The Innovators by Walter Isaacson is a great book because of its balanced description of the role of geniuses or disruptive innovators as much as of teamwork in incremental innovation. “The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central their skill is to innovation. […] But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how today’s technology evolution was fashioned.” [Page 1] He also goes deeper: “I also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by the government spending and managed by a military-industrial collaboration. Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.” [Page 2] ”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.” [Page 5]

The computer

I was a little more cautious with chapter 2 as I have the feeling that the story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage is well known. I may be wrong. But chapter 3 about the early days of the computer was mostly unknown to me. Who invented the computer? Probably many different people in different locations in the US, the UK and Germany, around WWII. “How did they develop this idea at the same time when war kept their two teams isolated? The answer is partly that advances in technology and theory made the moment ripe. Along with many innovators, Zuse and Stibitz were familiar with the use of relays in phone circuits, and it made sense to tie that to binary operations of math and logic. Likewise, Shannon, who was also very familiar with phone circuits, would be able to perform the logical tasks of Boolean algebra. The idea that digital circuits would be the key to computing was quickly becoming clear to researchers almost everywhere, even in isolated places like central Iowa.” [Page 54]

There would be a patent fight I did not know about. Read pages 82-84. You can also read the following on Wikipedia: “On June 26, 1947, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the first to file for patent on a digital computing device (ENIAC), much to the surprise of Atanasoff. The ABC [Atanasoff–Berry Computer] had been examined by John Mauchly in June 1941, and Isaac Auerbach, a former student of Mauchly’s, alleged that it influenced his later work on ENIAC, although Mauchly denied this. The ENIAC patent did not issue until 1964, and by 1967 Honeywell sued Sperry Rand in an attempt to break the ENIAC patents, arguing the ABC constituted prior art. The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota released its judgement on October 19, 1973, finding in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand that the ENIAC patent was a derivative of John Atanasoff’s invention.” [The trial had begun in June 1971 and the ENIAC patent was therefore made invalid]

I also liked his short comment about complementary skills. “Eckert and Mauchly served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision; Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved.” [Pages 74-75]

Women in Technology and Science

It is in chapter 4 about Programming that Isaacson addresses the role of women. “[Grace Hopper] education wasn’t as unusual as you might think. She was the eleventh woman to get a math doctorate from Yale, the first being in 1895. It was not at all uncommon for a woman, especially from a successful family, to get a doctorate in math in the 1930s. In fact, it was more common than it would be a generation later. The number of American women who got doctorates in math during the 1930s was 133, which was 15 percent of the total number of American math doctorates. During the decade of the 1950s, only 106 American women got math doctorates, which was a mere 4 percent of the total. (By the first decade of the 2000 things had more than rebounded and there were 1,600 women who got math doctorates, 30 percent of the total.)” [Page 88]

Not surprisingly, in the early days of computer development, men worked more in hardware whereas women would be in software. “All the engineers who built ENIAC’s hardware were men. Less heralded by history was a group of women, six in particular, who turned out to be almost as important in the development of modern computing.” [Page 95] “Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women. « Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer. » It happened because a lot of women back then had studied math and their skills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: the boys with their toys thought that assembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a man’s job. « American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today, » Jennings said. « If the ENIAC’s administration had known how crucial programming would be to the functioning of the electronic computer and how complex it would prove to be, they might have been more hesitant to give such an important role to women.” [Pages 99-100]

The sources of innovation

“Hopper’s historical sections focused on personalities. In doing so, her book emphasized the role of individuals. In contrast, shortly after Hopper’s book was completed, the executives at IBM commissioned their own history of the Mark I that gave primary credit to the IBM teams in Endicott, New York, who had constructed the machine. “IBM interests were best served by replacing individual history with organizational history,” the historian Kurt Beyer wrote in a study of Hopper. “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.” In the IBM version of history, the Mark I contained a long list of small innovations, such as the ratchet-type counter and the double-checked card feed, that IBM’s book attributed to a bevy of little-known engineers who worked collaboratively in Endicott.

