8 /10 1 Votes
Country United States Publication date October 7, 2014 Originally published 7 October 2014 Genre Biography OCLC 876012030 | 4/5 Goodreads Language English Pages 488 pp. Publisher Simon & Schuster (U.S.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Original title The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Media type E-book, print (hardback and paperback), audiobook Similar Walter Isaacson books, Biographies | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is an overview of the history of computer science and the Digital Revolution. It was written by Walter Isaacson, and published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster.
The book summarizes the contributions of several innovators who have made pivotal breakthroughs in computer technology and its applications—from the world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing's work in artificial intelligence, through the Information Age of the present. Although his book's focus is on individuals, Isaacson reminds readers that innovations are often the product of group collaboration.
Innovators discussed in the book include Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, John Mauchly, John von Neumann, J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce of Intel, Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs of Apple, Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Lee Felsenstein of Osborne.
Corrections
In December 2015, Simon & Schuster published a revised electronic edition of The Innovators, which corrected significant errors and omissions in the original edition’s Chapter 9, which covers Software. Isaacson – who in researching the book interviewed Bill Gates but not Paul Allen – had erroneously assigned virtually all credit for the company’s early innovations and success to Gates, when in fact they were the product of highly collaborative efforts by several people, including Allen. In the revised edition, among other edits, Isaacson includes archival material from 1981 in which Gates credits Allen for being the “idea man” in charge of R&D at Microsoft, while he, Gates, was “the front man running the business.”