Great and Innovators got some honorable mention getting about 15% of the votes. The thing that author, got admiration of Elon Musk for Franklin and Einstein biographies and after he was approached by Steve Jobs to write his biography he would have got access to practically anyone. So I took an advantage and bought it in the airport of Copenhagen choosing it over other more academic books like Blue Ocean Strategy etc. Although there is possibility that you might think the book was written from the leftover notes that weren't used in the Jobs book it is a good starting place to understand the context of the information age. I really enjoy making highlights when reading than I go through the highlights and while typing them it makes me remember some stuff better.• First it was daughter of Byron – Ada who found that numbers of cogs can be interpreted in a way different than just mathematical entities.• 1937 would become annus mirabilis of the computer age, and the result would be triumph of four properties, somewhat interrelated, that would define modern computing: digital, binary, electronic, general purpose• at Bell Labs they decided to use the system of logic, formulated ninety years earlier by the British mathematician George Boole. • Atanasoff – tale is evidence that we should not in fact romanticize such loners. He never got his machine to be fully functional. Had he been at Bell Labs, amid swarms of technicians and engineers and repairmen, or at a big research university, a solution would likely have been found for fixing the card reader as well as the other balky parts of his contraption. There would have been team members left behind to put on the finishing touches, or at least to remember what was being built.• A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way, but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience. – Einstein.• A physicist is the one who’s concerned with truth; an engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done. – Eckert• ENIAC – electronic numerical integrator and computer – hundred feet long and eight feet high; filling the space of what could be a modes three-bedroom apartment;• Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution Eckert was not shy about micromanaging.• Ideal computer is a machine that is electronic, general purpose and programmable; - ENIAC completed by Prosper Eckert and John Mauchly in November 1945 was the first machine to incorporate the full set of traits of a modern computer;• Starting with Charles Babbage the men who invented computers focused primarily on hardware. But the women who became involved in WWII saw early on the importance of programming, just as Ada Lovelace had.• The locus of technological innovation according to IBM was the corporation. The myth of the lone radical inventor working in the laboratory or basement was replaced by the reality of teams of faceless organizational engineers contributing incremental advancements.• What may seem like creative leaps – the Eureka moment – are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies and engineering methods ripen together.• One night the machine conkd out -… they found a moth with wingspan of four inches that had gotten smashed in one of the electromechanical relays – first actual case of being found – from then on – debugging the machine;• Computer innovators like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they stuck in their ways, the same traits that make them inventive such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along. Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and focused, yet he dazzled and baffled colleagues by suddenly changing his mind when he realized he needed to think different.• Women of ENIAC showed the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware.• If mentally superhuman race ever develops, the hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller once said its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann • Neumann was an amazing combination of a very brilliant man who knows that he’s brilliant but at the same time is very shy and modest about presenting his ideas to other people• The thing that von Neumann had which other geniuses have is the ability to pick out in a particular problem the one crucial thing that’s important• The sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other rather than as bolts out of the blue.• In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.• There was downside to the patent protection given to hardware innovation: the proprietary model produced companies that were so entrenched and defensive they would miss out on the personal computer revolution in the early 1070s;• Xerox PARC and other corporate research satellites that followed, Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents ere brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they could have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters. That was the upside. The downside was that these were big bureaucracies under corporate thumbs; Bell Labs, like Xerox PARC, showed the limits of industrial organisations when they don’t have passionate leaders and rebels who can turn innovations into great products;• Kelly’s mission was to make innovation something that an industrial organization could do on a regular basis;• Shockley: it takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device;• It is in the mind of single person that creative ideas and concepts are born;• It became clear that there was a lot that the theorists, engineers and metallurgists could learn from one another.• Creative energy generated by physical proximity;• Old physicist joke: they knew the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?