reading paper

 Read the chapter 2 first and then write the 2 pages paper.

  The paper should be single-spaced, 2-page (excluding cover page and references) long, and typed in Times New Roman 12 points. The paper should have a title, and consists of at least two sections: 1) A brief narrative of how an IS/IT is realized, initiated, designed, and implemented in terms of what/when/where/how this happened, and key character players involved in the series of events. 

THE
2

INNOVATORS

3

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)
Pro and Con
4

HOW A GROUP OF HACKERS, GENIUSES,
AND GEEKS CREATED THE DIGITAL
REVOLUTION
5

6

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2014 by Walter Isaacson
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Walter Isaacson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Excerpts from “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan.
Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Photo research and editing by Laura Wyss, Wyssphoto, Inc., with the assistance of Elizabeth Seramur, Amy Hikida, and Emily Vinson, and by
Jonathan Cox.
Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
ISBN: 978-1-47113-879-9
Ebook: 978-1-47113-881-2
The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or
errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
7

http://www.simonandschuster.co.uk

CONTENTS
Illustrated Timeline
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Ada, Countess of Lovelace
CHAPTER 2
The Computer
CHAPTER 3
Programming
CHAPTER 4
The Transistor
CHAPTER 5
The Microchip
CHAPTER 6
Video Games
CHAPTER 7
The Internet
CHAPTER 8
The Personal Computer
CHAPTER 9
Software
CHAPTER 10
Online
CHAPTER 11
The Web
CHAPTER 12
Ada Forever
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
8

Index
9

THE
10

INNOVATORS

11

1800
1843
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, publishes “Notes” on Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
1847
George Boole creates a system using algebra for logical reasoning.
1890
The census is tabulated with Herman Hollerith’s punch-card machines.
12

1931
Vannevar Bush devises the Differential Analyzer, an analog electromechanical computer.
1935
Tommy Flowers pioneers use of vacuum tubes as on-off switches in circuits.
1937
13

Alan Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers,” describing a universal computer.
Claude Shannon describes how circuits of switches can perform tasks of Boolean algebra.
Bell Labs’ George Stibitz proposes a calculator using an electric circuit.
14

Howard Aiken proposes construction of large digital computer and discovers parts of
Babbage’s Difference Engine at Harvard.
John Vincent Atanasoff puts together concepts for an electronic computer during a long
December night’s drive.
1938
William Hewlett and David Packard form company in Palo Alto garage.
1939
Atanasoff finishes model of electronic computer with mechanical storage drums.
15

Turing arrives at Bletchley Park to work on breaking German codes.
1941
Konrad Zuse completes Z3, a fully functional electromechanical programmable digital
computer.
16

John Mauchly visits Atanasoff in Iowa, sees computer demonstrated.
1952
1942
Atanasoff completes partly working computer with three hundred vacuum tubes, leaves for
Navy.
1943
Colossus, a vacuum-tube computer to break German codes, is completed at Bletchley Park.
1944
17

Harvard Mark I goes into operation.
John von Neumann goes to Penn to work on ENIAC.
1945
Von Neumann writes “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” describing a stored-program
computer.
18

Six women programmers of ENIAC are sent to Aberdeen for training.
Vannevar Bush publishes “As We May Think,” describing personal computer.
Bush publishes “Science, the Endless Frontier,” proposing government funding of academic
and industrial research.
ENIAC is fully operational.
1947
Transistor invented at Bell Labs.
1950
Turing publishes article describing a test for artificial intelligence.
19

1952
Grace Hopper develops first computer compiler.
Von Neumann completes modern computer at the Institute for Advanced Study.
UNIVAC predicts Eisenhower election victory.
1954
1954
Turing commits suicide.
20

Texas Instruments introduces silicon transistor and helps launch Regency radio.
1956
Shockley Semiconductor founded.
First artificial intelligence conference.
1957
21

Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and others form Fairchild Semiconductor.
Russia launches Sputnik.
1958
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) announced.
22

Jack Kilby demonstrates integrated circuit, or microchip.
1959
Noyce and Fairchild colleagues independently invent microchip.
1960
J. C. R. Licklider publishes “Man-Computer Symbiosis.”
23

Paul Baran at RAND devises packet switching.
1961
President Kennedy proposes sending man to the moon.
1962
MIT hackers create Spacewar game.
Licklider becomes founding director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office.
Doug Engelbart publishes “Augmenting Human Intellect.”
1963
24

Licklider proposes an “Intergalactic Computer Network.”
Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse.
1972
1964
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters take bus trip across America.
1965
Ted Nelson publishes first article about “hypertext.”
25

Moore’s Law predicts microchips will double in power each year or so.
1966
Stewart Brand hosts Trips Festival with Ken Kesey.
26

Bob Taylor convinces ARPA chief Charles Herzfeld to fund ARPANET.
Donald Davies coins the term packet switching.
1967
ARPANET design discussions in Ann Arbor and Gatlinburg.
1968
Larry Roberts sends out request for bids to build the ARPANET’s IMPs.
27

Noyce and Moore form Intel, hire Andy Grove.
Brand publishes first Whole Earth Catalog.
28

Engelbart stages the Mother of All Demos with Brand’s help.
1969
First nodes of ARPANET installed.
1971
Don Hoefler begins column for Electronic News called “Silicon Valley USA.”
Demise party for Whole Earth Catalog.
Intel 4004 microprocessor unveiled.
29

Ray Tomlinson invents email.
1972
Nolan Bushnell creates Pong at Atari with Al Alcorn.
1973
1973
30

Alan Kay helps to create the Alto at Xerox PARC.
Ethernet developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC.
Community Memory shared terminal set up at Leopold’s Records, Berkeley.
31

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn complete TCP/IP protocols for the Internet.
1974
Intel 8080 comes out.
1975
Altair personal computer from MITS appears.
32

Paul Allen and Bill Gates write BASIC for Altair, form Microsoft.
First meeting of Homebrew Computer Club.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launch the Apple I.
1977
The Apple II is released.
33

1978
First Internet Bulletin Board System.
1979
Usenet newsgroups invented.
Jobs visits Xerox PARC.
1980
IBM commissions Microsoft to develop an operating system for PC.
1981
Hayes modem marketed to home users.
1983
34

Microsoft announces Windows.
Richard Stallman begins developing GNU, a free operating system.
2011
1984
35

Apple introduces Macintosh.
1985
Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant launch The WELL.
CVC launches Q-Link, which becomes AOL.
1991
36

Linus Torvalds releases first version of Linux kernel.
Tim Berners-Lee announces World Wide Web.
1993
Marc Andreessen announces Mosaic browser.
37

Steve Case’s AOL offers direct access to the Internet.
1994
Justin Hall launches Web log and directory.
HotWired and Time Inc.’s Pathfinder become first major magazine publishers on Web.
1995
Ward Cunningham’s Wiki Wiki Web goes online.
1997
38

IBM’s Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov in chess.
1998
Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch Google.
1999
39

Ev Williams launches Blogger.
2001
Jimmy Wales, with Larry Sanger, launches Wikipedia.
2011
40

IBM’s computer Watson wins Jeopardy!
41

INTRODUCTION

HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few
people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo
inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison,
Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.
There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses.
This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs—who they were,
how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. It’s also a narrative of how they
collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.
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
today’s technology revolution was fashioned. It can also be more interesting.
We talk so much about innovation these days that it has become a buzzword, drained of
clear meaning. So in this book I set out to report on how innovation actually happens in the
real world. How did the most imaginative innovators of our time turn disruptive ideas into
realities? I focus on a dozen or so of the most significant breakthroughs of the digital age and
the people who made them. What ingredients produced their creative leaps? What skills
proved most useful? How did they lead and collaborate? Why did some succeed and others
fail?
I also explore the social and cultural forces that provide the atmosphere for innovation. For
the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by
government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration.
Intersecting with that was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded
hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers, most of whom were suspicious of
centralized authority.
Histories can be written with a different emphasis on any of these factors. An example is
the invention of the Harvard/IBM Mark I, the first big electromechanical computer. One of its
programmers, Grace Hopper, wrote a history that focused on its primary creator, Howard
Aiken. IBM countered with a history that featured its teams of faceless engineers who
contributed the incremental innovations, from counters to card feeders, that went into the
machine.
Likewise, what emphasis should be put on great individuals versus on cultural currents has
long been a matter of dispute; in the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle declared that
“the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” and Herbert Spencer responded
with a theory that emphasized the role of societal forces. Academics and participants often
view this balance differently. “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by
impersonal forces,” Henry Kissinger told reporters during one of his Middle East shuttle
missions in the 1970s. “But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities
make.”1 When it comes to digital-age innovation, as with Middle East peacemaking, a variety
42

of personal and cultural forces all come into play, and in this book I sought to weave them
together.
The Internet was originally built to facilitate collaboration. By contrast, personal computers,
especially those meant to be used at home, were devised as tools for individual creativity. For
more than a decade, beginning in the early 1970s, the development of networks and that of
home computers proceeded separately from one another. They finally began coming together
in the late 1980s with the advent of modems, online services, and the Web. Just as combining
the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination
of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to
create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.
Historians of science are sometimes wary about calling periods of great change
revolutions, because they prefer to view progress as evolutionary. “There was no such thing
as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it,” is the wry opening sentence of the
Harvard professor Steven Shapin’s book on that period. One method that Shapin used to
escape his half-joking contradiction is to note how the key players of the period “vigorously
expressed the view” that they were part of a revolution. “Our sense of radical change afoot
comes substantially from them.”2
Likewise, most of us today share a sense that the digital advances of the past half century
are transforming, perhaps even revolutionizing the way we live. I can recall the excitement
that each new breakthrough engendered. My father and uncles were electrical engineers, and
like many of the characters in this book I grew up with a basement workshop that had circuit
boards to be soldered, radios to be opened, tubes to be tested, and boxes of transistors and
resistors to be sorted and deployed. As an electronics geek who loved Heathkits and ham
radios (WA5JTP), I can remember when vacuum tubes gave way to transistors. At college I
learned programming using punch cards and recall when the agony of batch processing was
replaced by the ecstasy of hands-on interaction. In the 1980s I thrilled to the static and
screech that modems made when they opened for you the weirdly magical realm of online
services and bulletin boards, and in the early 1990s I helped to run a digital division at Time
and Time Warner that launched new Web and broadband Internet services. As Wordsworth
said of the enthusiasts who were present at the beginning of the French Revolution, “Bliss
was it in that dawn to be alive.”
I began work on this book more than a decade ago. It grew out of my fascination with the
digital-age advances I had witnessed and also from my biography of Benjamin Franklin, who
was an innovator, inventor, publisher, postal service pioneer, and all-around information
networker and entrepreneur. I wanted to step away from doing biographies, which tend to
emphasize the role of singular individuals, and once again do a book like The Wise Men,
which I had coauthored with a colleague about the creative teamwork of six friends who
shaped America’s cold war policies. My initial plan was to focus on the teams that invented
the Internet. But when I interviewed Bill Gates, he convinced me that the simultaneous
emergence of the Internet and the personal computer made for a richer tale. I put this book on
hold early in 2009, when I began working on a biography of Steve Jobs. But his story
reinforced my interest in how the development of the Internet and computers intertwined, so
as soon as I finished that book, I went back to work on this tale of digital-age innovators.
The protocols of the Internet were devised by peer collaboration, and the resulting system
seemed to have embedded in its genetic code a propensity to facilitate such collaboration.
The power to create and transmit information was fully distributed to each of the nodes, and
any attempt to impose controls or a hierarchy could be routed around. Without falling into the
teleological fallacy of ascribing intentions or a personality to technology, it’s fair to say that a
43

system of open networks connected to individually controlled computers tended, as the
printing press did, to wrest control over the distribution of information from gatekeepers,
central authorities, and institutions that employed scriveners and scribes. It became easier for
ordinary folks to create and share content.
The collaboration that created the digital age was not just among peers but also between
generations. Ideas were handed off from one cohort of innovators to the next. Another theme
that emerged from my research was that users repeatedly commandeered digital innovations
to create communications and social networking tools. I also became interested in how the
quest for artificial intelligence—machines that think on their own—has consistently proved
less fruitful than creating ways to forge a partnership or symbiosis between people and
machines. In other words, the collaborative creativity that marked the digital age included
collaboration between humans and machines.
Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who
were able to connect the arts and sciences. They believed that beauty mattered. “I always
thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Jobs told me when
I embarked on his biography. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of
Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of
humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” The people who were
comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine
symbiosis that is at the core of this story.
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.
When it comes to computers, there is one other historical figure, not as well known, who
embodied the combination of the arts and sciences. Like her famous father, she understood
the romance of poetry. Unlike him, she also saw the romance of math and machinery. And
that is where our story begins.
44

Ada, Countess of Lovelace (1815–52), painted by Margaret Sarah Carpenter in 1836.
45

Lord Byron (1788–1824), Ada’s father, in Albanian dress, painted by Thomas Phillips in 1835.
46

Charles Babbage (1791–1871), photograph taken circa 1837.
47

CHAPTER ONE

ADA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE
POETICAL SCIENCE
In May 1833, when she was seventeen, Ada Byron was among the young women presented at
the British royal court. Family members had worried about how she would acquit herself,
given her high-strung and independent nature, but she ended up behaving, her mother
reported, “tolerably well.” Among those Ada met that evening were the Duke of Wellington,
whose straightforward manner she admired, and the seventy-nine-year-old French
ambassador Talleyrand, who struck her as “an old monkey.”1
The only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, Ada had inherited her father’s romantic
spirit, a trait that her mother tried to temper by having her tutored in mathematics. The
combination produced in Ada a love for what she took to calling “poetical science,” which
linked her rebellious imagination to her enchantment with numbers. For many, including her
father, the rarefied sensibilities of the Romantic era clashed with the techno-excitement of the
Industrial Revolution. But Ada was comfortable at the intersection of both eras.
So it was not surprising that her debut at court, despite the glamour of the occasion, made
less impression on her than her attendance a few weeks later at another majestic event of the
London season, at which she met Charles Babbage, a forty-one-year-old widowed science
and math eminence who had established himself as a luminary on London’s social circuit.
“Ada was more pleased with a party she was at on Wednesday than with any of the
assemblages in the grand monde,” her mother reported to a friend. “She met there a few
scientific people—amongst them Babbage, with whom she was delighted.”2
Babbage’s galvanizing weekly salons, which included up to three hundred guests, brought
together lords in swallow-tail coats and ladies in brocade gowns with writers, industrialists,
poets, actors, statesmen, explorers, botanists, and other “scientists,” a word that Babbage’s
friends had recently coined.3 By bringing scientific scholars into this exalted realm, said one
noted geologist, Babbage “successfully asserted the rank in society due to science.”4
The evenings featured dancing, readings, games, and lectures accompanied by an
assortment of seafood, meat, fowl, exotic drinks, and iced desserts. The ladies staged
tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.
Astronomers set up telescopes, researchers displayed their electrical and magnetic
contrivances, and Babbage allowed guests to play with his mechanical dolls. The centerpiece
of the evenings—and one of Babbage’s many motives for hosting them—was his
demonstration of a model portion of his Difference Engine, a mammoth mechanical
calculating contraption that he was building in a fireproof structure adjacent to his home.
Babbage would display the model with great drama, cranking its arm as it calculated a
sequence of numbers and, just as the audience began to get bored, showed how the pattern
could suddenly change based on instructions that had been coded into the machine.5 Those
who were especially intrigued would be invited through the yard to the former stables, where
the complete machine was being constructed.
Babbage’s Difference Engine, which could solve polynomial equations, impressed people
in different ways. The Duke of Wellington commented that it could be useful in analyzing the
variables a general might face before going into battle.6 Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, marveled
48

that it was a “thinking machine.” As for Ada, who would later famously note that machines
could never truly think, a friend who went with them to the demonstration reported, “Miss
Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the
invention.”7
Ada’s love of both poetry and math primed her to see beauty in a computing machine. She
was an exemplar of the era of Romantic science, which was characterized by a lyrical
enthusiasm for invention and discovery. It was a period that brought “imaginative intensity
and excitement to scientific work,” Richard Holmes wrote in The Age of Wonder. “It was
driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.”8
In short, it was a time not unlike our own. The advances of the Industrial Revolution,
including the steam engine, mechanical loom, and telegraph, transformed the nineteenth
century in much the same way that the advances of the Digital Revolution—the computer,
microchip, and Internet—have transformed our own. At the heart of both eras were
innovators who combined imagination and passion with wondrous technology, a mix that
produced Ada’s poetical science and what the twentieth-century poet Richard Brautigan
would call “machines of loving grace.”
LORD BYRON
Ada inherited her poetic and insubordinate temperament from her father, but he was not the
source of her love for machinery. He was, in fact, a Luddite. In his maiden speech in the
House of Lords, given in February 1812 when he was twenty-four, Byron defended the
followers of Ned Ludd, who were rampaging against mechanical weaving machines. With
sarcastic scorn Byron mocked the mill owners of Nottingham, who were pushing a bill that
would make destroying automated looms a crime punishable by death. “These machines were
to them an advantage, inasmuch as they superseded the necessity of employing a number of
workmen, who were left in consequence to starve,” Byron declared. “The rejected workmen,
in the blindness of their ignorance, instead of rejoicing at these improvements in arts so
beneficial to mankind, conceived themselves to be sacrificed to improvements in
mechanism.”
Two weeks later, Byron published the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece,
and, as he later remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful,
seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living the life of a Byronic
hero while creating the archetype in his poetry. He became the toast of literary London and
was feted at three parties each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady
Caroline Lamb.
Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristocrat who was later prime
minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an
unconventional sexual ambiguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing.
They had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively. She famously
declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” which he was. So was she.
At Lady Caroline’s party, Lord Byron had also noticed a reserved young woman who was,
he recalled, “more simply dressed.” Annabella Milbanke, nineteen, was from a wealthy and
multi-titled family. The night before the party, she had read Childe Harold and had mixed
feelings. “He is rather too much of a mannerist,” she wrote. “He excels most in the
delineation of deep feeling.” Upon seeing him across the room at the party, her feelings were
conflicted, dangerously so. “I did not seek an introduction to him, for all the women were
absurdly courting him, and trying to deserve the lash of his Satire,” she wrote her mother. “I
am not desirous of a place in his lays. I made no offering at the shrine of Childe Harold,
49

though I shall not refuse the acquaintance if it comes my way.”9
That acquaintance, as it turned out, did come her way. After he was introduced to her
formally, Byron decided that she might make a suitable wife. It was, for him, a rare display of
reason over romanticism. Rather than arousing his passions, she seemed to be the sort of
woman who might tame those passions and protect him from his excesses—as well as help
pay off his burdensome debts. He proposed to her halfheartedly by letter. She sensibly
declined. He wandered off to far less appropriate liaisons, including one with his half sister,
Augusta Leigh. But after a year, Annabella rekindled the courtship. Byron, falling more
deeply in debt while grasping for a way to curb his enthusiasms, saw the rationale if not the
romance in the possible relationship. “Nothing but marriage and a speedy one can save me,”
he admitted to Annabella’s aunt. “If your niece is obtainable, I should prefer her; if not, the
very first woman who does not look as if she would spit in my face.”10 There were times
when Lord Byron was not a romantic. He and Annabella were married in January 1815.
Byron initiated the marriage in his Byronic fashion. “Had Lady Byron on the sofa before
dinner,” he wrote about his wedding day.11 Their relationship was still active when they
visited his half sister two months later, because around then Annabella got pregnant.
However, during the visit she began to suspect that her husband’s friendship with Augusta
went beyond the fraternal, especially after he lay on a sofa and asked them both to take turns
kissing him.12 The marriage started to unravel.
Annabella had been tutored in mathematics, which amused Lord Byron, and during their
courtship he had joked about his own disdain for the exactitude of numbers. “I know that two
and two make four—and should be glad to prove it too if I could,” he wrote, “though I must
say if by any sort of process I could convert two and two into five it would give me much
greater pleasure.” Early on, he affectionately dubbed her the “Princess of Parallelograms.”
But when the marriage began to sour, he refined that mathematical image: “We are two
parallel lines prolonged to infinity side by side but never to meet.” Later, in the first canto of
his epic poem Don Juan, he would mock her: “Her favourite science was the mathematical. . .
. She was a walking calculation.”
The marriage was not saved by the birth of their daughter on December 10, 1815. She was
named Augusta Ada Byron, her first name that of Byron’s too-beloved half sister. When
Lady Byron became convinced of her husband’s perfidy, she thereafter called her daughter by
her middle name. Five weeks later she packed her belongings into a carriage and fled to her
parents’ country home with the infant Ada.
Ada never saw her father again. Lord Byron left the country that April after Lady Byron, in
letters so calculating that she earned his sobriquet of “Mathematical Medea,” threatened to
expose his alleged incestuous and homosexual affairs as a way to secure a separation
agreement that gave her custody of their child.13
The opening of canto 3 of Childe Harold, written a few weeks later, invokes Ada as his
muse:

Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and of my heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted.
Byron wrote these lines in a villa by Lake Geneva, where he was staying with the poet Percy
Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s future wife, Mary. It rained relentlessly. Trapped inside for
days, Byron suggested they write horror stories. He produced a fragment of a tale about a
vampire, one of the first literary efforts on that subject, but Mary’s story was the one that
became a classic: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Playing on the ancient Greek
myth of the hero who crafted a living man out of clay and snatched fire from the gods for
human use, Frankenstein was the story of a scientist who galvanized a man-made assemblage
50

into a thinking human. It was a cautionary tale about technology and science. It also raised
the question that would become associated with Ada: Can man-made machines ever truly
think?
The third canto of Childe Harold ends with Byron’s prediction that Annabella would try to
keep Ada from knowing about her father, and so it happened. There was a portrait of Lord
Byron at their house, but Lady Byron kept it securely veiled, and Ada never saw it until she
was twenty.14
Lord Byron, by contrast, kept a picture of Ada on his desk wherever he wandered, and his
letters often requested news or portraits of her. When she was seven, he wrote to Augusta, “I
wish you would obtain from Lady B some accounts of Ada’s disposition. . . . Is the girl
imaginative? . . . Is she passionate? I hope that the Gods have made her anything save
poetical—it is enough to have one such fool in the family.” Lady Byron reported that Ada
had an imagination that was “chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical
ingenuity.”15
Around that time, Byron, who had been wandering through Italy, writing and having an
assortment of affairs, grew bored and decided to enlist in the Greek struggle for independence
from the Ottoman Empire. He sailed for Missolonghi, where he took command of part of the
rebel army and prepared to attack a Turkish fortress. But before he could engage in battle, he
caught a violent cold that was made worse by his doctor’s decision to treat him by
bloodletting. On April 19, 1824, he died. According to his valet, among his final words were
“Oh, my poor dear child!—my dear Ada! My God, could I have seen her! Give her my
blessing.”16
ADA
Lady Byron wanted to make sure that Ada did not turn out like her father, and part of her
strategy was to have the girl rigorously study math, as if it were an antidote to poetic
imagination. When Ada, at age five, showed a preference for geography, Lady Byron ordered
that the subject be replaced by additional arithmetic lessons, and her governess soon proudly
reported, “She adds up sums of five or six rows of figures with accuracy.” Despite these
efforts, Ada developed some of her father’s propensities. She had an affair as a young
teenager with one of her tutors, and when they were caught and the tutor banished, she tried
to run away from home to be with him. In addition, she had mood swings that took her from
feelings of grandiosity to despair, and she suffered various maladies both physical and
psychological.
Ada accepted her mother’s conviction that an immersion in math could help tame her
Byronic tendencies. After her dangerous liaison with her tutor, and inspired by Babbage’s
Difference Engine, she decided on her own, at eighteen, to begin a new series of lessons. “I
must cease to think of living for pleasure or self-gratification,” she wrote her new tutor. “I
find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now
seems to keep my imagination from running wild. . . . It appears to me that the first thing is to
go through a course of Mathematics.” He agreed with the prescription: “You are right in
supposing that your chief resource and safeguard at the present is in a course of severe
intellectual study. For this purpose there is no subject to be compared to Mathematics.”17 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.
Her interest in technology was stoked when her mother took her on a trip through the
British industrial midlands to see the new factories and machinery. Ada was particularly
impressed with an automated weaving loom that used punch cards to direct the creation of the
desired fabric patterns, and she drew a sketch of how it worked. Her father’s famous speech
51

in the House of Lords had defended the Luddites who had smashed such looms because of
their fear of what technology might inflict on humanity. But Ada waxed poetical about them
and saw the connection with what would someday be called computers. “This Machinery
reminds me of Babbage and his gem of all mechanism,” she wrote.18
Ada’s interest in applied science was further stimulated when she met one of Britain’s few
noted female mathematicians and scientists, Mary Somerville. Somerville had just finished
writing one of her great works, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, in which she tied
together developments in astronomy, optics, electricity, chemistry, physics, botany, and
geology.1 Emblematic of the time, it provided a unified sense of the extraordinary endeavors
of discovery that were under way. She proclaimed in her opening sentence, “The progress of
modern science, especially within the last five years, has been remarkable for a tendency to
simplify the laws of nature and to unite detached branches by general principles.”
Somerville became a friend, teacher, inspiration, and mentor to Ada. She met with Ada
regularly, sent her math books, devised problems for her to solve, and patiently explained the
correct answers. She was also a good friend of Babbage’s, and during the fall of 1834 she and
Ada would often visit his Saturday-evening salons. Somerville’s son, Woronzow Greig, aided
Ada’s efforts to settle down by suggesting to one of his former classmates at Cambridge that
she would make a suitable—or at least interesting—wife.
William King was socially prominent, financially secure, quietly intelligent, and as taciturn
as Ada was excitable. Like her, he was a student of science, but his focus was more practical
and less poetic: his primary interests were crop rotation theories and advances in livestock
breeding techniques. He proposed marriage within a few weeks of meeting Ada, and she
accepted. Her mother, with motives that only a psychiatrist could fathom, decided it was
imperative to tell William about Ada’s attempted elopement with her tutor. Despite this news,
William was willing to proceed with the wedding, which was held in July 1835. “Gracious
God, who has so mercifully given you an opportunity of turning aside from the dangerous
paths, has given you a friend and guardian,” Lady Byron wrote her daughter, adding that she
should use this opportunity to “bid adieu” to all of her “peculiarities, caprices, and self-
seeking.”19
The marriage was a match made in rational calculus. For Ada, it offered the chance to
adopt a more steady and grounded life. More important, it allowed her to escape dependence
on her domineering mother. For William, it meant having a fascinating, eccentric wife from a
wealthy and famous family.
Lady Byron’s first cousin Viscount Melbourne (who had the misfortune of having been
married to Lady Caroline Lamb, by then deceased) was the prime minister, and he arranged
that, in Queen Victoria’s coronation list of honors, William would become the Earl of
Lovelace. His wife thus became Ada, Countess of Lovelace. She is therefore properly
referred to as Ada or Lady Lovelace, though she is now commonly known as Ada Lovelace.
That Christmas of 1835, Ada received from her mother the family’s life-size portrait of her
father. Painted by Thomas Phillips, it showed Lord Byron in romantic profile, gazing at the
horizon, dressed in traditional Albanian costume featuring a red velvet jacket, ceremonial
sword, and headdress. For years it had hung over Ada’s grandparents’ mantelpiece, but it had
been veiled by a green cloth from the day her parents had separated. Now she was trusted not
only to see it but to possess it, along with his inkstand and pen.
Her mother did something even more surprising when the Lovelaces’ first child, a son, was
born a few months later. Despite her disdain for her late husband’s memory, she agreed that
Ada should name the boy Byron, which she did. The following year Ada had a daughter,
whom she dutifully named Annabella, after her mother. Ada then came down with yet
another mysterious malady, which kept her bedridden for months. She recovered well enough
52

to have a third child, a son named Ralph, but her health remained fragile. She had digestive
and respiratory problems that were compounded by being treated with laudanum, morphine,
and other forms of opium, which led to mood swings and occasional delusions.
Ada was further unsettled by the eruption of a personal drama that was bizarre even by the
standards of the Byron family. It involved Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron’s half sister
and occasional lover. According to widely accepted rumors, Medora was Byron’s daughter.
She seemed determined to show that darkness ran in the family. She had an affair with a
sister’s husband, then ran off with him to France and had two illegitimate children. In a fit of
self-righteousness, Lady Byron went to France to rescue Medora, then revealed to Ada the
story of her father’s incest.
This “most strange and dreadful history” did not seem to surprise Ada. “I am not in the
least astonished,” she wrote her mother. “You merely confirm what I have for years and years
felt scarcely a doubt about.”20 Rather than being outraged, she seemed oddly energized by the
news. She declared that she could relate to her father’s defiance of authority. Referring to his
“misused genius,” she wrote to her mother, “If he has transmitted to me any portion of that
genius, I would use it to bring out great truths and principles. I think he has bequeathed this
task to me. I have this feeling strongly, and there is a pleasure attending it.”21
Once again Ada took up the study of math in order to settle herself, and she tried to
convince Babbage to become her tutor. “I have a peculiar way of learning, and I think it must
be a peculiar man to teach me successfully,” she wrote him. Whether due to her opiates or her
breeding or both, she developed a somewhat outsize opinion of her own talents and began to
describe herself as a genius. In her letter to Babbage, she wrote, “Do not reckon me
conceited, . . . but I believe I have the power of going just as far as I like in such pursuits, and
where there is so decided a taste, I should almost say a passion, as I have for them, I question
if there is not always some portion of natural genius even.”22
Babbage deflected Ada’s request, which was probably wise. It preserved their friendship
for an even more important collaboration, and she was able to secure a first-rate math tutor
instead: Augustus De Morgan, a patient gentleman who was a pioneer in the field of symbolic
logic. He had propounded a concept that Ada would one day employ with great significance,
which was that an algebraic equation could apply to things other than numbers. The relations
among symbols (for example, that a + b = b + a) could be part of a logic that applied to things
that were not numerical.
Ada was never the great mathematician that her canonizers claim, but she was an eager
pupil, able to grasp most of the basic concepts of calculus, and with her artistic sensibility she
liked to visualize the changing curves and trajectories that the equations were describing. De
Morgan encouraged her to focus on the rules for working through equations, but she was
more eager to discuss the underlying concepts. Likewise with geometry, she often asked for
visual ways to picture problems, such as how the intersections of circles in a sphere divide it
into various shapes.
Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people,
including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely
language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times. Despite
her mother’s efforts, she remained her father’s daughter, with a poetic sensibility that allowed
her to view an equation as a brushstroke that painted an aspect of nature’s physical splendor,
just as she could visualize the “wine-dark sea” or a woman who “walks in beauty, like the
night.” But math’s appeal went even deeper; it was spiritual. Math “constitutes the language
through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world,” she said,
and it allows us to portray the “changes of mutual relationship” that unfold in creation. It is
“the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator’s
works.”
53

This ability to apply imagination to science characterized the Industrial Revolution as well
as the computer revolution, for which Ada was to become a patron saint. She was able, as she
told Babbage, to understand the connection between poetry and analysis in ways that
transcended her father’s talents. “I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have
been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; for with me the two go together indissolubly,” she
wrote.23
Her reengagement with math, she told her mother, spurred her creativity and led to an
“immense development of imagination, so much so that I feel no doubt if I continue my
studies I shall in due time be a Poet.”24 The whole concept of imagination, especially as it
was applied to technology, intrigued her. “What is imagination?” she asked in an 1841 essay.
“It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new,
original, endless, ever-varying combinations. . . . It is that which penetrates into the unseen
worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”25
By then Ada believed she possessed special, even supernatural abilities, what she called
“an intuitive perception of hidden things.” Her exalted view of her talents led her to pursue
aspirations that were unusual for an aristocratic woman and mother in the early Victorian age.
“I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make
me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature,” she explained in a letter to
her mother in 1841. “I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast
focus.”26
It was while in this frame of mind that she decided to engage again with Charles Babbage,
whose salons she had first attended eight years earlier.
CHARLES BABBAGE AND HIS ENGINES
From an early age, Charles Babbage had been interested in machines that could perform
human tasks. When he was a child, his mother took him to many of the exhibition halls and
museums of wonder that were springing up in London in the early 1800s. At one in Hanover
Square, a proprietor aptly named Merlin invited him up to the attic workshop where there was
a variety of mechanical dolls, known as “automata.” One was a silver female dancer, about a
foot tall, whose arms moved with grace and who held in her hand a bird that could wag its
tail, flap its wings, and open its beak. The Silver Lady’s ability to display feelings and
personality captured the boy’s fancy. “Her eyes were full of imagination,” he recalled. Years
later he discovered the Silver Lady at a bankruptcy auction and bought it. It served as an
amusement at his evening salons where he celebrated the wonders of technology.
At Cambridge Babbage became friends with a group, including John Herschel and George
Peacock, who were disappointed by the way math was taught there. They formed a club,
called the Analytical Society, which campaigned to get the university to abandon the calculus
notation devised by its alumnus Newton, which relied on dots, and replace it with the one
devised by Leibniz, which used dx and dy to represent infinitesimal increments and was thus
known as “d” notation. Babbage titled their manifesto “The Principles of pure D-ism in
opposition to the Dot-age of the University.”27 He was prickly, but he had a good sense of
humor.
One day Babbage was in the Analytical Society’s room working on a table of logarithms
that was littered with discrepancies. Herschel asked him what he was thinking. “I wish to
God these calculations had been executed by steam,” Babbage answered. To this idea of a
mechanical method for tabulating logarithms Herschel replied, “It is quite possible.”28 In
1821 Babbage turned his attention to building such a machine.
Over the years, many had fiddled with making calculating contraptions. In the 1640s,
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, created a mechanical calculator to
54

reduce the drudgery of his father’s work as a tax supervisor. It had spoked metal wheels with
the digits 0 through 9 on their circumference. To add or subtract numbers, the operator used a
stylus to dial a number, as if using a rotary phone, then dialed in the next number; an
armature carried or borrowed a 1 when necessary. It became the first calculator to be patented
and sold commercially.
Thirty years later, Gottfried Leibniz, the German mathematician and philosopher, tried to
improve upon Pascal’s contraption with a “stepped reckoner” that had the capacity to
multiply and divide. It had a hand-cranked cylinder with a set of teeth that meshed with
counting wheels. But Leibniz ran into a problem that would be a recurring theme of the
digital age. Unlike Pascal, an adroit engineer who could combine scientific theories with
mechanical genius, Leibniz had little engineering skill and did not surround himself with
those who did. So, like many great theorists who lacked practical collaborators, he was
unable to produce reliably working versions of his device. Nevertheless, his core concept,
known as the Leibniz wheel, would influence calculator design through the time of Babbage.
Babbage knew of the devices of Pascal and Leibniz, but he was trying to do something more
complex. He wanted to construct a mechanical method for tabulating logarithms, sines,
cosines, and tangents.2 To do so, he adapted an idea that the French mathematician Gaspard
de Prony came up with in the 1790s. In order to create logarithm and trigonometry tables, de
Prony broke down the operations into very simple steps that involved only addition and
subtraction. Then he provided easy instructions so that scores of human laborers, who knew
little math, could perform these simple tasks and pass along their answers to the next set of
laborers. In other words, he created an assembly line, the great industrial-age innovation that
was memorably analyzed by Adam Smith in his description of the division of labor in a pin-
making factory. After a trip to Paris in which he heard of de Prony’s method, Babbage wrote,
“I conceived all of a sudden the idea of applying the same method to the immense work with
which I had been burdened, and to manufacture logarithms as one manufactures pins.”29
Even complex mathematical tasks, Babbage realized, could be broken into steps that came
down to calculating “finite differences” through simple adding and subtracting. For example,
in order to make a table of squares—12, 22, 32, 42, and so on—you could list the initial
numbers in such a sequence: 1, 4, 9, 16. . . . This would be column A. Beside it, in column B,
you could figure out the differences between each of these numbers, in this case 3, 5, 7, 9. . . .
Column C would list the difference between each of column B’s numbers, which is 2, 2, 2, 2.
. . . Once the process was thus simplified, it could be reversed and the tasks parceled out to
untutored laborers. One would be in charge of adding 2 to the last number in column B, and
then would hand that result to another person, who would add that result to the last number in
column A, thus generating the next number in the sequence of squares.
55

Replica of the Difference Engine.
56

Replica of the Analytical Engine.
57

The Jacquard loom.
58

Silk portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752–1834) woven by a Jacquard loom.
Babbage devised a way to mechanize this process, and he named it the Difference Engine.
It could tabulate any polynomial function and provide a digital method for approximating the
solution to differential equations.
How did it work? The Difference Engine used vertical shafts with disks that could be
turned to any numeral. These were attached to cogs that could be cranked in order to add that
numeral to (or subtract it from) a disk on an adjacent shaft. The contraption could even
“store” the interim results on another shaft. The main complexity was how to “carry” or
“borrow” when necessary, as we do with pencils when we calculate 36 + 19 or 42 – 17.
Drawing on Pascal’s devices, Babbage came up with a few ingenious contrivances that
allowed the cogs and shafts to handle the calculation.
The machine was, in concept, a true marvel. Babbage even figured out a way to get it to
create a table of prime numbers up to 10 million. The British government was impressed, at
least initially. In 1823 it gave him seed money of £1,700 and would eventually sink more
than £17,000, twice the cost of a warship, into the device during the decade Babbage spent
trying to build it. But the project ran into two problems. First, Babbage and his hired engineer
did not quite have the skills to get the device working. Second, he began dreaming up
59

something better.
Babbage’s new idea, which he conceived in 1834, was a general-purpose computer that could
carry out a variety of different operations based on programming instructions given to it. It
could perform one task, then be made to switch and perform another. It could even tell itself
to switch tasks—or alter its “pattern of action,” as Babbage explained—based on its own
interim calculations. Babbage named this proposed machine the Analytical Engine. He was
one hundred years ahead of his time.
The Analytical Engine was the product of what Ada Lovelace, in her essay on imagination,
had called “the Combining Faculty.” Babbage had combined innovations that had cropped up
in other fields, a trick of many great inventors. He had originally used a metal drum that was
studded with spikes to control how the shafts would turn. But then he studied, as Ada had, the
automated loom invented in 1801 by a Frenchman named Joseph-Marie Jacquard, which
transformed the silk-weaving industry. Looms create a pattern by using hooks to lift selected
warp threads, and then a rod pushes a woof thread underneath. Jacquard invented a method of
using cards with holes punched in them to control this process. The holes determined which
hooks and rods would be activated for each pass of the weave, thus automating the creation
of intricate patterns. Each time the shuttle was thrown to create a new pass of the thread, a
new punch card would come into play.
On June 30, 1836, Babbage made an entry into what he called his “Scribbling Books” that
would represent a milestone in the prehistory of computers: “Suggested Jacquard’s loom as a
substitute for the drums.”30 Using punch cards rather than steel drums meant that an unlimited
number of instructions could be input. In addition, the sequence of tasks could be modified,
thus making it easier to devise a general-purpose machine that was versatile and
reprogrammable.
Babbage bought a portrait of Jacquard and began to display it at his salons. It showed the
inventor sitting in an armchair, a loom in the background, holding a pair of calipers over
rectangular punch cards. Babbage amused his guests by asking them to guess what it was.
Most thought it a superb engraving. He would then reveal that it was actually a finely woven
silk tapestry, with twenty-four thousand rows of threads, each controlled by a different punch
card. When Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, came to one of Babbage’s salons,
he asked Babbage why he found the tapestry so interesting. Babbage replied, “It will greatly
assist in explaining the nature of my calculating machine, the Analytical Engine.”31
Few people, however, saw the beauty of Babbage’s proposed new machine, and the British
government had no inclination to fund it. Try as he might, Babbage could generate little
notice in either the popular press or scientific journals.
But he did find one believer. Ada Lovelace fully appreciated the concept of a general-
purpose machine. More important, she envisioned an attribute that might make it truly
amazing: it could potentially process not only numbers but any symbolic notations, including
musical and artistic ones. She saw the poetry in such an idea, and she set out to encourage
others to see it as well.
She barraged Babbage with letters, some of which verged on cheeky, even though he was
twenty-four years her senior. In one, she described the solitaire game using twenty-six
marbles, where the goal is to execute jumps so that only one marble remains. She had
mastered it but was trying to derive a “mathematical formula . . . on which the solution
depends, and which can be put into symbolic language.” Then she asked, “Am I too
imaginative for you? I think not.”32
Her goal was to work with Babbage as his publicist and partner in trying to get support to
build the Analytical Engine. “I am very anxious to talk to you,” she wrote in early 1841. “I
will give you a hint on what. It strikes me that at some future time . . . my head may be made
60

by you subservient to some of your purposes and plans. If so, if ever I could be worthy or
capable of being used by you, my head will be yours.”33
A year later, a tailor-made opportunity presented itself.
LADY LOVELACE’S NOTES
In his quest to find support for his Analytical Engine, Babbage had accepted an invitation to
address the Congress of Italian Scientists in Turin. Taking notes was a young military
engineer, Captain Luigi Menabrea, who would later serve as prime minister of Italy. With
Babbage’s help, Menabrea published a detailed description of the machine, in French, in
October 1842.
One of Ada’s friends suggested that she produce a translation of Menabrea’s piece for
Scientific Memoirs, a periodical devoted to scientific papers. This was her opportunity to
serve Babbage and show her talents. When she finished, she informed Babbage, who was
pleased but also somewhat surprised. “I asked why she had not herself written an original
paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted,” Babbage said.34 She replied
that the thought had not occurred to her. Back then, women generally did not publish
scientific papers.
Babbage suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir, a project that she
embraced with enthusiasm. She began working on a section she called “Notes by the
Translator” that ended up totaling 19,136 words, more than twice the length of Menabrea’s
original article. Signed “A.A.L.,” for Augusta Ada Lovelace, her “Notes” became more
famous than the article and were destined to make her an iconic figure in the history of
computing.35
As she worked on the notes at her country estate in Surrey in the summer of 1843, she and
Babbage exchanged scores of letters, and in the fall they had numerous meetings after she
moved back to her London home. A minor academic specialty and gender-charged debate has
grown up around the issue of how much of the thinking was hers rather than his. In his
memoirs, Babbage gives her much of the credit: “We discussed together the various
illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her
own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that
relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the
trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I
had made in the process.”36
In her “Notes,” Ada explored four concepts that would have historical resonance a century
later when the computer was finally born. The first was that of a general-purpose machine,
one that could not only perform a preset task but could be programmed and reprogrammed to
do a limitless and changeable array of tasks. In other words, she envisioned the modern
computer. This concept was at the core of her “Note A,” which emphasized the distinction
between Babbage’s original Difference Engine and his proposed new Analytical Engine.
“The particular function whose integral the Difference Engine was constructed to tabulate is
Δ7ux = 0,” she began, explaining that its purpose was the computation of nautical tables. “The
Analytical Engine, on the contrary, is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one
particular function and of no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever.”
This was done, she wrote, by “the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard
devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the
fabrication of brocaded stuffs.” Even more than Babbage, Ada realized the significance of
this. It meant that the machine could be like the type of computer we now take for granted:
one that does not merely do a specific arithmetic task but can be a general-purpose machine.
She explained:
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The bounds of arithmetic were outstepped the moment the idea of applying cards had occurred. The Analytical Engine does not occupy
common ground with mere “calculating machines.” It holds a position wholly its own. In enabling a mechanism to combine together general
symbols, in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental
processes.37
Those sentences are somewhat clotted, but they are worth reading carefully. They describe
the essence of modern computers. And Ada enlivened the concept with poetic flourishes.
“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers
and leaves,” she wrote. When Babbage read “Note A,” he was thrilled and made no changes.
“Pray do not alter it,” he said.38
Ada’s second noteworthy concept sprang from this description of a general-purpose
machine. Its operations, she realized, did not need to be limited to math and numbers.
Drawing on De Morgan’s extension of algebra into a formal logic, she noted that a machine
such as the Analytical Engine could store, manipulate, process, and act upon anything that
could be expressed in symbols: words and logic and music and anything else we might use
symbols to convey.
To explain this idea, she carefully defined what a computer operation was: “It may be
desirable to explain that by the word ‘operation,’ we mean any process which alters the
mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may.” A computer
operation, she noted, could alter the relationship not just between numbers but between any
symbols that were logically related. “It might act upon other things besides number, were
objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract
science of operations.” The Analytical Engine could, in theory, even perform operations on
musical notations: “Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds
in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression
and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any
degree of complexity.” It was the ultimate Ada-like “poetical science” concept: an elaborate
and scientific piece of music composed by a machine! Her father would have shuddered.
This insight would become the core concept of the digital age: any piece of content, data,
or information—music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video—could be expressed
in digital form and manipulated by machines. Even Babbage failed to see this fully; he
focused on numbers. But Ada realized that the digits on the cogs could represent things other
than mathematical quantities. Thus did she make the conceptual leap from machines that
were mere calculators to ones that we now call computers. Doron Swade, a computer
historian who specializes in studying Babbage’s engines, has declared this one of Ada’s
historic legacies. “If we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition
was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper,” he said.39
Ada’s third contribution, in her final “Note G,” was to figure out in step-by-step detail the
workings of what we now call a computer program or algorithm. The example she used was a
program to compute Bernoulli numbers,3 an exceedingly complex infinite series that in
various guises plays a role in number theory.
To show how the Analytical Engine could generate Bernoulli numbers, Ada described a
sequence of operations and then made a chart showing how each would be coded into the
machine. Along the way, she helped to devise the concepts of subroutines (a sequence of
instructions that performs a specific task, such as computing a cosine or calculating
compound interest, and can be dropped into larger programs as needed) and a recursive loop
(a sequence of instructions that repeats itself).4 These were made possible by the punch-card
mechanism. Seventy-five cards were needed to generate each number, she explained, and
then the process became iterative as that number was fed back into the process to generate the
next one. “It will be obvious that the very same seventy-five variable cards may be repeated
for the computation of every succeeding number,” she wrote. She envisioned a library of
commonly used subroutines, something that her intellectual heirs, including women such as
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Grace Hopper at Harvard and Kay McNulty and Jean Jennings at the University of
Pennsylvania, would create a century later. In addition, because Babbage’s engine made it
possible to jump back and forth within the sequence of instruction cards based on the interim
results it had calculated, it laid the foundation for what we now call conditional branching,
changing to a different path of instructions if certain conditions are met.
Babbage helped Ada with the Bernoulli calculations, but the letters show her deeply
immersed in the details. “I am doggedly attacking and sifting to the very bottom all the ways
of deducing the Bernoulli numbers,” she wrote in July, just weeks before her translation and
notes were due at the printers. “I am in much dismay at having gotten so amazing a quagmire
and botheration with these Numbers that I cannot possibly get the thing done today. . . . I am
in a charming state of confusion.”40
When it got worked out, she added a contribution that was primarily her own: a table and
diagram showing exactly how the algorithm would be fed into the computer, step by step,
including two recursive loops. It was a numbered list of coding instructions that included
destination registers, operations, and commentary—something that would be familiar to any
C++ coder today. “I have worked incessantly and most successfully all day,” she wrote
Babbage. “You will admire the Table and Diagram extremely. They have been made out with
extreme care.” From all of the letters it is clear that she did the table herself; the only help
came from her husband, who did not understand the math but was willing to methodically
trace in ink what she had done in pencil. “Lord L is at this moment kindly inking it all over
for me,” she wrote Babbage. “I had to do it in pencil.”41
It was mainly on the basis of this diagram, which accompanied the complex processes for
generating Bernoulli numbers, that Ada has been accorded by her fans the accolade of “the
world’s first computer programmer.” That is a bit hard to defend. Babbage had already
devised, at least in theory, more than twenty explanations of processes that the machine might
eventually perform. But none of these was published, and there was no clear description of
the way to sequence the operations. Therefore, it is fair to say that the algorithm and detailed
programming description for the generation of Bernoulli numbers was the first computer
program ever to be published. And the initials at the end were those of Ada Lovelace.
There was one other significant concept that she introduced in her “Notes,” which harked
back to the Frankenstein story produced by Mary Shelley after that weekend with Lord
Byron. It raised what is still the most fascinating metaphysical topic involving computers,
that of artificial intelligence: Can machines think?
Ada believed not. A machine such as Babbage’s could perform operations as instructed,
she asserted, but it could not come up with ideas or intentions of its own. “The Analytical
Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote in her “Notes.” “It can
do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power
of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” A century later this assertion would be
dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” by the computer pioneer Alan Turing (see chapter 3).
Ada wanted her work to be regarded as a serious scientific paper and not merely a public
advocacy piece, so at the outset of her “Notes” she stated that she would “offer no opinion”
on the government’s reluctance to continue funding Babbage’s endeavors. This did not please
Babbage, who proceeded to write a screed attacking the government. He wanted Ada to
include it in her “Notes,” without his name on it, as if it were her opinion. She refused. She
did not want her work compromised.
Without informing her, Babbage sent his proposed appendage directly to Scientific
Memoirs. The editors decided that it should appear separately and suggested that he
“manfully” sign his name. Babbage was charming when he wished, but he could also be
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cranky, stubborn, and defiant, like most innovators. The proposed solution infuriated him,
and he wrote Ada asking that she withdraw her work. Now it was her turn to become irate.
Using a form of address typically used by male friends, “My Dear Babbage,” she wrote that
“withdrawing the translation and Notes” would “be dishonorable and unjustifiable.” She
concluded the letter, “Be assured that I am your best friend; but that I never can or will
support you in acting on principles which I conceive to be not only wrong in themselves, but
suicidal.”42
Babbage backed down and agreed to have his piece published separately in another
periodical. That day Ada complained to her mother:
I have been harassed and pressed in a most perplexing manner by the conduct of Mr. Babbage. . . . I am sorry to come to the conclusion that he
is one of the most impracticable, selfish, and intemperate persons one can have to do with. . . . I declared at once to Babbage that no power
should induce me to lend myself to any of his quarrels or to become in any way his organ. . . . He was furious. I imperturbable and unmoved.43

Ada’s response to the dispute was a bizarre sixteen-page letter to Babbage, poured forth in
a frenzy, that vividly displayed her moodiness, exultations, delusions, and passions. She
cajoled and berated him, praised and denigrated him. At one point she contrasted their
motives. “My own uncompromising principle is to endeavour to love truth and God before
fame and glory,” she claimed. “Yours is to love truth and God; but to love fame, glory,
honours yet more.” She proclaimed that she saw her own inevitable fame as being of an
exalted nature: “I wish to add my might toward expounding and interpreting the Almighty
and his laws. . . . I should feel it no small glory if I were able to be one of his most noted
prophets.”44
Having laid that groundwork, she offered him a deal: they should forge a business and
political partnership. She would apply her connections and persuasive pen to his endeavor to
build his Analytical Engine if—and only if—he would let her have control over his business
decisions. “I give you the first choice and offer of my services and my intellect,” she wrote.
“Do not lightly reject them.” The letter read in parts like a venture capital term sheet or a
prenuptial agreement, complete with the possibility of arbitrators. “You will undertake to
abide wholly by the judgment of myself (or of any persons whom you may now please to
name as referees, whenever we may differ) on all practical matters,” she declared. In return,
she promised, she would “lay before you in the course of a year or two explicit and honorable
propositions for executing your engine.”45
The letter would seem surprising were it not like so many others that she wrote. It was an
example of how her grandiose ambitions sometimes got the best of her. Nevertheless, she
deserves respect as a person who, rising above the expectations of her background and gender
and defying plagues of family demons, dedicated herself diligently to complex mathematical
feats that most of us never would or could attempt. (Bernoulli numbers alone would defeat
many of us.) Her impressive mathematical labors and imaginative insights came in the midst
of the drama of Medora Leigh and bouts of illness that would cause her to become dependent
on opiates that amplified her mood swings. She explained at the end of her letter to Babbage,
“My dear friend, if you knew what sad and direful experiences I have had, in ways of which
you cannot be aware, you would feel that some weight is due to my feelings.” Then, after a
quick detour to raise a small point about using the calculus of finite differences to compute
Bernoulli numbers, she apologized that “this letter is sadly blotted” and plaintively asked, “I
wonder if you will choose to retain the lady-fairy in your service or not.”46
Ada was convinced that Babbage would accept her offer to become entrepreneurial
partners. “He has so strong an idea of the advantage of having my pen as his servant that he
will probably yield; though I demand very strong concessions,” she wrote her mother. “If he
does consent to what I propose, I shall probably be enabled to keep him out of much hot
water and to bring his engine to consummation.”47 Babbage, however, thought it wiser to
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decline. He went to see Ada and “refused all the conditions.”48 Although they never again
collaborated on science, their relationship survived. “Babbage and I are I think more friends
than ever,” she wrote her mother the next week.49 And Babbage agreed the next month to pay
a visit to her country home, sending her a fond letter referring to her as “the Enchantress of
Numbers” and “my dear and much admired Interpreter.”
That month, September 1843, her translation and “Notes” finally appeared in Scientific
Memoirs. For a while she was able to bask in acclaim from friends and to hope that, like her
mentor Mary Somerville, she would be taken seriously in scientific and literary circles.
Publication made her finally feel like “a completely professional person,” she wrote to a
lawyer. “I really have become as much tied to a profession as you are.”50
It was not to be. Babbage got no more funding for his machines; they were never built, and
he died in poverty. As for Lady Lovelace, she never published another scientific paper.
Instead her life spiraled downward, and she became addicted to gambling and opiates. She
had an affair with a gambling partner who then blackmailed her, forcing her to pawn her
family jewels. During the final year of her life, she fought an exceedingly painful battle with
uterine cancer accompanied by constant hemorrhaging. When she died in 1852, at age thirty-
six, she was buried, in accordance with one of her last requests, in a country grave next to the
poet father she never knew, who had died at the same age.
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. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal
and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a
mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that
such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be
programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and
significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that
derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be
notated in symbols.
Over the years, Ada Lovelace has been celebrated as a feminist icon and a computer
pioneer. For example, the U.S. Defense Department named its high-level object-oriented
programming language Ada. However, she has also been ridiculed as delusional, flighty, and
only a minor contributor to the “Notes” that bear her initials. As she herself wrote in those
“Notes,” referring to the Analytical Engine but in words that also describe her fluctuating
reputation, “In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate
what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural
reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case.”
The reality is that Ada’s contribution was both profound and inspirational. More than
Babbage or any other person of her era, she was able to glimpse a future in which machines
would become partners of the human imagination, together weaving tapestries as beautiful as
those from Jacquard’s loom. Her appreciation for poetical science led her to celebrate a
proposed calculating machine that was dismissed by the scientific establishment of her day,
and she perceived how the processing power of such a device could be used on any form of
information. Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that
would blossom a hundred years later.
65

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), with his Differential Analyzer at MIT.
Alan Turing (1912–54), at the Sherborne School in 1928.
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Claude Shannon (1916–2001) in 1951.
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CHAPTER TWO

THE COMPUTER
Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when
the technology exists to implement it. For example, the idea of sending a man to the moon
was proposed right when the progress of microchips made it possible to put computer
guidance systems into the nose cone of a rocket. There are other cases, however, when the
timing is out of kilter. Charles Babbage published his paper about a sophisticated computer in
1837, but it took a hundred years to achieve the scores of technological advances needed to
build one.
Some of those advances seem almost trivial, but progress comes not only in great leaps but
also from hundreds of small steps. Take for example punch cards, like those Babbage saw on
Jacquard’s looms and proposed incorporating into his Analytical Engine. Perfecting the use
of punch cards for computers came about because Herman Hollerith, an employee of the U.S.
Census Bureau, was appalled that it took close to eight years to manually tabulate the 1880
census. He resolved to automate the 1890 count.
Drawing on the way that railway conductors punched holes in various places on a ticket in
order to indicate the traits of each passenger (gender, approximate height, age, hair color),
Hollerith devised punch cards with twelve rows and twenty-four columns that recorded the
salient facts about each person in the census. The cards were then slipped between a grid of
mercury cups and a set of spring-loaded pins, which created an electric circuit wherever there
was a hole. The machine could tabulate not only the raw totals but also combinations of traits,
such as the number of married males or foreign-born females. Using Hollerith’s tabulators,
the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of
electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in
1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines
Corporation, or IBM.
One way to look at innovation is as the accumulation of hundreds of small advances, such
as counters and punch-card readers. At places like IBM, which specialize in daily
improvements made by teams of engineers, this is the preferred way to understand how
innovation really happens. Some of the most important technologies of our era, such as the
fracking techniques developed over the past six decades for extracting natural gas, came
about because of countless small innovations as well as a few breakthrough leaps.
In the case of computers, there were many such incremental advances made by faceless
engineers at places like IBM. But that was not enough. Although the machines that IBM
produced in the early twentieth century could compile data, they were not what we would call
computers. They weren’t even particularly adroit calculators. They were lame. In addition to
those hundreds of minor advances, the birth of the computer age required some larger
imaginative leaps from creative visionaries.
DIGITAL BEATS ANALOG
The machines devised by Hollerith and Babbage were digital, meaning they calculated using
digits: discrete and distinct integers such as 0, 1, 2, 3. In their machines, the integers were
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added and subtracted using cogs and wheels that clicked one digit at a time, like counters.
Another approach to computing was to build devices that could mimic or model a physical
phenomenon and then make measurements on the analogous model to calculate the relevant
results. These were known as analog computers because they worked by analogy. Analog
computers do not rely on discrete integers to make their calculations; instead, they use
continuous functions. In analog computers, a variable quantity such as electrical voltage, the
position of a rope on a pulley, hydraulic pressure, or a measurement of distance is employed
as an analog for the corresponding quantities of the problem to be solved. A slide rule is
analog; an abacus is digital. Clocks with sweeping hands are analog, and those with displayed
numerals are digital.
Around the time that Hollerith was building his digital tabulator, Lord Kelvin and his
brother James Thomson, two of England’s most distinguished scientists, were creating an
analog machine. It was designed to handle the tedious task of solving differential equations,
which would help in the creation of tide charts and of tables showing the firing angles that
would generate different trajectories of artillery shells. Beginning in the 1870s, the brothers
devised a system that was based on a planimeter, an instrument that can measure the area of a
two-dimensional shape, such as the space under a curved line on a piece of paper. The user
would trace the outline of the curve with the device, which would calculate the area by using
a small sphere that was slowly pushed across the surface of a large rotating disk. By
calculating the area under the curve, it could thus solve equations by integration—in other
words, it could perform a basic task of calculus. Kelvin and his brother were able to use this
method to create a “harmonic synthesizer” that could churn out an annual tide chart in four
hours. But they were never able to conquer the mechanical difficulties of linking together
many of these devices in order to solve equations with a lot of variables.
That challenge of linking together multiple integrators was not mastered until 1931, when
an MIT engineering professor, Vannevar (rhymes with beaver) Bush—remember his name,
for he is a key character in this book—was able to build the world’s first analog electrical-
mechanical computer. He dubbed his machine a Differential Analyzer. It consisted of six
wheel-and-disk integrators, not all that different from Lord Kelvin’s, that were connected by
an array of gears, pulleys, and shafts rotated by electric motors. It helped that Bush was at
MIT; there were a lot of people around who could assemble and calibrate complex
contraptions. The final machine, which was the size of a small bedroom, could solve
equations with as many as eighteen independent variables. Over the next decade, versions of
Bush’s Differential Analyzer were replicated at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground
in Maryland, the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania,
and Manchester and Cambridge universities in England. They proved particularly useful in
churning out artillery firing tables—and in training and inspiring the next generation of
computer pioneers.
Bush’s machine, however, was not destined to be a major advance in computing history
because it was an analog device. In fact, it turned out to be the last gasp for analog
computing, at least for many decades.
New approaches, technologies, and theories began to emerge in 1937, exactly a hundred
years after Babbage first published his paper on the Analytical Engine. It would become an
annus mirabilis of the computer age, and the result would be the triumph of four properties,
somewhat interrelated, that would define modern computing:
DIGITAL. A fundamental trait of the computer revolution was that it was based on digital, not
analog, computers. This occurred for many reasons, as we shall soon see, including
simultaneous advances in logic theory, circuits, and electronic on-off switches that made a
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digital rather than an analog approach more fruitful. It would not be until the 2010s that
computer scientists, seeking to mimic the human brain, would seriously begin working on
ways to revive analog computing.
BINARY. Not only would modern computers be digital, but the digital system they would adopt
would be binary, or base-2, meaning that it employs just 0s and 1s rather than all ten digits of
our everyday decimal system. Like many mathematical concepts, binary theory was
pioneered by Leibniz in the late seventeenth century. During the 1940s, it became
increasingly clear that the binary system worked better than other digital forms, including the
decimal system, for performing logical operations using circuits composed of on-off
switches.
ELECTRONIC. In the mid-1930s, the British engineer Tommy Flowers pioneered the use of
vacuum tubes as on-off switches in electronic circuits. Until then, circuits had relied on
mechanical and electromechanical switches, such as the clacking electromagnetic relays that
were used by phone companies. Vacuum tubes had mainly been employed to amplify signals
rather than as on-off switches. By using electronic components such as vacuum tubes, and
later transistors and microchips, computers could operate thousands of times faster than
machines that had moving electromechanical switches.
GENERAL PURPOSE. Finally, the machines would eventually have the ability to be programmed
and reprogrammed—and even reprogram themselves—for a variety of purposes. They would
be able to solve not just one form of mathematical calculation, such as differential equations,
but could handle a multiplicity of tasks and symbol manipulations, involving words and
music and pictures as well as numbers, thus fulfilling the potential that Lady Lovelace had
celebrated when describing Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause,
the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that
coincided in multiple places. As often happens in the annals of invention, especially
information technology invention, the time was right and the atmosphere was charged. The
development of vacuum tubes for the radio industry paved the way for the creation of
electronic digital circuits. That was accompanied by theoretical advances in logic that made
circuits more useful. And the march was quickened by the drums of war. As nations began
arming for the looming conflict, it became clear that computational power was as important
as firepower. Advances fed on one another, occurring almost simultaneously and
spontaneously, at Harvard and MIT and Princeton and Bell Labs and an apartment in Berlin
and even, most improbably but interestingly, in a basement in Ames, Iowa.
Underpinning all of these advances were some beautiful—Ada might call them poetic—
leaps of mathematics. One of these leaps led to the formal concept of a “universal computer,”
a general-purpose machine that could be programmed to perform any logical task and
simulate the behavior of any other logical machine. It was conjured up as a thought
experiment by a brilliant English mathematician with a life story that was both inspiring and
tragic.
ALAN TURING
Alan Turing had the cold upbringing of a child born on the fraying fringe of the British
gentry.1 His family had been graced since 1638 with a baronetcy, which had meandered down
the lineage to one of his nephews. But for the younger sons on the family tree, which Turing
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and his father and grandfather were, there was no land and little wealth. Most went into fields
such as the clergy, like Alan’s grandfather, and the colonial civil service, like his father, who
served as a minor administrator in remote regions of India. Alan was conceived in
Chhatrapur, India, and born on June 23, 1912, in London, while his parents were on home
leave. When he was only one, his parents went back to India for a few years, and handed him
and his older brother off to a retired army colonel and his wife to be raised in a seaside town
on the south coast of England. “I am no child psychologist,” his brother, John, later noted,
“but I am assured that it is a bad thing for an infant in arms to be uprooted and put into a
strange environment.”2
When his mother returned, Alan lived with her for a few years and then, at age thirteen,
was sent to boarding school. He rode there on his bicycle, taking two days to cover more than
sixty miles, alone. There was a lonely intensity to him, reflected in his love of long-distance
running and biking. He also had a trait, so common among innovators, that was charmingly
described by his biographer Andrew Hodges: “Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that
separated initiative from disobedience.”3
In a poignant memoir, his mother described the son whom she doted upon:
Alan was broad, strongly built and tall, with a square, determined jaw and unruly brown hair. His deep-set, clear blue eyes were his most
remarkable feature. The short, slightly retroussé nose and humorous lines of his mouth gave him a youthful—sometimes a childlike—
appearance. So much so that in his late thirties he was still at times mistaken for an undergraduate. In dress and habits he tended to be slovenly.
His hair was usually too long, with an overhanging lock which he would toss back with a jerk of his head. . . . He could be abstracted and
dreamy, absorbed in his own thoughts which on occasion made him seem unsociable. . . . There were times when his shyness led him into
extreme gaucherie. . . . Indeed he surmised that the seclusion of a mediaeval monastery would have suited him very well.4

