Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.

This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.

For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.

Listening Length

17 hours and 28 minutes
Author

Walter Isaacson
Narrator

Dennis Boutsikaris
Audible release date

October 7, 2014
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster Audio
ASIN

B00M9KICAY
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	17 hours and 28 minutes
Author	Walter Isaacson
Narrator	Dennis Boutsikaris
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	October 07, 2014
Publisher	Simon & Schuster Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B00M9KICAY
Best Sellers Rank	#5,428 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1 in Digital Design (Books) #3 in History of Computers & Technology #3 in Computer & Technology Biographies

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Joshua

Yes, actually, you DID build that!

Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2018

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The overplayed hands of Ada Lovelace and Collaboration, constantly reinforced throughout the book, felt like Isaacson wanted to write the book around these points from the beginning.

While it’s true that the world’s greatest innovators were enabled by systems of collaborative support, the framing of it all in this book seemed so planned that it came across as dishonest. All the way to the end when the famous quote came up: ‘you didn’t build that’.

Certain people have a disproportionate impact on human advancement, and no matter how hard you try to replace the main course with a side dish, the main course is the main course. Give credit where credit is due, and that did not appropriately come out in this book.

Moving on to Harold Bloom’s, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds...

52 people found this helpful

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Mark Ellins

It is the Genesis of Hi-tech age with Rashi commentary

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2017

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As someone that grew up during the beginning of the high-tech age and then eventually working in and dedicating my life to high-tech, I found this book a fantastic eye-opener of how it all started. I love the stories about how these unique people, but also very lucky, helped bring us this modern phenomenon which has changed mankind. We haven’t seen this change since the invention of the wheel. Isaacson keeps each chapter focused on a specific subject and the flow is comprehensible and very interesting. He does not drill down into any deep technology nor does he waste of time with a lot of names that we will not remember. He focuses on the phenomena and how it led to the next stage in the high-tech story. I love his emphasis on collaboration as high tech is a group effort and not an individual one. I think he used the word “collaboration” at least 10,000 times 😊. My only comment is I think he needed far more graphs to better explain the technology. As he mentioned about Ada Lovelace, high-tech is also an art. Thus, explaining graphically would’ve brought that message home. But besides that small critique, whoever is in high-tech or even those that are interested in it, will truly enjoy this easy-to-read history.

5 people found this helpful

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SFO Alan

One of his best books.

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2018

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This book very well describes the earliest days of the computer, the era before the PC which I knew very little about. It gives life to the people involved and carefully describes their contrutions. It might be too technical for some and maybe not technical enough for others, but that I think its a very reasonable balance given that most people will be able to appreciate the problems faced by each era and the personalities of the people resonsible. Isaacson also correctly points out that the computer arose partly by contributions from brilliant indivduals and just as important by the collaborative efforts of groups of people both in academia and private industry. I found the book to be interesting and informative and kept me in car multiple times as I had to listen to the end of a section before getting out of the car.

2 people found this helpful

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Gordon Silverman

Ada2Ada

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2021

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A consummate historian has created a riveting narrative of the evolution of computer technology from the middle of the 19th century to the emergence of the Internet and its consequences. It starts with Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, and the world’s first programmer who anticipated such software concepts as the subroutine. It was not to be realized for more than a century. The narrative is populated by driven geniuses with idiosyncratic personalities (Gates, Allen, Jobs, Wozniak, Hopper) as well as the forgotten Atanasoff. It ends with Ada’s Objection to the inevitability of a Singularity. This work should be required reading for every Computer Science major.

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Herve Lebret

The Complexity and Beauty of Innovation according to Walter Isaacson

Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2015

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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 the feeling that the story of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage is well known. I may be wrong. But chapter 3 about the early days of the computer was mostly unknown to me. Who invented the computer? Probably many different people in different locations in the US, the UK and Germany, around WWII. “How did they develop this idea at the same time when war kept their two teams isolated? The answer is partly that advances in technology and theory made the moment ripe. Along with many innovators, Zuse and Stibitz were familiar with the use of relays in phone circuits, and it made sense to tie that to binary operations of math and logic. Likewise, Shannon, who was also very familiar with phone circuits, would be able to perform the logical tasks of Boolean algebra. The idea that digital circuits would be the key to computing was quickly becoming clear to researchers almost everywhere, even in isolated places like central Iowa.” [Page 54]

There would be a patent fight I did not know about. Read pages 82-84. You can also read the following on Wikipedia: “On June 26, 1947, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the first to file for patent on a digital computing device (ENIAC), much to the surprise of Atanasoff. The ABC [Atanasoff–Berry Computer] had been examined by John Mauchly in June 1941, and Isaac Auerbach, a former student of Mauchly’s, alleged that it influenced his later work on ENIAC, although Mauchly denied this. The ENIAC patent did not issue until 1964, and by 1967 Honeywell sued Sperry Rand in an attempt to break the ENIAC patents, arguing the ABC constituted prior art. The United States District Court for the District of Minnesota released its judgement on October 19, 1973, finding in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand that the ENIAC patent was a derivative of John Atanasoff’s invention.” [The trial had begun in June 1971 and the ENIAC patent was therefore made invalid]

I also liked his short comment about complementary skills. “Eckert and Mauchly served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision; Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved.” [Pages 74-75]

