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

Customer Review 5.0 out of 5 stars The Digital Revolution-The Interface of Arts and Sciences., Feb. 21 2015 By Stewart Paulson This review is from: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Hardcover) Isaacson introduces a significant number of personalities who contributed to the recent digital revolution - Often people who had been minimized or unrecognized historically for their contributions. According to Isaacson, the digital industry was a product of teamwork, brainstorming between dynamic individuals, who worked closely together, focusing on new and better products and services for the consumer. According to Isaacson the digital age evolved at the interface of the arts and sciences. Isaacson gives credit to many of the historically unrecognized women for their significant contribution in programming. He starts by recognizing Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who back in 1840 stated that machines could be programmed to perform numerous variable activities - and hence Ada was the first to recognize the potential for extending the mind through machines by programming, only to be limited by human needs and imagination. Isaacson recognizes the contribution of women in the movement of the computer program instructions into the computer as well as the role of women in development of many new programming languages as software. Isaacson's book attributes the rapid development of the digital technology to the participation by multiple facets of society such as government, the private sector and volunteers from all walks of life. Isaacson attributes rapid progress of digital innovation to the close and frequent interaction between hackers, geniuses and nerds. Mr. Isaacson talks about the role of open sourcing and blogging and their significance the present digital progress. He describes the ARPNET and Internet and their early problems, early solutions and rapid expansion and the role of government in facilitating internet development. The arts and humanities recognized the natural drivers of community and ensured that they were included in the new products and services, the necessity of attractive design of products, and friendly applications. They recognized tie between the mind and machinery as an expansion of the human mind and the computer and internet as an extension of the need to to relate. Science has brought about the implementation of logic and calculation capability of the machinery with speed and efficiency. The book simply reinforces that logic can get us from a to b but imagination can get us anywhere. It also reminds us that vision without implementation is often hallucination, recognizing applied science, such as engineering and computer science, as important contributors, fundamental to the digital paradigm shift. The author provides the history of artificial intelligence and the limitations of artificial intelligence. Aden Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter) premise of1840,s that machines can not think, but can only follow the instruction they are given by humans stands as true today, as in the 1840s, when she first proposed the idea. Isaacson explains that the human mind is much more complex , is beyond binary, and operates digitally and analogue. Creativity, Innovation, Empathy, Emotion, Sensitivity, Imagination and Morality still belong to the mind along with Consciousness and many other other human attributes. Without an understanding of Imagination the potential for artificial intelligence to mimic the human mind remains limited. Artificial intelligence is faced with many of the same questions it faced decades ago. Many view and opinions on this are discussed. Isaacson's book is well written as usual, highly objective, extremely fair to a wide variety of the historically inadequately credited individuals,and recognizant of the female contribution to the digital revolution. It is well written, captures your interest throughout and is very informative. I highly recommend Isaacson's book.

In a classic retelling of the story of digital revolution, Isaacson makes broader comments on the importance of collaboration and tries to de-romanticize the notion of innovation happening as a series of significant breakthroughs emanating from lone geniuses. In that sense, one could see that themes introduced in Where Good Ideas Come From and How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World are (deliberately or not) explained well in the context of digital revolution. More specifically, the often 'incremental' nature of innovation, significant gaps between others realize the importance of someone's invention, impact of developments in unrelated fields, and the very nature of collaboration. Later on in the book, Isaacson quotes Twitter co-founder "....they simply expand on an idea that already exists". The author also makes an important point in reminding that corporations (IBM, Intel,Bell labs, Honeywell..etc) played a significant role in these developments, but their stories oftentimes unfairly gets discounted in the face of narratives centered around individuals. Trying to balance interpretive historical narration and cataloging key details pertinent to the digital revolution, Isaacson weaves a (mostly) linear complex storyline starting with Ada to more recent topics such as IBM's Jeopardy machine. Throughout these often dense chapters, a patient reader is able to understand the core tenets of computers, programming, and the Web itself - and how they evolved over time. The calibration, refinement, and sometimes negation of these ideas over time, as with most understanding in science we take for granted, is well-documented and very informative. The fairly long chapters on computers and programming could test the patience of a reader early on, but these chapters lay the foundation for the chapters describing the dramatic growth seen in the past few decades. One could argue that books such as The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company , Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet numerous biographical sketches of Ada Lovelace, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (Sloan Technology Series) covered some of these topics with greater technical and/or biographical depth. However, most of these attempts have been stymied by a crucial fault - they all told history from a single point-of-view. In this book, there is no protagonist per se. That approach provides the author a dispassionate approach that allows for more incisive analysis, though he doesn't necessarily capitalize on it. Discussions on who should be given credit for the first computer is a rare example where the author manages to inject his own analysis. Given the vast research that went into this book and access to some of the key technology leaders of the time, one wishes the author attempted to predict the next few decades or hypothesize on what's required to make the next few steps in this field. Leveraging Ada's story to begin and end the narration gives a unique sense of closure for the reader - and a very stark reminder that despite all the advances we've seen so far, we are still far away from machines that can think (this last chapter (shortest and succinct), aptly titled 'Ada Forever' is one of the better-written chapters). The hype-less narration, systematic building of the key concepts, doing a good job in relating the developments across decades and tracing an investigative path to where we are, makes this a very compelling read for anyone interested in technology. 4.5 stars (Kindle version on iPad app worked great; though the layout of the photographs and the initial detailed timeline with rare pictures are much better in the hardcopy. It would've been great if the timeline at the outset of the book was available as a pullout)

Fascinating, worthwhile reading about the history of the internet.

Article livré sans problème, à temps et en parfait état.

la qualità costruttiva del libro era decente. sono arrivato come nuovo

Konsept olarak hesap yapabilen makineden başlayıp yanlış hatırlamıyorsam 2010'lara kadar ana başlıklar halinde "bilgisayarı kim icat etti" sorusunu ele alan bir kitap. Türkçe'sini çok beğenerek okumuştum. İngilizce alıştırması olması için İngilizce'sini de aldım. Konuya ilgisi olan herkese bu kitabı ve aynı yazarın Steve Jobs biyografisini tavsiye ederim.

book feels new, however sadly and unfortunately, the cover is damaged

What a journey through the history of computer innovation. Walter highlights the strengths and flaws of the heroes and heroines, and the recurrent themes across many of history’s great computer breakthroughs.