At the boarding school, Sherborne, he realized that he was homosexual. He became
infatuated with a fair-haired, slender schoolmate, Christopher Morcom, with whom he
studied math and discussed philosophy. But in the winter before he was to graduate, Morcom
suddenly died of tuberculosis. Turing would later write Morcom’s mother, “I simply
worshipped the ground he trod on—a thing which I did not make much attempt to disguise, I
am sorry to say.”5 In a letter to his own mother, Turing seemed to take refuge in his faith: “I
feel that I shall meet Morcom again somewhere and that there will be work for us to do
together there as I believed there was for us to do here. Now that I am left to do it alone, I
must not let him down. If I succeed I shall be more fit to join his company than I am now.”
But the tragedy ended up eroding Turing’s religious faith. It also turned him even more
inward, and he never again found it easy to forge intimate relationships. His housemaster
reported to his parents at Easter 1927, “Undeniably he’s not a ‘normal’ boy; not the worse for
that, but probably less happy.”6
In his final year at Sherborne, Turing won a scholarship to attend King’s College,
Cambridge, where he went in 1931 to read mathematics. One of three books he bought with
some prize money was The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, by John von
Neumann, a fascinating Hungarian-born mathematician who, as a pioneer of computer
design, would have a continuing influence on his life. Turing was particularly interested in
the math at the core of quantum physics, which describes how events at the subatomic level
are governed by statistical probabilities rather than laws that determine things with certainty.
He believed (at least while he was young) that this uncertainty and indeterminacy at the
subatomic level permitted humans to exercise free will—a trait that, if true, would seem to
distinguish them from machines. In other words, because events at the subatomic level are
not predetermined, that opens the way for our thoughts and actions not to be predetermined.
As he explained in a letter to Morcom’s mother:
It used to be supposed in science that if everything was known about the Universe at any particular moment then we can predict what it will be
through all the future. This idea was really due to the great success of astronomical prediction. More modern science however has come to the
conclusion that when we are dealing with atoms and electrons we are quite unable to know the exact state of them; our instruments being made
of atoms and electrons themselves. The conception then of being able to know the exact state of the universe then really must break down on the
small scale. This means then that the theory which held that as eclipses etc. are predestined so were all our actions breaks down too. We have a
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will which is able to determine the action of the atoms probably in a small portion of the brain, or possibly all over it.7
For the rest of his life, Turing would wrestle with the issue of whether the human mind was
fundamentally different from a deterministic machine, and he would gradually come to the
conclusion that the distinction was less clear than he had thought.
He also had an instinct that, just as uncertainty pervaded the subatomic realm, there were
also mathematical problems that could not be solved mechanically and were destined to be
cloaked in indeterminacy. At the time, mathematicians were intensely focused on questions
about the completeness and consistency of logical systems, partly due to the influence of
David Hilbert, the Göttingen-based genius who, among many other achievements, had come
up with the mathematical formulation of the theory of general relativity concurrently with
Einstein.
At a 1928 conference, Hilbert posed three fundamental questions about any formal system
of mathematics: (1) Was its set of rules complete, so that any statement could be proved (or
disproved) using only the rules of the system? (2) Was it consistent, so that no statement
could be proved true and also proved false? (3) Was there some procedure that could
determine whether a particular statement was provable, rather than allowing the possibility
that some statements (such as enduring math riddles like Fermat’s last theorem,5 Goldbach’s
conjecture,6 or the Collatz conjecture7) were destined to remain in undecidable limbo? Hilbert
thought that the answer to the first two questions was yes, making the third one moot. He put
it simply, “There is no such thing as an unsolvable problem.”
Within three years, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel, then twenty-five and living with
his mother in Vienna, polished off the first two of these questions with unexpected answers:
no and no. In his “incompleteness theorem,” he showed that there existed statements that
could be neither proved nor disproved. Among them, to oversimplify a bit, were those that
were akin to self-referential statements such as “This statement is unprovable.” If the
statement is true, then it decrees that we can’t prove it to be true; if it’s false, that also leads to
a logical contradiction. It is somewhat like the ancient Greek “liar’s paradox,” in which the
truth of the statement “This statement is false” cannot be determined. (If the statement is true,
then it’s also false, and vice versa.)
By coming up with statements that could not be proved or disproved, Gödel showed that
any formal system powerful enough to express the usual mathematics was incomplete. He
was also able to produce a companion theorem that effectively answered no to Hilbert’s
second question.
That left the third of Hilbert’s questions, that of decidability or, as Hilbert called it, the
Entscheidungsproblem or “decision problem.” Even though Gödel had come up with
statements that could be neither proved nor disproved, perhaps that odd class of statements
could somehow be identified and cordoned off, leaving the rest of the system complete and
consistent. That would require that we find some method for deciding whether a statement
was provable. When the great Cambridge math professor Max Newman taught Turing about
Hilbert’s questions, the way he expressed the Entscheidungsproblem was this: Is there a
“mechanical process” that can be used to determine whether a particular logical statement is
provable?
Turing liked the concept of a “mechanical process.” One day in the summer of 1935, he
was out for his usual solitary run along the Ely River, and after a couple of miles he stopped
to lie down among the apple trees in Grantchester Meadows to ponder an idea. He would take
the notion of a “mechanical process” literally, conjuring up a mechanical process—an
imaginary machine—and applying it to the problem.8
The “Logical Computing Machine” that he envisioned (as a thought experiment, not as a
real machine to be built) was quite simple at first glance, but it could handle, in theory, any
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mathematical computation. It consisted of an unlimited length of paper tape containing
symbols within squares; in the simplest binary example, these symbols could be merely a 1
and a blank. The machine would be able to read the symbols on the tape and perform certain
actions based on a “table of instructions” it had been given.9
The table of instructions would tell the machine what to do based on whatever
configuration it happened to be in and what symbol, if any, it found in the square. For
example, the table of instructions for a particular task might decree that if the machine was in
configuration 1 and saw a 1 in the square, then it should move one square to the right and
shift into configuration 2. Somewhat surprisingly, to us if not to Turing, such a machine,
given the proper table of instructions, could complete any mathematical task, no matter how
complex.
How might this imaginary machine answer Hilbert’s third question, the decision problem?
Turing approached the problem by refining the concept of “computable numbers.” Any real
number that was defined by a mathematical rule could be calculated by the Logical
Computing Machine. Even an irrational number such as π could be calculated indefinitely
using a finite table of instructions. So could the logarithm of 7, or the square root of 2, or the
sequence of Bernoulli numbers that Ada Lovelace had helped produce an algorithm for, or
any other number or series, no matter how challenging to compute, as long as its calculation
was defined by a finite set of rules. All of these were, in Turing’s parlance, “computable
numbers.”
Turing went on to show that noncomputable numbers also existed. This was related to
what he called “the halting problem.” There can be no method, he showed, to determine in
advance whether any given instruction table combined with any given set of inputs will lead
the machine to arrive at an answer or go into some loop and continue chugging away
indefinitely, getting nowhere. The insolvability of the halting problem, he showed, meant that
Hilbert’s decision problem, the Entscheidungsproblem, was unsolvable. Despite what Hilbert
seemed to hope, no mechanical procedure can determine the provability of every
mathematical statement. Gödel’s incompleteness theory, the indeterminacy of quantum
mechanics, and Turing’s answer to Hilbert’s third challenge all dealt blows to a mechanical,
deterministic, predictable universe.
Turing’s paper was published in 1937 with the not so snappy title “On Computable
Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” His answer to Hilbert’s third
question was useful for the development of mathematical theory. But far more important was
the by-product of Turing’s proof: his concept of a Logical Computing Machine, which soon
came to be known as a Turing machine. “It is possible to invent a single machine which can
be used to compute any computable sequence,” he declared.10 Such a machine would be able
to read the instructions of any other machine and carry out whatever task that machine could
do. In essence, it embodied the dream of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace for a completely
general-purpose universal machine.
A different and less beautiful solution to the Entscheidungsproblem, with the clunkier
name “untyped lambda calculus,” had been published earlier that year by Alonzo Church, a
mathematician at Princeton. Turing’s professor Max Newman decided that it would be useful
for Turing to go there to study under Church. In his letter of recommendation, Newman
described Turing’s enormous potential. He also added a more personal appeal based on
Turing’s personality. “He has been working without any supervision or criticism from
anyone,” Newman wrote. “This makes it all the more important that he should come into
contact as soon as possible with the leading workers on this line, so that he should not
develop into a confirmed solitary.”11
Turing did have a tendency toward being a loner. His homosexuality made him feel like an
outsider at times; he lived alone and avoided deep personal commitments. At one point he
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proposed marriage to a female colleague, but then felt compelled to tell her that he was gay;
she was unfazed and still willing to get married, but he believed it would be a sham and
decided not to proceed. Yet he did not become “a confirmed solitary.” He learned to work as
part of a team, with collaborators, which was key to allowing his abstract theories to be
reflected in real and tangible inventions.
In September 1936, while waiting for his paper to be published, the twenty-four-year-old
doctoral candidate sailed to America in steerage class aboard the aging ocean liner RMS
Berengaria, lugging with him a prized brass sextant. His office at Princeton was in the
Mathematics Department building, which also then housed the Institute for Advanced Study,
where Einstein, Gödel, and von Neumann held court. The cultivated and highly sociable von
Neumann became particularly interested in Turing’s work, despite their very different
personalities.
The seismic shifts and simultaneous advances of 1937 were not directly caused by the
publication of Turing’s paper. In fact, it got little notice at first. Turing asked his mother to
send out reprints of it to the mathematical philosopher Bertrand Russell and a half dozen
other famous scholars, but the only major review was by Alonzo Church, who could afford to
be flattering because he had been ahead of Turing in solving Hilbert’s decision problem.
Church was not only generous; he introduced the term Turing machine for what Turing had
called a Logical Computing Machine. Thus at twenty-four, Turing’s name became indelibly
stamped on one of the most important concepts of the digital age.12
CLAUDE SHANNON AND GEORGE STIBITZ AT BELL LABS
There was another seminal theoretical breakthrough in 1937, similar to Turing’s in that it was
purely a thought experiment. This one was the work of an MIT graduate student named
Claude Shannon, who that year turned in the most influential master’s thesis of all time, a
paper that Scientific American later dubbed “the Magna Carta of the Information Age.”13
Shannon grew up in a small Michigan town where he built model planes and amateur
radios, then went on to major in electrical engineering and math at the University of
Michigan. In his senior year he answered a help-wanted listing tacked to a bulletin board,
which offered a job at MIT working under Vannevar Bush helping to run the Differential
Analyzer. Shannon got the job and was mesmerized by the machine—not so much the rods
and pulleys and wheels that formed the analog components as the electromagnetic relay
switches that were part of its control circuit. As electrical signals caused them to click open
and clack closed, the switches created different circuit patterns.
During the summer of 1937, Shannon took a break from MIT and went to work at Bell
Labs, a research facility run by AT&T. Located then in Manhattan on the Hudson River edge
of Greenwich Village, it was a haven for turning ideas into inventions. Abstract theories
intersected with practical problems there, and in the corridors and cafeterias eccentric
theorists mingled with hands-on engineers, gnarly mechanics, and businesslike problem-
solvers, encouraging the cross-fertilization of theory with engineering. This made Bell Labs
an archetype of one of the most important underpinnings of digital-age innovation, what the
Harvard science historian Peter Galison has called a “trading zone.” When these disparate
practitioners and theoreticians came together, they learned how to find a common parlance to
trade ideas and exchange information.14
At Bell Labs, Shannon saw up close the wonderful power of the phone system’s circuits,
which used electrical switches to route calls and balance loads. In his mind, he began
connecting the workings of these circuits to another subject he found fascinating, the system
of logic formulated ninety years earlier by the British mathematician George Boole. Boole
revolutionized logic by finding ways to express logical statements using symbols and
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equations. He gave true propositions the value 1 and false propositions a 0. A set of basic
logical operations—such as and, or, not, either/or, and if/then—could then be performed
using these propositions, just as if they were math equations.
Shannon figured out that electrical circuits could execute these logical operations using an
arrangement of on-off switches. To perform an and function, for example, two switches could
be put in sequence, so that both had to be on for electricity to flow. To perform an or
function, the switches could be in parallel so that electricity would flow if either of them was
on. Slightly more versatile switches called logic gates could streamline the process. In other
words, you could design a circuit containing a lot of relays and logic gates that could
perform, step by step, a sequence of logical tasks.
(A “relay” is simply a switch that can be opened and shut electrically, such as by using an
electromagnet. The ones that clack open and closed are sometimes called electromechanical
because they have moving parts. Vacuum tubes and transistors can also be used as switches
in an electrical circuit; they are called electronic because they manipulate the flow of
electrons but do not require the movement of any physical parts. A “logic gate” is a switch
that can handle one or more inputs. For example, in the case of two inputs, an and logic gate
switches on if both of the inputs are on, and an or logic gate switches on if either of the
inputs is on. Shannon’s insight was that these could be wired together in circuits that could
execute the tasks of Boole’s logical algebra.)
When Shannon returned to MIT in the fall, Bush was fascinated by his ideas and urged him
to include them in his master’s thesis. Entitled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching
Circuits,” it showed how each of the many functions of Boolean algebra could be executed.
“It is possible to perform complex mathematical operations by means of relay circuits,” he
summed up at the end.15 This became the basic concept underlying all digital computers.
Shannon’s ideas intrigued Turing because they neatly related to his own just-published
concept of a universal machine that could use simple instructions, expressed in binary coding,
to tackle problems not only of math but of logic. Also, since logic was related to the way
human minds reason, a machine that performed logical tasks could, in theory, mimic the way
humans think.
Working at Bell Labs at the same time was a mathematician named George Stibitz, whose job
was to figure out ways to handle the increasingly complicated calculations needed by the
telephone engineers. The only tools he had were mechanical desktop adding machines, so he
set out to invent something better based on Shannon’s insight that electronic circuits could
perform mathematical and logical tasks. Late one evening in November, he went to the
stockroom and took home some old electromagnetic relays and bulbs. At his kitchen table, he
put the parts together with a tobacco tin and a few switches to form a simple logical circuit
that could add binary numbers. A lit bulb represented a 1, and an unlit bulb represented a 0.
His wife dubbed it the “K-Model,” after the kitchen table. He took it into the office the next
day and tried to convince his colleagues that, with enough relays, he could make a calculating
machine.
One important mission of Bell Labs was to figure out ways to amplify a phone signal over
long distances while filtering out static. The engineers had formulas that dealt with the
amplitude and phase of the signal, and the solutions to their equations sometimes involved
complex numbers (ones that include an imaginary unit that represents the square root of a
negative number). Stibitz was asked by his supervisor if his proposed machine could handle
complex numbers. When he said that it could, a team was assigned to help him build it. The
Complex Number Calculator, as it was called, was completed in 1939. It had more than four
hundred relays, each of which could open and shut twenty times per second. That made it
both blindingly fast compared to mechanical calculators and painfully clunky compared to
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the all-electronic vacuum-tube circuits just being invented. Stibitz’s computer was not
programmable, but it showed the potential of a circuit of relays to do binary math, process
information, and handle logical procedures.16
HOWARD AIKEN
Also in 1937 a Harvard doctoral student named Howard Aiken was struggling to do tedious
calculations for his physics thesis using an adding machine. When he lobbied the university
to build a more sophisticated computer to do the work, his department head mentioned that in
the attic of Harvard’s science center were some brass wheels from a century-old device that
seemed to be similar to what he wanted. When Aiken explored the attic, he found one of six
demonstration models of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, which Babbage’s son Henry
had made and distributed. Aiken became fascinated by Babbage and moved the set of brass
wheels into his office. “Sure enough, we had two of Babbage’s wheels,” he recalled. “Those
were the wheels that I had later mounted and put in the body of the computer.”17
That fall, just when Stibitz was cooking up his kitchen-table demonstration, Aiken wrote a
twenty-two-page memo to his Harvard superiors and executives at IBM making the case that
they should fund a modern version of Babbage’s digital machine. “The desire to economize
time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error
is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself,” his memo began.18
Aiken had grown up in Indiana under rough circumstances. When he was twelve, he used a
fireplace poker to defend his mother against his drunk and abusive father, who then
abandoned the family with no money. So young Howard dropped out of ninth grade to
support the family by working as a telephone installer, then got a night job with the local
power company so that he could attend a tech school during the day. He drove himself to be a
success, but in the process he developed into a taskmaster with an explosive temper, someone
who was described as resembling an approaching thunderstorm.19
Harvard had mixed feelings about building Aiken’s proposed calculating machine or
holding out the possibility that he might be granted tenure for a project that seemed to be
more practical than academic. (In parts of the Harvard faculty club, calling someone practical
rather than academic was considered an insult.) Supporting Aiken was President James
Bryant Conant, who, as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, was
comfortable positioning Harvard as part of a triangle involving academia, industry, and the
military. His Physics Department, however, was more purist. Its chairman wrote to Conant in
December 1939, saying that the machine was “desirable if money can be found, but not
necessarily more desirable than anything else,” and a faculty committee said of Aiken, “It
should be made quite clear to him that such activity did not increase his chances of promotion
to a professorship.” Eventually Conant prevailed and authorized Aiken to build his machine.20
In April 1941, as IBM was constructing the Mark I to Aiken’s specifications at its lab in
Endicott, New York, he left Harvard to serve in the U.S. Navy. For two years he was a
teacher, with the rank of lieutenant commander, at the Naval Mine Warfare School in
Virginia. One colleague described him as “armed to the teeth with room-length formulas and
ivy-covered Harvard theories” and running “smack into a collection of Dixie dumbbells
[none of whom] knew calculus from corn pone.”21 Much of his time was spent thinking about
the Mark I, and he made occasional visits to Endicott wearing his full dress uniform.22
His tour of duty had one major payoff: at the beginning of 1944, as IBM was getting ready
to ship the completed Mark I to Harvard, Aiken was able to convince the Navy to take over
authority for the machine and assign him to be the officer in charge. That helped him
circumnavigate the academic bureaucracy of Harvard, which was still balky about granting
him tenure. The Harvard Computation Laboratory became, for the time being, a naval
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facility, and all of Aiken’s staffers were Navy personnel who wore uniforms to work. He
called them his “crew,” they called him “commander,” and the Mark I was referred to as
“she,” as if she were a ship.23
The Harvard Mark I borrowed a lot of Babbage’s ideas. It was digital, although not binary;
its wheels had ten positions. Along its fifty-foot shaft were seventy-two counters that could
store numbers of up to twenty-three digits, and the finished five-ton product was eighty feet
long and fifty feet wide. The shaft and other moving parts were turned electrically. But it was
slow. Instead of electromagnetic relays, it used mechanical ones that were opened and shut by
electric motors. That meant it took about six seconds to do a multiplication problem,
compared to one second for Stibitz’s machine. It did, however, have one impressive feature
that would become a staple of modern computers: it was fully automatic. Programs and data
were entered by paper tape, and it could run for days with no human intervention. That
allowed Aiken to refer to it as “Babbage’s dream come true.”24
KONRAD ZUSE
Although they didn’t know it, all of these pioneers were being beaten in 1937 by a German
engineer working in his parents’ apartment. Konrad Zuse was finishing the prototype for a
calculator that was binary and could read instructions from a punched tape. However, at least
in its first version, called the Z1, it was a mechanical, not an electrical or electronic, machine.
Like many pioneers in the digital age, Zuse grew up fascinated by both art and
engineering. After graduating from a technical college, he got a job as a stress analyst for an
aircraft company in Berlin, solving linear equations that incorporated all sorts of load and
strength and elasticity factors. Even using mechanical calculators, it was almost impossible
for a person to solve in less than a day more than six simultaneous linear equations with six
unknowns. If there were twenty-five variables, it could take a year. So Zuse, like so many
others, was driven by the desire to mechanize the tedious process of solving mathematical
equations. He converted his parents’ living room, in an apartment near Berlin’s Tempelhof
Airport, into a workshop.25
In Zuse’s first version, binary digits were stored by using thin metal plates with slots and
pins, which he and his friends made using a jigsaw. At first he used punched paper tape to
input data and programs, but he soon switched to discarded 35 mm movie film, which not
only was sturdier but happened to be cheaper. His Z1 was completed in 1938, and it was able
to clank through a few problems, though not very reliably. All the components had been
made by hand, and they tended to jam. He was handicapped by not being at a place like Bell
Labs or part of a collaboration like Harvard had with IBM, which would have 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,
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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 making 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.
JOHN VINCENT ATANASOFF
Far from both Zuse and Stibitz, another inventor was also experimenting with digital circuits
in 1937. Toiling in a basement in Iowa, he would make the next historic innovation: building
a calculating device that, at least in part, used vacuum tubes. In some ways his machine was
less advanced than the others. It wasn’t programmable and multipurpose; instead of being
totally electronic, he included some slow mechanical moving elements; and even though he
built a model that was able to work in theory, he couldn’t actually get the thing reliably
operational. Nevertheless, John Vincent Atanasoff, known to his wife and friends as Vincent,
deserves the distinction of being the pioneer who conceived the first partly electronic digital
computer, and he did so after he was struck by inspiration during a long impetuous drive one
night in December 1937.28
Atanasoff was born in 1903, the eldest of seven children of a Bulgarian immigrant and a
woman descended from one of New England’s oldest families. His father worked as an
engineer in a New Jersey electric plant run by Thomas Edison, then moved the family to a
town in rural Florida south of Tampa. At nine, Vincent helped his father wire their Florida
house for electricity, and his father gave him a Dietzgen slide rule. “That slide rule was my
meat,” he recalled.29 At an early age, he dove into the study of logarithms with an enthusiasm
that seems a bit wacky even as he recounted it in earnest tones: “Can you imagine how a boy
of nine, with baseball on his mind, could be transformed by this knowledge? Baseball was
reduced to near zero as a stern study was made of logarithms.” Over the summer, he
calculated the logarithm of 5 to the base e, then, with his mother’s help (she had once been a
math teacher), he learned calculus while still in middle school. His father took him to the
phosphate plant where he was an electrical engineer, showing him how the generators
worked. Diffident, creative, and brilliant, young Vincent finished high school in two years,
getting all A’s in his double load of classes.
At the University of Florida he studied electrical engineering and displayed a practical
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inclination, spending time in the university’s machine shop and foundry. He also remained
fascinated by math and as a freshman studied a proof involving binary arithmetic. Creative
and self-confident, he graduated with the highest grade point average of his time. He accepted
a fellowship to pursue master’s work in math and physics at Iowa State and, even though he
later was admitted to Harvard, stuck with his decision to head up to the corn belt town of
Ames.
Atanasoff went on to pursue a doctorate in physics at the University of Wisconsin, where
he had the same experience as the other computer pioneers, beginning with Babbage. His
work, which was on how helium can be polarized by an electric field, involved tedious
calculations. As he struggled to solve the math using a desktop adding machine, he dreamed
of ways to invent a calculator that could do more of the work. After returning to Iowa State in
1930 as an assistant professor, he decided that his degrees in electrical engineering, math, and
physics had equipped him for the task.
There was a consequence to his decision not to stay at Wisconsin or to go to Harvard or a
similar large research university. At Iowa State, where no one else was working on ways to
build new calculators, Atanasoff was on his own. He could come up with fresh ideas, but he
did not have around him people to serve as sounding boards or to help him overcome
theoretical or engineering challenges. Unlike most innovators of the digital age, he was a lone
inventor, drawing his inspiration during solo car trips and in discussions with one graduate
student assistant. In the end, that would prove to be a drawback.
Atanasoff initially considered building an analog device; his love of slide rules led him to
try to devise a supersize version using long strips of film. But he realized that the film would
have to be hundreds of yards long in order to solve linear algebraic equations accurately
enough to suit his needs. He also built a contraption that could shape a mound of paraffin so
that it could calculate a partial differential equation. The limitations of these analog devices
caused him to focus instead on creating a digital version.
The first problem he tackled was how to store numbers in a machine. He used the term
memory to describe this feature: “At the time, I had only a cursory knowledge of the work of
Babbage and so did not know he called the same concept ‘store.’ . . . I like his word, and
perhaps if I had known, I would have adopted it; I like ‘memory,’ too, with its analogy to the
brain.”30
Atanasoff went through a list of possible memory devices: mechanical pins,
electromagnetic relays, a small piece of magnetic material that could be polarized by an
electric charge, vacuum tubes, and a small electrical condenser. The fastest would be vacuum
tubes, but they were expensive. So he opted instead to use what he called condensers—what
we now call capacitors—which are small and inexpensive components that can store, at least
briefly, an electrical charge. It was an understandable decision, but it meant that the machine
would be sluggish and clunky. Even if the adding and subtracting could be done at electronic
speeds, the process of taking numbers in and out of the memory unit would slow things down
to the speed of the rotating drum.
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George Stibitz (1904–95) circa 1945.
80

Konrad Zuse (1910–95) with the Z4 computer in 1944.
81

John Atanasoff (1903–95) at Iowa State, circa 1940.
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Reconstruction of Atanasoff’s computer.
Once he had settled on the memory unit, Atanasoff turned his attention to how to construct
the arithmetic and logic unit, which he called the “computing mechanism.” He decided it
should be fully electronic; that meant using vacuum tubes, even though they were expensive.
The tubes would act as on-off switches to perform the function of logic gates in a circuit that
could add, subtract, and perform any Boolean function.
That raised a theoretical math issue of the type he had loved since he was a boy: Should his
digital system be decimal or binary or rely on some other numerical base? A true enthusiast
for number systems, Atanasoff explored many options. “For a short time the base one-
hundred was thought to have some promise,” he wrote in an unpublished paper. “This same
calculation showed that the base that theoretically gives the highest speed of calculation is e,
the natural base.”31 But, balancing theory with practicality, he finally settled on base-2, the
binary system. By late 1937, these and other ideas were jangling around in his head, a
“hodgepodge” of concepts that wouldn’t “jell.”
Atanasoff loved cars; he liked to buy, if he could, a new one each year, and in December
1937, he had a new Ford with a powerful V8 engine. To relax his mind, he took it for a late-
night spin for what would become a noteworthy moment in the history of computing:
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One night in the winter of 1937 my whole body was in torment from trying to solve the problems of the machine. I got in my car and drove at
high speeds for a long while so I could control my emotions. It was my habit to do this for a few miles: I could gain control of myself by
concentrating on driving. But that night I was excessively tormented, and I kept on going until I had crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois
and was 189 miles from where I started.32
He turned off the highway and pulled into a roadhouse tavern. At least in Illinois, unlike in
Iowa, he could buy a drink, and he ordered himself a bourbon and soda, then another. “I
realized that I was no longer so nervous and my thoughts turned again to computing
machines,” he recalled. “I don’t know why my mind worked then when it had not worked
previously, but things seemed to be good and cool and quiet.” The waitress was inattentive,
so Atanasoff got to process his problem undisturbed.33
He sketched out his ideas on a paper napkin, then began to sort through some practical
questions. The most important was how to replenish the charges in the condensers, which
would otherwise drain after a minute or two. He came up with the idea of putting them on
rotating cylinder drums, about the size of 46-ounce cans of V8 juice, so they would come into
contact once a second with brushlike wires and have their charges refreshed. “During this
evening in the tavern, I generated within my mind the possibility of the regenerative
memory,” he declared. “I called it ‘jogging’ at that time.” With each turn of the rotating
cylinder, the wires would jog the memory of the condensers and, when necessary, retrieve
data from the condensers and store new data. He also came up with an architecture that would
take numbers from two different cylinders of condensers, then use the vacuum-tube circuit to
add or subtract them and put the result into memory. After a few hours of figuring everything
out, he recalled, “I got in my car and drove home at a slower rate.”34
By May 1939, Atanasoff was ready to begin construction of a prototype. He needed an
assistant, preferably a graduate student with engineering experience. “I have your man,” a
friend on the faculty told him one day. Thus he struck up a partnership with another son of a
self-taught electrical engineer, Clifford Berry.35
The machine was designed and hard-wired with a single purpose: solving simultaneous
linear equations. It could handle up to twenty-nine variables. With each step, Atanasoff’s
machine would process two equations and eliminate one of the variables, then print the
resulting equations on 8 x 11 binary punch cards. This set of cards with the simpler equation
would then be fed back into the machine for the process to begin anew, eliminating yet
another variable. The process required a bit of time. The machine would (if they could get it
to work properly) take almost a week to complete a set of twenty-nine equations. Still,
humans doing the same process on desk calculators would require at least ten weeks.
Atanasoff demonstrated a prototype at the end of 1939 and, hoping to get funding to build
a full-scale machine, typed up a thirty-five-page proposal, using carbon paper to make a few
copies. “It is the main purpose of this paper to present a description and exposition of a
computing machine which has been designed principally for the solution of large systems of
linear algebraic equations,” he began. As if to fend off criticism that this was a limited
purpose for a big machine, Atanasoff specified a long list of problems that required solving
such equations: “curve fitting . . . vibrational problems . . . electrical circuit analysis . . .
elastic structures.” He concluded with a detailed list of proposed expenditures, which added
up to the grand sum of $5,330, which he ended up getting from a private foundation.36 Then
he sent one of the carbon copies of his proposal to a Chicago patent lawyer retained by Iowa
State, who, in a dereliction of duty that would spawn decades of historical and legal
controversy, never got around to filing for any patents.
By September 1942 Atanasoff’s full-scale model was almost finished. It was the size of a
desk and contained close to three hundred vacuum tubes. There was, however, a problem: the
mechanism for using sparks to burn holes in the punch cards never worked properly, and
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there were no teams of machinists and engineers at Iowa State he could turn to for help.
At that point, work stopped. Atanasoff was drafted into the Navy and sent to its ordnance
laboratory in Washington, DC, where he worked on acoustic mines and later attended the
atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Shifting his focus from computers to ordnance
engineering, he remained an inventor, earning thirty patents, including on a minesweeping
device. But his Chicago lawyer never applied for patents on his computer.
Atanasoff’s computer could have been an important milestone, but it was, both literally
and figuratively, relegated to the dustbin of history. The almost-working machine was put
into storage in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State, and a few years later no
one seemed to remember what it did. When the space was needed for other uses in 1948, a
graduate student dismantled it, not realizing what it was, and discarded most of the parts.37
Many early histories of the computer age do not even mention Atanasoff.
Even if it had worked properly, his machine had limitations. The vacuum-tube circuit made
lightning-fast calculations, but the mechanically rotated memory units slowed down the
process enormously. So did the system for burning holes in the punch cards, even when it
worked. In order to be truly fast, modern computers would have to be all-electronic, not just
partly. Nor was Atanasoff’s model programmable. It was geared to do just one thing: solve
linear equations.
Atanasoff’s enduring romantic appeal is that he was a lone tinkerer in a basement, with
only his young sidekick Clifford Berry for a companion. But his tale is evidence that we
shouldn’t in fact romanticize such loners. Like Babbage, who also toiled in his own little
workshop with just an assistant, Atanasoff never got his machine to be fully functional. Had
he been at Bell Labs, amid swarms of technicians and engineers and repairmen, or at a big
research university, a solution would likely have been found for fixing the card reader as well
as the other balky parts of his contraption. Plus, when Atanasoff was called away to the Navy
in 1942, there would have been team members left behind to put on the finishing touches, or
at least to remember what was being built.
What saved Atanasoff from being a forgotten historical footnote is somewhat ironic, given
the resentment he later felt about the event. It was a visit that he had in June 1941 from one of
those people who, instead of toiling in isolation, loved visiting places and snatching up ideas
and working with teams of people. John Mauchly’s trip to Iowa would later be the subject of
costly lawsuits, bitter accusations, and dueling historical narratives. But it is what saved
Atanasoff from obscurity and moved the course of computer history forward.
JOHN MAUCHLY
In the early twentieth century, the United States developed, as Britain had earlier, a class of
gentleman scientists who congregated at wood-paneled explorers’ clubs and other rarefied
institutes, where they enjoyed sharing ideas, listening to lectures, and collaborating on
projects. John Mauchly was raised in that realm. His father, a physicist, was a research chief
in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Washington-based Carnegie Institution, the
nation’s foremost foundation for promoting the advance and sharing of research. His
specialty was recording electrical conditions in the atmosphere and relating them to the
weather, a collegial endeavor that involved coordinating researchers from Greenland to
Peru.38
Growing up in the Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, John was exposed to the area’s
growing scientific community. “Chevy Chase seemed to have practically all the scientists in
Washington,” he boasted. “The director of the Weights and Measures Division of the Bureau
of Standards lived near us. So did the director of its Radio Division.” The head of the
Smithsonian was also a neighbor. John spent many weekends using a desktop adding
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machine to do calculations for his dad, and he developed a passion for data-driven
meteorology. He also loved electrical circuits. With his young friends in his neighborhood, he
laid intercom wires that connected their homes and built remote-control devices to launch
fireworks for parties. “When I pressed a button, the fireworks would go off 50 feet away.” At
age fourteen he was earning money helping people in the neighborhood fix faulty wiring in
their homes.39
While an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University, Mauchly enrolled in a program for
exceptional undergraduates to leap directly into a PhD program in physics. He did his thesis
on light band spectroscopy because it combined beauty, experiments, and theory. “You had to
know some theory to figure out what the band spectra was all about, but you couldn’t do it
unless you had the experimental photographs of that spectrum, and who’s going to get it for
you?” he said. “Nobody but you. So I got plenty of training in glass blowing, and drawing
vacuums, finding the leaks etc.”40
Mauchly had an engaging personality and a wonderful ability (and desire) to explain
things, so it was natural that he would become a professor. Such posts were hard to come by
in the Depression, but he managed to land one at Ursinus College, an hour’s drive northwest
from Philadelphia. “I was the only person teaching physics there,” he said.41
An essential component of Mauchly’s personality was that he liked to share ideas—usually
with a broad grin and a sense of flair—which made him a wildly popular teacher. “He loved
to talk and seemed to develop many of his ideas in the give-and-take of conversation,”
recalled a colleague. “John loved social occasions, liked to eat good food and drink good
liquor. He liked women, attractive young people, the intelligent and the unusual.”42 It was
dangerous to ask him a question, because he could discourse earnestly and passionately about
almost anything, from theater to literature to physics.
In front of a class he played the showman. To explain momentum he would whirl around
with his arms flung out and then pulled in, and to describe the concept of action and reaction
he would stand on a homemade skateboard and lurch back and forth, a trick that one year
resulted in his falling and breaking an arm. People used to drive miles to hear his end-of-term
pre-Christmas lecture, which the college moved to its biggest auditorium to accommodate all
the visitors. In it he explained how spectrography and other tools of physics could be used to
determine what was inside a package without unwrapping it. According to his wife, “He
measured it. He weighed it. He submerged it in water. He poked it with a long needle.”43
Reflecting his boyhood fascination with meteorology, Mauchly’s research focus in the
early 1930s was on whether long-range weather patterns were related to solar flares,
sunspots, and the rotation of the sun. The scientists at the Carnegie Institution and the U.S.
Weather Bureau gave him twenty years of daily data from two hundred stations, and he set to
work calculating correlations. He was able (this being the Depression) to buy used desk
calculators cheaply from ailing banks and to hire a group of young people, through the New
Deal’s National Youth Administration, to do computations at fifty cents an hour.44
Like others whose work required tedious calculations, Mauchly yearned to invent a
machine to do them. With his gregarious style, he set about finding out what others were
doing and, in the tradition of great innovators, putting together a variety of ideas. In the IBM
pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, he saw an electric calculator that used punch
cards, but he realized that relying on cards would be too slow, given the amount of data he
had to crunch. He also saw an encryption machine that used vacuum tubes to code messages.
Might the tubes be used for other logical circuits? He took his students on a field trip to
Swarthmore College to see counting devices that used circuits made with vacuum tubes to
measure bursts of cosmic-ray ionization.45 He also took a night course in electronics and
began to experiment with his own hand-wired vacuum-tube circuits to see what else they
might do.
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At a conference at Dartmouth College in September 1940, Mauchly saw a demonstration
by George Stibitz of the Complex Number Calculator he had built at Bell Labs. What made
the demonstration exciting was that Stibitz’s computer was sitting at Bell’s building in lower
Manhattan, transmitting data over a Teletype line. It was the first computer to be used
remotely. For three hours it solved problems submitted by the audience, taking about a
minute for each. Among those at the demonstration was Norbert Wiener, a pioneer of
information systems, who tried to stump Stibitz’s machine by asking it to divide a number by
zero. The machine didn’t fall for the trap. Also present was John von Neumann, the
Hungarian polymath who was soon to play a major role with Mauchly in the development of
computers.46
When he decided to build a vacuum-tube computer of his own, Mauchly did what good
innovators properly do: he drew upon all of the information he had picked up from his
travels. Because Ursinus had no research budget, Mauchly paid for tubes out of his own
pocket and tried to cadge them from manufacturers. He wrote the Supreme Instruments Corp.
asking for components and declaring, “I am intending to construct an electrical calculating
machine.”47 He discovered during a visit to RCA that neon tubes could also be used as
switches; they were slower but cheaper than vacuum tubes, and he bought a supply at eight
cents apiece. “Before November 1940,” his wife later said, “Mauchly had successfully tested
certain components of his proposed computer and convinced himself that it was possible to
build a cheap, reliable digital device using only electronic elements.” This occurred, she
insisted, before he had even heard of Atanasoff.48
In late 1940 he confided in some friends that he hoped to pull together all of this
information to make a digital electronic computer. “We are now considering construction of
an electrical computing machine,” he wrote that November to a meteorologist he had worked
with. “The machine would perform its operations in about 1/200th second, using vacuum
tube relays.”49 Even though he was collaborative and picking up information from many
people, he began to exhibit a competitive urge to be the first to make a new type of computer.
He wrote a former student in December, “For your own private information, I expect to have,
in a year or so, when I can get the stuff and put it together, an electronic computing machine.
. . . Keep this dark, since I haven’t the equipment this year to carry it out and I would like to
‘be the first.’ ”50
That month, December 1940, Mauchly happened to meet Atanasoff, setting off a series of
events followed by years of disputes over Mauchly’s propensity to gather information from
different sources and his desire to “be the first.” Atanasoff was attending a meeting at the
University of Pennsylvania, and he dropped by a session at which Mauchly proclaimed his
hope of building a machine to analyze weather data. Afterward Atanasoff came up to say that
he had been building an electronic calculator at Iowa State. Mauchly jotted on his conference
program a note that Atanasoff claimed to have devised 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.) Mauchly was amazed. He estimated that the cost of a vacuum-tube
computer would be almost $13 per digit. He said he would love to see how it was done, and
Atanasoff invited him to come to Iowa.
Throughout the first half of 1941, Mauchly corresponded with Atanasoff and continued to
marvel at the low cost he claimed for his machine. “Less than $2 per digit sounds next to
impossible, and yet that is what I understood you to say,” he wrote. “Your suggestion about
visiting Iowa seemed rather fantastic when first made, but the idea grows on me.” Atanasoff
urged him to accept. “As an additional inducement I will explain the $2 per digit business,”
he promised.51
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THE MAUCHLY-ATANASOFF VISIT
The fateful visit lasted four days in June 1941.52 Mauchly drove from Washington and
brought his six-year-old son, Jimmy, arriving late on Friday, June 13, much to the surprise of
Atanasoff’s wife, Lura, who had not yet prepared the guest room. “I had to fly around, go to
the attic, get extra pillows, and everything,” she later recalled.53 She also made them supper,
since the Mauchlys had arrived hungry. The Atanasoffs had three children of their own, but
Mauchly seemed to assume that Lura would take care of Jimmy during the visit, so she did,
grudgingly. She took a dislike to Mauchly. “I don’t think he’s honest,” she told her husband
at one point.54
Atanasoff was eager to show off his partly built machine, even as his wife worried that he
was being too trusting. “You must be careful until this is patented,” she warned.
Nevertheless, Atanasoff took Mauchly, along with Lura and the children, to the physics
building basement the next morning, proudly pulling off a sheet to reveal what he and Berry
were cobbling together.
Mauchly was impressed by a few things. The use of condensers in the memory unit was
ingenious and cost-effective, as was Atanasoff’s method of replenishing their charge every
second or so by putting them on rotating cylinders. Mauchly had thought about using
condensers instead of more expensive vacuum tubes, and he appreciated how Atanasoff’s
method of “jogging their memory” made it workable. That was the secret behind how the
machine could be constructed for $2 per digit. After reading Atanasoff’s thirty-five-page
memo detailing the machine, and taking notes, he asked if he could take a carbon copy home.
That request Atanasoff denied, both because he had no extras to give away (photocopiers
hadn’t been invented) and because he was becoming worried that Mauchly was sucking in
too much information.55
But for the most part, Mauchly was uninspired by what he saw in Ames—or at least that is
what he insisted in retrospect. The foremost drawback was that Atanasoff’s machine was not
fully electronic but instead relied on the mechanical drums of condensers for memory. That
made it inexpensive but also very slow. “I thought his machine was very ingenious, but since
it was in part mechanical, involving rotating commutators for switching, it was not by any
means what I had in mind,” Mauchly remembered. “I no longer became interested in the
details.” Later, in his testimony at the trial over the validity of his patents, Mauchly called the
semimechanical nature of Atanasoff’s machine “a rather drastic disappointment” and
dismissed it as “a mechanical gadget which uses some electronic tubes in operation.”56
The second disappointment, Mauchly contended, was that Atanasoff’s machine was
designed for a single purpose and could not be programmed or modified to perform other
tasks: “He had not done anything to plan for this machine to be anything but a single set
purpose machine and to solve sets of linear equations.”57
So Mauchly left Iowa not with a breakthrough concept for how to build a computer but
rather with a handful of smaller insights to add to the basket of ideas he had been collecting,
consciously and subconsciously, on his visits to conferences and colleges and fairs. “I came
to Iowa with much the same attitude that I went to the World’s Fair and other places,” he
testified. “Is there something here which would be useful to aid my computations or anyone
else’s?”58
Like most people, Mauchly gleaned insights from a variety of experiences, conversations,
and observations—in his case at Swarthmore, Dartmouth, Bell Labs, RCA, the World’s Fair,
Iowa State, and elsewhere—then combined them into ideas he considered his own. “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. All ideas are born that way. So Mauchly considered his
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intuitions and thoughts about how to build a computer to be his own rather than a bag of ideas
he had stolen from other people. And despite later legal findings, he was for the most part
right, insofar as anyone can be right in thinking that his ideas are his own. That is the way the
creative process—if not the patent process—works.
Unlike Atanasoff, Mauchly had the opportunity, and the inclination, to collaborate with a
team filled with varied talents. As a result, instead of producing a machine that didn’t quite
work and was abandoned in a basement, he and his team would go down in history as the
inventors of the first electronic general-purpose computer.
As he was preparing to leave Iowa, Mauchly got a piece of pleasant news. He had been
accepted into an electronics course at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the many around
the country being funded on an emergency basis by the War Department. It was a chance to
learn more about using vacuum tubes in electronic circuits, which he was now convinced was
the best way to make computers. It also showed the importance of the military in driving
innovation in the digital age.
During this ten-week course in the summer of 1941, Mauchly got the chance to work with
a version of the MIT Differential Analyzer, the analog computer designed by Vannevar Bush.
The experience amped up his interest in building his own computer. It also made him realize
that the resources to do so at a place like Penn were far greater than at Ursinus, so he was
thrilled to accept an instructor’s position at the university when it was offered at the end of
the summer.
Mauchly conveyed the good news in a letter to Atanasoff, which also contained hints of a
plan that unnerved the Iowa professor. “A number of different ideas have come to me
recently anent computing circuits—some of which are more or less hybrids, combining your
methods with other things, and some of which are nothing like your machine,” Mauchly
wrote, truthfully. “The question in my mind is this: is there any objection, from your point of
view, to my building some sort of computer which incorporates some of the features of your
machine?”59 It’s hard to tell from the letter, or from the subsequent explanations, depositions,
and testimony over the ensuing years, whether Mauchly’s innocent tone was sincere or
feigned.
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Howard Aiken (1900–1973) at Harvard in 1945.
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John Mauchly (1907–80) circa 1945.
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J. Presper Eckert (1919–95) circa 1945.
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Eckert (touching machine), Mauchly (by pillar), Jean Jennings (in back), and Herman Goldstine (by Jennings) with ENIAC in 1946.
Either way, the letter upset Atanasoff, who had still not succeeded in prodding his lawyer
into filing any patent claims. He responded to Mauchly rather brusquely within a few days:
“Our attorney has emphasized the need of being careful about the dissemination of
information about our device until a patent application is filed. This should not require too
long, and, of course, I have no qualms about having informed you about our device, but it
does require that we refrain from making public any details for the time being.”60 Amazingly,
this exchange still did not provoke Atanasoff or the lawyer to make a filing for patents.
Mauchly proceeded to forge ahead during that fall of 1941 with his own design for a
computer, which he correctly believed drew ideas from a wide variety of sources and was
very different from what Atanasoff had built. In his summer course, he met the right partner
to join him in the endeavor: a graduate student with a perfectionist’s passion for precision
engineering, who knew so much about electronics that he served as Mauchly’s lab instructor,
even though he was twelve years younger (at twenty-two) and didn’t yet have his PhD.
J. PRESPER ECKERT
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John Adam Presper Eckert Jr., known formally as J. Presper Eckert and informally as Pres,
was the only child of a millionaire real estate developer in Philadelphia.61 One of his great-
grandfathers, Thomas Mills, invented the machines that made salt water taffy in Atlantic City
and, as important, created a business to manufacture and sell them. As a young boy, Eckert
was driven by his family’s chauffeur to the William Penn private school, founded in 1689.
But his success came not from the privileges of birth but from his own talents. He won a
citywide science fair at age twelve by building a guidance system for model boats using
magnets and rheostats, and at fourteen he devised an innovative way to use household current
to eliminate troublesome batteries for the intercom system in one of his father’s buildings.62
In high school Eckert dazzled his classmates with his inventions, and he made money by
building radios, amplifiers, and sound systems. Philadelphia, the city of Benjamin Franklin,
was then a great electronics center, and Eckert spent time at the research lab of Philo
Farnsworth, one of the inventors of television. Although he was accepted by MIT and wanted
to go there, his parents did not wish him to leave. Pretending to have suffered financial
setbacks because of the Depression, they pressured him to go to Penn and live at home. He
did rebel, however, against their desire that he study business; instead he enrolled in the
university’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering because he found the subject more
interesting.
Eckert’s social triumph at Penn was creating what he called an “Osculometer” (from the
Latin word for mouth), which purported to measure the passion and romantic electricity of a
kiss. A couple would hold the handles of the device and then kiss, their lip contact
completing an electric circuit. A row of bulbs would light up, the goal being to kiss
passionately enough to light up all ten and set off a blast from a foghorn. Smart contestants
knew that wet kisses and sweaty palms increased the circuit’s conductivity.63 Eckert also
invented a device that used a light-modulating method to record sound on film, for which he
successfully applied for a patent at age twenty-one, while still an undergraduate.64
Pres Eckert had his quirks. Filled with nervous energy, he would pace the room, bite his
nails, leap around, and occasionally stand atop a desk when he was thinking. He wore a
watch chain that wasn’t connected to a watch, and he would twirl it in his hands as if it were
rosary beads. He had a quick temper that would flare and then dissolve into charm. His
demand for perfection came from his father, who would walk around construction sites
carrying a large pack of crayons with which to scrawl instructions, using different colors to
indicate which worker was responsible. “He was sort of a perfectionist and made sure you did
it right,” his son said. “But he had a lot of charm, really. He got things done most of the time
by people wanting to do the stuff.” 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.”65
ENIAC
War mobilizes science. Over the centuries, ever since the ancient Greeks built a catapult and
Leonardo da Vinci served as the military engineer for Cesare Borgia, martial needs have
propelled advances in technology, and this was especially true in the mid-twentieth century.
Many of the paramount technological feats of that era—computers, atomic power, radar, and
the Internet—were spawned by the military.
America’s entry into World War II in December 1941 provided the impetus to fund the
machine that Mauchly and Eckert were devising. The University of Pennsylvania and the
Army’s Ordnance Department at Aberdeen Proving Ground had been tasked with producing
the booklets of firing-angle settings needed for the artillery being shipped to Europe. In order
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to be aimed properly, the guns required tables that factored in hundreds of conditions,
including temperature, humidity, wind speeds, altitude, and gunpowder varieties.
Creating a table for just one category of shell shot by one gun might require calculating
three thousand trajectories from a set of differential equations. The work was often done
using one of the Differential Analyzers invented at MIT by Vannevar Bush. The machine’s
calculations were combined with the labor of more than 170 people, most of them women,
known as “computers,” who tackled equations by punching the keys and cranking the handles
of desktop adding machines. Women math majors were recruited from around the nation. But
even with all of this effort, it took more than a month to complete just one firing table. By the
summer of 1942, it was clear that production was falling further behind every week,
rendering some of America’s artillery ineffective.
That August, Mauchly wrote a memo that proposed a way to help the Army meet this
challenge. It would change the course of computing. Titled “The Use of High Speed Vacuum
Tube Devices for Calculating,” his memo requested funding for the machine that he and
Eckert were hoping to build: a digital electronic computer, using circuits with vacuum tubes,
that could solve differential equations and perform other mathematical tasks. “A great gain in
the speed of calculation can be obtained if the devices which are used employ electronic
means,” he argued. He went on to estimate that a missile trajectory could be calculated in
“100 seconds.”66
Mauchly’s memo was ignored by Penn’s deans, but it was brought to the attention of the
Army officer attached to the university, Lieutenant (soon to be Captain) Herman Goldstine, a
twenty-nine-year-old who had been a math professor at the University of Michigan. His
mission was to speed up the production of firing tables, and he had dispatched his wife,
Adele, also a mathematician, on a cross-country tour to recruit more women to join the
battalions of human computers at Penn. Mauchly’s memo convinced him that there was a
better way.
The decision of the U.S. War Department to fund the electronic computer came on April 9,
1943. Mauchly and Eckert stayed up all the night before working on their proposal, but they
still hadn’t finished it by the time they got into the car for the two-hour ride from Penn to the
Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where officials from the Ordnance Department were
gathered. As Lieutenant Goldstine drove, they sat in the backseat writing the remaining
sections, and when they arrived in Aberdeen, they continued working in a small room while
Goldstine went to the review meeting. It was chaired by Oswald Veblen, the president of the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who was advising the military on mathematical
projects. Also present was Colonel Leslie Simon, director of the Army’s Ballistic Research
Laboratory. Goldstine recalled what happened: “Veblen, after listening for a short while to
my presentation and teetering on the back legs of his chair, brought the chair down with a
crash, arose, and said, ‘Simon, give Goldstine the money.’ He thereupon left the room and the
meeting ended on this happy note.”67
Mauchly and Eckert incorporated their memo into a paper they titled “Report on an
Electronic Diff. Analyzer.” Using the abbreviation diff. was cagey; it stood for both
differences, which reflected the digital nature of the proposed machine, and differential,
which described the equations it would tackle. Soon it was given a more memorable name:
ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Even though ENIAC was
designed primarily for handling differential equations, which were key to calculating missile
trajectories, Mauchly wrote that it could have a “programming device” that would allow it to
do other tasks, thus making it more of a general-purpose computer.68
In June 1943 construction of ENIAC began. Mauchly, who retained his teaching duties,
served as a consultant and visionary. Goldstine, as the Army’s representative, oversaw the
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operations and budget. And Eckert, with his passion for detail and perfection, was the chief
engineer. Eckert became so dedicated to the project that he would sometimes sleep next to the
machine. Once, as a joke, two engineers picked up his cot and gently moved him to an
identical room one floor up; when he awoke he briefly feared the machine had been stolen.69
Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution (a lesson
Atanasoff learned), Eckert was not shy about micromanaging. He would hover over the other
engineers and tell them where to solder a joint or twist a wire. “I took every engineer’s work
and checked every calculation of every resistor in the machine to make sure that it was done
correctly,” he asserted. He disdained anyone who dismissed an issue as trivial. “Life is made
up of a whole concentration of trivial matters,” he once said. “Certainly a computer is nothing
but a huge concentration of trivial matters.”70
Eckert and Mauchly served as counterbalances for each other, which made them typical of
so many digital-age leadership duos. Eckert drove people with a passion for precision;
Mauchly tended to calm them and make them feel loved. “He was always kidding and joking
with people,” Eckert recalled. “He was personable.” Eckert, whose technical skills came with
a nervous energy and scattershot attention span, badly needed an intellectual sounding board,
and Mauchly loved being that. Although he was not an engineer, Mauchly did have the
ability to connect scientific theories with engineering practicalities in a way that was
inspiring. “We got together and did this thing and I don’t think either of us would have done
it by ourselves,” Eckert later conceded.71
ENIAC was digital, but instead of a binary system, using just 0s and 1s, it used a decimal
system of ten-digit counters. In that regard, it was not like a modern computer. Other than
that, it was more advanced than the machines built by Atanasoff, Zuse, Aiken, and Stibitz.
Using what was called conditional branching (a capability described by Ada Lovelace a
century earlier), it could hop around in a program based on its interim results, and it could
repeat blocks of code, known as subroutines, that performed common tasks. “We had the
ability to have subroutines and subroutines of subroutines,” Eckert explained. When Mauchly
proposed this functionality, Eckert recalled, “it was an idea that I instantly recognized as the
key to this whole thing.”72
After a year of building, around the time of D-Day in June 1944, Mauchly and Eckert were
able to test the first two components, amounting to about one-sixth of the planned machine.
They started with a simple multiplication problem. When it produced the correct answer, they
let out a shout. But it took more than another year, until November 1945, for ENIAC to be
fully operational. At that point it was able to perform five thousand additions and subtractions
in one second, which was more than a hundred times faster than any previous machine. A
hundred feet long and eight feet high, filling the space of what could be a modest three-
bedroom apartment, it weighed close to thirty tons and had 17,468 vacuum tubes. By
contrast, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, then languishing in a basement in Iowa, was the size
of a desk, had only three hundred tubes, and could do merely thirty additions or subtractions
per second.
BLETCHLEY PARK
Although few outsiders knew it at the time—and would not know for more than three
decades—another electronic computer using vacuum tubes had been secretly built at the end
of 1943 on the grounds of a redbrick Victorian manor in the town of Bletchley, fifty-four
miles northwest of London, where the British had sequestered a team of geniuses and
engineers to break the German wartime codes. The computer, known as Colossus, was the
first all-electronic, partially programmable computer. Because it was geared for a special
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task, it was not a general-purpose or “Turing-complete” computer, but it did have Alan
Turing’s personal fingerprints on it.
Turing had begun to focus on codes and cryptology in the fall of 1936, when he arrived at
Princeton just after writing “On Computable Numbers.” He explained his interest in a letter
to his mother that October:
I have just discovered a possible application of the kind of thing I am working on at present. It answers the question “What is the most general
kind of code or cipher possible,” and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interesting codes. One of
them is pretty well impossible to decode without the key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H.M. Government for quite a
substantial sum, but am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think?73

Over the ensuing year, as he worried about the possibility of war with Germany, Turing
got more interested in cryptology and less interested in trying to make money from it.
Working in the machine shop of Princeton’s physics building in late 1937, he constructed the
first stages of a coding machine that turned letters into binary numbers and, using
electromechanical relay switches, multiplied the resulting numerically encoded message by a
huge secret number, making it almost impossible to decrypt.
One of Turing’s mentors in Princeton was John von Neumann, the brilliant physicist and
mathematician who had fled his native Hungary and was at the Institute for Advanced Study,
which for the time being was located in the building that housed the university’s Mathematics
Department. In the spring of 1938, as Turing was finishing his doctoral thesis, von Neumann
offered him a job as his assistant. With the war clouds gathering in Europe, the offer was
tempting, but it also felt vaguely unpatriotic. Turing decided to return to his fellowship at
Cambridge and shortly thereafter joined the British effort to crack the German military codes.
His Majesty’s Government Code and Cypher School was, at the time, located in London
and staffed mainly by literary scholars, such as Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, a classics professor
from Cambridge, and Oliver Strachey, a dilettante socialite who played piano and
occasionally wrote about India. There were no mathematicians among the eighty staffers until
the fall of 1938, when Turing went there. But the following summer, as Britain prepared for
war, the department began actively hiring mathematicians, at one point using a contest that
involved solving the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle as a recruitment tool, and it relocated
to the drab redbrick town of Bletchley, whose main distinction was being at the juncture
where the railway line between Oxford and Cambridge intersected with the one from London
to Birmingham. A team from the British intelligence service, posing as “Captain Ridley’s
shooting party,” visited the Bletchley Park manor house, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity that
its owner wanted to demolish, and discreetly bought it. The code breakers were located in the
cottages, stables, and some prefabricated huts that were erected on the grounds.74
Turing was assigned to a team working in Hut 8 that was trying to break the German
Enigma code, which was generated by a portable machine with mechanical rotors and
electrical circuits. It encrypted military messages by using a cipher that, after every
keystroke, changed the formula for substituting letters. That made it so tough to decipher that
the British despaired of ever doing so. A break came when Polish intelligence officers created
a machine based on a captured German coder that was able to crack some of the Enigma
codes. By the time the Poles showed the British their machine, however, it had been rendered
ineffective because the Germans had added two more rotors and two more plugboard
connections to their Enigma machines.
Turing and his team went to work creating a more sophisticated machine, dubbed “the
bombe,” that could decipher the improved Enigma messages—in particular, naval orders that
would reveal the deployment of U-boats that were decimating British supply convoys. The
bombe exploited a variety of subtle weaknesses in the coding, including the fact that no letter
could be enciphered as itself and that there were certain phrases the Germans used repeatedly.
By August 1940 Turing’s team had two operating bombes, which were able to break 178
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coded messages; by the end of the war they had built close to two hundred.
The Turing-designed bombe was not a notable advance in computer technology. It was an
electromechanical device with relay switches and rotors rather than vacuum tubes and
electronic circuits. But a subsequent machine produced at Bletchley Park, and Colossus, was
a major milestone.
The need for Colossus arose when the Germans started coding important messages, such as
orders from Hitler and his high command, with an electronic digital machine that used a
binary system and twelve code wheels of unequal size. The electromechanical bombes
designed by Turing were powerless to break it. It required an attack using lightning-quick
electronic circuits.
The team in charge, based in Hut 11, was known as the Newmanry after its leader, Max
Newman, the Cambridge math don who had introduced Turing to Hilbert’s problems almost a
decade earlier. Newman’s engineering partner was the electronics wizard Tommy Flowers, a
pioneer of vacuum tubes, who worked at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, a
London suburb.
Turing was not part of Newman’s team, but he did come up with a statistical approach,
dubbed “Turingery,” that detected any departures from a uniform distribution of characters in
a stream of ciphered text. A machine was built that could scan two loops of punched paper
tapes, using photoelectric heads, in order to compare all possible permutations of the two
sequences. The machine was dubbed the “Heath Robinson,” after a British cartoonist who
specialized, as did Rube Goldberg in America, in drawing absurdly complex mechanical
contraptions.
For almost a decade Flowers had been fascinated by electronic circuits made with vacuum
tubes, which he and other Brits called “valves.” As an engineer with the Post Office’s
telephone division, he had created in 1934 an experimental system that used more than three
thousand tubes to control connections among a thousand phone lines. He also pioneered the
use of vacuum tubes for data storage. Turing enlisted Flowers to help on the bombe machines
and then introduced him to Newman.
Flowers realized that the only way to analyze the German encrypted streams quickly
enough was to store at least one of them into the internal electronic memory of a machine
rather than trying to compare two punched paper tapes. This would require 1,500 vacuum
tubes. At first the Bletchley Park managers were skeptical, but Flowers pushed ahead, and by
December 1943—after only eleven months—he produced the first Colossus machine. An
even bigger version, using 2,400 vacuum tubes, was ready by June 1, 1944. Its first decoded
intercepts supported other sources informing General Dwight Eisenhower, who was about to
launch the D-Day invasion, that Hitler was not ordering extra troops to Normandy. Within a
year, eight more Colossus machines were produced.
This meant that well before ENIAC, which did not become operational until November
1945, the British code breakers had built a fully electronic and digital (indeed binary)
computer. The second version, in June 1944, was even capable of some conditional
branching. But unlike ENIAC, which had ten times the number of tubes, Colossus was a
special-purpose machine geared for code breaking, not a general-purpose computer. With its
limited programmability, it could not be instructed to perform all computational tasks, the
way that (in theory) ENIAC could.
SO, WHO INVENTED THE COMPUTER?
In assessing how to apportion credit for creating the computer, it’s useful to begin by
specifying which attributes define the essence of a computer. In the most general sense, the
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definition of a computer could encompass everything from an abacus to an iPhone. But in
chronicling the birth of the Digital Revolution, it makes sense to follow the accepted
definitions of what, in modern usage, constitutes a computer. Here are a few:
“A programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
“An electronic device which is capable of receiving information (data) in a particular form and of performing a sequence of operations in
accordance with a predetermined but variable set of procedural instructions (program) to produce a result.” (Oxford English Dictionary)
“A general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically.” (Wikipedia, 2014)

So the ideal computer is a machine that is electronic, general purpose, and programmable.
What, then, best qualifies as the first?
George Stibitz’s Model K, begun on his kitchen table in November 1937, led to a full-scale
model at Bell Labs in January 1940. It was a binary computer and the first such device to be
used remotely. But it used electromechanical relays and was thus not fully electronic. It was
also a special-purpose computer and not programmable.
Herman Zuse’s Z3, completed in May 1941, was the first automatically controlled,
programmable, electrical, binary machine. It was designed to do engineering problems rather
than be a general-purpose machine. However, it was later shown that, in theory, it could have
been used as a Turing-complete machine. Its major difference from modern computers was
that it was electromechanical, dependent on clacking and slow relay switches, rather than
electronic. Another shortcoming is that it never really went into full-scale service. It was
destroyed by the Allied bombing of Berlin in 1943.
The computer designed by John Vincent Atanasoff, which was complete but not fully
workable by the time Atanasoff abandoned it to serve in the Navy in September 1942, was
the world’s first electronic digital computer, but it was only partly electronic. Its add-subtract
mechanism used vacuum tubes, but its memory and data retrieval involved mechanical
rotating drums. Its other main drawback, in terms of being considered the first modern
computer, was that it was not programmable nor general purpose; instead it was hard-wired
for the special task of solving linear equations. Also, Atanasoff never got it fully operational,
and it disappeared into a basement at Iowa State.
Bletchley Park’s Colossus I, completed in December 1943 by Max Newman and Tommy
Flowers (with input from Alan Turing), was the first digital computer that was fully
electronic, programmable, and operational. It was not, however, a general-purpose or Turing-
complete machine; it was geared to the specific purpose of breaking Germany’s wartime
codes.
Howard Aiken’s Harvard Mark I, built with IBM and put into operation in May 1944, was
programmable, as we will see in the following chapter, but it was electromechanical rather
than electronic.
ENIAC, completed by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly in November 1945, was the first
machine to incorporate the full set of traits of a modern computer. It was all-electronic,
superfast, and could be programmed by plugging and unplugging the cables connecting its
different units. It was capable of changing paths based on interim results, and it qualified as a
general-purpose Turing-complete machine, meaning it could in theory tackle any task. Most
important, it worked. “That’s a big thing with an invention,” Eckert later said, contrasting
their machine with Atanasoff’s. “You have to have a whole system that works.”75 Mauchly
and Eckert got their machine to do some very powerful calculations, and it was in constant
use for ten years. It became the basis for most subsequent computers.
That last attribute is important. 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. Invention implies contributing something to the flow of history and
affecting how an innovation developed. Using historic impact as a standard, Eckert and
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Mauchly are the most noteworthy innovators. Almost all computers of the 1950s trace their
roots to ENIAC. The influence of Flowers, Newman, and Turing is somewhat trickier to
assess. Their work was kept top-secret, but all three men were involved in the British
computers built after the war. Zuse, who was isolated and under bombardment in Berlin, had
even less influence on the course of computer development elsewhere. As for Atanasoff, his
main influence on the field, perhaps his only influence, came from providing a few
inspirations to Mauchly when he visited.
The issue of what inspirations Mauchly gleaned during his four-day visit with Atanasoff in
Iowa in June 1941 turned into a protracted legal dispute. That raised another criterion, more
legalistic than historical, in assessing credit for invention: Who, if anyone, ended up with the
patents? In the case of the first computers, nobody did. But that outcome was due to a
controversial legal battle that resulted in the patents of Eckert and Mauchly being nullified.76
The saga began in 1947, when Eckert and Mauchly, after leaving Penn, applied for a patent
on their ENIAC work, which was finally granted (the patent system being rather slow) in
1964. By then the Eckert-Mauchly company and its patent rights had been sold to Remington
Rand, which became Sperry Rand; it began pressuring other companies to pay it licensing
fees. IBM and Bell Labs made deals, but Honeywell balked and started looking for a way to
challenge the patents. It hired a young lawyer, Charles Call, who had an engineering degree
and had worked at Bell Labs. His mission was to upend the Eckert-Mauchly patent by
showing that their ideas weren’t original.
Pursuing a tip from a Honeywell lawyer who had gone to Iowa State and read about the
computer that Atanasoff had built there, Call paid a visit to Atanasoff at his home in
Maryland. Atanasoff was charmed by Call’s knowledge of his computer and somewhat
resentful that he had never gotten much credit for it, so he handed over hundreds of letters
and documents that showed how Mauchly had derived some ideas from his visit to Iowa.
That evening Call drove to Washington to sit in the back of a lecture Mauchly was giving. In
answer to a question about Atanasoff’s machine, Mauchly claimed he had barely examined it.
Call realized that if he could get Mauchly to say this in a deposition, then he could discredit
him at a trial by producing Atanasoff’s documents.
When Mauchly found out a few months later that Atanasoff might be helping Honeywell
challenge his patents, he made his own visit to Atanasoff’s Maryland home, bringing with
him a Sperry Rand lawyer. It was an awkward meeting. Mauchly claimed that during his visit
to Iowa he hadn’t read Atanasoff’s paper carefully or examined his computer, and Atanasoff
coldly pointed out that this was not true. Mauchly stayed for dinner and tried to ingratiate
himself with Atanasoff, but to no avail.
The issue went to trial before a federal judge, Earl Larson, in Minneapolis in June 1971.
Mauchly proved a problematic witness. Pleading poor memory, he sounded squirrely about
what he had seen during his visit to Iowa, and he repeatedly backtracked from assertions he
had made in his earlier deposition, including his claim that he had only seen Atanasoff’s
computer partly covered and in dim light. Atanasoff, by contrast, was very effective. He
described the machine he had built, demonstrated a model, and pointed out which of his ideas
Mauchly had borrowed. In all, seventy-seven witnesses were called to testify, another eighty
were deposed, and 32,600 exhibits were entered into the record. The trial lasted more than
nine months, making it the longest federal trial to that point.
Judge Larson took another nineteen months to write his final decision, which was issued in
October 1973. In it he ruled that the Eckert-Mauchly ENIAC patent was invalid: “Eckert and
Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead
derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”77 Instead of appealing,
Sperry settled with Honeywell.8
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The judge’s opinion, at 248 pages, was thorough, but it disregarded some significant
differences between the machines. Mauchly did not derive quite as much from Atanasoff as
the judge seemed to think. For example, Atanasoff’s electronic circuit used binary logic,
whereas Mauchly’s was a decimal counter. Had the Eckert-Mauchly patent claims been less
sweeping, they probably would have survived.
The case did not determine, even legally, who should get what proportion of the credit for
the invention of the modern computer, but it did have two important consequences: it
resurrected Atanasoff from the basement of history, and it showed very clearly, though this
was not the intent of the judge or either party, that great innovations are usually the result of
ideas that flow from a large number of sources. An invention, especially one as complex as
the computer, usually comes not from an individual brainstorm but from a collaboratively
woven tapestry of creativity. Mauchly had visited and talked to many people. That perhaps
made his invention harder to patent, but it did not lessen the impact he had.
Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing
the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to
draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building
a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments.
The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer. “Atanasoff may
have won a point in court, but he went back to teaching and we went on to build the first real
electronic programmable computers,” Eckert later pointed out.78
A lot of the credit, too, should go to Turing, for developing the concept of a universal
computer and then being part of a hands-on team at Bletchley Park. How you rank the
historic contributions of the others depends partly on the criteria you value. If you are enticed
by the romance of lone inventors and care less about who most influenced the progress of the
field, you might put Atanasoff and Zuse high. But the main lesson to draw from the birth of
computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between
visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in
storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a
lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.
Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper (1906–92) with a part of Babbage’s Difference Engine at Harvard in 1946.
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Jean Jennings and Frances Bilas with ENIAC.
Jean Jennings (1924–2011) in 1945.
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Betty Snyder (1917–2001) in 1944.
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CHAPTER THREE

PROGRAMMING
The development of the modern computer required another important step. All of the
machines built during the war were conceived, at least initially, with a specific task in mind,
such as solving equations or deciphering codes. A real computer, like that envisioned by Ada
Lovelace and then Alan Turing, should be able to perform, seamlessly and quickly, any
logical operation. This required machines whose operations were determined not just by their
hardware but by software, the programs they could run. Once again Turing laid out the
concept clearly. “We do not need to have an infinity of different machines doing different
jobs,” he wrote in 1948. “A single one will suffice. The engineering problem of producing
various machines for various jobs is replaced by the office work of ‘programming’ the
universal machine to do these jobs.”1
In theory, machines such as ENIAC could be programmed and even pass for general-
purpose machines. But in practice, loading in a new program was a laborious process that
often involved replugging by hand the cables that connected different units in the computer.
The wartime machines could not switch programs at electronic speeds. This would require
the next major step in the creation of the modern computer: figuring out how to store
programs inside a machine’s electronic memory.
GRACE HOPPER
Starting with Charles Babbage, the men who invented computers focused primarily on the
hardware. But the women who became involved during World War II saw early on the
importance of programming, just as Ada Lovelace had. They developed ways to code the
instructions that told the hardware what operations to perform. In this software lay the magic
formulas that could transform the machines in wondrous ways.
The most colorful programming pioneer was a gutsy and spirited, yet also charming and
collegial, naval officer named Grace Hopper, who ended up working for Howard Aiken at
Harvard and then for Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Born Grace Brewster Murray in
1906, she was from a prosperous family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her
grandfather was a civil engineer who took her around New York on surveying trips, her
mother was a mathematician, and her father was an insurance executive. She graduated from
Vassar with a degree in math and physics, then went on to Yale, where in 1934 she earned
her PhD in math.2
Her education wasn’t as unusual as you might think. She was the eleventh woman to get a
math doctorate from Yale, the first being in 1895.3 It was not all that uncommon for a
woman, especially from a successful family, to get a doctorate in math in the 1930s. In fact, it
was more common than it would be a generation later. The number of American women who
got doctorates in math during the 1930s was 113, which was 15 percent of the total number of
American math doctorates. During the decade of the 1950s, only 106 American women got
math doctorates, which was a mere 4 percent of the total. (By the first decade of the 2000s
things had more than rebounded, and there were 1,600 women who got math doctorates, 30
percent of the total.)
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After marrying a professor of comparative literature, Vincent Hopper, Grace joined the
faculty of Vassar. Unlike most math professors, she insisted that her students be able to write
well. In her probability course, she began with a lecture on one of her favorite mathematical
formulas9 and asked her students to write an essay about it. These she would mark for clarity
of writing and style. “I’d cover [an essay] up with ink, and I would get a rebellion that they
were taking a math course not an English course,” she recalled. “Then I would explain, it was
no use trying to learn math unless they could communicate it with other people.”4 Throughout
her life, she excelled at being able to translate scientific problems—such as those involving
trajectories, fluid flows, explosions, and weather patterns—into mathematical equations and
then into ordinary English. This talent helped to make her a good programmer.
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. She took a partial leave from Vassar to
study with the noted mathematician Richard Courant at New York University, focusing on
methods for solving partial differential equations. She was still studying with Courant when
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. America’s entry into World War II
offered her a way to change her life. During the following eighteen months, she quit Vassar,
divorced her husband, and at age thirty-six joined the U.S. Navy. She was sent to the Naval
Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Smith College in Massachusetts, and in June 1944
graduated first in her class as Lieutenant Grace Hopper.
She assumed that she would be assigned to a cryptography and code group, but to her
surprise she was ordered to report to Harvard University to work on the Mark I, the behemoth
digital computer with clunky electromechanical relays and a motorized turning shaft that, as
described above, had been conceived by Howard Aiken in 1937. By the time Hopper was
assigned to it, the machine had been commandeered by the Navy; Aiken was still running it,
but as a commander in the Navy rather than as a member of the Harvard faculty.
When Hopper reported for duty in July 1944, Aiken gave her a copy of Charles Babbage’s
memoirs and brought her to see the Mark I. “That is a computing machine,” he told her.
Hopper just stared at it silently for a while. “There was this large mass of machinery out there
making a lot of racket,” she remembered. “It was all bare, all open, and very noisy.”5
Realizing that she would need to understand it fully in order to run it properly, she spent
nights analyzing the blueprints. Her strength came from her ability to know how to translate
(as she had at Vassar) real-world problems into mathematical equations, and then to
communicate those in commands that the machine would understand. “I learned languages of
oceanography, of this whole business of minesweeping, of detonators, of proximity fuses, of
biomedical stuff,” she explained. “We had to learn their vocabularies in order to be able to
run their problems. I could switch my vocabulary and speak highly technical for the
programmers, and then tell the same things to the managers a few hours later but with a
totally different vocabulary.” Innovation requires articulation.
Because of her ability to communicate precisely, Aiken assigned her to write what was to
become the world’s first computer programming manual. “You are going to write a book,” he
said one day, standing next to her desk.
“I can’t write a book,” she replied. “I’ve never written one.”
“Well, you’re in the Navy now,” he declared. “You are going to write one.”6
The result was a five-hundred-page book that was both a history of the Mark I and a guide
to programming it.7 The first chapter described earlier calculating machines, with an
emphasis on those built by Pascal, Leibniz, and Babbage. The frontispiece was a picture of
the portion of Babbage’s Difference Engine that Aiken had mounted in his office, and
Hopper began with an epigraph from Babbage. She understood, as had Ada Lovelace, that
Babbage’s Analytical Engine had a special quality, one that she and Aiken believed would
distinguish the Harvard Mark I from other computers of the time. Like Babbage’s unbuilt
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machine, Aiken’s Mark I, which received its marching orders via a punch tape, could be
reprogrammed with new instructions.
Every evening Hopper read to Aiken the pages she had written that day, which helped her
learn a simple trick of good writers: “He pointed out that if you stumble when you try to read
it aloud, you’d better fix that sentence. Every day I had to read five pages of what I had
written.”8 Her sentences became simple, crisp, and clear. With their strong partnership,
Hopper and Aiken became the modern counterparts, a century later, of Lovelace and
Babbage. The more she learned about Ada Lovelace, the more Hopper identified with her.
“She wrote the first loop,” Hopper said. “I will never forget. None of us ever will.”9
Hopper’s historical sections focused on personalities. In doing so, her book emphasized the
role of individuals. In contrast, shortly after Hopper’s book was completed, the executives at
IBM commissioned their own history of the Mark I that gave primary credit to the IBM teams
in Endicott, New York, who had constructed the machine. “IBM interests were best served by
replacing individual history with organizational history,” the historian Kurt Beyer wrote in a
study of Hopper. “The locus of technological innovation, according to IBM, was the
corporation. The myth of the lone radical inventor working in the laboratory or basement was
replaced by the reality of teams of faceless organizational engineers contributing incremental
advancements.”10 In the IBM version of history, the Mark I contained a long list of small
innovations, such as the ratchet-type counter and the double-decked card feed, that IBM’s
book attributed to a bevy of little-known engineers who worked collaboratively in Endicott.10
The difference between Hopper’s version of history and IBM’s ran deeper than a dispute
over who should get the most credit. It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the
history of innovation. Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the
role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of
teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM’s Endicott
facility. This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the
Eureka moment—are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas,
concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together. Neither way of looking at
technological advancement is, on its own, completely satisfying. Most of the great
innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly,
Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.
Hopper’s partner in operating the Mark I was Richard Bloch, a Harvard math major who had
played flute in the university’s prank-loving band and served a tour of duty in the Navy.
Ensign Bloch began working for Aiken three months before Hopper arrived, and he took her
under his wing. “I remember sitting down, long into the night, going over how this machine
worked, how to program this thing,” he said. He and Hopper alternated twelve-hour shifts
tending to the demands of the machine and its equally temperamental commander, Aiken.
“Sometimes he would show up at four in the morning,” Bloch said, “and his comment was
‘are we making numbers?’ He was very nervous when the machine stopped.”11
Hopper’s approach to programming was very systematic. She broke down every physics
problem or mathematical equation into small arithmetic steps. “You simply step by step told
the computer what to do,” she explained. “Get this number and add it to that number and put
the answer there. Now pick up this number and multiply it by this number and put it there.”12
When the program was punched into a tape and the moment came to test it, the Mark I crew,
as a joke that became a ritual, would pull out a prayer rug, face east, and pray that their work
would prove acceptable.
Late at night Bloch would sometimes fiddle with the hardware circuits of the Mark I,
which would cause problems for the software programs Hopper had written. She had a piss-
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and-vinegar personality salted with the language of a midshipman, and the ensuing tongue-
lashings she gave to the lanky and calmly amused Bloch were a precursor of the mix of
confrontation and camaraderie that was to develop between hardware and software engineers.
“Every time I got a program running, he’d get in there at night and change the circuits in the
computer and the next morning the program would not run,” she lamented. “What’s more, he
was home asleep and couldn’t tell me what he had done.” As Bloch put it, “all hell broke
loose” on such occasions. “Aiken didn’t look at these things with great humor.”13
Such episodes gave Hopper the reputation of being irreverent. That she was. But she also
had a software hacker’s ability to combine irreverence with a collaborative spirit. This pirate
crew camaraderie—something Hopper shared with subsequent generations of coders—
actually liberated rather than restrained her. As Beyer wrote, “It was Hopper’s collaborative
abilities rather than her rebellious nature that created the space for her independent thought
and action.”14
In fact, it was the calm Bloch rather than the spunky Hopper who had the more contentious
relationship with Commander Aiken. “Dick was always getting in trouble,” Hopper claimed.
“I would try to explain to him that Aiken was just like a computer. He’s wired a certain way,
and if you are going to work with him you must realize how he is wired.”15 Aiken, who
initially balked at having a woman on his officer corps, soon made Hopper not only his
primary programmer but his top deputy. Years later he would recall fondly the contributions
she made to the birth of computer programming. “Grace was a good man,” he declared.16
Among the programming practices that Hopper perfected at Harvard was the subroutine,
those chunks of code for specific tasks that are stored once but can be called upon when
needed at different points in the main program. “A subroutine is a clearly defined, easily
symbolized, often repeated program,” she wrote. “Harvard’s Mark I contained subroutines for
sine x, log10 x, and 10x, each called for by a single operational code.”17 It was a concept that
Ada Lovelace had originally described in her “Notes” on the Analytical Engine. Hopper
collected a growing library of these subroutines. She also developed, while programming the
Mark I, the concept of a compiler, which would eventually facilitate writing the same
program for multiple machines by creating a process for translating source code into the
machine language used by different computer processors.
In addition, her crew helped to popularize the terms bug and debugging. The Mark II
version of the Harvard computer was in a building without window screens. One night the
machine conked out, and the crew began looking for the problem. They found a moth with a
wingspan of four inches that had gotten smashed in one of the electromechanical relays. It
was retrieved and pasted into the log book with Scotch tape. “Panel F (moth) in relay,” the
entry noted. “First actual case of bug being found.”18 From then on, they referred to ferreting
out glitches as “debugging the machine.”
By 1945, thanks largely to Hopper, the Harvard Mark I was the world’s most easily
programmable big computer. It could switch tasks simply by getting new instructions via
punched paper tape rather than requiring a reconfiguration of its hardware or cables.
However, this distinction was largely unnoticed, both then and in history, because the Mark I
(and even its 1947 successor, the Mark II) used slow and clackety electromechanical relays
rather than electronic components such as vacuum tubes. “By the time anybody knew
anything about her,” Hopper said of the Mark II, “she was a dead duck, and everybody was
going electronic.”19
Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck
in their ways. The same traits that make them inventive, such as stubbornness and focus, can
make them resistant to change when new ideas come along. Steve Jobs was famously
stubborn and focused, yet he dazzled and baffled colleagues by suddenly changing his mind
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when he realized he needed to think different. Aiken lacked that agility. He was not nimble
enough to pirouette. He had a naval commander’s instinct for centralized authority, so his
crew was not as freewheeling as the Mauchly-Eckert team at Penn. Aiken also placed a
premium on reliability rather than speed. So he clung to the use of time-tested and
dependable electromechanical relays even after it became clear to the people at Penn and
Bletchley Park that vacuum tubes were the wave of the future. His Mark I could execute only
about three commands per second, while the ENIAC being built at Penn would execute five
thousand commands in that time.
When he went to Penn to see ENIAC and attend some lectures, “Aiken was absorbed in his
own way of doing things,” a report on the meeting noted, “and does not appear to have been
aware of the significance of the new electronic machines.”20 The same was true of Hopper
when she visited ENIAC in 1945. It seemed to her that the Mark I was superior because it
was easily programmable. With ENIAC, she said, “you plugged the pieces and essentially
you built a special computer for each job, and we were used to the concept of programming
and controlling the computer by our program.”21 The time it took to reprogram ENIAC,
which could be a whole day, wiped out the advantage it had in processing speed, unless it
was doing the same task over and over.
But unlike Aiken, Hopper was open-minded enough that she soon changed her outlook.
Advances were being made that year in ways to reprogram ENIAC more quickly. And the
people in the forefront of that programming revolution, to Hopper’s delight, were women.
THE WOMEN OF ENIAC
All the engineers who built ENIAC’s hardware were men. Less heralded by history was a
group of women, six in particular, who turned out to be almost as important in the
development of modern computing. As ENIAC was being constructed at Penn in 1945, it was
thought that it would perform a specific set of calculations over and over, such as determining
a missile’s trajectory using different variables. But the end of the war meant that the machine
was needed for many other types of calculations—sonic waves, weather patterns, and the
explosive power of new types of atom bombs—that would require it to be reprogrammed
often.
This entailed switching around by hand ENIAC’s rat’s nest of cables and resetting its
switches. At first the programming seemed to be a routine, perhaps even menial task, which
may have been why it was relegated to women, who back then were not encouraged to
become engineers. But what the women of ENIAC soon showed, and the men later came to
understand, was that the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design
of its hardware.
The tale of Jean Jennings is illustrative of the early women computer programmers.22 She was
born on a farm on the outskirts of Alanthus Grove, Missouri (population: 104), into a family
that had almost no money and deeply valued education. Her father taught in a one-room
schoolhouse, where Jean became the star pitcher and lone girl on the softball team. Her
mother, though she had dropped out of school in eighth grade, helped tutor algebra and
geometry. Jean was the sixth of seven children, all of whom went to college. That was back
when state governments valued education and realized the economic and social value of
making it affordable. She attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College in Maryville,
where the tuition was $76 per year. (In 2013 it was approximately $14,000 per year for in-
state residents, a twelve-fold increase after adjusting for inflation.) She started out majoring
in journalism, but she hated her advisor so switched to math, which she loved.
When she finished in January 1945, her calculus teacher showed her a flyer soliciting
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women mathematicians to work at the University of Pennsylvania, where women were
working as “computers”—humans who performed routinized math tasks—mainly calculating
artillery trajectory tables for the Army. As one of the ads put it:
Wanted: Women With Degrees in Mathematics. . . . Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were
preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering. . . . You will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is “WOMEN
WANTED!”23