• Transistor was one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. It came from the partnership of a theorist and an experimentalist working side by side, in a symbiotic relationship, bouncing theories and result back and forth in real time. It also came from embedding them in an environment where they could walk down a king corridor and bump into experts who could manipulate the impurities in germanium or be in a study group populated by people who understood the quantum-mechanical explanations of surface states, or sit in a cafeteria with engineers who knew all the tricks for transmitting phone signals over long distances. – transistor – by switching the device in and out, a distinct gain in speech level could be heard;• Bell Labs was cauldron of innovation . in addition to the transistor, it pioneered computer circuitry, laser technology, and cellular telephony. It was however less good at capitalizing on its inventions. As part of a regulated company that had a monopoly on most phone services, it was not hungry for new products, and it was legally restrained from leveraging its monopoly to enter other markets. In order to stave off public criticism and antitrust actions, it liberally licensed its patents to other companies. For the transistor, it set a remarkably low fee, $25,000 for any company that wanted them, and it even offered seminars explaining manufacturing techniques.• Like Steve Jobs, Haggerty was able to project a reality distortion field that he used to push people to accomplish things they thought impossible; Transistors were sold to the military 16$ apiece, but in order to break into a consumer market Haggerty insisted that his engineers find a way to make them so that they could be sold for less than $3.• Haggerty made the deal in June 1945 and typically insisted that the device be on the market by that November. It was.• The seeds were planted for a shift in perception of electronic technology, especially among the young. It would no longer be province for only big corporations and the military. It could also empower individuality, personal freedom, creativity and even a bit of rebellious spirit.• One problem with successful teams , particularly intense ones is that sometimes they break up. It takes special type of leader – inspiring yet also nurturing, competitive yet collaborative – to hold such teams together.• Another skill of great team leaders is the ability to instill a nonhierarchical esprit de corps.• Shockley setting up company in California;• Some leaders are able to be willful and demanding while still inspiring loyalty. They celebrate audaciousness in a way that makes them charismatic. • Many transformative innovators have been similarly stubborn about pushing a new idea, but Shockley crossed the line from being visionary to being hallucinatory;• Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right. If Shockley’s diode had proved practical, or if he had evolved it into an integrated circuit he may have again been regarded as visionary.• A key challenge for managers is how to strike a balance between being collegial and being decisive – you need to get calibration precise;• You’re better of to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years;• Because computers had to be made small enough to fit into rocket’s nose cone, it was imperative to find ways to cram hundreds and then thousands of transistors into any devices. – the result was an integrated circuit, also known as microchip;• Noyce and Kilby of Texas Instruments declared as inventors of microchip.• The nearly simultaneous advances of the time was primed for such an invention;• Killby’s humility when getting Nobel Prize: when I hear that kind of thing it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: No, I did not build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine;• One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is inventing popular ways to use these devices – idea TI hit upon was after radio pocket calculators;• Pattern for electronic devices: every year things got cheaper, smaller, faster, more powerful. Computer and microchip industry growing together – same happened half a century earlier when auto industry and oil industry was growing together. There is key lesson to innovation: understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.• Cramming more components onto integrated circuits• Moore’s law – remained true for 50 or so years – creating one of the greatest bursts of innovation and wealth in human history;• Low price for microchips would stimulate demand, high-volume production, and economies of scale – that would turn Moore’s law into reality;• When Noyce called Arthur Rock who had put together the financing deal that launched Fairchild Semiconductor Rock asked what took you so long?• Arthur Rock had helped to build something that was destined to be almost as important to the digital age as the microchip: venture capital – he was more into people than their ideas and the thing they were doing – personalities were making him to make decision. Stanford’s provost Fred Terman seeking ties with technology boom was helping Rock in understanding electronics with his professors.• Innovations come in a variety of guises. There arose Intel innovation that had almost as of much of an impact on the digital age as microchip. It was invention of a corporate culture and management style that was antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.• Already Dave Packard understood it was good to give his workers flexible hours and plenty of leeway in determining how to accomplish their objectives.• Grove of Intel felt honest confrontation was not only a managerial duty but one of life’s invigorating spices• Noyce when drew organizational chart for an employee he draw X in the center and than other X around it saying the X was employee.• It was culture of meritocracy; it was not corporation it was congregation;• Andy grove – brutal honesty, clear focus, and e demanding drive for excellence.• Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only paranoid survive.• Name Silicon Valley started with Dan Hoefler of Electronic News in 1971• Like the Bushnell of Atari many entrepreneurs had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.• Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy to turn it into a successful product.• A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.