THE INNOVATORS ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON Steve Jobs American Sketches Einstein: His Life and Universe A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas) Pro and Con Free Download ebook: http://freebookss.com http://freebookss.com HOW A GROUP OF HACKERS, GENIUSES, AND GEEKS CREATED THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION http://freebookss.com http://freebookss.com First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014 A CBS COMPANY Copyright © 2014 by Walter Isaacson This book is copyright under the Berne Convention No reproduction without permission All rights reserved The right of Walter Isaacson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 1st Floor 222 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8HB www.simonandschuster.co.uk Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Excerpts from “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company All rights reserved Photo research and editing by Laura Wyss, Wyssphoto, Inc., with the assistance of Elizabeth Seramur, Amy Hikida, and Emily Vinson, and by Jonathan Cox Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui ISBN: 978-1-47113-879-9 Ebook: 978-1-47113-881-2 The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given Corrections may be made to future printings Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY http://freebookss.com CONTENTS Illustrated Timeline Introduction CHAPTER Ada, Countess of Lovelace CHAPTER The Computer CHAPTER Programming CHAPTER The Transistor CHAPTER The Microchip CHAPTER Video Games CHAPTER The Internet http://freebookss.com CHAPTER The Personal Computer CHAPTER Software CHAPTER 10 Online CHAPTER 11 The Web CHAPTER 12 Ada Forever Acknowledgments Notes Photo Credits Index http://freebookss.com THE INNOVATORS http://freebookss.com 1800 1843 Ada, Countess of Lovelace, publishes “Notes” on Babbage’s Analytical Engine 1847 George Boole creates a system using algebra for logical reasoning 1890 http://freebookss.com The census is tabulated with Herman Hollerith’s punch-card machines 1931 Vannevar Bush devises the Differential Analyzer, an analog http://freebookss.com hockley’s search for replacement for, ref1, ref2 ail, Theodore, ref1 alentine, Don, ref1n eblen, Oswald, ref1, ref2 enrock Associates, ref1 enture capital, ref1, ref2, ref3 deo games, ref1, ref2, ref3 rtificial intelligence and, ref1 ietnam War, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 inge, Vernor, ref1 irtual Community, The (Rheingold), ref1 isiCalc, ref1, ref2, ref3 itruvian Man, ref1 on Meister, William Ferdinand, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 on Neumann, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 I work of, ref1, ref2 omic bomb work of, ref1 eath of, ref1n oldstine’s first meeting with, ref1 ngularity coined by, ref1 n stored memory, ref1 ored-program computer work of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 on Neumann, Klára, ref1, ref2 on Neumann, Nicholas, ref1 Waldrop, Mitchell, ref1 http://freebookss.com Wales, Ada, ref1 Wales, Jimmy, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Wall Street Journal, ref1, ref2 Wang, ref1 War Department, U.S., ref1, ref2, ref3 Warnock, John, ref1 Washington, George, ref1 Washington Post, ref1, ref2 Watson (computer), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Watson, Dr John (char.), ref1 Watson, Thomas (Bell’s assistant), ref1, ref2 Watson, Thomas, Jr (IBM chief), ref1 Watson, Thomas, Sr (IBM founder), ref1 Wavy Gravy, ref1 Wayne, Ron, ref1 eather patterns, ref1 eather predictions, ref1 eaving looms, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 WebCrawler, ref1 Weiland, Ric, ref1, ref2 WELL, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Wellington, Duke of, ref1, ref2 Wells Fargo, ref1 Wescoff, Marlyn, ref1 Westinghouse, ref1, ref2, ref3 WhatsApp, ref1 What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), ref1, ref2, ref3n http://freebookss.com Whitney, John Hay “Jock,” ref1 Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Whole Earth communalists, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Who Owns the Future? (Lanier), ref1 Wiener, Norbert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Wiesner, Jerome, ref1, ref2 WiFi, ref1n Wigner, Eugene, ref1 Wikipedia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 reation of, ref1 WikiWikiWeb, ref1, ref2 Wilkes, Maurice, ref1, ref2 Williams, Evan, ref1, ref2, ref3 Williams, Frederic Calland, ref1 Wilson, Woodrow, ref1 Windows, ref1, ref2, ref3 Winer, Dave, ref1 Winograd, Terry, ref1, ref2 Wired, ref1n, ref2, ref3 Wojcicki, Susan, ref1 Wolfe, Tom, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 omen: s ENIAC programmers, ref1, ref2 math doctorates received by, ref1 ord processing, 2467 Wordsworth, William, ref1 http://freebookss.com World Book Encyclopedia, ref1, ref2 World Health Organization, ref1 World’s Fair (1939), ref1 World War II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ode breaking in, ref1 cience promoted by, ref1 destroyed in, ref1, ref2 World Wide Web, ref1, ref2 erner-Lee’s collaborative vision of, ref1, ref2, ref3 nitial creation of, ref1 laced in public domain, ref1, ref2 rofits from, ref1, ref2 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ref1 Wozniak, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4n, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 pple partnership share of, ref1 reakout work of, ref1, ref2 rminal designed by, ref1 anadu, ref1, ref2 erox, ref1 erox Alto, ref1, ref2 erox PARC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 thernet invented at, ref1 erox Star, ref1 Mosaic, ref1 http://freebookss.com ahoo!, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ang, Jerry, ref1 ouTube, ref1 1, ref1 2, ref1 3, ref1, ref2 naimer, Sam, ref1 