Jennings, who had never been out of Missouri, applied. When she received a telegram of
acceptance, she boarded the midnight Wabash train heading east and arrived at Penn forty
hours later. “Needless to say, they were shocked that I had gotten there so quickly,” she
recalled.24
When Jennings showed up in March 1945, at age twenty, there were approximately
seventy women at Penn working on desktop adding machines and scribbling numbers on
huge sheets of paper. Captain Herman Goldstine’s wife, Adele, was in charge of recruiting
and training. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw Adele,” Jennings said. “She ambled into
class with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, walked over to a table, threw
one leg over its corner, and began to lecture in her slightly cleaned up Brooklyn accent.” For
Jennings, who had grown up as a spirited tomboy bristling at the countless instances of
sexism she faced, it was a transforming experience. “I knew I was a long way from
Maryville, where women had to sneak down to the greenhouse to grab a smoke.”25
A few months after she arrived, a memo was circulated among the women about six job
openings to work on the mysterious machine that was behind locked doors on the first floor
of Penn’s Moore School of Engineering. “I had no idea what the job was or what the ENIAC
was,” Jennings recalled. “All I knew was that I might be getting in on the ground floor of
something new, and I believed I could learn and do anything as well as anyone else.” She
also was looking to do something more exciting than calculating trajectories.
When she got to the meeting, Goldstine asked her what she knew about electricity. “I said
that I had had a course in physics and knew that E equaled IR,” she recalled, referring to
Ohm’s Law, which defines how a flow of electrical current is related to voltage and
resistance. “No, no,” Goldstine replied, “I don’t care about that, but are you afraid of it?”26
The job involved plugging in wires and throwing a lot of switches, he explained. She said that
she wasn’t afraid. While she was being interviewed, Adele Goldstine came in, looked at her,
and nodded. Jennings was selected.
In addition to Jean Jennings (later Bartik), the others were Marlyn Wescoff (later Meltzer),
Ruth Lichterman (later Teitelbaum), Betty Snyder (later Holberton), Frances Bilas (later
Spence), and Kay McNulty (who later married John Mauchly). They were a typical squad
thrown together by the war: Wescoff and Lichterman were Jewish, Snyder a Quaker,
McNulty an Irish-born Catholic, and Jennings a lapsed Church of Christ Protestant. “We had
a wonderful time with each other, mainly because none of us had ever been in close contact
with anyone from one of the others’ religions,” according to Jennings. “We had some great
arguments about religious truths and beliefs. Despite our differences, or perhaps because of
them, we really liked one another.”27
In the summer of 1945, the six women were sent to Aberdeen Proving Ground to learn how
to use IBM punch cards and wire up plug boards. “We had great discussions about religion,
our families, politics, and our work,” McNulty recalled. “We never ran out of things to say to
each other.”28 Jennings became a ringleader: “We worked together, lived together, ate
together, and sat up until all hours discussing everything.”29 Since they were all single and
surrounded by a lot of single soldiers, there were multiple memorable romances nurtured over
Tom Collins cocktails in the booths of the officers’ club. Wescoff found a Marine who was
“tall and quite handsome.” Jennings paired up with an Army sergeant named Pete, who was
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“attractive but not really handsome.” He was from Mississippi, and Jennings was outspoken
in her opposition to racial segregation: “Pete told me once that he would never take me to
Biloxi because I was so outspoken in my views on discrimination that I’d be killed.”30
After six weeks of training, the six women programmers consigned their boyfriends to
memory archives and returned to Penn, where they were given poster-size diagrams and
charts describing ENIAC. “Somebody gave us a whole stack of blueprints, and these were the
wiring diagrams for all the panels, and they said, ‘Here, figure out how the machine works
and then figure out how to program it,’ ” explained McNulty.31 That required analyzing the
differential equations and then determining how to patch the cables to connect to the correct
electronic circuits. “The biggest advantage of learning the ENIAC from the diagrams was that
we began to understand what it could and could not do,” said Jennings. “As a result we could
diagnose troubles almost down to the individual vacuum tube.” She and Snyder devised a
system to figure out which of the eighteen thousand vacuum tubes had burned out. “Since we
knew both the application and the machine, we learned to diagnose troubles as well as, if not
better than, the engineers. I tell you, those engineers loved it. They could leave the debugging
to us.”32
Snyder described making careful diagrams and charts for each new configuration of cables
and switches. “What we were doing then was the beginning of a program,” she said, though
they did not yet have that word for it. They wrote out each new sequence on paper to protect
themselves. “We all felt that we’d be scalped if we ruined the board,” said Jennings.33
One day Jennings and Snyder were sitting in the second-floor classroom they had
commandeered, staring at rolled-out sheets containing the diagrams of ENIAC’s many units,
when a man came in to inspect some construction. “Hi, my name is John Mauchly,” he said.
“I was just checking to see if the ceiling’s falling in.” Neither woman had met the ENIAC
visionary before, but they were not the least bit shy or intimidated. “Boy are we glad to see
you,” Jennings declared. “Tell us how this blasted accumulator works.” Mauchly carefully
answered the question and then others. When they finished, he told them, “Well, my office is
next door. So anytime I’m in my office, you can come in and ask me questions.”
Almost every afternoon, they did. “He was a marvelous teacher,” according to Jennings.
He pushed the women to envision the many things ENIAC might someday do, in addition to
calculating artillery trajectories. He knew that in order to make it a true general-purpose
computer, it would need to inspire programmers who could coax various tasks out of the
hardware. “He used to always try to get us to think of other problems,” said Jennings. “He
would always want us to invert a matrix or something like that.”34
Around the same time that Hopper was doing so at Harvard, the women of ENIAC were
developing the use of subroutines. They were fretting that the logical circuits did not have
enough capacity to compute some trajectories. It was McNulty who pushed a solution. “Oh, I
know, I know, I know,” she said excitedly one day. “We can use a master programmer to
repeat code.” They tried it and it worked. “We began to think about how we could have
subroutines, and nested subroutines, and all that stuff,” recalled Jennings. “It was very
practical in terms of doing this trajectory problem, because the idea of not having to repeat a
whole program, you could just repeat pieces of it and set up the master programmer to do
this. Once you’ve learned that, you learn how to design your program in modules.
Modularizing and developing subroutines were really crucial in learning how to program.”35
Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all
the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: “Despite our
coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined,
we helped initiate the era of the computer.” It happened because a lot of women back then
had studied math, and their skills were in demand. There was also an irony involved: the boys
with their toys thought that assembling the hardware was the most important task, and thus a
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man’s job. “American science and engineering was even more sexist than it is today,”
Jennings said. “If the ENIAC’s administrators had known how crucial programming would
be to the functioning of the electronic computer and how complex it would prove to be, they
might have been more hesitant to give such an important role to women.”36
STORED PROGRAMS
From the beginning, Mauchly and Eckert understood that there were ways to make ENIAC
easier to reprogram. But they didn’t try to do so because building in that capability would
have required them to make the hardware more complicated, and it wasn’t necessary for the
tasks they originally envisioned. “No attempt has been made to make provision for setting up
a problem automatically,” they wrote in their year-end 1943 ENIAC progress report. “This is
for the sake of simplicity and because it is anticipated that the ENIAC will be used primarily
for problems of a type in which one setup will be used many times before another problem is
placed on the machine.”37
But more than a year before ENIAC was finished, indeed as early as the beginning of
1944, Mauchly and Eckert realized that there was a good way to make computers easily
reprogrammable: store the programs inside the computer’s memory rather than load them in
every time. That, they sensed, would be the next great advance in computer development.
This “stored-program” architecture would mean that a computer’s tasks could be changed
almost instantly, without manually reconfiguring cables and switches.38
To store a program inside of the machine, they would need to create a large memory
capacity. Eckert considered many methods for doing that. “This programming may be of the
temporary type set up on alloy discs or of the permanent type on etched discs,” he wrote in a
January 1944 memo.39 Because such disks were not yet affordable, he proposed using instead,
on the next version of ENIAC, a cheaper storage method, which was called an acoustic delay
line. It had been pioneered at Bell Labs by an engineer named William Shockley (about
whom there will be a lot more later) and developed at MIT. The acoustic delay line worked
by storing data as pulses in a long tube filled with a thick and sluggish liquid, such as
mercury. At one end of the tube, an electrical signal carrying a stream of data would be
converted by a quartz plug into pulses that would ripple back and forth the length of the tube
for a while. The ripples could be refreshed electrically for as long as necessary. When it came
time to retrieve the data, the quartz plug would convert it back into an electrical signal. Each
tube could handle approximately a thousand bits of data at one-hundredth the cost of using a
circuit of vacuum tubes. The next-generation ENIAC successor, Eckert and Mauchly wrote in
a memo in the summer of 1944, should have racks of these mercury delay line tubes to store
both data and rudimentary programming information in digital form.
JOHN VON NEUMANN
At this point, one of the most interesting characters in the history of computing reenters the
tale: John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician who was a mentor to Turing in
Princeton and offered him a job as an assistant. An enthusiastic polymath and urbane
intellectual, he made major contributions to statistics, set theory, geometry, quantum
mechanics, nuclear weapons design, fluid dynamics, game theory, and computer architecture.
He would end up significantly improving upon, getting his name attached to, and reaping
most of the credit for the stored-program architecture that Eckert, Mauchly, and their
colleagues had begun to consider.40
Von Neumann was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Budapest in 1903, during a
glittering period after the Austro-Hungarian Empire abolished the restrictive laws against
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Jews. Emperor Franz Joseph awarded a hereditary title in 1913 to the banker Max Neumann
for “meritorious service in the financial field,” thus allowing the family to be called margittai
Neumann or, in German, von Neumann. János (known as Jancsi and later, in America, as
John or Johnny) was the eldest of three brothers, who all converted to Catholicism (“for
convenience sake,” one admitted) after their father’s death.41
Von Neumann was another innovator who stood at the intersection of the humanities and
sciences. “Father was an amateur poet and he believed that poetry could convey not only
emotions but also philosophical ideas,” John’s brother Nicholas recalled. “He regarded poetry
as a language within a language, an idea that might be traced to John’s future speculations on
the languages of the computer and the brain.” Of his mother he wrote, “She believed that
music, art, and related aesthetic pleasures had an important place in our lives, that elegance
was a quality to be revered.”42
There is a wealth of stories about young von Neumann’s prodigal genius, some of them
probably true. At age six, it was later said, he would joke with his father in classical Greek,
and he could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head. As a party trick, he would memorize
a page of the phone book and recite back the names and numbers, and he could recall
verbatim pages from novels or articles he had read, in any of five languages. “If a mentally
superhuman race ever develops,” the hydrogen bomb developer Edward Teller once said, “its
members will resemble Johnny von Neumann.”43
In addition to school, he had private tutors in math and languages, and by age fifteen he
had completely mastered advanced calculus. When the communist Béla Kun briefly took
over Hungary in 1919, von Neumann’s tutelage was moved to Vienna and a resort on the
Adriatic, and he developed a lifelong aversion to communism. He studied chemistry at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (where Einstein had gone) and mathematics
at both Berlin and Budapest, earning his doctorate in 1926. In 1930, he went to Princeton
University to teach quantum physics, and he stayed on after being appointed (along with
Einstein and Gödel) among the founding faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study.44
Von Neumann and Turing, who met in Princeton, would become paired as the grand
theorists of the general-purpose computer, but in personality and temperament they were
binary opposites. Turing led a spartan existence, lived in boardinghouses and hostels, and
generally kept to himself; von Neumann was an elegant bon vivant who hosted sparkling
parties with his wife once or twice a week at their huge house in Princeton. Turing was a
long-distance runner; there were very few thoughts that could be said never to have crossed
von Neumann’s mind, but running long distances (or even short distances) was among them.
“In dress and habits he tended to be slovenly,” Turing’s mother once said of her son. Von
Neumann, by contrast, wore a three-piece suit at almost all times, including on a donkey ride
down the Grand Canyon; even as a student he was so well dressed that, upon first meeting
him, the mathematician David Hilbert reportedly had but one question: Who is his tailor?45
Von Neumann loved telling jokes and reciting risqué limericks in various languages at his
parties, and he ate so heartily that his wife once said he could count anything except calories.
He drove cars with an abandon that was reckless but not always wreckless, and he was fond
of flashy new Cadillacs. “He bought a new one at least once a year, whether he had wrecked
the previous one or not,” wrote the science historian George Dyson.46
While at the Institute in the late 1930s, von Neumann developed an interest in ways to
mathematically model explosive shock waves. This led him to become, in 1943, a member of
the Manhattan Project, making frequent trips to the secret facilities in Los Alamos, New
Mexico, where atomic weapons were being developed. Because there was not enough
uranium-235 to build more than one bomb, the scientists at Los Alamos were also trying to
design a device that would use plutonium-239. Von Neumann focused on ways to construct
an explosive lens that would compress the plutonium core of the bomb to reach critical
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mass.11
Assessing this implosion concept required solving a swarm of equations that could
calculate the rate of flow of the compression of air or other material that would occur after an
explosion. Thus von Neumann embarked on a mission to understand the potential of high-
speed computers.
During the summer of 1944, this quest took him to Bell Labs to study the updated versions
of George Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator. The latest one had an innovation that
particularly impressed him: the punched tape that fed in the instructions for each task also
included the data, all commingled. He also spent time at Harvard trying to determine if
Howard Aiken’s Mark I could help with the bomb calculations. Throughout the summer and
fall of that year, he shuttled by train between Harvard, Princeton, Bell Labs, and Aberdeen,
acting as an idea bee, pollinating and cross-pollinating various teams with the notions that
had adhered to his mind as he buzzed around. Just as John Mauchly had traveled around
picking up the ideas that led to the first working electronic computer, von Neumann
wandered around gathering the elements and concepts that became part of stored-program
computer architecture.
At Harvard, Grace Hopper and her programming partner, Richard Bloch, set up a place for
von Neumann to work in the conference room right next to the Mark I. Von Neumann and
Bloch would write equations on the blackboard and feed them into the machine, and Hopper
would read off the intermediate results as they spewed out. When the machine was “making
numbers,” Hopper said, von Neumann would often barge in from the conference room and
predict what the results would be. “I’ll just never forget that surge out of the backroom, and
then surge back again and put them all over the blackboard, and von Neumann predicting
what the numbers would turn out to be and, ninety-nine percent of the time, with the greatest
of accuracy—fantastic,” Hopper enthused. “He just seemed to know how the computation
was going, or to feel how it was going.”47
Von Neumann impressed the Harvard team with how collaborative he was. He absorbed
their ideas, took credit for some, but also made it clear that nobody should claim ownership
of any concept. When the time came to write a report on what they were doing, von Neumann
insisted that Bloch’s name go first. “I really didn’t feel I deserved that; but that’s the way it
came out, so I prize that,” Bloch said.48 Aiken was similarly open about sharing ideas. “Don’t
worry about people stealing an idea,” he once told a student. “If it’s original, you will have to
ram it down their throats.” Yet even he was struck, and a little discomforted, by von
Neumann’s cavalier attitude about parsing out who deserved credit for ideas. “He talked
about concepts without worrying where they came from,” Aiken said.49
The problem von Neumann faced at Harvard was that the Mark I, with its
electromechanical switches, was excruciatingly slow. It would take months to get his atom
bomb calculations done. Even though the paper tape input was useful in reprogramming the
computer, it was necessary to switch tapes manually every time there was a call for a
subroutine. Von Neumann became convinced that the only solution was to build a computer
that worked at electronic speeds and could store and modify programs in an internal memory.
Thus he was primed to be part of the next big advance: the development of a stored-
memory computer. So it was fortuitous that, in late August 1944, he had an encounter on the
platform of the train station of the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
VON NEUMANN AT PENN
Captain Herman Goldstine, the Army liaison who was working with Mauchly and Eckert on
the ENIAC, happened to be on the same platform at Aberdeen waiting for the train north. He
had never met von Neumann, but he recognized him instantly. Goldstine tended to be star-
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struck by brilliant minds, so he was excited by what passed for a celebrity sighting in the
world of mathematics. “It was therefore with considerable temerity that I approached this
world-famous figure, introduced myself, and started talking,” he recalled. “Fortunately for
me von Neumann was a warm, friendly person who did his best to make people feel relaxed.”
The chat intensified when von Neumann discovered what Goldstine was doing. “When it
became clear to von Neumann that I was concerned with the development of an electronic
computer capable of 333 multiplications per second, the whole atmosphere of our
conversation changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination
for the doctor’s degree in mathematics.”50
At Goldstine’s behest, von Neumann visited Penn a few days later to see ENIAC as it was
being built. Presper Eckert was curious to meet the famed mathematician, and he had in mind
a test to see if he was “really a genius”: if his first question was about the logical structure of
the machine. When that indeed was the first question von Neumann asked, he earned Eckert’s
respect.51
ENIAC could solve in less than an hour a partial differential equation that would take
Harvard’s Mark I close to eighty hours. That impressed von Neumann. However,
reprogramming ENIAC to do different tasks could take hours, and von Neumann realized
how severe a drawback that was when it came to tackling a bunch of dissimilar problems.
Mauchly and Eckert had been wrestling throughout 1944 with ways to store programs inside
the machine. The arrival of von Neumann, brimming with ideas from Harvard and Bell Labs
and elsewhere, kicked into a higher orbit the thinking about stored-program computers.
Von Neumann, who became a consultant to the ENIAC team, pushed the idea that the
computer program should be stored in the same memory as its data, so that the program could
be easily modified as it was running. His work began the first week of September 1944, when
Mauchly and Eckert explained the machine in detail and shared their thoughts about creating,
in their next version, “one storage device with addressable locations” that would serve as a
memory for both the data and programming instructions. As Goldstine put it in a letter to his
Army superior that week, “We propose a centralized programming device in which the
program routine is stored in coded form in the same type storage devices suggested above.”52
Von Neumann’s series of meetings with the ENIAC team, and in particular four formal
sessions he held with them in the spring of 1945, took on such significance that minutes were
taken under the title “Meetings with von Neumann.” Pacing in front of a blackboard and
ringleading the discussion with the engagement of a Socratic moderator, he absorbed ideas,
refined them, and then wrote them on the board. “He would stand in front of the room like a
professor, consulting with us,” Jean Jennings recalled. “We would state to him a particular
problem that we had, and we were always very careful that the questions represented
fundamental problems that we were having and not just mechanical problems.”53
Von Neumann was open but intellectually intimidating. When he made pronouncements, it
was unusual for anyone to push back. But Jennings sometimes did. One day she disputed one
of his points, and the men in the room stared at her incredulously. But von Neumann paused,
tilted his head, and then accepted her point. Von Neumann could listen well, and he had also
mastered the ingratiating art of feigning humility.54 “He was an amazing combination of a
very brilliant man who knows that he’s brilliant, but at the same time is very modest and shy
about presenting his ideas to other people,” according to Jennings. “He was very restless and
would march back and forth across the room, yet when he presented his ideas it was almost as
though he were apologizing for disagreeing with you or thinking of a better idea.”
Von Neumann was especially good at devising the fundamentals of computer
programming, which was still an ill-defined craft that had advanced little in the century since
Ada Lovelace wrote down the steps for getting the Analytical Engine to generate Bernoulli
numbers. Creating an elegant instruction set, he realized, involved both rigorous logic and
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precise expression. “He was very thorough in explaining why we needed a particular
instruction or why we could do without an instruction,” Jennings recounted. “It was the first
time that I had ever realized the importance of instruction codes, the logic behind them and
the ingredients that a whole instruction set must have.” It was a manifestation of his broader
talent, which was to get to the essence of a new idea. “The thing that Von Neumann had,
which I’ve noticed that other geniuses have, is the ability to pick out, in a particular problem,
the one crucial thing that’s important.”55
Von Neumann realized that they were doing more than merely improving the ENIAC so
that it could be reprogrammed more quickly. More significantly, they were fulfilling Ada’s
vision by creating a machine that could perform any logical task on any set of symbols. “The
stored-program computer, as conceived by Alan Turing and delivered by John von Neumann,
broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things,” George
Dyson wrote. “Our universe would never be the same.”56
In addition, von Neumann grasped, more readily than his colleagues, an important attribute
of commingling data and programming instructions in the same stored memory. The memory
could be erasable, what we now call read-write memory. This meant that the stored program
instructions could be changed not just at the end of a run but anytime the program was
running. The computer could modify its own program based on the results it was getting. To
facilitate this, von Neumann came up with a variable-address program language that enabled
an easy switch to substitute instructions while the program was running.57
The team at Penn proposed to the Army that a new and improved ENIAC be built along
these lines. It would be binary rather than decimal, use mercury delay lines for memory, and
include much, though not all, of what became known as “von Neumann architecture.” In the
original proposal to the Army, this new machine was called the Electronic Discrete Variable
Automatic Calculator. Increasingly, however, the team started referring to it as a computer,
because it would do so much more than merely calculate. Not that it mattered. Everyone
simply called it EDVAC.
Over the ensuing years, at patent trials and conferences, in books and dueling historical
papers, there would be debates over who deserved the most credit for the ideas developed in
1944 and early 1945 that became part of the stored-program computer. The account above,
for example, gives primary credit to Eckert and Mauchly for the stored-program concept and
to von Neumann for realizing the importance of the computer’s ability to modify its stored
program as it ran and for creating a variable-address programming functionality to facilitate
this. But more important than parsing provenance of ideas is to appreciate how the innovation
at Penn was another example of collaborative creativity. Von Neumann, Eckert, Mauchly,
Goldstine, Jennings, and many others batted around ideas collectively and elicited input from
engineers, electronics experts, material scientists, and programmers.
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John von Neumann (1903–57) in 1954.
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Herman Goldstine (1913–2004) circa 1944.
Presper Eckert (center) and CBS’s Walter Cronkite (right) look at an election prediction from UNIVAC in 1952.
Most of us have been involved in group brainstorming sessions that produced creative
ideas. Even a few days later, there may be different recollections of who suggested what first,
and we realize that the formation of ideas was shaped more by the iterative interplay within
the group than by an individual tossing in a wholly original concept. The sparks come from
ideas rubbing against each other rather than as bolts out of the blue. This was true at Bell
Labs, Los Alamos, Bletchley Park, and Penn. One of von Neumann’s great strengths was his
talent—questioning, listening, gently floating tentative proposals, articulating, and collating
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—for being an impresario of such a collaborative creative process.
Von Neumann’s propensity to collect and collate ideas, and his lack of concern for pinning
down precisely where they came from, was useful in sowing and fertilizing the concepts that
became part of EDVAC. But it did sometimes rankle those more concerned about getting
credit—or even intellectual property rights—where due. He once proclaimed that it was not
possible to attribute the origination of ideas discussed in a group. Upon hearing that, Eckert is
said to have responded, “Really?”58
The benefits and drawbacks of von Neumann’s approach became apparent in June 1945.
After ten months of buzzing around the work being done at Penn, he offered to summarize
their discussions on paper. And that is what he proceeded to do on a long train ride to Los
Alamos.
In his handwritten report, which he mailed back to Goldstine at Penn, von Neumann
described in mathematically dense detail the structure and logical control of the proposed
stored-program computer and why it was “tempting to treat the entire memory as one organ.”
When Eckert questioned why von Neumann seemed to be preparing a paper based on the
ideas that others had helped to develop, Goldstine reassured him: “He’s just trying to get
these things clear in his own mind and he’s done it by writing me letters so that we can write
back if he hasn’t understood it properly.”59
Von Neumann had left blank spaces for inserting references to other people’s work, and
his text never actually used the acronym EDVAC. But when Goldstine had the paper typed
up (it ran to 101 pages), he ascribed sole authorship to his hero. The title page Goldstine
composed called it “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, by John von Neumann.”
Goldstine used a mimeograph machine to produce twenty-four copies, which he distributed at
the end of June 1945.60
The “Draft Report” was an immensely useful document, and it guided the development of
subsequent computers for at least a decade. Von Neumann’s decision to write it and allow
Goldstine to distribute it reflected the openness of academic-oriented scientists, especially
mathematicians, who tend to want to publish and disseminate rather than attempt to own
intellectual property. “I certainly intend to do my part to keep as much of this field in the
public domain (from the patent point of view) as I can,” von Neumann explained to a
colleague. He had two purposes in writing the report, he later said: “to contribute to clarifying
and coordinating the thinking of the group working on the EDVAC” and “to further the
development of the art of building high speed computers.” He said that he was not trying to
assert any ownership of the concepts, and he never applied for a patent on them.61
Eckert and Mauchly saw this differently. “You know, we finally regarded von Neumann as
a huckster of other people’s ideas with Goldstine as his principal mission salesman,” Eckert
later said. “Von Neumann was stealing ideas and trying to pretend work done at [Penn’s]
Moore School was work he had done.”62 Jean Jennings agreed, later lamenting that Goldstine
“enthusiastically supported von Neumann’s wrongful claims and essentially helped the man
hijack the work of Eckert, Mauchly, and the others in the Moore School group.”63
What especially upset Mauchly and Eckert, who tried to patent many of the concepts
behind both ENIAC and then EDVAC, was that the distribution of von Neumann’s report
legally placed those concepts in the public domain. When Mauchly and Eckert tried to patent
the architecture of a stored-program computer, they were stymied because (as both the
Army’s lawyers and the courts eventually ruled) von Neumann’s report was deemed to be a
“prior publication” of those ideas.
These patent disputes were the forerunner of a major issue of the digital era: Should
intellectual property be shared freely and placed whenever possible into the public domain
and open-source commons? That course, largely followed by the developers of the Internet
and the Web, can spur innovation through the rapid dissemination and crowd-sourced
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improvement of ideas. Or should intellectual property rights be protected and inventors
allowed to profit from their proprietary ideas and innovations? That path, largely followed in
the computer hardware, electronics, and semiconductor industries, can provide the financial
incentives and capital investment that encourages innovation and rewards risks. In the
seventy years since von Neumann effectively placed his “Draft Report” on the EDVAC into
the public domain, the trend for computers has been, with a few notable exceptions, toward a
more proprietary approach. In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more
on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of
new products.64
THE PUBLIC UNVEILING OF ENIAC
Even as the team at Penn was designing EDVAC, they were still scrambling to get its
predecessor, ENIAC, up and running. That occurred in the fall of 1945.
By then the war was over. There was no need to compute artillery trajectories, but
ENIAC’s first task nevertheless involved weaponry. The secret assignment came from Los
Alamos, the atomic weapons lab in New Mexico, where the Hungarian-born theoretical
physicist Edward Teller had devised a proposal for a hydrogen bomb, dubbed “the Super,” in
which a fission atomic device would be used to create a fusion reaction. To determine how
this would work, the scientists needed to calculate what the force of the reactions would be at
every ten-millionth of a second.
The nature of the problem was highly classified, but the mammoth equations were brought
to Penn in October for ENIAC to crunch. It required almost a million punch cards to input the
data, and Jennings was summoned to the ENIAC room with some of her colleagues so that
Goldstine could direct the process of setting it up. ENIAC solved the equations, and in doing
so showed that Teller’s design was flawed. The mathematician and Polish refugee Stanislaw
Ulam subsequently worked with Teller (and Klaus Fuchs, who turned out to be a Russian
spy) to modify the hydrogen bomb concept, based on the ENIAC results, so that it could
produce a massive thermonuclear reaction.65
Until such classified tasks were completed, ENIAC was kept under wraps. It was not shown
to the public until February 15, 1946, when the Army and Penn scheduled a gala presentation
with some press previews leading up to it.66 Captain Goldstine decided that the centerpiece of
the unveiling would be a demonstration of a missile trajectory calculation. So two weeks in
advance, he invited Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder to his apartment and, as Adele served tea,
asked them if they could program ENIAC to do this in time. “We sure could,” Jennings
pledged. She was excited. It would allow them to get their hands directly on the machine,
which was rare.67 They set to work plugging memory buses into the correct units and setting
up program trays.
The men knew that the success of their demonstration was in the hands of these two
women. Mauchly came by one Saturday with a bottle of apricot brandy to keep them
fortified. “It was delicious,” Jennings recalled. “From that day forward, I always kept a bottle
of apricot brandy in my cupboard.” A few days later, the dean of the engineering school
brought them a paper bag containing a fifth of whiskey. “Keep up the good work,” he told
them. Snyder and Jennings were not big drinkers, but the gifts served their purpose. “It
impressed us with the importance of this demonstration,” said Jennings.68
The night before the demonstration was Valentine’s Day, but despite their normally active
social lives, Snyder and Jennings did not celebrate. “Instead, we were holed up with that
wonderful machine, the ENIAC, busily making the last corrections and checks on the
program,” Jennings recounted. There was one stubborn glitch they couldn’t figure out: the
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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 demonstration would be a dud, and the ENIAC’s inventors and engineers would
be embarrassed.”69
Jennings and Snyder worked late into the evening before the press briefing trying to fix it,
but they couldn’t. They finally gave up at midnight, when Snyder needed to catch the last
train to her suburban apartment. But after she went to bed, Snyder figured it out: “I woke up
in the middle of the night thinking what that error was. . . . I came in, made a special trip on
the early train that morning to look at a certain wire.” The problem was that there was a
setting at the end of a “do loop” that was one digit off. She flipped the requisite switch and
the glitch was fixed. “Betty could do more logical reasoning while she was asleep than most
people can do awake,” Jennings later marveled. “While she slept, her subconscious untangled
the knot that her conscious mind had been unable to.”70
At the demonstration, ENIAC was able to spew out in fifteen seconds a set of missile
trajectory calculations that would have taken human computers, even working with a
Differential Analyzer, several weeks. It was all very dramatic. Mauchly and Eckert, like good
innovators, knew how to put on a show. The tips of the vacuum tubes in the ENIAC
accumulators, which were arranged in 10 x 10 grids, poked through holes in the machine’s
front panel. But the faint light from the neon bulbs, which served as indicator lights, was
barely visible. So Eckert got Ping-Pong balls, cut them in half, wrote numbers on them, and
placed them over the bulbs. As the computer began processing the data, the lights in the room
were turned off so that the audience would be awed by the blinking Ping-Pong balls, a
spectacle that became a staple of movies and TV shows. “As the trajectory was being
calculated, numbers built up in the accumulators and were transferred from place to place,
and the lights started flashing like the bulbs on the marquees in Las Vegas,” said Jennings.
“We had done what we set out to do. We had programmed the ENIAC.”71 That bears
repeating: they had programmed the ENIAC.
The unveiling of ENIAC made the front page of the New York Times under the headline
“Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering.” The story began, “One of
the war’s top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first time to
mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was announced here
tonight by the War Department.”72 The report continued inside the Times for a full page, with
pictures of Mauchly, Eckert, and the room-size ENIAC. Mauchly proclaimed that the
machine would lead to better weather predictions (his original passion), airplane design, and
“projectiles operating at supersonic speeds.” The Associated Press story reported an even
grander vision, declaring, “The robot opened the mathematical way to better living for every
man.”73 As an example of “better living,” Mauchly asserted that computers might one day
serve to lower the cost of a loaf of bread. How that would happen he did not explain, but it
and millions of other such ramifications did in fact eventually transpire.
Later Jennings complained, in the tradition of Ada Lovelace, that many of the newspaper
reports overstated what ENIAC could do by calling it a “giant brain” and implying that it
could think. “The ENIAC wasn’t a brain in any sense,” she insisted. “It couldn’t reason, as
computers still cannot reason, but it could give people more data to use in reasoning.”
Jennings had another complaint that was more personal: “Betty and I were ignored and
forgotten following the demonstration. We felt as if we had been playing parts in a
fascinating movie that suddenly took a bad turn, in which we had worked like dogs for two
weeks to produce something really spectacular and then were written out of the script.” That
night there was a candle-lit dinner at Penn’s venerable Houston Hall. It was filled with
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scientific luminaries, military brass, and most of the men who had worked on ENIAC. But
Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder were not there, nor were any of the other women
programmers.74 “Betty and I weren’t invited,” Jennings said, “so we were sort of horrified.”75
While the men and various dignitaries celebrated, Jennings and Snyder made their way home
alone through a very cold February night.
THE FIRST STORED-PROGRAM COMPUTERS
The desire of Mauchly and Eckert to patent—and profit from—what they had helped to
invent caused problems at Penn, which did not yet have a clear policy for divvying up
intellectual property rights. They were allowed to apply for patents on ENIAC, but the
university then insisted on getting royalty-free licenses as well as the right to sublicense all
aspects of the design. Furthermore, the parties couldn’t agree on who would have rights to the
innovations on EDVAC. The wrangling was complex, but the upshot was that Mauchly and
Eckert left Penn at the end of March 1946.76
They formed what became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, based in
Philadelphia, and were pioneers in turning computing from an academic to a commercial
endeavor. (In 1950 their company, along with the patents they would be granted, became part
of Remington Rand, which morphed into Sperry Rand and then Unisys.) Among the
machines they built was UNIVAC, which was purchased by the Census Bureau and other
clients, including General Electric.
With its flashing lights and Hollywood aura, UNIVAC became famous when CBS featured
it on election night in 1952. Walter Cronkite, the young anchor of the network’s coverage,
was dubious that the huge machine would be much use compared to the expertise of the
network’s correspondents, but he agreed that it might provide an amusing spectacle for
viewers. Mauchly and Eckert enlisted a Penn statistician, and they worked out a program that
compared the early results from some sample precincts to the outcomes in previous elections.
By 8:30 p.m. on the East Coast, well before most of the nation’s polls had closed, UNIVAC
predicted, with 100-to-1 certainty, an easy win for Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson.
CBS initially withheld UNIVAC’s verdict; Cronkite told his audience that the computer had
not yet reached a conclusion. Later that night, though, after the vote counting confirmed that
Eisenhower had won handily, Cronkite put the correspondent Charles Collingwood on the air
to admit that UNIVAC had made the prediction at the beginning of the evening but CBS had
not aired it. UNIVAC became a celebrity and a fixture on future election nights.77
Eckert and Mauchly did not forget the importance of the women programmers who had
worked with them at Penn, even though they had not been invited to the dedication dinner for
ENIAC. They hired Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to
become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages, and
Jean Jennings, who married an engineer and became Jean Jennings Bartik. Mauchly also
wanted to recruit Kay McNulty, but after his wife died in a drowning accident he proposed
marriage to her instead. They had five children, and she continued to help on software design
for UNIVAC.
Mauchly also hired the dean of them all, Grace Hopper. “He let people try things,” Hopper
replied when asked why she let him talk her into joining the Eckert-Mauchly Computer
Corporation. “He encouraged innovation.”78 By 1952 she had created the world’s first
workable compiler, known as the A-0 system, which translated symbolic mathematical code
into machine language and thus made it easier for ordinary folks to write programs.
Like a salty crew member, Hopper valued an all-hands-on-deck style of collaboration, and
she helped develop the open-source method of innovation by sending out her initial versions
of the compiler to her friends and acquaintances in the programming world and asking them
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to make improvements. She used the same open development process when she served as the
technical lead in coordinating the creation of COBOL, the first cross-platform standardized
business language for computers.79 Her instinct that programming should be machine-
independent was a reflection of her preference for collegiality; even machines, she felt,
should work well together. It also showed her early understanding of a defining fact of the
computer age: that hardware would become commoditized and that programming would be
where the true value resided. Until Bill Gates came along, it was an insight that eluded most
of the men.12
Von Neumann was 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 company rights to any inventions he made. It was a perfectly
valid arrangement. Nevertheless, it outraged Eckert and Mauchly. “He sold all our ideas
through the back door to IBM,” Eckert complained. “He spoke with a forked tongue. He said
one thing and did something else. He was not to be trusted.”81
After Mauchly and Eckert left, Penn rapidly lost its role as a center of innovation. Von
Neumann also left, to return to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He took with
him Herman and Adele Goldstine, along with key engineers such as Arthur Burks. “Perhaps
institutions as well as people can become fatigued,” Herman Goldstine later reflected on the
demise of Penn as the epicenter of computer development.82 Computers were considered a
tool, not a subject for scholarly study. Few of the faculty realized that computer science
would grow into an academic discipline even more important than electrical engineering.
Despite the exodus, Penn was able to play one more critical role in the development of
computers. In July 1946 most of the experts in the field—including von Neumann, Goldstine,
Eckert, Mauchly, and others who had been feuding—returned for a series of talks and
seminars, called the Moore School Lectures, that would disseminate their knowledge about
computing. The eight-week series attracted Howard Aiken, George Stibitz, Douglas Hartree
of Manchester University, and Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge. A primary focus was the
importance of using stored-program architecture if computers were to fulfill Turing’s vision
of being universal machines. As a result, the design ideas developed collaboratively by
Mauchly, Eckert, von Neumann, and others at Penn became the foundation for most future
computers.
The distinction of being the first stored-program computers went to two machines that were
completed, almost simultaneously, in the summer of 1948. One of them was an update of the
original ENIAC. Von Neumann and Goldstine, along with the engineers Nick Metropolis and
Richard Clippinger, worked out a way to use three of ENIAC’s function tables to store a
rudimentary set of instructions.83 Those function tables had been used to store data about the
drag on an artillery shell, but that memory space could be used for other purposes since the
machine was no longer being used to calculate trajectory tables. Once again, the actual
programming work was done largely by the women: Adele Goldstine, Klára von Neumann,
and Jean Jennings Bartik. “I worked again with Adele when we developed, along with others,
the original version of the code required to turn ENIAC into a stored-program computer using
the function tables to store the coded instructions,” Bartik recalled.84
This reconfigured ENIAC, which became operational in April 1948, had a read-only
memory, which meant that it was hard to modify programs while they were running. In
addition, its mercury delay line memory was sluggish and required precision engineering.
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Both of these drawbacks were avoided in a small machine at Manchester University in
England that was built from scratch to function as a stored-program computer. Dubbed “the
Manchester Baby,” it became operational in June 1948.
Manchester’s computing lab was run by Max Newman, Turing’s mentor, and the primary
work on the new computer was done by Frederic Calland Williams and Thomas Kilburn.
Williams invented a storage mechanism using cathode-ray tubes, which made the machine
faster and simpler than ones using mercury delay lines. It worked so well that it led to the
more powerful Manchester Mark I, which became operational in April 1949, as well as the
EDSAC, completed by Maurice Wilkes and a team at Cambridge that May.85
As these machines were being developed, Turing was also trying to develop a stored-
program computer. After leaving Bletchley Park, he joined the National Physical Laboratory,
a prestigious institute in London, where he designed a computer named the Automatic
Computing Engine in homage to Babbage’s two engines. But progress on ACE was fitful. By
1948 Turing was fed up with the pace and frustrated that his colleagues had no interest in
pushing the bounds of machine learning and artificial intelligence, so he left to join Max
Newman at Manchester.86
Likewise, von Neumann embarked on developing a stored-program computer as soon as he
settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1946, an endeavor chronicled in
George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral. The Institute’s director, Frank Aydelotte, and its most
influential faculty trustee, Oswald Veblen, were staunch supporters of what became known as
the IAS Machine, fending off criticism from other faculty that building a computing machine
would demean the mission of what was supposed to be a haven for theoretical thinking. “He
clearly stunned, or even horrified, some of his mathematical colleagues of the most erudite
abstraction, by openly professing his great interest in other mathematical tools than the
blackboard and chalk or pencil and paper,” von Neumann’s wife, Klára, recalled. “His
proposal to build an electronic computing machine under the sacred dome of the Institute was
not received with applause to say the least.”87
Von Neumann’s team members were stashed in an area that would have been used by the
logician Kurt Gödel’s secretary, except he didn’t want one. Throughout 1946 they published
detailed papers about their design, which they sent to the Library of Congress and the U.S.
Patent Office, not with applications for patents but with affidavits saying they wanted the
work to be in the public domain.
Their machine became fully operational in 1952, but it was slowly abandoned after von
Neumann left for Washington to join the Atomic Energy Commission. “The demise of our
computer group was a disaster not only for Princeton but for science as a whole,” said the
physicist Freeman Dyson, a member of the Institute (and George Dyson’s father). “It meant
that there did not exist at that critical period in the 1950s an academic center where computer
people of all kinds could get together at the highest intellectual level.”88 Instead, beginning in
the 1950s, innovation in computing shifted to the corporate realm, led by companies such as
Ferranti, IBM, Remington Rand, and Honeywell.
That shift takes us back to the issue of patent protections. If von Neumann and his team
had continued to pioneer innovations and put them in the public domain, would such an open-
source model of development have led to faster improvements in computers? Or did
marketplace competition and the financial rewards for creating intellectual property do more
to spur innovation? In the cases of the Internet, the Web, and some forms of software, the
open model would turn out to work better. But when it came to hardware, such as computers
and microchips, a proprietary system provided incentives for a spurt of innovation in the
1950s. The reason the proprietary approach worked well, especially for computers, was that
large industrial organizations, which needed to raise working capital, were best at handling
the research, development, manufacturing, and marketing for such machines. In addition,
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until the mid-1990s, patent protection was easier to obtain for hardware than it was for
software.13 However, there was a downside to the patent protection given to hardware
innovation: the proprietary model produced companies that were so entrenched and defensive
that they would miss out on the personal computer revolution in the early 1970s.
CAN MACHINES THINK?
As he thought about the development of stored-program computers, Alan Turing turned his
attention to the assertion that Ada Lovelace had made a century earlier, in her final “Note” on
Babbage’s Analytical Engine: that machines could not really think. If a machine could
modify its own program based on the information it processed, Turing asked, wouldn’t that
be a form of learning? Might that lead to artificial intelligence?
The issues surrounding artificial intelligence go back to the ancients. So do the related
questions involving human consciousness. As with most questions of this sort, Descartes was
instrumental in framing them in modern terms. In his 1637 Discourse on the Method, which
contains his famous assertion “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes wrote:
If there were machines that bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should
still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real humans. The first is that . . . it is not conceivable that such a machine
should produce arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of
men can do. Secondly, even though some machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably
fail in others, which would reveal that they are acting not from understanding.

Turing had long been interested in the way computers might replicate the workings of a
human brain, and this curiosity was furthered by his work on machines that deciphered coded
language. In early 1943, as Colossus was being designed at Bletchley Park, Turing sailed
across the Atlantic on a mission to Bell Laboratories in lower Manhattan, where he consulted
with the group working on electronic speech encipherment, the technology that could
electronically scramble and unscramble telephone conversations.
There he met the colorful genius Claude Shannon, the former MIT graduate student who
wrote the seminal master’s thesis in 1937 that showed how Boolean algebra, which rendered
logical propositions into equations, could be performed by electronic circuits. Shannon and
Turing began meeting for tea and long conversations in the afternoons. Both were interested
in brain science, and they realized that their 1937 papers had something fundamental in
common: they showed how a machine, operating with simple binary instructions, could
tackle not only math problems but all of logic. And since logic was the basis for how human
brains reasoned, then a machine could, in theory, replicate human intelligence.
“Shannon wants to feed not just data to [a machine], but cultural things!” Turing told Bell
Lab colleagues at lunch one day. “He wants to play music to it!” At another lunch in the Bell
Labs dining room, Turing held forth in his high-pitched voice, audible to all the executives in
the room: “No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a
mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph
Company.”89
When Turing returned to Bletchley Park in April 1943, he became friends with a colleague
named Donald Michie, and they spent many evenings playing chess in a nearby pub. As they
discussed the possibility of creating a chess-playing computer, Turing approached the
problem not by thinking of ways to use brute processing power to calculate every possible
move; instead he focused on the possibility that a machine might learn how to play chess by
repeated practice. In other words, it might be able to try new gambits and refine its strategy
with every new win or loss. This approach, if successful, would represent a fundamental leap
that would have dazzled Ada Lovelace: machines would be able to do more than merely
follow the specific instructions given them by humans; they could learn from experience and
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refine their own instructions.
“It has been said that computing machines can only carry out the purposes that they are
instructed to do,” he explained in a talk to the London Mathematical Society in February
1947. “But is it necessary that they should always be used in such a manner?” He then
discussed the implications of the new stored-program computers that could modify their own
instruction tables. “It would be like a pupil who had learnt much from his master, but had
added much more by his own work. When this happens I feel that one is obliged to regard the
machine as showing intelligence.”90
When he finished his speech, his audience sat for a moment in silence, stunned by Turing’s
claims. Likewise, his colleagues at the National Physical Laboratory were flummoxed by
Turing’s obsession with making thinking machines. The director of the National Physical
Laboratory, Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the evolutionary biologist), wrote to his
superiors in 1947 that Turing “wants to extend his work on the machine still further towards
the biological side” and to address the question “Could a machine be made that could learn
by experience?”91
Turing’s unsettling notion that machines might someday be able to think like humans
provoked furious objections at the time—as it has ever since. There were the expected
religious objections and also those that were emotional, both in content and in tone. “Not
until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions
felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain,”
declared a famous brain surgeon, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, in the prestigious Lister Oration in
1949.92 Turing’s response to a reporter from the London Times seemed somewhat flippant,
but also subtle: “The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a
machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”93
The ground was thus laid for Turing’s second seminal work, “Computing Machinery and
Intelligence,” published in the journal Mind in October 1950.94 In it he devised what became
known as the Turing Test. He began with a clear declaration: “I propose to consider the
question, ‘Can machines think?’ ” With a schoolboy’s sense of fun, he then invented a game
—one that is still being played and debated—to give empirical meaning to that question. He
proposed a purely operational definition of artificial intelligence: If the output of a machine is
indistinguishable from that of a human brain, then we have no meaningful reason to insist
that the machine is not “thinking.”
Turing’s test, which he called “the imitation game,” is simple: An interrogator sends
written questions to a human and a machine in another room and tries to determine from their
answers which one is the human. A sample interrogation, he wrote, might be the following:

Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.
A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.

Q: Add 34957 to 70764.
A: (Pause about 30 seconds and then give as answer) 105621.

Q: Do you play chess?
A: Yes.

Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play?
A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R–R8 mate.
In this sample dialogue, Turing did a few things. Careful scrutiny shows that the respondent,
after thirty seconds, made a slight mistake in addition (the correct answer is 105,721). Is that
evidence that the respondent was a human? Perhaps. But then again, maybe it was a machine
cagily pretending to be human. Turing also flicked away Jefferson’s objection that a machine
cannot write a sonnet; perhaps the answer above was given by a human who admitted to that
inability. Later in the paper, Turing imagined the following interrogation to show the
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difficulty of using sonnet writing as a criterion of being human:

Q: In the first line of your sonnet which reads “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” would not “a spring day” do as well or better?
A: It wouldn’t scan.

Q: How about “a winter’s day.” That would scan all right.
A: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day.

Q: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
A: In a way.

Q: Yet Christmas is a winter’s day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
A: I don’t think you’re serious. By a winter’s day one means a typical winter’s day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
Turing’s point was that it might not be possible to tell whether such a respondent was a
human or a machine pretending to be a human.
Turing gave his own guess as to whether a computer might be able to win this imitation
game: “I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers . .
. to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have
more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of
questioning.”
In his paper Turing tried to rebut the many possible challenges to his definition of thinking.
He swatted away the theological objection that God has bestowed a soul and thinking
capacity only upon humans, arguing that this “implies a serious restriction of the
omnipotence of the Almighty.” He asked whether God “has freedom to confer a soul on an
elephant if He sees fit.” Presumably so. By the same logic, which, coming from the
nonbelieving Turing was somewhat sardonic, surely God could confer a soul upon a machine
if He so desired.
The most interesting objection, especially for our narrative, is the one that Turing
attributed to Ada Lovelace. “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate
anything,” she wrote in 1843. “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can
follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” In other
words, unlike the human mind, a mechanical contrivance cannot have free will or come up
with its own initiatives. It can merely perform as programmed. In his 1950 paper, Turing
devoted a section to what he dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection.”
His most ingenious parry to this objection was his argument that a machine might actually
be able to learn, thereby growing into its own agent and able to originate new thoughts.
“Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to
produce one which simulates the child’s?” he asked. “If this were then subjected to an
appropriate course of education, one would obtain the adult brain.” A machine’s learning
process would be different from a child’s, he admitted. “It will not, for instance, be provided
with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not
have eyes. . . . One could not send the creature to school without the other children making
excessive fun of it.” The baby machine would therefore have to be tutored some other way.
Turing proposed a punishment and reward system, which would cause the machine to repeat
certain activities and avoid others. Eventually such a machine could develop its own
conceptions about how to figure things out.
But even if a machine could mimic thinking, Turing’s critics objected, it would not really
be conscious. When the human player of the Turing Test uses words, he associates those
words with real-world meanings, emotions, experiences, sensations, and perceptions.
Machines don’t. Without such connections, language is just a game divorced from meaning.
This objection led to the most enduring challenge to the Turing Test, which was in a 1980
essay by the philosopher John Searle. He proposed a thought experiment, called the Chinese
Room, in which an English speaker with no knowledge of Chinese is given a comprehensive
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set of rules instructing him on how to respond to any combination of Chinese characters by
handing back a specified new combination of Chinese characters. Given a good enough
instruction manual, the person might convince an interrogator that he was a real speaker of
Chinese. Nevertheless, he would not have understood a single response that he made, nor
would he have exhibited any intentionality. In Ada Lovelace’s words, he would have no
pretensions whatever to originate anything but instead would merely do whatever actions he
was ordered to perform. Similarly, the machine in Turing’s imitation game, no matter how
well it could mimic a human being, would have no understanding or consciousness of what it
was saying. It makes no more sense to say that the machine “thinks” than it does to say that
the fellow following the massive instruction manual understands Chinese.95
One response to the Searle objection is to argue that, even if the man does not really
understand Chinese, the entire system incorporated in the room—the man (processing unit),
instruction manual (program), and files full of Chinese characters (the data)—as a whole
might indeed understand Chinese. There’s no conclusive answer. Indeed, the Turing Test and
the objections to it remain to this day the most debated topic in cognitive science.
For a few years after he wrote “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing seemed to
enjoy engaging in the fray that he provoked. With wry humor, he poked at the pretensions of
those who prattled on about sonnets and exalted consciousness. “One day ladies will take
their computers for walks in the park and tell each other ‘My little computer said such a
funny thing this morning!’ ” he japed in 1951. As his mentor Max Newman later noted, “His
comical but brilliantly apt analogies with which he explained his ideas made him a delightful
companion.”96
One topic that came up repeatedly in discussions with Turing, and would soon have a sad
resonance, was the role that sexual appetites and emotional desires play in human thinking,
unlike in machines. A very public example occurred in a January 1952 televised BBC debate
that Turing had with the brain surgeon Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, moderated by Max Newman
and the philosopher of science Richard Braithwaite. “A human’s interests are determined, by
and large, by his appetites, desires, drives, instincts,” said Braithwaite, who argued that to
create a true thinking machine, “it would seem to be necessary to equip the machine with
something corresponding to a set of appetites.” Newman chimed in that machines “have
rather restricted appetites, and they can’t blush when they’re embarrassed.” Jefferson went
even further, repeatedly using “sexual urges” as an example and referring to a human’s
“emotions and instincts, such as those to do with sex.” Man is prey to “sexual urges,” he said,
and “may make a fool of himself.” He spoke so much about how sexual appetites affected
human thinking that the BBC editors cut some of it out of the broadcast, including his
assertion that he would not believe a machine could think until he saw it touch the leg of a
female machine.97
Turing, who was still rather discreet about being a homosexual, fell quiet during this part
of the discussion. During the weeks leading up to the recording of the broadcast on January
10, 1952, he was engaged in a series of actions that were so very human that a machine
would have found them incomprehensible. He had just finished a scientific paper, and he
followed it by writing a short story about how he planned to celebrate: “It was quite some
time now since he had ‘had’ anyone, in fact not since he had met that soldier in Paris last
summer. Now that his paper was finished he might justifiably consider that he had earned
another gay man, and he knew where he might find one who might be suitable.”98
On Oxford Street in Manchester, he picked up a nineteen-year-old working-class drifter
named Arnold Murray and began a relationship. When he returned from taping the BBC
show, he invited Murray to move in. One night Turing told young Murray of his fantasy of
playing chess against a nefarious computer that he was able to beat by causing it to show
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anger, then pleasure, then smugness. The relationship became more complex in the ensuing
days, until Turing returned home one evening and found that his house had been burglarized.
The culprit was a friend of Murray’s. When Turing reported the incident to the police, he
ended up disclosing to them his sexual relationship with Murray, and they arrested Turing for
“gross indecency.”99
At the trial in March 1952, Turing pled guilty, though he made clear he felt no remorse.
Max Newman appeared as a character witness. Convicted and stripped of his security
clearance,14 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 always been
fascinated by the scene in Snow White in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into a
poisonous brew. He was found in his bed with froth around his mouth, cyanide in his system,
and a half-eaten apple by his side.
Was that something a machine would have done?
John Bardeen (1908–91), William Shockley (1910–89), and Walter Brattain (1902–87) in a Bell Labs photograph in 1948.
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The first transistor at Bell Labs.
William Shockley (at head of table) the day he won the Nobel Prize being toasted by colleagues, including Gordon Moore (seated left) and
Robert Noyce (standing center with wine glass) in 1956.
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CHAPTER FOUR

