New Delhi:
The story of how the minds of those who created our current digital revolution like Lady Ada Lovelace, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Page worked and what made them so inventive is told in a new book by American writer and biographer Walter Isaacson.
“The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” is also a narrative of how the ability of these people to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.
In his book, published by Simon & Schuster, Isaacson begins with 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, Gates, Steve Wozniak, Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Page.
Isaacson, who recently wrote the biography of Jobs, explores what were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities, what led to their creative leaps and why some succeed and others fail.
The author says the computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.
“The tale of their teamwork is also important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation In this book I set out to report on how innovation actually happens in the real world...I focus on a dozen or so of the most significant breakthroughs of the digital age and the people who made them,” he says.
Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in the book had one thing in common: they were product people.
“They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation,” Isaacson says.
According to the author, just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.
He terms Ada’s contribution as both profound and inspirational.
“More than Charles Babbage (regarded as father of computing) or any other person of her era, she was able to glimpse a future in which machines would become partners of the human imagination, together weaving tapestries as beautiful as those from Jacquard’s loom,” Isaacson says.
