About book The Innovators: How A Group Of Hackers, Geniuses And Geeks Created The Digital Revolution (2014)
A wonderful, behind-the-scenes looks at the ideas, contributions and conflicts that created the digital world we inhabit today. My children (from 20 to 25 years old) have a difficult time imagining a world without laptops, video games, pocket-sized cell phones, and being able to communicate almost instantly with almost anyone, anywhere...the pre-personal computer age might just as well be the age when dinosaurs walked the Earth. The innovators profiled by Isaacson are the movers and shakers, the brains and the brawn, that enabled all the amazing inventions we count on every day. Lovelace, Babbage, Von Neuman, Turing, Gates, Jobs, etc., some names we recognize, and many we don't, all had a piece in the great puzzle. But Isaacson is also careful to emphasize that many of the ideas and subsequent products were the result of group work, through company divisions as large as Bell Labs and XeroxPARC, to two-person teams such as Bill Gates and Steve Allen, or Jobs and Woz. Clearly, with computer science as technical as it is, some concepts have been simplified for the average reader to comprehend, but you still get a feeling for the complexity of the problems that needed to be solved to arrive at our current state of IT wonder. Highly recommended. This is well written. I'm familiar with much of it but there were always interesting new things. The only weak part is he doesn't seem to have much of an understanding of software. That's kind of a big weakness. Also, his focus on Ada is that she was in software. He could have given more information on the development of Fortran and C, since they are so basic. I don't think Bill Gates was very important in software either, more in terms of business.
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Enjoyed a book that pulls all my heros together in one book.
—red
A fantastic book. The best non-fiction book of the year.
—jovita