THE TRANSISTOR
The invention of computers did not immediately launch a revolution. Because they relied on
large, expensive, fragile vacuum tubes that consumed a lot of power, the first computers were
costly behemoths that only corporations, research universities, and the military could afford.
Instead the true birth of the digital age, the era in which electronic devices became embedded
in every aspect of our lives, occurred in Murray Hill, New Jersey, shortly after lunchtime on
Tuesday, December 16, 1947. That day two scientists at Bell Labs succeeded in putting
together a tiny contraption they had concocted from some strips of gold foil, a chip of
semiconducting material, and a bent paper clip. When wiggled just right, it could amplify an
electric current and switch it on and off. The transistor, as the device was soon named,
became to the digital age what the steam engine was to the Industrial Revolution.
The advent of transistors, and the subsequent innovations that allowed millions of them to
be etched onto tiny microchips, meant that the processing power of many thousands of
ENIACs could be nestled inside the nose cone of rocket ships, in computers that could sit on
your lap, in calculators and music players that could fit in your pocket, and in handheld
devices that could exchange information or entertainment with any nook or node of a
networked planet.
Three passionate and intense colleagues, whose personalities both complemented and
conflicted with one another, would go down in history as the inventors of the transistor: a deft
experimentalist named Walter Brattain, a quantum theorist named John Bardeen, and the
most passionate and intense of them all—tragically so by the end—a solid-state physics
expert named William Shockley.
But there was another player in this drama that was actually as important as any individual:
Bell Labs, where these men worked. What made the transistor possible was a mixture of
diverse talents rather than just the imaginative leaps of a few geniuses. By its nature, the
transistor required a team that threw together theorists who had an intuitive feel for quantum
phenomena with material scientists who were adroit at baking impurities into batches of
silicon, along with dexterous experimentalists, industrial chemists, manufacturing specialists,
and ingenious tinkerers.
BELL LABS
In 1907 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company faced a crisis. The patents of its
founder, Alexander Graham Bell, had expired, and it seemed in danger of losing its near-
monopoly on phone services. Its board summoned back a retired president, Theodore Vail,
who decided to reinvigorate the company by committing to a bold goal: building a system
that could connect a call between New York and San Francisco. The challenge required
combining feats of engineering with leaps of pure science. Making use of vacuum tubes and
other new technologies, AT&T built repeaters and amplifying devices that accomplished the
task in January 1915. On the historic first transcontinental call, in addition to Vail and
President Woodrow Wilson, was Bell himself, who echoed his famous words from thirty-nine
years earlier, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” This time his former assistant
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Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, replied, “It would take me a week.”1
Thus was the seed planted for a new industrial organization that became known as Bell
Labs. Originally located on the western edge of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village overlooking
the Hudson River, it brought together theoreticians, materials scientists, metallurgists,
engineers, and even AT&T pole climbers. It was where George Stibitz developed a computer
using electromagnetic relays and Claude Shannon worked on information theory. Like Xerox
PARC and other corporate research satellites that followed, Bell Labs showed how sustained
innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together,
preferably in close physical proximity where they could have frequent meetings and
serendipitous encounters. That was the upside. The downside was that these were big
bureaucracies under corporate thumbs; Bell Labs, like Xerox PARC, showed the limits of
industrial organizations when they don’t have passionate leaders and rebels who can turn
innovations into great products.
The head of Bell Labs’ vacuum-tube department was a high-octane Missourian named
Mervin Kelly, who had studied to be a metallurgist at the Missouri School of Mines and then
got a PhD in physics under Robert Millikan at the University of Chicago. He was able to
make vacuum tubes more reliable by devising a water-cooling system, but he realized that
tubes would never be an efficient method of amplification or switching. In 1936 he was
promoted to research director of Bell Labs, and his first priority was to find an alternative.
Kelly’s great insight was that Bell Labs, which had been a bastion of practical engineering,
should also focus on basic science and theoretical research, until then the domain of
universities. He began a search for the country’s brightest young physics PhDs. His mission
was to make innovation something that an industrial organization could do on a regular basis
rather than ceding that territory to eccentric geniuses holed up in garages and garrets.
“It had become a matter of some consideration at the Labs whether the key to invention
was a matter of individual genius or collaboration,” Jon Gertner wrote in The Idea Factory, a
study of Bell Labs.2 The answer was both. “It takes many men in many fields of science,
pooling their various talents, to funnel all the necessary research into the development of one
new device,” Shockley later explained.3 He was right. He was also, however, showing a rare
flash of feigned humility. More than anyone, he believed in the importance of the individual
genius, such as himself. Even Kelly, the proselytizer for collaboration, realized that
individual genius also needed to be nurtured. “With all the needed emphasis on leadership,
organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount
importance,” he once said. “It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and
concepts are born.”4
The key to innovation—at Bell Labs and in the digital age in general—was realizing that
there was no conflict between nurturing individual geniuses and promoting collaborative
teamwork. It was not either-or. Indeed, throughout the digital age, the two approaches went
together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated
innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak)
partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of
technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product. When
part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles
Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to
history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after
Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley,
innovation slowly withered.
The need to combine theorists with engineers was particularly true in a field that was
becoming increasingly important at Bell Labs: solid-state physics, which studied how
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electrons flow through solid materials. In the 1930s, Bell Labs engineers were tinkering with
materials such as silicon—after oxygen the most common element in the earth’s crust and a
key component of sand—in order to juice them into performing electronic tricks. At the same
time in the same building, Bell theorists were wrestling with the mind-bending discoveries of
quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is based on theories developed by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and
others about what goes on inside an atom. In 1913 Bohr had come up with a model of atomic
structure in which electrons orbited around a nucleus at specific levels. They could make a
quantum leap from one level to the next, but never be in between. The number of electrons in
the outer orbital level helped to determine
the chemical and electronic properties of the element, including how well it conducted
electricity.
Some elements, such as copper, are good conductors of electricity. Others, such as sulfur,
are horrible conductors, and are thus good insulators. And then there are those in between,
such as silicon and germanium, which are known as semiconductors. What makes them
useful is that they are easy to manipulate into becoming better conductors. For example, if
you contaminate silicon with a tiny amount of arsenic or boron, its electrons become more
free to move.
The advances in quantum theory came at the same time that metallurgists at Bell Labs
were finding ways to create new materials using novel purification techniques, chemical
tricks, and recipes for combining rare and ordinary minerals. In seeking to solve some
everyday problems, like vacuum-tube filaments that burned out too quickly or telephone-
speaker diaphragms that sounded too tinny, they were mixing new alloys and developing
methods to heat or cool concoctions until they performed better. By trial and error, like cooks
in a kitchen, they were creating a revolution in materials science that would go hand in hand
with the theoretical revolution that was occurring in quantum mechanics.
As they experimented with their samples of silicon and germanium, the chemical engineers
at Bell Labs stumbled across evidence for much of what the theorists were conjecturing.15 It
became clear that there was a lot that the theorists, engineers, and metallurgists could learn
from one another. So in 1936 a solid-state study group was formed at Bell Labs that included
a potent mix of practical and theoretical stars. It met once a week in the late afternoon to
share findings, engage in a bit of academic-style trash talk, and then adjourn for informal
discussions that lasted late into the night. There was value to getting together in person rather
than just reading each other’s papers: the intense interactions allowed ideas to be kicked into
higher orbits and, like electrons, occasionally break loose to spark chain reactions.
Of all the people in the group, one stood out. William Shockley, a theorist who had arrived
at Bell Labs right when the study group was being formed, impressed the others, and
sometimes frightened them, with both his intellect and his intensity.
WILLIAM SHOCKLEY
William Shockley grew up with a love of both art and science. His father studied mine
engineering at MIT, took music courses in New York, and learned seven languages as he
wandered through Europe and Asia as an adventurer and mineral speculator. His mother
majored in both math and art at Stanford and was one of the first known climbers to succeed
in a solo ascent of Mt. Whitney. They met in a tiny Nevada mining village, Tonopah, where
he was staking claims and she had gone to do surveying work. After they were married, they
moved to London, where their son was born in 1910.
William would be their only child, and for that they were thankful. Even as a baby he had a
ferocious temper, with fits of rage so loud and long that his parents kept losing babysitters
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and apartments. In a journal his father described the boy “screaming at the top of his voice
and bending and throwing himself back” and recorded that he “has bitten his mother severely
many times.”5 His tenacity was ferocious. In any situation, he simply had to have his way.
His parents eventually adopted a policy of surrender. They abandoned any attempt to
discipline him, and until he was eight they home-schooled him. By then they had moved to
Palo Alto, where his mother’s parents lived.
Convinced that their son was a genius, William’s parents had him evaluated by Lewis
Terman,16 who had devised the Stanford–Binet IQ test and was planning a study of gifted
children. Young Shockley scored in the high 120s, which was respectable but not enough for
Terman to label him a genius. Shockley would become obsessed by IQ tests and use them to
assess job applicants and even colleagues, and he developed increasingly virulent theories
about race and inherited intelligence that would poison the later years of his life.6 Perhaps he
should have learned from his own life the shortcomings of IQ tests. Despite being certified as
a nongenius, he was smart enough to skip middle school and get a degree from Caltech and
then a doctorate in solid-state physics from MIT. He was incisive, creative, and ambitious.
Even though he loved performing magic tricks and playing practical jokes, he never learned
to be easygoing or friendly. He had an intellectual and personal intensity, resonating from his
childhood, that made him difficult to deal with, all the more so as he became successful.
When Shockley graduated from MIT in 1936, Mervin Kelly came up from Bell Labs to
interview him and offered him a job on the spot. He also gave Shockley a mission: find a way
to replace vacuum tubes with a device that was more stable, solid, and cheap. After three
years, Shockley became convinced he could find a solution using solid material such as
silicon rather than glowing filaments in a bulb. “It has today occurred to me that an amplifier
using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible,” he wrote in his lab
notebook on December 29, 1939.7
Shockley had the ability to visualize quantum theory, how it explained the movement of
electrons, the way a choreographer can visualize a dance. His colleagues said that he could
look at semiconducting material and see the electrons. However, in order to transform his
artist’s intuitions into a real invention, Shockley needed a partner who was an adroit
experimenter, just as Mauchly needed Eckert. This being Bell Labs, there were many in the
building, most notably the merrily cantankerous westerner Walter Brattain, who enjoyed
making ingenious devices with semiconducting compounds such as copper oxide. For
example, he built electric rectifiers, which turn alternating current into direct current, based
on the fact that current flows in only one direction through an interface where a piece of
copper meets a layer of copper oxide.
Brattain grew up on an isolated ranch in eastern Washington State, where as a boy he
herded cattle. With his raspy voice and homespun demeanor, he affected the self-deprecating
style of a confident cowboy. He was a natural-born tinkerer with deft fingers, and he loved
devising experiments. “He could put things together out of sealing wax and paper clips,”
recalled an engineer he worked with at Bell Labs.8 But he also had a laid-back cleverness that
led him to seek shortcuts rather than plod through repetitious trials.
Shockley had an idea for finding a solid-state replacement for a vacuum tube by putting a
grid into a layer of copper oxide. Brattain was skeptical. He laughed and told Shockley that
he had tried that approach before, and it never ended up producing an amplifier. But
Shockley kept pushing. “It’s so damned important,” Brattain finally said, “that if you’ll tell
me how you want it made, we’ll try it.”9 But as Brattain predicted, it didn’t work.
Before Shockley and Brattain could figure out why it had failed, World War II intervened.
Shockley went off to become a research director in the Navy’s antisubmarine group, where
he developed analyses of bomb detonation depths to improve attacks on German U-boats. He
later traveled to Europe and Asia to help B-29 bomber fleets use radar. Brattain likewise left
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for Washington to work on submarine-detection technologies for the Navy, focusing on
airborne magnetic devices.
THE SOLID-STATE TEAM
While Shockley and Brattain were away, the war was transforming Bell Labs. It became part
of the triangular relationship that was forged among the government, research universities,
and private industry. As the historian Jon Gertner noted, “In the first few years after Pearl
Harbor, Bell Labs took on nearly a thousand different projects for the military—everything
from tank radio sets to communications systems for pilots wearing oxygen masks to
enciphering machines for scrambling secret messages.”10 The staff doubled in size, to nine
thousand.
Having outgrown its Manhattan headquarters, most of Bell Labs moved to two hundred
rolling acres in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly and his colleagues wanted their new
home to feel like an academic campus, but without the segregation of various disciplines into
different buildings. They knew that creativity came through chance encounters. “All
buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between
departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them,” an executive
wrote.11 The corridors were extremely long, more than the length of two football fields, and
designed to promote random meetings among people with different talents and specialties, a
strategy that Steve Jobs replicated in designing Apple’s new headquarters seventy years later.
Anyone walking around Bell Labs might be bombarded with random ideas, soaking them up
like a solar cell. Claude Shannon, the eccentric information theorist, would sometimes ride a
unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding
at colleagues.17 It was a wacky metaphor for the balls-in-the-air ferment in the halls.
In November 1941 Brattain had made his last journal entry, into his notebook #18194,
before leaving Bell Labs in Manhattan for his wartime service. Almost four years later, he
picked up that same notebook in his new lab in Murray Hill and began anew with the entry
“The war is over.” Kelly assigned him and Shockley to a research group that was designed
“to achieve a unified approach to the theoretical and experimental work of the solid state
area.” Its mission was the same as they had before the war: to create a replacement for the
vacuum tube using semiconductors.12
When Kelly sent around the list of who was going to be on the solid-state research group,
Brattain marveled that it included no losers. “By golly! There isn’t an s.o.b. in the group,” he
recalled saying, before pausing to worry, “Maybe I was the s.o.b. in the group.” As he later
declared, “It was probably one of the greatest research teams ever pulled together.”13
Shockley was the primary theoretician, but given his duties as the team’s supervisor—he
was on a different floor—they decided to bring in an additional theorist. They chose a soft-
spoken expert in quantum theory, John Bardeen. A child genius who had skipped three grades
in school, Bardeen had written his doctoral thesis under Eugene Wigner at Princeton and
during his wartime service in the Naval Ordnance Laboratory discussed torpedo design with
Einstein. He was one of the world’s greatest experts on using quantum theory to understand
how materials conduct electricity, and he had, according to colleagues, a “genuine ability to
collaborate easily with experimentalist and theorist alike.”14 There was initially no separate
office for Bardeen, so he ensconced himself in Brattain’s lab space. It was a smart move that
showed, once again, the creative energy generated by physical proximity. By sitting together,
the theorist and the experimentalist could brainstorm ideas face-to-face, hour after hour.
Unlike Brattain, who was voluble and talkative, Bardeen was so quiet that he was dubbed
“Whispering John.” To understand his mumbling, people had to lean forward, but they
learned that it was worth it. He was also contemplative and cautious, unlike Shockley, who
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was lightning-quick and impulsively spouted theories and assertions.
Their insights came from interactions with each other. “The close collaboration between
experimentalists and theorists extended through all stages of the research, from the
conception of the experiment to the analysis of the results,” said Bardeen.15 Their impromptu
meetings, usually led by Shockley, occurred almost every day, a quintessential display of
finish-each-other’s-sentence creativity. “We would meet to discuss important steps almost on
the spur of the moment,” Brattain said. “Many of us had ideas in these discussion groups, one
person’s remarks suggesting an idea to another.”16
These meetings became known as “blackboard sessions” or “chalk talks” because
Shockley would stand, chalk in hand, scribbling down ideas. Brattain, ever brash, would pace
around the back of the room and shout out objections to some of Shockley’s suggestions,
sometimes betting a dollar they wouldn’t work. Shockley didn’t like losing. “I finally found
out he was annoyed when he paid me off once in ten dimes,” Brattain recalled.17 The
interactions would spill over into their social outings; they often played golf together, went
out for beer at a diner called Snuffy’s, and joined in bridge matches with their spouses.
THE TRANSISTOR
With his new team at Bell Labs, Shockley resurrected the theory he had been playing with
five years earlier for a solid-state replacement for the vacuum tube. If a strong electrical field
was placed right next to a slab of semiconducting material, he posited, the field would pull
some electrons to the surface and permit a surge of current through the slab. This potentially
would allow a semiconductor to use a very small signal to control a much larger signal. A
very low-powered current could provide the input, and it could control (or switch on and off)
a much higher-powered output current. Thus the semiconductor could be used as an amplifier
or an on-off switch, just like a vacuum tube.
There was one small problem with this “field effect”: when Shockley tested the theory—
his team charged a plate with a thousand volts and put it only a millimeter away from a
semiconductor surface—it didn’t work. “No observable change in current,” he wrote in his
lab notebook. It was, he later said, “quite mysterious.”
Figuring out why a theory failed can point the way to a better one, so Shockley asked
Bardeen to come up with an explanation. The two of them spent hours discussing what are
known as “surface states,” the electronic properties and quantum-mechanical description of
the atom layers closest to the surface of materials. After five months, Bardeen had his insight.
He went to the blackboard in the workspace he shared with Brattain and began to write.
Bardeen realized that when a semiconductor is charged, electrons become trapped on its
surface. They cannot move about freely. They form a shield, and an electric field, even a
strong one a millimeter away, cannot penetrate this barrier. “These added electrons were
trapped, immobile, in surface states,” Shockley noted. “In effect, the surface states shielded
the interior of the semiconductor from the influence of the positively charged control plate.”18
The team now had a new mission: find a way to break through the shield that formed on
the surface of semiconductors. “We concentrated on new experiments related to Bardeen’s
surface states,” Shockley explained. They would have to breach this barrier in order to goose
the semiconductor into being able to regulate, switch, and amplify current.19
Progress was slow over the next year, but in November 1947 a series of breakthroughs led
to what became known as the Miracle Month. Bardeen built on the theory of the
“photovoltaic effect,” which says that shining light on two dissimilar materials that are in
contact with one another will produce an electric voltage. That process, he surmised, might
dislodge some of the electrons that created the shield. Brattain, working side by side with
Bardeen, devised ingenious experiments to test out ways to do this.
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After a while, serendipity proved to be their friend. Brattain conducted some of the
experiments in a thermos so he could vary the temperature. But condensation on the silicon
kept gunking up the measurements. The best way to solve that would be to put the entire
apparatus in a vacuum, but that would have required a lot of work. “I’m essentially a lazy
physicist,” Brattain admitted. “So I got the idea to immerse the system in a dielectric
liquid.”20 He filled the thermos with water, which proved a simple way to avoid the
condensation problem. He and Bardeen tried it out on November 17, and it worked
beautifully.
That was a Monday. Throughout that week, they bounced through a series of theoretical
and experimental ideas. By Friday, Bardeen had come up with a way to eliminate the need to
immerse the apparatus in water. Instead, he suggested, they could just use a drop of water, or
a little gel, right where a sharp metal point jabbed down into the piece of silicon. “Come on,
John,” Brattain responded enthusiastically. “Let’s go make it.” One challenge was that the
metal point couldn’t be allowed contact with the water drop, but Brattain was an
improvisational wizard and solved that with a bit of sealing wax. He found a nice slab of
silicon, put a tiny drop of water on it, coated a piece of wire with wax to insulate it, and
jabbed the wire through the water drop and into the silicon. It worked. It was able to amplify
a current, at least slightly. From this “point-contact” contraption the transistor was born.
Bardeen went into the office the next morning to record the results in his notebook. “These
tests show definitely that it is possible to introduce an electrode or grid to control the flow of
current in a semiconductor,” he concluded.21 He even went in on Sunday, which he normally
reserved for golf. They also decided it was time to call Shockley, who had been immersed for
months in other matters. Over the next two weeks he would come down and offer
suggestions, but he mainly let his dynamic duo proceed apace.
Sitting side by side at Brattain’s lab bench, Bardeen would quietly offer ideas and Brattain
would excitedly try them out. Sometimes Bardeen wrote in Brattain’s notebook as the
experiments were being conducted. Thanksgiving passed with little notice as they tried
different designs: germanium instead of silicon, lacquer rather than wax, gold for the contact
points.
Usually Bardeen’s theories led to Brattain’s experiments, but sometimes the process
worked in reverse: unexpected results drove new theories. In one of the germanium
experiments, the current seemed to flow in the opposite direction from what they expected.
But it was amplified by a factor of more than three hundred, far more than they had
previously achieved. So they ended up acting out the old physicist joke: they knew that the
approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory? Bardeen soon found a
way to do so. He realized that the negative voltage was driving away electrons, causing an
increase in “electron holes,” which occur when there is no electron in a position where one
could exist. The existence of such holes attracts a flow of electrons.
There was one problem: this new method did not amplify higher frequencies, including
audible sounds. That would make it useless for telephones. Bardeen theorized that the water
or electrolyte drop was making things sluggish. So he improvised a few other designs. One
involved a wire point stuck into the germanium just a tiny distance from a gold plate that was
creating a field. It succeeded in amplifying the voltage, at least slightly, and it worked at
higher frequencies. Once again Bardeen supplied a theory for the serendipitous results: “The
experiment suggested that holes were flowing into the germanium surface from the gold
spot.”22
Like a call-and-response duet sitting together at a piano, Bardeen and Brattain continued
their iterative creativity. They realized that the best way to increase the amplification would
be to have two point-contacts jabbed into the germanium really close together. Bardeen
calculated that they should be less than two-thousandths of an inch apart. That was a
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challenge, even for Brattain. But he came up with a clever method: he glued a piece of gold
foil onto a small plastic wedge that looked like an arrowhead, then he used a razor blade to
cut a thin slit in the foil at the tip of the wedge, thus forming two gold contact points close
together. “That’s all I did,” Brattain recounted. “I slit carefully with the razor until the circuit
opened, and put it on a spring and put it down on the same piece of germanium.”23
When Brattain and Bardeen tried it on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 16, 1947,
something amazing happened: the contraption worked. “I found if I wiggled it just right,”
Brattain recalled, “that I had an amplifier with the order of magnitude of one hundred
amplification, clear up to the audio range.”24 On his way home that evening, the voluble and
talkative Brattain told the others in his carpool he had just done “the most important
experiment that I’d ever do in my life.” He then made them pledge not to say anything.25
Bardeen, as was his wont, was less talkative. When he got home that night, however, he did
something unusual: he told his wife about something that happened at the office. It was only
a sentence. As she was peeling carrots at the kitchen sink, he mumbled quietly, “We
discovered something important today.”26
Indeed, the transistor was one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. It
came from the partnership of a theorist and an experimentalist working side by side, in a
symbiotic relationship, bouncing theories and results back and forth in real time. It also came
from embedding them in an environment where they could walk down a long corridor and
bump into experts who could manipulate the impurities in germanium, or be in a study group
populated by people who understood the quantum-mechanical explanations of surface states,
or sit in a cafeteria with engineers who knew all the tricks for transmitting phone signals over
long distances.
Shockley convened a demonstration for the rest of the semiconductor group and a few Bell
Labs supervisors on the following Tuesday, December 23. The executives put on earphones
and took turns speaking into a microphone so that they could hear for themselves the actual
amplification of a human voice using a simple, solid-state device. It was a moment that
should have resonated like Alexander Graham Bell’s first words barked on a telephone, but
no one later could recall the words spoken into the device on that momentous afternoon.
Instead the event was memorialized for history by understated entries made into lab
notebooks. “By switching the device in and out, a distinct gain in speech level could be
heard,” Brattain wrote.27 Bardeen’s entry was even more matter-of-fact: “Voltage
amplification was obtained with use of two gold electrodes on a specifically prepared
germanium surface.”28
SHOCKLEY’S ONE-UPMANSHIP
Shockley signed Bardeen’s historic notebook entry as a witness, but he did not make any
entries of his own that day. He was clearly rattled. The pride he should have felt in the
success of his team was overshadowed by his intense and dark competitive drive. “My
emotions were somewhat conflicted,” he later admitted. “My elation with the group’s success
was tempered by not being one of the inventors. I experienced some frustration that my
personal efforts, started more than eight years before, had not resulted in a significant
inventive contribution of my own.”29 There were demons that increasingly gnawed away
deep in his psyche. He would never again be friends with Bardeen and Brattain. Instead he
started working feverishly to claim equal credit for the invention and to create, on his own, an
even better version.
Shortly after Christmas, Shockley took the train to Chicago to attend two conferences, but
he spent most of his time in his room at the Bismarck Hotel devising a revised method for
creating the device. On New Year’s Eve, as partygoers danced in the ballroom below, he
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wrote seven pages of notes on lined graph paper. When he woke up on New Year’s Day of
1948, he wrote thirteen more. These he sent by airmail back to a colleague at Bell Labs who
glued them into Shockley’s lab notebook and asked Bardeen to sign them as a witness.
By then Mervin Kelly had assigned one of the Bell Lab attorneys to produce, as fast as
possible, a set of patent applications for the new device. This was not Iowa State, where there
was no one on staff to handle such a task. When Shockley returned from Chicago, he
discovered that Bardeen and Brattain had already been consulted, and he was upset. He called
them into his office separately and explained why he should get the primary—perhaps even
sole—credit. “He thought,” Brattain recalled, “that he could write a patent, starting with the
field effect, on the whole damn thing.” Bardeen was characteristically silent, though he did
mutter bitterly once it was over. Brattain, as was his wont, was blunt. “Oh hell, Shockley,” he
yelled. “There’s enough glory in this for everybody.”30
Shockley pressed Bell’s lawyers to apply for a very broad patent based on his own initial
insight about how a field effect could influence current in a semiconductor. But in their
research the lawyers discovered that a patent had been granted in 1930 to a little-known
physicist named Julius Lilienfeld, who had proposed (but never built or understood) a device
using the field effect. So they decided to pursue a patent for the more narrow invention of a
point-contact method of making a semiconductor device, and the only names on that
particular application would be Bardeen and Brattain. The attorneys questioned the two of
them separately, and both said that it had been a joint effort in which each of them
contributed equally. Shockley was furious that he was being left off the most important of the
patent applications. Bell executives tried to paper over the rift by requiring that all publicity
photos and press releases include all three men.
Over the next few weeks, Shockley became increasingly disconcerted, so much so that he
had trouble sleeping.31 His “will to think,” as he called it, was driven by “my own motivation
to play a more significant personal, rather than managerial, role in what was obviously a
development of enormous potential importance.”32 At odd hours of the night, he would pace
around searching for better ways to make the device. Early on the morning of January 23,
1948, a month after the demonstration of the Bardeen-Brattain invention, Shockley woke up
with an insight that pulled together the thinking he had done on his trip to Chicago. Sitting at
his kitchen table, he began writing furiously.
Shockley’s idea involved a way to make a semiconductor amplifier that was less rickety
than the contrivance that Bardeen and Brattain had rigged up. Instead of jamming gold points
into a slab of germanium, Shockley envisioned a simpler “junction” approach that looked like
a sandwich. It would have a top and bottom layer of germanium that had been doped with
impurities so that they had an excess of electrons, and sandwiched between them would be a
thin slice of germanium that had holes or a deficit of electrons. The layers with an excess of
electrons were called “n-type” germanium, for negative, and the layer with a deficit or holes
where electrons could be was called “p-type,” for positive. Each of the layers would be
attached to a wire that allowed its voltage to be tweaked. The middle layer would be an
adjustable barrier that, depending how turned on it was by voltage, regulated the current of
electrons that flowed between the top and bottom layers. Applying a small positive voltage to
this barrier would, Shockley wrote, “increase the flow of electrons over the barrier
exponentially.” The stronger the charge on this inside p-type layer, the more it would suck
electrons from one outside n-type layer to the other. In other words, it could amplify or
switch off the current going through the semiconductor—and do so in mere billionths of a
second.
Shockley put some notes in his lab book, but he kept his idea secret for almost a month. “I
had a competitive urge to make some important transistor inventions on my own,” he later
conceded.33 He did not tell his colleagues until mid-February, when they were at a
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presentation of some related work by a Bell Labs scientist. Shockley recalled being “startled”
when the scientist presented some findings that supported the theoretical basis for a junction
device, and he realized that someone in the audience, most likely Bardeen, might take the
logical next steps. “From that point on,” he asserted, “the concept of using p-n junctions
rather than metal point contacts would have been but a small step and the junction transistor
would have been invented.” So before Bardeen or anyone else could suggest such a device,
Shockley leaped up and took the stage to reveal the design he had been working on. “I did not
want to be left behind on this one,” he later wrote.34
Bardeen and Brattain were taken aback. The fact that Shockley had been so secretive about
his new idea—thus violating the code of sharing that was part of the Bell culture—upset
them. Yet they could not help but be impressed by the simple beauty of Shockley’s approach.
After patent applications for both methods had been filed, the Bell Labs brass decided it was
time to make the new device public. But first they needed a name for it. Internally it had been
called a “semiconductor triode” and a “surface-state amplifier,” but those were not catchy
enough names for an invention that, they correctly believed, would revolutionize the world.
One day a colleague named John Pierce wandered into Brattain’s office. In addition to being
a good engineer, he was a clever wordsmith who wrote science fiction under the pseudonym
J. J. Coupling. Among his many quips were “Nature abhors a vacuum tube” and “After
growing wildly for years, the field of computing appears to be reaching its infancy.” Brattain
declared, “You’re just the man I want to see.” He posed the naming question, and after just a
moment Pierce came up with a suggestion. Since the device had the property of
transresistance and should have a name similar to devices such as the thermistor and varistor,
Pierce proposed transistor. Exclaimed Brattain, “That’s it!” The naming process still had to
go through a formal poll of all the other engineers, but transistor easily won the election over
five other options.35
On June 30, 1948, the press gathered in the auditorium of Bell Labs’ old building on West
Street in Manhattan. The event featured Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain as a group, and it
was moderated by the director of research, Ralph Bown, dressed in a somber suit and colorful
bow tie. He emphasized that the invention sprang from a combination of collaborative
teamwork and individual brilliance: “Scientific research is coming more and more to be
recognized as a group or teamwork job. . . . What we have for you today represents a fine
example of teamwork, of brilliant individual contributions, and of the value of basic research
in an industrial framework.”36 That precisely described the mix that had become the formula
for innovation in the digital age.
The New York Times buried the story on page 46 as the last item in its “News of Radio”
column, after a note about an upcoming broadcast of an organ concert. But Time made it the
lead story of its science section, with the headline “Little Brain Cell.” Bell Labs enforced the
rule that Shockley be in every publicity photo along with Bardeen and Brattain. The most
famous one shows the three of them in Brattain’s lab. Just as it was about to be taken,
Shockley sat down in Brattain’s chair, as if it were his desk and microscope, and became the
focal point of the photo. Years later Bardeen would describe Brattain’s lingering dismay and
his resentment of Shockley: “Boy, Walter hates this picture. . . . That’s Walter’s equipment
and our experiment, and Bill didn’t have anything to do with it.”37
TRANSISTOR RADIOS
Bell Labs was a cauldron of innovation. In addition to the transistor, it pioneered computer
circuitry, laser technology, and cellular telephony. It was, however, less good at capitalizing
on its inventions. As part of a regulated company that had a monopoly on most phone
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services, it was not hungry for new products, and it was legally restrained from leveraging its
monopoly to enter other markets. In order to stave off public criticism and antitrust actions, it
liberally licensed its patents to other companies. For the transistor, it set a remarkably low
fee, $25,000, for any company that wanted to make them, and it even offered seminars
explaining manufacturing techniques.
Despite these promiscuous policies, one fledgling firm had trouble wrangling a license: a
Dallas-based oil exploration company that had reoriented and renamed itself Texas
Instruments. Its executive vice president, Pat Haggerty, who would later take over the firm,
had served in the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics and become convinced that electronics were
about to transform almost all aspects of life. When he heard about transistors, he decided that
Texas Instruments would find a way to exploit them. Unlike many established companies, it
was bold enough to reinvent itself. But the folks at Bell Labs were, Haggerty recalled,
“visibly amused at the effrontery of our conviction that we could develop the competence to
compete in the field.” At least initially, Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license.
“This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38
In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas
Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a
chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor
team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas
Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform
better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that
used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley.
Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that
almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my
colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a
few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a
record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his
silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare
undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was
scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39
Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by
Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal.
Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure
up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step
in the innovation process.
Like Steve Jobs, Haggerty was able to project a reality distortion field that he used to push
people to accomplish things they thought impossible. Transistors were being sold in 1954 to
the military for about $16 apiece. But in order to break into the consumer market, Haggerty
insisted that his engineers find a way to make them so that they could be sold for less than $3.
They did. He also developed a Jobs-like knack, which would serve him then and in the future,
for conjuring up devices that consumers did not yet know they needed but would soon find
indispensable. In the case of the transistor, Haggerty came up with the idea of a small pocket
radio. When he tried to convince RCA and other big firms that made tabletop radios to
become a partner in the venture, they pointed out (rightly) that consumers were not
demanding a pocket radio. But Haggerty understood the importance of spawning new
markets rather than merely chasing old ones. He convinced a small Indianapolis company
that built TV antenna boosters to join forces on what would be called the Regency TR-1
radio. Haggerty made the deal in June 1954 and, typically, insisted that the device be on the
market by that November. It was.
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The Regency radio, the size of a pack of index cards, used four transistors and sold for
$49.95. It was initially marketed partly as a security item, now that the Russians had the atom
bomb. “In event of an enemy attack, your Regency TR-1 will become one of your most
valued possessions,” the first owner’s manual declared. But it quickly became an object of
consumer desire and teenage obsession. Its plastic case came, iPod-like, in four colors: black,
ivory, Mandarin Red, and Cloud Gray. Within a year, 100,000 had been sold, making it one
of the most popular new products in history.40
Suddenly everyone in America knew what a transistor was. IBM’s chief Thomas Watson
Jr. bought a hundred Regency radios and gave them to his top executives, telling them to get
to work using transistors in computers.41
More fundamentally, the transistor radio became the first major example of a defining
theme of the digital age: technology making devices personal. The radio was no longer a
living-room appliance to be shared; it was a personal device that allowed you to listen to your
own music where and when you wanted—even if it was music that your parents wanted to
ban.
Indeed, there was a symbiotic relationship between the advent of the transistor radio and
the rise of rock and roll. Elvis Presley’s first commercial recording, “That’s All Right,” came
out at the same time as the Regency radio. The rebellious new music made every kid want a
radio. And the fact that the radios could be taken to the beach or the basement, away from the
disapproving ears and dial-controlling fingers of parents, allowed the music to flourish. “The
only regret I have about the transistor is its use for rock and roll,” its coinventor Walter
Brattain often lamented, presumably half in jest. Roger McGuinn, who became the lead
singer of the Byrds, got a transistor radio for his thirteenth birthday, in 1955. “I heard Elvis,”
he recalled. “It was a game changer for me.”42
The seeds were planted for a shift in perception of electronic technology, especially among
the young. It would no longer be the province only of big corporations and the military. It
could also empower individuality, personal freedom, creativity, and even a bit of a rebellious
spirit.
SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE
One problem with successful teams, particularly intense ones, is that sometimes they break
up. It takes a special type of leader—inspiring yet also nurturing, competitive yet
collaborative—to hold such teams together. Shockley was not such a leader. Just the
opposite. As he had shown when he went off on his own to devise the junction transistor, he
could be competitive and secretive with his own coworkers. Another skill of great team
leaders is the ability to instill a nonhierarchical esprit de corps. Shockley was bad at that as
well. He was autocratic, often snuffing out spirit by quashing initiative. The great triumph of
Brattain and Bardeen had come when Shockley was offering up a few suggestions but not
micromanaging or bossing them. After that he became more overbearing.
During weekend golf games, Bardeen and Brattain would share their dismay about
Shockley. At one point Brattain decided that Mervin Kelly, the president of Bell Labs,
needed to be clued in. “Do you want to call him, or do you want me to?” he asked Bardeen.
The task fell, not surprisingly, to the more voluble Brattain.
He and Kelly met one afternoon in the wood-paneled study of Kelly’s home in the nearby
suburb of Short Hills. Brattain laid out their grievances, describing how ham-fisted Shockley
was as a manager and colleague. Kelly batted away the complaints. “So finally, without
thinking of its impact, I inadvertently said to him that John Bardeen and I knew when
Shockley invented the PNP [junction] transistor,” Brattain recalled. In other words, he had let
slip a veiled threat that some of the concepts in the patent application for the junction
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transistor, which listed Shockley as the inventor, had actually arisen from the work that
Brattain and Bardeen had done. “Kelly realized that neither Bardeen nor I, if we ever went on
the stand in a patent fight, would lie about what we knew. This changed his whole attitude.
And after that, my position in the Laboratories was a little bit more satisfactory.”43 Bardeen
and Brattain no longer had to report to Shockley.
The new arrangement turned out not to be enough to satisfy Bardeen, who turned his focus
away from semiconductors and began working on superconductivity theory. He took a job at
the University of Illinois. “My difficulties stem from the invention of the transistor,” he wrote
in a resignation letter to Kelly. “Before that there was an excellent research atmosphere here.
. . . After the invention Shockley at first refused to allow anyone else in the group to work on
the problem. In short, he used the group largely to exploit his own ideas.”44
Bardeen’s resignation and Brattain’s complaints did not help Shockley’s standing at Bell
Labs. His prickly personality meant that he was passed over for promotions. He appealed to
Kelly and even the president of AT&T, but to no avail. “The hell with that,” he told a
colleague. “I’ll go set up my own business, I’ll make a million dollars that way. And by the
way, I’ll do it out in California.” When he heard of Shockley’s plans, Kelly did not try to
dissuade him. Quite the contrary: “I told him that if he thinks he can earn a million dollars, go
ahead!” Kelly even called Laurence Rockefeller to recommend that he help finance
Shockley’s proposed venture.45
As he grappled with his situation in 1954, Shockley went through a midlife crisis. After
helping his wife fight ovarian cancer, he left her while she was in remission and found
himself a girlfriend, whom he would later marry. He took a leave from Bell Labs. And this
being a classic midlife crisis, he even bought a sports car, a green Jaguar XK120 two-seat
convertible.
Shockley spent a semester as a visiting professor at Caltech and took a gig consulting with
the Army’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in Washington, but much of the time he
traveled the country trying to figure out his new venture, visiting technology companies, and
meeting with successful entrepreneurs such as William Hewlett and Edwin Land. “Think I
shall try to raise some capital and start on my own,” he wrote his girlfriend. “After all, it is
obvious I am smarter, more energetic, and understand folks better than most of these other
folks.” His journals for 1954 show him struggling to make sense of his quest. “Lack of
appreciation by bosses, means what?” he wrote at one point. As happens in many
biographies, there was also the theme of living up to a late father. Contemplating his plan to
create a company that would make transistors ubiquitous, he wrote, “Idea of setting world on
fire, father proud.”46
Setting the world on fire. Despite the fact that he would never turn out to be successful in
business, Shockley would accomplish that. The company that he was about to found would
transform a valley known for its apricot orchards into one famed for turning silicon into gold.
SHOCKLEY SEMICONDUCTOR
At the February 1955 annual gala of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, two pioneers of
electronics were honored: Lee de Forest, who had invented the vacuum tube, and Shockley,
an inventor of its replacement. Shockley sat with a distinguished industrialist, Arnold
Beckman, the chamber’s vice chairman. Like Shockley, Beckman had worked for Bell Labs,
where he developed techniques for making vacuum tubes. As a professor at Caltech he had
invented a variety of measuring instruments, including one that measured the acidity of
lemons, and he used his invention as the foundation for building a large manufacturing
company.
That August, Shockley invited Beckman to serve on the board of his proposed transistor
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company. “I asked him a little bit more about who else was going to be on the board,”
Beckman recalled, “and it turned out that he was going to have a board composed of almost
everyone who was in the instrument business, all of whom would be his competitors.”
Beckman realized how “unbelievably naïve” Shockley was, so in order to help him devise a
more sensible approach, he invited him to spend a week in Newport Beach, where Beckman
kept his sailboat.47
Shockley’s plan was to make transistors by using gas diffusion to dope silicon with
impurities. By adjusting the time, pressure, and temperature, he could precisely control the
process, thus allowing different varieties of transistors to be mass-manufactured. Impressed
by the idea, Beckman convinced Shockley not to launch his own company and instead to lead
a new division of Beckman Instruments, which Beckman would fund.
Beckman wanted it located in the Los Angeles area, where most of his other divisions
were. But Shockley insisted that it be located in Palo Alto, where he had been raised, so that
he could be near his aging mother. They doted on each other intensely, which some found
weird but which had the historic significance of helping to create Silicon Valley.
Palo Alto was still, as it had been in Shockley’s childhood, a small college town
surrounded by orchards. But during the 1950s its population would double, to fifty-two
thousand, and twelve new elementary schools would be built. The influx was partly due to
the boom in the cold war defense industry. Canisters of film dropped from America’s U-2 spy
planes were sent to the NASA Ames Research Center in nearby Sunnyvale. Defense
contractors took root in the surrounding areas, such as the Lockheed Missiles and Space
Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and Westinghouse, which
produced tubes and transformers for the missile systems. Neighborhoods of tract houses
sprang up to accommodate young engineers and Stanford junior professors. “You had all
these military companies on the cutting edge,” recalled Steve Jobs, who was born in 1955 and
grew up in the area. “It was mysterious and high-tech and made living there very exciting.”48
Sprouting alongside the defense contractors were companies that made electrical
measuring instruments and other technological devices. The sector’s roots stretched back to
1938, when the electronics entrepreneur Dave Packard and his new wife moved into a home
in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced. The house
also had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the valley—in
which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator. By the
1950s Hewlett-Packard had become the pace horse for the region’s tech startups.49
Fortunately there was a place for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages. Fred
Terman, a doctoral student of Vannevar Bush’s at MIT who became Stanford University’s
dean of engineering, created an industrial park in 1953 on seven hundred acres of
undeveloped university property, where tech companies could lease land inexpensively and
build new offices. It helped transform the area. Hewlett and Packard had been Terman’s
students, and he had persuaded them to stay in Palo Alto when they founded their company
rather than move east, as most of Stanford’s top graduates had been doing. They became one
of the first tenants in the Stanford Research Park. Throughout the 1950s Terman, who went
on to become Stanford’s provost, grew the industrial park by encouraging its occupants to
have a symbiotic relationship with Stanford; employees and executives could study or teach
part-time at the university, and its professors were given leeway to advise new businesses.
Stanford’s office park would end up nurturing hundreds of companies, from Varian to
Facebook.
When Terman learned that Shockley was thinking of locating his new enterprise in Palo
Alto, he wrote a courtship letter that described all the incentives that proximity to Stanford
would offer. “I believe that its location here would be mutually advantageous,” he concluded.
Shockley agreed. While its new Palo Alto headquarters was being constructed, Shockley
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Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, set up temporarily in a
Quonset shed that had served as a storage space for apricots. Silicon had come to the valley.
ROBERT NOYCE AND GORDON MOORE
Shockley tried to recruit some of the researchers he had worked with at Bell Labs, but they
knew him too well. So he set about compiling a list of the best semiconductor engineers in
the country and calling them cold. The most notable of them all, destined to be a momentous
choice, was Robert Noyce, a charismatic Iowa golden boy with a doctorate from MIT, who
was at the time a twenty-eight-year-old research manager at Philco in Philadelphia. In
January 1956 Noyce picked up the phone and heard the words “Shockley here.” He knew
immediately who it was. “It was like picking up the phone and talking to God,” Noyce
declared.50 He later joked, “When he came out here to organize Shockley Labs, he whistled
and I came.”51
Noyce, the third of four sons of a Congregationalist minister, grew up in a series of tiny
Iowa farm towns—Burlington, Atlantic, Decorah, Webster City—where his father found
himself called. Both of Noyce’s grandfathers were also ministers of the Congregationalist
Church, a Nonconformist Protestant movement that was a product of the Puritan
Reformation. Even though he didn’t inherit their religious faith, Noyce did absorb their
denomination’s aversion to hierarchy, centralized authority, and autocratic leadership.52
When Noyce was twelve, his family finally settled down in Grinnell (population 5,200 at
the time), about fifty miles east of Des Moines, where his father got an administrative job
with the Church. The centerpiece of the town was Grinnell College, founded in 1846 by a
group of Congregationalists from New England. Noyce, with an infectious grin and a taut
graceful body, flourished in the town’s high school as a scholar, athlete, and heartthrob. “The
quick lopsided smile, the good manners and fine family, the wavy hair high on his forehead,
the dash of rapscallion—it made for an appealing combination,” wrote his biographer Leslie
Berlin. Said his high school girlfriend, “He was probably the most physically graceful man
I’ve ever met.”53
Years later the literary journalist Tom Wolfe wrote a glimmering profile of Noyce for
Esquire, in which he came close to canonizing him:
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Robert Noyce (1927–90) at Fairchild in 1960.
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Gordon Moore (1929– ) at Intel in 1970.
Gordon Moore (far left), Robert Noyce (front center), and the other “traitorous eight” who in 1957 left Shockley to form Fairchild
Semiconductor.
Bob had a certain way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with a gaze that seemed to be about one hundred
amperes. While he looked at you he never blinked and never swallowed. He absorbed everything you said and then answered very levelly in a
soft baritone voice and often with a smile that showed off his terrific set of teeth. The stare, the voice, the smile; it was all a bit like the movie
persona of the most famous of all Grinnell College’s alumni, Gary Cooper. With his strong face, his athlete’s build, and the Gary Cooper
manner, Bob Noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect. People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and,
moreover, make you want to admire them for it. They make you see the halos over their heads.54

As a kid, Noyce benefited from a situation that was common back then: “Dad always
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managed to have some sort of workshop in the basement.” Young Noyce loved to make
things, including a vacuum-tube radio, a sled with a propeller, and a headlight to use on his
early-morning paper route. Most famously, he built a hang glider that he flew by hitching it to
the back of a fast-moving car or by leaping with it off a barn roof. “I grew up in small town
America, so we had to be self-sufficient. If something was broke you fix it yourself.”55
Like his brothers, Noyce was at the top of his class academically. He mowed the lawn of
Grant Gale, a beloved professor who taught physics at Grinnell College. With the help of his
mother, who knew the Gales from church, he wrangled permission to take Gale’s college
course during his senior year of high school. Gale became Noyce’s intellectual mentor, which
continued the following year, when he enrolled at Grinnell as an undergraduate.
There he pursued a double major in math and physics, starring in all endeavors, academic
and extracurricular, with a grace worn lightly. He made a point of deriving every formula in
physics class from scratch, became the Midwest conference champion diver on the swim
team, played oboe in the band, sang in the chorus, designed circuits for the model airplane
club, had the lead in a radio soap opera, and helped his math professor teach a calculus class
on complex numbers. Most amazingly, he was, despite all this, well liked.
His scampish affability sometimes got him into trouble. When his dormitory decided to
throw a spring luau in his junior year, Noyce and a friend volunteered to procure the pig that
would be roasted. After a few drinks, they snuck into a farm nearby and, combining strength
with agility, kidnapped a twenty-five-pound suckling. After they butchered the squealing pig
with knives in an upstairs shower in the dorm, they roasted it. There followed much cheering,
applause, eating, and drinking. The next morning brought a moral hangover. Noyce went
with his friend to the farmer and confessed, offering to pay for what they had taken. In a
storybook he would have been given the George Washington cherry tree award. But in the
struggling farm country of Iowa, the larceny he had committed was neither funny nor
forgivable. The farm was owned by the dour mayor of the town, and he threatened to press
charges. Eventually Professor Gale helped broker a compromise: Noyce would pay for the
pig and be suspended for one semester, but not expelled. Noyce took it in stride.56
When Noyce returned in February 1949, Gale did him what may have been an even bigger
favor. The professor had been a college friend of John Bardeen, and when he read about the
transistor that Bardeen had coinvented at Bell Labs he wrote and asked for a sample. He also
contacted the president of Bell Labs, who was a Grinnell alum and the father of two current
students. A batch of technical monographs arrived followed by a transistor. “Grant Gale got
hold of one of the first point contact transistors that was ever made,” Noyce recalled. “That
was during my junior year there. I suppose that was one of the things that influenced me to
get involved in transistors.” In a later interview, Noyce described his excitement more
vividly: “The concept hit me like the atom bomb. It was simply astonishing. Just the whole
concept, that you could get amplification without a vacuum. It was one of those ideas that just
jolts you out of the rut, gets you thinking in a different way.”57
Upon graduation, Noyce received what was, for someone with his style and charm, the
college’s highest honor, awarded by a vote of his classmates: the Brown Derby Prize, given
to “the senior man who earned the best grades with the least amount of work.” But when he
arrived at MIT to pursue a doctorate, he realized that he was going to have to apply himself
more diligently. He was deemed deficient in theoretical physics and had to take an
introductory course in the topic. By his second year he had regained his stride and won an
academic fellowship. His dissertation investigated how the photoelectric effect was manifest
in the surface state of insulators. Although it was not a triumph of lab work or analysis, it did
familiarize him with Shockley’s research in that field.
Thus when he got the summons from Shockley, he was eager to accept. But there was one
strange hoop he had to leap through. Shockley, who had failed to triumph on an IQ test as a
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kid and was starting to show the creepy paranoia that would mar his later career, insisted that
his new hires go through a battery of psychological and intelligence exams. So Noyce spent
an entire day at a testing firm in Manhattan reacting to ink blots, opining on weird drawings,
and filling out aptitude quizzes. He was judged to be an introvert and not a good potential
manager, which revealed a lot more about the weaknesses of the tests than of Noyce.58
Shockley’s other great hire, also judged by the psychology firm to be a poor potential
manager, was the soft-spoken chemist Gordon Moore, who also got a phone call from
Shockley out of the blue. Shockley was carefully assembling a team with different scientific
talents that could be mixed together to catalyze innovation. “He knew chemists had been
useful to him at Bell Laboratories, so he thought he needed one in his new operation, and he
got my name and gave me a call,” Moore said. “Fortunately, I recognized who it was. I
picked up the phone, he says, ‘Hello, this is Shockley.’ ”59
With his self-effacing and genial manner cloaking a precision-guided mind, Gordon Moore
would become one of the most revered and beloved figures in Silicon Valley. He had grown
up near Palo Alto, in Redwood City, where his father was a deputy sheriff. When he was
eleven, the kid next door got a chemistry set. “In those days there was really neat stuff in
chemistry sets,” Moore recalled, lamenting that government regulations and parental fears
have since neutered such kits and probably deprived the nation of some needed scientists. He
was able to turn out a small quantity of nitroglycerin, which he made into dynamite. “A
couple of ounces of dynamite makes an absolutely fantastic firecracker,” he gleefully
recounted in an interview, wiggling all ten of his fingers to show that they had survived such
childhood foolery.60 His fun with chemistry sets, he said, helped set him on a path to a
chemistry degree from Berkeley and a doctorate from Caltech.
From his birth until he finished his doctorate, Moore never ventured farther east than
Pasadena. He was a true-bred Californian, easygoing and affable. For a brief period after
getting his PhD, he went to work at a Navy physics laboratory in Maryland. But he and his
beloved wife, Betty, also a native of northern California, were restless to get home, so he was
receptive when the call from Shockley came.
When Moore went for his interview, he was twenty-seven, a year younger than Noyce, and
was already balding in a distinguished manner. Shockley peppered him with questions and
brainteasers, holding a stopwatch to time his answers. Moore did so well that Shockley took
him to dinner at Rickeys Hyatt House, the local hangout, and did his magic trick of bending a
spoon without seeming to apply any physical force.61
The dozen engineers recruited by Shockley, almost all under thirty, considered him a bit
bizarre but absolutely brilliant. “He just showed up in my lab at MIT one day, and I thought,
my God, I’ve never met anybody this brilliant,” remarked the physicist Jay Last. “I changed
my whole career plans and said, I wanna go to California and work with this man.” Among
the others were Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist, and Eugene Kleiner, who later became a
great venture capitalist. By April 1956 there were enough new employees to throw a
welcome party. Noyce drove across the country from Philadelphia, rushing to make it in time.
He arrived at 10 p.m., while Shockley was doing a solo tango with a rose in his mouth. One
of the engineers described Noyce’s arrival to his biographer Berlin: “He hadn’t shaved, he
looked like he’d been living in his suit for a week—and he was thirsty. There was a big
goddamn bowl of martinis on the table there. Noyce picks up the goddamn bowl, and starts
drinking [from] it. Then he passes out. I said to myself, ‘this is going to be a whole lot of
fun.’ ”62
SHOCKLEY UNRAVELS
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Some leaders are able to be willful and demanding while still inspiring loyalty. They
celebrate audaciousness in a way that makes them charismatic. Steve Jobs, for example; his
personal manifesto, dressed in the guise of a TV ad, began, “Here’s to the crazy ones. The
misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes.” Amazon’s
founder Jeff Bezos has that same ability to inspire. The knack is to get people to follow you,
even to places they may not think they can go, by motivating them to share your sense of
mission. Shockley did not have this talent. Because of his aura, he was able to recruit brilliant
employees, but soon after they began working together, they were rankling under his ham-
fisted management, just as Brattain and Bardeen had.
One useful leadership talent is knowing when to push ahead against doubters and when to
heed them. Shockley had trouble striking this balance. One case arose when he devised a
four-layer diode that he thought would be faster and more versatile than a three-layer
transistor. In some ways, it was the first step toward an integrated circuit, because the new
device would perform tasks that would require four or five transistors on a circuit board. But
it was difficult to manufacture (the paper-thin silicon had to be doped differently on either
side), and most of the ones that came off the line proved useless. Noyce tried to get Shockley
to abandon the diode, but to no avail.
Many transformative innovators have been similarly stubborn about pushing a new idea,
but Shockley crossed the line from being visionary to being hallucinatory, turning him into a
case study in bad leadership. In his pursuit of the four-layer diode, he was secretive, rigid,
authoritarian, and paranoid. He formed private teams and refused to share information with
Noyce, Moore, and others. “He couldn’t face up to the fact that he’d made a bad decision so
he started blaming everybody around him,” recalled Jay Last, one engineer who resisted him.
“He was very abusive. I went from being his fair-haired boy to being one of the causes of all
his problems.”63
His paranoia, already diffusing into his personality layers, was manifest in disruptive
incidents. For example, when a secretary at the firm cut her finger opening a door, Shockley
became convinced it was a sabotage scheme. He ordered everyone in the firm to take a lie
detector test. Most refused, and Shockley had to back down. It was later discovered that the
cut was caused by the remains of a thumbtack that had been used to post a notice on the door.
“I don’t think ‘tyrant’ begins to encapsulate Shockley,” Moore said. “He was a complex
person. He was very competitive and even competed with the people that worked for him.
My amateur diagnosis is he was also paranoid.”64
Worse yet, Shockley’s infatuation with the four-layer diode turned out to be misplaced.
Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out
to be right. If Shockley’s diode had proved practical, or if he had evolved it into an integrated
circuit, he may have again been regarded as a visionary. But that didn’t happen.
The situation became even worse after Shockley, along with his erstwhile partners Bardeen
and Brattain, won the Nobel Prize. When Shockley got the call early on the morning of
November 1, 1956, his first reaction was that it was a Halloween trick. Later he would
become darkly suspicious that there were people who had tried to deny him the prize, and he
would write the Nobel committee seeking information about those who wrote in opposition to
him, a request that was denied. But for that day, at least, there was a respite in the tension and
a chance to celebrate. A champagne lunch was held at Rickeys.
Shockley was still estranged from Bardeen and Brattain, but the atmosphere was cordial
when they convened with their families in Stockholm for the awards ceremony. The chair of
the Nobel committee used his speech to highlight the combination of individual genius and
teamwork that was involved in the invention of the transistor. He called it a “supreme effort
of foresight, ingenuity and perseverance, exercised individually and as a team.” Late that
night, Bardeen and Brattain were having drinks at the bar of the Grand Hotel when, shortly
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after midnight, Shockley walked in. They had barely spoken to him for six years, but they put
their differences aside and invited him to join their table.
When Shockley returned from Stockholm, his head was swelled but his insecurities were
undiminished. In a talk to coworkers, he noted that it was “about time” that his contributions
were recognized. The atmosphere at the firm “deteriorated very rapidly,” Last observed, until
it began to resemble “a big psychiatric institute.” Noyce told Shockley of the “general feeling
of resentment” that was accumulating, but his warning had little effect.65
Shockley’s unwillingness to share credit made it hard for him to create a spirit of
collaboration. When some of his employees wrote papers to be presented at the American
Physical Society in December 1956, the month after he had received his Nobel, Shockley
required that his name be listed on them all as a coauthor. The same was true on most patent
applications coming out of his firm. Yet he insisted, somewhat contradictorily, that there was
truly only one real inventor of any device, because “there’s only one light bulb to go on in
somebody’s head.” Any other people involved, he added, were “mere helpers.”66 His own
experience with the team that invented the transistor should have disabused him of such a
notion.
Shockley’s ego caused him to clash not only with subordinates but also with his nominal
boss and owner, Arnold Beckman. When Beckman flew up for a meeting about the need to
control costs, Shockley surprised everyone by declaring in front of the entire senior staff,
“Arnold, if you don’t like what we’re doing up here I can take this group and get support any
place else.” He then stormed out of the room, leaving his owner humiliated in front of the
staff.
Thus Beckman was attentive when he was called in May 1957 by Gordon Moore, who had
been tapped by other restless colleagues to present their grievances. “Things aren’t going well
up there, are they?” Beckman asked.
“No, they really are not,” replied Moore, who assured Beckman that the top staff would
stay if Shockley quit.67 The reverse was also true, Moore warned; if Shockley was not
replaced by a competent manager, the staff would likely leave.
Moore and his colleagues had recently seen The Caine Mutiny, and they started plotting
against their own Captain Queeg.68 Over the next few weeks, in a series of secret meetings
and dinners with Beckman and seven disgruntled top staffers led by Moore, a deal was
hammered out to move Shockley into a senior consulting role with no management duties.
Beckman took Shockley to dinner and informed him of the change.
At first Shockley acquiesced. He would allow Noyce to manage the lab and confine his
own duties to offering ideas and strategic advice. But then he changed his mind. It was not in
Shockley’s nature to cede control. Plus, he had qualms about Noyce’s executive ability. He
told Beckman that Noyce would not be an “aggressive leader” or decisive enough, and there
was some merit to that criticism. Shockley may have been too driven and decisive, but
Noyce, who was naturally congenial and accommodating, could have benefited from a dose
of toughness. A key challenge for managers is how to strike a balance between being decisive
and being collegial, and neither Shockley nor Noyce got the calibration precise.
When forced to choose between Shockley and the staff, Beckman got cold feet. “With one
of my misdirected feelings of loyalty, I felt I owed Shockley and should give him enough of a
chance to prove himself,” Beckman later explained. “If I had known what I know now, I
would have said goodbye to Shockley.”69 Beckman stunned Moore and his supporters with
his decision. “Beckman essentially told us, ‘Shockley’s the boss, take it or leave it,’ ” Moore
recalled. “We discovered a group of young PhDs couldn’t push aside a new Nobel Prize
winner very easily.” A revolt became inevitable. “We were just completely sandbagged, and
we realized then we had to leave,” said Last.70
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Abandoning an established enterprise to start a rival was rather unusual back then, so it
took some courage. “The business culture that existed in this country was that you go to work
for a company, and you stay with that company, and you retire with that company,” observed
Regis McKenna, who became a marketing maven for technology firms. “This was what
traditional East Coast—and even Midwestern—American values were.” That’s no longer
true, of course, and the Shockley rebels contributed to the cultural shift. “It looks easy
nowadays because we have a tradition—largely set in motion by those guys—where it’s
accepted in this town,” said Michael Malone, a historian of Silicon Valley. “You’re better off
to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty
years. But that wasn’t true in the 1950s. It must’ve been scary as hell.”71
Moore rallied the rebel contingent. There were seven of them at first—Noyce had not yet
enlisted—and they decided to form their own company. But that required funding. So one of
them, Eugene Kleiner, wrote a letter to his father’s stockbroker at the venerable Wall Street
brokerage firm Hayden, Stone & Co. After describing their credentials, he declared, “We
believe that we could get a company into the semiconductor business within three months.”
The letter ended up on the desk of Arthur Rock, a thirty-year-old analyst who had been
succeeding with risky investments since his days at Harvard Business School. Rock
convinced his boss, Bud Coyle, that it was worth a trip west to investigate.72
When Rock and Coyle met with the seven in San Francisco’s Clift Hotel, they found one
thing missing: a leader. So they urged the rebels to recruit Noyce, who was resisting because
of his feeling of commitment to Shockley. Moore was finally able to persuade him to come to
the next meeting. Rock was impressed: “As soon as I saw Noyce I was struck by his
charisma, and I could tell he was their natural leader. They deferred to him.”73 At that
meeting, the group, including Noyce, made a pact that they would all leave together to form a
new firm. Coyle pulled out some crisp new dollar bills, which they signed as a symbolic
contract with each other.
It was hard to get money, especially from established corporations, to start a completely
independent company. The idea of seed funding for startups was not yet well established; that
important innovation would have to wait, as we shall see, until the next time Noyce and
Moore leaped into a new venture. So they searched for a corporate sponsor that might set
them up as a semiautonomous division, just as Beckman had done with Shockley. Over the
next few days, the cabal pored over the Wall Street Journal and came up with a list of thirty-
five firms that might adopt them. Rock started making calls when he got back to New York,
but to no avail. “None of them were willing to take on a separate company division,” he
recalled. “They felt that their own employees would have problems with it. We had a couple
of months of doing this and were about to give up, when someone suggested that I see
Sherman Fairchild.”74
It was a fine match. Fairchild, the owner of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, was an
inventor, playboy, entrepreneur, and the largest single stockholder in IBM, which his father
had cofounded. A great tinkerer, as a Harvard freshman he invented the first synchronized
camera and flash. He went on to develop aerial photography, radar cameras, specialized
airplanes, methods to illuminate tennis courts, high-speed tape recorders, lithotypes for
printing newspapers, color engraving machines, and a wind-resistant match. In the process,
he added a second fortune to his inheritance, and he was as joyful spending it as he had been
making it. He frequented the 21 Club and the El Morocco nightclub wearing (in the words of
Fortune) “a fresh pretty girl every few days like a new boutonniere,” and he designed for
himself a futuristic house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with glass walls and ramps
overlooking an atrium garden with green ceramic-clad rocks.75
Fairchild readily put up $1.5 million to start the new company—about twice what the eight
founders had originally thought necessary—in return for an option deal. If the company
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turned out to be successful, he would be able to buy it outright for $3 million.
Dubbed “the traitorous eight,” Noyce and his posse set up shop just down the road from
Shockley on the outskirts of Palo Alto. Shockley Semiconductor never recovered. Six years
later, Shockley gave up and joined the faculty of Stanford. His paranoia deepened, and he
became obsessed with his notion that blacks were genetically inferior in terms of IQ and
should be discouraged from having children. The genius who conceptualized the transistor
and brought people to the promised land of Silicon Valley became a pariah who could not
give a lecture without facing hecklers.
The traitorous eight who formed Fairchild Semiconductor, by contrast, turned out to be the
right people at the right place at the right time. The demand for transistors was growing
because of the pocket radios that Pat Haggerty had launched at Texas Instruments, and it was
about to skyrocket even higher; on October 4, 1957, just three days after Fairchild
Semiconductor was formed, the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite and set off a space
race with the United States. The civilian space program, along with the military program to
build ballistic missiles, propelled the demand for both computers and transistors. It also
helped assure that the development of these two technologies became linked. Because
computers had to be made small enough to fit into a rocket’s nose cone, it was imperative to
find ways to cram hundreds and then thousands of transistors into tiny devices.
Jack Kilby (1923–2005) at Texas Instruments in 1965.
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Kilby’s microchip.
Arthur Rock (1926– ) in 1997.
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Andy Grove (1936–) with Noyce and Moore at Intel in 1978.
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CHAPTER FIVE

THE MICROCHIP
In a paper written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the transistor, published in 1957 just
when Fairchild Semiconductor was formed and Sputnik launched, a Bell Labs executive
identified a problem that he dubbed “the tyranny of numbers.” As the number of components
in a circuit increased, the number of connections increased way faster. If a system had, for
example, ten thousand components, that might require 100,000 or more little wire links on
the circuit boards, most often soldered by hand. This was not a recipe for reliability.
It was, instead, part of a recipe for an innovation. The need to solve this growing problem
coincided with hundreds of small advances in ways to manufacture semiconductors. This
combination produced an invention that occurred independently in two different places,
Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor. The result was an integrated circuit, also
known as a microchip.
JACK KILBY
Jack Kilby was another of those boys from the rural Midwest who tinkered in the workshop
with his dad and built ham radios.1 “I grew up among the industrious descendants of the
western settlers of the American Great Plains,” he declared when he won a Nobel Prize.2 He
was raised in Great Bend, in the middle of Kansas, where his father ran a local utility
company. In the summer they would drive in the family Buick to far-flung generating plants
and, when something had gone wrong, crawl through them together looking for the problem.
During one bad blizzard they used a ham radio to keep in touch with areas where customers
had lost phone service, and young Kilby became fascinated by the importance of such
technologies. “It was during an ice storm in my teens,” he told the Washington Post’s T. R.
Reid, “that I first saw how radio and, by extension, electronics, could really impact people’s
lives by keeping them informed and connected, and giving them hope.”3 He studied to get a
ham operator’s license and kept upgrading his radio using parts that he scrounged.
After being turned down by MIT, he went to the University of Illinois, interrupting his
studies after Pearl Harbor to join the Navy. Deployed to a radio repair facility in India, he
made runs to Calcutta to buy parts on the black market, using them to build better receivers
and transmitters in a pup-tent lab. He was a gentle guy with a wide smile and an easygoing,
taciturn manner. What made him special was his insatiable curiosity about inventions. He
began to read every new patent issued. “You read everything—that’s part of the job,” he said.
“You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be
useful.”4
His first job was at Centralab, a Milwaukee firm that made electronic parts. It
experimented with ways of combining the components used to make hearing aids onto a
single ceramic base, a rough precursor of the idea for a microchip. In 1952 Centralab was one
of the companies that paid $25,000 for a license to make transistors, and it was the
beneficiary of Bell’s willingness to share its knowledge. Kilby attended a two-week Bell
Labs seminar—staying with dozens of others at a Manhattan hotel and being loaded every
morning onto a bus for Murray Hill—that included in-depth sessions on transistor design,
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hands-on experience in the labs, and visits to a manufacturing plant. Bell sent all attendees
three volumes of technical papers. With its extraordinary willingness to license its patents
cheaply and share its knowledge, Bell Labs laid the foundations for the Digital Revolution,
even though it didn’t fully capitalize on it.
In order to be at the forefront of transistor development, Kilby realized that he needed to
work at a bigger company. Weighing a variety of offers, he decided in the summer of 1958 to
join Texas Instruments, where he would get to work with Pat Haggerty and his brilliant
transistor research team led by Willis Adcock.
The policy at Texas Instruments was for everyone to take off the same two weeks in July.
So when Kilby arrived in Dallas with no accrued vacation time, he was one of the very few
people in the semiconductor lab. This gave him time to think about what could be done with
silicon other than fabricate it into transistors.
He knew that if you created a bit of silicon without any impurities, it would act as a simple
resistor. There was also a way, he realized, to make a p-n junction in a piece of silicon act as
a capacitor, meaning it could store a small electrical charge. In fact, you could make any
electronic component out of differently treated silicon. From that he came up with what
became known as the “monolithic idea”: you could make all of these components in one
monolithic piece of silicon, thus eliminating the need to solder together different components
on a circuit board. In July 1958, six months before Noyce wrote down a similar idea, Kilby
described it in his lab notebook in a sentence that would later be quoted in his Nobel Prize
citation: “The following circuit elements could be made on a single slice: resistors, capacitor,
distributed capacitor, transistor.” Then he drew a few crude sketches of how to construct
these components by configuring sections of silicon that had been doped with impurities to
have different properties on a single slab.
When his boss, Willis Adcock, returned from vacation he was not fully persuaded that this
would be practical. There were other things for the lab to do that seemed more pressing. But
he made Kilby a deal: if he could make a working capacitor and resistor, Adcock would
authorize an effort to do a complete circuit on a single chip.
All went as planned, and in September 1958 Kilby prepared a demonstration that was
similar in drama to the one Bardeen and Brattain had done for their superiors at Bell Labs
eleven years earlier. On a silicon chip the size of a short toothpick, Kilby assembled the
components that would, in theory, make an oscillator. Under the gaze of a group of
executives, including the chairman of the company, a nervous Kilby hooked up the tiny chip
to an oscilloscope. He looked at Adcock, who shrugged as if to say, Here goes nothing. When
he pushed a button, the line on the oscilloscope screen undulated in waves, just as it should.
“Everybody broke into broad smiles,” Reid reported. “A new era in electronics had begun.”5
It was not the most elegant device. In the models that Kilby built that fall of 1958, there
were a lot of tiny gold wires connecting some of the components within the chip. It looked
like expensive cobwebs sticking out of a silicon twig. Not only was it ugly; it was also
impractical. There would be no way to manufacture it in large quantities. Nevertheless, it was
the first microchip.
In March 1959, a few weeks after filing for a patent, Texas Instruments announced its new
invention, which it dubbed a “solid circuit.” It also put a few prototypes on display, with
much fanfare, at the Institute of Radio Engineers annual conference in New York City. The
company’s president declared that the invention would be the most important one since the
transistor. It seemed like hyperbole, but it was an understatement.
The Texas Instruments announcement struck like a thunderbolt at Fairchild. Noyce, who
had jotted down his own version of the concept two months earlier, was disappointed at being
scooped and fearful of the competitive advantage it might give Texas Instruments.
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NOYCE’S VERSION
There are often different paths to the same innovation. Noyce and his Fairchild colleagues
had been pursuing the possibility of a microchip from another direction. It began when they
found themselves hit with a messy problem: their transistors were not working very well. Too
many of them failed. A tiny piece of dust or even exposure to some gases could cause them to
fizzle. So, too, might a sharp tap or bump.
Jean Hoerni, a Fairchild physicist who was one of the traitorous eight, came up with an
ingenious fix. On the surface of a silicon transistor, he would place a thin layer of silicon
oxide, like icing atop a layer cake, that would protect the silicon below. “The building up of
an oxide layer . . . on the surface of the transistor,” he wrote in his notebook, “will protect the
otherwise exposed junctions from contamination.”6
The method was dubbed “the planar process” because of the flat plane of oxide that sat on
top of the silicon. In January 1959 (after Kilby had come up with his ideas but before they
were patented or announced), Hoerni had another “epiphany” while showering one morning:
tiny windows could be engraved in this protective oxide layer to allow impurities to be
diffused at precise spots in order to create the desired semiconductor properties. Noyce loved
this idea of “building a transistor inside a cocoon,” and he compared it to “setting up your
jungle operating room—you put the patient inside a plastic bag and you operate inside of that,
and you don’t have all the flies of the jungle sitting on the wound.”7
The role of patent lawyers is to protect good ideas, but sometimes they also stimulate them.
The planar process became an example of this. Noyce called in John Ralls, Fairchild’s patent
lawyer, to prepare an application. So Ralls began grilling Hoerni, Noyce, and their
coworkers: What practical things could be done with this planar process? Ralls was probing
to obtain the widest range of possible uses to put in the patent application. Recalled Noyce,
“The challenge from Ralls was, ‘What else can we do with these ideas in terms of patent
protection?’ ”8
At the time, Hoerni’s idea was merely designed to build a reliable transistor. It had not yet
occurred to them that the planar process with its tiny windows could be used to permit many
types of transistors and other components to be etched onto a single piece of silicon. But
Ralls’s persistent questioning got Noyce thinking, and he spent time that January batting
around ideas with Moore, scribbling them on a blackboard and jotting them into his
notebook.
Noyce’s first realization was that the planar process could eliminate the tiny wires that
stuck out of each layer of the transistor. In their place, little copper lines could be printed on
top of the oxide layer. That would make manufacturing the transistors faster and more
reliable. This led to Noyce’s next insight: if you used these printed copper lines to connect
the regions of a transistor, you could also use them to connect two or more transistors that
were on the same piece of silicon. The planar process with its window technique would allow
you to diffuse impurities so that multiple transistors could be placed on the same silicon chip,
and the printed copper wires could connect them into a circuit. He walked into Moore’s office
and drew the idea on the blackboard for him.
Noyce was a talkative bundle of energy and Moore was a taciturn yet insightful sounding
board, and they played off each other well. The next leap was easy: the same chip could also
contain various components, such as resistors and capacitors. Noyce scribbled on Moore’s
blackboard to show how a small section of pure silicon could serve as a resistor, and a few
days later he sketched out how to make a silicon capacitor. The little metal lines printed on
the oxide surface could integrate all of these components into a circuit. “I don’t remember
any time when a light bulb went off and the whole thing was there,” conceded Noyce. “It was
more like, every day, you would say, ‘Well, if I could do this, then maybe I could do that, and
that would let me do this,’ and eventually you had the concept.”9 After this flurry of activity
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he wrote an entry in his notebook, in January 1959: “It would be desirable to make multiple
devices on a single piece of silicon.”10
Noyce had come up with the concept of a microchip independently of (and a few months
later than) Kilby, and they had gotten there in different ways. Kilby was trying to solve the
problem of how to overcome the tyranny of numbers by creating circuits with many
components that did not have to be soldered together. Noyce was mainly motivated by trying
to figure out all the neat tricks that could come from Hoerni’s planar process. There was one
other, more practical difference: Noyce’s version didn’t have a messy spider’s nest of wires
protruding from it.
PROTECTING DISCOVERIES
Patents present an inevitable source of tension in the history of invention, especially so in the
digital age. Innovations tend to proceed through collaboration and building on the work of
others, so it is difficult to ascribe with precision the ownership of ideas or intellectual
property rights. Occasionally this is made gloriously irrelevant when a group of innovators
agrees to engage in an open-source process that allows the fruits of their creativity to be in
the public domain. More often, however, an innovator wants credit. Sometimes this is for ego
reasons, as was the case when Shockley maneuvered to be listed on the patents for the
transistor. At other times it is for financial reasons, especially when it involves companies
such as Fairchild and Texas Instruments that need to reward investors in order to have the
working capital necessary to keep inventing things.
In January 1959 the lawyers and executives at Texas Instruments began scrambling to file
a patent application for Kilby’s idea of an integrated circuit—not because they knew what
Noyce was jotting in his notebook but because of rumors that RCA had come up with the
same idea. They decided to make the application sweeping and broad. That strategy carried a
risk because the claims might be easier to dispute, as happened with Mauchly and Eckert’s
broad claims for their computer patent. But if granted it would serve as an offensive weapon
against anyone who tried to make a product that was similar. Kilby’s invention, the patent
application declared, was “a new and totally different concept for miniaturization.” Although
the application described only two circuits that Kilby had devised, it asserted, “There is no
limit upon the complexity or configuration of circuits that can be made in this manner.”
In the rush, however, there wasn’t time to produce pictures of the various methods that
might work for wiring together the components on the proposed microchip. The only
example available was Kilby’s spidery demonstration model with a snarl of tiny gold wires
threading through it. The Texas Instruments team decided to use this “flying wire picture,” as
it was later derisively called, as the depiction. Kilby had already figured out that there could
be a simpler version using printed metal connections, so at the last moment he told his
lawyers to add a passage to the application claiming rights to that concept as well. “Instead of
using the gold wires in making electrical connections,” it noted, “connections may be
provided in other ways. For example . . . silicon oxide may be evaporated onto the
semiconductor circuit wafer. . . . Material such as gold may then be laid down on the
insulating material to make the necessary electrical connections.” It was filed in February
1959.11
When Texas Instruments made its public announcement the next month, Noyce and his
team at Fairchild hastened to file a competing patent application. Because they were seeking
a shield against Texas Instruments’ sweeping claim, the Fairchild lawyers focused very
specifically on what was special about Noyce’s version. They emphasized that the planar
process, which Fairchild had already filed to patent, permitted a printed-circuit method “for
making electrical connections to the various semiconductor regions” and “to make unitary
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circuit structures more compact and more easily fabricated.” Unlike circuits in which
“electrical connection had to be made by fastening wires,” declared the Fairchild application,
Noyce’s method meant that “the leads can be deposited at the same time and in the same
manner as the contacts themselves.” Even if Texas Instruments should be awarded a patent
for putting multiple components on a single chip, Fairchild hoped to be awarded a patent for
making the connections through printed metal lines instead of wires. Because this would be
necessary for mass-producing microchips, Fairchild knew it would give them some parity in
patent protection and force Texas Instruments to enter into a cross-licensing deal. The
Fairchild application was filed in July 1959.12
As happened with the patent dispute over the computer, the legal system took years
grappling with the issue of who deserved what patents on the integrated circuit, and it never
quite resolved the question. The rival applications from Texas Instruments and Fairchild were
assigned to two different examiners, who each seemed unaware of the other. Although filed
second, the Noyce patent application was ruled on first; in April 1961 it was granted. Noyce
was declared the inventor of the microchip.
The Texas Instruments lawyers filed a “priority contest,” claiming that Kilby had the idea
first. That led to the case of Kilby v. Noyce, run by the Board of Patent Interferences. Part of
the case involved looking at the respective notebooks and other testimony to see who had
come up with the general concept first; there was broad agreement, even from Noyce, that
Kilby’s ideas had come a few months earlier. But there was also a dispute over whether the
Kilby application really covered the key technological process of printing metal lines on top
of an oxide layer, rather than using a lot of little wires, to make a microchip. This involved
many conflicting arguments about the phrase Kilby had inserted at the end of the application,
that “material such as gold may then be laid down” on the oxide layer. Was that a specific
process he had discovered or merely a casual speculation he had tossed in?13
As the wrangling dragged on, the patent office confused things a bit further by ruling, in
June 1964, on Kilby’s original application—and granting it. That made the priority contest all
the more important. It was not until February 1967 that the verdict finally came, in Kilby’s
favor. It had been eight years since he had filed for his patent, and now he and Texas
Instruments were declared the inventors of the microchip. Except that didn’t end things.
Fairchild appealed, and the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, after hearing all the
arguments and testimony, ruled in November 1969 the other way. “Kilby has not
demonstrated,” the appeals court declared, “that the term ‘laid down’ had . . . or has since
acquired a meaning in electronic or semiconductor arts which necessarily connotes
adherence.”14 Kilby’s lawyer tried to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to
take the case.
Noyce’s victory, after a decade of back-and-forth and more than a million dollars in legal
fees, turned out to mean little. The subhead on the small story in Electronic News was “Patent
Reversal Won’t Change Much.” By this point the legal proceedings had become almost
irrelevant. The market for microchips had exploded so rapidly that the businesslike folks at
Fairchild and Texas Instruments realized that the stakes were too high to leave to the legal
system. In the summer of 1966, three years before the final legal resolution, Noyce and his
Fairchild lawyers met with the president and counsel of Texas Instruments and hammered out
a peace treaty. Each company granted that the other had some intellectual property rights to
the microchip, and they agreed to cross-license to each other whatever rights they had. Other
companies would have to make licensing deals with both, usually paying a royalty fee that
totaled about 4 percent of their profit.15
So who invented the microchip? As with the question of who invented the computer, the
answer cannot be settled simply by reference to legal rulings. The nearly simultaneous
advances made by Kilby and Noyce showed that the atmosphere of the time was primed for
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such an invention. Indeed, many people around the country and world, including Werner
Jacobi at Siemens in Germany and Geoffrey Dummer of the Royal Radar Establishment in
Britain, had earlier proposed the possibility of an integrated circuit. What Noyce and Kilby
did, in collaboration with teams at their companies, was figure out practical methods to
produce such a device. Although Kilby was a few months earlier in coming up with a way to
integrate components on a chip, Noyce did something more: he devised the right way to
connect these components. His design could be mass-produced efficiently, and it became the
general model for future microchips.
There is an inspiring lesson in how Kilby and Noyce personally handled the question of
who invented the microchip. They were both decent people; they came from tight-knit small
communities in the Midwest and were well grounded. Unlike Shockley, they did not suffer
from a toxic mix of ego and insecurity. Whenever the topic of credit for the invention came
up, each was generous in praising the contributions of the other. It soon became accepted to
give them joint credit and refer to them as coinventors. In one early oral history, Kilby gently
grumbled, “It doesn’t fit with what I understand to be co-invention, but that’s become
accepted.”16 But he, too, eventually embraced the idea and was ever afterward gracious about
it. When Craig Matsumoto of Electronic Engineering Times asked him about the controversy
many years later, “Kilby heaped praise on Noyce and said the semiconductor revolution came
from the work of thousands, not from one patent.”17
When Kilby was told that he had won the Nobel Prize in 2000, ten years after Noyce had
died,18 among the first things he did was praise Noyce. “I’m sorry he’s not still alive,” he told
reporters. “If he were, I suspect we’d share this prize.” When a Swedish physicist introduced
him at the ceremony by saying that his invention had launched the global Digital Revolution,
Kilby displayed his aw-shucks humility. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it
reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I
didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’ ”18
MICROCHIPS BLAST OFF
The first major market for microchips was the military. In 1962 the Strategic Air Command
designed a new land-based missile, the Minuteman II, that would each require two thousand
microchips just for its onboard guidance system. Texas Instruments won the right to be the
primary supplier. By 1965 seven Minutemen were being built each week, and the Navy was
also buying microchips for its submarine-launched missile, the Polaris. With a coordinated
astuteness not often found among military procurement bureaucracies, the designs of the
microchips were standardized. Westinghouse and RCA began supplying them as well. So the
price soon plummeted, until microchips were cost-effective for consumer products and not
just missiles.
Fairchild also sold chips to weapons makers, but it was more cautious than its competitors
about working with the military. In the traditional military relationship, a contractor worked
hand in glove with uniformed officers, who not only managed procurement but also dictated
and fiddled with design. Noyce believed such partnerships stifled innovation: “The direction
of the research was being determined by people less competent in seeing where it ought to
go.”19 He insisted that Fairchild fund the development of its chips using its own money so
that it kept control of the process. If the product was good, he believed, military contractors
would buy it. And they did.
America’s civilian space program was the next big booster for microchip production. In
May 1961 President John F. Kennedy declared, “I believe that this nation should commit
itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and
returning him safely to the earth.” The Apollo program, as it became known, needed a
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guidance computer that could fit into a nose cone. So it was designed from scratch to use the
most powerful microchips that could be made. The seventy-five Apollo Guidance Computers
that were built ended up containing five thousand microchips apiece, all identical, and
Fairchild landed the contract to supply them. The program beat Kennedy’s deadline by just a
few months; in July 1969 Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. By that time the Apollo
program had bought more than a million microchips.
These massive and predictable sources of demand from the government caused the price of
each microchip to fall rapidly. The first prototype chip for the Apollo Guidance Computer
cost $1,000. By the time they were being put into regular production, each cost $20. The
average price for each microchip in the Minuteman missile was $50 in 1962; by 1968 it was
$2. Thus was launched the market for putting microchips in devices for ordinary consumers.20
The first consumer devices to use microchips were hearing aids because they needed to be
very small and would sell even if they were rather expensive. But the demand for them was
limited. So Pat Haggerty, the president of Texas Instruments, repeated a gambit that had
served him in the past. One aspect of innovation is inventing new devices; another is
inventing popular ways to use these devices. Haggerty and his company were good at both.
Eleven years after he had created a huge market for inexpensive transistors by pushing pocket
radios, he looked for a way to do the same for microchips. The idea he hit upon was pocket
calculators.
On a plane ride with Jack Kilby, Haggerty sketched out his idea and handed Kilby his
marching orders: Build a handheld calculator that can do the same tasks as the thousand-
dollar clunkers that sit on office desks. Make it efficient enough to run on batteries, small
enough to put into a shirt pocket, and cheap enough to buy on impulse. In 1967 Kilby and his
team produced almost what Haggerty envisioned. It could do only four tasks (add, subtract,
multiply, and divide) and was a bit heavy (more than two pounds) and not very cheap
($150).21 But it was a huge success. A new market had been created for a device people had
not known they needed. And following the inevitable trajectory, it kept getting smaller, more
powerful, and cheaper. By 1972 the price of a pocket calculator had dropped to $100, and 5
million units were sold. By 1975 the price was down to $25, and sales were doubling every
year. In 2014 a Texas Instruments pocket calculator cost $3.62 at Walmart.
MOORE’S LAW
That became the pattern for electronic devices. Every year things got smaller, cheaper, faster,
more powerful. This was especially true—and important—because two industries were
growing up simultaneously, and they were intertwined: the computer and the microchip. “The
synergy between a new component and a new application generated an explosive growth for
both,” Noyce later wrote.22 The same synergy had happened a half century earlier when the
oil industry grew in tandem with the auto industry. There was a key lesson for innovation:
Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur
each other on.
If someone could provide a pithy and accurate rule for predicting the trend lines, it would
help entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to apply this lesson. Fortunately, Gordon Moore
stepped forward at that moment to do so. Just as the microchip sales were starting to
skyrocket, he was asked to forecast the future market. His paper, titled “Cramming More
Components onto Integrated Circuits,” was published in the April 1965 issue of Electronics
magazine.
Moore began with a glimpse of the digital future. “Integrated circuits will lead to such
wonders as home computers—or at least terminals connected to a central computer—
automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment,” he
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wrote. Then he produced an even more prescient prediction that was destined to make him
famous. “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a
factor of two per year,” he noted. “There is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly
constant for at least ten years.”23
Roughly translated, he was saying that the number of transistors that could be crammed,
cost-effectively, onto a microchip had been doubling every year, and he expected it to do so
for at least the next ten years. One of his friends, a professor at Caltech, publicly dubbed this
“Moore’s Law.” In 1975, when the ten years had passed, Moore was proved right. He then
modified his law by cutting the predicted rate of increase by half, prophesying that the future
numbers of transistors crammed onto a chip would show “a doubling every two years, rather
than every year.” A colleague, David House, offered a further modification, now sometimes
used, which said chip “performance” would double every eighteen months because of the
increased power as well as the increased numbers of transistors that would be put onto a
microchip. Moore’s formulation and its variations proved to be useful at least through the
subsequent half century, and it helped chart the course for one of the greatest bursts of
innovation and wealth creation in human history.
Moore’s Law became more than just a prediction. It was also a goal for the industry, which
made it partly self-fulfilling. The first such example occurred in 1964, as Moore was
formulating his law. Noyce decided that Fairchild would sell its simplest microchips for less
than they cost to make. Moore called the strategy “Bob’s unheralded contribution to the
semiconductor industry.” Noyce knew that the low price would cause device makers to
incorporate microchips into their new products. He also knew that the low price would
stimulate demand, high-volume production, and economies of scale, which would turn
Moore’s Law into a reality.24
Fairchild Camera and Instrument decided, not surprisingly, to exercise its right to buy out
Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959. That made the eight founders rich but sowed seeds of
discord. The corporation’s East Coast executives refused to give Noyce the right to hand out
stock options to new and valued engineers, and they sucked up the semiconductor division
profits to fund less successful investments in more mundane realms, such as home movie
cameras and stamp machines.
There were also internal problems in Palo Alto. Engineers began defecting, thus seeding
the valley with what became known as Fairchildren: companies that sprouted from spores
emanating from Fairchild. The most notable came in 1961, when Jean Hoerni and three of the
other eight defectors from Shockley left Fairchild to join a startup, funded by Arthur Rock,
that became Teledyne. Others followed, and by 1968 Noyce himself was ready to leave. He
had been passed over for the top corporate job at Fairchild, which ticked him off, but he also
realized that he did not really want it. Fairchild, the corporation as a whole and even the
semiconductor division in Palo Alto, had become too big and bureaucratic. Noyce yearned to
shed some managerial duties and return to being close to the lab.
“How about starting a new company?” he asked Moore one day.
“I like it here,” Moore replied.25 They had helped to create the culture of the California
tech world, in which people left established companies to form new ones. But now, as they
were both hitting forty, Moore no longer had the urge to jump off the roof in a hang glider.
Noyce kept pressing. Finally, as the summer of 1968 approached, he simply told Moore he
was leaving. “He had a way of making you want to take a leap with him,” Moore said many
years later, laughing. “So finally I said, ‘Okay, let’s go.’ ”26
“As [the company] has grown larger and larger, I have enjoyed my daily work less and
less,” Noyce wrote in his letter of resignation to Sherman Fairchild. “Perhaps this is partly
because I grew up in a small town, enjoying all the personal relationships of a small town.
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Now we employ twice the total population of my largest ‘home town.’ ” His desire, he said,
was to “get close to advanced technology again.”27
When Noyce called Arthur Rock, who had put together the financing deal that launched
Fairchild Semiconductor, Rock immediately asked, “What took you so long?”28
ARTHUR ROCK AND VENTURE CAPITAL
In the eleven years since he had assembled the deal for the traitorous eight to form Fairchild
Semiconductor, Arthur Rock had helped to build something that was destined to be almost as
important to the digital age as the microchip: venture capital.
For much of the twentieth century, venture capital and private equity investing in new
companies had been mainly the purview of a few wealthy families, such as the Vanderbilts,
Rockefellers, Whitneys, Phippses, and Warburgs. After World War II, many of these clans
set up firms to institutionalize the business. John Hay “Jock” Whitney, an heir to multiple
family fortunes, hired Benno Schmidt Sr. to form J. H. Whitney & Co., which specialized in
what they originally called “adventure capital” to fund entrepreneurs with interesting ideas
who could not get bank loans. The six sons and one daughter of John D. Rockefeller Jr., led
by Laurence Rockefeller, started a similar firm, which eventually became Venrock
Associates. That same year, 1946, also saw the birth of the most influential entry, one that
was based on business acumen rather than family wealth: the American Research and
Development Corporation (ARDC). It was founded by Georges Doriot, a former dean of the
Harvard Business School, in partnership with a former MIT president, Karl Compton. ARDC
scored big by doing a startup investment in Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957, which
was worth five hundred times as much when the company went public eleven years later.29
Arthur Rock took this concept west, ushering in the silicon age of venture capital. When he
put together Noyce’s traitorous eight with Fairchild Camera, Rock and his company took a
stake in the deal. After that, he realized that he could raise a fund of money and do similar
deals without relying on one corporate patron. He had a background in business research, a
love of technology, an intuitive feel for business leadership, and a lot of East Coast investors
he had made happy. “The money was on the East Coast but the exciting companies were in
California, so I decided to move west knowing that I could connect the two,” he said.30
Rock grew up the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in Rochester, New York, where he
worked as a soda jerk in his father’s candy store and developed a good feel for personalities.
One of his key investment maxims was to bet primarily on the people rather than the idea. In
addition to going over business plans, he conducted incisive personal interviews with those
who sought funding. “I believe so strongly in people that I think talking to the individual is
much more important than finding out too much about what they want to do,” he explained.
On the surface, he wore the cloak of the curmudgeon, with a gruff and taciturn style. But
those who looked at his face closely enough could tell from the light in his eyes and the hints
of a smile that he enjoyed people and had a warm sense of humor.
When he got to San Francisco, he was introduced to Tommy Davis, a talkative deal maker
who was investing the money of the Kern County Land Co., a cattle and oil empire flush with
cash. They went into business together as Davis and Rock, raised $5 million from Rock’s
East Coast investors (as well as some of the Fairchild founders), and started funding new
companies in return for a chunk of the equity. Stanford’s provost Fred Terman, still seeking
to build his university’s ties to the growing tech boom, encouraged his engineering professors
to spend time advising Rock, who took a night course in electronics at the university. Two of
his first bets were on Teledyne and Scientific Data Systems, which both paid off handsomely.
By the time Noyce called him about finding an exit strategy from Fairchild in 1968, Rock’s
partnership with Davis had amiably dissolved (their investments had shot up thirtyfold in
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seven years) and he was on his own.
“If I wanted to start a company,” Noyce asked, “could you find me the money?” Rock
assured him it would be easy. What could better fit his theory that you place your money on
the jockeys—that you invest based on your assessment of the people running the company—
than an enterprise that would be led by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore? He barely asked
what they were going to make, and at first he didn’t even think they needed to do a business
plan or description. “It was the only investment that I’ve ever made that I was 100 percent
sure would succeed,” he later claimed.31
When he had sought a home for the traitorous eight in 1957, he pulled out a single piece of
legal-pad paper, wrote a numbered list of names, and methodically phoned each one, crossing
off names as he went down the list. Now, eleven years later, he took another sheet of paper
and listed people who would be invited to invest and how many of the 500,000 shares19
available at $5 apiece he would offer to each. This time around, he would cross out only one
name. (“Johnson at Fidelity”20 didn’t come in.) Rock needed a second sheet to revise the
allocations because most people wanted to invest more than he offered them. It took him less
than two days to raise the money. The lucky investors included Rock himself, Noyce, Moore,
Grinnell College (Noyce wanted to make it rich, and he did), Laurence Rockefeller, Rock’s
Harvard classmate Fayez Sarofim, Max Palevsky of Scientific Data Systems, and Rock’s old
investment firm, Hayden, Stone. Most notably, the other six members of the traitorous eight,
many of them now working at firms that would have to compete with this new one, were
given a chance to invest. All did.
Just in case someone desired a prospectus, Rock himself typed up a three-and-a-half-page
sketch of the proposed company. It opened by describing Noyce and Moore and then gave a
perfunctory three-sentence overview of the “transistor technologies” the company would
develop. “Lawyers later screwed up venture investing by forcing us to write prospectus books
that were so long and complex and carefully vetted that it’s a joke,” Rock complained later,
pulling the pages out of his file cabinet. “All I had to tell people was that it was Noyce and
Moore. They didn’t need to know much else.”32
The first name that Noyce and Moore chose for their new company was NM Electronics,
their initials. That was not very exciting. After many clunky suggestions—Electronic Solid
State Computer Technology Corp. was one—they finally decided on Integrated Electronics
Corp. That wasn’t very thrilling, either, but it had the virtue that it could be abridged—as
Intel. That had a nice ring to it. It was smart and knowing, in many different ways.
THE INTEL WAY
Innovations come in a variety of guises. Most of those featured in this book are physical
devices, such as the computer and the transistor, and related processes, such as programming,
software, and networking. Also important are the innovations that produce new services, such
as venture capital, and those that create organizational structures for research and
development, such as Bell Labs. But this section is about a different type of creation. There
arose at Intel an innovation that had almost as much of an impact on the digital age as any of
these. It was the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis
of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.
The roots of this style, like much of what happened in Silicon Valley, were at Hewlett-
Packard. During World War II, while Bill Hewlett was in the military, Dave Packard slept on
a cot at the office many nights and managed three shifts of workers, many of them women.
He realized, partly out of necessity, that it helped to give his workers flexible hours and
plenty of leeway in determining how to accomplish their objectives. The management
hierarchy was flattened. During the 1950s this approach merged with the casual lifestyle of
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California to create a culture that included Friday beer bashes, flexible hours, and stock
options.33
Robert Noyce took this culture to the next level. To understand him as a manager, it’s
useful to recall that he was born and bred a Congregationalist. His father and both
grandfathers were ministers of the dissenting denomination that had as its core creed the
rejection of hierarchy and all of its trappings. The Puritans had purified the church of all
pomp and levels of authority, even going as far as eliminating elevated pulpits, and those who
spread this Nonconformist doctrine to the Great Plains, including the Congregationalists,
were just as averse to hierarchical distinctions.
It also helps to remember that, from his early days as a student, Noyce loved madrigal
singing. Every Wednesday evening he attended rehearsals of his twelve-voice group.
Madrigals don’t rely on lead singers and soloists; the polyphonic songs weave multiple
voices and melodies together, none of them dominant. “Your part depends on [the others’
and] it always supports the others,” Noyce once explained.34
Gordon Moore was similarly unpretentious, nonauthoritarian, averse to confrontation, and
uninterested in the trappings of power. They complemented each other well. Noyce was Mr.
Outside; he could dazzle a client with the halo effect that had followed him since childhood.
Moore, always temperate and thoughtful, liked being in the lab, and he knew how to lead
engineers with subtle questions or (the sharpest arrow in his quiver) a studied silence. Noyce
was great at strategic vision and seeing the big picture; Moore understood the details,
particularly of the technology and engineering.
So they were perfect partners, except in one way: with their shared aversion to hierarchy
and unwillingness to be bossy, neither was a decisive manager. Because of their desire to be
liked, they were reluctant to be tough. They guided people but didn’t drive them. If there was
a problem or, heaven forbid, a disagreement, they did not like to confront it. So they
wouldn’t.
That’s where Andy Grove came in.
Grove, born András Gróf in Budapest, did not come from a madrigal-singing
Congregationalist background. He grew up Jewish in Central Europe as fascism was rising,
learning brutal lessons about authority and power. When he was eight, the Nazis took over
Hungary; his father was sent to a concentration camp, and András and his mother were forced
to move into a special cramped apartment for Jews. When he went outside, he had to wear a
yellow Star of David. One day when he got sick, his mother was able to convince a non-
Jewish friend to bring some ingredients for soup, which led to the arrest of both his mother
and the friend. After she was released, she and András assumed false identities while friends
sheltered them. The family was reunited after the war, but then the communists took over.
Grove decided, at age twenty, to flee across the border to Austria. As he wrote in his memoir,
Swimming Across, “By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist
dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ Final Solution, the siege of Budapest by
the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a
variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at
gunpoint.”35 It wasn’t like mowing lawns and singing in a small-town Iowa choir, and it did
not instill genial mellowness.
Grove arrived in the United States a year later and, as he taught himself English, was able
to graduate first in his class at City College of New York and then earn a PhD in chemical
engineering from Berkeley. He joined Fairchild in 1963 right out of Berkeley, and in his
spare time wrote a college textbook titled Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.
When Moore told him of his plans to leave Fairchild, Grove volunteered to come along. In
fact, he almost forced himself on Moore. “I really respected him and wanted to go wherever
he went,” Grove declared. He became the third person at Intel, serving as the director of
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engineering.
Grove had deep admiration for Moore’s technical skills but not his management style. That
was understandable, given Moore’s aversion to confrontation and almost any aspect of
management beyond proffering gentle advice. If there was a conflict, he would watch quietly
from afar. “He is either constitutionally unable or simply unwilling to do what a manager has
to do,” Grove said of Moore.36 The feisty Grove, by contrast, felt that honest confrontation
was not only a managerial duty but one of life’s invigorating spices, which as a hardened
Hungarian he relished.
Grove was even more appalled by the management style of Noyce. At Fairchild he had
simmered with fury when Noyce ignored the incompetence of one of his division heads, who
showed up late and drunk at meetings. Thus he groaned when Moore said that his new
venture would be in partnership with Noyce. “I told him that Bob was a better leader than
Andy gave him credit for,” Moore said. “They just had different styles.”37
Noyce and Grove got along socially better than they did professionally. They went with
their families to Aspen, where Noyce helped Grove learn to ski and even buckled his boots
for him. Nevertheless, Grove detected a detachment in Noyce that could be disconcerting:
“He was the only person I can think of who was both aloof and charming.”38 In addition,
despite their weekend friendship, Grove found himself irritated and sometimes appalled by
Noyce at the office. “I had nothing but unpleasant, discouraging dealings with him as I
watched Bob manage a troubled company,” he recalled. “If two people argued and we all
looked to him for a decision, he would put a pained look on his face and said something like,
‘Maybe you should work that out.’ More often he didn’t say that, he just changed the
subject.”39
What Grove did not realize at the time, but came to understand later, was that effective
management need not always come from having one strong leader. It can come from having
the right combination of different talents at the top. Like a metallic alloy, if you get the right
mix of elements the result can be strong. Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate
this, he read Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief
executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. Grove realized that
instead of being embodied in one person, such traits could exist in a leadership team. That
was the case at Intel, Grove said, and he made copies of the chapter for Noyce and Moore.
Noyce was the outside guy, Moore the inside, and Grove was the man of action.40
Arthur Rock, who put together the funding for the trio and initially served as their board
chair, understood the virtue of creating an executive team whose members complemented
each other. He also noted a corollary: it was important that the trifecta become CEO in the
order that they did. Noyce he described as “a visionary who knew how to inspire people and
sell the company to others when it was getting off the ground.” Once that was done, Intel
needed to be led by someone who could make it a pioneer in each new wave of technology,
“and Gordon was such a brilliant scientist he knew how to drive the technology.” Then, when
there were dozens of other companies competing, “we needed a hard-charging, no-nonsense
manager who could focus on driving us as a business.” That was Grove.41
The Intel culture, which would permeate the culture of Silicon Valley, was a product of all
three men. As might be expected in a congregation where Noyce was the minister, it was
devoid of the trappings of hierarchy. There were no reserved parking places. Everyone,
including Noyce and Moore, worked in similar cubicles. Michael Malone, a reporter,
described visiting Intel to do an interview: “I couldn’t find Noyce. A secretary had to come
out and lead me to his cubicle, because his cubicle was almost indistinguishable from all the
other cubicles in this vast prairie dog town of cubicles.”42
When one early employee wanted to see the company’s organization chart, Noyce made an
X in the center of a page and then drew a bunch of other Xs around it, with lines leading to
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each. The employee was at the center, and the others were people he would be dealing with.43
Noyce noticed that at East Coast companies the clerks and secretaries got little metal desks
while those of top executives were expansive ones made of mahogany. So Noyce decided
that he would work at a small gray aluminum desk, even as newly hired support staffers were
given bigger wooden ones. His dented and scratched desk was near the center of the room, in
open view, for everyone to see. It prevented anyone else from demanding some vestment of
power. “There were no privileges anywhere,” recalled Ann Bowers, who was the personnel
director and later married Noyce.21 “We started a form of company culture that was
completely different than anything had been before. It was a culture of meritocracy.”44
It was also a culture of innovation. Noyce had a theory that he developed after bridling
under the rigid hierarchy at Philco. The more open and unstructured a workplace, he
believed, the faster new ideas would be sparked, disseminated, refined, and applied. “The
idea is people should not have to go up through a chain of command,” said one of Intel’s
engineers, Ted Hoff. “If you need to talk to a particular manager you go talk to him.”45 As
Tom Wolfe put it in his profile, “Noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate
system of class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the CEOs and vice-
presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy.”
By avoiding a chain of command, both at Fairchild Semiconductor and then at Intel, Noyce
empowered employees and forced them to be entrepreneurial. Even though Grove cringed
when disputes went unresolved at meetings, Noyce was comfortable letting junior employees
resolve problems rather than bucking them up to a higher layer of management that would
tell them what to do. Responsibility was thrust on young engineers, who found themselves
having to be innovators. Every now and then, a staffer might be unnerved by a tough
problem. “He would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do,” Wolfe
reported. “And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100 ampere eyes, listen, and say:
‘Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and
you’ve got to consider C.’ Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: ‘But if you think
I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey . . . it’s your ass.’ ”
Instead of proposing plans to top management, Intel’s business units were entrusted to act
as if they were their own little and agile company. Whenever there was a decision that
required buy-in from other units, such as a new marketing plan or a change in a product
strategy, the issue would not be bucked up to bosses for a decision. Instead an impromptu
meeting would be convened to hash it out, or try to. Noyce liked meetings, and there were
rooms set aside for whenever anyone felt the need to call one. At these meetings everyone
was treated as an equal and could challenge the prevailing wisdom. Noyce was there not as a
boss but as a pastor guiding them to make their own decisions. “This wasn’t a corporation,”
Wolfe concluded. “It was a congregation.”46
Noyce was a great leader because he was inspiring and smart, but he was not a great
manager. “Bob operated on the principle that if you suggested to people what the right thing
to do would be, they would be smart enough to pick it up and do it,” said Moore. “You didn’t
have to worry about following up.”47 Moore admitted that he was not much better: “I was
never very eager to exert authority or be the boss either, which might mean we were too
much alike.”48
Such a management style needed someone to impose discipline. Early on at Intel, well
before it was his turn in the lineup to become CEO, Grove helped institute some management
techniques. He created a place where people were held accountable for sloppiness. Failures
had consequences. “Andy would fire his own mother if she got in the way,” said one
engineer. Another colleague explained that this was necessary in an organization headed by
Noyce: “Bob really has to be a nice guy. It’s important for him to be liked. So somebody has
to kick ass and take names. And Andy happens to be very good at that.”49
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Grove began to study and absorb the art of management as if it were the science of
circuitry. He would later become a best-selling author of books with titles such as Only the
Paranoid Survive and High Output Management. He did not try to impose a hierarchal
command on what Noyce had wrought. Instead he helped to instill a culture that was driven,
focused, and detail-aware, traits that would not naturally have arisen from Noyce’s laid-back,
nonconfrontational style. His meetings were crisp and decisive, unlike those run by Noyce,
where people tended to hang around as long as possible knowing that he was likely to tacitly
assent to the last person who had his ear.
What saved Grove from seeming like a tyrant was that he was so irrepressible, which made
him hard not to like. When he smiled, his eyes lit up. He had a pixielike charisma. With his
Hungarian accent and goofy grin, he was by far the most colorful engineer in the valley. He
succumbed to the dubious fashions of the early 1970s by attempting, in an immigrant geek
manner worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit, to be groovy. He grew his sideburns long and
his mustache droopy and wore open shirts with gold chains dangling over his chest hair.
None of which hid the fact that he was a real engineer, one who had been a pioneer of the
metal-oxide semiconductor transistor that became the workhorse of modern microchips.
Grove nurtured Noyce’s egalitarian approach—he worked in an exposed cubicle his entire
career, and loved it—but he added an overlay of what he called “constructive confrontation.”
He never put on airs, but he never let down his guard. In contrast to Noyce’s sweet gentility,
Grove had a blunt, no-bullshit style. It was the same approach Steve Jobs would later use:
brutal honesty, clear focus, and a demanding drive for excellence. “Andy was the guy who
made sure the trains all ran on time,” recalled Ann Bowers. “He was a taskmaster. He had
very strong views about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do and he was very
direct about that.”50
Despite their different styles, there was one thing that Noyce and Moore and Grove shared:
an unwavering goal of making sure that innovation, experimentation, and entrepreneurship
flourished at Intel. 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.
THE MICROPROCESSOR
Inventions sometimes occur when people are confronted with a problem and scramble to
solve it. At other times, they happen when people embrace a visionary goal. The tale of how
Ted Hoff and his team at Intel invented the microprocessor is a case of both.
Hoff, who had been a young teacher at Stanford, became the twelfth employee at Intel,
where he was assigned to work on chip design. He realized that it was wasteful and inelegant
to design many types of microchips that each had a different function, which Intel was doing.
A company would come in and ask it to build a microchip designed to do a specific task.
Hoff envisioned, as did Noyce and others, an alternative approach: creating a general-purpose
chip that could be instructed, or programmed, to do a variety of different applications as
desired. In other words, a general-purpose computer on a chip.51
This vision coincided with a problem that was dumped in Hoff’s lap in the summer of
1969. A Japanese company named Busicom was planning a powerful new desktop calculator,
and it had drawn up specifications for twelve special-purpose microchips (different ones to
handle display, calculations, memory, etc.) that it wanted Intel to build. Intel agreed, and a
price was set. Noyce asked Hoff to oversee the project. Soon a challenge arose. “The more I
learned about this design, the more concerned I became that Intel may have undertaken more
than it was prepared to deliver,” Hoff recalled. “The number of chips and their complexity
was much greater than I had expected.” There was no way Intel could build them at the
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agreed price. Making matters worse, the growing popularity of Jack Kilby’s pocket calculator
was forcing Busicom to cut its price even further.
“Well, if there’s anything you can think of to simplify the design, why don’t you pursue
it,” Noyce suggested.52
Hoff proposed that Intel design a single logic chip that could perform almost all of the
tasks that Busicom wanted. “I know this can be done,” he said of the general-purpose chip.
“It can be made to emulate a computer.” Noyce told him to try it.
Before they could sell the idea to Busicom, Noyce realized he had to convince someone
who might be even more resistant: Andy Grove, who nominally worked for him. Part of what
Grove saw as his mandate was keeping Intel focused. Noyce would say yes to almost
anything; Grove’s job was to say no. When Noyce sauntered over to Grove’s workspace and
sat on the corner of his desk, Grove was immediately on guard. He knew that Noyce’s effort
to appear nonchalant was a sign that something was afoot. “We’re starting another project,”
Noyce said, affecting a laugh.53 Grove’s first reaction was to tell Noyce he was crazy. Intel
was a fledgling company still struggling to manufacture its memory chips, and it didn’t need
any distractions. But after he heard Noyce describe Hoff’s idea, Grove realized that resistance
was probably wrong and definitely futile.
By September 1969 Hoff and his colleague Stan Mazor had sketched out the architecture
of a general-purpose logic chip that could follow programming instructions. It would be able
to do the work of nine of the twelve chips that Busicom had requested. Noyce and Hoff
presented the option to Busicom executives, who agreed that it was the better approach.
When it came time to renegotiate the price, Hoff made a critical recommendation to
Noyce, one that helped create a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel
would remain a driver of the digital age. It was a deal point that Bill Gates and Microsoft
would emulate with IBM a decade later. In return for giving Busicom a good price, Noyce
insisted that Intel retain the rights to the new chip and be allowed to license it to other
companies for purposes other than making a calculator. He realized that a chip that could be
programmed to perform any logical function would become a standard component in
electronic devices, the way two-by-four pieces of lumber were a standard component in the
construction of houses. It would replace custom chips, which meant it could be manufactured
in bulk and thus continually decline in price. It would also usher in a more subtle shift in the
electronics industry: the importance of hardware engineers, who designed the placement of
the components on a circuit board, began to be supplanted by a new breed, software
engineers, whose job it was to program a set of instructions into the system.
Because it was essentially a computer processor on a chip, the new device was dubbed a
microprocessor. In November 1971 Intel unveiled the product, the Intel 4004, to the public. It
took out ads in trade magazines announcing “a new era of integrated electronics—a
microprogrammable computer on a chip!” It was priced at $200, and orders, as well as
thousands of requests for the manual, began pouring in. Noyce was attending a computer
show in Las Vegas on the day of the announcement and was thrilled to watch potential
customers cramming into the Intel suite.
Noyce became an apostle of the microprocessor. At a reunion in San Francisco he hosted
for his extended family in 1972, he stood up in the bus he had chartered and waved a wafer
over his head. “This is going to change the world,” he told them. “It’s going to revolutionize
your home. In your own house, you’ll all have computers. You will have access to all sorts of
information.” His relatives passed the wafer around the bus like an object of veneration. “You
won’t need money anymore,” he prophesied. “Everything will happen electronically.”54
He was exaggerating only slightly. Microprocessors began showing up in smart traffic
lights and car brakes, coffeemakers and refrigerators, elevators and medical devices, and
thousands of other gizmos. But the foremost success of the microprocessor was making
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possible smaller computers, most notably personal computers that you could have on your
desk and in your home. And if Moore’s Law continued to hold true (as it would), a personal
computer industry would grow up symbiotically with a microprocessor industry.
That is what happened in the 1970s. The microprocessor spawned hundreds of new
companies making hardware and software for personal computers. Intel not only developed
the leading-edge chips; it also created the culture that inspired venture-funded startups to
transform the economy and uproot the apricot orchards of Santa Clara Valley, the forty-mile
stretch of flat land from south San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose.
The valley’s main artery, a bustling highway named El Camino Real, was once the royal
road that connected California’s twenty-one mission churches. By the early 1970s—thanks to
Hewlett-Packard, Fred Terman’s Stanford Industrial Park, William Shockley, Fairchild and
its Fairchildren—it connected a bustling corridor of tech companies. In 1971 the region got a
new moniker. Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began
writing a series of columns entitled “Silicon Valley USA,” and the name stuck.55
Dan Edwards and Peter Samson in 1962 playing Spacewar at MIT.
Nolan Bushnell (1943– ).
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CHAPTER SIX