Women in Technology and Science

It is in chapter 4 about Programming that Isaacson addresses the role of women. “[Grace Hopper] education wasn’t as unusual as you might think. She was the eleventh woman to get a math doctorate from Yale, the first being in 1895. It was not at all uncommon for a woman, especially from a successful family, to get a doctorate in math in the 1930s. In fact, it was more common than it would be a generation later. The number of American women who got doctorates in math during the 1930s was 133, which was 15 percent of the total number of American math doctorates. During the decade of the 1950s, only 106 American women got math doctorates, which was a mere 4 percent of the total. (By the first decade of the 2000 things had more than rebounded and there were 1,600 women who got math doctorates, 30 percent of the total.)” [Page 88]

Not surprisingly, in the early days of computer development, men worked more in hardware whereas women would be in software. “All the engineers who built ENIAC’s hardware were men. Less heralded by history was a group of women, six in particular, who turned out to be almost as important in the development of modern computing.” [Page 95] “Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women. « Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer. » It happened because a lot of women back then had studied math and their skills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: the boys with their toys thought that assembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a man’s job. « American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today, » Jennings said. « If the ENIAC’s administration had known how crucial programming would be to the functioning of the electronic computer and how complex it would prove to be, they might have been more hesitant to give such an important role to women.” [Pages 99-100]

The sources of innovation

“Hopper’s historical sections focused on personalities. In doing so, her book emphasized the role of individuals. In contrast, shortly after Hopper’s book was completed, the executives at IBM commissioned their own history of the Mark I that gave primary credit to the IBM teams in Endicott, New York, who had constructed the machine. “IBM interests were best served by replacing individual history with organizational history,” the historian Kurt Beyer wrote in a study of Hopper. “The locus of technological innovation, according to IBM was the corporation. The myth of the lone radical inventor working in the laboratory or basement was replaced by the reality of teams of faceless organizational engineers contributing incremental advancements.” In the IBM version of history, the Mark I contained a long list of small innovations, such as the ratchet-type counter and the double-checked card feed, that IBM’s book attributed to a bevy of little-known engineers who worked collaboratively in Endicott.
The difference between Hopper’s version of history and IBM’s ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit. It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovations. Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM’s Endicott facility. This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps – the Eureka moment – are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together. Neither way of looking at technological advancement is, on its oqn, completely satisfying. Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.” [Pages 91-92]

Google about Disruptive and Incremental Innovation

This is very similar to what I read about Google: “To us, innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas. Since “novel” is often just a fancy synonym for “new”, we should also clarify that for something to be innovative, it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising. If your customers are asking for it, you aren’t being innovative when you give them what they want; you are just being responsive. That’s a good thing, but it’s not innovative. Finally “useful” is a rather underwhelming adjective to describe that innovation hottie, so let’s add an adverb and make it radically useful, Voilà: For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful.” […] “But Google also releases over five hundred improvements to its search every year. Is that innovative? Or incremental? They are new and surprising, for sure, but while each one of them, by itself is useful, it may be a stretch to call it radically useful. Put them all together, though, and they are. […] This more inclusive definition – innovation isn’t just about the really new, really big things – matters because it affords everyone the opportunity to innovate, rather than keeping it to the exclusive realm of these few people in that off-campus building [Google[x]] whose job is to innovate.” [How Google Works – Page 206]

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Top reviews from other countries

Brian61

Very interesting book for those interested in the advance of computer science

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 26, 2019

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We have all heard of the famouse people that have driven electronic products for the masses in recent years. This book also highlights the unsung heroes that also made contributions either as individuals of more importantly as part of a team. Improvements in electronics that everyone now takes for granted has been done incrementally over many years with very few earth shattering individual moments. As with cars we didn't go from a Model T Ford to a modern Formula 1 car overnight. A lot of small improvements happened in between.

2 people found this helpful

Niall J

Importantly left out Plato

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 4, 2021

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Not sure how this oversight made it through but the system that first took the flat screen and touchscreen idea into actual use is left out here. University of Illinois's Plato, as well as a terminal was also a networked system that at one time was briefly larger than the Arpanet and certainly more open. I mean, there's a chapter on the Internet! Come on! Otherwise a good book.

One person found this helpful

Thiefboy

Superb summary of the history of the computer and computer science

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 2, 2020

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Walter has an open and engaging style that engages immediately. I have found myself quoting and sending quotes from the kindle version of this book to my family more than on anything else I have read. Thanks for bringing together art and science and highlighting the fantastic opportunities ahead of us if we work with artificial intelligence instead of competing with it.

Well worth a read.

P.S. The section on Wiki’s also encouraged me to write this review and contribute, very convincing!

One person found this helpful

utk

What a wonderfully connected storytelling - Isaacson really takes you through the ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2015

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What a wonderfully connected storytelling - Isaacson really takes you through the various branches of innovations that have led to the digital life we have today. Without getting boring for a second, he walks one through an interconnected culture of hackers that was intent on prodding things, often producing results that they didn't set out to get.

My one gripe with the narrative is that it does get a little repetitive at times from a format perspective (new tech -> innovator -> childhood and growing up -> what led to the innovation etc) but that can hardly be avoided in a book of this nature.

The fact that he starts from Ada Lovelace and Babbage and takes us all the way through to the present day in one book is really incredible.

3 people found this helpful

Mr. R. J. Smith

Interesting and insightful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 30, 2015

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Great whistlestop history of the milestones that have allowed us to reach great heights as a species. Also refreshing to see the common themes of collaboration and the way all innovation is the tip of an ever growing stack of innovations that came before it. A real human team effort. Final point, I did a computer science degree in the 90's and something this book shows which my degree didn't is the massive contribution the ladies made to the field even back in the beginning when they were generally discouraged from dabbling in what was considered a man world. Long Live Ada!

2 people found this helpful

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