uckerberg, Mark, ref1 use, Konrad, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 nfluence of, ref1, ref2 http://freebookss.com ABOUT THE AUTHOR Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine He is the author of Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and is the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made He and his wife live in Washington, DC http://freebookss.com ENDNOTES It was in a review of this book that one of Babbage’s friends, William Whewell, coined the term scientist to suggest the connection among these disciplines Specifically, he wanted to use the method of divided differences to closely approximate logarithmic and trigonometric functions Named after the seventeenth-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, who studied the sums of powers of consecutive integers, they play an intriguing role in number theory, mathematical analysis, and differential topology Ada’s example involved tabulating polynomials using difference techniques as a sub-function, which required a nested loop structure with a varying range for the inner loop For the equation an + bn = cn, in which a, b, and c are positive integers, there is no solution when n is greater than Every even integer greater than can be expressed as the sum of two primes http://freebookss.com A process in which a number is divided by if it is even, and is tripled and the result added to if odd, when repeated indefinitely, will always eventually lead to a result of By then Atanasoff had retired His career after World War II had been spent in the field of military ordnance and artillery, not computers He died in 1995 John Mauchly remained a computer scientist, partly as a consultant with Sperry and as the founding president of the Association for Computing Machinery He died in 1980 Eckert likewise remained with Sperry much of his career He died in 1995 Stirling’s formula, which approximates the value of the factorial of a number 10 The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to highlight her role and that of the programmers 11 Von Neumann was successful in this The plutonium implosion design would result in the first detonation of an atomic device, the Trinity test, in July 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and it would be used for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the uranium bomb was used on Hiroshima With his hatred of both the Nazis and the Russian-backed communists, von Neumann became a vocal proponent of atomic weaponry He attended the Trinity test, as well as later tests on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, and http://freebookss.com he argued that a thousand radiation deaths was an acceptable price to pay for the United States attaining a nuclear advantage He would die twelve years later, at age fifty-three, of bone and pancreatic cancer, which may have been caused by the radiation emitted during those tests 12 In 1967, at age sixty, Hopper was recalled to active duty in the Navy with the mission of standardizing its use of COBOL and validating COBOL compilers By vote of Congress, she was permitted to extend her tour beyond retirement age She attained the rank of rear admiral, and finally retired in August 1986 at age seventy-nine as the Navy’s oldest serving officer 13 The U.S Constitution empowers Congress “to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive Right to their respective writings and discoveries.” The U.S Patent and Trademark Office throughout the 1970s generally would not grant patents to innovations whose only departure from existing technology was the use of a new software algorithm That became murky in the 1980s with conflicting appeals court and Supreme Court rulings Policies changed in the mid-1990s, when the DC Circuit Court issued a series of rulings permitting patents for software that produces a “useful, concrete and tangible result” and President Bill Clinton appointed as head of the Patent Office a person who had been the chief lobbyist for the Software Publishing Industry 14 At Christmas 2013 Turing was posthumously granted a formal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II http://freebookss.com 15 For example, the engineers and theorists discovered that silicon (which has four electrons in its outer orbit) that was doped with phosphorus or arsenic (which have five electrons in their outer orbits) had spare electrons and thus was a negative-charged carrier The result was called an n-type semiconductor Silicon that was doped with boron (with three electrons in its outer orbit) had a deficit of electrons—there were “holes” where some electrons would normally be—and thus was positively charged, making it known as a p-type semiconductor 16 His son Fred Terman later became the famous dean and provost at Stanford 17 For a short video of Shannon and his machines juggling, see https://www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/shortsha.mov 18 Only living people can be selected for a Nobel 19 The vehicle he used was convertible debentures, which were loans that could be converted into common stock if the company became successful but were worthless (at the end of the line of creditors) if it failed 20 Edward “Ned” Johnson III, then running the Fidelity Magellan Fund In 2013 Rock still had these two sheets, along with the older one seeking the patron for what became Fairchild, tucked in a filing cabinet in his office overlooking San Francisco Bay 21 After she married Noyce she had to leave Intel, and she moved to the fledgling Apple Computer, where she became Steve Jobs’s first http://freebookss.com director of human resources and also a calming maternal influence on him 22 A sample of Doc Smith’s prose, from his novel Triplanetary (1948): “Nerado’s vessel was completely ready for any emergency And, unlike