VIDEO GAMES
The evolution of microchips led to devices that were, as Moore’s Law forecast, smaller and
more powerful each year. But there was another impetus that would drive the computer
revolution and, eventually, the demand for personal computers: the belief that computers
weren’t merely for number-crunching. They could and should be fun for people to use.
Two cultures contributed to the idea that computers should be things that we interact and
play with. There were the hard-core hackers who believed in “the hands-on imperative” and
loved pranks, clever programming tricks, toys, and games.1 And there were the rebel
entrepreneurs eager to break into the amusement games industry, which was dominated by
syndicates of pinball distributors and ripe for a digital disruption. Thus was born the video
game, which turned out to be not merely an amusing sideshow but an integral part of the
lineage that led to today’s personal computer. It also helped to propagate the idea that
computers should interact with people in real time, have intuitive interfaces, and feature
delightful graphic displays.
STEVE RUSSELL AND SPACEWAR
The hacker subculture, as well as the seminal video game Spacewar, emanated from MIT’s
Tech Model Railroad Club, a geeky student organization founded in 1946 that met in the
bowels of a building where radar had been developed. Its bunker was almost completely
filled by a model train board with dozens of tracks, switches, trolleys, lights, and towns, all
compulsively crafted and historically accurate. Most of its members obsessed over fashioning
picture-perfect pieces to display on the layout. But there was a subset of the club that was
more interested in what was underneath the sprawling chest-high board. The members of the
“Signals and Power Subcommittee” tended to the relays, wires, circuits, and crossbar
switches, which were rigged together on the underside of the board to provide a complex
hierarchy of controllers for the numerous trains. In this tangled web they saw beauty. “There
were neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a
long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires—twisting and twirling like a rainbow-
colored explosion of Einstein’s hair,” Steven Levy wrote in Hackers, which begins with a
colorful depiction of the club.2
Members of the Signals and Power Subcommittee embraced the term hacker with pride. It
connoted both technical virtuosity and playfulness, not (as in more recent usage) lawless
intrusions into a network. The intricate pranks devised by MIT students—putting a live cow
on the roof of a dorm, a plastic cow on the Great Dome of the main building, or causing a
huge balloon to emerge midfield during the Harvard-Yale game—were known as hacks. “We
at TMRC use the term ‘hacker’ only in its original meaning, someone who applies ingenuity
to create a clever result, called a ‘hack,’ ” the club proclaimed. “The essence of a ‘hack’ is
that it is done quickly, and is usually inelegant.”3
Some of the early hackers had been infused with the aspiration of creating machines that
could think. Many were students at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, founded in 1959 by two
professors who would become fabled: John McCarthy, a Santa Claus lookalike who coined
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the term artificial intelligence, and Marvin Minsky, who was so clever that he seemed a
refutation of his own belief that computers would someday surpass human intelligence. The
prevailing doctrine of the lab was that, given enough processing power, machines could
replicate neural networks like those of the human brain and be able to interact intelligently
with users. Minsky, a puckish man with twinkling eyes, had built a learning machine
designed to model the brain, which he named SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog
Reinforcement Calculator), hinting that he was serious but might also be joking a bit. He had
a theory that intelligence could be a product of the interaction of nonintelligent components,
such as small computers connected by giant networks.
A seminal moment for the hackers of the Tech Model Railroad Club came in September
1961, when the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) donated the prototype of its PDP-1
computer to MIT. About the size of three refrigerators, the PDP-1 was the first computer to
be designed for direct interaction with the user. It could connect to a keyboard and a monitor
that displayed graphics, and it could be operated easily by a single person. Like moths to a
flame, a handful of hard-core hackers began to circle this new computer, and they formed a
cabal to conjure up something fun to do with it. Many of the discussions took place in a
rundown apartment on Hingham Street in Cambridge, so the members dubbed themselves the
Hingham Institute. The high-minded name was ironic. Their goal was not to come up with
some elevated use for the PDP-1 but instead to do something clever.
Previous hackers had created a few rudimentary games for earlier computers. One at MIT
had a dot on a screen that represented a mouse trying to navigate a maze to find a wedge of
cheese (or, in later versions, a martini); another, at the Brookhaven National Lab on Long
Island, used an oscilloscope on an analog computer to simulate a tennis match. But the
members of the Hingham Institute knew that with the PDP-1 they had the chance to create the
first real computer video game.
The best programmer in their group was Steve Russell, who was helping Professor McCarthy
create the language LISP, which was designed to facilitate artificial intelligence research.
Russell was a consummate geek, brimming with passions and intellectual obsessions that
ranged from steam trains to thinking machines. Short and excitable, he had thick glasses and
curly hair. When he spoke, he sounded like someone had punched his fast-forward button.
Although he was intense and energetic, he was prone to procrastination, earning him the
nickname “Slug.”
Like most of his hacker friends, Russell was an avid fan of bad movies and pulp science
fiction. His favorite author was E. E. “Doc” Smith, a failed food engineer (an expert on the
bleaching of flour, he concocted doughnut mixes) who specialized in a trashy sci-fi subgenre
known as space opera. It featured melodramatic adventures filled with battles against evil,
interstellar travel, and clichéd romance. Doc Smith “wrote with the grace and refinement of a
pneumatic drill,” according to Martin Graetz, a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club and
the Hingham Institute, who wrote a reminiscence about the creation of Spacewar. Graetz
recalled a typical Doc Smith tale:
After some preliminary foofaraw to get everyone’s name right, a bunch of overdeveloped Hardy Boys go trekking off through the universe to
punch out the latest gang of galactic goons, blow up a few planets, kill all sorts of nasty life forms, and just have a heck of a good time. In a
pinch, which is where they usually were, our heroes could be counted on to come up with a complete scientific theory, invent the technology to
implement it, and produce the weapons to blow away the baddies, all while being chased in their spaceship hither and thither through the
trackless wastes of the galaxy.22

Afflicted by their passion for such space operas, it’s not surprising that Russell, Graetz,
and their friends decided to concoct a space-war game for the PDP-1. “I had just finished
reading Doc Smith’s Lensman series,” Russell recalled. “His heroes had a strong tendency to
get pursued by the villain across the galaxy and have to invent their way out of their problem
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while they were being pursued. That sort of action was the thing that suggested Spacewar.”4
Proudly nerdy, they reconstituted themselves into the Hingham Institute Study Group on
Space Warfare, and Slug Russell proceeded to code.5
Except that, true to his nickname, he didn’t. He knew what the starting point of his game
program would be. Professor Minsky had stumbled upon an algorithm that drew a circle on
the PDP-1 and was able to modify it so that it would display three dots on the screen that
interacted with each other, weaving beautiful little patterns. Minsky called his hack the Tri-
Pos, but his students dubbed it “the Minskytron.” That was a good foundation for creating a
game featuring interacting spaceships and missiles. Russell spent weeks mesmerized by the
Minskytron and grokking its ability to make patterns. But he bogged down when it came time
to write the sine-cosine routines that would determine the motion of his spaceships.
When Russell explained this obstacle, a fellow club member named Alan Kotok knew how
to solve it. He drove out to the suburban Boston headquarters of DEC, which made the PDP-
1, and found a sympathetic engineer who had the routines necessary to make the calculations.
“Alright, here are the sine-cosine routines,” Kotok told Russell. “Now what’s your excuse?”
Russell later admitted, “I looked around and I didn’t find an excuse, so I had to settle down
and do some figuring.”6
Throughout the Christmas vacation of 1961 Russell hacked away, and within weeks he had
produced a method to maneuver dots on the screen by using the toggle switches of the control
panel to make them speed up, slow down, and turn. Then he converted the dots into two
cartoonish spaceships, one of them fat and bulging like a cigar and the other thin and straight
like a pencil. Another subroutine allowed each spaceship to shoot a dot out of its nose,
mimicking a missile. When the position of the missile dot coincided with that of a spaceship,
the latter would “explode” into randomly moving dots. By February 1962 the basics had been
completed.
At that point Spacewar became an open-source project. Russell put his program tape in the
box that held other PDP-1 programs, and his friends began to make improvements. One of
them, Dan Edwards, decided it would be cool to introduce a gravitational force, so he
programmed in a big sun that exerted a tug on the ships. If you didn’t pay attention, it could
suck you in and destroy you, but good players learned to whip close to the sun and use its
gravitational pull to gain momentum and swing around at higher speeds.
Another friend, Peter Samson, “thought my stars were random and unrealistic,” Russell
recalled.7 Samson decided the game needed “the real thing,” meaning astronomically correct
constellations rather than miscellaneous dots. So he created a programming addition he called
“Expensive Planetarium.” Using information from the American Ephemeris and Nautical
Almanac, he encoded a routine that showed all the stars in the night sky down to the fifth
magnitude. By specifying how many times a display point on the screen fired, he was even
able to replicate each star’s relative brightness. As the spaceships sped along, the
constellations slowly scrolled past.
This open-source collaboration produced many more clever contributions. Martin Graetz
came up with what he called “the ultimate panic button,” which was the ability to get out of a
jam by toggling a switch and disappearing temporarily into another dimension of hyperspace.
“The idea was that when everything else failed you could jump into the fourth dimension and
disappear,” he explained. He had read about something similar, called a “hyper-spatial tube,”
in one of Doc Smith’s novels. There were, however, some limits: you could toggle into
hyperspace only three times in a game; your disappearance gave your opponent a breather;
and you never knew where your spaceship would reappear. It might end up in the sun or right
in the sights of your opponent. “It was something you could use, but not something you
wanted to use,” Russell explained. Graetz added an homage to Professor Minsky: a ship
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disappearing into hyperspace left behind one of the signature patterns of the Minskytron.8
One lasting contribution came from two active members of the Tech Model Railroad Club,
Alan Kotok and Bob Sanders. They realized that players crammed in front of a PDP-1
console jostling elbows and frantically grabbing at the computer’s switches was both
awkward and dangerous. So they rummaged around under the train set in the clubroom and
commandeered some of the toggles and relays. These they pieced together inside two plastic
boxes to make remote controls, complete with all the necessary function switches and the
hyperspace panic button.
The game quickly spread to other computer centers and became a staple of hacker culture.
DEC began shipping the game preloaded into its computers, and programmers created new
versions for other systems. Hackers around the world added more features, such as cloaking
powers, exploding space mines, and ways to shift into a first-person perspective from the
view of one of the pilots. As Alan Kay, one of the pioneers of the personal computer, said,
“The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display
connected to a computer.”9
Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital
age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a
team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source
software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of
course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based
on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our
hands on a computer and make it respond to us in real time,” said Russell.10
NOLAN BUSHNELL AND ATARI
Like many computer science students in the 1960s, Nolan Bushnell was a Spacewar fanatic.
“The game was seminal to anyone who loved computers, and for me it was transforming,” he
recalled. “Steve Russell was like a god to me.” What set Bushnell apart from other computer
bums who got their kicks by maneuvering blips on a screen was that he was also enthralled
by amusement parks. He worked in one to help pay for college. In addition, he had the
boisterous temperament of an entrepreneur, relishing the mix of thrill-seeking and risk-
taking. Thus it was that Nolan Bushnell became one of those innovators who turned an
invention into an industry.11
When Bushnell was fifteen, his father died. He had been a construction contractor in a
growing exurb of Salt Lake City, and he left behind several unfinished jobs for which he
hadn’t been paid. Young Bushnell, already big and boisterous, finished them off, adding to
his natural bravado. “When you do something like that as a 15-year-old, you begin to believe
you can do anything,” he said.12 Not surprisingly, he became a poker player, and as good luck
would have it he lost, fortuitously forcing him to take a job on the midway at the Lagoon
Amusement Park while studying at the University of Utah. “I learned all the various tricks for
getting people to put up their quarters, and that sure served me well.”13 He was soon
promoted to the pinball and game arcade, where animated driving games such as Speedway,
made by Chicago Coin Machine Manufacturing Company, were the new rage.
He was fortunate as well in landing at the University of Utah. It had the best computer
graphics program in the country, run by professors Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, and
became one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. (Other
students included Jim Clark, who founded Netscape; John Warnock, who cofounded Adobe;
Ed Catmull, who cofounded Pixar; and Alan Kay, about whom more later.) The university
had a PDP-1, complete with a Spacewar game, and Bushnell combined his love of the game
with his understanding of the economics of arcades. “I realized you could make a whole lot
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of quarters if you could put a computer with a game in an arcade,” he said. “And then I did
the division and realized that even a whole lot of quarters coming in every day would never
add up to the million-dollar cost of a computer. You divide twenty-five cents into a million
dollars and you give up.”14 And so he did, for the moment.
When he graduated in 1968 (“last in his class,” he often bragged), Bushnell went to work
for Ampex, which made recording equipment. He and a colleague there, Ted Dabney,
continued to concoct schemes for turning a computer into an arcade video game. They
considered ways to adapt the Data General Nova, a $4,000 refrigerator-size minicomputer
that came out in 1969. But no matter how they juggled the numbers, it was neither cheap
enough nor powerful enough.
In his attempts to push the Nova to support Spacewar, Bushnell looked for elements of the
game, such as the background of stars, that could be generated by the hardware circuits rather
than by the processing power of the computer. “Then I had a great epiphany,” he recalled.
“Why not do it all with hardware?” In other words, he could design circuits to perform each
of the tasks that the program would have done. That made it cheaper. It also meant that the
game had to be a lot simpler. So he turned Spacewar into a game that had only one user-
controlled spaceship, which fought against two simple saucers generated by the hardware.
Eliminated, too, were the sun’s gravity and the panic button to disappear into hyperspace. But
it was still a fun game, and it could be built at a reasonable cost.
Bushnell sold the idea to Bill Nutting, who had formed a company to make an arcade game
called Computer Quiz. In keeping with that name, they dubbed Bushnell’s game Computer
Space. He and Nutting hit it off so well that Bushnell quit Ampex in 1971 to join Nutting
Associates.
As they were working on the first Computer Space consoles, Bushnell heard that he had
competition. A Stanford grad named Bill Pitts and his buddy Hugh Tuck from California
Polytechnic had become addicted to Spacewar, and they decided to use a PDP-11
minicomputer to turn it into an arcade game. When Bushnell heard this, he invited Pitts and
Tuck to visit. They were appalled at the sacrifices—indeed sacrileges—Bushnell was
perpetrating in stripping down Spacewar so that it could be produced inexpensively. “Nolan’s
thing was a totally bastardized version,” Pitts fumed.15 For his part, Bushnell was
contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would
be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge ten cents
a game. “I was surprised at how clueless they were about the business model,” he said.
“Surprised and relieved. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I knew they’d be no
competition.”
Galaxy Game by Pitts and Tuck debuted at Stanford’s Tresidder student union coffeehouse
in the fall of 1971. Students gathered around each night like cultists in front of a shrine. But
no matter how many lined up their coins to play, there was no way the machine could pay for
itself, and the venture eventually folded. “Hugh and I were both engineers and we didn’t pay
attention to business issues at all,” conceded Pitts.16 Innovation can be sparked by
engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.
Bushnell was able to produce his game, Computer Space, for only $1,000. It made its
debut a few weeks after Galaxy Game at the Dutch Goose bar in Menlo Park near Palo Alto
and went on to sell a respectable 1,500 units. Bushnell was the consummate entrepreneur:
inventive, good at engineering, and savvy about business and consumer demand. He also was
a great salesman. One reporter remembered running into him at a Chicago trade show:
“Bushnell was about the most excited person I’ve ever seen over the age of six when it came
to describing a new game.”17
Computer Space turned out to be less popular in beer halls than it was in student hangouts,
so it was not as successful as most pinball games. But it did acquire a cult following. More
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important, it launched an industry. Arcade games, once the domain of pinball companies
based in Chicago, would soon be transformed by engineers based in Silicon Valley.
Unimpressed by his experience with Nutting Associates, Bushnell decided to form his own
company for his next video game. “Working for Nutting was a great learning experience,
because I discovered that I couldn’t screw things up any worse than they did,” he recalled.18
He decided to name the new company Syzygy, a barely pronounceable term for when three
celestial bodies are in a line. Fortunately, that name was not available because a hippie
candle-making commune had registered it. So Bushnell decided to call his new venture Atari,
adopting a term from the Japanese board game Go.
PONG
On the day that Atari was incorporated, June 27, 1972, Nolan Bushnell hired his first
engineer. Al Alcorn was a high school football player from a rough neighborhood of San
Francisco who taught himself television repair through an RCA correspondence course. At
Berkeley he participated in a work-study program that brought him to Ampex, where he
worked under Bushnell. He graduated just as Bushnell was forming Atari.
Many of the key partnerships in the digital age paired people with different skills and
personalities, such as John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain,
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But occasionally the partnerships worked because the
personalities and enthusiasms were similar, as was the case of Bushnell and Alcorn. Both
were burly and fun-loving and irreverent. “Al is one of my favorite people in world,”
Bushnell asserted more than forty years later. “He was the perfect engineer and funny, so he
was well-suited to video games.”19
At the time, Bushnell had a contract to make a new video game for the Chicago firm Bally
Midway. The plan was to do a car racing game, which seemed likely to be more appealing
than spaceship navigation to beer drinkers in workingmen’s bars. But before tossing the task
to Alcorn, Bushnell decided to give him a warm-up exercise.
At a trade show, Bushnell had checked out the Magnavox Odyssey, a primitive console for
playing games on home television sets. One of the offerings was a version of Ping-Pong. “I
thought it was kind of crappy,” Bushnell said years later, after he had been sued for stealing
its idea. “It had no sound, no score, and the balls were square. But I noticed some people
were having some fun with it.” When he arrived back at Atari’s little rented office in Santa
Clara, he described the game to Alcorn, sketched out some circuits, and asked him to build an
arcade version of it. He told Alcorn he had signed a contract with GE to make the game,
which was untrue. Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality
in order to motivate people. “I thought it would be a great training program for Al.”20
Alcorn got a prototype wired up in a few weeks, completing it at the beginning of
September 1972. With his childlike sense of fun, he came up with enhancements that turned
the monotonous blip bouncing between paddles into something amusing. The lines he created
had eight regions so that when the ball hit smack in the center of a paddle it bounced back
straight, but as it hit closer to the paddle’s edges it would fly off at angles. That made the
game more challenging and tactical. He also created a scoreboard. And in a stroke of simple
genius, he added just the right “thonk” sound from the sync generator to sweeten the
experience. Using a $75 Hitachi black-and-white TV set, Alcorn hard-wired the components
together inside a four-foot-tall wooden cabinet. Like Computer Space, the game did not use a
microprocessor or run a line of computer code; it was all done in hardware with the type of
digital logic design used by television engineers. Then he slapped on a coin box taken from
an old pinball machine, and a star was born.21 Bushnell dubbed it Pong.
One of Pong’s most ingenious features was its simplicity. Computer Space had required
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complex instructions; there were enough directives on its opening screen (among them, for
example, “There is no gravity in space; rocket speed can only be changed by engine thrust”)
to baffle a computer engineer. Pong, by contrast, was simple enough that a beer-sloshed
barfly or stoned sophomore could figure it out after midnight. There was only one instruction:
“Avoid missing ball for high score.” Consciously or not, Atari had hit upon one of the most
important engineering challenges of the computer age: creating user interfaces that were
radically simple and intuitive.
Bushnell was so pleased by Alcorn’s creation that he decided it should be more than a
training exercise: “My mind changed the minute it got really fun, when we found ourselves
playing it for an hour or two after work every night.”22 He flew to Chicago to persuade Bally
Midway to accept Pong as a fulfillment of their contract rather than push for a car racing
game. But the company declined to take it. It was wary of games that required two players.
This turned out to be a lucky break. To test out Pong, Bushnell and Alcorn installed the
prototype at Andy Capp’s, a beer bar in the working-class town of Sunnyvale that had peanut
shells on the floor and guys playing pinball in the back. After a day or so, Alcorn got a call
from the bar’s manager complaining that the machine had stopped working. He should come
fix it right away, because it had been surprisingly popular. So Alcorn hurried over. As soon
as he opened the machine, he discovered the problem: the coin box was so filled with
quarters that it was jammed. The money gushed onto the floor.23
Bushnell and Alcorn knew they had a hit on their hands. An average machine made $10 a
day; Pong was taking in $40. Suddenly Bally’s decision to decline it seemed like a blessing.
The true entrepreneur in Bushnell came out: he decided that Atari would manufacture the
game on its own, even though it had no financing or equipment.
He took the gamble of deciding to bootstrap the whole operation; he would fund as much
as possible from the cash flow he made on sales. He looked at how much money he had in the
bank, divided it by the $280 cost of making each machine, and figured that he could build
thirteen of them initially. “But that was an unlucky number,” he recalled, “so we decided to
build twelve.”24
Bushnell made a small model of the console shell he desired out of clay, then took it to a
boat manufacturer who began producing them in fiberglass. It took just a week to build each
complete game and another few days to sell it for $900, so with the $620 profit he had a
positive cash flow to keep things going. Some of the early proceeds were spent on a sales
brochure, which featured a beautiful young woman in a slinky sheer nightgown draping her
arm over the game machine. “We hired her from the topless bar down the street,” Bushnell
recounted forty years later to an audience of earnest high school students, who seemed
somewhat baffled by the tale and unsure what a topless bar was.25
Venture capital, a realm that had just begun in Silicon Valley with Arthur Rock’s financing
of Intel, was not available for a company proposing to make video games, which were not yet
a known product and were associated with the mobbed-up pinball industry.23 Banks demurred
as well when Bushnell ambled in for a loan. Only Wells Fargo came through, providing a
credit line of $50,000, which was far less than Bushnell had requested.
With the money, Bushnell was able to open up a production facility in an abandoned roller-
skating rink a few blocks from Atari’s Santa Clara office. The Pong games were put together
not on an assembly line but in the middle of the floor, with young workers ambling up to
stick in the various components. Workers were dragooned from unemployment centers
nearby. After weeding out the hires that were heroin addicts or stole the television monitors,
the operation scaled up rapidly. At first they were making ten units a day, but within two
months they could make almost a hundred. The economics were improved as well; the cost of
each game was held to just over $300, but the sales price was raised to $1,200.
The atmosphere was what you might expect from the fun-loving Bushnell and Alcorn, both
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still in their twenties, and it took to the next level the casual style of Silicon Valley startups.
Every Friday there would be a beer bash and pot-smoking party, sometimes capped by
skinny-dipping, especially if that week’s numbers had been made. “We found out our
employees would respond to having a party for hitting quotas as much as having a bonus,”
Bushnell said.
Bushnell bought himself a nice house in the hills of nearby Los Gatos, where he sometimes
held board meetings or staff parties in his hot tub. When he built a new engineering facility,
he decreed that it should have its own hot tub. “It was a recruiting tool,” he insisted. “We
found out that our lifestyle and the parties were hugely good for attracting workers. If we
were trying to hire somebody, we’d invite him to one of our parties.”26
In addition to being a recruiting tool, the culture at Atari was a natural outgrowth of
Bushnell’s personality. But it was not simply self-indulgent. It was based on a philosophy
that drew from the hippie movement and would help define Silicon Valley. At its core were
certain principles: authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented,
nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured. Unlike at East Coast
corporations, there were no fixed working hours and no dress code, either for the office or the
hot tub. “At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with
your badge stapled to your shoulder or something,” said Steve Bristow, an engineer. “At
Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.”27
The success of Pong prompted a lawsuit from Magnavox, which marketed the Odyssey
home-television game that Bushnell had played at a trade show. The Magnavox game had
been devised by an outside engineer named Ralph Baer. He could not claim to have invented
the concept; its roots went back at least to 1958, when William Higinbotham at the
Brookhaven National Lab rigged up an oscilloscope on an analog computer to knock a blip
back and forth in what he called Tennis for Two. Baer, however, was one of those innovators,
like Edison, who believed that filing for patents was a key element of the invention process.
He had more than seventy of them, including for various aspects of his games. Instead of
fighting the lawsuit, Bushnell came up with a clever deal that was a win for both companies.
He paid a rather low flat fee, $700,000, for perpetual rights to make the game on the
condition that Magnavox enforce its patents and demand a percentage royalty from the other
companies, including his former partners Bally Midway and Nutting Associates, that wanted
to make similar games. That helped put Atari at a competitive advantage.
Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to
execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful
product. Nolan Bushnell scored a trifecta when he was twenty-nine, which is why he, rather
than Bill Pitts, Hugh Tuck, Bill Nutting, or Ralph Baer, goes down in history as the innovator
who launched the video game industry. “I am proud of the way we were able to engineer
Pong, but I’m even more proud of the way I figured out and financially engineered the
business,” he said. “Engineering the game was easy. Growing the company without money
was hard.”28
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J. C. R. Licklider (1915–90).
Bob Taylor (1932– ).
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Larry Roberts (1937– ).
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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE INTERNET
VANNEVAR BUSH’S TRIANGLE
Innovations often bear the imprint of the organizations that created them. For the Internet,
this was especially interesting, for it was built by a partnership among three groups: the
military, universities, and private corporations. What made the process even more fascinating
was that this was not merely a loose-knit consortium with each group pursuing its own aims.
Instead, during and after World War II, the three groups had been fused together into an iron
triangle: the military-industrial-academic complex.
The person most responsible for forging this assemblage was Vannevar Bush, the MIT
professor who in 1931 built the Differential Analyzer, the early analog computer described in
chapter 2.1 Bush was well suited to this task because he was a star in all three camps: dean of
the MIT School of Engineering, a founder of the electronics company Raytheon, and
America’s top military science administrator during World War II. “No American has had
greater influence in the growth of science and technology than Vannevar Bush,” MIT’s
president Jerome Wiesner later proclaimed, adding that his “most significant innovation was
the plan by which, instead of building large government laboratories, contracts were made
with universities and industrial laboratories.”2
Bush was born near Boston in 1890, the son of a Universalist minister who had begun his
career as a cook on a mackerel smack. Both of Bush’s grandfathers were whaling captains,
which instilled in him a salty and forthright manner that helped make him a decisive manager
and charismatic administrator. Like many successful technology leaders, he was an expert in
both engineering products and making crisp decisions. “All of my recent ancestors were sea
captains, and they have a way of running things without any doubt,” he once said. “That left
me with some inclination to run a show once I was in it.”3
Also like many good technology leaders, he grew up loving both the humanities and the
sciences. He could quote Kipling and Omar Khayyam “by the yard,” played the flute, loved
symphonies, and read philosophy for pleasure. His family, too, had a basement workshop,
where he built little boats and mechanical toys. As Time later reported in its inimitable old
style, “Lean, sharp, salty, Van Bush is a Yankee whose love of science began, like that of
many American boys, in a passion for tinkering with gadgets.”4
He went to Tufts, where in his spare time he built a surveying machine that used two
bicycle wheels and a pendulum to trace the perimeter of an area and calculate its size, thus
being an analog device for doing integral calculus. He got a patent on it, which became the
first of forty-nine that he would accumulate. While at Tufts, he and his roommates consulted
with a series of small companies and then, after graduating, founded Raytheon, which grew
into a sprawling defense contractor and electronics firm.
Bush earned a PhD in electrical engineering jointly from MIT and Harvard, then became a
professor and dean of engineering at MIT, where he built his Differential Analyzer. His
passion was elevating the role of science and engineering in society at a time, the mid-1930s,
when not much exciting seemed to be happening in either field. Televisions were not yet a
consumer product, and the most notable new inventions put into the time capsule at the New
York 1939 World’s Fair were a Mickey Mouse watch and a Gillette Safety Razor. The advent
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of World War II would change that, producing an explosion of new technologies, with
Vannevar Bush leading the way.
Worried that America’s military was lagging in technology, he mobilized Harvard
president James Bryant Conant and other scientific leaders to convince President Franklin
Roosevelt to form the National Defense Research Committee and then the military’s Office
of Scientific Research and Development, both of which he headed. With an ever-present pipe
in his mouth and a pencil in his hand, he oversaw the Manhattan Project to build the atom
bomb as well as the projects to develop radar and air-defense systems. Time dubbed him
“General of Physics” on its cover in 1944. “If we had been on our toes in war technology ten
years ago,” the magazine quoted him as saying as he banged his fist on his desk, “we would
probably not have had this damn war.”5
With his no-nonsense style tempered by a personal warmth, he was a tough but endearing
leader. Once a group of military scientists, frustrated by some bureaucratic problem, walked
into his office to resign. Bush couldn’t figure out what the snafu was. “So I just told them,”
he recalled, “ ‘One does not resign in time of war. You chaps get the hell out of here and get
back to work, and I’ll look into it.’ ”6 They obeyed. As MIT’s Wiesner later observed, “He
was a man of strong opinions, which he expressed and applied with vigor, yet he stood in awe
of the mysteries of nature, had a warm tolerance for human frailty, and was open-minded to
change.”7
When the war ended, Bush produced a report in July 1945 at Roosevelt’s behest (which
ended up being delivered to President Harry Truman) that advocated government funding of
basic research in partnership with universities and industry. Bush chose an evocative and
quintessentially American title, “Science, the Endless Frontier.” His introduction deserves to
be reread whenever politicians threaten to defund the research needed for future innovation.
“Basic research leads to new knowledge,” Bush wrote. “It provides scientific capital. It
creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn.”8
Bush’s description of how basic research provides the seed corn for practical inventions
became known as the “linear model of innovation.” Although subsequent waves of science
historians sought to debunk the linear model for ignoring the complex interplay between
theoretical research and practical applications, it had a popular appeal as well as an
underlying truth. The war, Bush wrote, had made it “clear beyond all doubt” that basic
science—discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computer science, radar
—“is absolutely essential to national security.” It was also, he added, crucial for America’s
economic security. “New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are
founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed
by research in the purest realms of science. A nation which depends upon others for its new
basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive
position in world trade.” By the end of his report, Bush had reached poetic heights in
extolling the practical payoffs of basic scientific research: “Advances in science when put to
practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure
for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has
been the burden of the common man for past ages.”9
Based on this report, Congress established the National Science Foundation. At first
Truman vetoed the bill because it mandated that the director be appointed by an independent
board rather than the president. But Bush turned Truman around by explaining that this
would buffer him from those seeking political favors. “Van, you should be a politician,”
Truman told him. “You have some of the instincts.” Bush replied, “Mr. President, what the
hell do you think I’ve been doing around this town for five or six years?”10
The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academia was,
in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological
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revolution of the late twentieth century. The Defense Department and National Science
Foundation soon became the prime funders of much of America’s basic research, spending as
much as private industry during the 1950s through the 1980s.24 The return on that investment
was huge, leading not only to the Internet but to many of the pillars of America’s postwar
innovation and economic boom.11
A few corporate research centers, most notably Bell Labs, existed before the war. But after
Bush’s clarion call produced government encouragement and contracts, hybrid research
centers began to proliferate. Among the most notable were the RAND Corporation, originally
formed to provide research and development (hence the name) to the Air Force; Stanford
Research Institute and its offshoot, the Augmentation Research Center; and Xerox PARC. All
would play a role in the development of the Internet.
Two of the most important of these institutes sprang up around Cambridge, Massachusetts,
just after the war: Lincoln Laboratory, a military-funded research center affiliated with MIT,
and Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a research and development company founded and
populated by MIT (and a few Harvard) engineers. Closely associated with both of them was
an MIT professor with a Missouri drawl and an easygoing talent for teambuilding. He would
become the single most important person in creating the Internet.
J. C. R. LICKLIDER
In searching for fathers of the Internet, the best person to start with is a laconic yet oddly
charming psychologist and technologist, with an open-faced grin and show-me attitude,
named Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, born in 1915 and known to everyone as “Lick.” He
pioneered the two most important concepts underlying the Internet: decentralized networks
that would enable the distribution of information to and from anywhere, and interfaces that
would facilitate human-machine interaction in real time. Plus, he was the founding director of
the military office that funded the ARPANET, and he returned for a second stint a decade
later when protocols were created to weave it into what became the Internet. Said one of his
partners and protégés, Bob Taylor, “He was really the father of it all.”12
Licklider’s father was a poor Missouri farm boy who became a successful insurance
salesman in St. Louis and then, when the Depression wiped him out, a Baptist minister in a
tiny rural town. As a doted-upon only child, Lick turned his bedroom into a model plane
production facility and rebuilt clunker cars with his mother standing by his side handing him
tools. Nevertheless, he felt trapped growing up in an isolated rural area filled with barbed-
wire fences.
He escaped first to Washington University in St. Louis and then, after getting a doctorate
in psychoacoustics (how we perceive sounds), joined Harvard’s psychoacoustics lab.
Increasingly interested in the relationship between psychology and technology, how human
brains and machines interacted, he moved to MIT to start a psychology section based in the
Electrical Engineering Department.
At MIT Licklider joined the eclectic circle of engineers, psychologists, and humanists
gathered around Professor Norbert Wiener, a theorist who studied how humans and machines
worked together and coined the term cybernetics, which described how any system, from a
brain to an artillery aiming mechanism, learned through communications, control, and
feedback loops. “There was tremendous intellectual ferment in Cambridge after World War
II,” Licklider recalled. “Wiener ran a weekly circle of forty or fifty people who got together.
They would gather together and talk for a couple of hours. I was a faithful adherent to that.”13
Unlike some of his MIT colleagues, Wiener believed that the most promising path for
computer science was to devise machines that would work well with human minds rather
than try to replace them. “Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements
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for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought,” Wiener wrote. “This is not
the case.”14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on
connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking. Licklider became an
adherent of this approach, which he later called “man-computer symbiosis.”
Licklider had a mischievous but friendly sense of humor. He loved watching the Three
Stooges and was childishly fond of sight gags. Sometimes, when a colleague was about to
give a slide presentation, Licklider would slip a photo of a beautiful woman into the
projector’s carousel. At work he energized himself with a steady supply of Cokes and candies
from the vending machines, and he gave out Hershey bars to his kids and students whenever
they delighted him. He was also devoted to his graduate students, whom he would invite to
dinners at his home in the Boston suburb of Arlington. “To him, collaboration was what it
was all about,” his son Tracy said. “He wandered around setting up islands of people and
encouraging them to be inquisitive and solve problems.” That was one reason he became
interested in networks. “He knew that getting good answers involved distant collaboration.
He loved spotting talented people and tying them together in a team.”15
His embrace, however, did not extend to people who were pretentious or pompous (with
the exception of Wiener). When he thought a speaker was spouting nonsense, he would stand
up and ask what seemed to be innocent but were in fact devilish questions. After a few
moments, the speaker would realize he had been deflated and Licklider would sit down. “He
didn’t like poseurs or pretenders,” Tracy recalled. “He was never mean, but he slyly pricked
people’s pretensions.”
One of Licklider’s passions was art. Whenever he traveled he would spend hours at
museums, sometimes dragging along his two reluctant children. “He became a nut about it,
couldn’t get enough of it,” said Tracy. Sometimes he would spend five hours or more in a
museum marveling at each brushstroke, analyzing how each picture came together, and
attempting to fathom what it taught about creativity. He had an instinct for spotting talent in
all fields, arts as well as sciences, but he felt that it was most easy to discern in its purest
forms, such as the brushstroke of a painter or the melodic refrain of a composer. He said he
looked for the same creative strokes in the designs of computer or network engineers. “He
became a really skilled scout of creativity. He often discussed what made people creative. He
felt it was easier to see in an artist, so he tried even harder to spot it in engineering, where you
can’t see the brushstrokes quite as readily.”16
Most important, Licklider was kind. When he worked at the Pentagon later in his career,
according to his biographer Mitchell Waldrop, he noticed the cleaning woman admiring the
art prints on his wall late one evening. She told him, “You know, Dr. Licklider, I always
leave your room until last because I like to have time by myself, with nothing pressing, to
look at the pictures.” He asked which print she liked most, and she pointed to a Cézanne. He
was thrilled, since it was his favorite, and he promptly gave it to her.17
Licklider felt that his love of art made him more intuitive. He could process a wide array of
information and sniff out patterns. Another attribute, which would serve him well when he
helped put together the team that laid the foundations for the Internet, was that he loved to
share ideas without craving credit for them. His ego was so tamed that he seemed to enjoy
giving away rather than claiming credit for ideas that were developed in conversation. “For
all his considerable influence on computing, Lick retained his modesty,” said Bob Taylor.
“His favorite kind of joke was one at his own expense.”18
TIME-SHARING AND MAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS
At MIT Licklider collaborated with the artificial intelligence pioneer John McCarthy, in
whose lab the hackers of the Tech Model Railroad Club had invented Spacewar. With
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McCarthy in the lead, they helped to develop, during the 1950s, systems for computer time-
sharing.
Up until then, when you wanted a computer to perform a task, you had to submit a stack of
punch cards or a tape to the computer’s operators, as if handing an offering to the priests who
shielded an oracle. This was known as “batch processing,” and it was annoying. It could take
hours or even days to get results back; any little mistake might mean having to resubmit your
cards for another run; and you might not be able to touch or even see the computer itself.
Time-sharing was different. It allowed a whole lot of terminals to be hooked up to the
same mainframe, so that many users could type in commands directly and get a response
almost instantly. Like a grandmaster playing dozens of games of chess simultaneously, the
mainframe’s core memory would keep track of all the users, and its operating system would
be capable of multitasking and running many programs. This provided users with an
enchanting experience: you could have a hands-on and real-time interaction with a computer,
like a conversation. “We had a kind of little religion growing here about how this was going
to be totally different from batch processing,” said Licklider.19
It was a key step toward a direct human-computer partnership or symbiosis. “The invention
of interactive computing through time-sharing was even more important than the invention of
computing itself,” according to Bob Taylor. “Batch processing was like exchanging letters
with someone, while interactive computing was like talking to them.”20
The importance of interactive computing became apparent at Lincoln Laboratory, the
military-funded research center that Licklider helped to build at MIT in 1951. There he
forged a team, half of them psychologists and half engineers, to look at ways that humans
could interact more intuitively with computers and information could be presented with a
friendlier interface.
One mission at Lincoln Laboratory was developing computers for an air defense system
that would provide early warning of an enemy attack and coordinate a response. It was
known as SAGE, for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, and it cost more money and
employed more people than the Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb. For it to work,
the SAGE system needed to enable its users to have instant interactions with its computers.
When an enemy missile or bomber was on the way, there would be no time for batch
processing of the calculations.
The SAGE system included twenty-three tracking centers across the United States, which
were connected by long-distance phone lines. It was able to disseminate information on up to
four hundred fast-moving planes at once. This required powerful interactive computers,
networks that could transmit vast amounts of information, and displays that could present this
information in an easy-to-understand graphical fashion.
Because of his background in psychology, Licklider was called upon to help design the
human-machine interfaces (what users saw on the screen). He formulated a set of theories
about ways to cultivate a symbiosis, an intimate partnership, that would allow humans and
machines to work cooperatively to solve problems. Particularly important was figuring out
ways to visually convey changing situations. “We wanted methods of saving the air situation
for successive seconds, and plotting tracks, not blips, and coloring the tracks so that we could
see which was the recent information and tell which way the thing was going,” he
explained.21 America’s fate might depend on the ability of a console jockey to assess data
correctly and respond instantly.
The interactive computers, intuitive interfaces, and high-speed networks showed how
people and machines could work together in a collaborative partnership, and Licklider
imagined ways this could happen for more than air defense systems. He began to talk about
what he called a “truly SAGE system” that would network not only air defense centers but
also “thinking centers” incorporating vast libraries of knowledge, which people could interact
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with on friendly display consoles—in other words, the digital world we have today.
These ideas formed the basis for one of the most influential papers in the history of
postwar technology, titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which Licklider published in 1960.
“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be
coupled together very tightly,” he wrote, “and that the resulting partnership will think as no
human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-
handling machines we know today.” This sentence bears rereading, because it became one of
the seminal concepts of the digital age.22
Licklider sided with Norbert Wiener, whose theory of cybernetics was based on humans
and machines working closely together, rather than with their MIT colleagues Marvin
Minsky and John McCarthy, whose quest for artificial intelligence involved creating
machines that could learn on their own and replicate human cognition. As Licklider
explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines
“cooperate in making decisions.” In other words, they would augment each other. “Men will
set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations.
Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for
insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.”
THE INTERGALACTIC COMPUTER NETWORK
As he combined his interests in psychology and engineering, Licklider became even more
focused on computers. That led him in 1957 to sign on with the fledgling Cambridge-based
firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a commercial-academic research company where
many of his friends worked. As at Bell Labs when the transistor was being invented, BBN
gathered a galvanizing mix of talent that included theorists, engineers, technicians, computer
scientists, psychologists, and the occasional Army colonel.23
One of Licklider’s assignments at BBN was to lead a team tasked with figuring out how
computers could transform libraries. He dictated his final report, “Libraries of the Future,” in
the course of five hours while sitting by the pool during a conference in Las Vegas.24 It
explored the potential “of devices and techniques for on-line man-computer interaction,” a
concept that foreshadowed the Internet. He envisioned the accumulation of a huge database
of information that was curated and weeded so that “it doesn’t get too diffuse, overwhelming,
or unreliable.”
In a colorful part of the paper, he presented a fictional scenario in which he posed
questions to the machine. He imagined the machine’s activity: “Over the week-end it
retrieved over 10,000 documents, scanned them all for sections rich in relevant material,
analyzed all the rich sections into statements in a high-order predicate calculus, and entered
the statements into the data base.” Licklider realized that the approach he described would
eventually be superseded. “Certainly, a more sophisticated approach will be feasible before
1994,” he wrote, looking three decades into the future.25 He was remarkably prescient. In
1994 the first text-crawling search engines, WebCrawler and Lycos, were developed for the
Internet, and they were quickly followed by Excite, Infoseek, AltaVista, and Google.
Licklider also predicted something that was counterintuitive but has turned out to be
pleasantly true: that digital information would not completely replace print. “As a medium for
the display of information, the printed page is superb,” he wrote. “It affords enough
resolution to meet the eye’s demand. It presents enough information to occupy the reader for
a convenient quantum of time. It offers great flexibility of font and format. It lets the reader
control the mode and rate of inspection. It is small, light, movable, cuttable, clippable,
pastable, replicable, disposable, and inexpensive.”26
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In October 1962, while he was still working on his “Libraries of the Future” project,
Licklider was recruited to Washington to head up a new office dealing with information
processing at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, then known as
ARPA.25 Embedded in the Pentagon, it was empowered to fund basic research at universities
and corporate institutes, thus becoming one of many ways the government implemented
Vannevar Bush’s vision. It also had a more proximate cause. On October 4, 1957, the
Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. The connection that Bush had made
between science and defense was now twinkling in the sky every night. When Americans
squinted to see it, they could also see that Bush was right: the nation that funded the best
science would produce the best rockets and satellites. A ripple of healthy public panic ensued.
President Eisenhower liked scientists. Their culture and their mode of thinking, their ability
to be nonideological and rational, appealed to him. “Love of liberty means the guarding of
every resource that makes freedom possible—from the sanctity of our families and the wealth
of our soil to the genius of our scientists,” he had proclaimed in his first inaugural address.
He threw White House dinners for scientists, the way that the Kennedys would do for artists,
and gathered many around him in advisory roles.
Sputnik gave Eisenhower the opportunity to formalize his embrace. Less than two weeks
after it was launched, he gathered fifteen top science advisors who had worked with the
Office of Defense Mobilization and asked them, his aide Sherman Adams recalled, “to tell
him where scientific research belonged in the structure of the federal government.”27 He then
met for breakfast with James Killian, the president of MIT, and appointed him to be his full-
time science advisor.28 Together with the defense secretary, Killian worked out a plan,
announced in January 1958, to put the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon.
As the historian Fred Turner wrote, “ARPA marked an extension of the defense-oriented
military-university collaborations that began in World War II.”29
The office within ARPA that Licklider was recruited to lead was called Command and
Control Research. Its mission was to study how interactive computers could help facilitate the
flow of information. There was another job opening to lead a group studying psychological
factors in military decision making. Licklider argued that these two topics should be put
together. “I started to wax eloquent on my view that the problems of command and control
were essentially problems of man-computer interaction,” he later said.30 He agreed to take
both jobs and renamed his combined group ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques
Office (IPTO).
Licklider had a lot of exciting ideas and passions, most notably ways to encourage time-
sharing, real-time interactivity, and interfaces that would nurture man-machine symbiosis. All
of these tied together into a simple concept: a network. With his wry sense of humor, he
began referring to his vision with the “intentionally grandiloquent” phrase “the Intergalactic
Computer Network.”31 In an April 1963 memo addressed to “members and affiliates” of that
dream network, Licklider described its goals: “Consider the situation in which several
different centers are netted together . . . Is it not desirable, or even necessary for all the
centers to agree upon some language or, at least, upon some conventions for asking such
questions as ‘What language do you speak?’ ”32
BOB TAYLOR AND LARRY ROBERTS
Unlike many other partners who advanced the digital age, Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts
were never friends, either before or after their time together at IPTO. Indeed, in later years
they would bitterly disparage each other’s contributions. “Larry claims that he laid out the
network himself, which is totally false,” Taylor complained in 2014. “Don’t trust what he
says. I feel sorry for him.”33 For his part, Roberts claims that Taylor is bitter because he did
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not get enough credit: “I don’t know what to give him credit for other than hiring me. That’s
the only important thing Bob did.”34
But during the four years they worked together at ARPA in the 1960s, Taylor and Roberts
complemented each other well. Taylor was not a brilliant scientist; he didn’t even have a
doctorate. But he had an affable, persuasive personality and was a magnet for talent. Roberts,
by contrast, was an intense engineer with an abrupt manner, bordering on curt, who used to
measure on a stopwatch the time it took to walk alternative routes between offices in the
sprawling Pentagon. He didn’t charm his colleagues, but he often awed them. And his
brusque direct manner made him a competent if not beloved manager. Taylor cajoled people,
while Roberts impressed them with his intellect.
Bob Taylor was born in 1932 in a home for unwed mothers in Dallas, put on a train to an
orphanage in San Antonio, and adopted when he was twenty-eight days old by an itinerant
Methodist minister and his wife. The family uprooted every couple of years to pulpits in such
towns as Uvalde, Ozona, Victoria, San Antonio, and Mercedes.35 His upbringing, he said, left
two imprints on his personality. As with Steve Jobs, who was also adopted, Taylor’s parents
repeatedly emphasized that he had been “chosen, specially picked out.” He joked, “All the
other parents had to take what they got, but I was chosen. That probably gave me an
undeserved sense of confidence.” He also had to learn repeatedly, with each family move, to
forge new relationships, learn new lingo, and secure his place in a small-town social order.
“You’ve got to make a new set of friends and interact with a new set of prejudices every
time.”36
Taylor studied experimental psychology at Southern Methodist University, served in the
Navy, and got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Texas. While doing
a paper on psychoacoustics, he had to submit his data on punch cards for batch processing at
the university computing system. “I had to carry around stacks of cards that took days to get
processed, and then they would say I had some comma wrong on card 653 or something and
needed to have it all redone,” he said. “It made me angry.” He realized that there could be a
better way when he read Licklider’s paper on interactive machines and man-computer
symbiosis, which elicited a Eureka moment. “Yes, that’s how it should be!” he recalled
saying to himself.37
After teaching at a prep school and working at a defense contractor in Florida, Taylor got a
job at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, overseeing research on flight-simulation
displays. Licklider was by then running the Information Processing Techniques Office at
ARPA, where he began a regular series of meetings with other government researchers doing
similar work. When Taylor showed up in late 1962, Licklider surprised him by knowing of
the psychoacoustics paper he had written at the University of Texas. (Taylor’s advisor was a
friend of Licklider.) “I was terribly flattered,” Taylor recalled, “so I became an admirer and
really good friend of Lick’s from then on.”
Taylor and Licklider sometimes traveled to conferences together, further sealing their
friendship. On a trip to Greece in 1963, Licklider took Taylor to one of Athens’s art museums
and demonstrated his technique for studying brushstrokes by squinting at a painting. At a
taverna late that evening, Taylor got himself invited to sit in with the band and taught them to
play Hank Williams songs.38
Unlike some engineers, both Licklider and Taylor understood human factors; they had
studied psychology, could relate to people, and took joy in appreciating art and music.
Although Taylor could be blustery and Licklider tended to be gentle, they both loved working
with other people, befriending them, and nurturing their talents. This love of human
interaction and appreciation for how it worked made them well suited to designing the
interfaces between humans and machines.
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When Licklider stepped down from IPTO, his deputy, Ivan Sutherland, took over
temporarily, and at Licklider’s urging Taylor moved over from NASA to become
Sutherland’s deputy. Taylor was among the few who realized that information technology
could be more exciting than the space program. After Sutherland resigned in 1966 to become
a tenured professor at Harvard, Taylor was not everyone’s first choice to replace him, since
he did not have a PhD and wasn’t a computer scientist, but he eventually got the job.
Three things at IPTO struck Taylor. First, every one of the universities and research centers
that had a contract with ARPA wanted the latest computers with the most capabilities. That
was wasteful and duplicative. There might be a computer that did graphics in Salt Lake City
and another that mined data at Stanford, but a researcher who needed to perform both tasks
either had to go back and forth by plane or ask IPTO to fund another computer. Why couldn’t
they be connected by a network that allowed them to time-share each other’s computer?
Second, on his travels to talk to young researchers, Taylor discovered that those in one place
were intensely interested in learning about the research happening at other places. He realized
that it would make sense to connect them electronically so they could share more easily.
Third, Taylor was struck by the fact that there were three terminals in his Pentagon office,
each with its own passwords and commands, connected to different computer centers ARPA
was funding. “Well this is silly,” he thought. “I should be able to access any of these systems
from a single terminal.” His need for three terminals, he said, “led to an epiphany.”39 All
three of these problems could be solved by building a data network to connect research
centers, that is, if he could implement Licklider’s dream of an Intergalactic Computer
Network.
He walked across to the E-ring of the Pentagon to see his boss, ARPA director Charles
Herzfeld. With his Texas twang, Taylor knew how to charm Herzfeld, an intellectual
Viennese refugee. He brought no presentation or memos, instead just launching into an
ebullient pitch. A network funded and imposed by ARPA could permit research centers to
share computing resources, collaborate on projects, and allow Taylor to jettison two of his
office terminals.
“Great idea,” Herzfeld said. “Get it going. How much money do you need?”
Taylor allowed that it might take a million dollars just to get the project organized.
“You’ve got it,” Herzfeld said.
As he headed back to his office, Taylor looked at his watch. “Jesus Christ,” he murmured
to himself. “That only took twenty minutes.”40
It was a story Taylor told often in interviews and oral histories. Herzfeld liked the tale, but
he later felt compelled to confess that it was a little misleading. “He leaves out the fact that
I’d been studying the problem with him and with Licklider for three years,” said Herzfeld. “It
was not hard to get the million dollars because I was kind of waiting for him to ask for it.”41
Taylor conceded that was the case, and he added his own lagniappe: “What really pleased me
was that Charlie took the money out of funds that were supposed to go to developing a
missile defense system, which I thought was the stupidest and most dangerous idea.”42
Taylor now needed someone to run the project, which is how Larry Roberts came into the
picture. He was an obvious choice.
Roberts seemed born and bred to help build the Internet. Both of his parents had doctorates in
chemistry, and as a kid growing up near Yale he had built a television, Tesla coil,26 ham
radio, and telephone system from scratch. He went to MIT, where he got his bachelor’s,
master’s, and doctoral degrees in engineering. Impressed by Licklider’s papers on man-
computer symbiosis, he went to work with him at Lincoln Laboratory and became his protégé
in the fields of time-sharing, networks, and interfaces. One of his experiments at Lincoln
Laboratory involved connecting two distant computers; it had been funded by Bob Taylor at
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ARPA. “Licklider inspired me with his vision of linking computers into a network,” Roberts
recalled, “and I decided that would be my work.”
But Roberts kept turning down Taylor’s offer to come to Washington to be his deputy. He
liked his job at Lincoln Laboratory and didn’t especially respect Taylor. There was also
something Taylor didn’t know: a year earlier, Roberts had been offered Taylor’s job. “When
Ivan was leaving, he asked me to come to IPTO as the next director, but it was a management
job, and I preferred research,” he said. Having declined the top post, Roberts was not about to
be Taylor’s deputy. “Forget it,” he told Taylor. “I’m busy. I’m having fun with this
wonderful research.”43
There was another reason Roberts resisted, which Taylor could sense. “Larry was from
MIT with a doctorate, and I was from Texas with just a master’s,” Taylor later said. “So I
suspect he didn’t want to work for me.”44
Taylor, however, was a clever and stubborn Texan. In the fall of 1966, he asked Herzfeld,
“Charlie, doesn’t ARPA fund 51 percent of Lincoln Laboratory?” Herzfeld confirmed that.
“Well, you know this networking project that I want to do, I’m having a hard time getting the
program manager that I want, and he works at Lincoln Laboratory.” Perhaps Herzfeld could
call the head of the lab, Taylor suggested, and say that it would be in its interest to convince
Roberts to accept the job. It was a Texas way of doing business, as the president at the time,
Lyndon Johnson, would have appreciated. The lab’s chief was no dummy. “It would probably
be a nice thing for all of us if you’d consider this,” he pointed out to Roberts after getting
Herzfeld’s call.
So in December 1966, Larry Roberts went to work at ARPA. “I blackmailed Larry Roberts
into becoming famous,” Taylor later said.45
When Roberts first moved to Washington, around Christmas, he and his wife stayed for a
few weeks with Taylor while looking for a home. Even though they were not destined to be
personal pals, the relationship between the two men was cordial and professional, at least
during their years at ARPA.46
Roberts was not as genial as Licklider, nor as extroverted as Taylor, nor as congregational
as Bob Noyce. “Larry’s a cold fish,” according to Taylor.47 Instead he had a trait that was just
as useful in promoting collaborative creativity and managing a team: he was decisive. More
important, his decisiveness was based not on emotion or personal favoritism but rather on a
rational and precise analysis of options. His colleagues respected his decisions, even if they
disagreed with them, because he was clear, crisp, and fair. It was one of the advantages of
having a true product engineer in charge. Uncomfortable at being Taylor’s deputy, Roberts
was able to work out an arrangement with ARPA’s top boss, Charlie Herzfeld, to be
designated the agency’s chief scientist instead. “I managed contracts during the day and did
my networking research at night,” he recalled.48
Taylor, on the other hand, was jocular and gregarious, sometimes to a fault. “I’m an
outgoing person,” he observed. Each year he would convene a conference of the ARPA-
funded researchers and another for their best graduate students, usually in fun places like
Park City, Utah, and New Orleans. He made each researcher give a presentation, and then
everyone could pile on with questions and suggestions. In that way he got to know the rising
stars around the country, making him a magnet for talent that would later serve him well
when he went to work at Xerox PARC. It also helped him accomplish one of the most
important tasks in building a network: getting everyone to buy into the idea.
ARPANET
Taylor knew that he needed to sell the time-sharing network idea to the people it was
intended to help, namely the researchers who were getting ARPA funding. So he invited them
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to a meeting at the University of Michigan in April 1967, where he had Roberts present the
plan. The computer sites would be connected, Roberts explained, by leased phone lines. He
described two possible architectures: a hub system with a central computer in a place like
Omaha that would route information, or a weblike system that looked like a highway map
with lines crisscrossing as they were spun from place to place. Roberts and Taylor had begun
to favor the decentralized approach; it would be safer. The information could be passed along
from node to node until it reached its destination.
Many of the participants were reluctant to join the network. “The universities in general
did not want to share their computers with anybody,” Roberts said. “They wanted to buy their
own machines and hide in the corner.”49 Nor did they want the valuable processing time of
their computers to be nibbled away by having to handle the traffic routing that would come
with being on the network. The first to dissent were Marvin Minsky of the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Lab and his former colleague John McCarthy, who had moved to Stanford. Their
computers, they said, were already being used to the max. Why would they want to allow
others to tap into them? In addition they would have the burden of routing network traffic
from computers they didn’t know and whose language they didn’t speak. “Both complained
they would lose computing power and said they didn’t want to participate,” Taylor recalled.
“I told them they had to, because it would let me cut my funding of computers by a factor of
three.”50
Taylor was persuasive and Roberts persistent, and they pointed out to the participants that
they were all being funded by ARPA. “We are going to build a network and you are going to
participate in it,” Roberts declared flatly. “And you are going to connect it to your
machines.”51 They would get no more funding to buy computers until they were hooked into
the network.
Ideas are often sparked by the exchanges at meetings, and one popped up at the end of the
Michigan session that helped to defuse opposition to the network. It came from Wes Clark,
who had conceived a personal computer at Lincoln Laboratory dubbed the LINC. He was
more interested in developing computers designed for individual use than he was in
promoting time-sharing of large computers, so he hadn’t been paying much attention. But as
the meeting was ending he realized why it was hard getting the research centers to accept the
network idea. “Just before we broke up, I do remember suddenly realizing what the meta-
problem was,” he said. “I passed Larry a note saying that I thought I saw how to solve the
problem.”52 On the ride to the airport, in a rental car that Taylor was driving, Clark explained
his idea to Roberts, along with two other colleagues. ARPA should not force the research
computers at each site to handle the routing of data, Clark argued. Instead ARPA should
design and give each site a standardized minicomputer that would do the routing. The big
research computer at each site would then have only the simple task of establishing a
connection with its ARPA-supplied routing minicomputer. This had three advantages: it
would take most of the burden off the host site’s mainframe, give ARPA the power to
standardize the network, and allow the routing of data to be completely distributed rather than
controlled by a few big hubs.
Taylor embraced the idea right away. Roberts asked a few questions and then agreed. The
network would be managed by the standardized minicomputers that Clark had suggested,
which became known as Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. Later they would simply be
called “routers.”
When they got to the airport, Taylor asked who should build these IMPs. Clark said it was
obvious: the task should be assigned to Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge firm
where Licklider had worked. But also in the car was Al Blue, who was in charge of
compliance issues at ARPA. He reminded the group that the project would have to be sent
out for bids in accordance with federal contracting standards.53
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At a follow-up conference in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in October 1967, Roberts presented the
revised plan for the network. He also gave it a name, ARPA Net, which later morphed into
ARPANET. But one issue remained unresolved: Would communication between two places
on the network require a dedicated line between them, as a phone call did? Or was there some
practical way to allow multiple data streams to share lines simultaneously, sort of like a time-
sharing system for phone lines? Potential specifications for such a data network had been
proposed earlier that month by a committee at the Pentagon.
That is when a young engineer from England, Roger Scantlebury, got up to present a paper
describing the research of his boss, Donald Davies of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory.
It provided an answer: a method of breaking messages into small units that Davies had
dubbed “packets.” Scantlebury added that the idea had been developed independently by a
researcher named Paul Baran at RAND. After the talk, Larry Roberts and others gathered
around Scantlebury to learn more, then moved on to the bar to discuss it late into the night.
PACKET SWITCHING: PAUL BARAN, DONALD DAVIES, AND
LEONARD KLEINROCK
There are many ways of sending data through a network. The simplest, known as circuit
switching, is the way a phone system does it: a set of switches creates a dedicated circuit for
signals to go back and forth for the duration of the conversation, and the connection remains
open, even during long pauses. Another method is message switching or, as the telegraph
operators called it, store-and-forward switching. In this system, an entire message is given an
address header, sent into the network, and then passed along from node to node as it wends
its way to its destination.
An even more efficient method is packet switching, a special type of store-and-forward
switching in which the messages are broken into bite-size units of the exact same size, called
packets, which are given address headers describing where they should go. These packets are
then sent hopping through the network to their destination by being passed along from node
to node, using whatever links are most available at that instant. If certain links start getting
clogged with too much data, some of the packets will be routed to alternative paths. When all
the packets get to their destination node, they are reassembled based on the instructions in the
headers. “It’s like breaking a long letter into dozens of postcards, each numbered and
addressed to the same place,” explained Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s pioneers. “Each may
take different routes to get to the destination, and then they’re reassembled.”54
As Scantlebury explained in Gatlinburg, the person who first fully conceived a packet-
switched network was an engineer named Paul Baran (pronounced BEAR-en). His family
had immigrated from Poland when he was two and settled in Philadelphia, where his father
opened a small grocery store. After graduating from Drexel in 1949, Baran joined Presper
Eckert and John Mauchly in their new computer company, where he tested components for
UNIVAC. He moved to Los Angeles, took night classes at UCLA, and eventually got a job at
the RAND Corporation.
When the Russians tested a hydrogen bomb in 1955, Baran found his life mission: to help
prevent a nuclear holocaust. One day at RAND he was looking at the weekly list sent by the
Air Force of topics it needed researched, and he seized on one that related to building a
military communications system that would survive an enemy attack. He knew that such a
system could help prevent a nuclear exchange, because if one side feared that its
communications system could be knocked out it would be more likely to launch a preemptive
first strike when tensions mounted. With survivable communications systems, nations would
not feel the need to adopt a hair-trigger posture.
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Donald Davies (1924–2000).
194