• Triangular relationship between government, industry and academia;• Licklider – father of internet as such – decentralized to make it less vulnerable against attacks;• Most true geniuses –kepler, newton, Einstein, steve jobs – have instinct for simplicity;• Xerox PARC- the best way to predict the future is to invent it;• Homebrew Computer Club – started on 5.3.1975 Menlo Park Garage• Public awareness crucial for innovation • Hobbyists paying for altair sending checks in a town they can not pronounce – that how much they wanted it;• Gates was nerd before the term was invented;• Computer terminal was for gates what a toy compass was to baby Einstein;• Gates wanted to price the product so low that computer producers should never think of having their own software;• Bushnell telling Jobs: pretend to be completely in control and people will assume you are;• Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc spreadsheet helped popularize Apple;• IBM could have everything Microsoft made although they did not make anything yet-as said by Gates• Gates – in fact our tagline in our ad had been we set the standard but when we did in fact set the standard our anti-trust lawyers told us to get rid of that. It’s one of those things you can use only when it’s not true.• Greatest innovations would come not from the people who created breakthroughs but who applied them usefully.• Conception is just first step what matters is execution;• In 1981 Apple had revenues 334 mln $ Microsoft 15 mln$;• Torvalds felt he was following in the footsteps of centuries of scientists and other academics who built their work on the foundations of others. I also wanted feedback – okay and praise. It did not make sense to charge people who could potentially help improve my work.• The tradition of forming voluntary associations, found in all societies, was especially strong in early America.• Everybody esp hackers want to impress the peers, improve their reputation, elevate their social status – open source programming is giving them that chance• According to Wales the best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them not because you want them to.• But to Stallman your motivation was also important – ultimate purist;• Windows and Mac, UNIX and Linux, iOS and Android a variety of approaches competed over decades spurring each other on – and providing a check against any one model becoming so dominant that it stifled innovation;• Internet a federal project –funded by public money initially that paid of overwhelmingly.• Limitations of what you could do with a computer was just limitations of your imaginations;• Even about Oxford Tim Berners Lee said that they did not have that same ripe community and cultural mix that was at the Homebrew and in Silicon Valley;• WWW – Lee wanted creative space like sandpit;• Andreessen of Mosaic knew one of the secrets of digital-age entrepreneurs: he fanatically heeded user feedback and spent time on internet newsgroups soaking up suggestions and complaints;• Andreessen said bitcoin back in 1990s would be better;• To get people on your blog : stay casual, get personal, be provocative.• Connecting to community is one of the basic desires that drive the digital world;• Wikipedia – imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it; - result the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history; there is something primordial in it – wikipedians calling it wiki-crack;• Page wanted to avoid be like Tesla – looking for funding; leadershape-encouraged students to hav healthy disregard for the impossible. • Page wanted to be like professor who has one foot in industry and wants to do crazy stuff that’s world-breaking. Stanford led the way as an incubator also – among companies wpawned by Stanford were Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems – then Google. • Page and Brin said going to Montessori school as a more important factor – I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently.• Both Brin and Page were rejected by MIT• Page had a dream on what if he could download whole web – he added you have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set; - he called the project backrub;• According to Page user is never wrong – that what they told him at AltaVista that he was doing it all wrong;• Google is playing with googol but googol.com was taken and the guy refused to sell;• The guy that did something similar and than left to China and founded Baidu Yanhong Li• Stanford not only permitted students to work on commercial endeavors it encouraged and facilitated it. There was even an office to assist with the patenting process and licensing arrangements.• Bechtolsheim: other web sites took a good chunk of venture funding and spent it on advertising, this was opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.• Brin: process might seem automated but in terms of how much human input goes into the final product, there are millions of people who spend time designing their webpages, determining who to link to and how, and that human element goes into it.• Microchips allowed computers to become small enough to be personal appliances, and packet-switched networks allowed them to be connected as nodes on a web;• HAL of 2001 remains as mirage, always about twenty years away;• Computers today are brilliant idiots. – IBM research director• Gates: eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system;• The strategy of combining computer and human capabilities, of creating a human-computer symbiosis, turned out to be more fruitful that the pursuit of machines that could think on their own;• Future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers;• Creativity is collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.• Talented federal bureaucrats – not always oxymoron.• Digital theorists and hackers often disparage this approach but a private enterprise system that financially rewarded invention was a component of a system that led to breathtaking innovation in transistors, chips, computers, phones, devices and Web services;

A great overview of the history of the computer and the Internet. There are other books that cover some of this history in more detail and accuracy, but none as accessible to the uninitiated. The book starts with Lady Lovelace and ends with Ginni Romett's leading IBM into a future of human and computer symbiosis with programs like Watson.

A great overview of the history of the computer and the Internet. There are other books that cover some of this history in more detail and accuracy, but none as accessible to the uninitiated. The book starts with Lady Lovelace and ends with Ginni Romett's leading IBM into a future of human and computer symbiosis with programs like Watson.

