The Innovators

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. (Location 683)

allowed him to team up with engineers who could have supplemented his talents. The Z1 did, however, show that the logical concept Zuse had designed would work in theory. A college friend who was helping him, Helmut Schreyer, urged that they make a version using electronic vacuum tubes rather than mechanical switches. Had they done so right away, they would have gone down in history as the first inventors of a working modern computer: binary, electronic, and programmable. But Zuse, as well as the experts he consulted at the technical school, balked at the expense of building a device with close to two thousand vacuum tubes.26 So for the Z2 they decided instead to use electromechanical relay switches, acquired secondhand from the phone company, which were tougher and cheaper, although a lot slower. The result was a computer that used relays for the arithmetic unit. However, the memory unit was mechanical, using movable pins in a metal sheet. In 1939 Zuse began work on a third model, the Z3, that used electromechanical relays both for the arithmetic unit and for the memory and control units. When it was completed in 1941, it became the first fully working all-purpose, programmable digital computer. Even though it did not have a way to directly handle conditional jumps and branching in the programs, it could theoretically perform as a universal Turing machine. Its major difference from later computers was that it used clunky electromagnetic relays rather than electronic components such as vacuum tubes or transistors. Zuse’s friend Schreyer went on to write a doctoral thesis, “The Tube Relay and the Techniques of Its Switching,” that advocated using vacuum tubes for a powerful and fast computer. But when he and Zuse proposed it to the German Army in 1942, the commanders said they were confident that they would win the war before the two years it would take to build such a machine.27 They were more interested in ma...

...king weapons than computers. As a result, Zuse was pulled away from his computer work and sent back to engineering airplanes. In 1943 his computers and designs were destroyed in the Allied bombing of Berlin. Zuse and Stibitz, working independently, had both come up with employing relay switches to make circuits that could handle binary computations. How did they develop this idea at the same time when war kept their two teams isolated? The answer is partly that advances in technology and theory made the moment ripe. Along with many other innovators, Zuse and Stibitz were familiar with the use of relays in phone circuits, and it made sense to tie that to binary operations of math and logic. Likewise, Shannon, who was also very familiar with phone circuits, made the related theoretical leap that electronic circuits would be able to perform the logical tasks of Boolean algebra. The idea that digital circuits would be the key to computing was quickly becoming clear to researchers almost everywhere, even in isolated places like central Iowa. (Location 999)

“anyone encouraging idealism today faces a great obstacle: the prevailing ideology encourages people to dismiss idealism as ‘impractical.’ (Location 6220)

The fact is, there aren’t just two sides to any issue, there’s almost always a range of responses, and ‘it depends’ is almost always the right answer in any big question.” (Location 6225)

As Case understood, the secret sauce was not games or published content; it was a yearning for connection. “Our big bet, even back in 1985, was what we called community,” he recounted. “Now people refer to it as social media. We thought the killer app of the Internet was going to be people. People interacting with people they already knew in new ways that were more convenient, but also people interacting with people they didn’t yet know, but should know because they had some kind of shared interest.” (Location 6524)

AOL’s users were not called customers or subscribers; they were members. (Location 6533)

“When I got a copy of Vannevar Bush’s ‘As We May Think,’ I said to myself, ‘Yep, there it is! He figured it out!’ (Location 6778)

He believed that a hypertext network should have two-way links, which would require the approval of both the person creating the link and the person whose page was being linked to. Such a system would have the side benefit of enabling micropayments to content producers. “HTML is precisely what we were trying to prevent—ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management,” Nelson later lamented.48 Had Nelson’s system of two-way links prevailed, it would have been possible to meter the use of links and allow small automatic payments to accrue to those who produced the content that was used. The entire business of publishing and journalism and blogging would have turned out differently. Producers of digital content could have been compensated in an easy, frictionless manner, permitting a variety of revenue models, including ones that did not depend on being beholden solely to advertisers. Instead the Web became a realm where aggregators could make (Location 6831)

One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused. (Location 7013)

Williams knew that his first company had failed because it tried to do thirty things and succeeded at none. Hourihan, who had been a management consultant, was adamant: Williams’s blogger scripting tool was neat, but it was a distraction. It could never be a commercial product. (Location 7013)

He was following another basic lesson for innovation: Don’t stay too focused. (Location 7017)

Most people would have quit at that point. There was no money for rent, no one to keep the servers running, no sight of any revenue. He also faced painful personal and legal attacks from his former employees, causing him to rack up lawyer’s bills. “The story apparently was that I fired all my friends and I didn’t pay them and took over the company,” he said. “It was really ugly.”72 (Location 7034)