Paul Baran (1926–2011).
195

Leonard Kleinrock (1934– ).
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Vint Cerf (1943– ) and Bob Kahn (1938– ).
Baran came up with two key ideas, which he began publishing in 1960. His first was that
the network should not be centralized; there should be no main hub that controlled all the
switching and routing. Nor should it even be merely decentralized, with the control in many
regional hubs, like AT&T’s phone system or the route map of a major airline. If the enemy
took out a few such hubs, the system could be incapacitated. Instead control should be
completely distributed. In other words, each and every node should have equal power to
switch and route the flow of data. This would become the defining trait of the Internet, the
ingrained attribute that would allow it to empower individuals and make it resistant to
centralized control.
He drew a network that looked like a fishnet. All of the nodes would have the power to
route traffic, and they were each connected to a few other nodes. If any one of the nodes was
destroyed, then the traffic would just be routed along other paths. “There is no central
control,” Baran explained. “A simple local routing policy is performed at each node.” He
figured out that even if each node had only three or four links, the system would have almost
unlimited resilience and survivability. “Just a redundancy level of maybe three or four would
permit almost as robust a network as the theoretical limit.”55
“Having figured out how to get robustness, I then had to tackle the problem of getting
signals through this fishnet type of network,” Baran recounted.56 This led to his second idea,
which was to break up the data into standard-size little blocks. A message would be broken
into many of these blocks, each of which would scurry along different paths through the
network’s nodes and be reassembled when they got to their destination. “A universally
standardized message block would be composed of perhaps 1024 bits,” he wrote. “Most of
the message block would be reserved for whatever type data is to be transmitted, while the
remainder would contain housekeeping information such as error detection and routing data.”
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Baran then collided with one of the realities of innovation, which was that entrenched
bureaucracies are resistant to change. RAND recommended his packet-switched network idea
to the Air Force, which, after a thorough review, decided to build one. But then the
Department of Defense decreed that any such undertaking should be handled by the Defense
Communications Agency so that it could be used by all of the service branches. Baran
realized that the Agency would never have the desire or the ability to get it done.
So he tried to convince AT&T to supplement its circuit-switched voice network with a
packet-switched data network. “They fought it tooth and nail,” he recalled. “They tried all
sorts of things to stop it.” They would not even let RAND use the maps of its circuits, so
Baran had to use a leaked set. He made several trips to AT&T headquarters in lower
Manhattan. On one of them, a senior executive who was an old-fashioned analog engineer
looked stunned when Baran explained that his system would mean that data could go back
and forth without a dedicated circuit remaining open the whole time. “He looked at his
colleagues in the room while his eyeballs rolled up sending a signal of his utter disbelief,”
according to Baran. After a pause, the executive said, “Son, here’s how a telephone works,”
and proceeded with a patronizing and simplistic description.
When Baran continued to push his seemingly preposterous notion that messages could be
chopped up and skedaddle through the net as tiny packets, AT&T invited him and other
outsiders to a series of seminars explaining how its system really worked. “It took ninety-four
separate speakers to describe the entire system,” Baran marveled. When it was over, the
AT&T executives asked Baran, “Now do you see why packet switching wouldn’t work?” To
their great disappointment, Baran simply replied, “No.” Once again, AT&T was stymied by
the innovator’s dilemma. It balked at considering a whole new type of data network because
it was so invested in traditional circuits.57
Baran’s work eventually culminated in eleven volumes of detailed engineering analysis,
On Distributed Communications, completed in 1964. He insisted that it not be classified as
secret because he realized such a system worked best if the Russians had one as well.
Although Bob Taylor read some of it, no one else at ARPA did, so Baran’s idea had little
impact until it was brought to the attention of Larry Roberts at the 1967 Gatlinburg
conference. When he returned to Washington, Roberts unearthed Baran’s reports, dusted
them off, and began to read.
Roberts also got hold of the papers written by Donald Davies’s group in England, which
Scantlebury had summarized in Gatlinburg. Davies was the son of a Welsh coal mine clerk
who died a few months after his son was born, in 1924. Young Davies was raised in
Portsmouth by his mother, who worked for Britain’s General Post Office, which ran the
nation’s telephone system. He spent his childhood playing with telephone circuits, then
earned degrees in math and physics at Imperial College in London. During the war he worked
at Birmingham University creating alloys for nuclear weapons tubes as an assistant to Klaus
Fuchs, who turned out to be a Soviet spy. He went on to work with Alan Turing building the
Automatic Computing Engine, a stored-program computer, at the National Physical
Laboratory.
Davies developed two interests: computer time-sharing, which he had learned about during
a 1965 visit to MIT, and the use of phone lines for data communications. Combining these
ideas in his head, he hit upon the goal of finding a method similar to time-sharing for
maximizing the use of communications lines. This led him to the same concepts that Baran
had developed about the efficiency of bite-size message units. He also came up with a good
old English word for them: packets. In trying to convince the General Post Office to adopt the
system, Davies ran into the same problem that Baran had when knocking on the door of
AT&T. But they both found a fan in Washington. Larry Roberts not only embraced their
ideas; he also adopted the word packet.58
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A third and somewhat more controversial contributor in this mix was Leonard Kleinrock, a
joyful, affable, and occasionally self-promoting expert on the flow of data in networks, who
became close friends with Larry Roberts when they shared an office as doctoral students at
MIT. Kleinrock grew up in New York City in a family of poor immigrants. His interest in
electronics was sparked when, at the age of six, he was reading a Superman comic and saw
instructions for building a crystal radio with no battery. He pieced together a toilet paper roll,
one of his father’s razor blades, some wire, and graphite from a pencil, and then convinced
his mother to take him on the subway to lower Manhattan to buy a variable capacitor at an
electronics store. The contraption worked, and a lifelong fascination with electronics
blossomed. “I still am awed by it,” he recalled of the radio. “It still seems magical.” He began
scoring radio tube manuals from surplus stores and scavenging discarded radios from
Dumpsters, picking apart their components like a vulture so he could build his own radios.59
Unable to afford college, even at tuition-free City College of New York, he worked days at
an electronics firm and took night courses. The instructors at night were more practical than
those during the day; instead of being taught the theory of a transistor, Kleinrock remembered
his teacher telling him how heat-sensitive they were and how to adjust for the expected
temperature when designing a circuit. “You’d never learn such practical things in the day
session,” he recalled. “The instructors just wouldn’t know that.”60
After graduating, he won a fellowship to do his doctorate at MIT. There he studied queuing
theory, which looks at such questions as what an average wait time in a line might be
depending on a variety of factors, and in his dissertation he formulated some of the
underlying math that analyzed how messages would flow and bottlenecks arise in switched
data networks. In addition to sharing an office with Roberts, Kleinrock was a classmate of
Ivan Sutherland and went to lectures by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. “It was a real
hotbed of intellectual brilliance,” he recalled of MIT at the time.61
Late one night at the MIT computer lab, a tired Kleinrock was running one of the
machines, a huge experimental computer known as the TX-2, and heard an unfamiliar
“psssssss” sound. “I began to get very worried,” he recalled. “There was an empty slot where
a piece of the machine had been removed to be repaired, and my eyes raised up and I looked
at that slot and looking back were two eyes!” It was Larry Roberts, playing a prank on him.62
The effervescent Kleinrock and the tightly controlled Roberts remained pals, despite (or
maybe because of) their difference in personalities. They enjoyed going to Las Vegas casinos
together to try to outsmart the house. Roberts came up with a card-counting scheme for
blackjack, based on tracking both high and low cards, and he taught it to Kleinrock. “We got
kicked out once, playing with my wife at the Hilton, when the casino managers were
watching us through the ceiling and became suspicious when I bought insurance on a hand
when you normally wouldn’t unless you knew there weren’t many high cards left,” Roberts
recalled. Another ploy involved trying to calculate the trajectory of the ball at the roulette
table using a counter made from transistors and an oscillator. It would measure the velocity of
the ball and predict which side of the wheel it would end up on, allowing them to bet with
more favorable odds. To gather the necessary data, Roberts had his hand wrapped in gauze to
hide a recorder. The croupier, figuring something was afoot, looked at them and asked,
“Would you like me to break your other arm?” He and Kleinrock decided not, and left.63
In his MIT dissertation proposal, written in 1961, Kleinrock proposed exploring the
mathematical basis for predicting traffic jams in a weblike network. In this and related
papers, he described a store-and-forward network—“communication nets in which there is
storage at each of the nodes”—but not a purely packet-switched network, in which the
messages would be broken up into very small units of the exact same size. He addressed the
issue of “the average delay experienced by a message as it passes through the net” and
analyzed how imposing a priority structure that included breaking messages into pieces
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would help solve the problem. He did not, however, use the term packet nor introduce a
concept that closely resembled one.64
Kleinrock was a gregarious and eager colleague, but he was never known for emulating
Licklider in being reticent about claiming credit. He would later alienate many of the other
developers of the Internet by asserting that, in his PhD thesis and his paper proposing it (both
written after Baran began formulating packet switching at RAND), he had “developed the
basic principles of packet switching” and “the mathematical theory of packet networks, the
technology underpinning the Internet.”65 Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began an energetic
campaign to be recognized “as the Father of Modern Data Networking.”66 He claimed in a
1996 interview, “My dissertation laid out the basic principles for packet switching.”67
This led to an outcry among many of the other Internet pioneers, who publicly attacked
Kleinrock and said that his brief mention of breaking messages into smaller pieces did not
come close to being a proposal for packet switching. “Kleinrock is a prevaricator,” said Bob
Taylor. “His claim to have anything to do with the invention of packet switching is typical
incorrigible self-promotion, which he has been guilty of from day one.”68 (Countered
Kleinrock, “Taylor is disgruntled because he never got the recognition he thought he
deserved.”69)
Donald Davies, the British researcher who coined the term packet, was a gentle and
reticent researcher who never boasted of his accomplishments. People called him humble to a
fault. But as he was dying, he wrote a paper to be published posthumously that attacked
Kleinrock in surprisingly strong terms. “The work of Kleinrock before and up to 1964 gives
him no claim to have originated packet switching,” Davies wrote after an exhaustive analysis.
“The passage in his book on time-sharing queue discipline, if pursued to a conclusion, might
have led him to packet switching, but it did not. . . . I can find no evidence that he understood
the principles of packet switching.”70 Alex McKenzie, an engineer who managed BBN’s
network control center, would later be even more blunt: “Kleinrock claims to have introduced
the idea of packetization. This is utter nonsense; there is NOTHING in the entire 1964 book
that suggests, analyzes, or alludes to the idea of packetization.” He called Kleinrock’s claims
“ludicrous.”71
The backlash against Kleinrock was so bitter that it became the subject of a 2001 New York
Times article by Katie Hafner. In it she described how the usual collegial attitude of the
Internet pioneers had been shattered by Kleinrock’s claim of priority for the concept of
packet switching. Paul Baran, who did deserve to be known as the father of packet switching,
came forward to say that “the Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” and he
pointedly declared that most people involved did not assert claims of credit. “It’s just this one
little case that seems to be an aberration,” he added, referring disparagingly to Kleinrock.72
Interestingly, until the mid-1990s Kleinrock had credited others with coming up with the
idea of packet switching. In a paper published in November 1978, he cited Baran and Davies
as pioneers of the concept: “In the early 1960’s, Paul Baran had described some of the
properties of data networks in a series of RAND Corporation papers. . . . In 1968 Donald
Davies at the National Physical Laboratories in England was beginning to write about packet-
switched networks.”73 Likewise, in a 1979 paper describing the development of distributed
networks, Kleinrock neither mentioned nor cited his own work from the early 1960s. As late
as 1990 he was still declaring that Baran was the first to conceive of packet switching: “I
would credit him [Baran] with the first ideas.”74 However, when Kleinrock’s 1979 paper was
reprinted in 2002, he wrote a new introduction that claimed, “I developed the underlying
principles of packet switching, having published the first paper on the subject in 1961.”75
In fairness to Kleinrock, whether or not he had claimed that his work in the early 1960s
devised packet switching, he would have been (and still should be) accorded great respect as
an Internet pioneer. He was indisputably an important early theorist of data flow in networks
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and also a valued leader in building the ARPANET. He was one of the first to calculate the
effect of breaking up messages as they were passed from node to node. In addition, Roberts
found his theoretical work valuable and enlisted him to be part of the implementation team
for the ARPANET. Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the
opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them.
The Kleinrock controversy is interesting because it shows that most of the Internet’s
creators preferred—to use the metaphor of the Internet itself—a system of fully distributed
credit. They instinctively isolated and routed around any node that tried to claim more
significance than the others. The Internet was born of an ethos of creative collaboration and
distributed decision making, and its founders liked to protect that heritage. It became
ingrained in their personalities—and in the DNA of the Internet itself.
WAS IT NUKE-RELATED?
One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a
nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts,
who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the
innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have
different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and
Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have
begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers.
There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND
reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic
system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he
explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and
so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication
system.”76 That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a
preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive
an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very
interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”77
So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several
hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”78
That may have been Baran’s goal, but remember that he never convinced the Air Force to
build such a system. Instead his concepts were adopted by Roberts and Taylor, who insisted
that they were merely seeking to create a resource-sharing network for ARPA researchers,
not one that would survive an attack. “People have been taking what Paul Baran wrote about
a secure nuclear defense network and applying it to the ARPANET,” said Roberts. “Of
course, they had nothing to do with each other. What I told Congress was that this was for the
future of science in the world—the civilian world as well as the military—and the military
would benefit just as much as the rest of the world. But it clearly wasn’t for military
purposes. And I didn’t mention nuclear war.”79 At one point Time magazine reported that the
Internet had been built to assure communications after a nuclear attack, and Taylor wrote a
letter to the editors correcting them. Time didn’t print it. “They sent me back a letter insisting
that their sources were correct,” he recalled.80
Time’s sources were higher in the chain of command than Taylor. Those who worked at
ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, which was responsible for the network
project, may have sincerely believed that their project had nothing to do with nuclear
survivability, but some of the higher-ups at ARPA believed that was, in fact, one of its
critical missions. And that is how they convinced Congress to keep funding it.
Stephen Lukasik was the deputy director of ARPA from 1967 to 1970 and then director
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until 1975. In June 1968 he was able to get the formal authorization and appropriation for
Roberts to proceed with building the network. That was just a few months after the Tet
Offensive and the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Antiwar protests were at their height, and
students had rioted at top universities. Defense Department money was not flowing freely to
costly programs designed merely to allow collaboration among academic researchers. Senator
Mike Mansfield and others had begun demanding that only projects directly relevant to a
military mission get funding. “So in this environment,” Lukasik said, “I would have been
hard pressed to plow a lot of money into the network just to improve the productivity of the
researchers. That rationale would just not have been strong enough. What was strong enough
was this idea that packet switching would be more survivable, more robust under damage to a
network. . . . In a strategic situation—meaning a nuclear attack—the president could still
communicate to the missile fields. So I can assure you, to the extent that I was signing the
checks, which I was from 1967 on, I was signing them because that was the need I was
convinced of.”81
In 2011 Lukasik was amused and somewhat annoyed by what had become the
conventional dogma, that the ARPANET had not been built for strategic military reasons. So
he wrote a piece entitled “Why the Arpanet Was Built,” which he circulated to colleagues.
“ARPA’s existence and its sole purpose was to respond to new national security concerns,”
he explained. “In the instant case it was the command and control of military forces,
especially those deriving from the existence of nuclear weapons and deterring their use.”82
This directly contradicted the statements of one of his predecessors as ARPA director,
Charles Herzfeld, the Viennese refugee who approved Bob Taylor’s proposal of a time-
sharing research network in 1965. “The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and
Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim,” Herzfeld insisted
many years later. “To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not
ARPA’s mission to do this.”83
Two semiofficial histories authorized by ARPA come down on opposite sides. “It was
from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow
related to building a network resistant to nuclear war,” said the history written by the Internet
Society. “This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study.”84 On the
other hand, the “Final Report” by the National Science Foundation in 1995 declared, “An
outgrowth of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the
ARPANET’s packet-switching scheme was meant to provide reliable communications in the
face of nuclear attack.”85
So which view is correct? In this case, both are. For the academics and researchers who
were actually building the network, it had only a peaceful purpose. For some of those who
were overseeing and funding the project, especially in the Pentagon and Congress, it also had
a military rationale. Stephen Crocker was a graduate student in the late 1960s who became
integrally involved in coordinating how the ARPANET would be designed. He never
considered nuclear survivability to be part of his mission. Yet when Lukasik sent around his
2011 paper, Crocker read it, smiled, and revised his thinking. “I was on top and you were on
the bottom, so you really had no idea of what was going on and why we were doing it,”
Lukasik told him. To which Crocker replied, with a dab of humor masking a dollop of
wisdom, “I was on the bottom and you were on the top, so you had no idea of what was going
on or what we were doing.”86
As Crocker finally realized, “You can’t get all the guys involved to agree on why it was
built.” Leonard Kleinrock, who had been his supervisor at UCLA, came to the same
conclusion: “We will never know if nuclear survivability was the motivation. It was an
unanswerable question. For me, there was no notion of a military rationale. But if you go up
the chain of command, I am sure that some were saying that surviving a nuclear attack was a
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reason.”87
The ARPANET ended up representing an interesting conjunction of military and academic
interests. It was funded by the Defense Department, which tended to want hierarchal
command systems with centralized controls. But the Pentagon had delegated the design of the
network to a bunch of academics, some of whom were avoiding being drafted and most of
whom had a distrust of centralized authority. Because they opted for a structure of limitless
nodes, each with its own router, rather than one based on a few centralized hubs, the network
would be hard to control. “My bias was always to build decentralization into the net,” Taylor
said. “That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central
organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them.”88 By picking people like Taylor to
build its network, the Pentagon was spawning one that it would not be able to fully control.
There was yet another layer of irony. The decentralized and distributed architecture meant
that the network would be more reliable. It could even withstand a nuclear attack. Building a
resilient and attack-proof military command-and-control system was not what motivated the
ARPA researchers. It wasn’t even in the back of their minds. But that was one reason they
ended up getting a steady stream of Pentagon and congressional funding for the project.
Even after the ARPANET morphed into the Internet in the early 1980s, it would continue
to serve both a military and a civilian purpose. Vint Cerf, a gentle and reflective thinker who
helped create the Internet, recalled, “I wanted to demonstrate that our technology could
survive a nuclear attack.” So in 1982 he ran a series of tests that replicated a nuclear attack
artificially. “There were a number of such simulations or demonstrations like that, some of
which were extremely ambitious. They involved the Strategic Air Command. At one point we
put airborne packet radios in the field while using the airborne systems to sew together
fragments of Internet that had been segregated by a simulated nuclear attack.” Radia Perlman,
one of the foremost women network engineers, developed at MIT protocols that would assure
network robustness in the face of malicious attacks, and she helped Cerf come up with ways
to partition and reconstruct the ARPANET when necessary to make it more survivable.89
This interplay of military and academic motives became ingrained in the Internet. “The
design of both the ARPANET and the Internet favored military values, such as survivability,
flexibility, and high performance, over commercial goals, such as low cost, simplicity, or
consumer appeal,” the technology historian Janet Abbate noted. “At the same time, the group
that designed and built ARPA’s networks was dominated by academic scientists, who
incorporated their own values of collegiality, decentralization of authority, and open
exchange of information into the system.”90 These academic researchers of the late 1960s,
many of whom associated with the antiwar counterculture, created a system that resisted
centralized command. It would route around any damage from a nuclear attack but also
around any attempt to impose control.
ONE GIANT LEAP: THE ARPANET HAS LANDED, OCTOBER
1969
In the summer of 1968, when much of the world, from Prague to Chicago, was being rocked
by political unrest, Larry Roberts sent out a solicitation for bids to companies that might want
to build the minicomputers that would be sent to each research center to serve as the routers,
or Interface Message Processors, of the proposed ARPANET. His plan incorporated the
packet-switching concept of Paul Baran and Donald Davies, the suggestion for standardized
IMPs proposed by Wes Clark, the theoretical insights of J. C. R. Licklider, Les Earnest, and
Leonard Kleinrock, and the contributions of many other inventors.
Of the 140 companies that received the request, only a dozen decided to submit bids. IBM,
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for example, didn’t. It doubted that the IMPs could be built at a reasonable price. Roberts
convened a committee meeting in Monterey, California, to assess the bids that had been
submitted, and Al Blue, the compliance officer, took pictures of each with measuring sticks
showing how thick they were.
Raytheon, the large Boston-area defense contractor that had been cofounded by Vannevar
Bush, emerged as the frontrunner, and even entered into price negotiations with Roberts. But
Bob Taylor stepped in and expressed the view, already being pushed by Wes Clark, that the
contract should go to BBN, which was not burdened with a multilayer corporate bureaucracy.
“I said that the corporate culture between Raytheon and the research universities would be
bad, like oil and water,” Taylor recalled.91 As Clark put it, “Bob overruled the committee.”
Roberts went along. “Raytheon had a good proposal that competed equally with BBN, and
the only distinguishing thing in the long run for my final decision was that BBN had a tighter
team organized in a way that I thought would be more effective,” he recalled.92
In contrast to the bureaucracy-laden Raytheon, BBN had a nimble band of brilliant
engineers, led by two refugees from MIT, Frank Heart and Robert Kahn.93 They helped to
improve Roberts’s proposal by specifying that when a packet was passed from one IMP to
the next, the sending IMP would keep it stored until it got an acknowledgment from the
receiving IMP, and it would resend the message if the acknowledgment didn’t come
promptly. That became a key to the net’s reliability. At each step, the design was being
improved by collective creativity.
Just before Christmas, Roberts surprised many by announcing the selection of BBN rather
than Raytheon. Senator Ted Kennedy sent the usual telegram that goes to a constituent who
lands a big federal project. In it, he congratulated BBN for being chosen to build the
Interfaith Message Processor, which in some ways was an apt description of the ecumenical
role of the Interface Message Processors.94
Roberts selected four research centers to be the first ARPANET nodes: UCLA, where Len
Kleinrock worked; Stanford Research Institute (SRI), with the visionary Douglas Engelbart;
the University of Utah, with Ivan Sutherland; and the University of California at Santa
Barbara. They were given the task of figuring out how their big “host” computers would
connect to the standardized IMPs that would be shipped to them. Like typical senior
professors, the researchers at these centers enlisted a motley crew of graduate students to do
the work.
The members of this young work team gathered in Santa Barbara to figure out how to
proceed, and they discovered a verity that would remain true even in the age of digital social
networks: it was useful—and fun—to get together in person, interfacing in the literal sense of
that word. “There was a kind of cocktail-party phenomenon where you find you have a lot of
rapport with each other,” recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team
who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet
regularly, rotating among their sites.
The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right
personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical
collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more
interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an
intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority,
which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent.
Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited
for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They
assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules
and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the
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host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate
students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington
or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker
recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the
authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be
open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so
by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to
the hackers and academics.
So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate
students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to
write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of
pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was
anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of
writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and
someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.” His
desire to be deferential kept him up at nights, literally. “I was living with my girlfriend and
her baby from a previous relationship at her parents’ house. The only place to work at night
without disturbing people was the bathroom, and I would stand there naked and scribble
down notes.”96
Crocker realized that he needed an unassertive name for the list of suggestions and
practices. “To emphasize the informal nature, I hit upon this silly little idea of calling every
one of them a ‘Request for Comments’—no matter whether it really was a request.” It was
the perfect phrase to encourage Internet-era collaboration—friendly, not bossy, inclusive, and
collegial. “It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions;
without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach
agreement,” Crocker wrote forty years later.97
The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the
postal system. (There was no such thing as email, since they hadn’t invented the network
yet.) In a warm and casual tone, devoid of any officiousness, Crocker set forth the task of
figuring out how the host computer at each institution should connect to the new network.
“During the summer of 1968, representatives from the initial four sites met several times to
discuss the host software,” he wrote. “I present here some of the tentative agreements reached
and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions
are expected.”98 The people who received RFC 1 felt that they were being included in a fun
process rather than being dictated to by a bunch of protocol czars. It was a network they were
talking about, so it made sense to try to loop everyone in.
The RFC process pioneered open-source development of software, protocols, and content.
“That culture of open processes was essential in enabling the Internet to grow and evolve as
spectacularly as it has,” Crocker said later.99 Even more broadly, it became the standard for
collaboration in the digital age. Thirty years after RFC 1, Vint Cerf wrote a philosophical
RFC called “The Great Conversation” that began, “A long time ago, in a network far, far
away . . .” After describing the informal way RFCs had begun, Cerf continued, “Hiding in the
history of the RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work.”100 It
was a grand statement, and it would have seemed overblown except that it was true.
The RFCs produced a set of host-to-IMP standards by the end of August 1969, just when the
first IMP was shipped to Kleinrock’s lab. When it arrived at the UCLA loading dock, a dozen
people were there to greet it: Crocker, Kleinrock, a few other team members, and Cerf and
his wife, Sigrid, who had brought champagne. They were surprised to see that the IMP was
the size of a refrigerator and was clad, as per the specifications of the military machine that it
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was, in battleship-gray steel. It was wheeled into the computer room, plugged in, and started
right up. BBN had done great work, delivering on time and on budget.
One machine does not a network make. It was not until a month later, when a second IMP
was delivered to SRI on the edge of the Stanford campus, that the ARPANET could truly get
up and running. On October 29 the connection was ready to be made. The event was
appropriately casual. It had none of the drama of the “one small step for man, one giant leap
for mankind” that had occurred on the moon a few weeks earlier, with a half billion people
watching on television. Instead it was an undergraduate named Charley Kline, under the eye
of Crocker and Cerf, who put on a telephone headset to coordinate with a researcher at SRI
while typing in a login sequence that he hoped would allow his terminal at UCLA to connect
through the network to the computer 354 miles away in Palo Alto. He typed in “L.” The guy
at SRI told him that it had been received. Then he typed in “O.” That, too, was confirmed.
When he typed in “G,” the system hit a memory snag because of an auto-complete feature
and crashed. Nevertheless, the first message had been sent across the ARPANET, and if it
wasn’t as eloquent as “The Eagle has landed” or “What has God wrought,” it was suitable in
its understated way: “Lo.” As in “Lo and behold.” In his logbook, Kline recorded, in a
memorably minimalist notation, “22:30. Talked to SRI Host to Host. CSK.”101
It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock,
Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and
Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for
almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley
were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor.
And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these
(perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines.
THE INTERNET
The ARPANET was not yet the Internet. It was just one network. Within a few years, there
were other packet-switched networks that were similar but not interconnected. For example,
engineers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) wanted a local-area network to
connect the office workstations they were designing in the early 1970s, and a recent Harvard
PhD there named Bob Metcalfe created a way to use coaxial cable (the type that plugs into
cable TV boxes) to create a high-bandwidth system that he named “Ethernet.” It was modeled
on a wireless network developed in Hawaii known as ALOHAnet, which sent packet data
through UHF and satellite signals. In addition, there was a packet radio network in San
Francisco, known as PRNET, and also a satellite version called SATNET. Despite their
similarities, these packet-switched networks were not compatible or interoperable.
In early 1973 Robert Kahn set out to remedy that. There should be a way, he decided, to
allow all these networks to interconnect, and he was in a position to make that happen. He
had left BBN, where he had helped develop the IMPs, to become a project manager at
ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office. Having worked on the ARPANET and
then PRNET, he made it his mission to create a method to connect them and other packet
networks, a system that he and his colleagues began calling an “internetwork.” After a while,
that word got shortened a bit, to “internet.”
To be his partner in this endeavor, Kahn tapped Vint Cerf, who had been Steve Crocker’s
sidekick on the group writing Requests for Comments and figuring out the protocols of the
ARPANET. Cerf was raised in Los Angeles, where his father worked for a company that
made engines for the Apollo space program. Like Gordon Moore, he grew up playing with a
chemistry set in the days when they were delightfully dangerous. “We had things like
powdered magnesium, powdered aluminum, and sulfur and glycerin and potassium
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permanganate,” he recalled. “When you pour them together, they burst into flame.” In fifth
grade he was bored with math, so his teacher gave him a seventh-grade algebra book. “I spent
the whole summer working every single problem in the book,” he said. “I liked the word
problems the best because they were like little mystery stories. You had to figure out who ‘x’
was, and I was always curious to find out what’s ‘x’ going to turn out to be.” He also became
deeply immersed in science fiction, especially the stories of Robert Heinlein, and began his
lifelong practice of rereading J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy almost every year.102
Because he had been born prematurely, Cerf was hearing impaired, and he began using a
hearing aid at age thirteen. Around that time he also started wearing a coat and tie to school
and carrying a briefcase. “I didn’t want to fit in with everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to
look different, be noticed. That was a very effective way to do it, and it was better than
wearing a nose ring, which I figured my Dad would not have put up with in the 1950’s.”103
In high school he became best friends with Crocker, and they spent weekends together
doing science projects and playing 3-D chess. After graduating from Stanford and working
for IBM for two years, he became a doctoral student at UCLA, where he worked in
Kleinrock’s group. There he met Bob Kahn, and they remained close after Kahn went to
work at BBN and then ARPA.
When Kahn embarked on his internetwork endeavor in the spring of 1973, he visited Cerf
and described all the packet-switched networks that had sprung up in addition to the
ARPANET. “How are we going to hook these different kinds of packet-nets to each other?”
Kahn asked. Cerf seized on the challenge, and the two of them launched into a three-month
burst of collaboration that would lead to the creation of the Internet. “He and I clicked
instantly on this,” Kahn later said. “Vint is the kind of guy who likes to roll up his sleeves
and say let’s get on with it. I thought that was a breath of fresh air.”104
They began by organizing a meeting at Stanford in June 1973 to gather ideas. As a result of
this collaborative approach, Cerf later said, the solution “turned out to be the open protocol
that everybody had a finger in at one time or another.”105 But most of the work was done as a
duet by Kahn and Cerf, who holed up for intense sessions at Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo
Alto or at a hotel next to Dulles Airport. “Vint liked to get up and draw these spider
drawings,” Kahn recalled. “Often times we would have a conversation back and forth and he
would say, ‘Let me draw a picture of that.’ ”106
One day in October 1973, Cerf made a simple sketch in a San Francisco hotel lobby that
codified their approach. It showed various networks like the ARPANET and PRNET, each
with lots of host computers connected to them, and a set of “gateway” computers that would
pass packets between each of the networks. Finally, they spent an entire weekend together at
the ARPA office near the Pentagon, where they stayed up almost two nights straight and then
ended up at a nearby Marriott for a triumphal breakfast.
They rejected the idea that the networks could each keep their own different protocols,
although that would have been easier to sell. They wanted a common protocol. That would
allow the new internetwork to scale up explosively, since any computer or network using the
new protocol could link in without requiring a translation system. The traffic between
ARPANET and any other network should be seamless. So they came up with the idea of
having every computer adopt the same method and template for addressing its packets. It was
as if every postcard mailed in the world had to have a four-line address specifying street
number and city and country using the Roman alphabet.
The result was an Internet Protocol (IP) that specified how to put the packet’s destination
in its header and helped determine how it would travel through networks to get there. Layered
above it was a higher-level Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that instructed how to put
the packets back together in the right order, checked to see if any of them was missing, and
requested retransmission of any information that had been lost. These became known as TCP/
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IP. Kahn and Cerf published them as a paper called “A Protocol for Packet Network
Interconnection.” The Internet was born.
On the twentieth anniversary of the ARPANET in 1989, Kleinrock and Cerf and many of the
other pioneers gathered at UCLA, where the network’s first node had been installed. There
were poems and songs and doggerel written to celebrate the occasion. Cerf performed a
parody of Shakespeare, titled “Rosencrantz and Ethernet,” that raised to a Hamlet-like
question the choice between packet switching and dedicated circuits:

All the world’s a net! And all the data in it merely packets come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are heard no more. ’Tis a
network waiting to be switched!
To switch or not to switch? That is the question:
Whether ’tis wiser in the net to suffer
The store and forward of stochastic networks,
Or to raise up circuits against a sea of packets,
And by dedication serve them?107

A generation later, in 2014, Cerf was working at Google in Washington, DC, still enjoying
himself and marveling at the wonders they had wrought by creating the Internet. Wearing
Google Glass, he noted that every year brings something new. “Social networks—I joined
Facebook as an experiment—business apps, mobile, new things keep piling onto the
Internet,” he said. “It has scaled up a million times over. Not many things can do that without
breaking. And yet those old protocols we created are doing just fine.”108
NETWORKED CREATIVITY
So who does deserve the most credit for inventing the Internet? (Hold the inevitable Al Gore
jokes. We will get to his role—yes, he did have one—in chapter 10.) As with the question of
who invented the computer, the answer is that it was a case of collaborative creativity. As
Paul Baran later explained to the technology writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, using a
beautiful image that applies to all innovation:

The process of technological development is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and
each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, “I built a cathedral.” Next month another block is placed atop the previous
one. Then comes along an historian who asks, “Well, who built the cathedral?” Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If
you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to
follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.109

The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it
was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and
freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that
facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the
belief that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian
diktats should be circumvented. As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet
Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough
consensus and running code.”110 The result was a networked commons, a place where
innovations could be crowd-sourced and open-source.
Innovation is not a loner’s endeavor, and the Internet was a prime example. “With
computer networks, the loneliness of research is supplanted by the richness of shared
research,” proclaimed the first issue of ARPANET News, the new network’s official
newsletter.
The network pioneers J. C. R. Licklider and Bob Taylor realized that the Internet, because
of how it was built, had an inherent tendency to encourage peer-to-peer connections and the
formation of online communities. This opened up beautiful possibilities. “Life will be happier
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for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be
selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity,” they
wrote in a visionary 1968 paper titled “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Their
optimism verged on utopianism. “There will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can
afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and
disciplines, will be open to him.”111
But it didn’t happen right away. After the Internet was created in the mid-1970s, there
were a few more innovations necessary before it could become a transformative tool. It was
still a gated community, open primarily to researchers at military and academic institutions. It
wasn’t until the early 1980s that civilian counterparts to ARPANET were fully opened, and it
would take yet another decade before most ordinary home users could get in.
There was, in addition, one other major limiting factor: the only people who could use the
Internet were those who had hands-on access to computers, which were still big, intimidating,
costly, and not something you could run down to Radio Shack and buy. The digital age could
not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal.
Ken Kesey (1935–2001) holding a flute on the bus.
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Stewart Brand (1938– ).
210

The first issue, fall 1968.
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CHAPTER EIGHT

THE PERSONAL COMPUTER
“AS WE MAY THINK”
The idea of a personal computer, one that ordinary individuals could get their hands on and
take home, was envisioned in 1945 by Vannevar Bush. After building his big analog
computer at MIT and helping to create the military-industrial-academic triangle, he wrote an
essay for the July 1945 issue of the Atlantic titled “As We May Think.”271 In it he conjured up
the possibility of a personal machine, which he dubbed a memex, that would store and
retrieve a person’s words, pictures, and other information: “Consider a future device for
individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. . . . A memex is a
device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is
mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged
intimate supplement to his memory.” The word intimate was important. Bush and his
followers focused on ways to make close, personal connections between man and machine.
Bush imagined that the device would have a “direct entry” mechanism, such as a keyboard,
so you could put information and your records into its memory. He even predicted hypertext
links, file sharing, and ways to collaborate on projects. “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias
will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be
dropped into the memex and there amplified,” he wrote, anticipating Wikipedia by a half
century.
As it turned out, computers did not emerge the way that Bush envisioned, at least not
initially. Instead of becoming personal tools and memory banks for individuals to use, they
became hulking industrial and military colossi that researchers could time-share but the
average person could not touch. By the early 1970s innovative companies such as DEC were
making minicomputers the size of a small refrigerator, but they dismissed the idea that there
would be a market for desktop models that could be owned and operated by ordinary folks. “I
can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own,” DEC president Ken
Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting where his operations committee was debating whether
to create a smaller version of its PDP-8 for personal consumers.2 As a result, the personal
computer revolution, when it erupted in the mid-1970s, was led by scruffy entrepreneurs in
strip malls and garages who started companies with names like Altair and Apple.
THE CULTURAL BREW
The personal computer was made possible by a number of technological advances, most
notably the microprocessor, a circuit etched on a tiny chip that integrated all of the functions
of a computer’s central processing unit. But social forces also help drive and shape
innovations, which then bear the imprint of the cultural milieu into which they were born.
Rarely has there been a more potent cultural amalgam than the one that bubbled up in the San
Francisco Bay Area beginning in the 1960s, and it turned out to be ripe for producing
homebrewed computers.
What were the tribes that formed that cultural mix?3 It began with the pocket protector–
wearing engineers who migrated to the area with the growth of defense contractors, such as
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Westinghouse and Lockheed. Next there arose an entrepreneurial startup culture, exemplified
by Intel and Atari, where creativity was encouraged and stultifying bureaucracies disdained.
The hackers who moved west from MIT brought their craving for hands-on computers that
they could touch and play with. There was also a subculture populated by wireheads,
phreakers, and hard-core hobbyists who got their kicks hacking into the Bell System’s phone
lines or the time-shared computers of big corporations. And emanating from San Francisco
and Berkeley were idealists and community organizers who sought ways, in the words of one
of them, Liza Loop, “to co-opt technological advances for progressive purposes and thereby
triumph over the bureaucratic mindset.”4
Added to this mix were three countercultural strands. There were the hippies, born out of
the Bay Area’s beat generation, whose merry rebelliousness was fueled by psychedelics and
rock music. There were the New Left activists, who spawned the Free Speech Movement at
Berkeley and the antiwar protests on campuses around the world. And interwoven with them
were the Whole Earth communalists, who believed in controlling their own tools, sharing
resources, and resisting the conformity and centralized authority imposed by power elites.
As different as some of these tribes were from each other, their worlds intermingled and
they shared many values. They aspired to a do-it-yourself creativity that was nurtured by
building Heathkit radios as kids, reading the Whole Earth Catalog in college, and fantasizing
about someday joining a commune. Ingrained in them was the very American belief, so
misunderstood by Tocqueville, that rugged individualism and the desire to form associations
were totally compatible, even complementary, especially when it involved creating things
collaboratively. The maker culture in America, ever since the days of community barn raisers
and quilting bees, often involved do-it-ourselves rather than do-it-yourself. In addition, many
of these Bay Area tribes of the late 1960s shared a resistance to power elites and a desire to
control their own access to information. Technology should be made open and friendly and
convivial rather than daunting and mysterious and Orwellian. As Lee Felsenstein, one of the
avatars of many of these cultural strands, put it, “We wanted there to be personal computers
so that we could free ourselves from the constraints of institutions, whether government or
corporate.”5
Ken Kesey was a muse of the hippie strand of this cultural tapestry. After graduating from the
University of Oregon, he went to the Bay Area in 1958 as a graduate student in Stanford’s
creative writing program. While there, he worked the overnight shift at a mental hospital and
signed up to be a guinea pig in a CIA-funded series of experiments, Project MKUltra, testing
the effects of the psychedelic drug LSD. Kesey ended up liking the drug, very much. The
combustible combination of creative writing, dropping acid for pay, and working as an
orderly in an asylum led to his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
While others were starting electronics companies in the neighborhood around Stanford,
Kesey used the proceeds from his book, combined with some acid he had been able to
liberate from the CIA experiments, to form a commune of early hippies called the Merry
Pranksters. In 1964 he and his posse embarked on a psychedelic cross-country odyssey in an
old International Harvester school bus dubbed Furthur (spelling later corrected) painted in
Day-Glo colors.
Upon his return, Kesey began hosting a series of Acid Tests at his home, and at the end of
1965 he decided, since he was an entrepreneur as well as a hippie, to take them public. One
of the earliest took place that December at Big Ng’s, a music club in San Jose. Kesey enlisted
a bar band that he liked, led by Jerry Garcia, which had just changed its name from the
Warlocks to the Grateful Dead.6 Flower power was born.
Concurrently there arose a companion cultural phenomenon, the peace movement, that
shared this rebellious spirit. The confluence of hippie and antiwar sensibilities led to
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memorable period pieces, amusing in retrospect but considered deep at the time, such as
psychedelic posters exhorting “Make love not war” and tie-dyed T-shirts featuring peace
symbols.
The hippie and antiwar movements were both wary of computers, at least initially. The
hulking mainframes with whirring tapes and blinking lights were seen as depersonalizing and
Orwellian, tools of Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the Power Structure. In The Myth
of the Machine, the sociologist Lewis Mumford warned that the rise of computers could mean
that “man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.”7 At peace
protests and hippie communes, from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury in San
Francisco, the injunction printed on punch cards, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” became
an ironic catchphrase.
But by the early 1970s, when the possibility of personal computers arose, attitudes began
to change. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being
embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his
history of the period, What the Dormouse Said.8 In The Greening of America, which served
as a manifesto for the new era, a Yale professor, Charles Reich, denounced the old corporate
and social hierarchies and called for new structures that encouraged collaboration and
personal empowerment. Instead of deploring computers as tools of the old power structure,
he argued that they could aid the shift in social consciousness if they were made more
personal: “The machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends, in order that
man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life.”9
A technotribalism began to emerge. Tech gurus such as Norbert Wiener, Buckminster
Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan became required reading in communes and dorms. By the
1980s the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary would update his famous mantra “Turn on, tune in,
drop out” to proclaim instead “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”10 Richard Brautigan was the poet-
in-residence in 1967 at Caltech, and that year he captured the new ethos in a poem, “All
Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”11 It began:
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
STEWART BRAND
The person who best embodied and most exuberantly encouraged this connection between
techies and hippies was a lanky enthusiast with a toothy smile named Stewart Brand, who
popped up like a gangly sprite at the intersection of a variety of fun cultural movements over
the course of many decades. “The counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided
the philosophical foundations of the entire personal-computer revolution,” he wrote in a 1995
Time essay titled “We Owe It All to the Hippies.”
Hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyberrevolution. . . . Most of our generation scorned computers as
the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent—later called “hackers”—embraced computers and set about transforming them
into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future . . . youthful computer programmers who deliberately led the rest
of civilization away from centralized mainframe computers.12