Originally airport reading - amazed me in the end. Once I came over an article on the Internet; I guess it was on Fortune speaking about the fortune 500 CEOs which book they value most. It was saying that about 30% of them named Good to Great and Innovators got some honorable mention getting about 15% of the votes. The thing that author, got admiration of Elon Musk for Franklin and Einstein biographies and after he was approached by Steve Jobs to write his biography he would have got access to practically anyone. So I took an advantage and bought it in the airport of Copenhagen choosing it over other more academic books like Blue Ocean Strategy etc. Although there is possibility that you might think the book was written from the leftover notes that weren't used in the Jobs book it is a good starting place to understand the context of the information age. I really enjoy making highlights when reading than I go through the highlights and while typing them it makes me remember some stuff better.• First it was daughter of Byron – Ada who found that numbers of cogs can be interpreted in a way different than just mathematical entities.• 1937 would become annus mirabilis of the computer age, and the result would be triumph of four properties, somewhat interrelated, that would define modern computing: digital, binary, electronic, general purpose• at Bell Labs they decided to use the system of logic, formulated ninety years earlier by the British mathematician George Boole. • Atanasoff – tale is evidence that we should not in fact romanticize such loners. He never got his machine to be fully functional. Had he been at Bell Labs, amid swarms of technicians and engineers and repairmen, or at a big research university, a solution would likely have been found for fixing the card reader as well as the other balky parts of his contraption. There would have been team members left behind to put on the finishing touches, or at least to remember what was being built.• A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way, but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience. – Einstein.• A physicist is the one who’s concerned with truth; an engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done. – Eckert• ENIAC – electronic numerical integrator and computer – hundred feet long and eight feet high; filling the space of what could be a modes three-bedroom apartment;• Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution Eckert was not shy about micromanaging.• Ideal computer is a machine that is electronic, general purpose and programmable; - ENIAC completed by Prosper Eckert and John Mauchly in November 1945 was the first machine to incorporate the full set of traits of a modern computer;• Starting with Charles Babbage the men who invented computers focused primarily on hardware. But the women who became involved in WWII saw early on the importance of programming, just as Ada Lovelace had.• The locus of technological innovation according to IBM was the corporation. The myth of the lone radical inventor working in the laboratory or basement was replaced by the reality of teams of faceless organizational engineers contributing incremental advancements.• What may seem like creative leaps – the Eureka moment – are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies and engineering methods ripen together.• One night the machine conkd out -… they found a moth with wingspan of four inches that had gotten smashed in one of the electromechanical relays – first actual case of being found – from then on – debugging the machine;• Computer innovators like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they stuck in their ways, the same traits that make them inventive such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along. Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and focused, yet he dazzled and baffled colleagues by suddenly changing his mind when he realized he needed to think different.• Women of ENIAC showed the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware.• If mentally superhuman race ever develops, the hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller once said its members will resemble Johnny von Neumann • Neumann was an amazing combination of a very brilliant man who knows that he’s brilliant but at the same time is very shy and modest about presenting his ideas to other people• The thing that von Neumann had which other geniuses have is the ability to pick out in a particular problem the one crucial thing that’s important• The sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other rather than as bolts out of the blue.• In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.• There was downside to the patent protection given to hardware innovation: the proprietary model produced companies that were so entrenched and defensive they would miss out on the personal computer revolution in the early 1070s;• Xerox PARC and other corporate research satellites that followed, Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents ere brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they could have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters. That was the upside. The downside was that these were big bureaucracies under corporate thumbs; Bell Labs, like Xerox PARC, showed the limits of industrial organisations when they don’t have passionate leaders and rebels who can turn innovations into great products;• Kelly’s mission was to make innovation something that an industrial organization could do on a regular basis;• Shockley: it takes many men in many fields of science, pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one new device;• It is in the mind of single person that creative ideas and concepts are born;• It became clear that there was a lot that the theorists, engineers and metallurgists could learn from one another.• Creative energy generated by physical proximity;• Old physicist joke: they knew the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?