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

Walter Isaacson “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” Simon & Schuster, 2014, 488 pps  

Isaacson is an author worth following.  Before this book, he wrote the biography of Steve Jobs, a book I reported on some time ago.  Now he has written The Innovators, another book well worth the reader’s time, documenting the digital revolution of today.  This revolution is comparable to the earlier Industrial Revolution in which the steam engine, mechanical loom, and telegraph transformed the nineteenth century in much the same way the computer, microchip, and Internet have transformed the later 20^th and beginning 21^st centuries.  We are living through the Digital Revolution.  This Revolution is told through the accomplishments of many individuals and those they collaborated with.  In most instances, the Digital Revolution involved groups of people rather than just individuals.

The book is historically organized by chapters on specific digital technologies—“The Computer,” “Programming,” “The Microchip,” “Video Games,” “The Internet,” etc.  Of course, the book covers people like Gates and Jobs and their contributions.

My Notes:

Pg. 217:  The Internet was built by a partnership of the military, universities, and private corporations.  During and after WWII, these three groups fused together into an iron triangle: the military-industrial-academic complex.

Pg. 253:  The Apple II was the first personal computer to be simple and fully integrated, from the hardware to the software.  It went on sale in 1977 for $1,298 and within three years 100,000 of them were sold.

Pg. 403:  In 1986, then senator from Tennessee, Al Gore launched a congressional study that looked at creating supercomputer centers, interconnecting the various research networks, increasing their bandwidth, and opening them up to more users.  He later followed up with detailed hearings that led to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 and the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act of 1992.  These allowed commercial networks, such as AOL, to connect with the research network run by the National Science Foundation, and hence to the Internet itself.  When vice president, Gore pushed the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993, it made the Internet widely available to the general public.  It’s a mark of our political discourse today that one of the significant nonpartisan achievements on behalf of American innovation got turned into a punch line because of something that Gore never said—that he “invented” the Internet.  He did say he took the initiative in creating the Internet—which, inelegant, is true.

Pg. 427:  By 2014 there would be 847 million blogs in the world.

Pg. 444:  At the beginning of 2014, there were 287 language editions of Wikipedia with a total number of articles of 30 million, with 4.4 million in English.