Brand was born in 1938 in Rockford, Illinois, where his father was a partner in an ad
agency and, like so many fathers of digital entrepreneurs, a ham radio operator. After
graduating as a biology major from Stanford, where he was in Army ROTC, Brand served
two years as an infantry officer, including airborne training and a stint as an Army
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photographer. He then began a joyful life meandering among different communities at that
exciting juncture where performance art and technology intermingle.13
Not surprisingly, life on that techno/creative edge led Brand to become one of the early
experimenters with LSD. After being introduced to the drug in a pseudoclinical setting near
Stanford in 1962, he became a regular at Kesey’s Merry Prankster gatherings. He also was a
photographer, technician, and producer at a multimedia art collective called USCO, which
produced events that involved acid rock music, technological wizardry, strobe lights,
projected images, and performances that enlisted audience participation. Occasionally they
featured talks by Marshall McLuhan, Dick Alpert, and other new age prophets. A
promotional piece on the group noted that it “unites the cults of mysticism and technology as
a basis for introspection and communication,” a phrase that served as a suitable credo for
techno-spiritualists. Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries
of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious.
For Brand, the 1960s protest slogan “Power to the people” began to ring hollow when used
by New Left political activists, but computers offered a true opportunity for individual
empowerment. “Power to the people was a romantic lie,” he later said. “Computers did more
than politics did to change society.”14 He visited the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and
wrote an article for Rolling Stone in 1972 calling it “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been
around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.” This counterculture and cyberculture combination,
he realized, was a recipe for a digital revolution. “The freaks who design computer science”
would wrest power away from the “rich and powerful institutions,” he wrote. “Ready or not,
computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”
This utopian vision, he added, was “in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of
the science, such as Norbert Wiener, J. C. R. Licklider, John von Neumann, and Vannevar
Bush.”15
All of these experiences led Brand to become the impresario and techie for one of the
seminal events of the 1960s counterculture, the January 1966 Trips Festival at
Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. After the joys of the Acid Tests, which had been held
weekly throughout December, Brand proposed to Kesey that they throw a blowout version
that would last for three days. The extravaganza opened with Brand’s own troupe, America
Needs Indians, performing a “sensorium” that included a high-tech light show, slide
projectors, music, and Native American dancers. It was followed by what the program
described as “revelations, audioprojections, the endless explosion, the congress of wonders,
liquid projections, and the jazz mice.” And that was just the opening night. The next night
was kicked off by Kesey, who had been busted for drugs a few days earlier on Brand’s North
Beach roof but was out on bail and orchestrating the event from a command scaffold.
Featured were the Merry Pranksters and their Psychedelic Symphony, Big Brother and the
Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.
The writer Tom Wolfe tried to recapture the technodelic essence in his seminal work of New
Journalism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the
intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes
exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow,
and a troop of weird girls in leotards, leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles.
The final night celebrated technology even more enthusiastically. “Since the common
element of all shows is ELECTRICITY, this evening will be programmed live from stimuli
provided by a PINBALL MACHINE,” the program exulted. “The audience is invited to wear
ECSTATIC DRESS & bring their own GADGETS (a.c. outlets will be provided).”16
Yes, the Trip Festival’s conjunction of drugs, rock, and technology—acid and a.c. outlets!
—was jarring. But it turned out to be, significantly, a quintessential display of the fusion that
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shaped the personal computer era: technology, counterculture, entrepreneurship, gadgets,
music, art, and engineering. From Stewart Brand to Steve Jobs, those ingredients fashioned a
wave of Bay Area innovators who were comfortable at the interface of Silicon Valley and
Haight-Ashbury. “The Trips Festival marked Stewart Brand’s emergence as a countercultural
entrepreneur—but in a deeply technocratic mold,” wrote the cultural historian Fred Turner.17
A month after the Trips Festival, in February 1966, Brand was sitting on his gravelly rooftop
in San Francisco’s North Beach enjoying the effects of 100 micrograms of LSD. Staring at
the skyline, he ruminated on something that Buckminster Fuller had said: our perception that
the world is flat and stretches indefinitely, rather than round and small, is because we have
never seen it from outer space. Abetted by the acid, he began to grok the smallness of the
earth and the importance of other people appreciating that as well. “It had to be broadcast,
this fundamental point of leverage on the world’s ills,” he recalled. “A photograph would do
it—a color photograph from space of the earth. There it would be for all to see, the earth
complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way.”18 It would, he
believed, promote big-picture thinking, empathy for all the earth’s inhabitants, and a sense of
connectedness.
He resolved to convince NASA to take such a picture. So, with the offbeat wisdom that
comes from acid, he decided to produce hundreds of buttons so that people in the pre-Twitter
age could spread the word. “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” they
read. His plan was goofy-simple: “I prepared a Day-Glo sandwich board with a little sales
shelf on the front, decked myself out in a white jump suit, boots and costume top hat with
crystal heart and flower, and went to make my debut at the Sather Gate of the University of
California in Berkeley, selling my buttons for twenty-five cents.” University officials did him
the favor of throwing him off campus, which prompted a story in the San Francisco
Chronicle, thus helping publicize his one-man crusade. He took it on the road to other
colleges across the country, ending at Harvard and MIT. “Who the hell’s that?” asked an MIT
dean as he watched Brand give an impromptu lecture while selling his buttons. “That’s my
brother,” said Peter Brand, an MIT instructor.19
In November 1967 NASA complied. Its ATS-3 satellite took a picture of Earth from
twenty-one thousand miles up, which served as the cover image and title inspiration for
Brand’s next venture, the Whole Earth Catalog. As its name implied, it was (or at least
dressed itself in the guise of) a catalogue, one that cleverly blurred the distinction between
consumerism and communalism. Its subtitle was “Access to Tools,” and it combined the
sensibilities of the back-to-the-land counterculture with the goal of technological
empowerment. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate,
personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his
own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is
interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.”
Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and
mechanisms that work reliably.” The first edition featured such items as Norbert Wiener’s
book Cybernetics and a programmable HP calculator, along with buckskin jackets and beads.
The underlying premise was that a love of the earth and a love of technology could coexist,
that hippies should make common cause with engineers, and that the future should be a
festival where a.c. outlets would be provided.20
Brand’s approach was not New Left political. Nor was it even antimaterialist, given his
celebration of games and gadgets you could buy. But he did pull together, better than anyone,
many of the cultural strands of that period, from acid-dropping hippies to engineers to
communal idealists who sought to resist the centralized control of technology. “Brand did the
marketing work for the concept of the personal computer through the Whole Earth Catalog,”
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said his friend Lee Felsenstein.21
DOUGLAS ENGELBART
Shortly after the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog came out, Brand helped to produce
a happening that was an odd echo of his techno-choreography of the January 1966 Trips
Festival. Dubbed “the Mother of All Demos,” the December 1968 extravaganza became the
seminal event of the personal computer culture, just as the Trips Festival had been for the
hippie culture. It happened because, like a magnet, Brand naturally attracted and attached
himself to interesting people. This time it was an engineer named Douglas Engelbart, who
had taken on as his life’s passion inventing ways that computers could augment human
intelligence.
Engelbart’s father, an electrical engineer, had a shop in Portland, Oregon, where he sold
and repaired radios; his grandfather, who operated hydropower dams in the Pacific
Northwest, liked to take the family inside the goliath plants to see how the turbines and
generators worked. So it was natural that Engelbart developed a passion for electronics. In
high school he heard that the Navy had a program, cloaked in secrecy, to train technicians in
a mysterious new technology called radar, and he studied hard to make sure he could get in it,
which he did.22
His great awakening came while serving in the Navy. He was loaded onto a ship that set
sail from just south of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, and as they were waving good-bye,
an announcement came on the public address system that the Japanese had surrendered and
World War II was over. “We all shouted,” Engelbart recounted, “ ‘Turn around! Let us go
back and celebrate!’ ” But the ship kept sailing, “right out into the fog, into the seasickness,”
on to Leyte Gulf in the Philippines.23 On Leyte Island, Engelbart secluded himself whenever
possible in a Red Cross library in a thatched hut on stilts, and there he became enthralled by a
heavily illustrated Life magazine reprint of Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article “As We May
Think,” the one that envisioned the memex personal information system.24 “The whole
concept of helping people work and think that way just excited me,” he recalled.25
After his Navy service, he got an engineering degree from Oregon State and then worked
at the forerunner to NASA at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Painfully shy, he
joined an intermediate Greek folk-dancing class at the Palo Alto Community Center in order
to meet a woman he could marry, which he did. On the day after his engagement, as he was
driving to work, he felt a frightening, life-altering apprehension: “By the time I got to work, I
had this realization that I didn’t have any more goals.”26
For the next two months, he assiduously tended to the task of finding for himself a worthy
life goal. “I looked at all the crusades people could join, to find out how I could retrain
myself.” What struck him was that any effort to improve the world was complex. He thought
about people who tried to fight malaria or increase food production in poor areas and
discovered that led to a complex array of other issues, such as overpopulation and soil
erosion. To succeed at any ambitious project, you had to assess all of the intricate
ramifications of an action, weigh probabilities, share information, organize people, and more.
“Then one day, it just dawned on me—BOOM—that complexity was the fundamental thing,”
he recalled. “And it just went click. If in some way, you could contribute significantly to the
way humans could handle complexity and urgency, that would be universally helpful.”27 Such
an endeavor would address not just one of the world’s problems; it would give people the
tools to take on any problem.
The best way to help people handle complexity was along the lines that Bush had
proposed, Engelbart decided. As he tried to imagine conveying information on graphic
screens in real time, his radar training came in handy. “It was within an hour that I had the
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image of sitting at a big screen with all kinds of symbols,” he recalled, “and you could be
operating all kinds of things to drive the computer.”28 That day he set out on a mission to find
ways to allow people to visually portray the thinking they were doing and link them to other
people so they could collaborate—in other words, networked interactive computers with
graphic displays.
This was in 1950, five years before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born. Even the very
first commercial computers, such as UNIVAC, were not yet publicly available. But Engelbart
bought into Bush’s vision that someday people would have their own terminals, which they
could use to manipulate, store, and share information. This expansive conception needed a
suitably grand name, and Engelbart came up with one: augmented intelligence. In order to
serve as the pathfinder for this mission, he enrolled at Berkeley to study computer science,
earning his doctorate in 1955.
Engelbart was one of those people who could project intensity by speaking in an eerily calm
monotone. “When he smiles, his face is wistful and boyish, but once the energy of his
forward motion is halted and he stops to ponder, his pale blue eyes seem to express sadness
or loneliness,” a close friend said. “His voice, as he greets you, is low and soft, as though
muted from having traveled a long distance. There is something diffident yet warm about the
man, something gentle yet stubborn.”29
To put it more bluntly, Engelbart sometimes gave the impression that he had not been born
on this planet, which made it difficult for him to get funding for his project. He finally was
hired in 1957 to work on magnetic storage systems at the Stanford Research Institute, an
independent nonprofit set up by the university in 1946. A hot topic at SRI was artificial
intelligence, especially the quest to create a system that mimicked the neural networks of the
human brain.
But the pursuit of artificial intelligence didn’t excite Engelbart, who never lost sight of his
mission to augment human intelligence by creating machines like Bush’s memex that could
work closely with people and help them organize information. This goal, he later said, was
born out of his respect for the “ingenious invention” that was the human mind. Instead of
trying to replicate that on a machine, Engelbart focused on how “the computer could interact
with the different capabilities that we’ve already got.”30
For years he worked on draft after draft of a paper describing his vision, until it grew to
forty-five thousand words, the length of a small book. He published it as a manifesto in
October 1962 titled “Augmenting Human Intellect.” He began by explaining that he was not
seeking to replace human thought with artificial intelligence. Instead he argued that the
intuitive talents of the human mind should be combined with the processing abilities of
machines to produce “an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the
human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined
terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” In
painstaking detail, he gave many examples of how this human-computer symbiosis would
work, including an architect using a computer to design a building and a professional putting
together an illustrated report.31
As he was working on the paper, Engelbart wrote a fan letter to Vannevar Bush, and he
devoted an entire section of his paper to describing the memex machine.32 Seventeen years
after Bush had written “As We May Think,” there was still a radical feel to his concept that
humans and computers should interact in real time through simple interfaces that included
graphical screens, pointers, and input devices. Engelbart emphasized that his system wouldn’t
be just for math: “Every person who does his thinking with symbolized concepts (whether in
the form of the English language, pictographs, formal logic, or mathematics) should be able
to benefit significantly.” Ada Lovelace would have been thrilled.
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Engelbart’s treatise appeared the same month that Licklider, who had explored the same
concepts two years earlier in his “Man-Computer Symbiosis” paper, took over ARPA’s
Information Processing Techniques Office. Part of Licklider’s new job was to give out
federal grants to promising projects. Engelbart got in line. “I was standing at the door with
this 1962 report and a proposal,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh boy, with all the things he’s
saying he wants to do, how can he refuse me?’ ”33 He couldn’t, so Engelbart got an ARPA
grant. Bob Taylor, who was then still at NASA, also gave Engelbart some funding. Thus it
was that he was able to create his own Augmentation Research Center at SRI. It became
another example of how government funding of speculative research eventually paid off
hundreds of times over in practical applications.
THE MOUSE AND NLS
The NASA grant from Taylor was supposed to be applied to a stand-alone project, and
Engelbart decided to use it to find an easy way for humans to interact with machines.34 “Let’s
go after some screen-select devices,” he suggested to his colleague Bill English.35 His goal
was to find the simplest way for a user to point to and select something on a screen. Dozens
of options for moving an on-screen cursor were being tried by researchers, including light
pens, joysticks, trackballs, trackpads, tablets with styli, and even one that users were
supposed to control with their knees. Engelbart and English tested each. “We timed how long
it took each user to move the cursor to the object,” Engelbart said.36 Light pens seemed the
simplest, for example, but they required a user to pick them up and put them down each time,
which was tiresome.
They made a chart of all the advantages and drawbacks of each device, which helped
Engelbart imagine devices that hadn’t yet been conceived. “Just as the periodic table’s rules
have led to the discovery of certain previously unknown elements, this grid ultimately
defined the desirable characteristics of a device that didn’t yet exist,” he said. One day in
1961 he was at a conference and began to daydream. He recalled a mechanical device that
had fascinated him in high school, a planimeter, that could calculate the area of a space by
being rolled around its perimeter. It used two perpendicular wheels, one horizontal and the
other vertical, to tote up the distance it was rolled in each direction. “Just thinking about those
two wheels, soon the rest of it was very simple, so I went and made a sketch,” he recalled.37
In his pocket notebook he showed how the device could roll around a desktop and its two
wheels would register higher or lower voltages as they turned in each direction. That voltage
could be transmitted through a cord to the computer screen to move a cursor up and down
and back and forth.
The result, at once both simple and profound, was a classic physical expression of the
augmentation ideal and the hands-on imperative. It made use of the human talent of mind-
hand-eye coordination (something robots are not good at) to provide a natural interface with a
computer. Instead of acting independently, humans and machines would act in harmony.
Engelbart gave his sketch to Bill English, who carved a piece of mahogany to make the
first model. When they tried it on their focus group, it tested better than any other device. At
first, the cord was in front, but they quickly realized it worked better coming out of the back
end, like a tail. They dubbed the device a “mouse.”
Most true geniuses (Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and even Steve Jobs, to name a few) have
an instinct for simplicity. Engelbart didn’t. Desiring to cram a lot of functionality into any
system he built, he wanted the mouse to have many buttons, perhaps up to ten. But to his
disappointment, the testing determined that the optimum number of buttons the mouse should
have was three. As it turned out, even that was at least one button too many, or perhaps, as
the simplicity-freak Jobs would later insist, two buttons too many.
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Over the next six years, culminating in 1968, Engelbart went on to devise a full-fledged
augmentation system that he called “oNLine System,” or NLS. In addition to the mouse, it
included many other advances that led to the personal computer revolution: on-screen
graphics, multiple windows on a screen, digital publishing, blog-like journals, wiki-like
collaborations, document sharing, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, Skype-like
videoconferencing, and the formatting of documents. One of his technocharged protégés,
Alan Kay, who would later advance each of these ideas at Xerox PARC, said of Engelbart, “I
don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug’s ideas.”38
THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS
Engelbart was more into Greek folk dances than Trips Festivals, but he had gotten to know
Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at the same lab. Brand’s succession of
ventures, including the Whole Earth Catalog, were based just a few blocks from Engelbart’s
Augmentation Research Center. Thus it was natural that they team up for a demonstration in
December 1968 of Engelbart’s oNLine System. Thanks to Brand’s instincts as an impresario,
the demo, which later became known as the Mother of All Demos, became a multimedia
extravaganza, like an Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on silicon. The event turned out to be the
ultimate melding of hippie and hacker culture, and it has remained unchallenged, even by
Apple product launches, as the most dazzling and influential technology demonstration of the
digital age.39
The year had been turbulent. In 1968 the Tet Offensive turned America against the
Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, and Lyndon
Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. Peace protests shut down major universities
and disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Russians crushed Prague
Spring, Richard Nixon was elected president, and Apollo 8 orbited the moon. Also that year,
Intel was founded and Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog.
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Doug Engelbart (1925–2013).
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Englebart’s first mouse.
Stewart Brand (center) assisting at the Mother of All Demos in 1968.
Engelbart’s ninety-minute demonstration occurred on December 9 in front of a standing-
room-only crowd of close to a thousand at a computer industry conference in San Francisco.
Wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark skinny tie, he sat on the right of the stage in a
sleek Herman Miller “Action Office” console. The display of his computer terminal was
projected onto a twenty-foot screen behind him. “I hope you’ll go along with this rather
unusual setting,” he began. He wore a microphone headset that a fighter pilot might use, and
he spoke in a monotone, like a computer-generated voice trying to emulate the narrator in an
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old movie newsreel. Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture guru and chronicler, later said that he
looked like “the Chuck Yeager of the computer cosmos, calmly putting the new system
through its paces and reporting back to his astonished earthbound audience in a calm, quiet
voice.”40
“If in your office,” Engelbart intoned, “you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a
computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly
responsive to every action you have, how much value could you derive from that?” He
promised that the combination of technologies he was about to demonstrate would “all go
very interesting,” and then he muttered under his breath, “I think.”
A camera mounted on his terminal provided a video stream of his face, while another
camera overhead showed his hands controlling the mouse and keyboard. Bill English, the
mouse crafter, sat in the back of the auditorium like a newsroom producer selecting which
images were mixed, matched, and projected on the big screen.
Stewart Brand was thirty miles south at Engelbart’s lab near Stanford, generating computer
images and working cameras. Two leased microwave lines and a telephone hookup
transmitted to the lab every mouse and keyboard click Engelbart made, then sent images and
information back to the auditorium. The audience watched incredulously as Engelbart
collaborated with distant colleagues to create a document; different people made edits, added
graphics, changed the layout, built a map, and embedded audio and visual elements in real
time. They even were able to create hypertext links together. In short, Engelbart showed,
back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today. The demo
gods were with him, and to his amazement there were no glitches. The crowd gave him a
standing ovation. Some even rushed up to the stage as if he were a rock star, which in some
ways he was.41
Down the hall from Engelbart, a competing session was being presented by Les Earnest,
who had cofounded, with the MIT refugee John McCarthy, the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Lab. As reported by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said, their session
featured a film about a robot that acted as if it could hear and see things. The two demos
presented a clear contrast between the goal of artificial intelligence and that of augmented
intelligence. The latter mission had seemed rather quirky when Engelbart began working on
it, but when he showed off all of its elements in his December 1968 demo—a personal
computer that humans could easily interact with in real time, a network that allowed
collaborative creativity—it overshadowed the robot. The headline of the story from the
conference in the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle was “Fantastic World of Tomorrow’s
Computer.” It was about Engelbart’s oNLine System, not about the robot.42
As if to seal the marriage of the counterculture and cyberculture, Brand brought Ken Kesey
to Engelbart’s lab to experience the oNLine System. Kesey, by then famous from Tom
Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, got a full tour of how the system could cut, paste,
retrieve, and collaboratively create books and other documents. He was impressed. “It’s the
next thing after acid,” Kesey pronounced.43
ALAN KAY
Alan Kay struggled to make sure that he got to Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. He had a
102-degree fever and strep throat, but he was able to drag himself onto a plane from Utah,
where he was a graduate student. “I was shivering and sick and could barely walk,” he
recalled, “but I was determined to get there.”44 He had already seen and embraced Engelbart’s
ideas, but the drama of the demonstration struck him like a clarion call. “To me he was
Moses opening the Red Sea,” Kay said. “He showed us a promised land that needed to be
found, and the seas and rivers we needed to cross to get there.”45
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Like Moses, Engelbart would not actually make it to that promised land. Instead it would
be Kay and a merry band of colleagues at the research center of a copier company who would
be at the forefront of bringing the ideas of Licklider and Engelbart into the paradise of
personal computing.
Kay had learned to love both the sciences and humanities as a child in central
Massachusetts, where he was born in 1940. His father was a physiologist who designed
artificial legs and arms. On long walks with him, Kay developed a love of science. But he
also became passionate about music. His mother was an artist and musician, just as was her
father, Clifton Johnson, a noted illustrator and author who played the pipe organ at their local
church. “Since my father was a scientist and my mother was an artist, the atmosphere during
my early years was full of many kinds of ideas and ways to express them. I did not
distinguish between ‘art’ and ‘science’ and still don’t.”46
At seventeen he went away to music camp, where he played guitar and was a member of
the jazz band. He also, like his grandfather, loved pipe organs, and he eventually helped a
master builder construct one in the Spanish baroque style for a Lutheran seminary. He was a
savvy and well-read student who often got in trouble in school, mainly for insubordination, a
trait of many tech innovators. He was almost expelled, but he also starred on the national
radio show Quiz Kids.
Kay enrolled in Bethany College in West Virginia to study math and biology, but he was
kicked out during the spring of his first year after “excessive unexcused absences.” For a
while he hung out in Denver, where a friend had taken a job tending to United Airlines’
reservation computer system. Kay was struck that the computers seemed to increase rather
than reduce drudge work for humans.
Faced with being drafted, he enlisted in the Air Force, where his top scores on an aptitude
test led him to be tapped for training as a computer programmer. He worked on the IBM
1401, the first widely marketed computer for small businesses. “This was back in the days
when programming was a low-status profession and most of the programmers were women,”
he said. “They were really good. My boss was a woman.”47 When his service was over, he
enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he indulged all of his passions: he studied
biology, mathematics, music, and theater while programming supercomputers at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research.
He wandered off to graduate school at the University of Utah, which he ended up
considering “the best luck I ever had.” The computer science pioneer David Evans was
building there the best graphics program in the country. On the day that Kay arrived in the
fall of 1966, Evans handed him a document from a stack on his desk and told him to read it. It
was the MIT doctoral dissertation of Ivan Sutherland, who was then teaching at Harvard but
would soon move to Utah. Written under the supervision of the information theorist Claude
Shannon, the thesis was titled “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communications
System.”48
Sketchpad was a computer program that pioneered the use of a graphical user interface,
one that displayed icons and graphics on the display screen, the way today’s computers do.
The graphics, which could be created and manipulated with a light pen, provided a charming
new way for humans and computers to interact. “The Sketchpad system makes it possible for
a man and a computer to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings,” Sutherland
wrote. The realization that art and technology could combine to create a delightful computer
interface appealed to Kay’s childlike enthusiasm for making sure that the future would turn
out to be fun. Sutherland’s ideas, he said, were “a glimpse of heaven” and “imprinted” him
with a passion for creating friendly personal computers.49
His first contact with Engelbart came in early 1967, a few months after being turned on to
Sutherland’s Sketchpad ideas. Engelbart was on a tour of universities, lecturing on the ideas
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that he would eventually put on display in his Mother of All Demos and lugging a Bell &
Howell projector so that he could show a film of his oNLine System. “He would freeze frame
and run it at different speeds forward and backward,” Kay recalled. “He would say, ‘Here’s
the cursor. Watch what it’s going to do next!’ ”50
The field of computer graphics and natural user interfaces was on fire, and Kay soaked up
ideas from many sources. He heard a lecture by MIT’s Marvin Minsky on artificial
intelligence and the dreadful way that schools were crushing the creativity of young students
by not teaching them to deal imaginatively with complexity. “He put forth a terrific diatribe
against traditional education methods,” Kay remembered.51 He then met Minsky’s colleague
Seymour Papert, who had created a programming language called LOGO that was simple
enough for a school kid to use. Among its many tricks was allowing students to use simple
commands to control a robotic turtle moving around the classroom. After hearing Papert, Kay
began drawing sketches of what a kid-friendly personal computer might look like.
At a conference at the University of Illinois, Kay saw a rudimentary flat-screen display,
made of thin glass with neon gas. Putting that together in his mind with Engelbart’s
demonstrations of the oNLine System, and roughly calculating the effect of Moore’s Law, he
realized that graphical displays with windows, icons, hypertext, and a mouse-controlled
cursor could be incorporated in small computers within a decade. “I was almost frightened by
the implications,” he said, indulging his flair for dramatic storytelling. “It must have been the
same kind of disorientation people had after reading Copernicus and first looked up from a
different Earth to a different Heaven.”
Kay saw the future with great clarity, and he became impatient to invent it. “There would
be millions of personal machines and users, mostly outside of direct institutional control,” he
realized. This would require the creation of small personal computers with graphical displays
easy enough for a kid to use and cheap enough for every individual to own. “It all came
together to form an image of what a personal computer really should be.”
In his doctoral thesis he described some of its traits, most notably that it should be simple
(“It must be learnable in private”) and friendly (“Kindness should be an integral part”). He
was designing a computer as if he were a humanist as well as an engineer. He drew
inspiration from an Italian printer in the early sixteenth century named Aldus Manutius, who
realized that personal books would need to fit into saddlebags and thus produced ones of the
size now common.
Likewise, Kay recognized that the ideal personal computer had to be no larger than a
notebook. “It was easy to know what to do next,” he recalled. “I built a cardboard model of it
to see what it would look and feel like.”52
Kay had been inspired by what Engelbart was trying to do at his Augmentation Research
Center. But instead of taking a job there, he joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (SAIL), run by Professor John McCarthy. It was not a good fit. Because
McCarthy was focused on artificial intelligence, rather than on ways to augment human
intelligence, he had little interest in personal computers. He believed instead in large
computers that would be time-shared.
In an academic paper he delivered in 1970, just after Kay came to SAIL, McCarthy
described his vision of time-sharing systems that used terminals with little processing power
or memory of their own. “The terminal is to be connected by the telephone system to a time-
shared computer which, in turn, has access to files containing all books, magazines,
newspapers, catalogs, airline schedules,” he wrote. “Through the terminal the user can get
any information he wants, can buy and sell, could communicate with persons and institutions,
and process information in other useful ways.”53
McCarthy foresaw that this could lead to a proliferation of new information sources that
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would compete with traditional media, though he mistakenly thought that these would be
supported by customer payments rather than advertising. “Since the cost of keeping a file of
information in the computer and making it publicly available will be small, even a high
school student could compete with the New Yorker if he could write well enough and if word
of mouth and mention by reviewers brought him to public attention.” He also predicted
crowdsourced content: a user would be able to “tell the system whether last year’s cure for
baldness worked and get a summary of the opinions of those who bothered to record their
opinions of the cure he contemplates trying now.” McCarthy had a rosy view of what turned
out to be a raucous blogosphere: “Public controversy can be carried out more expeditiously
than at present. If I read something that seems controversial, I can ask the system if anyone
has filed a reply. This, together with an author’s ability to revise his original statement, will
lead people to converge on considered positions more quickly.”
McCarthy’s vision was prescient, but it differed in one major way from Kay’s vision, and
from the networked world that we have today. It was not based on personal computers with
their own memory and processing power. Instead McCarthy believed that people would have
inexpensive, dumb terminals that would be connected to powerful distant computers. Even
after hobbyist clubs began springing up to celebrate personal computers, McCarthy was
pushing a plan for a “Home Terminal Club” that would lease to people for $75 a month
simple Teletype-like terminals that would allow them to time-share on a distant powerful
mainframe.54
Kay’s contrasting vision was that powerful small computers, complete with their own
memory and processing power, would become personal tools for individual creativity. He
dreamed of kids wandering into the woods and using them under trees, just as they might use
crayons and a pad of paper. So after two years of toiling among the time-sharing evangelists
at SAIL, Kay accepted an offer in 1971 to join a corporate research center two miles away
that was attracting young innovators who wanted to make computers that were personal,
friendly, and geared to individuals. McCarthy would later dismiss these goals as “Xerox
heresies,”55 but they ended up setting the course for the era of personal computers.
XEROX PARC
In 1970 the Xerox Corporation followed in the footsteps of the Bell System by launching a
lab dedicated to pure research. In order that it not be contaminated by the mind-set of the
corporation’s bureaucracy or the day-to-day demands of its business, it was located in the
Stanford industrial park, some three thousand miles from the company’s Rochester, New
York, headquarters.56
Among those recruited to lead Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox
PARC, was Bob Taylor, who had recently left ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques
Office after helping to build the ARPANET. Through his visits to ARPA-funded research
centers and the conferences he hosted for the brightest graduate students, he had developed a
radar for talent. “Taylor had worked with and funded many of the leading computer science
research groups during this period,” recalled Chuck Thacker, who was one of Taylor’s
recruits. “As a result, he was in a unique position to attract a staff of the highest quality.”57
Taylor had another leadership skill that he had refined at his meetings with ARPA
researchers and graduate students: he was able to provoke “creative abrasion,” in which a
team of people can question each other, even try to eviscerate each other’s ideas, but then are
expected to articulate the other side of the dispute. Taylor did that at what he called “Dealer”
meetings (evoking people trying to beat the dealer at blackjack), in which one person had to
present an idea while others engaged in constructive (usually) criticism. Taylor was not a
technology wizard himself, but he knew how to get a group of them to sharpen their sabers in
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friendly duels.58 His flair for playing a master of ceremonies allowed him to prod, cajole,
stroke, and jolly up temperamental geniuses and get them to collaborate. He was much better
at tending to the egos of people who worked under him than catering to his bosses, but that
was part of his charm—especially if you weren’t one of his bosses.
Among Taylor’s first recruits was Alan Kay, whom he knew from ARPA conferences. “I
met Alan when he was a doctoral student at Utah, and I liked him a lot,” Taylor said.59 He
didn’t, however, hire Kay for his own lab at PARC but instead recommended him to another
group there. It was Taylor’s way of seeding the whole place with people who impressed him.
When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great
achievement there would be. “A personal computer,” he answered. Asked what that was, he
picked up a notebook-size portfolio, flipped open its cover, and said, “This will be a flat-
panel display. There’ll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your
mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple
of pounds. That’s what I’m talking about.” His interviewer scratched his head and muttered
to himself, “Yeah, right.” But Kay got the job.
With his twinkling eyes and lively mustache, Kay came to be seen as a disruptor, which he
was. He took impish pleasure in pushing the executives of a copier company to create a small
and friendly computer for kids. Xerox’s corporate planning director, Don Pendery, a dour
New Englander, embodied what the Harvard professor Clay Christensen has labeled the
innovator’s dilemma: he saw the future filled with shadowy creatures that threatened to gnaw
away at Xerox’s copier business. He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of
“trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening
session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to
wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the
future is to invent it.”60
For his 1972 Rolling Stone piece on the emerging tech culture in Silicon Valley, Stewart
Brand visited Xerox PARC, causing agita back east at corporate headquarters when the
article appeared. With literary gusto, he described how PARC’s research had moved “away
from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and the personal, toward putting maximum
computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.” Among the people he
interviewed was Kay, who said, “The people here are used to dealing lightning with both
hands.” Because of people like Kay, PARC had a playful sensibility that was derivative of the
MIT Tech Model Railroad Club. “It’s a place where you can still be an artisan,” he told
Brand.61
Kay realized that he needed a catchy name for the little personal computer he wanted to
build, so he began calling it the Dynabook. He also came up with a cute name for its
operating system software: Smalltalk. The name was meant to be unintimidating to users and
not raise expectations among hard-core engineers. “I figured that Smalltalk was so innocuous
a label that if it ever did anything nice, people would be pleasantly surprised,” Kay noted.
He was determined that his proposed Dynabook would cost less than $500 “so that we
could give it away in schools.” It also had to be small and personal, so that “a kid could take
it wherever he goes to hide,” with a programming language that was user-friendly. “Simple
things should be simple, complex things should be possible,” he declared.62
Kay wrote a description of the Dynabook, titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All
Ages,” that was partly a product proposal but mostly a manifesto. He began by quoting Ada
Lovelace’s seminal insight about how computers could be used for creative tasks: “The
Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and
leaves.” In describing how children (of all ages) would use a Dynabook, Kay showed he was
in the camp of those who saw personal computers primarily as tools for individual creativity
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rather than as networked terminals for collaboration. “Although it can be used to
communicate with others through the ‘knowledge utilities’ of the future such as a school
‘library,’ ” he wrote, “we think that a large fraction of its use will involve reflexive
communication of the owner with himself through this personal medium, much as paper and
notebooks are currently used.”
The Dynabook, Kay continued, should be no larger than a notebook and weigh no more
than four pounds. “The owner will be able to maintain and edit his own files of text and
programs when and where he chooses. Need we add that it be usable in the woods?” In other
words, it was not just a dumb terminal designed to be networked into a time-shared
mainframe. However, he did envision a day when personal computers and digital networks
would come together. “A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global
information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV will bring the libraries
and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) to the home.”63 It was an enticing vision of
the future, but one that would take another two decades to invent.
To advance his crusade for the Dynabook, Kay gathered around him a small team and
crafted a mission that was romantic, aspirational, and vague. “I only hired people that got
stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea,” Kay recalled. “A lot
of daytime was spent outside of PARC, playing tennis, bike riding, drinking beer, eating
Chinese food, and constantly talking about the Dynabook and its potential to amplify human
reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.”64
In order to take the first step toward realizing the Dynabook, Kay proposed an “interim”
machine. It would be about the size of a carry-on suitcase and would have a small graphical
display screen. In May 1972 he made his pitch to Xerox PARC’s hardware bosses to build
thirty so that they could be tested in classrooms to see if students could do simple
programming tasks on them. “The uses for a personal gadget as an editor, reader, take-home
context, and intelligent terminal are fairly obvious,” he told the engineers and managers
sitting in beanbag chairs. “Now let’s build thirty of these things so we can get on with it.”
It was a romantic pitch confidently delivered, as tended to be the case with Kay, but it did
not dazzle Jerry Elkind, the manager of PARC’s computer lab. “Jerry Elkind and Alan Kay
were like creatures from different planets, one an austere by-the-numbers engineer and the
other a brash philosophical freebooter,” according to Michael Hiltzik, who wrote a history of
Xerox PARC. Elkind did not get stars in his eyes when imagining children programming toy
turtles on Xerox machines. “Let me play devil’s advocate,” he responded. The other
engineers perked up, sensing that a merciless evisceration was in the offing. PARC’s mandate
was to create the office of the future, Elkind noted, so why should it be in the business of
child’s play? The corporate environment lent itself to the time-sharing of corporate-run
computers, so shouldn’t PARC continue to pursue those opportunities? After a rapid-fire
series of such questions, Kay felt like crawling away. When it was over, he cried. His request
that a set of interim Dynabooks be built was denied.65
Bill English, who had worked with Engelbart and built the first mouse, was by then at
PARC. After the meeting he pulled Kay aside, consoled him, and offered some advice. He
needed to stop being a dreamy loner and instead should prepare a well-crafted proposal with
a budget. “What’s a budget?” Kay asked.66
Kay scaled back his dream and proposed an interim-interim plan. He would use $230,000
that he had in his budget to emulate the Dynabook on a Nova, a footlocker-size minicomputer
made by Data General. But the prospect didn’t really thrill him.
That is when two stars from Bob Taylor’s group at PARC, Butler Lampson and Chuck
Thacker, popped into Kay’s office with a different scheme.
“Do you have any money?” they asked.
“Yes, about $230K for Novas,” Kay replied. “Why?”
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“How would you like us to build your little machine for you?” they asked, referring to the
interim Dynabook that Elkind had shot down.
“I’d like it fine,” Kay allowed.67
Thacker wanted to build his own version of a personal computer, and he realized that
Lampson and Kay also had the same general goal in mind. So the plot was to pool their
resources and proceed without waiting for permission.
“What are you going to do about Jerry?” Kay asked about his nemesis Elkind.
“Jerry’s out of the office for a few months on a corporate task force,” said Lampson.
“Maybe we can sneak it in before he gets back.”68
Bob Taylor had helped hatch the plan because he wanted to push his team away from
building time-sharing computers and devise instead “an interconnected collection of small
display-based machines.”69 He was thrilled to get three of his favorite engineers—Lampson,
Thacker, and Kay—collaborating on the project. The team had a push-pull dynamic:
Lampson and Thacker knew what was possible, while Kay set his sights on the ultimate
dream machine and challenged them to achieve the impossible.
The machine they designed was named the Xerox Alto (although Kay stubbornly
continued to refer to it as “the interim Dynabook”). It had a bitmapped display, which meant
that each pixel on the screen could be turned on or off to help render a graphic, a letter, a
paintbrush swipe, or whatever. “We chose to provide a full bitmap, in which each screen
pixel was represented by a bit of main storage,” Thacker explained. That put a lot of demands
on the memory, but the guiding principle was that Moore’s Law would continue to rule and
that memory would get cheaper in an exponential way. The user’s interaction with the display
was controlled by a keyboard and mouse, as Engelbart had designed. When it was completed
in March 1973, it featured a graphic, painted by Kay, of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster
holding the letter “C.”
Alan Kay (1940– ) at Xerox PARC in 1974.
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Kay’s 1972 sketch for a Dynabook.
Lee Felsenstein (1945– ).
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The first issue, October 1972.
By keeping children (of all ages) in mind, Kay and his colleagues advanced Engelbart’s
concepts by showing that they could be implemented in a manner that was simple, friendly,
and intuitive to use. Engelbart, however, did not buy into their vision. Instead he was
dedicated to cramming as many functions as possible into his oNLine System, and thus he
never had a desire to make a computer that was small and personal. “That’s a totally different
trip from where I’m going,” he told colleagues. “If we cram ourselves in those little spaces,
we’d have to give up a whole bunch.”70 That is why Engelbart, even though he was a
prescient theorist, was not truly a successful innovator: he kept adding functions and
instructions and buttons and complexities to his system. Kay made things easier, and in so
doing showed why the ideal of simplicity—making products that humans find convivial and
easy to use—was central to the innovations that made computers personal.
Xerox sent Alto systems to research centers around the country, spreading the innovations
dreamed up by PARC engineers. There was even a precursor to the Internet Protocols, the
PARC Universal Packet, that allowed different packet-switched networks to interconnect.
“Most of the tech that makes the Internet possible was invented at Xerox PARC in the
1970s,” Taylor later claimed.71
As things turned out, however, although Xerox PARC pointed the way to the land of
personal computers—devices you could call your own—the Xerox Corporation did not lead
the migration. It made two thousand Altos, mainly for use in Xerox offices or affiliated
institutions, but it didn’t market the Alto as a consumer product.28 “The company wasn’t
equipped to handle an innovation,” Kay recalled. “It would have meant completely new
packaging, all new manuals, handling updates, training staff, localizing to different
countries.”72
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Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back
east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, “The
computer will never be as important to society as the copier.”73
At a lavish Xerox corporate conference in Boca Raton, Florida (where Henry Kissinger
was the paid keynote speaker), the Alto system was put on display. In the morning there was
an onstage demo that echoed Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and in the afternoon thirty
Altos were set up in a showroom for everyone to use. The executives, all of whom were male,
showed little interest, but their wives immediately started testing the mouse and typing away.
“The men thought it was beneath them to know how to type,” said Taylor, who had not been
invited to the conference but showed up anyway. “It was something secretaries did. So they
didn’t take the Alto seriously, thinking that only women would like it. That was my
revelation that Xerox would never get the personal computer.”74
Instead, more entrepreneurial and nimble innovators would be the first to foray into the
personal computer market. Some would eventually license or steal ideas from Xerox PARC.
But at first the earliest personal computers were homebrewed concoctions that only a
hobbyist could love.
THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS
Among the tribes of the Bay Area in the years leading up to the birth of the personal
computer was a cohort of community organizers and peace activists who learned to love
computers as tools for bringing power to the people. They embraced small-scale
technologies, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and many of the
tools-for-living values of the Whole Earth crowd, without being enthralled by psychedelics or
repeated exposures to the Grateful Dead.
Fred Moore was an example. The son of an Army colonel stationed at the Pentagon, he had
gone west to study engineering at Berkeley in 1959. Even though the U.S. military buildup in
Vietnam had not begun, Moore decided to become an antiwar protestor. He camped out on
the steps of Sproul Plaza, soon to become the epicenter of student demonstrations, with a sign
denouncing ROTC. His protest lasted only two days (his father came to take him home), but
he reenrolled at Berkeley in 1962 and resumed his rebellious ways. He served two years in
jail as a draft resister and then, in 1968, moved to Palo Alto, driving down in a Volkswagen
van with a baby daughter whose mother had drifted away.75
Moore planned to become an antiwar organizer there, but he discovered the computers at
the Stanford Medical Center and became hooked. Since nobody ever asked him to leave, he
spent his days hacking around on the computers while his daughter wandered the halls or
played in the Volkswagen. He acquired a faith in the power of computers to help people take
control of their lives and form communities. If they could use computers as tools for personal
empowerment and learning, he believed, ordinary folks could break free of the dominance of
the military-industrial establishment. “Fred was a scrawny-bearded, intense-eyed radical
pacifist,” recalled Lee Felsenstein, who was part of the community organizing and computer
scene in Palo Alto. “At the drop of a hat he would scurry off to pour blood on a submarine.
You couldn’t really shoo him away.”76
Given his peacenik-tech passions, it is not surprising that Moore gravitated into the orbit of
Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth crowd. Indeed, he ended up having a star turn at one of
the weirdest events of the era: the 1971 demise party for the Whole Earth Catalog.
Miraculously, the publication had ended its run with $20,000 in the bank, and Brand decided
to rent the Palace of Fine Arts, an ersatz classical Greek structure in San Francisco’s Marina
District, to celebrate with a thousand kindred spirits who would decide how to give away the
money. He brought a stack of hundred-dollar bills, harboring a fantasy that the rock- and
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drug-crazed crowd would come to a judicious consensus on what to do with it. “How can we
ask anyone else in the world to arrive at agreements if we can’t?” Brand asked the crowd.77
The debate lasted ten hours. Wearing a monk’s black cassock with hood, Brand let each
speaker hold the stack of money while addressing the crowd, and he wrote the suggestions on
a blackboard. Paul Krassner, who had been a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, gave
an impassioned talk about the plight of the American Indians—“We ripped off the Indians
when we came here!”—and said the money should be given to them. Brand’s wife, Lois, who
happened to be an Indian, came forward to declare that she and other Indians didn’t want it.
A person named Michael Kay said they should just give it out to themselves and started
handing out the bills to the crowd; Brand retorted that it would be better to use it all together
and asked people to pass the bills back up to him, which some of them did, prompting
applause. Dozens of other suggestions, ranging from wild to wacky, were made. Flush it
down the toilet! Buy more nitrous oxide for the party! Build a gigantic plastic phallic symbol
to stick into the earth! At one point a member of the band Golden Toad shouted, “Focus your
fucking energy! You’ve got nine million suggestions! Pick one! This could go on for the next
fucking year. I came here to play music.” This led to no decision but did prompt a musical
interlude featuring a belly dancer who ended by falling to the floor and writhing.
At that point Fred Moore, with his scraggly beard and wavy hair, got up and gave his
occupation as “human being.” He denounced the crowd for caring about money, and to make
his point he took the two dollar bills he had in his pocket and burned them. There was some
debate about taking a vote, which Moore also denounced because it was a method for
dividing rather than uniting people. By then it was 3 a.m., and the dazed and confused crowd
had become even more so. Moore urged them to share their names so that they could stay
together as a network. “A union of people here tonight is more important than letting a sum
of money divide us,” he declared.78 Eventually he outlasted all but twenty or so diehards, and
it was decided to give the money to him until a better idea came along.79
Since he didn’t have a bank account, Moore buried the $14,905 that was left of the $20,000 in
his backyard. Eventually, after much drama and unwelcome visits from supplicants, he
distributed it as loans or grants to a handful of related organizations involved in providing
computer access and education in the area. The recipients were part of the techno-hippie
ecosystem that emerged in Palo Alto and Menlo Park around Brand and his Whole Earth
Catalog crowd.
This included the catalogue’s publisher, the Portola Institute, an alternative nonprofit that
promoted “computer education for all grade levels.” Its loose-knit learning program was run
by Bob Albrecht, an engineer who had dropped out of corporate America to teach computer
programming to kids and Greek folk dancing to Doug Engelbart and other adults. “While
living in San Francisco at the top of the crookedest street, Lombard, I frequently ran
computer programming, wine tasting, and Greek dancing parties,” he recalled.80 He and his
friends opened a public-access computer center, featuring a PDP-8, and he took some of his
best young students on field trips, most memorably to visit Engelbart at his augmentation lab.
One of the early editions of the Whole Earth Catalog featured on its end page a picture of
Albrecht, sporting a porcupine brush cut, teaching some kids to use a calculator.
Albrecht, who wrote self-teaching guides, including the popular My Computer Likes Me
(When I Speak BASIC), launched a publication called the People’s Computer Company,
which was not really a company but called itself one in honor of Janis Joplin’s band, Big
Brother and the Holding Company. The scraggly newsletter adopted as its motto “Computer
power to the people.” The first issue, in October 1972, had on its cover a drawing of a boat
sailing into the sunset and the hand-scrawled declaration “Computers are mostly used against
people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; Time to change
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all that—we need a PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY.”81 Most issues featured lots of
line drawings of dragons—“I loved dragons ever since I was thirteen,” Albrecht recalled—
and stories about computer education, BASIC programming, and various learning fairs and
do-it-yourself technology festivals.82 The newsletter helped to weave together electronic
hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and community-learning organizers.
Another embodiment of this culture was Lee Felsenstein, an earnest antiwar protestor with an
electrical engineering degree from Berkeley who became a featured character in Steven
Levy’s Hackers. Felsenstein was far from being a Merry Prankster. Even in the heady days of
student unrest at Berkeley, he eschewed sex and drugs. He combined a political activist’s
instinct for community organizing with an electronic geek’s disposition for building
communications tools and networks. A faithful reader of the Whole Earth Catalog, he had an
appreciation for the do-it-yourself strand in American community culture along with a faith
that public access to communications tools could wrest power from governments and
corporations.83
Felsenstein’s community-organizing streak and love for electronics were instilled as a
child in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1945. His father was a locomotive machinist who
had become a sporadically employed commercial artist, and his mother was a photographer.
Both were secret members of the Communist Party. “Their outlook was that what you were
fed by the media was generally phony, which was one of my father’s favorite words,”
Felsenstein recalled. Even after they left the Party, his parents remained left-wing organizers.
As a kid, Felsenstein picketed visiting military leaders and helped organize demonstrations in
front of a Woolworth’s in support of the desegregation sit-ins in the South. “I always had a
piece of paper to draw on when I was a kid, because my parents encouraged us to be creative
and imaginative,” he recalled. “And on the other side there was usually some mimeographed
leaflet from an old block organization event.”84
His technological interests were instilled partly by his mother, who repeatedly told of how
her late father had created the small diesel engines used in trucks and trains. “I took the hint
that she wanted me to be an inventor,” he said. Once, when he was reprimanded by a teacher
for daydreaming, he replied, “I’m not daydreaming, I’m inventing.”85
In a household with a competitive older brother and an adopted sister, Felsenstein took
refuge in going to the basement and playing with electronics. It instilled in him a sense that
communications technology should enable individual empowerment: “The technology of
electronics promised something I apparently wanted greatly—communication outside the
hierarchical structure of the family.”86 He took a correspondence course that came with
booklets and test equipment, and he bought radio handbooks and ninety-nine-cent transistors
so that he could learn how to turn schematic drawings into working circuits. One of the many
hackers who grew up building Heathkits and other solder-it-yourself electronic projects, he
later worried that subsequent generations were growing up with sealed devices that couldn’t
be explored.29 “I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were
easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”87
Felsenstein’s political instincts and technological interests came together in a love for
science fiction, particularly the writings of Robert Heinlein. Like generations of gamers and
computer jockeys who helped to create the culture of the personal computer, he was inspired
by the genre’s most common motif, that of the hacker hero who uses tech wizardry to bring
down evil authority.
He went to Berkeley in 1963 to study electrical engineering, just as the revolt against the
Vietnam War was brewing. Among his first acts was to join a protest, along with the poet
Allen Ginsberg, against the visit of a South Vietnamese dignitary. It ran late, and he had to
get a cab to make it back in time for chemistry lab.
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In order to pay his tuition, he entered a work-study program that got him a job with NASA
at Edwards Air Force Base, but he was forced to quit when the authorities discovered that his
parents had been communists. He called his father to ask if that was true. “I don’t want to talk
about it on the phone,” his father replied.88
“Keep your nose clean, son, and you won’t have any trouble getting your job back,”
Felsenstein was told by an Air Force officer. But it was not in his nature to keep his nose
clean. The incident had inflamed his antiauthoritarian streak. He arrived back on campus in
October 1964 just as the Free Speech Movement protests erupted, and, like a sci-fi hero, he
decided to use his technology skills to engage in the fray. “We were looking for nonviolent
weapons, and I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information
flow.”89
At one point there was a rumor that the police had surrounded the campus, and someone
shouted at Felsenstein, “Quick! Make us a police radio.” It was not something he could do on
the spot, but it resulted in another lesson: “I made up my mind, I had to be out front of
everyone applying tech for societal benefit.”90
His biggest insight was that creating new types of communications networks was the best
way to wrest power from big institutions. That was the essence, he realized, of a free speech
movement. “The Free Speech Movement was about bringing down the barriers to people-to-
people communications and thus allowing the formation of connections and communities that
were not handed down by powerful institutions,” he later wrote. “It laid the ground for a true
revolt against the corporations and governments that were dominating our lives.”91
He began to think about what kind of information structures would facilitate this type of
person-to-person communications. He first tried print, launching a newsletter for his student
co-op, and then joined the underground weekly the Berkeley Barb. There he acquired the
semi-ironic title of “military editor” after writing a story about a landing ship dock and using
the initials “LSD” in a satirical fashion. He had hoped that “print could be the new
community media,” but he became disenchanted when he “saw it turn into a centralized
structure that sold spectacle.”92 At one point he developed a bullhorn with a mesh network of
input wires that allowed people in the crowd to talk back. “It had no center and thus no
central authority,” he said. “It was an Internet-like design, which was a way to distribute
communications power to all the people.”93
He realized that the future would be shaped by the distinction between broadcast media
like television, which “transmitted identical information from a central point with minimal
channels for return information,” and nonbroadcast, “in which every participant is both a
recipient and a generator of information.” For him, networked computers would become the
tool that would allow people to take control of their lives. “They would bring the locus of
power down to the people,” he later explained.94
In those pre-Internet days, before Craigslist and Facebook, there were community
organizations known as Switchboards that served to make connections among people and link
them to services they might be seeking. Most were low-tech, usually just a few people around
a table with a couple of phones and a lot of cards and flyers tacked to the walls; they served
as routers to create social networks. “It seemed that every subcommunity had one or more,”
Felsenstein recalled. “I visited them to see if there was any technology they could use to
forward their efforts.” At one point a friend accosted him on the street with some exciting
news: one of these community groups had scored a mainframe computer by guilt-tripping
some wealthy San Francisco liberals. That tip led him to a nonprofit called Resource One,
which was reconfiguring the mainframe so that it could be time-shared by other
Switchboards. “We had the idea that we were going to be the computer for the
counterculture,” he said.95
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Around that time Felsenstein put a personal ad in the Berkeley Barb that read,
“Renaissance Man, Engineer and Revolutionist, seeking conversation.”96 Through it he met
one of the first female hackers and cyberpunks, Jude Milhon, who wrote under the name St.
Jude. She, in turn, introduced him to her companion, Efrem Lipkin, a systems programmer.
The Resource One computer had not been able to find any time-sharing clients, so at Lipkin’s
suggestion they embarked on a new effort, called Community Memory, to use the computer
as a public electronic bulletin board. In August 1973 they set up a terminal, with a link via
phone line to the mainframe, at Leopold’s Records, a student-owned music store in
Berkeley.97
Felsenstein had seized on a seminal idea: public access to computer networks would allow
people to form communities of interest in a do-it-yourself way. The flyer-cum-manifesto
advertising the project proclaimed that “non-hierarchical channels of communication—
whether by computer and modem, pen and ink, telephone, or face-to-face—are the front line
of reclaiming and revitalizing our communities.”98
One smart decision Felsenstein and his friends made was to not have predefined keywords,
such as help wanted or cars or babysitting, programmed into the system. Instead users could
make up any keywords they wanted for their posting. This permitted the street to find its own
uses for the system. The terminal became a bulletin board for posting poetry, organizing
carpools, sharing restaurant ideas, and seeking compatible partners for chess, sex, studying,
meditation, and just about anything else. With St. Jude leading the way, people created their
own online persona and developed a literary flair not possible on cork-and-tack bulletin
boards.99 Community Memory became the forerunner to Internet bulletin board systems and
online services such as The WELL. “We opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was
hospitable territory,” Felsenstein observed.100
Another insight, equally important for the digital age, came after a disagreement with his
sometime friend Lipkin, who wanted to build a terminal that was iron-clad closed so that the
people in the community couldn’t break it. Felsenstein advocated the opposite approach. If
the mission was to give computing power to the people, then the hands-on imperative needed
to be honored. “Efrem said if people get their hands on it they will break it,” Felsenstein
recalled. “I took what became the Wikipedia philosophy, which was that allowing people to
be hands-on would make them protective and fix it when broken.” He believed computers
should be playthings. “If you encourage people to tamper with the equipment, you will be
able to grow a computer and a community in symbiosis.”101
These instincts were crystallized into a philosophy when Felsenstein’s father, just after the
terminal had been set up in Leopold’s, sent him a book called Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan
Illich, an Austrian-born, American-raised philosopher and Catholic priest who criticized the
domineering role of technocratic elites. Part of Illich’s remedy was to create technology that
would be intuitive, easy to learn, and “convivial.” The goal, he wrote, should be to “give
people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency.”102 Like
Engelbart and Licklider, Illich spoke of the need for a “symbiosis” between the user and the
tool.
Felsenstein embraced Illich’s notion that computers should be built in a way that
encouraged hands-on tinkering. “His writings encouraged me to be the pied piper leading
people to equipment they could use.” A dozen years later, when they finally met, Illich asked
him, “If you want to connect people, why do you wish to interpose computers between
them?” Felsenstein replied, “I want computers to be the tools that connect people and to be in
harmony with them.”103
Felsenstein wove together, in a very American way, the ideals of the maker culture—the
fun and fulfillment that comes from an informal, peer-led, do-it-ourselves learning experience
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—with the hacker culture’s enthusiasm for technological tools and the New Left’s instinct for
community organizing.30 As he told a room full of earnest hobbyists at the Bay Area Maker
Faire of 2013, after noting the odd but apt phenomenon of having a 1960s revolutionary as
their keynote speaker, “The roots of the personal computer can be found in the Free Speech
Movement that arose at Berkeley in 1964 and in the Whole Earth Catalog, which did the
marketing for the do-it-yourself ideals behind the personal computer movement.”104
In the fall of 1974, Felsenstein put together specifications for a “Tom Swift Terminal,”
which was, he said, “a Convivial Cybernetic Device” named after “the American folk hero
most likely to be found tampering with the equipment.”105 It was a sturdy terminal designed
to connect people to a mainframe computer or network. Felsenstein never got it fully
deployed, but he mimeographed copies of the specs and handed them out to those who might
embrace the notion. It helped nudge the Community Memory and Whole Earth Catalog
crowd toward his creed that computers should be personal and convivial. That way they
could become tools for ordinary people, not just the technological elite. In the poet Richard
Brautigan’s phrase, they should be “machines of loving grace,” so Felsenstein named the
consulting firm he formed Loving Grace Cybernetics.
Felsenstein was a natural-born organizer, so he decided to create a community of people who
shared his philosophy. “My proposition, following Illich, was that a computer could only
survive if it grew a computer club around itself,” he explained. Along with Fred Moore and
Bob Albrecht, he had become a regular at a potluck dinner hosted on Wednesday nights at the
People’s Computer Center. Another regular was Gordon French, a lanky engineer who loved
to build his own computers. Among the topics they discussed was “What will personal
computers really be like once they finally come into existence?” When the potluck dinners
petered out early in 1975, Moore and French and Felsenstein decided to start a new club.
Their first flyer proclaimed, “Are you building your own computer? Terminal? TV
typewriter? I/O device? Or some other digital black-magic box? If so, you might like to come
to a gathering of people with likeminded interests.”106
The Homebrew Computer Club, as they dubbed it, ended up attracting a cross-section of
enthusiasts from the many cultural tribes of the Bay Area digital world. “It had its
psychedelic rangers (not many), its ham radio rule-followers, its white-shoe would-be
industry potentates, its misfit second- and third-string techs and engineers, and its other
offbeat folks—including a prim and proper lady who sat up front who had been, I was later
told, President Eisenhower’s personal pilot when she was a male,” Felsenstein recalled.
“They all wanted there to be personal computers, and they all wanted to throw off the
constraints of institutions, be they government, IBM or their employers. People just wanted to
get digital grit under their fingernails and play in the process.”107
This first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held on a rainy Wednesday,
March 5, 1975, in Gordon French’s Menlo Park garage. It occurred just when the first truly
personal home computer became available, not from Silicon Valley but from a sagebrush-
strewn strip mall in a silicon desert.
ED ROBERTS AND THE ALTAIR
There was one other character type that helped to create the personal computer: the serial
entrepreneur. Eventually these overcaffeinated startup jockeys would come to dominate
Silicon Valley, edging aside the hippies, Whole Earthers, community organizers, and hackers.
But the first of this breed to be successful in creating a marketable personal computer was
based far away from both Silicon Valley and the computer centers of the East Coast.
When the Intel 8080 microprocessor was about to come out in April 1974, Ed Roberts was
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able to score some handwritten data sheets describing it. A burly entrepreneur with an office
in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, storefront, he came up with a perfectly simple idea of what
he could make using this “computer on a chip”: a computer.108
Roberts was not a computer scientist or even a hacker. He had no grand theories about
augmenting intelligence or the symbiosis wrought by graphical user interfaces. He had never
heard of Vannevar Bush or Doug Engelbart. He was instead a hobbyist. Indeed, he had a
curiosity and passion that made him, in the words of one coworker, “the world’s ultimate
hobbyist.”109 Not the type who got all gooey talking about the maker culture but the type who
catered to (and acted like an overgrown version of) the pimply-faced boys who loved to fly
model airplanes and shoot off rockets in the backyard. Roberts helped usher in a period in
which the world of personal computing was pushed forward not by whiz kids from Stanford
and MIT but by Heathkit hobbyists who loved the sweet smell of smoldering solder.
Roberts was born in Miami in 1941, the son of a household appliance repairman. He joined
the Air Force, which sent him to Oklahoma State to get an engineering degree and then
assigned him to the laser division of a weapons lab in Albuquerque. There he began starting
businesses, such as one that ran the animated characters in the Christmas display of a
department store. In 1969 he and an Air Force mate named Forrest Mims launched a
company aimed at the small but passionate market of model rocket enthusiasts. It produced
do-it-yourself kits that allowed backyard space cadets to make miniature flashing lights and
radio gadgets so that they could track their toy rockets.
Roberts had the buoyancy of a startup junkie. According to Mims, “He was utterly
confident his entrepreneurial gifts would allow him to fulfill his ambitions of earning a
million dollars, learning to fly, owning his own airplane, living on a farm, and completing
medical school.”110 They named their company MITS, in order to evoke MIT, and then
reverse-engineered it as an acronym for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems. Its
$100-a-month office space, which had formerly been a snack bar, was wedged between a
massage parlor and a Laundromat in a fraying strip mall. The old sign reading “The
Enchanted Sandwich Shop” still, rather aptly, hung over the MITS door.
Following in the footsteps of Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, Roberts next forayed into
the electronic calculator business. Understanding the hobbyist mentality, he sold his
calculators as unassembled do-it-yourself kits, even though assembled devices would not
have cost much more. By then he’d had the good fortune of meeting Les Solomon, the
technical editor of Popular Electronics, who had visited Albuquerque on a story-scouting
tour. Solomon commissioned Roberts to write a piece, whose headline, “Electronic Desk
Calculator You Can Build,” appeared on the November 1971 cover. By 1973 MITS had 110
employees and $1 million in sales. But pocket calculator prices were collapsing, and there
was no profit left to be made. “We went through a period where our cost to ship a calculator
kit was $39, and you could buy one in a drugstore for $29,” Roberts recalled.111 By the end of
1974 MITS was more than $350,000 in debt.
Being a brash entrepreneur, Roberts responded to the crisis by deciding to launch a whole
new business. He had always been fascinated by computers, and he assumed that other
hobbyists felt the same. His goal, he enthused to a friend, was building a computer for the
masses that would eliminate the Computer Priesthood once and for all. After studying the
instruction set for the Intel 8080, Roberts concluded that MITS could make a do-it-yourself
kit for a rudimentary computer that would be so cheap, under $400, that every enthusiast
would buy it. “We thought he was off the deep end,” a colleague later confessed.112
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Ed Roberts (1941–2010).
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Altair on the cover, January 1975.
Intel was selling the 8080 for $360 at retail, but Roberts browbeat them down to $75
apiece on the condition that he would buy a thousand. He then got a bank loan based on his
insistence that he would sell that many, though privately he feared that initial orders would be
closer to the two hundred range. No matter. He had the entrepreneur’s risk-loving outlook:
either he would succeed and change history, or he would go bankrupt even faster than he
already was.
The machine that Roberts and his motley crew built would not have impressed Engelbart,
Kay, or the others in the labs around Stanford. It had only 256 bytes of memory and no
keyboard or other input device. The only way to put data or instructions in was to toggle a
row of switches. The wizards at Xerox PARC were building graphical interfaces to display
information; the machine coming out of the old Enchanted Sandwich Shop could display
binary-code answers only through a few lights on the front panel that flashed on and off. But
even though it wasn’t a technological triumph, it was what hobbyists had been yearning for.
There was a pent-up demand for a computer that they could make and own, just like a ham
radio.
Public awareness is an important component of innovation. A computer created in, say, a
basement in Iowa that no one writes about becomes, for history, like a tree falling in Bishop
Berkeley’s uninhabited forest; it’s not obvious that it makes a sound. The Mother of All
Demos helped Engelbart’s innovations catch on. That is why product launches are so
important. The MITS machine might have languished with the unsold calculators in
Albuquerque, if Roberts had not previously befriended Les Solomon of Popular Electronics,
which was to the Heathkit set what Rolling Stone was for rock fans.
Solomon, a Brooklyn-born adventurer who as a young man had fought alongside
Menachem Begin and the Zionists in Palestine, was eager to find a personal computer to
feature on the cover of his magazine. A competitor had done a cover on a computer kit called
the Mark-8, which was a barely workable box using the anemic Intel 8008. Solomon knew he
had to top that story quickly. Roberts sent him the only workable prototype of his MITS
machine via Railway Express Agency, which lost it. (The venerable shipping service went
out of business a few months later.) So the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics
featured a fake version. As they were rushing the article into print, Roberts still hadn’t picked
a name for it. According to Solomon, his daughter, a Star Trek junkie, suggested it be named
after the star that the spaceship Enterprise was visiting that night, Altair. And so the first real,
working personal computer for home consumers was named the Altair 8800.113
“The era of the computer in every home—a favorite topic among science-fiction writers—
has arrived!” the lede of the Popular Electronics story exclaimed.114 For the first time, a
workable and affordable computer was being marketed to the general public. “To my mind,”
Bill Gates would later declare, “the Altair is the first thing that deserves to be called a
personal computer.”115
The day that issue of Popular Electronics hit the newsstands, orders started pouring in.
Roberts had to hire extra people in Albuquerque to answer the phones. In just one day they
got four hundred orders, and within months five thousand kits had been sold (though not
shipped, since MITS could not make them nearly that fast). People were sending checks to a
company they had never heard of, in a town whose name they couldn’t spell, in hopes of
eventually getting a box of parts that they could solder together that would, if all went well,
make some lights blink on and off based on information they had painstakingly entered using
toggle switches. With the passion of hobbyists, they wanted a computer of their own—not a
shared device or one that would network with other people but one that they could play with
by themselves in their bedroom or basement.
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As a result, electronics club hobbyists, in league with Whole Earth hippies and homebrew
hackers, launched a new industry, personal computers, that would drive economic growth and
transform how we live and work. In a power-to-the-people move, computers were wrested
from the sole control of corporations and the military and placed into the hands of
individuals, making them tools for personal enrichment, productivity, and creativity. “The
dystopian society envisioned by George Orwell in the aftermath of World War II, at about the
same time the transistor was invented, has completely failed to materialize,” the historians
Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson wrote, “in large part because transistorized electronic
devices have empowered creative individuals and nimble entrepreneurs far more than Big
Brother.”116
THE HOMEBREW DEBUT
At the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975, the Altair was the
centerpiece. MITS had sent it to the People’s Computer Company for review, and it got
passed around to Felsenstein, Lipkin, and others before being brought to the meeting. There it
was exposed to a garage full of hobbyists, hippies, and hackers. Most of them were
underwhelmed—“There was nothing to it but switches and lights,” said Felsenstein—but they
had an inkling that it heralded a new age. Thirty people gathered around and shared what they
knew. “That may have been the moment at which the personal computer became a convivial
technology,” Felsenstein recalled.117
One hard-core hacker, Steve Dompier, told of going down to Albuquerque in person to pry
loose a machine from MITS, which was having trouble fulfilling orders. By the time of the
third Homebrew meeting, in April 1975, he had made an amusing discovery. He had written a
program to sort numbers, and while he was running it, he was listening to a weather broadcast
on a low-frequency transistor radio. The radio started going zip-zzziiip-ZZZIIIPP at different
pitches, and Dompier said to himself, “Well what do you know! My first peripheral device!”
So he experimented. “I tried some other programs to see what they sounded like, and after
about eight hours of messing around I had a program that could produce musical tones and
actually make music.”118 He charted the tones made by his different program loops, and
eventually he was able to enter a program using the toggle switches that, when it ran, played
the Beatles’ “The Fool on the Hill” on his little radio.31 The tones were not beautiful, but the
Homebrew crowd reacted with a moment of awed silence, then cheers and a demand for an
encore. Dompier then had his Altair produce a version of “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for
Two),” which had been the first song ever played by a computer, at Bell Labs on an IBM 704
in 1961, and was reprised in 1968 by HAL when it was being dismantled in Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Genetically inherited,” was how Dompier described the
song. The members of the Homebrew Club had found a computer they could take home and
make do all sorts of beautiful things, including, as Ada Lovelace had predicted, rendering
music.
Dompier published his musical program in the next issue of the People’s Computer
Company, which led to a historically noteworthy response from a mystified reader. “Steven
Dompier has an article about the musical program that he wrote for the Altair in the People’s
Computer Company publication,” Bill Gates, a Harvard student on leave writing software for
MITS in Albuquerque, wrote in the Altair newsletter. “The article gives a listing of his
program and the musical data for ‘The Fool on the Hill’ and ‘Daisy.’ He doesn’t explain why
it works and I don’t see why. Does anyone know?”119 The simple answer was that the
computer, as it ran the programs, produced frequency interference that could be controlled by
the timing loops and picked up as tone pulses by an AM radio.
By the time his query was published, Gates had been thrown into a more fundamental
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dispute with the Homebrew Computer Club. It became archetypal of the clash between the
commercial ethic that believed in keeping information proprietary, represented by Gates, and
the hacker ethic of sharing information freely, represented by the Homebrew crowd.
Paul Allen (1953– ) and Bill Gates (1955– ) in the Lakeside school’s computer room.
Gates arrested for speeding, 1977.
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The Microsoft team, with Gates at bottom left and Allen at bottom right, just before leaving Albuquerque in December 1978.
243

