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Einstein's developmental problems have probably been exaggerated, perhaps even by himself, for we have some letters from his adoring grandparents saying that he was just as clever and endearing as every grandchild is. But throughout his life, Einstein had a mild form of echolalia, causing him to repeat phrases to himself, two or three times, especially if they amused him. And he generally preferred to think in pictures, most notably in famo..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Power to the people was a romantic lie," he later said. "Computers did more than politics did to change society."
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Walter Isaacson |
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By 1940 Grace Hopper was bored. She had no children, her marriage was unexciting, and teaching math was not as fulfilling as she had hoped.
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Walter Isaacson |
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The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,
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Walter Isaacson |
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When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I
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Walter Isaacson |
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Laurene, Eve, Erin, and Lisa at the Corinth Canal in Greece, 2006: "For young people, this"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Steve believed it was our job to teach people aesthetics, to teach people what they should like,
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Walter Isaacson |
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went to Williams College, where the famed historian James MacGregor Burns drily noted, "He was among my median students."17 He spent more time thinking about starting businesses than studying for class. "I remember a professor pulling me aside and suggesting I should defer my business interests and focus on my studies as college represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Case recalled. "Needless to say, I disagreed." He took only one co..
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Walter Isaacson |
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fifteen or so students who met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. "They would get an engineer from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on," Jobs recalled. "My dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a pioneer of light-emitting diodes. So we talked about what to do with them." Because his father now worked for a laser company,"
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Walter Isaacson |
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that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," he told me. "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery." Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-P..
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Walter Isaacson |
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would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips. His father used to do that for auto parts, and he succeeded because he knew the value of each better than the clerks. Jobs followed suit. He developed a knowledge of electronic parts that was honed by his love of negotiating and turning a profit. He would go to electronic flea markets, such as the San Jose swap meet, haggle for a used circuit board that..
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Walter Isaacson |
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he affected an attitude that combined wiry and weird intensity with aloof rebelliousness. McCollum later said, "He was usually off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn't want to have much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class." He never trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom. One day Jobs needed a part that was not available, so he made a collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit, and sai..
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Walter Isaacson |
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My father told me, 'You always want to be in the middle,' " he said. "I didn't want to be up with the high-level people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that's what I wanted to be. I was way too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve." By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the "electronics kids." He had an easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he developed the chunky and stooped lo..
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Walter Isaacson |
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and tried to redesign the computers using these newer parts. The challenge he set himself was to replicate the design using the fewest components possible. Each night he would try to improve his drawing from the night before. By the end of his senior year, he had become a master. "I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper." He never told his friends. After all, ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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results in binary code with little lights. When it was finished, Fernandez told Wozniak there was someone at Homestead High he should meet. "His name is Steve. He likes to do pranks like you do, and he's also into building electronics like you are." It may have been the most significant meeting in a Silicon Valley garage since Hewlett went into Packard's thirty-two years earlier. "Steve and I just sat on the sidewalk in front of Bill's hous..
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Walter Isaacson |
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one stubborn glitch they couldn't figure out: the program did a wonderful job spewing out data on the trajectory of artillery shells, but it just didn't know when to stop. Even after the shell would have hit the ground, the program kept calculating its trajectory, "like a hypothetical shell burrowing through the ground at the same rate it had traveled through the air," as Jennings described it. "Unless we solved that problem, we knew the de..
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Walter Isaacson |
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He prescribed Euclidean geometry, followed by a dose of trigonometry and algebra. That should cure anyone, they both thought, from having too many artistic or romantic passions.
