The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 130

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Rahul Mehta at the University of Chicago and Danny Z. Wilson at Harvard read an early draft to fix any math or engineering mistakes; no doubt I snuck a few in when they weren’t looking, so they shouldn’t be blamed for any lapses. I’m particularly grateful to Strobe Talbott, who read and made extensive comments on a draft. He has done the same for each book I’ve written, going back to The Wise Men in 1986, and I’ve kept every set of his detailed notes as a testament to his wisdom and generosity.

I also tried something different for this book: crowdsourcing suggestions and corrections on many of the chapters. This isn’t a new thing. Sending around papers for comments is one reason why the Royal Society was created in London in 1660 and why Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society. At Time magazine, we had a practice of sending story drafts to all bureaus for their “comments and corrections,” which was very useful. In the past, I’ve sent parts of my drafts to dozens of people I knew. By using the Internet, I could solicit comments and corrections from thousands of people I didn’t know.

This seemed fitting, because facilitating the collaborative process was one reason the Internet was created. One night when I was writing about that, I realized that I should try using the Internet for this original purpose. It would, I hoped, both improve my drafts and allow me to understand better how today’s Internet-based tools (compared to Usenet and the old bulletin board systems) facilitate collaboration.

I experimented on many sites. The best, it turned out, was Medium, which was invented by Ev Williams, a character in this book. One excerpt was read by 18,200 people in its first week online. That’s approximately 18,170 more draft readers than I’ve ever had in the past. Scores of readers posted comments, and hundreds sent me emails. This led to many changes and additions as well as an entirely new section (on Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc). I want to thank the hundreds of collaborators, some of whom I have now gotten to know, who helped me in this crowdsourcing process. (Speaking of which, I hope that someone will soon invent a cross between an enhanced eBook and a wiki so that new forms of multimedia history can emerge that are partly author-guided and partly crowdsourced.)

I also want to thank Alice Mayhew and Amanda Urban, who have been my editor and agent for thirty years, and the team at Simon & Schuster: Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Jonathan Cox, Julia Prosser, Jackie Seow, Irene Kheradi, Judith Hoover, Ruth Lee-Mui, and Jonathan Evans. At the Aspen Institute, I am indebted to Pat Zindulka and Leah Bitounis, among many others. I’m also lucky to have three generations of my family willing to read and comment on a draft of this book: my father, Irwin (an electrical engineer); my brother, Lee (a computer consultant); and my daughter, Betsy (a tech writer, who first turned me on to Ada Lovelace). Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Cathy, the wisest reader and most loving person I’ve ever known.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and is the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He and his wife live in Washington, DC.

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ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON

Steve Jobs

American Sketches

Einstein: His Life and Universe

A Benjamin Franklin Reader

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Kissinger: A Biography

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (with Evan Thomas)

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Henry Kissinger, background briefing for reporters, Jan. 15, 1974, from file in Time magazine archives.

2. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1, 5.

CHAPTER ONE: ADA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE

1. Lady Byron to Mary King, May 13, 1833. The Byron family letters, including those of Ada, are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Transcriptions of Ada’s are in Betty Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters (Strawberry, 1992) and in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace (John Murray, 1977). In addition to sources cited below, this section also draws on Joan Baum, The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron (Archon, 1986); William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (Bantam, 1991); Dorothy Stein, Ada (MIT Press, 1985); Doron Swade, The Difference Engine (Viking, 2001); Betty Toole, Ada: Prophet of the Computer Age (Strawberry, 1998); Benjamin Woolley, The Bride of Science (Macmillan, 1999); Jeremy Bernstein, The Analytical Engine (Morrow, 1963); James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon, 2011), chapter 4. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Ada’s letters rely on the Toole transcriptions.

Writers about Ada Lovelace range from canonizers to debunkers. The most sympathetic books are those by Toole, Woolley, and Baum; the most scholarly and balanced is Stein’s. For a debunking of Ada Lovelace, see Bruce Collier, “The Little Engines That Could’ve,” PhD dissertation, Harvard, 1970, http://robroy.dyndns.info/collier/. He writes, “She was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her talents. . . . Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the ‘Notes’ than trouble.”

2. Lady Byron to Dr. William King, June 7, 1833.

3. Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (Pantheon, 2008), 450.

4. Laura Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club (Broadway, 2011), 190.

5. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837), chapters 2 and 8, http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/bridgewater/intro.htm; Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, 192.

6. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 51.

7. Sophia De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (Longmans, 1882), 9; Stein, Ada, 41.

8. Holmes, The Age of Wonder, xvi.

9. Ethel Mayne, The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella, Lady Noel Byron (Scribner’s, 1929), 36; Malcolm Elwin, Lord Byron’s Wife (Murray, 1974), 106.

10. Lord Byron to Lady Melbourne, Sept. 28, 1812, in John Murray, editor, Lord Byron’s Correspondence (Scribner’s, 1922), 88.

11. Stein, Ada, 14, from Thomas Moore’s biography of Byron based on Byron’s destroyed journals.

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