The Innovators: Exploring How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Revolutionized the Digital Age

Carol Wilson: This book skilfully sorts out a very great number of facts over a long period of history. For those of us who remember what seemed at the time to be the start of the digital revolution in the mid-eighties, it is fascinating to see the dots joined on the digital journey starting with Lord Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace, who visualised plans for the first computer, including the back-story to all the famous and less-famous names along the way, including Turing, Jobs, Gates et al.

United Kingdom on Oct 01, 2023

Samuel Valdes: Amazing book! It tells the history and insights with great details about tech innovations on our last century. A must read for any tech enthusiast or innovator!

United States on Sep 27, 2023

William Orr: A great biographer. He edits and lays out his work well.

United States on Sep 11, 2023

A. P. Hatcher: Good in-depth reports on the people who brought us into the age of technology.

United States on Aug 27, 2023

David Tillemans: A must read about a history of the development of the computer and the internet in an understanding language. He left things out, but gives a nice overview about the innovation and impact of the computer technology, which we take for granted today.

Germany on Aug 26, 2023

Herve Lebret: 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 computer

I was a little more cautious with chapter 2 as I have...

United States on Oct 06, 2015

Horace Lu: 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...

United States on Jan 20, 2015

Khyati Shah: Watson Isaacson, the author whose last book was one of the best-selling biography — Steve Jobs, has come up with another block-buster. A superb book that very well articulates the historical timeline that resulted in today’s virtually shrinking world.
The book encapsulates everything besides the history of technology and computers, which is needed to be great leader, visionary and innovator. The biographic content presentation of the book embarks the journey from 1800’s, stopping at most remarkable stations where innovations were happening or were in process of being conceived. Watson’s ability to provide us just enough interesting insights of the life of these great dignitaries makes this book more fun and leaves you curious for more at the best. You cannot help but wander into constant guesswork to find out more about the personalities you leave behind.
The entire book seems like a journey in a locomotive steam engine powered train which gradually converts to a bullet train — symbolical change from Differential Engine to present day tablet computers. Each chapter is like a time station, that is fun to hop out from the train to explore; for you will be waiting to...

India on Jan 02, 2015

Dave: As someone who was there in the early days of the PC, I enjoyed this book.

Given that the author has set himself the more-or-less impossible task of telling the full story of the "digital revolution" from the Victorians up to the present day, he does a good job, especially as he's also set himself the task of concentrating on team effort as much as individual pioneers. Sometimes this becomes rather breathless in a "Game of Thrones" kind of way - you meet a new character, read their mini-biography, and are just starting to get the idea of who they are when they get killed off (or at least drop out of sight) two pages later, but I suppose this is inevitable given that any one of his chapters could easily be made a full book.

The most irritating feature of the book is fan-boy drivel about the "visionary genius" of Steve Jobs, which can plumb depths of silliness "Most true geniuses (Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and even Steve Jobs, to name a few)" - GET A GRIP MAN!!! In general he seems to value the contribution of the "visionary" who says "Hey let's build a computer out of goose poo!" over the engineer who spends the next several years up to his arse in poo making it...

United Kingdom on Nov 23, 2014

jmattei: An excellent overview of the developmental steps that brought us to the state of technology we all enjoy today. The details of the oldest parts of the history were educational for me, especially Lady Ada's influence. I had heard all the names but the details of their various contributions, the great leaps and wasted potential were equally interesting. I lived through and participated in a fair amount of this journey; I used the earliest IBM word processing systems that relied on magnetic tapes. I started working in IT when COBOL was the standard programming language, Hayes built my modems and 1200 baud was "the bomb", Smalltalk was my first dial-up software and DARPA Net was the only real inter-network (as we now understand the term) in the world. I built my first Ethernet on "Bell" wire and had to order NIC's from the only manufacturer who produced cards with on-board transceivers. Xerox PARC supplied the first NOS and protocols I ever used (Novell Netware), TCP/IP wasn't there yet.

The book took me back. I worked with real collaborators to invent and implement innovative uses of the new technologies. We had to understand how the mechanics worked so we could imagine what...

Canada on Nov 20, 2014