The difference between Hopper’s version of history and IBM’s ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit. It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovations. Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM’s Endicott facility. This latter approach tries to show that 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. Neither way of looking at technological advancement is, on its oqn, completely satisfying. Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.” [Pages 91-92]

Google about Disruptive and Incremental Innovation

This is very similar to what I read about Google: “To us, innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas. Since “novel” is often just a fancy synonym for “new”, we should also clarify that for something to be innovative, it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising. If your customers are asking for it, you aren’t being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive. That’s a good thing, but it’s not innovative. Finally “useful” is a rather underwhelming adjective to describe that innovation hottie, so let’s add an adverb and make it radically useful, Voilà: For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.” […] “But Google also releases over five hundred improvements to its search every year. Is that innovative? Or incremental? They are new and surprising, for sure, but while each one of them, by itself is useful, it may be a stretch to call it radically useful. Put them all together, though, and they are. […] This more inclusive definition – innovation isn’t just about the really new, really big things – matters because it affords everyone the opportunity to innovate, rather than keeping it to the exclusive realm of these few people in that off-campus building [Google[x]] whose job is to innovate.” [How Google Works – Page 206]

In a classic retelling of the story of digital revolution, Isaacson makes broader comments on the importance of collaboration and tries to de-romanticize the notion of innovation happening as a series of significant breakthroughs emanating from lone geniuses. In that sense, one could see that themes introduced in Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World are (deliberately or not) explained well in the context of digital revolution. More specifically, the often 'incremental' nature of innovation, significant gaps between others realize the importance of someone's invention, impact of developments in unrelated fields, and the very nature of collaboration. Later on in the book, Isaacson quotes Twitter co-founder "....they simply expand on an idea that already exists". The author also makes an important point in reminding that corporations (IBM, Intel,Bell labs, Honeywell..etc) played a significant role in these developments, but their stories oftentimes unfairly gets discounted in the face of narratives centered around individuals.

Trying to balance interpretive historical narration and cataloging key details pertinent to the digital revolution, Isaacson weaves a (mostly) linear complex storyline starting with Ada to more recent topics such as IBM's Jeopardy machine. Throughout these often dense chapters, a patient reader is able to understand the core tenets of computers, programming, and the Web itself - and how they evolved over time. The calibration, refinement, and sometimes negation of these ideas over time, as with most understanding in science we take for granted, is well-documented and very informative. The fairly long chapters on computers and programming could test the patience of a reader early on, but these chapters lay the foundation for the chapters describing the dramatic growth seen in the past few decades.

One could argue that books such as The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internetnumerous biographical sketches of Ada Lovelace, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (Sloan Technology Series) covered some of these topics with greater technical and/or biographical depth. However, most of these attempts have been stymied by a crucial fault - they all told history from a single point-of-view. In this book, there is no protagonist per se. That approach provides the author a dispassionate approach that allows for more incisive analysis, though he doesn't necessarily capitalize on it. Discussions on who should be given credit for the first computer is a rare example where the author manages to inject his own analysis.

Given the vast research that went into this book and access to some of the key technology leaders of the time, one wishes the author attempted to predict the next few decades or hypothesize on what's required to make the next few steps in this field. Leveraging Ada's story to begin and end the narration gives a unique sense of closure for the reader - and a very stark reminder that despite all the advances we've seen so far, we are still far away from machines that can think (this last chapter (shortest and succinct), aptly titled 'Ada Forever' is one of the better-written chapters). The hype-less narration, systematic building of the key concepts, doing a good job in relating the developments across decades and tracing an investigative path to where we are, makes this a very compelling read for anyone interested in technology. 4.5 stars

(Kindle version on iPad app worked great; though the layout of the photographs and the initial detailed timeline with rare pictures are much better in the hardcopy. It would've been great if the timeline at the outset of the book was available as a pullout)

Customer Review

5.0 out of 5 stars The Digital Revolution-The Interface of Arts and Sciences., Feb. 21 2015

By

Stewart Paulson

This review is from: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Hardcover)

Isaacson introduces a significant number of personalities who contributed to the recent digital revolution - Often people who had been minimized or unrecognized historically for their contributions. According to Isaacson, the digital industry was a product of teamwork, brainstorming between dynamic individuals, who worked closely together, focusing on new and better products and services for the consumer. According to Isaacson the digital age evolved at the interface of the arts and sciences. Isaacson gives credit to many of the historically unrecognized women for their significant contribution in programming. He starts by recognizing Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who back in 1840 stated that machines could be programmed to perform numerous variable activities - and hence Ada was the first to recognize the potential for extending the mind through machines by programming, only to be limited by human needs and imagination. Isaacson recognizes the contribution of women in the movement of the computer program instructions into the computer as well as the role of women in development of many new programming languages as software. Isaacson's book attributes the rapid development of the digital technology to the participation by multiple facets of society such as government, the private sector and volunteers from all walks of life. Isaacson attributes rapid progress of digital innovation to the close and frequent interaction between hackers, geniuses and nerds.

