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Walter Isaacson's 'The Innovators' Charts the History of Computing and the Internet
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There is a woman on the cover.
And a person who is half Syrian.
I'd guess that the book is inclusive, but it should really just deliver on the title, tell us about the innovators. What body parts they have or what color they are is secondary and not really something we should focus on. Time to get past that kind of thinking.
TCPIP is a much more important thing than the WWW. The WWW was basically an application of hypercards (popular in the late 1980s) were you network based resources (not just local). So, WWW was a logical extension of existing concepts.
I actually used WWW (based on that crappy implementation, WWW would have gone nowhere!!).
WWW propagation to the masses went :
www (horrible, just good enough as proof of concept)
- 1991 or 1992
Lynx (very good, that one really spread www use to tech community, universities) before images were widespread in web pages.
I used Lynx a lot until late 1995 (because it was much faster to use when on very slow modem connections than anything else out there and web site were text heavy).
- 1993
Mosaic (first stab at graphical interface, pretty buggy as I recall). Didn't like it.
- Late 1994
Netscape, well WOW, now you had the WEB (then Web went BOOM! into t he real world).
Created my first web site in late 1993. Didn't take long, few minutes in vi.
Interesting, and the point I was trying to make, although I don't have any personal experience of early web implementations. It appears like hypertext can be attributed to Ted Nelson in 1965 according to the Wikipedia entry on HTTP.
It's not a theory. But what's your theory?
Hackers is a masterpiece, it made me realize I was born during the wrong decade (and made me realize I would've said the same thing anyways).
Do not forget "Where the Wizards Stay up Late" by Hafner which is a gem.
It's not a theory. But what's your theory?
Their are many examples on this site
http://www.nethistory.info/History of the Internet/origins.html
Personally I go with the US government idea, but its not clear cut.
That links makes a theory about motivations, it's not a theory that internet did not preced HTTP by several decades and started out as ARPAnet. It's also not a theory that HTTP is not an application protocol built on TCP/IP, it is.
If you believe Isaacson would be making this if he hadn't cashed in on Steve Jobs I have some Bit Coins to sell you...
Because historically women and people of color were left out of the historical record.
By looking at the historical record one might be inclined to believe that only white men invented anything.
I haven't read the book but if it leaves out Mark Dean, an African American that holds three of the original nine IBM PC patents then the book is quite frankly, worthless.
Mark Dean is/was an IBM Fellow.
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'Teamwork' only goes so far. Someone still has to have the original spark, the idea that sparks thoughts in others.
Want to see a committee decision? Look at Windows 8! It's schizophrenic in the way that it looks, and works. I mean, the only thing I could think of after trying to use it was 'Someone at the table had to say 'HELL NO!'' and there wasn't anyone there that did, or apparently could.
Given all of the lore of Jobs, I feel that he probably more than anything had a concept of 'style' that shaped the things Apple put out. Elegance comes to mind too.
Put Sony in charge of the iPod, and, well, look what they came up with for their music players.
But anyway...
Want to see a committee decision? Look at Windows 8! It's schizophrenic in the way that it looks, and works. I mean, the only thing I could think of after trying to use it was 'Someone at the table had to say 'HELL NO!'' and there wasn't anyone there that did, or apparently could.
Given all of the lore of Jobs, I feel that he probably more than anything had a concept of 'style' that shaped the things Apple put out. Elegance comes to mind too.
Put Sony in charge of the iPod, and, well, look what they came up with for their music players.
But anyway...
Do you understand that most of the time the author has very little contribution into what goes on the actual cover? I am willing to bet (mostly because I have personal ties of people in this industry, and seen it first hand) Issacson had almost zero input in how the cover looked, or even if Steve Jobs was included in the cover.
Heck, my best friend is a published author, and I worked directly with them in helping getting their book ready for a publisher. They had almost zero say in what was going on the cover of the book.
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I'm willing to be there will be an Audio Book version available not too long after the release of the book. From Audible or some other place.
OMG do we have to jump into the racist/sexist slop already? It's just possible, and very probable, that because of the period in our history that computers were developed in it was mainly done by white guys, just like our Constitution. Live with it.
If it's as insightful, well researched, and comprehensive as his book Einstein: His life and Universe, then this should be a tour de force par excellence.
Here we go again...
Al Gore, Jr's actual quote:
It's true Al Gore, Jr. did not claim that he "invented" the Internet; however, his actual quote is patently false as the Internet was created by ARPA before Al Gore, Jr. was even in Congress. So, while not being an outright lie, Al's words were at a politician's typical level of disingenuousness.
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Including the most personal computers ever sold (a million before Apple), the first PC debut, and the inventor of the CPU used in Apple and Atari systems might have been considered an "innovation". But alas, nothing in the index. No mention of Chuck Peddle (father of the PC), Commodore, or MOS Technology. :-(
May want to first read the "The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" aka (in the second edition)
"A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall.
Starts with the invention of the 6502 processor and its accompanying development kit that snarky teens bought and later made into the Apple I, Apple II, Atari 2600, etc. all the way to the drama of a plane crash, an FBI software pirate bust, and how a nonchalant software agreement irked and outwitted a small startup called Microsoft out of millions.
May want to first read the "The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" aka (in the second edition)
"A Company on the Edge" by Brian Bagnall.
Starts with the invention of the 6502 processor and its accompanying development kit that snarky teens bought and later made into the Apple I, Apple II, Atari 2600, etc. all the way to the drama of a plane crash, an FBI software pirate bust, and how a nonchalant software agreement irked and outwitted a small startup called Microsoft out of millions.
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I think we were all asking that.
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Although Vice-President Gore's phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet in the sense of having designed or implemented it, but rather that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet.
To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign. Gore never used the word "invent," and the words "create" and "invent" have distinctly different meanings: the former is used in the sense of "to bring about" or "to bring into existence" while the latter is generally used to signify the first instance of someone's thinking up or implementing an idea.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp#qsBDp6IwhrGyMF3q.99
THe key to Job and Apple is * Experience *, when you have an experience, you don't compartementalize it in dozens of seperate specs. Jobs wanted those products to be a part of your life, not be your life.
Which meant, they looked nice, they simplified and augmented your life. You didn't need to learn to appreciate beige and bland and take a course to use a MAC or an ipod.
That's still the key to Apple right now. You see it in the verse ads and in the balanced Iphone Designs.
That's why I laugh at people who are amazed at Apple going into fashion? Who would argue that clothes and accessories are NOT par of people's lives. There's nothing surprising about that, it was predestined that eventually they'd end up there.
Neither, Samsung, Google, Amazon, Microsoft have the background to go there with credibility; it is not part of their genes. If Apple is able to strike hard there; they will differentiate themselves in a profound way from their competition and avoid the commodity trap.
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No, you are not alone, I liked it as well. Maybe I am biased though as I have known Walter personally for the past ten years and I am proud to have been a part of several projects and political think tanks with him.
By the way, he uses a Blackberry for what that is worth...