The Innovators

Walter Isaacson is best known for his biography of Steve Jobs. Here he steps back to tell the whole story of how computers and the internet came to be. The subtitle is How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.

What it’s about

The book starts with Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century, long before electronic computers. It moves through the machines of the 1930s and 40s, the invention of the transistor, the birth of the microchip, and the early software and game industries. It follows the story on to the personal computer, the internet and the web, and ends in the era of search engines and online collaboration.

Isaacson’s central argument is that innovation is usually a team effort and not the work of a lone genius. He keeps returning to people who connected others, such as the engineers who combined each other’s ideas and the managers who built the groups that made them work. He gives particular attention to people whose contributions are often left out, including the women who programmed some of the earliest computers.

Why it belongs on coldboot

The site’s Ancient History section is about everything before 1980, and this is the most readable single book about that period. It covers the decades before the articles on this site begin and then runs forward past them, so it works as a map of the whole territory.

Keep in mind

A book that covers two centuries has to simplify, and credit for the big inventions is disputed by historians. Isaacson’s version of who built the first computer is one reasonable account among several. Treat it as a strong, well-told overview and follow the threads that interest you into more specialized books.

Edition linked: paperback (Simon & Schuster, 2015).