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Title details for The Innovators by Walter Isaacson - Available

The Innovators

How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson
Dennis Boutsikaris
Audiobook
3 of 4 copies available
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3 of 4 copies available
2015 Audie Award Finalist for Nonfiction
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson's New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a "riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving" (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the internet.
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?

The Innovators is a masterly saga of collaborative genius destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution—and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. Isaacson begins the adventure 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 is "a sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age" (The New York Times).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    October 7, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781442376236
      • File size: 503500 KB
      • Duration: 17:28:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      On the heels of the author's gravelly voiced narration of the introduction, narrator Dennis Boutsikaris at first sounds tame or buttoned-down. But as the audio unfolds, his reading reveals a rich palette of emotional accents that he applies to great effect in all the right places. His skill with the subtleties of narrative energy also work well with this textured history lesson--one that focuses less on the technological than on the visionary characters profiled by the author. With one fascinating story after the other (did you know the daughter of a famous poet pioneered computer programming in the 1840s?), this highly entertaining audio chronicles the importance of collaboration as much as individual creativity among the colorful pioneers who brought us today's digital world. T.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 4, 2014
      The history of the computer as told through this fascinating book is not the story of great leaps forward but rather one of halting progress. Journalist and Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson (Steve Jobs) presents an episodic survey of advances in computing and the people who made them, from 19th-century digital prophet Ada Lovelace to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. His entertaining biographical sketches cover headline personalities (such as a manic Bill Gates in his salad days) and unsung toilers, like WWII’s pioneering female programmers, and outright failures whose breakthroughs fizzled unnoticed, such as John Atanasoff, who was close to completing a full-scale model computer in 1942 when he was drafted into the Navy. Isaacson examines these figures in lucid, detailed narratives, recreating marathon sessions of lab research, garage tinkering, and all-night coding in which they struggled to translate concepts into working machinery. His account is an antidote to his 2011 Great Man hagiography of Steve Jobs; for every visionary—or three (vicious fights over who invented what are ubiquitous)—there is a dogged engineer; a meticulous project manager; an indulgent funder; an institutional hothouse like ARPA, Stanford, and Bell Labs; and hordes of technical experts. Isaacson’s absorbing study shows that technological progress is a team sport, and that there’s no I in computer. Photos. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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