Book Review: The Innovators

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first book by Walter Isaacson that I am reading. I did not read Isaacson's more famous biography of Steve Jobs because I am not really a fan of Steve Jobs. I won't invest my time to read book length biographies of arrogant bullies, no matter how brilliant they may be.

The book title is a bit misleading. Innovation can come from many fields of expertise. For example, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the movable type in printing is an innovation. Henry Ford's idea of the assembly line is an innovation on how to produce things. The invention of the sea container for transporting goods is an innovation in the area of logistics. But this book isn't about these innovators from all fields of industry. Instead, it is laser focused on only innovators in the digital computing industry.

Despite my gripe with the title, this book is still an excellent history book on important personalities in the field of computing. In fact, it is the only book that I have read that fleshes out the story of Ada Lovelace in great detail. I would highly recommend this book on just the story of Ada Lovelace alone.

Also, this is the first book that I have read that describes and emphasize about the significant contributions and importance of women in the field of software programming. Many other history books cover the history of computing machines like ENIAC or Turing's ENGIMA. Also, these other books emphasized on the hardware creators, which tends to be guys. But the machines need to be programmed, and the creators of the programming languages were usually given short shrift. Isaacson's book fills the narrative gap created by these male-bias omissions, and showed how critical women were to the development of software.

Isaacson's book also covers controversial areas such as the stories of people who lost in the courts of law. History is filled with such examples, such as Thomas Edison being credited as the guy who gave the world electricity, when more credit should have been given to Nikola Tesla. There were many people who independently came up with ideas for making the computer or the integrated circuit, but history will always assign credit to a sole person. Isaacson's book also tells the stories of the other inventors who helped contribute to the field, but are forgotten today as they are not credited at all in the current history books.

A big problem with a history book about computing is that new things are happening every day in the world of Information Technology. Thanks to the rapid pace of innovation in IT, we are living and breathing history, and new advances cannot be covered adequately in books such as this one. Every day, new products that were practically the stuff of science fiction years ago are now becoming reality. Cashless payments, driverless vehicles, personal robots with powerful artificial intelligence; these will likely transform human society in years to come. And then, this book will need to be updated to include the pioneers of these nascent technologies today that may become commonplace products in the next few years.


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