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Walter Isaacson |
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use as few chips as possible, both as a personal challenge and because he did not want to take advantage of his colleague's largesse. Much of the work was done in the garage of a friend just around the corner, Bill Fernandez, who was still at Homestead High. To lubricate their efforts, they drank large amounts of Cragmont cream soda, riding their bikes to the Sunnyvale
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Walter Isaacson |
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In the first few pages, I was confronted with my family, my anecdotes, my things, my thoughts, myself in the character Jane,
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Walter Isaacson |
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managers in the spring of 1976. The senior executive at the meeting was impressed, and seemed torn, but he finally said it was not something that HP could develop. It was a hobbyist product, at least for now, and didn't fit into the company's high-quality market segments.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Lasseter, August 1997: His cherubic face and demeanor masked an artistic perfectionism
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Walter Isaacson |
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disdainful of the Eckert-Mauchly mercenary approach. "Eckert and Mauchly are a commercial group with a commercial patent policy," he complained to a friend. "We cannot work with them directly or indirectly in the same open manner in which we would work with an academic group."80 But for all of his righteousness, von Neumann was not above making money off his ideas. In 1945 he negotiated a personal consulting contract with IBM, giving the co..
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Walter Isaacson |
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a good company must "impute"--it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing."
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Walter Isaacson |
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I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs later recalled. "People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."
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Walter Isaacson |
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Neglect is a form of abuse,
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Walter Isaacson |
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The tale of their teamwork is important because we don't often focus on how central that skill is to innovation. There are thousands of books celebrating people we biographers portray, or mythologize, as lone inventors. I've produced a few myself. Search the phrase "the man who invented" on Amazon and you get 1,860 book results. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how to..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.
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Walter Isaacson |
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old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?
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Walter Isaacson |
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Grove's mantra was "Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive." Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent."
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Walter Isaacson |
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1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of simple modern homes for the American "everyman," Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. "Eichler" --
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Walter Isaacson |
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real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit. Garage Band The Jobs house in Los Altos became the assembly point for the fifty Apple I boards that had to be delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the
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soldering himself. When they completed a board, they would hand it off to Wozniak. "I would plug each assembled board into the TV and keyboard to test it to see if it worked," he said. "If it did, I put it in a box. If it didn't, I'd figure what pin hadn't gotten into the socket right." Paul Jobs suspended"
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Walter Isaacson |
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were able to build the boards more cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on parts," Jobs recalled. "So the fifty we sold to the Byte Shop almost paid for all the material we needed to make a hundred boards." Now they could make a real profit by selling the remaining fifty to their friends and Homebrew compatriots. Elizabeth Holmes officially"
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Walter Isaacson |
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Seasons or Ritz-Carlton hotel. So Johnson sent his first five store managers through the Ritz-Carlton training
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Walter Isaacson |
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smart call. To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak's awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs's role. He began by asking their erstwhile partner Ron Wayne to design a case. "I assumed they had no money, so I did one that didn't require any tooling and could be fabricated in a standard metal shop," he said. His design called for a Plexiglas cover..
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Walter Isaacson |
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stories involving the troubles in Northern Ireland, Morocco's war for the Spanish Sahara, and a ring of traders violating the sanctions against Rhodesia. He was exhilarated by danger. Once in Belfast he insisted that we go cover a demonstration, when I was quite content to stay at the bar of the Europa Hotel. He showed me that even though the street clashes might seem violent and bloody on television, just a half block away things were calm..
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Walter Isaacson |
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a machine that could process and store data at a cost of only $2 per digit. (Atanasoff's machine could handle three thousand digits and cost about $6,000.)
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Walter Isaacson |
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suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman's pushback, from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear
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Walter Isaacson |
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shop class used to be." The juxtaposition highlighted the shift from the interests of his father's generation. "Mr. McCollum felt that electronics class was the new auto shop." McCollum believed in military discipline and respect for authority. Jobs didn't. His aversion to authority was something he no longer tried to hide, and he affected an attitude that combined wiry and weird intensity with aloof rebelliousness. McCollum later said, "He..
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Walter Isaacson |
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his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage,
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Walter Isaacson |
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won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them
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Walter Isaacson |
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at Atari, who designed Pong and hired Jobs. GIL AMELIO. Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back. BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs's girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa. LISA BRENNAN-JOBS. Daughter of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in New York
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Walter Isaacson |
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The downside
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Walter Isaacson |
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delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the payment for the parts would come due. All available hands were enlisted: Jobs and Wozniak, plus Daniel Kottke, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had broken away from the cult she'd joined), and Jobs's pregnant sister, Patty. Her vacated bedroom as well as the kitchen table and garage were commandeered as work space. Holmes,
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Walter Isaacson |