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Laurene Powell, said bluntly, "If you're ever going to do a book on Steve, you'd better do it now." He had just taken a second"
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Walter Isaacson |
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veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his "reality distortion field." Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory"
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Walter Isaacson |
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I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.
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Walter Isaacson |
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interviews with more than a hundred family members,
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Walter Isaacson |
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veteran colleagues at Apple used to call his "reality distortion field."
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Walter Isaacson |
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Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they adopted Steve soon after his birth in
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Walter Isaacson |
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of the most momentous innovations tiptoe quietly onto history's stage. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee was glancing through the Internet's alt.hypertext newsgroup and ran across this question: "Is anyone aware of research or development efforts in . . . hypertext links enabling retrieval from multiple heterogeneous sources?" His answer, "from: timbl@info.cern.ch at 2:56 pm," became the first public announcement of the Web. "The WorldWideWeb ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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Back in 1917, when Einstein had analyzed the "cosmological considerations" arising from his general theory of relativity, most astronomers thought that the universe consisted only of our Milky Way, floating with its 100 billion or so stars in a void of empty space."
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Walter Isaacson |
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A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience." When people take insights from multiple sources and put them together, it's natural for them to think that the resulting ideas are their own--as in truth they are."
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Walter Isaacson |
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An engineer's engineer, Eckert felt that people like himself were necessary complements to physicists such as Mauchly. "A physicist is one who's concerned with the truth," he later said. "An engineer is one who's concerned with getting the job done."
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Walter Isaacson |
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When we ascribe credit for an invention, determining who should be most noted by history, one criterion is looking at whose contributions turned out to have the most influence.
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Walter Isaacson |
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stuck with him. He saw a calf being born, and he was amazed
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Walter Isaacson |
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Turing was offered a choice: imprisonment or probation contingent on receiving hormone treatments via injections of a synthetic estrogen designed to curb his sexual desires, as if he were a chemically controlled machine. He chose the latter, which he endured for a year. Turing at first seemed to take it all in stride, but on June 7, 1954, he committed suicide by biting into an apple he had laced with cyanide. His friends noted that he had a..
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Walter Isaacson |
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In his competition with Bradford, Franklin had one big disadvantage. Bradford was the postmaster of Philadelphia, and he used that position to deny Franklin the right, at least officially, to send his Gazette through the mail. Their ensuing struggle over the issue of open carriage was an early example of the tension that often still exists between those who create content and those who control distribution systems.
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Walter Isaacson |
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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 |