The Innovators
How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
-
-
3.9 • 293 Ratings
-
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a “riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving” (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the internet.
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?
The Innovators is a masterly saga of collaborative genius destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution—and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. Isaacson begins the adventure 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 is “a sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age” (The New York Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The history of the computer as told through this fascinating book is not the story of great leaps forward but rather one of halting progress. Journalist and Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson (Steve Jobs) presents an episodic survey of advances in computing and the people who made them, from 19th-century digital prophet Ada Lovelace to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. His entertaining biographical sketches cover headline personalities (such as a manic Bill Gates in his salad days) and unsung toilers, like WWII's pioneering female programmers, and outright failures whose breakthroughs fizzled unnoticed, such as John Atanasoff, who was close to completing a full-scale model computer in 1942 when he was drafted into the Navy. Isaacson examines these figures in lucid, detailed narratives, recreating marathon sessions of lab research, garage tinkering, and all-night coding in which they struggled to translate concepts into working machinery. His account is an antidote to his 2011 Great Man hagiography of Steve Jobs; for every visionary or three (vicious fights over who invented what are ubiquitous) there is a dogged engineer; a meticulous project manager; an indulgent funder; an institutional hothouse like ARPA, Stanford, and Bell Labs; and hordes of technical experts. Isaacson's absorbing study shows that technological progress is a team sport, and that there's no I in computer. Photos.
Customer Reviews
Love of the Machine
This book is amazing. I was up until all hours of the night reading, reading, reading & learning, learning, learning. The interconnectedness of the world & how rapidly it is increasing is amazing. To see what has happened to technology since I bought my 1st IBM computer in 1982 for $3450 with two 10 megabit (yes, megabit) hard drives & how it has gotten here continues to amaze me. Mr Isaacson enthralled me.
The Innovators
The latest from Mr. Isaacson has a bit too much biography on each of the "innovators" and quite thin on explanations and backgrounds of the tech aspects of each innovation. Recommended for history and biography buffs; not for geeks.
Being There or What You Missed
If you lived through the time period that Walter Isaacson so well writes about (as I have), you are going to be amazed with how far and quickly we have progressed and how we got here. Those of you that came into this timeline after it began, you will be amazed with what you missed experiencing.
If you were directly involved with “computers” during this time period (as I was), it is so very interesting to see what we missed that was happening while we used this “new” technology.
A great read!