Technology
by Walter Isaacson
Who invented the computer?
Ask who invented the computer, or the internet, and there's no single name to give. Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs and Einstein, traces the digital revolution from the 1840s to Google to find out who really made it happen.
Hear a sample · read by Laura
John Atanasoff built an early electronic computer in Iowa, with one graduate student to help. It never fully worked, and was abandoned when he left for wartime work. ENIAC, built by a large team at the University of Pennsylvania, went into service. Big breakthroughs, Isaacson finds, usually need a team.
Isaacson keeps finding pairs and trios. Someone with a big idea teams up with someone who can build it. At Intel, Robert Noyce inspired people, Gordon Moore mastered the science and Andy Grove ran the place with a hard hand. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak.
Isaacson argues that many of the greatest innovators stood where the humanities meet technology. Lovelace joined her mother's love of mathematics with her father's poetry. Over a century later, Steve Jobs said Apple lived at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.
Lovelace wrote that the Analytical Engine couldn't originate anything, only do what we knew how to order it to do. Alan Turing later called this Lady Lovelace's Objection. Isaacson sides with J.C.R. Licklider's idea of people and computers working in partnership, each doing what it does best.
Teams
The digital age was built by teams of people working together, far more than by lone geniuses.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace saw, back in 1843, that computing machines could work with more than numbers.
ENIAC
Women wrote the first programs for ENIAC, but for years they got little credit.
Bell Labs
The transistor came out of Bell Labs, where physicists and engineers worked side by side.
The microchip
Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce each came up with the microchip, months apart.
A story from the book
Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, translated an article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and added notes far longer than the article. She saw it could work with any symbols, even music, and set out steps for it to calculate Bernoulli numbers. She called her approach poetical science.
Hot take · true or myth?
The first people to program ENIAC were women.
True. A group of women mathematicians, including Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder, worked out how to program it. Isaacson notes that for decades they were left out of the story.
One thing to try
Think of an idea you've been sitting on. Isaacson's innovators rarely got far alone. Noyce had Moore, and Jobs had Wozniak. Write down the skill you lack most, name one person who has it, and message them this week.
Knotd has the key ideas from 250+ non-fiction books, each in a few minutes, in plain words. The Innovators comes with a Hot Take round to make it stick.
Get the whole book on KnotdOpen in the appWho invented the computer? Ask who invented the computer, or the internet, and there's no single name to give. Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs and Einstein, traces the digital revolution from the 1840s to Google to find out who really made it happen.
Teams beat lone geniuses; Visionaries need engineers; Art meets science; Humans with machines.
Think of an idea you've been sitting on. Isaacson's innovators rarely got far alone. Noyce had Moore, and Jobs had Wozniak. Write down the skill you lack most, name one person who has it, and message them this week.
Yes. Knotd has the key ideas from The Innovators in a few minutes, in plain words, plus a Hot Take round to test them. It's one of 250+ non-fiction books in the app.