her sister-ship, she was manned by scientists well-versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought Beams, rods and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed and stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant, coruscating incandescence Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of annihilation Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens.” 23 Three years later, in 1975, when Atari decided to build a home version of Pong, the venture capital industry had caught fire, and Bushnell was able to get $20 million in funding from Don Valentine, who had just founded Sequoia Capital Atari and Sequoia helped to launch each other 24 By 2010, federal spending on research had dropped to half of what was spent by private industry 25 The government has repeatedly changed whether there should be a “D” for “Defense” in the acronym The agency was created in 1958 as ARPA It was renamed DARPA in 1972, then reverted to ARPA in http://freebookss.com 1993, and then became DARPA again in 1996 26 A high-frequency transformer that can take ordinary voltage, like the 120 volts in a U.S outlet, and step it up to superhigh voltages, often discharging energy in cool-looking electrical arcs 27 It appeared the same month that he presented to President Truman his other groundbreaking essay, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which proposed the creation of a research collaboration among government, industry, and universities See chapter 28 The Xerox Star workstation was not introduced until 1981, eight years after the Alto was invented, and even it was not initially marketed as a stand-alone computer but as part of an “integrated office system” that included a file server, a printer, and usually other networked workstations 29 In 2014 Felsenstein was working on a toy/kit for middle school students that would be like an electronic logic board Lego set that would help students visualize bits, electronic components, and logic functions such as not, or, and and 30 When Wired magazine featured maker culture in its April 2011 issue, it put a woman engineer on its cover for the first time, the MITtrained do-it-yourself entrepreneur Limor Fried, whose moniker “ladyada” and company name Adafruit Industries were homages to Ada Lovelace 31 To listen to Dompier’s Altair play “Fool on the Hill,” go to http://freebookss.com http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=46 32 After they became successful, Gates and Allen donated a new science building to Lakeside and named its auditorium after Kent Evans 33 Steve Wozniak’s unwillingness to tackle this tedious task when he wrote BASIC for the Apple II would later force Apple to have to license BASIC from Allen and Gates 34 Reading a draft version of this book online, Steve Wozniak said that Dan Sokol made only eight copies, because they were hard and timeconsuming to make But John Markoff, who reported this incident in What the Dormouse Said, shared with me (and Woz and Felsenstein) the transcript of his interview with Dan Sokol, who said he used a PDP-11 with a high-speed tape reader and punch Every night he would make copies, and he estimated he made seventy-five in all 35 The lawyers were right to be worried Microsoft later was involved in a protracted antitrust suit brought by the Justice Department, which charged that it had improperly leveraged its dominance of the operating system market to seek advantage in browsers and other products The case was eventually settled after Microsoft agreed to modify some of its practices 36 By 2009 the Debian version 5.0 of GNU/Linux had 324 million source lines of code, and one study estimated that it would have cost about $8 billion to develop by conventional means http://freebookss.com (http://gsyc.es/~frivas/paper.pdf) 37 An Ethernet or WiFi today can transmit data at a billion bps, which is more than million times faster 38 Western Union later bought the business and turned it into its Mailgram service 39 A reference to the phrase used during the 1980 drama in which Americans were held hostage in Iran 40 Like the Web’s HTTP, Gopher was an Internet (TCP/IP) application layer protocol It primarily facilitated a menu-based navigation for finding and distributing documents (usually text-based) online The links were done by the servers rather than embedded in the documents It was named after the university’s mascot and was also a pun on “go for.” 41 A year later, Andreessen would join with the serially successful entrepreneur Jim Clark to launch a company called Netscape that produced a commercial version of the Mosaic browser 42 Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies incorporate mathematically coded encryption techniques and other principles of cryptography to create a secure currency that is not centrally controlled 43 In March 2003 blog as both a noun and a verb was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary http://freebookss.com 44 Tellingly, and laudably, Wikipedia’s entries on its own history and the roles of Wales and Sanger have turned out, after much fighting on the discussion boards, to be balanced and objective 45 Created by the Byte Shop’s owner Paul Terrell, who had launched the Apple I by ordering the first fifty for his store 46 The one written by Bill Gates 47 Gates donated to computer buildings at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon The one at Harvard, cofunded with Steve Ballmer, was named Maxwell Dworkin, after their mothers 48 The Oxford English Dictionary added google as a verb in 2006 49 A neuron is a nerve cell that transmits information using electrical or chemical signals A synapse is a structure or pathway that carries a signal from a neuron to another neuron or cell Free Download ebook: http://freebookss.com http://freebookss.com