• Transistor was one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. It came from the partnership of a theorist and an experimentalist working side by side, in a symbiotic relationship, bouncing theories and result back and forth in real time. It also came from embedding them in an environment where they could walk down a king corridor and bump into experts who could manipulate the impurities in germanium or be in a study group populated by people who understood the quantum-mechanical explanations of surface states, or sit in a cafeteria with engineers who knew all the tricks for transmitting phone signals over long distances. – transistor – by switching the device in and out, a distinct gain in speech level could be heard;• Bell Labs was cauldron of innovation . in addition to the transistor, it pioneered computer circuitry, laser technology, and cellular telephony. It was however less good at capitalizing on its inventions. As part of a regulated company that had a monopoly on most phone services, it was not hungry for new products, and it was legally restrained from leveraging its monopoly to enter other markets. In order to stave off public criticism and antitrust actions, it liberally licensed its patents to other companies. For the transistor, it set a remarkably low fee, $25,000 for any company that wanted them, and it even offered seminars explaining manufacturing techniques.• Like Steve Jobs, Haggerty was able to project a reality distortion field that he used to push people to accomplish things they thought impossible; Transistors were sold to the military 16$ apiece, but in order to break into a consumer market Haggerty insisted that his engineers find a way to make them so that they could be sold for less than $3.• Haggerty made the deal in June 1945 and typically insisted that the device be on the market by that November. It was.• The seeds were planted for a shift in perception of electronic technology, especially among the young. It would no longer be province for only big corporations and the military. It could also empower individuality, personal freedom, creativity and even a bit of rebellious spirit.• One problem with successful teams , particularly intense ones is that sometimes they break up. It takes special type of leader – inspiring yet also nurturing, competitive yet collaborative – to hold such teams together.• Another skill of great team leaders is the ability to instill a nonhierarchical esprit de corps.• Shockley setting up company in California;• Some leaders are able to be willful and demanding while still inspiring loyalty. They celebrate audaciousness in a way that makes them charismatic. • Many transformative innovators have been similarly stubborn about pushing a new idea, but Shockley crossed the line from being visionary to being hallucinatory;• Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right. If Shockley’s diode had proved practical, or if he had evolved it into an integrated circuit he may have again been regarded as visionary.• A key challenge for managers is how to strike a balance between being collegial and being decisive – you need to get calibration precise;• You’re better of to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years;• Because computers had to be made small enough to fit into rocket’s nose cone, it was imperative to find ways to cram hundreds and then thousands of transistors into any devices. – the result was an integrated circuit, also known as microchip;• Noyce and Kilby of Texas Instruments declared as inventors of microchip.• The nearly simultaneous advances of the time was primed for such an invention;• Killby’s humility when getting Nobel Prize: when I hear that kind of thing it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: No, I did not build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine;• One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is inventing popular ways to use these devices – idea TI hit upon was after radio pocket calculators;• Pattern for electronic devices: every year things got cheaper, smaller, faster, more powerful. Computer and microchip industry growing together – same happened half a century earlier when auto industry and oil industry was growing together. There is key lesson to innovation: understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.• Cramming more components onto integrated circuits• Moore’s law – remained true for 50 or so years – creating one of the greatest bursts of innovation and wealth in human history;• Low price for microchips would stimulate demand, high-volume production, and economies of scale – that would turn Moore’s law into reality;• When Noyce called Arthur Rock who had put together the financing deal that launched Fairchild Semiconductor Rock asked what took you so long?• Arthur Rock had helped to build something that was destined to be almost as important to the digital age as the microchip: venture capital – he was more into people than their ideas and the thing they were doing – personalities were making him to make decision. Stanford’s provost Fred Terman seeking ties with technology boom was helping Rock in understanding electronics with his professors.• Innovations come in a variety of guises. There arose Intel innovation that had almost as of much of an impact on the digital age as microchip. It was invention of a corporate culture and management style that was antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.• Already Dave Packard understood it was good to give his workers flexible hours and plenty of leeway in determining how to accomplish their objectives.• Grove of Intel felt honest confrontation was not only a managerial duty but one of life’s invigorating spices• Noyce when drew organizational chart for an employee he draw X in the center and than other X around it saying the X was employee.• It was culture of meritocracy; it was not corporation it was congregation;• Andy grove – brutal honesty, clear focus, and e demanding drive for excellence.• Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only paranoid survive.• Name Silicon Valley started with Dan Hoefler of Electronic News in 1971• Like the Bushnell of Atari many entrepreneurs had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.• Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy to turn it into a successful product.• A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.• Triangular relationship between government, industry and academia;• Licklider – father of internet as such – decentralized to make it less vulnerable against attacks;• Most true geniuses –kepler, newton, Einstein, steve jobs – have instinct for simplicity;• Xerox PARC- the best way to predict the future is to invent it;• Homebrew Computer Club – started on 5.3.1975 Menlo Park Garage• Public awareness crucial for innovation • Hobbyists paying for altair sending checks in a town they can not pronounce – that how much they wanted it;• Gates was nerd before the term was invented;• Computer terminal was for gates what a toy compass was to baby Einstein;• Gates wanted to price the product so low that computer producers should never think of having their own software;• Bushnell telling Jobs: pretend to be completely in control and people will assume you are;• Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc spreadsheet helped popularize Apple;• IBM could have everything Microsoft made although they did not make anything yet-as said by Gates• Gates – in fact our tagline in our ad had been we set the standard but when we did in fact set the standard our anti-trust lawyers told us to get rid of that. It’s one of those things you can use only when it’s not true.