Sub-title: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Before genealogy absorbed my attention, I spent time being a computer geek, a useful passion for my genealogy pursuits. This book chronicles the rise of the computer and internet revolution, from Ada Lovelace through Jobs, Gate, and the internet gurus of today. I re-lived the evolution of the machines and applications that I learned and used through out the late 70s, through the 80's and 90's. I found myself being nostalgic for the sound a a dial-up modem and the black c:> screen.
It took me forever to get through this, at least a couple months, as other books distracted me.
A thought I played with after reading multiple books by Isaacson is if an author has ever written a historical account of the evolution of housekeeping and the role of women in society.
Quotes:
"Using Hollerith's tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information...the company he founded became... IBM."
"Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters he [J Presper Eckert] once said. Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters."
"...the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources."
"...the sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other...questioning, listening, genly floating tentative proposals, articulating, and collating..."
"There was a key lesson for innovation: understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on."
"[talking about Steve Jobs using PARC] Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully."
"The hacker corps that grew up around GNS and Linux showed that emotional incentives, beyond financial rewards, can motivate voluntary collaboration."
"[Williams, founder of Blogger] Connecting into a community is one of the basic desires that drive the digital world."
"Having a healthy disregard for the impossible"
"Baidu, which became that country's [China's] largest search engine and one of Google's most powerful global competitors."
"...the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers."
Published: 2014 Read: April - June 2022 Genre: History