Mr. Isaacson talks about the role of open sourcing and blogging and their significance the present digital progress. He describes the ARPNET and Internet and their early problems, early solutions and rapid expansion and the role of government in facilitating internet development. The arts and humanities recognized the natural drivers of community and ensured that they were included in the new products and services, the necessity of attractive design of products, and friendly applications. They recognized tie between the mind and machinery as an expansion of the human mind and the computer and internet as an extension of the need to to relate. Science has brought about the implementation of logic and calculation capability of the machinery with speed and efficiency.

The book simply reinforces that logic can get us from a to b but imagination can get us anywhere. It also reminds us that vision without implementation is often hallucination, recognizing applied science, such as engineering and computer science, as important contributors, fundamental to the digital paradigm shift.

The author provides the history of artificial intelligence and the limitations of artificial intelligence. Aden Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter) premise of1840,s that machines can not think, but can only follow the instruction they are given by humans stands as true today, as in the 1840s, when she first proposed the idea. Isaacson explains that the human mind is much more complex , is beyond binary, and operates digitally and analogue. Creativity, Innovation, Empathy, Emotion, Sensitivity, Imagination and Morality still belong to the mind along with Consciousness and many other other human attributes. Without an understanding of Imagination the potential for artificial intelligence to mimic the human mind remains limited. Artificial intelligence is faced with many of the same questions it faced decades ago. Many view and opinions on this are discussed.

Isaacson's book is well written as usual, highly objective, extremely fair to a wide variety of the historically inadequately credited individuals,and recognizant of the female contribution to the digital revolution. It is well written, captures your interest throughout and is very informative. I highly recommend Isaacson's book.

The changes in how people used technology, just The Innovators said, has been and will be made step by step. Given this “step-by-step” feature and the complexity in each step, it was done in a collaborative fashion. “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,” said Walter Issacson, the author.

The fundamental shift in the fashion of innovation brought fundamental shift in how people should think and behave. The situation, in American physicist William Shockley’s words, “there’s only one light bulb to go on in somebody’s head,” is no more.

His collaboration with other scientists significantly developed semi-conductor. However, he was ruined by the mindset that “there’s only one light bulb to go on in somebody’s head”. In his case, he thought the only light bulb was in his head. He fell into the meaningless battle for getting credit for inventions, became paranoia and was away from most of his friends and family - his children reportedly learned from his death through media.

Shockley was living in the transition period from one mindset to another. When he was carried into the new period by time when achievements are collaborative, his mind was still living in the past.

As what we are going to do was becoming more and more gigantic, any achievement now has been more of a beehive – everyone has his or her part. Steve Jobs was great, but it was simply impossible for him to design iPhone, which has thousands of patents and hundreds of thousands of applications at App Store, completely by himself. He wouldn’t have iPhone if there were no Motorola or Ericsson. IPhone would also not be so perfect if there were no Tim Cook.

Had Shockley learned that he had been just supporting others as others had been supporting him, he might have made more contributions to science, and maybe, I would have embraced One Drive five years earlier.

Given the complexity of our jobs, we must learn how to share our ideas and our honor with many “light bulbs.” But having many light bulbs doesn’t necessarily make beauty. It may only add to the light pollution. We need to make them 1) shine; 2) shine in harmony 3) shine in beauty. If they don’t’ shine in beauty, no one would be willing to pay for the electricity. To shine in beauty, we need to make them shine in harmony, and to have some sort of harmony, we must need to make sure every bulb in our box is able to shine well.

Human beings are much more complicated than light bulbs. A productive team has to be in good relations within, but we cannot just program how they “shine” like light bulbs. We need to take into consideration many more factors. We have to make team members be able to do what they are good at and make sure they are happy.

It brings serious managerial challenges. That’s perhaps why good innovators’ stories fall onto charismatic people with good educational background, good working experiences and good personality. And they, of the right types and complementing abilities, have to come together at the right time and right place. If we alter their names, we might well develop a romantic story.

Individuals are not important compared to be a massive project, but to make a massive project work, we need so many good people. It appears contradictory, but actually not. Truly good people in modern times should be aware that individual talents would only be valuable in a group project, and instead of living in Boyzone in which one takes the lead, they would prefer Backstreet Boys mode where everyone is equally important.

It is easier said than done to share the light with others, given their hard-cultivated talents, but that’s also why only a small proportion of people in the world could be documented as innovators, whether the innovation is big or small.

I am not a technician, but there are lessons I could draw from this book. News production is also in its own time of transition. Where is it heading?