• Greatest innovations would come not from the people who created breakthroughs but who applied them usefully.• Conception is just first step what matters is execution;• In 1981 Apple had revenues 334 mln $ Microsoft 15 mln$;• Torvalds felt he was following in the footsteps of centuries of scientists and other academics who built their work on the foundations of others. I also wanted feedback – okay and praise. It did not make sense to charge people who could potentially help improve my work.• The tradition of forming voluntary associations, found in all societies, was especially strong in early America.• Everybody esp hackers want to impress the peers, improve their reputation, elevate their social status – open source programming is giving them that chance• According to Wales the best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them not because you want them to.• But to Stallman your motivation was also important – ultimate purist;• Windows and Mac, UNIX and Linux, iOS and Android a variety of approaches competed over decades spurring each other on – and providing a check against any one model becoming so dominant that it stifled innovation;• Internet a federal project –funded by public money initially that paid of overwhelmingly.• Limitations of what you could do with a computer was just limitations of your imaginations;• Even about Oxford Tim Berners Lee said that they did not have that same ripe community and cultural mix that was at the Homebrew and in Silicon Valley;• WWW – Lee wanted creative space like sandpit;• Andreessen of Mosaic knew one of the secrets of digital-age entrepreneurs: he fanatically heeded user feedback and spent time on internet newsgroups soaking up suggestions and complaints;• Andreessen said bitcoin back in 1990s would be better;• To get people on your blog : stay casual, get personal, be provocative.• Connecting to community is one of the basic desires that drive the digital world;• Wikipedia – imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it; - result the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history; there is something primordial in it – wikipedians calling it wiki-crack;• Page wanted to avoid be like Tesla – looking for funding; leadershape-encouraged students to hav healthy disregard for the impossible. • Page wanted to be like professor who has one foot in industry and wants to do crazy stuff that’s world-breaking. Stanford led the way as an incubator also – among companies wpawned by Stanford were Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems – then Google. • Page and Brin said going to Montessori school as a more important factor – I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently.• Both Brin and Page were rejected by MIT• Page had a dream on what if he could download whole web – he added you have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set; - he called the project backrub;• According to Page user is never wrong – that what they told him at AltaVista that he was doing it all wrong;• Google is playing with googol but googol.com was taken and the guy refused to sell;• The guy that did something similar and than left to China and founded Baidu Yanhong Li• Stanford not only permitted students to work on commercial endeavors it encouraged and facilitated it. There was even an office to assist with the patenting process and licensing arrangements.• Bechtolsheim: other web sites took a good chunk of venture funding and spent it on advertising, this was opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.• Brin: process might seem automated but in terms of how much human input goes into the final product, there are millions of people who spend time designing their webpages, determining who to link to and how, and that human element goes into it.• Microchips allowed computers to become small enough to be personal appliances, and packet-switched networks allowed them to be connected as nodes on a web;• HAL of 2001 remains as mirage, always about twenty years away;• Computers today are brilliant idiots. – IBM research director• Gates: eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system;• The strategy of combining computer and human capabilities, of creating a human-computer symbiosis, turned out to be more fruitful that the pursuit of machines that could think on their own;• Future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers;• Creativity is collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.• Talented federal bureaucrats – not always oxymoron.• Digital theorists and hackers often disparage this approach but a private enterprise system that financially rewarded invention was a component of a system that led to breathtaking innovation in transistors, chips, computers, phones, devices and Web services;

A beautiful tale of the history of the Digital Age. At many points during the book, I made my mind to give this 5 stars. But I plucked 2 stars mainly for 2 reasons:1) Too much stress on Collaboration:He tries to convince that collaboration is the only thing that fosters creativity and innovation, which I partly believe. There have been many instances in history where brilliant ideas and innovations have come up when innovator secluded himself from the distractions of the groups. (Read, 'When Collaboration Kills Creativity' chapter in Susan Cain's 'Quiet'). I think Isaacson should have looked into that perspective as well.2) Too much stress on Human-Computer Symbiosis: Currently, Human-Computer Symbiosis works better than AI, agreed. But this is because current AI is still in its infancy. Issacson's view on AI is myopic (as is expected from someone who is not working in this field) and he's just trying to extend his collaboration (bullshit?) towards the future of AI (and thereby belittling it?). Human-Computer Collaboration will work well only to a certain extent. When Artificial General Intelligence is quite mature in the future, there's no way you can derive that conclusion.

