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

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 computerI 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 ScienceIt 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 InnovationThis 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]

Ordered for my son who is in the industry and he thought it was a great read.

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.

good book recommend it but didn't mention all the hackers and geeksnot very much to any mention of Paul Allen and Jody Allen

We have all heard of the famouse people that have driven electronic products for the masses in recent years. This book also highlights the unsung heroes that also made contributions either as individuals of more importantly as part of a team. Improvements in electronics that everyone now takes for granted has been done incrementally over many years with very few earth shattering individual moments. As with cars we didn't go from a Model T Ford to a modern Formula 1 car overnight. A lot of small improvements happened in between.

Walter has an open and engaging style that engages immediately. I have found myself quoting and sending quotes from the kindle version of this book to my family more than on anything else I have read. Thanks for bringing together art and science and highlighting the fantastic opportunities ahead of us if we work with artificial intelligence instead of competing with it.Well worth a read.P.S. The section on Wiki’s also encouraged me to write this review and contribute, very convincing!

Not sure how this oversight made it through but the system that first took the flat screen and touchscreen idea into actual use is left out here. University of Illinois's Plato, as well as a terminal was also a networked system that at one time was briefly larger than the Arpanet and certainly more open. I mean, there's a chapter on the Internet! Come on! Otherwise a good book.

What a wonderfully connected storytelling - Isaacson really takes you through the various branches of innovations that have led to the digital life we have today. Without getting boring for a second, he walks one through an interconnected culture of hackers that was intent on prodding things, often producing results that they didn't set out to get.My one gripe with the narrative is that it does get a little repetitive at times from a format perspective (new tech -> innovator -> childhood and growing up -> what led to the innovation etc) but that can hardly be avoided in a book of this nature.The fact that he starts from Ada Lovelace and Babbage and takes us all the way through to the present day in one book is really incredible.

Great whistlestop history of the milestones that have allowed us to reach great heights as a species. Also refreshing to see the common themes of collaboration and the way all innovation is the tip of an ever growing stack of innovations that came before it. A real human team effort. Final point, I did a computer science degree in the 90's and something this book shows which my degree didn't is the massive contribution the ladies made to the field even back in the beginning when they were generally discouraged from dabbling in what was considered a man world. Long Live Ada!