I don’t read the New York Times now; instead, I read Wall Street Journal bogs, Vice and Buzzfeed. Why? Does it represent something? And if everybody around me is doing the same, how should I prepare for the change? As a journalist, what mindsets should I have and abandon? And if I were to have a small team, what team members should I recruit and how I should keep them together?

Innovators not only talk about how the digital age evolves. It also provides illustrates how a transitional period works and provides many successful and unsuccessful examples. Many products are doomed to be forgotten because they are inherently unable to keep up with the new trend. Cassette tapes would never be digital in any form, and CDs would never be as portable as a MP3 player. But human-beings are different. They are not inherently unable to change their minds. The issue is not “can” or “cannot” but how hard it is to make it happen and how motivated people are to make those changes.

I still remember my mother’s instructions on the day that I made my first phone call. “Wally,” she said, “pick up the phone and listen for the operator to say ‘Number, please?’”

That was 1952. It was also the year when Grace Hopper developed the first computer compiler and a computer predicted the winner of a presidential election. We’ve sure come a long way since then.

My telephone story didn’t make Walter Isaacson’s book, The Innovators: How A Group of Hackers, Geniuses, And Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, but Grace Hopper’s story did, and so did the story of that UNIVAC computer that predicted the outcome of the presidential election. If you like stories of human ingenuity, and you’re interested in how we got to where we are today in technology, this is the book for you.

Walter Isaacson is an amazing writer and a great storyteller. The book is a selection of stories, beginning back in 1843 with Ada Lovelace, right down to almost the present day with the stories of Wikipedia and IBM’s Watson computer beating the experts on Jeopardy!

There are stories about people that I’m sure you’ve heard of, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Steward Brand. There are also stories of people who aren’t as well-known to the general public.

You’ll read about Paul Baran, who devised the packet-switching technology that makes the internet possible. There’s the story of Ray Tomlinson, who gets credit for creating the first email program. You’ll learn about the powerful influence that World War II had on the development of technology. You’ll trace the genealogy of important tech companies, from Bell Labs through Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel. You’ll learn how George Boole’s system of using algebra for logical reasoning (1847) was used by Claude Shannon almost a century later.

I’ve got a special perspective on this book stories because I’ve been fascinated with technology since I was young, and because I was “present at the creation” when computers were moving from kits to finished goods and computing was changing from mainframe systems to client-server systems. I have first-hand experience with some of the people and situations described in this book, and by and large, Isaacson got them all right.

In A Nutshell

If you’re interested in the history of technology and how we got to where we are today, rendered in well-told, accurate stories, you’ll want to read The Innovators: How A Group of Hackers, Geniuses, And Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.

As an introduction to the ethos and personalities who created the modern digital revolution era, The Innovators is a success. Even though extremely light on the actual science and engineering of computers (there isn't a single line of code) and necessarily brief about the major personalities of its one hundred fifty year odd history, the book does convey a good sense of the similarities among the luminaries of computing.

Isaacson, always interested in what makes some people truly significant and others merely dreamers or money makers, focuses on the need for sensitivity to the ability of computers to complement, instead of replace, human intelligence. He also observes that the major figures in computing were able to blend insights from the humanities and sciences and tended to work in close collaboration with others. The myth of the lonely creative genius turns out, at least in computing, to be mostly a myth.

The book travels rather well trodden ground and is not a book for those who want an understanding of the development of computer science. But if you are interested in sketches--almost universally positive as is Isaacson's style--of the major figures in computing along with a simple explanation as to why they're important, this book is a good purchase.

Isaacson's prose is easy to read--I read the whole book in less than day--which means that the book is not only a worthy exercise in lifetime learning but a pleasurable experience as well. I would have preferred more technical descriptions of computer science but I work in data analytics so my opinion may not accord with the majority of readers.

Somewhat simplistic, too universally positive but still an interesting survey of the major figures in computing. Not life changing but I can think of worse ways to spend nine hours than reading a work with as interesting a subject and as polished prose as this book.

I decided, upon finishing the book, to give it five stars minus - the minus reflects some reservations I have.

The book has several themes, the most important is the COLLECTIVE nature of great inventions that are different of scientific discoveries that may be based on previous discoveries but usually made by one scientist.

Of course, in the times of Byron and his daughter, the issue of a computing machine was so new that the collective consisted only of Ada and Babbage.

Actually, even more than hundred years later, the collectives remained rather small: Gates and Allen, two Apple Steves, etc.

I was most impressed by the truly collective efforts that are still very much alive: the Wikipedia. I never attempted to edit it although, apparently, I can do it now. I do not have any plans to do so.

