The Innovators

Thoughts

Great to read about the history of computers and the Digital Revolution. The importance of collaboration really stands out.

I like reading books like this because they give a very wide map of the space. You get lots of mini histories and biographies of people, companies, institutions and technologies that you can then go deeper on later. Sort of a skeleton map to build everything else around. I plan to do the same with books like Conquering the Electron for electrical engineering and electronics.

One thing I like about reading this way is the automatic recall that starts to happen between books. The same people, places, companies and ideas keep showing up from different perspectives. You read about someone briefly in one book, then they appear again somewhere else, and gradually the connections start forming without deliberately trying to memorise everything.

The importance of collaboration was probably one of the biggest themes for me. The usual image of invention is often centred on individual genius, but even people of exceptional intellect or talent seem limited without the right team around them. So much progress comes from people with different strengths working together, challenging each other, and building on each other's ideas. It has also made me appreciate similar examples I've come across in other books and makes me want to read more about great technical teams and institutions like Bell Labs, Apollo, the Manhattan Project, Xerox PARC, etc.

Another recurring theme is how difficult it is to answer questions like "who invented the computer?" or "who invented the internet?" There often isn't a clean answer. They are cumulative inventions, built from lots of contributions made by different people over long periods of time. Someone develops one idea, someone else improves it, another person combines it with something else, and eventually something recognisable as the modern technology emerges. Very literally standing on the shoulders of giants.

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