I enjoyed the book in terms of information and knowledge; I learned a lot of detail that I did not previously know. And I really agreed with the team dynamic vs individual narcissists who appear as their own heroes all through the book. I know one or two! When one is changing the world by leading a new thing, one needs to believe in one's mission. The Vision vs Operations person is well defined. The author gives good insight in to what drives different individuals; especially Lovelace/Babbage, Roberts/Taylor, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz.The author has a tendency to repeat which got somewhat tiring over time. He reminds me of a lecturer who has taught the same course too many times and likes the sound of their own voice.The book was well researched. The first half of the book dealt with a long span of years from Babbage, Lovelace and co. through to WW2 whereas the second half dealt with way more detail where a lot of those mentioned will be consigned to history's scrapheap in future. So in that sense I found the book unbalanced and struggled to stay interested in the finish. I get the sense that the author wanted to show the human side of the internet but I think that it could have been done 20% more efficiently. Some interesting phrases:23% (big ideas)defining theme of the digital age: technology making devices personal.32% (people being less pigeon-holed in the past)psychologist and technologist,32% (renaissance man)He had an instinct for spotting talent in all fields, arts as well as sciences, but he felt that it was most easy to discern in its purest forms, such as the brushstroke of a painter or the melodic refrain of a composer. He said he looked for the same creative strokes in the designs of computer or network engineers.39% (experimental ism)Yes, the Trip Festival’s conjunction of drugs, rock, and technology—acid and a.c. outlets!—was jarring. But it turned out to be, significantly, a quintessential display of the fusion that shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets, music, art, and engineering.43% (driving to get somewhere not knowing where it is)“The technology of electronics promised something I apparently wanted greatly—communication outside the hierarchical structure of the family.”43% (win-win marriage of 2 things loved)I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information flow.”43% (risk taker)Felsenstein put a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb that read, “Renaissance Man, Engineer and Revolutionist, seeking conversation.”44% (nerds)Popular Electronics, which was to the Heathkit set what Rolling Stone was for rock fans.47% (Bill Gates)For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized a monthlong summer internship he had done in Congress. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math.48% (Gates again with a practical problem - determination)“A day or two later, this smart sophomore comes into my office and explains that he’s got a five-thirds N algorithm.” In other words, Gates had figured out a way to do it with five-thirds flips per pancake in the stack.53%“Mathematics has something in common with poetry,” he later said. “It’s made out of these true relationships, true steps, true deductions, so it has this beauty about it.”54% (loner in a group)“Hackers are also motivated, in large part, by the esteem they can gain in the eyes of their peers by making solid contributions. . . .55%“anyone encouraging idealism today faces a great obstacle: the prevailing ideology encourages people to dismiss idealism as ‘impractical.’ ”55% (Linus T)“I have always thought that idealistic people are interesting, but kind of boring and scary.”55% (Linus T)“I don’t like single-issue people, nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and white are very nice or ultimately very useful. The fact is, there aren’t just two sides to any issue, there’s almost always a range of responses, and ‘it depends’ is almost always the right answer in any big question.”55%“The street finds its own uses for things,”55%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.”56%As the Internet goes through different cycles—it has been a platform for time-sharing, community, publishing, blogging, and social networking—there may come a time when the natural yearning that humans have for forging trusted communities, akin to corner bars, will reassert itself, and The WELL or startups that replicate its spirit will become the next hot innovation.63% (great image)“Imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it”64%“commons-based peer production.”64%When Justin Hall created his quirky home page in January 1994, there were only seven hundred websites in the world. By the end of that year there were ten thousand, and by the end of the following year there were 100,000.67% (artificial intelligence - author does the different between augmented and artificial intelligence well) The Perceptron still does not exist.68%“Computers today are brilliant idiots,”68%Douglas Hofstadter, a professor at Indiana University, combined the arts and sciences in his unexpected 1979 best seller, Gödel, Escher, Bach.70%Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design.70%Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.”70%The converse to this paean to the humanities, however, is also true. People who love the arts and humanities should endeavor to appreciate the beauties of math and physics, just as Ada did.70%“the two cultures,” science and the humanities.70%“poetical science.”