Just for the record, I am very, very old MSc in Computer Science, New York University 1982. TCP/IP protocol did not exist in 1982 and Isaacson explains it rather well. I did not know that there was more than just one TCP/IP protocol (Arpanet) originally and the Internet merged them together.

The book is bit technical, not for people who, as the author points out, cannot distinguish between Basic and C++. That I can still do in my very old age and I still do some rudimentary programming in Visual Basic.

This is one of the best books I have read recently and I hope it will remain on the New York Times best seller list for a while.

I decided, upon finishing the book, to give her five stars minus - the minus reflects some reservations I have.

The book has several themes, the most important is the COLLECTIVE nature of great inventions that are different of scientific discoveries that may be based on previous discoveries but usually made by one scientist.

Of course, in the times of Byron and his daughter, the issue of a computing machine was so new that the collective consisted only of Ada and Babbage.

Actually, even more than hundred years later, the collectives remained rather small: Gates and Allen, two Apple Steves, etc.

I was most impressed by the truly collective efforts that are still very much alive: the Wikipedia. I never attempted to edit it although, apparently, I can do it now. I do not have any plans to do so.

Just for the record, I am very, very old MSc in Computer Science, New York University 1982. TCP/IP protocol did not exist in 1982 and Isaacson explains it rather well. I did not know that there was more than just one TCP/IP protocol (Arpanet) originally and the Internet merged them together.

The book is bit technical, not for people who, as the author points out, cannot distinguish between Basic and C++. That I can still do in my very old age and I still do some rudimentary programming in Visual Basic.

This is one of the best books I have read recently and I hope it will remain on the New York Times best seller list for a while.

I recently finished reading The The Innovators and I really liked it. The book can be described as a series of biographical sketches of the dozens of figures who had partial responsibility for bring about the digital age - from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and their mechanical computer in the 1800’s to the founders of Google. Isaachsen does a good job of teasing out the strong personalities of these innovators, but he also manages to use a few themes to draw the book together. First and foremost, Isaachsen stresses the importance of collaboration in essentially all important innovations - dispelling the myth of the lone genius.

Almost all the biographical portraits the author presents, come in pairs or triplets. People of differing temperaments, background, and skill-sets manage to find each other and create something important. Jobs had Woz, Gates had Allen, and Moore had Noyce Unsurprisingly, many of those collaborations were short-lived as egos and differences caused splits. The author does mention a couple of lone-inventors, but they only serve to reinforce the story. They may have had a great idea, and even a good start to an innovation - but without the right surroundings and collaborators, it often didn’t lead to anything lasting.

In the final chapter, Isaachsen also takes the chance to speculate on how technology and computers will continue to evolve, and gives new meaning to his collaboration theme. He begins with the fears that computers will become so powerful and intelligent that they will become a threat to humankind - like HAL in 2001 space odyssey or Skynet of The Terminator films. Isaachsen rightfully downplays this idea. He gives a nice anecdote about chess-playing computers. Deep Blue by IBM managed to beat the best human player in the world already in 1997 - a digital generation ago. Yet he notes that in tournaments where players are free to enter in collaboration with a computer - it is not the best computer or the best human, nor even the combination of both that wins. Instead it is often a combination of computers and people who are savvy about using them.

The point he leaves the reader with is that those that are best able to make use of computers will be best placed to succeed in a world with ever more computing power. This has some important implications for a lot of fields, but especially education. I was fortunate enough to have several programming courses available to me in high school - 15 years ago. But when I started college, there was no requirement for taking a computing course of any kind - and I studied math! Nor did any requirements to take a computer science courses exist when I studied Economics and Management Science at the graduate level, even though both fields increasingly rely on programming skills. As The Innovators compellingly lays out, computing and programming are becoming essential skills in the modern world - the education system is lagging badly.

Article livré sans problème, à temps et en parfait état.

la qualità costruttiva del libro era decente. sono arrivato come nuovo

Konsept olarak hesap yapabilen makineden başlayıp yanlış hatırlamıyorsam 2010'lara kadar ana başlıklar halinde "bilgisayarı kim icat etti" sorusunu ele alan bir kitap. Türkçe'sini çok beğenerek okumuştum. İngilizce alıştırması olması için İngilizce'sini de aldım. Konuya ilgisi olan herkese bu kitabı ve aynı yazarın Steve Jobs biyografisini tavsiye ederim.

book feels new, however sadly and unfortunately, the cover is damaged

What a journey through the history of computer innovation. Walter highlights the strengths and flaws of the heroes and heroines, and the recurrent themes across many of history’s great computer breakthroughs.