The Innovators (book)
   HOME
*





The Innovators (book)
''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. 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 assigned virtually all credit for the company's early innovations and success to Gates, when in fact they were the product of highl ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Walter Isaacson
Walter Seff Isaacson (born May 20, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and professor. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of ''Time''. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, he attended Harvard University and the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar at Pembroke College. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of '' The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made'' (1986) and the author of '' Kissinger: A Biography'' (1992), '' Benjamin Franklin: An American Life'' (2003), '' Einstein: His Life and Universe'' (2007), ''American Sketches'' (2009), '' Steve Jobs'' (2011), '' The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution'' (2014), ''Leonardo da Vinci'' (2017) and '' The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race'' (2021). Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by Similarweb and formerly Alexa; Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations. Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name as a blend of ''wiki'' and '' encyclopedia''. Wales was influenced by the " spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics after being exposed to these ideas by the libertarian economist Mark Thornton. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Its combin ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Jean Bartik
Jean Bartik ( Betty Jean Jennings; December 27, 1924 – March 23, 2011) was one of the original six programmers for the ENIAC computer. Bartik studied mathematics in school then began work at the University of Pennsylvania, first manually calculating ballistics trajectories and then using ENIAC to do so. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence. Bartik and her colleagues developed and codified many of the fundamentals of programming while working on the ENIAC, since it was the first computer of its kind. After her work on ENIAC, Bartik went on to work on BINAC and UNIVAC, and spent time at a variety of technical companies as a writer, manager, engineer and programmer. She spent her later years as a real estate agent and died in 2011 from congestive heart failure complications. Content-management framework Drupal's default theme, ''Bartik'', is named in her honor. Early life and educatio ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Richard Milton Bloch
Richard Milton Bloch (1921 – 2000) was a pioneering American computer programmer. Bloch, Grace Hopper, and Robert Campbell were the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical computer which, when it began operation in 1944, was the first American programmable computer. Early life Bloch was born in Rochester, New York, on June 18, 1921, and grew up there, being graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School. He then attended Harvard University on a scholarship, majoring in mathematics, being graduated in 1943. He then immediately joined the Navy, as World War II was in progress, and was assigned to the United States Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Research Institute. There, he was recruited by Howard Aiken to work on the Mark I project, moving to Harvard in March 1944. Mark I work The Harvard Mark I became operational in 1944, and was used for war work, including computation of ballistic tables, Bessel function, Bessel tables for electronics and other applicat ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy Rear admiral (United States), rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first Linker (computing), linkers. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. Prior to joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 years old. She instead joined the Navy Reserves. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

John Mauchly
John William Mauchly (August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts, including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Their work, as exposed in the widely read ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'' (1945) and as taught in the Moore School Lectures (1946), influenced an explosion of computer development in the late 1940s all over the world. Biography John W. Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907, to Sebastian and Rachel (Scheidemantel) Mauchly in Cincinnati, Ohio. He moved with his parents and sister, Helen Elizabeth (Betty), at an early age to Chevy Chase, Maryland, when Sebastian Mauchly obtained ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff, , (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor from mixed Bulgarian-Irish origin, best known for being credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College (now known as Iowa State University). Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 when the '' Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'' lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. Early life and education Atanasoff was born on October 4, 1903, in Hamilton, New York to an electrical engineer and a school teacher. Atanasoff's father, Ivan Atanasov, was of Bulgarian origin, born in 1876 in the village of Boyadzhik, close to Yambol, then in the Ottoman Empire. While Atanasov was still an infant, his own father was killed by Ottoman soldiers after the Bulgarian April Uprising. In 1889, A ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Howard H
Howard is an English-language given name originating from Old French Huard (or Houard) from a Germanic source similar to Old High German ''*Hugihard'' "heart-brave", or ''*Hoh-ward'', literally "high defender; chief guardian". It is also probably in some cases a confusion with the Old Norse cognate ''Haward'' (''Hávarðr''), which means "high guard" and as a surname also with the unrelated Hayward. In some rare cases it is from the Old English ''eowu hierde'' "ewe herd". In Anglo-Norman the French digram ''-ou-'' was often rendered as ''-ow-'' such as ''tour'' → ''tower'', ''flour'' (western variant form of ''fleur'') → ''flower'', etc. (with svarabakhti). A diminutive is "Howie" and its shortened form is "Ward" (most common in the 19th century). Between 1900 and 1960, Howard ranked in the U.S. Top 200; between 1960 and 1990, it ranked in the U.S. Top 400; between 1990 and 2004, it ranked in the U.S. Top 600. People with the given name Howard or its variants include: Given ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory". As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense of the United States during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications. Biography Childhood The Shannon family lived in Gaylord, Michigan, and Claude was born in a hospital in nearby Petoskey, Michigan, Petoskey. His father, Claude Sr. (1862–1934), was a businessman and for a while, a judge of probate in Gaylord. His mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1890–1945), ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


George Stibitz
George Robert Stibitz (April 30, 1904 – January 31, 1995) was a Bell Labs researcher internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was known for his work in the 1930s and 1940s on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element. Stibitz was born in York, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor's degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University. Computer In November 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs (1930–1941), completed a relay-based adder he later dubbed the " Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Replicas of the "Model K" now reside in the Computer History Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the William Howard Doane Library at Denison University and the American Computer Museum ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Konrad Zuse
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer. Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book (''Calculating Space''). Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany.
[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush ( ; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation. Bush joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1919, and founded the company that became the Raytheon Company in 1922. Bush became vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, and president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1938. During his career, Bush patented a string of his own inventions. He is known ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]