The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

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The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Book Detail

Hardcover: 560 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (October 7, 2014)
Language: English

ISBN-10: 147670869X
ISBN-13: 978-1476708690
Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.6 x 9.2 inches

Many books have been written about Silicon Valley and the collection of geniuses, eccentrics, and mavericks who launched the “Digital Revolution”; Robert X. Cringely’s Accidental Empires and Michael A. Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning are just two excellent accounts of the unprecedented explosion of tech entrepreneurs and their game-changing success. But Walter Isaacson goes them one better: The Innovators, his follow-up to the massive (in both sales and size) Steve Jobs, is probably the widest-ranging and most comprehensive narrative of them all. Don’t let the scope or page-count deter you: while Isaacson builds the story from the 19th century–innovator by innovator, just as the players themselves stood atop the achievements of their predecessors his discipline and era-based structure allows readers to dip in and out of digital history, from Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, to Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, to Tim Berners-Lee and the birth of the World Wide Web (with contextual nods to influential counterculture weirdos along the way). Isaacson’s presentation is both brisk and illuminating; while it doesn’t supersede previous histories, The Innovators might be the definitive overview, and it’s certainly one hell of a read.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Book Synopsis

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.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Book Review

‘The Innovators’ is a serial biography of a number of highly creative scientists and engineers since the 1840s who gave us the Third Industrial Revolution – transistors, microchips and microprocessors, programmable computers and their software, PCs, and the graphic interface. In turn, those innovations set the stage for video games, the Internet, search engines, Wikipedia, and touchscreens. One important conclusion – the most important digital advances have been made by teams and collaboration, not lone geniuses, and founded on incremental improvements over time. Creative people and ideas, however, are not enough. Isaacson also points out the contributions of necessity (eg. wars), and venture capital.

AT&T’s Bell Labs during and after WWII was a great ‘idea factory,’ per Isaacson; other examples include Xerox’s PARC (possibly the origin of most electronic innovations in the 1970s – the ethernet, ENIAC, the mouse, and graphical user interface), the Manhattan Project at wartime Los Alamos, Intel, Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken, , pre-Microsoft Bill Gates and Paul Allen (BASIC, DOS), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage (an 1830s punched-card-driven computer).

The book opens with a fascinating and detailed description of the amazing Lovelace/Babbage computer 100 years ahead of its time, needing scores of technological advances to implement. Another early predecessor described was Hollerith’s punch card tabulator used to automate the 1890 Census (took one year, instead of the customary eight); the company he founded became IBM in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions. In between came Lord Kelvin and James Thomson’s ‘harmonic synthesizer’ that could perform integration (calculus). Get online The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution today.