The Innovators

To try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet.

I couldn’t imagine the resources, inventions, and amount of collaborative work from people of a wide variety of backgrounds it took to navigate the digital revolution and arrive here in the digital age.

After reading this detailed history of the digital revolution, I can see more vividly the environment, collaborative effort, and forces needed to make impactful innovations succeed.

Walter Isaacson draws both a big picture and detailed view from ideation of the computer starting with Ada Lovelace to programming, inventing transistors, microchips, video game, internet, the personal computer, proprietory & open-source software, going online, and the web proliferation. Describing the big events, inventions, and people who contributed to the creation of the digital revolution.

It was a long read (~500 pages) and took me around 4 months of off and on reading sessions to finish it. It was an enlightening perspective on how the digital revolution was shaped and all the different contributing factors that made it happen.