A nice history of some of the key players in the history of modern computing. On the plus side, the book correctly credits most major technological progress not to the action of a small number of heroes working alone, but to teams of people building off each others' ideas. It also does a good job of showing the role of women, government funding, theoretical research, open source development, and many other aspects of technological development, whereas other narratives usually omit one or more of these. On the negative side, to get through so much history, the book only gives you a neat, clean, saran-wrapped glimpse at most of the stories, and overlooks some important stories entirely. I prefer Isaacson's books that focus on a single person (e.g. Steve Jobs), as that lets you see just how messy, chaotic, and sometimes downright accidental innovation really is. In short, this book is a nice TLDR of computing history, but if you find a story that intrigues you, you'll have to dig deeper to really appreciate it.

An insightful look at those crazy nerds who gave us the internet and heralded the Digital Revolution. If you liked Isaacson's other books about Ben Franklin and Einstein, then you should really like this one as well.(A great book to read along with this is Digital Destiny by Shawn Dubravac.)

After writing a biography of Steve Jobs, the late and enigmatic leader of Apple's drive for aesthetic and technological superiority over competitors, it makes sense that the author would seek to write a collaborate and somewhat dishy book that sought to deal with the sprawling subject of technological innovation in the world of computing that starts in the early 19th century and continues to the contemporary period.  The approach has considerable merit, not least that the author is knowledgeable about the subject and has done a great deal of research into it, and also that the author has some serious points to make about the culture of innovation that is well worth understanding and appreciating.  Although I must admit I found some aspects of this picture of innovation to be unappealing, I did find it instructive the way that the author discussed the culture of innovation that led to the digital revolution and why it appears (with reason) that this culture acts in such a biased and leftist fashion in the enforcement of community standards.  For that alone this book is worth the hefty read, even if one has little interest in the people who have been responsible for the digital revolution throughout the decades.This book consists of twelve chapters over nearly 500 pages of text that seeks to convey the sweeping epic of technological innovation in the computing world.  The author begins with Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, and explores her personal life and her contributions to computing along with those of her contemporaries like Babbage (1).  After that the author moves on to the development of the computer and the various controversies over prior invention (something that continues on through the course of the book) as well as the insights of people like Turing (2).  The author then looks at early programmers, pointing to the role of women in these efforts (3).  The author returns to hardware concerns with a chapter on transistors (4) and the microchip (5), examining the way that multiple parties were seeking the same solutions simultaneously and working collaboratively.  This leads to a short chapter on video games that looks at the early role of Atari (6), before the author discusses the public-private collaborations that led to the internet (7).  The author discusses various struggles to develop the personal computer (8) and the savvy recognition on the part of Bill Gates that software would be important in making it work (9).  The author then looks at the importance of AOL in helping people get online (10) and the early development of the worldwide web (11) that has led to a world where human beings and computers can work together profitably, perhaps for a long while to come (12).There are a few valuable insights that this book provides.  The author offers a defense of Al Gore's role in promoting the internet, discusses the vital importance of left-wing counterculture elements in fostering an environment that encouraged personal computing, and discusses fights over the question of community property or corporate profit that have surfaced time and time again.  The author makes a strong case for a role of government in creating public goods like the infrastructure of the internet that can serve for the well-being of people in the United States and around the world.  The author's discussion of the marked left-wing bias of many involved in the world of Silicon Valley and personal computing in general can help the reader understand the politically biased nature of the behavior of companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which routinely attack conservative perspectives while turning a blind eye to leftist excesses.  By wrestling with the political nature of innovation, the author has done the reader a great service even if his definition of innovation is quite a bit more narrow than one would want.

The Innovators is a book about how ideas rub against one another & how individuals and teams have been able to innovate in the past century or so to bring us to where we are today: writing a review on a book-aggregator website about an e-book read on a kindle device. It deals with the historical details and anecdotes of computing as well as with what it takes to innovate. It's also a collection of brief biographies of the most important individuals who made the digital revolution happen.

A Bit of a Slog at Times, But Worth Carrying On The scope of this work is so comprehensive that it could easily have gone across many volumes. At times I feel that Isaacson gets over-burdened with details and names, which tend to race by - especially in telling the story of the early years of computing. I found that the book becomes much more readable as time goes on and we approach the modern era. I, for one, learned a few things - even about events that I was alive for and aware of.