CHAPTER NINE

SOFTWARE
When Paul Allen wandered up to the cluttered news kiosk in the middle of Harvard Square
and saw the January 1975 Popular Electronics cover with the Altair on it, he was both
exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived,
he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he
grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill
Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced
him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without
us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of
intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight
weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of
the computer business.1
Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up
caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios
or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates
sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s time-sharing terminal, had once
assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally
turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2
For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software
code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed
building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who
had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he
admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3
What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the
Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that,
they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become
an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application
software would capture most of the profits. “When Paul showed me that magazine, there was
no such thing as a software industry,” Gates recalled. “We had the insight that you could
create one. And we did.” Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, “That was the
most important idea that I ever had.”4
BILL GATES
The rocking motion that Gates exhibited when reading the Popular Electronics article had
been a sign of his intensity since childhood. “As a baby, he used to rock back and forth in his
cradle himself,” recalled his father, a successful and gentle lawyer. His favorite toy was a
springed hobbyhorse.5
Gates’s mother, a respected civic leader from a prominent Seattle banking family, was
known for her strong will, but she soon found that she was no match for her son. Often when
she would summon him to dinner from his basement bedroom, which she had given up trying
to make him clean, he wouldn’t answer. “What are you doing?” she once demanded.
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“I’m thinking,” he shouted back.
“You’re thinking?”
“Yes, Mom, I’m thinking,” he replied. “Have you ever tried thinking?”
She sent him to a psychologist, who turned him on to books about Freud, which he
devoured, but was unable to tame his attitude. After a year of sessions, he told Gates’s
mother, “You’re going to lose. You had better just adjust to it because there’s no use trying to
beat him.” His father recounted, “She came around to accepting that it was futile trying to
compete with him.”6
Despite such occasional rebellions, Gates enjoyed being part of a loving and close-knit
family. His parents and his two sisters liked lively dinner table conversations, parlor games,
puzzles, and cards. Because he was born William Gates III, his grandmother, an avid bridge
player (and basketball star), dubbed him Trey, the card term for a 3, which became his
childhood nickname. Along with family friends, they spent much of the summer and some
weekends at a collection of cabins on the Hood Canal near Seattle, where the kids engaged in
a “Cheerio Olympics” featuring a formal opening ceremony with torchlight parade followed
by three-legged races, egg tosses, and similar games. “The play was quite serious,” his father
recalled. “Winning mattered.”7 It was there that Gates, at age eleven, negotiated his first
formal contract; he drew up and signed a deal with one of his sisters giving him the
nonexclusive but unlimited right to use her baseball glove for $5. “When Trey wants the mitt,
he gets it” was one of the provisions.8
Gates tended to shy away from team sports, but he became a serious tennis player and
water-skier. He also worked assiduously on perfecting fun tricks, such as being able to leap
out of a trash can without touching the rim. His father had been an Eagle Scout (you could
see in him throughout his life all twelve virtues of the Scout law), and young Bill in turn
became an avid Scout, achieving Life Rank but falling three badges short of becoming an
Eagle. At one jamboree he demonstrated how to use a computer, but that was before you
could earn a badge for computing skill.9
Despite all these wholesome activities, Gates’s extreme intellect, big glasses, skinny frame,
squeaky voice, and wonkish style—shirt often buttoned to the neck—made him come across
as seriously nerdy. “He was a nerd before the term was even invented,” one teacher declared.
His intellectual intensity was legendary. In fourth grade his science class was assigned a five-
page paper, and he turned in thirty pages. That year he checked “scientist” when asked to
select his future occupation. He also won a dinner atop Seattle’s Space Needle by
memorizing and reciting perfectly the Sermon on the Mount in a contest run by his family’s
pastor.10
In the fall of 1967, when Gates was just turning twelve but still looked about nine, his
parents realized that he would be better off in a private school. “We became concerned about
him when he was ready for junior high,” said his father. “He was so small and shy, in need of
protection, and his interests were so very different from the typical sixth grader’s.”11 They
chose Lakeside, which had an old brick campus that looked like a New England prep school
and catered to the sons (and soon daughters) of Seattle’s business and professional
establishment.
A few months after he entered Lakeside, his life was transformed by the arrival of a
computer terminal in a small downstairs room of the science and math building. It was not
actually a true computer but instead a Teletype terminal that was connected by a phone line to
a General Electric Mark II time-sharing computer system. The Lakeside Mothers Club, with
$3,000 in proceeds from a rummage sale, had bought the right to use a block of time on the
system at $4.80 per minute. It would turn out that they woefully underestimated how popular,
and expensive, this new offering would be. When his seventh-grade math teacher showed
him the machine, Gates was instantly hooked. “I knew more than he did for that first day,”
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the teacher recalled, “but only that first day.”12
Gates began going to the computer room whenever he could, every day, with a hard-core
group of friends. “We were off in our own world,” he remembered. The computer terminal
became to him what a toy compass had been to the young Einstein: a mesmerizing object that
animated his deepest and most passionate curiosities. In struggling to explain what he loved
about the computer, Gates later said it was the simple beauty of its logical rigor, something
that he had cultivated in his own thinking. “When you use a computer, you can’t make fuzzy
statements. You make only precise statements.”13
The language the computer used was BASIC, Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction
Code, which had been developed a few years earlier at Dartmouth to allow nonengineers to
write programs. None of Lakeside’s teachers knew BASIC, but Gates and his friends inhaled
the forty-two-page manual and became wizards at it. Soon they were teaching themselves
more sophisticated languages, such as Fortran and COBOL, but BASIC remained Gates’s
first love. While still in middle school, he produced programs that played tic-tac-toe and
converted numbers from one mathematical base to another.
Paul Allen was two years ahead of Gates and physically far more mature (he could even
grow sideburns) when they met in the Lakeside computer room. Tall and socially gregarious,
he was not a typical wonk. He was immediately amused and charmed by Gates. “I saw a
gangly, freckle-faced eighth-grader edging his way into the crowd around the Teletype, all
arms and legs and nervous energy,” Allen recalled. “His blond hair went all over the place.”
The two boys bonded and would often work late into the evening in the computer room. “He
was really competitive,” Allen said of Gates. “He wanted to show you how smart he was.
And he was really, really persistent.”14
One day Allen, who came from a more modest background (his father was a library
administrator at the University of Washington), visited Gates at his home and was awed. “His
parents subscribed to Fortune and Bill read it religiously.” When Gates asked him what he
thought it would be like to run a big company, Allen said he had no clue. “Maybe we’ll have
our own company someday,” Gates declared.15
One trait that differentiated the two was focus. Allen’s mind would flit among many ideas
and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor. “Where I was curious to study everything in
sight, Bill would focus on one task at a time with total discipline,” said Allen. “You could see
it when he programmed—he’d sit with a marker clenched in his mouth, tapping his feet and
rocking, impervious to distraction.”16
On the surface, Gates could come across as both a nerd and a brat. He had a
confrontational style, even with teachers, and when he was angry would throw a tantrum. He
was a genius, knew it, and flaunted it. “That’s stupid,” he would tell classmates and teachers
alike. Or he would escalate the insult to be “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard” or
“completely brain dead.” At one point he laughed at a kid in class for being slow in figuring
something out, causing a popular kid sitting in front of Gates to turn around and grab him by
the buttoned-up collar and threaten to pummel him. The teacher had to step in.
But to those who knew him, Gates was more than merely nerdy or bratty. Intense and whip
smart, he also had a sense of humor, loved adventures, took physical risks, and liked to
organize activities. At sixteen he got a new red Mustang (he still had it more than forty years
later, preserved in the garage of his mansion), and he took it on high-speed joy rides with his
friends. He also brought his pals to his family compound on the Hood Canal, where he would
kite-ski on a thousand-foot line behind a speedboat. He memorized James Thurber’s classic
story “The Night the Bed Fell” for a student performance, and he starred in a production of
Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy. Around that time, he started informing people, in a matter-of-
fact way, that he would make a million dollars before he turned thirty. He woefully
underestimated himself; at age thirty he would be worth $350 million.
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THE LAKESIDE PROGRAMMING GROUP
In the fall of 1968, when Gates was entering eighth grade, he and Allen formed the Lakeside
Programming Group. Partly it was a geek’s version of a gang. “At bottom, the Lakeside
Programming Group was a boys’ club, with lots of one-upmanship and testosterone in the
air,” said Allen. But it quickly morphed into a moneymaking business, and a competitive one
at that. “I was the mover,” declared Gates. “I was the guy who said, ‘Let’s call the real world
and try to sell something to it.’ ”17 As Allen later noted with a bit of an edge, “While we were
all bent on showing our stuff, Bill was the most driven and competitive, hands down.”18
The Lakeside Programming Group included two other denizens of the school’s computer
room. Ric Weiland, who was in Allen’s tenth-grade class, was an altar boy at the local
Lutheran church whose father was a Boeing engineer. Two years earlier, he had made his
first computer in his basement. He looked much different from the other obsessives holed up
in the computer room. Strikingly handsome, square jawed, tall, and muscular, he was coming
to grips with the fact that he was gay, which was difficult to be open about in a conservative
high school in the 1960s.
The other partner was Kent Evans, who was in Gates’s eighth-grade class. The son of a
Unitarian minister, he was gregarious and unfailingly friendly, with a lopsided but winning
smile that came from being born with a cleft palate that had been surgically repaired. He was
utterly fearless and uninhibited, whether it was cold-calling grown-up executives or climbing
rocky cliffs. He had made up the name Lakeside Programming Group as a way to get free
material from the companies that advertised in electronics magazines. He also loved business,
and he and Gates read each issue of Fortune magazine together. He became Gates’s best
friend. “We were going to conquer the world,” said Gates. “We used to talk on the phone
forever. I still remember his phone number.”19
The Lakeside Programming Group’s first job came that fall of 1968. Some engineers from
the University of Washington had formed a little time-sharing company, housed in an
abandoned Buick dealership, called the Computer Center Corporation and nicknamed C-
Cubed. They bought a DEC PDP-10—a versatile mainframe that was destined to become a
workhorse of the burgeoning time-sharing industry and Gates’s favorite machine—with the
plan of selling time on it to customers, such as Boeing, who would hook in via Teletype and
phone lines. One of the partners at C-Cubed was a Lakeside mother who came up with an
offer for Gates’s gang that was like asking a posse of third-graders to be tasters in a chocolate
factory. The mission: to drive the new PDP-10 as hard as they could and as long as they
wanted, programming and playing on it nights and weekends, to see what things they could
do to make it crash. C-Cubed’s deal with DEC was that it would not have to make lease
payments for the machine until it was debugged and stable. DEC had not counted on its being
tested by the pubescent hot-rodders of the Lakeside Programming Group.
There were two rules: whenever they crashed the machine, they had to describe what they
had done, and they couldn’t do the same trick again until they were told to. “They brought us
in like we were monkeys to find bugs,” Gates recalled. “So we would push the machine to the
max in these totally brute-force ways.” The PDP-10 had three magnetic tapes, and the
Lakeside boys would get all of them spinning at once and then try to crash the system by
launching a dozen or so programs to grab as much memory as they could. “It was goofy
stuff,” Gates said.20 In return for performing their shakedown cruise, they got to use all the
time they wanted to write programs of their own. They created a Monopoly game with
random-number generators to roll the dice, and Gates indulged his fascination with Napoleon
(also a math wizard) by concocting a complex war game. “You’d have these armies and
you’d fight battles,” Allen explained. “The program kept getting bigger and bigger, and
finally when you stretched it all out, it was like fifty feet of Teletype paper.”21
The boys would take the bus to C-Cubed and spend evenings and weekends hunkered
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down in the terminal room. “I became hard-core,” Gates boasted. “It was day and night.”
They would program until they were starving, then walk across the street to a hippie hangout
called Morningtown Pizza. Gates became obsessed. His room at home was strewn with
clothes and Teletype printouts. His parents tried to impose a curfew, but it didn’t work. “Trey
got so into it,” his father recalled, “that he would sneak out the basement door after we went
to bed and spend most of the night there.”22
The C-Cubed executive who became their mentor was none other than Steve “Slug”
Russell, the creative and wry programmer who as a student at MIT had created Spacewar.
The torch was being passed to a new generation of hackers. “Bill and Paul thought crashing
the machine was so fun that I had to keep reminding them they weren’t supposed to do it
again until we told them so,” Russell said.23 “When I stuck my nose in on them, I’d get asked
a question or five, and my natural inclination was to answer questions at considerable
length.”24 What particularly amazed Russell was Gates’s ability to associate different types of
error with specific programmers back at DEC headquarters. A typical bug report from Gates
read, “Well, Mr. Faboli’s code at this line, he’s made the same mistake of not checking the
semaphore when he’s changing the status. If we simply insert this line here, we can get rid of
this problem.”25
Gates and Allen came to appreciate the importance of the computer’s operating system,
which was akin to its nervous system. As Allen explained, “It does the logistical work that
allows the central processing unit to compute: shifting from program to program; allocating
storage to files; moving data to and from modems and disk drives and printers.” The
operating system software for the PDP-10 was called TOPS-10, and Russell allowed Gates
and Allen to read, but not take home, the manuals. They would sometimes stay until dawn
absorbing them.
In order to fully understand the operating system, Gates realized, they would have to get
access to its source code, which programmers used to specify each action to be performed.
But the source code was tightly held by the top engineers and was off-limits to the Lakeside
boys. That made it all the more of a Holy Grail. One weekend they discovered that printouts
of the programmers’ work were discarded into a big Dumpster in the back of the building. So
Allen clasped his hands to give Gates a boost—“He couldn’t have weighed more than 110
pounds,” Allen said—and he dove into the container to rummage among the coffee grinds
and garbage to find the stacks of stained and crumpled fanfold printouts. “We took that
precious hoard back to the terminal room and pored over it for hours,” said Allen. “I had no
Rosetta Stone to help me, and understood maybe one or two lines out of ten, but I was blown
away by the source code’s tightly written elegance.”
That led Gates and Allen to want to drill down a level deeper. In order to grasp the
architecture of the operating system they would have to master assembly code, the underlying
commands—“Load B. Add C. Store in A.”—that directly spoke to the machine’s hardware.
Allen recalled, “Seeing my interest, Steve Russell took me aside, handed me an assembler
manual bound in glossy plastic, and told me, ‘You need to read this.’ ”26 He and Gates would
read the manuals and sometimes still be confused. At that point Russell would hand them
another one and say, “Now it’s time to read this.” After a while, they became masters of the
complexities, and the simplicities, that can make an operating system so potent and graceful.
When the DEC software was finally determined to be stable, the Lakeside boys lost their
right to use the PDP-10 for free. “They basically said, ‘Okay you monkeys, go home,’ ”
Gates said.27 The Lakeside Mothers Club came to the rescue, at least to some extent. It
funded personal accounts for the boys, but there was a time and dollar limit. Gates and Allen
knew they could never live within the limit, so they tried to beat the system by getting hold of
an administrator’s password, hacking into the internal accounting system file, and breaking
the encryption code. That allowed them to tap into free accounts. But before they could
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wreak much havoc, they got caught: their math teacher found their roll of Teletype paper with
all the account numbers and passwords. The matter went all the way up to the top echelons at
C-Cubed and DEC, and a stern delegation visited the school for a meeting in the principal’s
office. Gates and Allen hung their heads, feigning deep contrition, but it didn’t work. They
were banned from using the system for the rest of the semester and the entire summer.
“I swore off computers for a while, and I tried to be normal,” said Gates. “I decided to
prove I could get all A’s without ever taking a textbook home. Instead I read biographies of
Napoleon and novels like Catcher in the Rye.”28
For almost a year the Lakeside Programming Group was on hiatus. Then, in the fall of 1970,
the school started buying time on a PDP-10 from a company in Portland, Oregon, called
Information Sciences, Inc. (ISI). It was expensive, $15 an hour. Gates and his friends quickly
learned to hack in for free, but once again they got caught. So they took another approach:
they sent ISI a letter offering their services in return for free time.
The executives at ISI were dubious, so the four boys went down to Portland carrying
printouts and program codes to show how good they were. “We outlined our experience and
submitted our résumés,” Allen recalled. Gates, who had just turned sixteen, wrote his in
pencil on lined notebook paper. They got an assignment to write a payroll program that
would produce paychecks with correct deductions and taxes.29
That’s when the first cracks appeared in the Gates-Allen relationship. The program had to
be written not in BASIC (Gates’s favorite language) but in COBOL, the more complex
language that had been developed by Grace Hopper and others as a standard for businesses.
Ric Weiland knew COBOL and wrote a program editor for the ISI system, which Allen
quickly mastered. At that point the two older boys decided that they didn’t need Gates or
Kent Evans. “Paul and Rick decided there wasn’t enough work to go around and said, we
don’t need you guys,” Gates recalled. “They thought that they would do the work and get the
computer time.”30
Gates was frozen out for six weeks, during which time he read algebra books and avoided
Allen and Weiland. “And then Paul and Rick realized, oh shit, this is a pain,” said Gates. The
program required not only coding skills but someone who could figure out social security
deductions, federal taxes, and state unemployment insurance. “So then they say, ‘hey, we’re
in trouble on this thing, can you come back and help?’ ” That’s when Gates pulled a power
play that would define his future relationship with Allen. As Gates described it, “That’s when
I say, ‘Okay. But I’m going to be in charge. And I’ll get used to being in charge, and it’ll be
hard to deal with me from now on unless I’m in charge. If you put me in charge, I’m in
charge of this and anything else we do.’ ”31
And so he was, from then on. When he returned to the fold, Gates insisted on turning the
Lakeside Programming Group into a legal partnership, using an agreement drawn up with his
father’s help. And though partnerships generally don’t have presidents, Gates started calling
himself that. He was sixteen. Then he divvied up the $18,000 worth of computer time that
they were earning, screwing Allen in the process. “I gave 4/11ths to myself, 4/11ths to Kent,
2/11ths to Rick, and 1/11th to Paul,” Gates recalled. “The guys thought it was really funny
that I did 11ths. But Paul had been so lazy and had never done anything and I was just trying
to decide, okay, there’s a factor of two between what Paul did and what Rick did, and then
there’s more than a factor of two between what Rick did and what Kent and I did.”32
At first Gates tried to give himself slightly more than Evans as well. “But Kent would
never let me get away with that.” Evans was as savvy about business as Gates was. When
they finished the payroll program, Evans made a note in the meticulous journal that he kept:
“Tuesday we go to Portland to deliver the program and as they have put it, ‘hammer out an
agreement for future work.’ Everything so far has been done for its educational benefits and
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for large amounts of expensive computer time. Now we want to get some monetary benefits,
too.”33 The negotiations were tense, and for a while ISI tried to hold back some of the
computer time payment because they objected to the lack of documentation. But with the
help of a letter written by Gates’s father, the dispute was resolved and a new deal was
negotiated.
In the fall of 1971, at the beginning of Gates’s junior year, Lakeside merged with a girls’
school. This created a class-scheduling nightmare, so the administrators asked Gates and
Evans to write a program to solve it. Gates knew that a school schedule had scores of
variables—required courses, teacher schedules, classroom space, honors classes, electives,
staggered sections, double-period labs—that would make it extremely difficult, so he
declined. Instead a teacher took on the challenge, while Gates and Evans taught his computer
class for him. But that January, as he was still struggling to produce a workable program, the
teacher was killed when a small plane he was riding in crashed. Gates and Evans agreed to
take over the task. They spent hours in the computer room, often sleeping there overnight,
trying to write a new program from scratch. In May they were still struggling, trying to finish
so that it could be ready for the next school year.
That is when Evans, despite being exhausted, decided to go through with a mountain-
climbing excursion he had signed up for. He was not an athlete. “It was really unusual that he
signed up for this climbing course,” Gates recalled. “I think he wanted to push himself.”
Evans’s father, knowing how drained his son was, begged him to cancel: “The last
conversation I had with him was trying to convince him not to go, but he had a commitment
to finishing things.” The class was learning how to belay on one of the more gentle slopes
when Evans tripped. He tried to get up, then continued to roll more than two hundred yards
across the snow and down a glacier, tucking in his arms to protect himself instead of splaying
them out as he should have. His head smashed into several rocks, and he died aboard the
helicopter that came to rescue him.
Lakeside’s headmaster called the Gates home, and Bill was summoned into his parents’
bedroom, where he was told the news.32 The service was conducted by Lakeside’s art teacher,
Robert Fulghum, who was a Unitarian minister like Evans’s father and who would later
become a popular writer (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten). “I had never
thought of people dying,” Gates said. “At the service, I was supposed to speak, but I couldn’t
get up. For two weeks I couldn’t do anything at all.” He spent a lot of time afterward with
Kent’s parents. “Kent was the apple of their eye.”34
Gates called Paul Allen, who had just finished his freshman year at Washington State, and
asked him to come back to Seattle to help with the scheduling program. “I was going to do it
with Kent,” Gates told him. “I need help.” He was in bad shape. “Bill stayed depressed for
weeks,” Allen recalled.35 They brought cots to campus and, like old times, spent many nights
in the computer room that summer of 1972, communing with a PDP-10. With his rigorous
mind, Gates was able to take the problem posed by the Rubik’s Cube of class-scheduling
variables and break it into a series of small component problems that could be solved
sequentially. He was also able to put himself into a history class with all the right girls and
only one other boy (“a real wimp”) and make sure that he and his senior class friends had
Tuesday afternoons free. They had T-shirts made featuring a beer keg and the words
“Tuesday Club” emblazoned on the front.36
That summer Gates and Allen became enchanted by Intel’s new 8008 microprocessor, a
powerful upgrade of its 4004 “computer on a chip.” They were so excited by a story on it in
Electronics Magazine that years later Gates would remember the page number it was on. If
the chip really could act like a computer and be programmed, Allen asked Gates, why not
write a programming language for it, specifically a version of BASIC? If they pulled off such
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a feat, Allen argued, “ordinary people would be able to buy computers for their offices, even
their homes.” Gates dismissed the 8008 as not being up for such a task. “It would be dog-
slow and pathetic,” he replied. “And BASIC by itself would take up almost all the memory.
There’s just not enough horsepower.” Allen realized that Gates was right, and they agreed to
wait until, in accordance with Moore’s Law, a microprocessor twice as powerful came out in
a year or two. The parameters of their partnership were becoming clear. “I was the idea man,
the one who’d conceive of things out of whole cloth,” explained Allen. “Bill listened and
challenged me, and then homed in on my best ideas to help make them a reality. Our
collaboration had a natural tension, but mostly it worked productively and well.”37
Gates had gotten a contract to analyze traffic patterns for a company that counted how
many cars ran over rubber tubes laid across roads. He and Allen decided to create a special-
purpose computer that would process the raw data. Showing his clunky taste, Gates chose the
name Traf-O-Data for their new venture. They went to a nearby Hamilton Avnet electronics
store and, with a great sense of the moment, shelled out $360 in cash to buy a single 8008
chip. Allen recalled the moment vividly: “The sales clerk handed us a small cardboard box,
which we opened then and there for our first look at a microprocessor. Inside an aluminum
foil wrapper, stuck into a small slab of nonconductive black rubber, was a thin rectangle
about an inch long. For two guys who’d spent their formative years with massive
mainframes, it was a moment of wonder.” Gates told the clerk, “That’s a lot of money for
such a little thing,” but he and Allen were suitably impressed, for they knew the little chip
contained the brains of a whole computer. “These people thought it was the strangest thing
ever to have these kids coming in and buying an 8008,” Gates recalled. “And we were so
worried as we unwrapped the foil that we would break the thing.”38
In order to write a program that would work on the 8008, Allen devised a way to emulate
the microprocessor on a mainframe computer. As he later explained, the emulation of the
8008 “reflected a truism in technology circles that harkened back to the theories of Alan
Turing in the 1930s: any computer could be programmed to behave like any other computer.”
There was another lesson in this feat of alchemy, one that was at the core of what Gates and
Allen contributed to the computer revolution: “Software trumped hardware,” Allen later
explained.39
Given their reverence for software over hardware, it is not surprising that Gates and Allen
were able to write a good program for their proposed traffic tabulator but were never able to
get the hardware components working properly, most notably the mechanism that was
supposed to read the traffic tapes. One day, after they thought they had it running smoothly,
an official with the Seattle engineering department came to Gates’s family home to be given
a sales demo. As they sat in the living room, the demo gods had their revenge and the tape
reader kept failing. Gates ran to get his mother. “Tell him, Mom!” he implored. “Tell him it
worked last night!”40
The final semester of Gates’s senior year, in the spring of 1973, he and Allen were recruited
by the Bonneville Power Administration, which was on a nationwide hunt for PDP-10 experts
to help program its electrical grid management system. Gates and his parents talked to
Lakeside’s headmaster, who agreed that the job would be more educational than attending his
last semester of school. Allen felt the same way about his semester at Washington State:
“Here was a chance to work together again on a PDP-10, and for pay!” They piled into
Gates’s Mustang convertible, drove the 165 miles south from Seattle to the Bonneville
command center in under two hours, and rented a cheap apartment together.
Their work was in an underground bunker on the Columbia River across from Portland.
“They had this massive control room, which looks better than any TV show I’ve ever seen,”
Gates recalled. He and Allen would hunker down for coding sessions that lasted twelve hours
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or more. “When Bill felt himself flagging, he’d grab a jar of Tang, pour some powder on one
hand, and lick it off for a pure sugar high,” Allen recalled. “His palms had a chronic orange
tinge that summer.” Sometimes, after a two-day work binge, they would get “slept up,” as
Gates called it, by crashing for eighteen hours or so. “We had contests,” Gates said, “to see
who could stay in the building like three days straight, four days straight. Some of the more
prudish people would say ‘Go home and take a bath.’ We were just hard-core, writing
code.”41
Occasionally Gates would take a break for some extreme waterskiing, including dry-dock
starts from diving platforms, then go back to the bunker for more coding. He and Allen got
along well, except when Allen’s methodical chess-playing style would triumph over Gates’s
more reckless and aggressive approach. “When I beat him one day, he got so angry that he
swept the pieces to the floor,” said Allen. “After a few games like that, we stopped
playing.”42
Gates applied only to three colleges his senior year—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he
took different approaches to each. “I was born to apply for college,” he boasted, fully aware
of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political
type and emphasized a monthlong summer internship he had done in Congress. For
Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said
his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the
interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three and chose Harvard.43
“You know, Bill,” Allen warned him, “when you get to Harvard, there are going to be
some people a lot better in math than you are.”
“No way,” Gates replied. “There’s no way!”
“Wait and see,” said Allen.44
GATES AT HARVARD
When Gates was asked to pick the types of roommates he preferred, he asked for an African
American and an international student. He was assigned to Wigglesworth Hall, a freshman
dorm in Harvard Yard, with Sam Znaimer, a science lover from a family of poor Jewish
refugees in Montreal, and Jim Jenkins, a black student from Chattanooga. Znaimer, who had
never known a privileged WASP before, found Gates very friendly and his study habits
weirdly fascinating. “His habit was to do 36 hours or more at a stretch, collapse for ten hours,
then go out, get a pizza, and go back at it,” he said. “And if that meant he was starting again
at three in the morning, so be it.”45 He marveled as Gates spent several nights filling out
federal and state tax forms for Traf-O-Data’s revenues. When working hard, Gates would
rock back and forth. Then he would grab Znaimer for a frenzy of playing Pong, the Atari
video game, in the dorm lounge, or Spacewar in Harvard’s computer lab.
The computer lab was named after Howard Aiken, who had invented the Mark I and
operated it during World War II with the help of Grace Hopper. It housed Gates’s favorite
machine: a PDP-10 from DEC, which had been destined for military use in Vietnam but was
reassigned to assist military-funded research at Harvard. To avoid sparking an antiwar
protest, it was smuggled into the Aiken Lab early one Sunday morning in 1969. It was funded
by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (then known as DARPA),
but that was kept quiet, so there was no written policy about who could use it. There was also
a slew of PDP-1 computers on which to play Spacewar. For his freshman computer project,
Gates linked the PDP-10 and a PDP-1 to create a video baseball game. “The logic was on the
PDP-10, but I sent it down to the PDP-1 because I used the same display as Spacewar, a line-
drawing display which you don’t see anymore,” he explained.46
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Gates would stay up late writing the algorithms to direct the bounce of the ball and the
angle of approach of the fielders. “The projects he worked on for the first year were not
commercial,” Znaimer said. “They were mostly done for the love of computing.”47 The
professor who oversaw the lab, Thomas Cheatham, had mixed feelings: “He was a hell of a
good programmer.” He was, however, also a “pain in the ass” and “an obnoxious human
being. . . . He’d put people down when it was not necessary, and just generally was not a
pleasant fellow to have around.”48
Allen’s warning to Gates that he would not be the smartest kid in the class turned out to be
true. There was a freshman who lived upstairs from him who was better at math, Andy
Braiterman from Baltimore. They would wrestle with problem sets all night in Braiterman’s
room, eating pizza. “Bill was intense,” Braiterman remembered, and also “a good arguer.”49
Gates was particularly forceful in arguing that soon everyone would have a home computer
that could be used for calling up books and other information. The following year he and
Braiterman roomed together.
Gates decided to major in applied math rather than pure math, and he was able to make a
small mark on the field. In a class taught by the computer scientist Harry Lewis, he was
introduced to a classical problem:
The chef in our place is sloppy, and when he prepares a stack of pancakes they come out all different sizes. Therefore, when I deliver them to a
customer, on the way to the table I rearrange them (so that the smallest winds up on top, and so on, down to the largest at the bottom) by
grabbing several from the top and flipping them over, repeating this (varying the number I flip) as many times as necessary. If there are n
pancakes, what is the maximum number of flips (as a function f(n) of n) that I will ever have to use to rearrange them?
The answer required coming up with a good algorithm, just as any computer program did. “I
posed it in class and then I went on,” Lewis recalled. “A day or two later, this smart
sophomore comes into my office and explains that he’s got a five-thirds N algorithm.” In
other words, Gates had figured out a way to do it with five-thirds flips per pancake in the
stack. “It involved a complicated case analysis of what exactly the configuration of the top
few pancakes might look like. It was quite clever.” A teaching assistant in the class, Christos
Papadimitriou, later published the solution in a scholarly paper coauthored with Gates.50
As Gates was preparing to begin his sophomore year in the summer of 1974, he convinced
Allen to move to the Boston area and take a job with Honeywell that had originally been
offered to Gates. Allen dropped out of Washington State, drove his Chrysler east, and urged
Gates to drop out as well. We’re going to miss the computer revolution, he argued. Over
pizza they would fantasize about creating their own company. “If everything went right, how
big do you think our company could be?” Allen asked at one point. Gates replied, “I think we
could get it up to thirty-five programmers.”51 But Gates bowed to pressure from his parents to
remain at Harvard, at least for the time being.
Like many innovators, Gates was rebellious just for the hell of it. He decided that he would
not go to the lectures for any course in which he was enrolled, and he would audit lectures
only of courses that he was not taking. He followed this rule carefully. “By my sophomore
year, I was auditing classes that met at the same time as my actual classes just to make sure
I’d never make a mistake,” he recalled. “So I was this complete rejectionist.”52
He also took up poker with a vengeance. His game of choice was Seven Card Stud, high
low. A thousand dollars or more could be won or lost per night. Gates, whose IQ surpassed
his EQ, was better at calculating the odds than in reading the thoughts of his fellow players.
“Bill had a monomaniacal quality,” Braiterman said. “He would focus on something and
really stick with it.” At one point he gave his checkbook to Allen in order to prevent himself
from squandering more money, but he soon demanded it back. “He was getting some costly
lessons in bluffing,” said Allen. “He’d win three hundred dollars one night and lose six
hundred the next. As Bill dropped thousands that fall, he kept telling me, ‘I’m getting better.’
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”53
In a graduate-level economics class, he met a student who lived down the hall of his dorm.
Steve Ballmer was very different from Gates on the surface. Big, boisterous, and gregarious,
he was the type of campus activity junkie who liked to join or lead multiple organizations. He
was in the Hasty Pudding Club, which wrote and produced musical theater shows, and served
with a cheerleader’s enthusiasm as manager of the football team. He was both the publisher
of the Advocate, the campus literary magazine, and the advertising manager of the Crimson,
the newspaper. He even joined one of the fraying men’s clubs, and convinced his new best
friend Gates to do so as well. “A bizarre experience,” Gates called it. What bound them
together was their shared superintensity. They would talk and argue and study together at
high volume, each of them rocking back and forth. Then they would go to movies together.
“We went and saw Singin’ in the Rain and A Clockwork Orange, which are only connected
by the use of a common song,” said Gates. “And then we got to be super-good friends.”54
Gates’s haphazard life at Harvard was suddenly upended in December 1974, halfway
through his sophomore year, when Allen arrived at his Currier House room with the new
issue of Popular Electronics featuring the Altair on the cover. Allen’s rallying cry, “Hey, this
thing is happening without us,” jolted Gates into action.
BASIC FOR THE ALTAIR
Gates and Allen set out to write software that would make it possible for hobbyists to create
their own programs on the Altair. Specifically, they decided to write an interpreter for the
programming language BASIC that would run on the Altair’s Intel 8080 microprocessor. It
would become the first commercial native high-level programming language for a
microprocessor. And it would launch the personal computer software industry.
Using some old stationery with the Traf-O-Data letterhead, they wrote a letter to MITS, the
fledgling Albuquerque company that made the Altair, claiming that they had created a
BASIC interpreter that could run on the 8080. “We are interested in selling copies of this
software to hobbyists through you.”55 That wasn’t exactly true. They had not yet written any
software. But they knew they could scramble into action if MITS expressed interest.
When they did not hear back, they decided to phone. Gates suggested that Allen place the
call, because he was older. “No, you should do it; you’re better at this kind of thing,” Allen
argued. They came up with a compromise: Gates would call, disguising his squeaky voice,
but he would use the name Paul Allen, because they knew it would be Allen who would fly
out to Albuquerque if they got lucky. “I had my beard going and at least looked like an adult,
while Bill still could pass for a high school sophomore,” recalled Allen.56
When the gruff-sounding Ed Roberts answered the phone, Gates put on a deep voice and
said, “This is Paul Allen in Boston. We’ve got a BASIC for the Altair that’s just about
finished, and we’d like to come out and show it to you.” Roberts replied that he had gotten
many such calls. The first person to walk through his door in Albuquerque with a working
BASIC would get the contract. Gates turned to Allen and exulted, “God, we gotta get going
on this!”
Because they did not have an Altair to work on, Allen had to emulate one on Harvard’s
PDP-10, a reprise of the tactic he had used to build their Traf-O-Data machine. So they
bought a manual for the 8080 microprocessor, and within weeks Allen had the emulator and
other development tools ready.
Meanwhile Gates was furiously writing the BASIC interpreter code on yellow legal pads.
By the time Allen had finished the emulator, Gates had outlined the structure and much of the
code. “I can still see him alternately pacing and rocking for long periods before jotting on a
yellow legal pad, his fingers stained from a rainbow of felt-tip pens,” Allen recalled. “Once
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my emulator was in place and he was able to use the PDP-10, Bill moved to a terminal and
peered at his legal pad as he rocked. Then he’d type a flurry of code with those strange hand
positions of his, and repeat. He could go like that for hours at a stretch.”57
One night they were having dinner at Currier House, Gates’s dorm, sitting at the table with
the other math wonks, and they began complaining about facing the tedious task of writing
floating-point math routines, which would give the program the ability to deal with both very
small and very large numbers and decimal points in scientific notation.33 A curly-haired kid
from Milwaukee named Monte Davidoff piped up, “I’ve written those kinds of routines.”58
This was one of the benefits of being a geek at Harvard. Gates and Allen began peppering
him with questions about his capacity to handle floating-point code. Satisfied that he knew
what he was talking about, they brought him to Gates’s room and negotiated a fee of $400 for
his work. He became the third member of the team, and would eventually earn a lot more.
Gates ignored the exam cramming he was supposed to be doing and even stopped playing
poker. For eight weeks he and Allen and Davidoff holed up day and night at Harvard’s Aiken
Lab making history on the PDP-10 that the Defense Department was funding. Occasionally
they would break for dinner at Harvard House of Pizza or Aku Aku, an ersatz Polynesian
restaurant. In the wee hours of the morning, Gates would sometimes fall asleep at the
terminal. “He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his
nose touched the keyboard,” Allen said. “After dozing an hour or two, he’d open his eyes,
squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat
of concentration.”
They would scribble away at their notepads, competing at times to see who could execute a
subroutine in the fewest lines. “I can do it in nine,” one would shout. Another would shoot
back, “Well, I can do it in five!” Allen noted, “We knew that each byte saved would leave
that much more room for users to add to their applications.” The goal was to get the program
into less than the 4K of memory that an enhanced Altair would have, so there would still be
room left for the consumer to use. (A 16GB smartphone has four million times that amount of
memory.) At night they would fan out the printouts on the floor and search for ways to make
it more elegant, compact, and efficient.59
By late February 1975, after eight weeks of intense coding, they got it down, brilliantly,
into 3.2K. “It wasn’t a question of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of
whether I could squeeze it into under 4k and make it super fast,” said Gates. “It was the
coolest program I ever wrote.”60 Gates checked it for errors one last time, then commanded
the Aiken Lab’s PDP-10 to spew out a punch tape of it so Allen could take it to Albuquerque.
On the flight down, Allen remembered he hadn’t written a loader, the sequence of
commands that would instruct the Altair how to put the BASIC interpreter into its memory.
As the plane was preparing to land, he grabbed a pad and wrote twenty-one lines in the
machine language used by the Intel microprocessor, each line a three-digit number in base-8.
He was sweating by the time he left the terminal, wearing a tan Ultrasuede polyester suit and
looking for Ed Roberts. Eventually he spotted a jowly three-hundred-pound man in jeans and
a string tie in a pickup truck. “I’d expected a high-powered executive from some cutting-edge
entrepreneurial firm, like the ones clustered along Route 128, the high-tech beltway around
Boston,” Allen recalled.
The MITS world headquarters was likewise not quite what Allen expected. It was in a low-
rent strip mall, and the only Altair with enough memory to run BASIC was still being tested.
So they put off until the next morning trying out the program and headed off “to a three-
dollar buffet at a Mexican place called Pancho’s, where you got what you paid for,” Allen
said. Roberts drove him to the local Sheraton, where the desk clerk told him that his room
would be $50. That was $10 more than Allen had brought with him, so after an awkward
stare Roberts had to pay for the room. “I guess I wasn’t what he’d been expecting, either,”
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said Allen.61
The next morning, Allen returned to MITS for the big test. It took almost ten minutes to
load in the code for the BASIC interpreter that he and Gates had written. Roberts and his
colleagues exchanged amused glances, already suspecting that the show would be a fiasco.
But then the Teletype clacked to life. “MEMORY SIZE?” it asked. “Hey, it typed
something!” shouted one of the MITS team. Allen was happily flabbergasted. He typed in the
answer: 7168. The Altair responded: “OK.” Allen typed, “PRINT 2+2.” It was the simplest of
all commands, but it would test not only Gates’s coding but also Davidoff’s floating-point
math routines. The Altair responded: “4.”
Up until then, Roberts had been watching quietly. He had taken his failing company further
into debt on the wild surmise that he could create a computer that a home hobbyist could use
and afford. Now he was watching as history was being made. For the first time, a software
program had run on a home computer. “Oh my God,” he shouted. “It printed ‘4’!”62
Roberts invited Allen into his office and agreed to license the BASIC interpreter for
inclusion on all Altair machines. “I couldn’t stop grinning,” Allen confessed. When he
arrived back in Cambridge, bringing with him a working Altair to install in Gates’s dorm
room, they went out to celebrate. Gates had his usual: a Shirley Temple, ginger ale with
maraschino cherry juice.63
A month later, Roberts offered Allen a job at MITS as director of software. His colleagues
at Honeywell thought he was crazy to consider it. “Your job’s safe at Honeywell,” they told
him. “You can work here for years.” But career safety was not an ideal embraced by those
eager to lead the computer revolution. So in the spring of 1975, Allen moved to Albuquerque,
a city he had only recently learned was not in Arizona.
Gates decided to stay at Harvard, at least for the time being. There he endured what has
become a rite of passage, amusing only in retrospect, for many of its most successful
students: being hauled before the university’s secretive Administrative Board for a
disciplinary process, known as being “Ad Boarded.” Gates’s case arose when auditors from
the Defense Department decided to check the use of the PDP-10 that it was funding in
Harvard’s Aiken Lab. They discovered that one sophomore, W. H. Gates, was using most of
the time. After much fretting, Gates prepared a paper defending himself and describing how
he had created a version of BASIC using the PDP-10 as an emulator. He ended up being
exonerated for his use of the machine, but he was “admonished” for allowing a nonstudent,
Paul Allen, to log on with his password. He accepted that minor reprimand and agreed to put
his early version of the BASIC interpreter (but not the refined one he and Allen were then
working on) into the public domain.64
By that time Gates was focusing more on his software partnership with Allen than his
course work at Harvard. He finished his sophomore year that spring of 1975, then flew down
to Albuquerque for the summer and decided to stay there rather than return for the first
semester of his junior year that fall. He went back to Harvard for two more semesters, in the
spring and fall of 1976, but then left Harvard for good, two semesters shy of graduating. In
June 2007, when he returned to Harvard to get an honorary degree, he began his speech by
directing a comment to his father in the audience. “I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to
say this: Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”65
MICRO-SOFT
When Gates arrived in Albuquerque in the summer of 1975, he and Allen were still supplying
BASIC for the Altair on a handshake deal with Ed Roberts. Gates insisted on a formal
agreement and, after much haggling, agreed to license the software to MITS for ten years, to
be bundled with each Altair, for $30 in royalty per copy. Gates was able to win two
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provisions that would be historically significant. He insisted that he and Allen would retain
ownership of the software; MITS would merely have rights to license it. He also required that
MITS use its “best efforts” to sublicense the software to other computer makers, splitting the
revenues with Gates and Allen. It set a precedent for the deal Gates would make six years
later with IBM. “We were able to make sure our software worked on many types of
machines,” he said. “That allowed us and not the hardware makers to define the market.”66
Now they needed a name. They kicked around a few ideas, including Allen & Gates, which
they decided sounded too much like a law firm. Eventually they picked one that was not
particularly exciting or inspiring but did convey that they were writing software for
microcomputers. In the final documents for the MITS deal, they referred to themselves as
“Paul Allen and Bill Gates doing business as Micro-Soft.” A credit line appeared in the
source code of what was then their only product: “Micro-Soft BASIC: Paul Allen wrote the
non-runtime stuff. Bill Gates wrote the runtime stuff. Monte Davidoff wrote the math
package.” Within a couple of years, the name was simplified to Microsoft.
After bunking for a while at the Sundowner Motel on a strip of Route 66 known more for
prostitutes than programmers, Gates and Allen moved to a cheap furnished apartment. Monte
Davidoff, of floating-point math fame, and Chris Larson, a younger student from Lakeside
High, moved in, turning the apartment into a frat house doing business as a geek bunker. In
the evenings Allen would crank up his Stratocaster guitar and play along with Aerosmith or
Jimi Hendrix, and Gates would retaliate by loudly singing Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”67
Of them all, Gates was the prime example of the innovator’s personality. “An innovator is
probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore
normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed as a bit imbalanced,” he said.
“Certainly in my teens and 20s, I fit that model.”68 He would work, as he had at Harvard, in
bursts that could last up to thirty-six hours, and then curl up on the floor of his office and fall
asleep. Said Allen, “He lived in binary states: either bursting with nervous energy on his
dozen Cokes a day, or dead to the world.”
Gates was also a rebel with little respect for authority, another trait of innovators. To folks
like Roberts, a former Air Force officer with five sons who called him “Sir,” Gates came
across as a brat. “He literally was a spoiled kid, that’s what the problem was,” said Roberts
later. But it was more complex than that. Gates worked hard and lived frugally off his then-
meager earnings, but he did not believe in being deferential. The scrawny Gates would go toe
to toe with the brawny six-foot-four Roberts and engage in arguments so heated that, as Allen
remembered, “you could hear them yelling throughout the plant, and it was a spectacle.”
Allen assumed that his partnership with Gates would be fifty-fifty. They had always been a
team, and it seemed unnecessary to fight over who had done more. But since their spat over
the payroll program in high school, Gates had insisted on being in charge. “It’s not right for
you to get half,” he told Allen. “You had your salary at MITS while I did almost everything
on BASIC without one back in Boston. I should get more. I think it should be sixty-forty.”
Whether or not Gates was right, it was in his nature to insist on such things, and it was in
Allen’s nature not to. Allen was taken aback but agreed. Worse yet, Gates insisted on revising
the split two years later. “I’ve done most of the work on BASIC, and I gave up a lot to leave
Harvard,” he told Allen on a walk. “I deserve more than 60 percent.” His new demand was
that the split be 64-36. Allen was furious. “It exposed the differences between the son of a
librarian and the son of a lawyer,” he said. “I’d been taught that a deal was a deal and your
word was your bond. Bill was more flexible.” But again Allen went along.69
In fairness to Gates, he was the person who, by then, was actually running the fledgling
company. Not only was he writing much of the code, but he also was in charge of sales,
making most of the calls himself. He would kick around ideas about product strategy with
Allen for hours, but he was the one who made the final decisions on which versions of
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Fortran or BASIC or COBOL would be built. He was also in charge of business deals with
the hardware makers, and he was an even tougher negotiator with them than he had been with
Allen. Plus he was in charge of personnel, which meant hiring, firing, and telling people in
words of one syllable when their work sucked, which is something Allen would never do. He
had the credibility to do so; when there were contests in the office to see who could write a
program using the fewest lines of code, Gates usually won.
Allen would sometimes come in late and might even think it was permissible to leave work
in time for dinner. But not Gates and his close coterie. “It was hard-core,” he recalled. “A
small group and me would work late into the night. And I’d sometimes stay all night and then
sleep in the office and my secretary would come wake me up if we had a meeting.”70
Born with a risk-taking gene, Gates would cut loose late at night by driving at terrifying
speeds up the mountain roads to an abandoned cement plant. “Sometimes I wondered why
Bill drove so fast,” Allen said. “I decided it was his way of letting off steam. He’d get so
wound up in our work that he needed a way to stop thinking about the business and the code
for a while. His breakneck driving wasn’t so different from table stakes poker or edge-of-the-
envelope waterskiing.” Once they had made a little money, Gates splurged on a green
Porsche 911, which he would race along the freeway after midnight. At one point he
complained to his local dealer that the car’s top speed was supposed to be 126 miles per hour,
but he could get it up only to 121. Late one night he was caught speeding and got into an
argument with the cop about why he wasn’t carrying a driver’s license. He was thrown into
jail. “Got arrested,” he said when Allen picked up the phone. He was released in a few hours,
but his mug shot from that night became a memorable icon of geek history.71
Gates’s intensity paid off. It allowed Microsoft to meet software deadlines that seemed
insane, beat other competitors to the market for each new product, and charge such a low
price that computer manufacturers rarely thought of writing or controlling their own software.
SOFTWARE WANTS TO BE FREE
In June 1975, the month that Gates moved to Albuquerque, Roberts decided to send the Altair
on the road as if it were a carnival show exhibit. His goal was to spread the word about the
Altair’s wonders and create fan clubs in towns across America. He tricked out a Dodge
camper van, dubbed it the MITS Mobile, and sent it on a sixty-town tour up the coast of
California then down to the Southeast, hitting such hot spots as Little Rock, Baton Rouge,
Macon, Huntsville, and Knoxville.
Gates, who went along for part of the ride, thought it was a neat marketing ploy. “They
bought this big blue van and they went around the country and created computer clubs
everyplace they went,” he marveled.72 He was at the shows in Texas, and Allen joined them
when they got to Alabama. At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people, a mix of hippyish
hobbyists and crew-cut engineers, paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a
movie. The presentation lasted three hours. At the end of a display of a lunar landing game,
doubters peered under the table suspecting that there were cables to some bigger
minicomputer hidden underneath. “But once they saw it was real,” Allen recalled, “the
engineers became almost giddy with enthusiasm.”73
One of the stops was at Rickeys Hyatt House hotel in Palo Alto on June 5. There a fateful
encounter occurred after Microsoft BASIC was demonstrated to a group of hobbyists,
including many from the recently formed Homebrew Computer Club. “The room was packed
with amateurs and experimenters eager to find out about this new electronic toy,” the
Homebrew’s newsletter reported.74 Some of them were also eager to act on the hacker credo
that software should be free. This was not surprising given the social and cultural attitudes, so
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different from the entrepreneurial zeal in Albuquerque, that had flowed together in the early
1970s leading up to the formation of the Homebrew Club.
Many of the Homebrew members who met the MITS Mobile had built an Altair and been
waiting impatiently to get hold of the BASIC program that Gates and Allen had produced.
Some had already sent checks to MITS for it. So they were thrilled to see that the Altairs on
display were running a version of it. Indulging in the imperative of hackers, one of the
members, Dan Sokol, “borrowed” the punched paper tape that had the program and used a
DEC PDP-11 to make copies.75 At the next Homebrew meeting, there was a cardboard box
filled with dozens of BASIC tapes for members to take.34 There was one stipulation: you had
to make a few copies to replenish the communal box. “Remember to bring back more copies
than you take,” Lee Felsenstein joked. It was his signature line for any software sharing.76
Thus did Microsoft BASIC spread freely.
This, not surprisingly, infuriated Gates. He wrote a passionate open letter, displaying all
the tact of a nineteen-year-old, which served as the opening shot in the war over the
protection of intellectual property in the age of personal computers:
An Open Letter to Hobbyists . . .
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though
the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC.
Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are
apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount
of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is
something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. . . . One thing you do do
is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into
programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in
hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software
available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft. . . .
I would appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with
good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
The letter was printed in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter and also the Altair user
group’s Computer Notes and the People’s Computer Company.77 It stirred up a frenzy. “I got
a lot of shit,” Gates admitted. Of the three hundred letters he received, only five had a
voluntary payment. Most of the rest heaped abuse on him.78
Basically, Gates was correct. The creation of software was just as valuable as the creation
of hardware. Those who made software deserved to be compensated. If they weren’t, people
would quit writing software. By resisting the hacker ethos that anything that could be copied
should be free, Gates helped ensure the growth of the new industry.
Still, there was a certain audacity to the letter. Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of
computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade
through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his letter that he and
Allen had used more than $40,000 worth of computer time to make BASIC, he omitted the
fact that he had never actually paid for that time and that much of it was on Harvard’s
military-supplied computer, funded by American taxpayers. The editor of one hobbyist
newsletter wrote, “Rumors have been circulating through the hobby computer community
that imply that development of the BASIC referred to in Bill Gates’s letter was done on a
Harvard University computer provided at least in part with government funds and that there
was some question as to the propriety if not the legality of selling the results.”79
Also, though Gates did not appreciate it at the time, the widespread pirating of Microsoft
BASIC helped his fledgling company in the long run. By spreading so fast, Microsoft BASIC
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became a standard, and other computer makers had to license it. When National
Semiconductor came out with a new microprocessor, for example, it needed a BASIC and
decided to license Microsoft’s because everyone was using it. “We made Microsoft the
standard,” said Felsenstein, “and he called us thieves for doing so.”80
At the end of 1978 Gates and Allen moved their company from Albuquerque back home to
the Seattle area. Just before they left, one of the twelve staffers won a free photo shoot from a
local studio, so they posed for what would become a historic photograph, with Allen and
most of the others looking like refugees from a hippie commune and Gates sitting up front
looking like a Cub Scout. On his drive up the California coast, Gates was slapped with three
speeding tickets, two from the same policeman.81
APPLE
Among those in Gordon French’s garage at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer
Club was a socially awkward young hardware engineer named Steve Wozniak, who had
dropped out of college and was working at Hewlett-Packard’s calculator division in the
Silicon Valley town of Cupertino. A friend had shown him the flyer—“Are you building your
own computer?”—and he worked up the courage to attend. “That night turned out to be one
of the most important nights of my life,” he declared.82
Wozniak’s father was a Lockheed engineer who loved explaining electronics. “One of my
first memories is his taking me to his workplace on a weekend and showing me a few
electronic parts, putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them,” Wozniak
recalled. There were usually stray transistors and resistors lying around the house, and when
Steve would ask, “What’s that?” his father would start from the beginning and explain how
electrons and protons worked. “He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, and he would
answer anything and make diagrams for it,” Wozniak said. “He taught me how to make an
and gate and an or gate out of parts he got—parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed
me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of
one gate to the input of the other. To this very moment, that is the way every single digital
device on the planet works at its most basic level.” It was a striking example of the imprint a
parent can make, especially back in the days when parents knew how radios worked and
could show their kids how to test the vacuum tubes and replace the one that had burned out.
Wozniak made a crystal radio using scraped pennies when he was in second grade, a
multihouse intercom system for the kids in his neighborhood when he was in fifth grade, a
Hallicrafters shortwave radio when he was in sixth grade (he and his dad earned ham licenses
together), and later that year taught himself how to apply Boolean algebra to electronic circuit
design and demonstrate it with a machine that never lost at tic-tac-toe.
By the time he was in high school, Wozniak was applying his electronic wizardry to
pranks. In one case he built a metronome attached to stripped batteries that looked like a
bomb. When his principal discovered it ticking in a locker, he rushed it onto the playground
away from the kids and called the bomb squad. Wozniak had to spend one night in the local
house of detention, where he taught his fellow inmates to remove the wires on the ceiling fan
and touch them to the iron bars in order to shock the jailer when he came to open the door.
Although he had learned to code well, he was at heart a hardware engineer, unlike more
refined software jockeys such as Gates. At one point he built a roulette-like game where
players put their fingers in slots and when the ball landed one of them got shocked.
“Hardware guys will play this game, but software guys are always way too chicken,” he said.
Like others, he combined a love of technology with a hippie outlook, although he could not
quite pull off the counterculture lifestyle. “I would wear this little Indian headband, and I
wore my hair really long and grew a beard,” he recalled. “From the neck up, I looked like
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Jesus Christ. But from the neck down, I still wore the clothes of a regular kid, a kid engineer.
Pants. Collared shirt. I never did have the weird hippie clothes.”
For fun, he would study the manuals of the office computers made by Hewlett-Packard and
DEC and then try to redesign them using fewer chips. “I have no idea why this became the
pastime of my life,” he admitted. “I did it all alone in my room with my door shut. It was like
a private hobby.” It was not an activity that made him the life of the party, so he became
pretty much a loner, but that talent to save chips served him well when he decided to build a
computer of his own. He did so using only twenty chips, compared to the hundreds in most
real computers. A friend who lived down the block joined him for the soldering, and because
they drank so much Cragmont cream soda, it was dubbed the Cream Soda Computer. There
was no screen or keyboard; instructions were fed in by punch card, and answers were
conveyed by flashing lights on the front.
The friend introduced Wozniak to a kid who lived a few blocks away and shared their
interest in electronics. Steve Jobs was almost five years younger and still at Homestead High,
which Wozniak had attended. They sat on the sidewalk swapping tales about pranks they had
pulled, Bob Dylan songs they liked, and electronic designs they had made. “Typically, it was
really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it
right away,” Wozniak said. “I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.”
Jobs was similarly impressed. “Woz was the first person I’d met who knew more electronics
than I did,” he later said, stretching his own expertise.
Their greatest escapade, which laid the foundation for the computer partnership they would
form, involved what was known as a Blue Box. In the fall of 1971, Wozniak read an article in
Esquire describing how “phone phreaks” had created a device that emitted just the right tone
chirps to fool the Bell System and cadge free long-distance calls. Before he even finished
reading the article, he called Jobs, who was just beginning his senior year at Homestead High,
and read parts of it aloud to him. It was a Sunday, but they knew how to sneak into a library
at Stanford that might have the Bell System Technical Journal, which the Esquire article said
included all the frequencies for the signal tones. After rummaging through the stacks,
Wozniak finally found the journal. “I was practically shaking, with goose bumps and
everything,” he recalled. “It was such a Eureka moment.” They drove to Sunnyvale
Electronics to buy the parts they needed, soldered them together, and tested it with a
frequency counter that Jobs had made as a school project. But it was an analog device, and
they couldn’t get it to produce tones that were precise and consistent enough.
Wozniak realized he would need to build a digital version, using a circuit with transistors.
That fall was one of his infrequent semesters of dropping into college, and he was spending it
at Berkeley. With help from a music student in his dorm, he had one built by Thanksgiving.
“I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of,” he said. “I still think it was incredible.”
They tested it by calling the Vatican, with Wozniak pretending to be Henry Kissinger
needing to speak to the pope; it took a while, but the officials at the Vatican finally realized it
was a prank before they woke up the pontiff.
Wozniak had devised an ingenious gadget, but by partnering with Jobs he was able to do
much more: create a commercial enterprise. “Hey, let’s sell these,” Jobs suggested one day. It
was a pattern that would lead to one of the most storied partnerships of the digital age, up
there with Allen & Gates and Noyce & Moore. Wozniak would come up with some clever
feat of engineering, and Jobs would find a way to polish and package it and sell it at a
premium. “I got together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and
keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs said of the Blue Box. Using $40 worth
of parts for each Blue Box, they produced a hundred that they sold for $150 apiece. The
escapade ended after they got ripped off at gunpoint trying to sell one in a pizza parlor, but
from the seeds of the adventure a company would be born. “If it hadn’t been for the Blue
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Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple,” Jobs later reflected. “Woz and I learned how to
work together.” Wozniak agreed: “It gave us a taste of what we could do with my
engineering skills and his vision.”
Jobs spent the following year dropping in and out of Reed College and then seeking spiritual
enlightenment on a pilgrimage to India. When he returned in the fall of 1974, he went to
work at Atari under Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn. Atari, flush with its success with Pong,
was on a hiring spree. “Have fun; make money,” declared one of the ads it took out in the San
Jose Mercury. Jobs showed up dressed in his hippie garb and said he wouldn’t leave the
lobby until he was hired. At Alcorn’s urging, Bushnell decided to take a chance on him. Thus
the torch was passed from the most creative entrepreneur of video games to the man who
would become the most creative entrepreneur of personal computers.
Despite his newly acquired Zen sensibilities, Jobs was inclined to inform his coworkers
that they were “dumb shits” whose ideas sucked. Yet somehow he also managed to be
compelling and inspiring. He sometimes wore a saffron robe, went barefoot, and believed that
his strict diet of only fruits and vegetables meant that he need not use deodorant or shower
often. As Bushnell recounted, “this was a mistaken theory.” So he put Jobs on the night shift,
when almost no one else was around. “Steve was prickly, but I kind of liked him. So I asked
him to go on the night shift. It was a way to save him.”
Jobs would later say that he learned some important lessons at Atari, the most profound
being the need to keep interfaces friendly and intuitive. Instructions should be insanely
simple: “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.” Devices should not need manuals. “That simplicity
rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron Wayne, who
worked with Jobs at Atari. In addition, Bushnell was able to help mold Jobs into an
entrepreneur. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,”
Bushnell recalled. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I
taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, pretend to
be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”
Wozniak liked to come by Atari most evenings, after he finished work at Hewlett-Packard,
to hang with Jobs and play the auto racing video game, Gran Trak 10, that Atari had finally
developed. “My favorite game ever,” he called it. In his spare time, he pieced together a
home version of Pong that he could play on his TV set. He was able to program it to blast the
word Hell or Damn whenever a player missed hitting the ball. One night he showed it to
Alcorn, who came up with a scheme. He assigned Jobs to engineer a one-player version of
Pong, to be called Breakout, in which a user could volley the ball against a brick wall,
dislocating bricks to win points. Alcorn guessed, correctly, that Jobs would convince
Wozniak to do the circuit design. Jobs was not a great engineer, but he was good at getting
people to do things. “I looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell explained. “Woz was a
better engineer.” He was also a lovable and naïve teddy bear of a guy, who was as eager to
help Jobs make a video game as Tom Sawyer’s friends were to whitewash his fence. “This
was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,” he
recalled.
As Woz stayed up all night churning out elements of the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his
left wire-wrapping the chips. Woz thought the task would take weeks, but in an early
example of Jobs exerting what colleagues called his reality distortion field, he was able to
stare unblinkingly at Woz and convince him he could do the job in four days.
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Steve Jobs (1955–2011) and Steve Wozniak (1950– ) in 1976.
Jobs graphic on the original Macintosh in 1984.
Richard Stallman (1953– ).
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Linus Torvalds (1969– ).
The March 1975 first gathering of the Homebrew Computer Club came just after Wozniak
had finished designing Breakout. At the outset of the meeting, he felt out of place. He had
been making calculators and home television game displays, but most of the excitement at
that meeting centered on the new Altair computer, which didn’t initially interest him. Shy at
the best of times, he withdrew into a corner. He later described the scene: “Someone there
was holding up the magazine Popular Electronics, which had a picture of a computer on the
front of it called the Altair. It turned out all these people were really Altair enthusiasts, not
TV terminal people like I thought.” They went around the room introducing themselves, and
when Wozniak’s turn came he said, “I’m Steve Wozniak, I work at Hewlett-Packard on
calculators and I designed a video terminal.” He added that he also liked video games and
pay movie systems for hotels, according to the minutes taken by Moore.
But there was one thing that piqued Wozniak’s interest. A person at the meeting passed
around the specification sheet for the new Intel microprocessor. “That night, I checked out
the microprocessor data sheet and I saw it had an instruction for adding a location in memory
to the A register,” he recalled. “I thought, Wait a minute. Then it had another instruction you
could use for subtracting memory from the A register. Whoa. Well, maybe this doesn’t mean
anything to you, but I knew exactly what these instructions meant, and it was the most
exciting thing to discover ever.”
Wozniak had been designing a terminal with a video monitor and a keyboard. He had
planned for it to be a “dumb” terminal; it would have no computing power of its own, and
instead it would connect via a phone line to a time-shared computer somewhere else. But
when he saw the specs for the microprocessor—a chip that had a central processing unit on it
—he had an insight: he could use a microprocessor to put some of the computing power into
the terminal he was building. It would be a great leap from the Altair: a computer and a
keyboard and a screen all integrated! “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped
into my head,” he said. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become
known as the Apple I.”
After a day of work on calculator design at HP, Wozniak would go home for a quick
dinner and then return to his cubicle to work on his computer. At 10 p.m. on Sunday, June 29,
1975, a historic milestone occurred: Wozniak tapped a few keys on his keyboard, the signal
was processed by a microprocessor, and letters appeared on the screen. “I was shocked,” he
confessed. “It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and
seen it show up on the screen right in front of them.” That was not precisely true, but it was
indeed the first time a keyboard and a monitor had been integrated with a personal computer
designed for hobbyists.
The mission of the Homebrew Computer Club was to share ideas freely. That put it in the
crosshairs of Bill Gates, but Wozniak embraced the communal ethos: “I so believed in the
club’s mission to further computing that I Xeroxed maybe a hundred copies of my complete
design and gave it to anyone who wanted it.” He was too shy, initially, to stand in front of the
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group and make a formal presentation, but he was so proud of his design that he loved
standing in the back, showing it off to any who gathered around, and handing out the
schematics. “I wanted to give it away for free to other people.”
Jobs thought differently, just as he had with the Blue Box. And as it turned out, his desire
to package and sell an easy-to-use computer—and his instinct for how to do it—changed the
realm of personal computers just as much as Wozniak’s clever circuit design did. Indeed,
Wozniak would have been relegated to minor mentions in the Homebrew newsletter had Jobs
not insisted that they create a company to commercialize it.
Jobs began calling chip makers such as Intel to get free samples. “I mean, he knew how to
talk to a sales representative,” Wozniak marveled. “I could never have done that. I’m too
shy.” Jobs also started accompanying Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the
television set and conducting the demonstrations, and he came up with a plan to sell circuit
boards preprinted with Wozniak’s design. It was typical of their partnership. “Every time I’d
design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak. “It
never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them in the air
and sell a few.’ ” Jobs sold his Volkswagen Bus and Wozniak sold his HP calculator to raise
funding for their endeavor.
They made an odd but powerful partnership: Woz was an angelic naïf who looked like a
panda, Jobs a demon-driven mesmerizer who looked like a whippet. Gates had bullied Allen
into giving him more than half of their partnership. In the case of Apple, it was Wozniak’s
father, an engineer who respected engineers and disdained marketers and managers, who
insisted that his son, who had made the designs, be given more than 50 percent of the
partnership. He confronted Jobs when he came by the Wozniak house: “You don’t deserve
shit. You haven’t produced anything.” Jobs began to cry and told Steve Wozniak that he was
willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not 50-50,” Jobs said, “you can have the whole
thing.” Wozniak, however, understood what Jobs contributed to their partnership, and it was
worth at least 50 percent. If he had been on his own, Wozniak might not have progressed
beyond handing out free schematics.
After they demonstrated the computer at a Homebrew meeting, Jobs was approached by
Paul Terrell, the owner of a small chain of computer stores called The Byte Shop. After they
talked, Terrell said, “Keep in touch,” handing Jobs his card. The next day Jobs walked into
his store barefoot and announced, “I’m keeping in touch.” By the time Jobs had finished his
pitch, Terrell had agreed to order fifty of what became known as the Apple I computer. But
he wanted them fully assembled, not just printed boards with a pile of components. It was
another step in the evolution of personal computers. They would not be just for solder-gun-
wielding hobbyists anymore.
Jobs understood this trend. When it came time to build the Apple II, he did not spend much
time studying microprocessor specs. Instead he went to Macy’s at the Stanford mall and
studied the Cuisinart. He decided that the next personal computer should be like an appliance:
all fit together with a sleek case and no assembly required. From the power supply to the
software, from the keyboard to the monitor, everything should be tightly integrated. “My
vision was to create the first fully packaged computer,” he explained. “We were no longer
aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew
how to buy transformers and keyboards. For every one of them there were a thousand people
who would want the machine to be ready to run.”
By early 1977 a few other hobbyist computer companies had bubbled up from the
Homebrew and other such cauldrons. Lee Felsenstein, the club’s master of ceremonies, had
launched Processor Technology and come out with a computer called Sol. Other companies
included Cromemco, Vector Graphic, Southwest Technical Products, Commodore, and
IMSAI. But the Apple II was the first personal computer to be simple and fully integrated,
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from the hardware to the software. It went on sale in June 1977 for $1,298, and within three
years 100,000 of them were sold.
The rise of Apple marked a decline of hobbyist culture. For decades young innovators such
as Kilby and Noyce had been introduced to electronics by knowing how to distinguish
different transistors, resistors, capacitors, and diodes, then wire-wrapping or soldering them
into breadboards to create circuits that became ham radios, rocket controllers, amplifiers, and
oscilloscopes. But in 1971 microprocessors began making complex circuit boards obsolete,
and Japanese electronics companies began mass-producing products that were cheaper than
homemade ones. Sales of do-it-yourself kits withered away. Hardware hackers such as
Wozniak ceded primacy to software coders such as Gates. With the Apple II and then, more
notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users
were not supposed to open and fiddle with their innards.
The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve
Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He
was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let
you buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s clunky operating system on it, nor buy
Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.
That integrated model did not become standard practice. The launch of the Apple II woke
up the big computer companies, most notably IBM, and prompted an alternative to emerge.
IBM—more specifically IBM as it was outmaneuvered by Bill Gates—would embrace an
approach in which the personal computer’s hardware and its operating system were made by
different companies. As a result, software would become king, and, except at Apple, most
computer hardware would become a commodity.
DAN BRICKLIN AND VISICALC
For personal computers to be useful, and for practical people to justify buying them, they had
to become tools rather than merely toys. Even the Apple II might have been a passing fad,
once the excitement of the hobbyists receded, if users had not been able to apply it to a
practical task. Thus there arose a demand for what became known as application software,
programs that could apply a personal computer’s processing power to a specific chore.
The most influential pioneer in that field was Dan Bricklin, who conceived the first
financial spreadsheet program, VisiCalc.83 Bricklin was an MIT computer science graduate
who spent a few years developing word-processing software at Digital Equipment
Corporation and then enrolled at Harvard Business School. Sitting in a lecture one day in the
spring of 1978, he watched as the professor created the columns and rows for a financial
model on the blackboard. When he found an error or wanted to modify a value in one cell, the
professor had to use his eraser and change the values in many of the other cells.84
Bricklin had seen Doug Engelbart demonstrate his oNLine System, made famous at the
Mother of All Demos, which featured a graphical display and a mouse for pointing and
clicking. Bricklin began envisioning an electronic spreadsheet that would use a mouse and
simple point-drag-and-click interface. That summer, while riding a bike on Martha’s
Vineyard, he decided to turn the idea into a product. He was well suited for such an endeavor.
He was a software engineer with the instincts of a product person; he had a feel for what
users would want. His parents were entrepreneurs, and he was excited by the prospect of
starting a business. And he was a good team player, who knew how to find the right partners.
“I had the right combination of experience and knowledge to develop software that met a
need people had,” he observed.85
So he teamed up with a friend he had met at MIT, Bob Frankston, another software
engineer whose father was an entrepreneur. “The ability for Dan and me to work as a team
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was crucial,” Frankston said. Although Bricklin could have written the program alone,
instead he sketched it out and had Frankston develop it. “It gave him the freedom to focus on
what the program should do rather than how to do it,” Frankston said of their collaboration.86
The first decision they made was to develop the program for use on a personal computer
rather than on a DEC business computer. They chose the Apple II because Wozniak had
made its architecture open and transparent enough that the functions needed by software
developers were easily accessible.
They created the prototype over a weekend on an Apple II they borrowed from someone
who would, in effect, become a third collaborator, Dan Fylstra. A recent graduate of Harvard
Business School, Fylstra had launched a software publishing company, which focused on
games such as chess, that he ran out of his Cambridge apartment. In order for a software
industry to develop separately from the hardware industry, it was necessary to have
publishers who knew how to promote and distribute products.
Because both Bricklin and Frankston had good business sense and a feel for consumer
desires, they focused on making VisiCalc a product, not just a program. They used friends
and professors as focus groups to make sure the interface was intuitive and easy to use. “The
goal was to give the user a conceptual model that was unsurprising,” Frankston explained. “It
was called the principle of least surprise. We were illusionists synthesizing an experience.”87
Among those who helped turn VisiCalc into a business phenomenon was Ben Rosen, then
an analyst with Morgan Stanley who later turned his influential newsletter and conferences
into a business of his own and then started a venture capital firm in Manhattan. In May 1979
Fylstra demonstrated an early version of VisiCalc at Rosen’s Personal Computer Forum in
his hometown of New Orleans. In his newsletter, Rosen enthused, “VisiCalc comes alive
visually. . . . In minutes, people who have never used a computer are writing and using
programs.” He ended with a prediction that came true: “VisiCalc could someday become the
software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.”
VisiCalc catapulted the Apple II to triumph, because for a year there were no versions for
other personal computers. “That’s what really drove the Apple II to the success it achieved,”
Jobs later said.88 It was quickly followed by word-processing software, such as Apple Writer
and EasyWriter. Thus did VisiCalc not only stimulate the market for personal computers, but
it helped to create an entire new profit-driven industry, that of publishing proprietary
application software.
THE IBM OPERATING SYSTEM
During the 1970s IBM dominated the mainframe market with its 360 series. But it was beaten
by DEC and Wang in the market for refrigerator-size minicomputers, and it looked like it
might be left behind in personal computers as well. “IBM bringing out a personal computer
would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance,” one expert declared.89
The company’s top management seemed to agree. So they considered instead just licensing
the Atari 800 home computer and slapping IBM’s name on it. But when that option was
debated at a July 1980 meeting, IBM’s CEO Frank Carey dismissed it. Surely the world’s
greatest computer company could create a personal computer of its own, he said. Doing
anything new at the company, he complained, seemed to require three hundred people
working three years.
That is when Bill Lowe, who was the director of IBM’s development lab in Boca Raton,
Florida, piped up. “No, sir, you’re wrong,” he stated. “We can get a project out in a year.”90
His cockiness got him assigned the task of overseeing the project, code-named Acorn, to
create an IBM personal computer.
Lowe’s new team was led by Don Estridge, who chose Jack Sams, a gentle southerner who
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was a twenty-year veteran of IBM, to be in charge of piecing together the software. Given the
one-year deadline, Sams knew that he would have to license software from outside vendors
rather than have it written in-house. So on July 21, 1980, he placed a call to Bill Gates and
asked to see him right away. When Gates invited him to fly to Seattle the following week,
Sams replied that he was already heading for the airport and wanted to see Gates the next
day. Sensing a big fish hungry to be hooked, Gates was thrilled.
A few weeks earlier, Gates had recruited his Harvard dorm mate Steve Ballmer to
Microsoft as the business manager, and he asked Ballmer to join him at the IBM meeting.
“You’re the only other guy here who can wear a suit,” Gates pointed out.91 When Sams
arrived, Gates was also wearing a suit, but he did not quite fill it. “This young fellow came
out to take us back, and I thought he was the office boy,” recalled Sams, who was dressed in
the IBM standard blue suit and white shirt. But he and the rest of his team were soon dazzled
by Gates’s brilliance.
At first the IBM folks wanted to talk about licensing Microsoft BASIC, but Gates turned
the conversation into an intense discussion about where technology was heading. By the end
of a few hours, they were talking about licensing all of the programming languages Microsoft
had or could produce, including Fortran and COBOL in addition to BASIC. “We told IBM,
‘Okay, you can have everything we make,’ even though we hadn’t even made it yet,” Gates
recalled.92
The IBM team returned a few weeks later. There was one essential piece of software, in
addition to these programming languages, that IBM was missing. It needed an operating
system, the software program that would serve as the foundation for all of the other
programs. An operating system handles the basic instructions that other software uses,
including such chores as deciding where data should be stored, how memory and processing
resources should be allocated, and how applications software interacts with the computer’s
hardware.
Microsoft did not yet make an operating system. It was instead working with one called
CP/M (for Control Program for Microcomputers) that was owned by Gary Kildall, a
childhood friend of Gates who had recently moved to Monterey, California. So with Sams
sitting in his office, Gates picked up the phone and called Kildall. “I’m sending some guys
down,” he said, describing what the IBM executives were seeking. “Treat them right, they’re
important guys.”93
Kildall didn’t. Gates later referred to it as “the day Gary decided to go flying.” Instead of
meeting the IBM visitors, Kildall chose to pilot his private plane, as he loved to do, and keep
a previously scheduled appointment in San Francisco. He left it to his wife to meet with the
four dark-suited men of the IBM team in the quirky Victorian house that served as Kildall’s
company headquarters. When they presented her with a long nondisclosure agreement, she
refused to sign it. After much haggling, the IBM folks walked out in disgust. “We popped out
our letter that said please don’t tell anybody we’re here, and we don’t want to hear anything
confidential, and she read it and said I can’t sign this,” Sams recalled. “We spent the whole
day in Pacific Grove debating with them and with our attorneys and her attorneys and
everybody else about whether or not she could even talk to us about talking to us, and then
we left.” Kildall’s little company had just blown its chance to become the dominant player in
computer software.94
Sams flew back to Seattle to see Gates and asked him to figure out another way to conjure
up an operating system. Fortunately, Paul Allen knew someone in Seattle who could help:
Tim Paterson, who worked for a small firm called Seattle Computer Products. A few months
earlier Paterson had become frustrated that Kildall’s CP/M was not available for Intel’s
newest microprocessors, so he adapted it into an operating system that he dubbed QDOS, for
Quick and Dirty Operating System.95
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By then Gates had come to the realization that one operating system, most likely the one
chosen by IBM, would end up being the standard operating system that most personal
computers would use. He also figured out that whoever owned that operating system would
be in the catbird seat. So instead of sending the IBM folks to see Paterson, Gates and his team
said that they would handle things on their own. Ballmer later recalled, “We just told IBM,
‘Look, we’ll go and get this operating system from this small local company, we’ll take care
of it, we’ll fix it up.’ ”
Paterson’s firm was struggling to make ends meet, so Allen was able to negotiate a savvy
deal with his friend. After initially acquiring just a nonexclusive license, Allen went back
when an IBM deal looked likely and bought Paterson’s software outright, without telling him
why. “We ended up working out a deal to buy the operating system from him, for whatever
usage we wanted, for fifty thousand dollars,” Allen recalled.96 For that pittance Microsoft
acquired the software that, after they spruced it up, would allow it to dominate the software
industry for more than three decades.
But Gates almost balked. He was uncharacteristically worried that Microsoft, which was
wildly overcommitted with other projects, might not have the capacity to gussy up QDOS
into an IBM-worthy operating system. Microsoft had only forty ragtag employees, some of
whom slept on the floor and took sponge baths in the morning, and it was led by a twenty-
four-year-old who could still be mistaken for an office boy. On a Sunday at the end of
September 1980, two months after IBM first came calling, Gates gathered his top team to
make the go or no-go decision. It was Kay Nishi, a young computer entrepreneur from Japan
with a Gatesian intensity, who was the most adamant. “Gotta do it! Gotta do it!” he squealed
repeatedly as he bounced around the room. Gates decided he was right.97
Gates and Ballmer took an overnight flight to Boca Raton to negotiate the deal. Their 1980
revenues were $7.5 million, compared to IBM’s $30 billion, but Gates was gunning for an
agreement that would allow Microsoft to keep ownership of an operating system that IBM
would turn into a global standard. In its deal with Paterson’s company, Microsoft had bought
DOS outright, “for whatever usage,” rather than merely licensing it. That was smart, but what
was even smarter was not letting IBM force Microsoft to make the same arrangement.
When they landed at the Miami airport, they went to a bathroom to change into suits, and
Gates realized he had forgotten a tie. In an unusual display of fastidiousness, he insisted that
they stop at a Burdine’s department store on the drive to Boca in order to buy one. It did not
have the full desired effect on the crisp-suited IBM executives waiting to greet him. One of
the software engineers recalled that Gates looked like a “kid that had chased somebody
around the block and stolen a suit off him and the suit was way too big for him. His collar
stuck up and he looked like some punk kid, and I said, ‘Who the hell is this?’ ”98
Once Gates began his presentation, however, they quit focusing on his disheveled
appearance. He wowed the IBM team with his mastery of details, both technical and legal,
and projected calm confidence when insisting on terms. It was largely an act. When he
arrived back in Seattle, Gates went into his office, lay on the floor, and agonized aloud to
Ballmer about all of his doubts.
After a month of back-and-forth, a thirty-two-page deal was struck in early November
1980. “Steve and I knew that contract by heart,” Gates declared.99 “We didn’t get paid that
much. The total was something like $186,000.” At least initially. But it had the two
provisions that Gates knew would alter the balance of power in the computer industry. The
first was that IBM’s license to use the operating system, which it would call PC-DOS, would
be nonexclusive. Gates could license the same operating system to other personal computer
makers under the name MS-DOS. Second, Microsoft would keep control of the source code.
This meant that IBM couldn’t modify or evolve the software into something that became
proprietary to its machines. Only Microsoft could make changes, and then it could license
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each new version to any company it wanted. “We knew there were going to be clones of the
IBM PC,” Gates said. “We structured that original contract to allow them. It was a key point
in our negotiations.”100
The deal was similar to the one Gates had made with MITS, when he retained the right to
license BASIC to other computer makers as well. That approach allowed Microsoft’s BASIC
and then, more important, its operating system to become an industry standard, one that
Microsoft controlled. “In fact, our tagline in our ad had been ‘We set the standard,’ ” Gates
recalled with a laugh. “But when we did in fact set the standard, our antitrust lawyer told us
to get rid of that. It’s one of those slogans you can use only when it’s not true.”35101
Gates boasted to his mother about the importance of his deal with IBM, hoping that it
would prove that he had been right to drop out of Harvard. Mary Gates happened to be on the
board of the United Way with IBM’s president John Opel, who was about to take over from
Frank Cary as CEO. One day she was flying with Opel on his plane to a meeting, and she
mentioned the connection. “Oh, my little boy’s doing this project, he’s actually working with
your company.” Opel seemed unaware of Microsoft. So when she came back, she warned
Bill, “Look, I mentioned your project and how you dropped out of school and all this stuff to
Opel, and he doesn’t know who you are, so maybe your project’s not as important as you
think.” A few weeks later, the Boca Raton executives went to IBM headquarters to brief Opel
on their progress. “We have a dependency on Intel for the chip, and Sears and ComputerLand
are going to do the distribution,” the team leader explained. “But probably our biggest
dependency is actually a pretty small software company up in Seattle run by a guy named Bill
Gates.” To which Opel responded, “Oh, you mean Mary Gates’s son? Oh, yeah, she’s
great.”102
Producing all the software for IBM was a struggle, as Gates predicted, but the ragtag
Microsoft crew worked around the clock for nine months to get it done. For one last time,
Gates and Allen were a team again, sitting side by side through the night, coding with the
shared intensity they had displayed at Lakeside and Harvard. “The one tiff Paul and I had was
when he wanted to go see a space shuttle launch and I didn’t, because we were late,” said
Gates. Allen ended up going. “It was the first one,” he said. “And we flew back right after the
launch. We weren’t gone even 36 hours.”
By writing the operating system, the two of them helped determine the look and feel of the
personal computer. “Paul and I decided every stupid little thing about the PC,” Gates said.
“The keyboard layout, how the cassette port worked, how the sound port worked, how the
graphics port worked.”103 The result reflected, alas, Gates’s nerdy design taste. Other than
causing a cohort of users to learn where the backslash key was, there was little good that
could be said about human-machine interfaces that relied on prompts such as “c:\>” and files
with clunky names such as AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS.
Years later, at an event at Harvard, the private equity investor David Rubenstein asked
Gates why he had saddled the world with the Control+Alt+Delete startup sequence: “Why,
when I want to turn on my software and computer, do I need to have three fingers? Whose
idea was that?” Gates began to explain that IBM’s keyboard designers had failed to provide
an easy way to signal the hardware to bring up the operating system, then he stopped himself
and sheepishly smiled. “It was a mistake,” he admitted.104 Hard-core coders sometimes forget
that simplicity is the soul of beauty.
The IBM PC was unveiled, with a list price of $1,565, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria in
August 1981. Gates and his team were not invited to the event. “The weirdest thing of all,”
Gates said, “was when we asked to come to the big official launch, IBM denied us.”105 In
IBM’s thinking, Microsoft was merely a vendor.
Gates got the last laugh. Thanks to the deal he made, Microsoft was able to turn the IBM
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PC and its clones into interchangeable commodities that would be reduced to competing on
price and doomed to having tiny profit margins. In an interview appearing in the first issue of
PC magazine a few months later, Gates pointed out that soon all personal computers would
be using the same standardized microprocessors. “Hardware in effect will become a lot less
interesting,” he said. “The total job will be in the software.”106
THE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE
Steve Jobs and his team at Apple bought a new IBM PC as soon as it came out. They wanted
to check out what the competition looked like. The consensus was, to use Jobs’s phrase, “It
sucked.” This was not simply a reflection of Jobs’s instinctive arrogance, although it was
partly that. It was a reaction to the fact that the machine, with its surly c:\> prompts and boxy
design, was boring. It didn’t occur to Jobs that corporate technology managers might not be
yearning for excitement at the office and knew they couldn’t get in trouble for choosing a
boring brand like IBM over a plucky one like Apple. Bill Gates happened to be at Apple
headquarters for a meeting on the day that the IBM PC was announced. “They didn’t seem to
care,” he said. “It took them a year to realize what had happened.”107
Jobs was aroused by competition, especially when he thought it sucked. He saw himself as
an enlightened Zen warrior, fighting the forces of ugliness and evil. He had Apple take out an
ad in the Wall Street Journal, which he helped to write. The headline: “Welcome, IBM.
Seriously.”
One reason Jobs was dismissive was that he had already seen the future and was embarked
on inventing it. On visits to Xerox PARC, he was shown many of the ideas that Alan Kay,
Doug Engelbart, and their colleagues had developed, most notably the graphical user
interface (GUI, pronounced GOO-ee), which featured a desktop metaphor with windows,
icons, and a mouse that served as a pointer. The creativity of the Xerox PARC team
combined with the design and marketing genius of Jobs would make the GUI the next great
leap in facilitating the human-machine interaction that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had
envisioned.
Jobs’s two main visits with his team to Xerox PARC were in December 1979. Jef Raskin,
an Apple engineer who was designing a friendly computer that would eventually become the
Macintosh, had already seen what Xerox was doing and wanted to convince Jobs to look into
it. One problem was that Jobs found Raskin insufferable—the technical terminology he used
for Raskin was “a shithead who sucks”—but eventually Jobs made the pilgrimage. He had
worked out a deal with Xerox that allowed the Apple folks to study the technology in return
for allowing Xerox to make a million-dollar investment in Apple.
Jobs was certainly not the first outsider to see what Xerox PARC had wrought. Its
researchers had given hundreds of demonstrations to visitors, and they had already distributed
more than a thousand Xerox Altos, the expensive computer developed by Lampson, Thacker,
and Kay that used a graphical user interface and other PARC innovations. But Jobs was the
first to become obsessed with the idea of incorporating PARC’s interface ideas into a simple,
inexpensive, personal computer. Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from
the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.
On Jobs’s first visit, the Xerox PARC engineers, led by Adele Goldberg, who worked with
Alan Kay, were reserved. They did not show Jobs much. But he threw a tantrum—“Let’s stop
this bullshit!” he kept shouting—and finally was given, at the behest of Xerox’s top
management, a fuller show. Jobs bounced around the room as his engineers studied each
pixel on the screen. “You’re sitting on a goldmine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not
taking advantage of this.”
There were three major innovations on display. The first was Ethernet, the technologies
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developed by Bob Metcalfe for creating local area networks. Like Gates and other pioneers of
personal computers, Jobs was not very interested—certainly not as interested as he should
have been—in networking technology. He was focused on the ability of computers to
empower individuals rather than to facilitate collaboration. The second innovation was
object-oriented programming. That, likewise, did not grab Jobs, who was not a programmer.
What caught his attention was the graphical user interface featuring a desktop metaphor
that was as intuitive and friendly as a neighborhood playground. It had cute icons for
documents and folders and other things you might want, including a trash can, and a mouse-
controlled cursor that made them easy to click. Not only did Jobs love it, but he could see
ways to improve it, make it simpler and more elegant.
The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC.
Until then, most computers, including the Apple II, would merely generate numerals or letters
on the screen, usually in a ghastly green against a black background. Bitmapping allowed
each and every pixel on the screen to be controlled by the computer—turned off or on and in
any color. That permitted all sorts of wonderful displays, fonts, designs, and graphics. With
his feel for design, familiarity with fonts, and love of calligraphy, Jobs was blown away by
bitmapping. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” he recalled. “I could see what the
future of computing was destined to be.”
As Jobs drove back to Apple’s office in Cupertino, at a speed that would have awed even
Gates, he told his colleague Bill Atkinson that they had to incorporate—and improve upon—
Xerox’s graphical interface in future Apple computers, such as the forthcoming Lisa and
Macintosh. “This is it!” he shouted. “We’ve got to do it!” It was a way to bring computers to
the people.108
Later, when he was challenged about pilfering Xerox’s ideas, Jobs quoted Picasso: “Good
artists copy, great artists steal.” He added, “And we have always been shameless about
stealing great ideas.” He also crowed that Xerox had fumbled its idea. “They were copier-
heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management.
“They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could
have owned the entire computer industry.”109
In fact, neither explanation does Jobs and Apple justice. As the case of the forgotten Iowa
inventor John Atanasoff shows, conception is just the first step. What really matters is
execution. Jobs and his team took Xerox’s ideas, improved them, implemented them, and
marketed them. Xerox had the chance to do that, and they in fact tried to, with a machine
called the Xerox Star. It was clunky and kludgy and costly, and it flopped. The Apple team
simplified the mouse so it had only one button, gave it the power to move documents and
other items around the screen, allowed file extensions to be changed just by dragging a
document and “dropping” it into a folder, created pull-down menus, and allowed the illusion
of documents piling on top of each other and overlapping.
Apple launched Lisa in January 1983 and then, more successfully, Macintosh a year later.
Jobs knew when he unveiled the Mac that it would propel the personal computer revolution
by being a machine that was friendly enough to take home. At the dramatic product launch,
he walked across a dark stage to pull the new computer out of a cloth bag. The theme from
Chariots of Fire began to play, and the word MACINTOSH scrolled horizontally across the
screen, then underneath it the words insanely great! appeared in elegant script, as if being
slowly written by hand. There was a moment of awed silence in the auditorium, then a few
gasps. Most had never seen, or even imagined, something so spectacular. The screen then
flicked through displays of different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, a chess game,
spreadsheet, and a rendering of Jobs with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh by his
head. The ovation lasted for five minutes.110
The Macintosh launch was accompanied by a memorable ad, “1984,” that showed a young
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heroine outracing the authoritarian police to throw a hammer into a screen, destroying Big
Brother. It was Jobs the rebel taking on IBM. And Apple now had an advantage: it had
perfected and implemented a graphical user interface, the great new leap in human-machine
interaction, while IBM and its operating system supplier Microsoft were still using curt
command lines with c:\> prompts.
WINDOWS
In the early 1980s, before the introduction of the Macintosh, Microsoft had a good
relationship with Apple. In fact, on the day that IBM launched its PC in August 1981, Gates
was visiting Jobs at Apple, which was a regular occurrence since Microsoft was making most
of its revenue writing software for the Apple II. Gates was still the supplicant in the
relationship. In 1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15
million. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write new versions of its software for the Macintosh, which
was still a secret development project. So at their August 1981 meeting, he confided his plans
to Gates.
Gates thought that the idea of the Macintosh—an inexpensive computer for the masses
with a simple graphical user interface—sounded, as he put it, “super neat.” He was willing,
indeed eager, to have Microsoft write application software for it. So he invited Jobs up to
Seattle. In his presentation there to the Microsoft engineers, Jobs was at his charismatic best.
With a bit of metaphorical license, he spun his vision of a factory in California that would
take in sand, the raw material of silicon, and churn out an “information appliance” that was so
simple it would need no manual. The Microsoft folks code-named the project “Sand.” They
even reverse-engineered it into an acronym: Steve’s Amazing New Device.111
Jobs had one major worry about Microsoft: he didn’t want it to copy the graphical user
interface. With his feel for what would wow average consumers, he knew that the desktop
metaphor with point-and-click navigation would be, if done right, the breakthrough that
would make computers truly personal. At a design conference in Aspen in 1981, he waxed
eloquently about how friendly computer screens would become by using “metaphors that
people already understand such as that of documents on a desktop.” His fear that Gates would
steal the idea was somewhat ironic, since Jobs himself had filched the concept from Xerox.
But to Jobs’s way of thinking, he had made a business deal for the rights to appropriate
Xerox’s idea. Plus he had improved it.
So Jobs wrote into his contract with Microsoft a clause that he believed would give Apple
at least a year’s head start in having a graphical user interface. It decreed that for a certain
period Microsoft would not produce for any company other than Apple any software that
“utilizes a mouse or tracking ball” or had a point-and-click graphical interface. But Jobs’s
reality distortion field got the better of him. Because he was so intent on getting Macintosh
on the market by late 1982, he became convinced that it would happen. So he agreed that the
prohibition would last until the end of 1983. As it turned out, Macintosh did not ship until
January 1984.
In September 1981 Microsoft secretly began designing a new operating system, intended to
replace DOS, based on the desktop metaphor with windows, icons, mouse, and pointer. It
hired from Xerox PARC Charles Simonyi, a software engineer who had worked alongside
Alan Kay in creating graphical programs for the Xerox Alto. In February 1982 the Seattle
Times ran a picture of Gates and Allen that, as a sharp-eyed reader may have noted, had a
whiteboard in the background with a few sketches and the words Window manager on top.
By that summer, just as Jobs began to realize that the release date for the Macintosh would
slip until at least late 1983, he became paranoid. His fears were heightened when his close pal
Andy Hertzfeld, an engineer on the Macintosh team, reported that his contact at Microsoft
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had begun asking detailed questions about how bitmapping was executed. “I told Steve that I
suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac,” Hertzfeld recalled.112
Jobs’s fears were realized in November 1983, two months before the Macintosh was
launched, when Gates held a press conference at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan. He
announced that Microsoft was developing a new operating system that would be available for
IBM PCs and their clones, featuring a graphical user interface. It would be called Windows.
Gates was within his rights. His restrictive agreement with Apple expired at the end of
1983, and Microsoft did not plan to ship Windows until well after that. (As it turned out,
Microsoft took so long to finish even a shoddy version 1.0 that Windows would not end up
shipping until November 1985.) Nevertheless, Jobs was livid, which was not a pretty sight.
“Get Gates down here immediately,” he ordered one of his managers. Gates complied, but he
was unintimidated. “He called me down to get pissed off at me,” Gates recalled. “I went
down to Cupertino, like a command performance. I told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said
to him, ‘We’re betting our company on graphics interface.’ ” In a conference room filled with
awed Apple employees, Jobs shouted back, “You’re ripping us off! I trusted you, and now
you’re stealing from us!”113 Gates had a habit of getting calmer and cooler whenever Jobs
worked himself into a frenzy. At the end of Jobs’s tirade, Gates looked at him and, in his
squeaky voice, replied with what became a classic zinger: “Well, Steve, I think there’s more
than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named
Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen
it.”114
Jobs remained angry and resentful for the rest of his life. “They just ripped us off
completely, because Gates has no shame,” he said almost thirty years later, shortly before he
died. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he believes that, he really has entered into one
of his own reality distortion fields.”115
The courts ended up ruling that Gates was legally correct. A decision by a federal appeals
court noted that “GUIs were developed as a user-friendly way for ordinary mortals to
communicate with the Apple computer . . . based on a desktop metaphor with windows, icons
and pull-down menus which can be manipulated on the screen with a hand-held device called
a mouse.” But it ruled, “Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical
user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor.” Protecting a look-and-feel innovation was
almost impossible.
Whatever the legalities were, Jobs had a right to be angry. Apple had been more
innovative, imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. Microsoft’s GUI was
shoddy, with tiled windows that could not overlap with each other and graphics that looked
like they had been designed by drunkards in a Siberian basement.
Nevertheless, Windows eventually clawed its way to dominance, not because its design
was better but because its business model was better. The market share commanded by
Microsoft Windows reached 80 percent by 1990 and kept rising, to 95 percent by 2000. For
Jobs, Microsoft’s success represented an aesthetic flaw in the way the universe worked. “The
only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he later
said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t
think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”116
The primary reason for Microsoft’s success was that it was willing and eager to license its
operating system to any hardware maker. Apple, by contrast, opted for an integrated
approach. Its hardware came only with its software and vice versa. Jobs was an artist, a
perfectionist, and thus a control freak who wanted to be in charge of the user experience from
beginning to end. Apple’s approach led to more beautiful products, a higher profit margin,
and a more sublime user experience. Microsoft’s approach led to a wider choice of hardware.
It also turned out to be a better path for gaining market share.
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RICHARD STALLMAN, LINUS TORVALDS, AND THE FREE
AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE MOVEMENTS
In late 1983, just as Jobs was preparing to unveil the Macintosh and Gates was announcing
Windows, another approach to the creation of software emerged. It was pushed by one of the
diehard denizens of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Tech Model Railroad Club,
Richard Stallman, a truth-possessed hacker with the looks of an Old Testament prophet. With
even greater moral fervor than the Homebrew Computer Club members who copied tapes of
Microsoft BASIC, Stallman believed that software should be collaboratively created and
freely shared.117
At first glance, this did not seem like an approach that would provide incentives for people
to produce great software. The joy of free sharing wasn’t what motivated Gates, Jobs, and
Bricklin. But because there was a collaborative and communitarian ethic that permeated
hacker culture, the free and open-source software movements ended up being powerful
forces.
Born in 1953, Richard Stallman was intensely interested in math as a child growing up in
Manhattan, and he conquered calculus on his own as a young boy. “Mathematics has
something in common with poetry,” he later said. “It’s made out of these true relationships,
true steps, true deductions, so it has this beauty about it.” Unlike his classmates, he was
deeply averse to competition. When his high school teacher divided the students into two
teams for a quiz contest, Stallman refused to answer any questions. “I resisted the notion of
competing,” he explained. “I saw that I was being manipulated and my classmates were
falling prey to this manipulation. They all wanted to beat the other people, who were just as
much their friends as were the people on their own team. They started demanding that I
answer the questions so we could win. But I resisted the pressure because I had no preference
for one team or the other.”118
Stallman went to Harvard, where he became a legend even among the math wizards, and
during the summers and after he graduated he worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab,
two subway stops away in Cambridge. There he added to the train track layout at the Tech
Model Railroad Club, wrote a PDP-11 simulator to run on the PDP-10, and grew enamored
with the collaborative culture. “I became part of a software-sharing community that had
existed for many years,” he recalled. “Whenever people from another university or a
company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. You could always ask to see
the source code.”119
Like a good hacker, Stallman defied restrictions and locked doors. With his fellow
students, he devised multiple ways to break into offices where there were forbidden
terminals; his own specialty was climbing through the false ceilings, pushing aside a tile, and
lowering a long strip of magnetic tape tipped with wads of sticky duct tape to open door
handles. When MIT instituted a database of users and a system of strong passwords, Stallman
resisted, and he rallied his colleagues to do so as well: “I thought that was disgusting, so I
didn’t fill out the form and I created a null-set password.” At one point a professor warned
that the university might delete his directory of files. That would be unfortunate for everyone,
Stallman replied, since some of the system’s resources were in his directory.120
Unfortunately for Stallman, the hacker camaraderie at MIT began to dissipate in the early
1980s. The lab bought a new time-sharing computer with a software system that was
proprietary. “You had to sign a nondisclosure agreement even to get an executable copy,”
Stallman lamented. “This meant that the first step in using a computer was to promise not to
help your neighbor. A cooperating community was forbidden.”121
Instead of rebelling, many of his colleagues joined for-profit software firms, including a
spinoff from the MIT lab called Symbolics, where they made a lot of money by not sharing
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freely. Stallman, who sometimes slept in his office and looked like he shopped in a thrift
store, did not share their money-seeking motivations and regarded them as traitors. The final
straw came when Xerox donated a new laser printer and Stallman wanted to institute a
software hack so that it would warn users on the network when it jammed. He asked someone
to provide the printer’s source code, but he refused, saying he had signed a nondisclosure
agreement. Stallman was morally outraged.
All of these events turned Stallman into even more of a Jeremiah, railing against idolatry
and preaching from a book of lamentations. “Some people do compare me with an Old
Testament prophet, and the reason is Old Testament prophets said certain social practices
were wrong,” he asserted. “They wouldn’t compromise on moral issues.”122 Neither would
Stallman. Proprietary software was “evil,” he said, because “it required people to agree not to
share and that made society ugly.” The way to resist and defeat the forces of evil, he decided,
was to create free software.
So in 1982, repelled by the selfishness that seemed to pervade Reagan-era society as well
as software entrepreneurs, Stallman embarked on a mission to create an operating system that
was free and completely nonproprietary. In order to prevent MIT from making a claim to any
rights to it, he quit his job at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, though he was allowed by his
indulgent supervisor to keep his key and continue using the lab’s resources. The operating
system Stallman decided to develop was one that would be similar to and compatible with
UNIX, which had been developed at Bell Labs in 1971 and was the standard for most
universities and hackers. With a coder’s subtle humor, Stallman created a recursive acronym
for his new operating system, GNU, which stood for GNU’s Not UNIX.
In the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a publication that sprang out of the
Homebrew Computer Club and People’s Computer Company, Stallman issued a manifesto:
“I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other
people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each
user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. . .
. Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like
air.”123
Stallman’s free software movement was imperfectly named. Its goal was not to insist that
all software come free of charge but that it be liberated from any restrictions. “When we call
software ‘free,’ we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it,
to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes,” he repeatedly had
to explain. “This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer.’ ”
For Stallman, the free software movement was not merely a way to develop peer-produced
software; it was a moral imperative for making a good society. The principles that it
promoted were, he said, “essential not just for the individual users’ sake, but for society as a
whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation.”124
To enshrine and certify his creed, Stallman came up with a GNU General Public License
and also the concept, suggested by a friend, of “copyleft,” which is the flipside of asserting a
copyright. The essence of the General Public License, Stallman said, is that it gives
“everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and
distribute modified versions—but not permission to add restrictions of their own.”125
Stallman personally wrote the first components for the GNU operating system, including a
text editor, a compiler, and many other tools. But it became increasingly clear that one key
element was missing. “What about the kernel?” Byte magazine asked in a 1986 interview.
The central module of an operating system, a kernel manages the requests from software
programs and turns them into instructions for the computer’s central processing unit. “I’m
finishing the compiler before I go to work on the kernel,” Stallman answered. “I am also
going to have to rewrite the file system.”126
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For a variety of reasons, he found it difficult to complete a kernel for GNU. Then, in 1991,
one became available not from Stallman or his Free Software Foundation, but from a most
unexpected source: a twenty-one-year-old toothy and boyish Swedish-speaking Finn at the
University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds.
Linus Torvalds’s father was a Communist Party member and TV journalist, his mother a
student radical and then print journalist, but as a child in Helsinki he became more interested
in technology than in politics.127 He described himself as “good at math, good at physics, and
with no social graces whatsoever, and this was before being a nerd was considered a good
thing.”128 Especially in Finland.
When Torvalds was eleven, his grandfather, a professor of statistics, gave him a used
Commodore Vic 20, one of the first personal computers. Using BASIC, Torvalds began
writing his own programs, including one that amused his younger sister by writing “Sara is
the best” over and over. “One of the biggest joys,” he said, “was learning that computers are
like mathematics: You get to make up your own world with its own rules.”
Tuning out his father’s urgings to learn to play basketball, Torvalds focused instead on
learning to write programs in machine language, the numerical instructions executed directly
by a computer’s central processing unit, exposing him to the joy of being “intimate with a
machine.” He later felt lucky to have learned assembly language and machine code on a very
basic device: “Computers were actually better for kids when they were less sophisticated,
when dweebie youngsters like me could tinker under the hood.”129 Like car engines,
computers eventually became harder to take apart and put back together.
After enrolling in the University of Helsinki in 1988 and serving his year in the Finnish
Army, Torvalds bought an IBM clone with an Intel 386 processor. Unimpressed with its MS-
DOS, which Gates and company had produced, he decided that he wanted to install UNIX,
which he had learned to like on the university’s mainframes. But UNIX cost $5,000 per copy
and wasn’t configured to run on a home computer. Torvalds set out to remedy that.
He read a book on operating systems by a computer science professor in Amsterdam,
Andrew Tanenbaum, who had developed MINIX, a small clone of UNIX for teaching
purposes. Deciding that he would replace the MS-DOS with MINIX on his new PC, Torvalds
paid the $169 license fee (“I thought it was outrageous”), installed the sixteen floppy disks,
and then started to supplement and modify MINIX to suit his tastes.
Torvalds’s first addition was a terminal emulation program so that he could dial into the
university’s mainframe. He wrote the program from scratch in assembly language, “at the
bare hardware level,” so he didn’t need to depend on MINIX. During the late spring of 1991,
he hunkered down to code just as the sun reappeared from its winter hibernation. Everyone
was emerging into the outdoors, except him. “I was spending most of my time in a bathrobe,
huddled over my unattractive new computer, with thick black window shades shielding me
from the sunlight.”
Once he got a rudimentary terminal emulator working, he wanted to be able to download
and upload files, so he built a disk driver and file system driver. “By the time I did this it was
clear the project was on its way to becoming an operating system,” he recalled. In other
words, he was embarking on building a software package that could serve as a kernel for a
UNIX-like operating system. “One moment I’m in my threadbare robe hacking away on a
terminal emulator with extra functions. The next moment I realize it’s accumulating so many
functions that it has metamorphosed into a new operating system in the works.” He figured
out the hundreds of “system calls” that UNIX could do to get the computer to perform basic
operations such as Open and Close, Read and Write, and then wrote programs to implement
them in his own way. He was still living in his mother’s apartment, often fighting with his
sister Sara, who had a normal social life, because his modem hogged their phone line.
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“Nobody could call us,” she complained.130
Torvalds initially planned to name his new software “Freax,” to evoke “free” and “freaks”
and “UNIX.” But the person who ran the FTP site he was using didn’t like the name, so
Torvalds resorted to calling it “Linux,” which he pronounced, similarly to the way he
pronounced his first name, “LEE-nucks.”131 “I never wanted to use that name because I felt,
OK, that’s a little too egotistical,” he said. But he later conceded that there was a part of his
ego that enjoyed getting acclaim after so many years of living in the body of a reclusive nerd,
and he was glad he went along with the name.132
In the early fall of 1991, when the Helsinki sun started disappearing again, Torvalds
emerged with the shell of his system, which contained ten thousand lines of code.36 Instead of
trying to market what he had produced, he decided simply to offer it publicly. He had
recently gone with a friend to hear a lecture by Stallman, who had become an itinerant global
preacher for the doctrine of free software. Torvalds didn’t actually get religion or embrace the
dogma: “It probably didn’t make a huge impact on my life at that point. I was interested in
the technology, not the politics—I had enough politics at home.”133 But he did see the
practical advantages of the open approach. Almost by instinct rather than as a philosophical
choice, he felt Linux should be freely shared with the hope that anyone who used it might
help improve it.
On October 5, 1991, he posted a cheeky message on the MINIX discussion newsgroup.
“Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device
drivers?” he began. “I’m working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386
computers. It has finally reached the stage where it’s even usable (though may not be
depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider
distribution.”134
“It wasn’t much of a decision to post it,” he recalled. “It was how I was accustomed to
exchanging programs.” In the computer world, there was (and still is) a strong culture of
shareware, in which people voluntarily sent in a few dollars to someone whose program they
downloaded. “I was getting emails from people asking me if I would like them to send me
thirty bucks or so,” Torvalds said. He had racked up $5,000 in student loans and was still
paying $50 a month for the installment loan on his computer. But instead of seeking
donations he asked for postcards, and they started flooding in from people all over the world
who were using Linux. “Sara typically picked up the mail, and she was suddenly impressed
that her combative older brother was somehow hearing from new friends so far away,”
Torvalds recalled. “It was her first tip-off that I was doing anything potentially useful during
those many hours when I had the phone line engaged.”
Torvalds’s decision to eschew payments came from a mix of reasons, as he later explained,
including a desire to live up to his family heritage:
I felt I was following in the footsteps of centuries of scientists and other academics who built their work on the foundations of others. . . . I also
wanted feedback (okay, and praise). It didn’t make sense to charge people who could potentially help improve my work. I suppose I would have
approached it differently if I had not been raised in Finland, where anyone exhibiting the slightest sign of greediness is viewed with suspicion, if
not envy. And yes, I undoubtedly would have approached the whole no-money thing a lot differently if I had not been brought up under the
influence of a diehard academic grandfather and a diehard communist father.

“Greed is never good,” Torvalds declared. His approach helped turn him into a folk hero,
suitable for veneration at conferences and on magazine covers as the anti-Gates. Charmingly,
he was self-aware enough to know that he relished such acclaim and that this made him a
little bit more egotistical than his admirers realized. “I’ve never been the selfless, ego-free,
techno-lovechild the hallucinating press insists I am,” he admitted.135
Torvalds decided to use the GNU General Public License, not because he fully embraced
the free-sharing ideology of Stallman (or for that matter his own parents) but because he
thought that letting hackers around the world get their hands on the source code would lead to
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an open collaborative effort that would make it a truly awesome piece of software. “My
reasons for putting Linux out there were pretty selfish,” he said. “I didn’t want the headache
of trying to deal with parts of the operating system that I saw as the crap work. I wanted
help.”136
His instinct was right. His release of his Linux kernel led to a tsunami of peer-to-peer
volunteer collaboration that became a model of the shared production that propelled digital-
age innovation.137 By the fall of 1992, a year after its release, Linux’s newsgroup on the
Internet had tens of thousands of users. Selfless collaborators added improvements such as a
Windows-like graphical interface and tools to facilitate the networking of computers.
Whenever there was a bug, someone somewhere stepped in to fix it. In his book The
Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, one of the seminal theorists of the open software
movement, propounded what he called “Linus’s Law”: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow.”138
Peer-to-peer sharing and commons-based collaboration were nothing new. An entire field of
evolutionary biology has arisen around the question of why humans, and members of some
other species, cooperate in what seem to be altruistic ways. The tradition of forming
voluntary associations, found in all societies, was especially strong in early America,
evidenced in cooperative ventures ranging from quilting bees to barn raisings. “In no country
in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more
unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America,” Alexis de
Tocqueville wrote.139 Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography propounded an entire civic
creed, with the motto “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine,” to explain his
formation of voluntary associations to create a hospital, militia, street-sweeping corps, fire
brigade, lending library, night-watch patrol, and many other community endeavors.
The hacker corps that grew up around GNU and Linux showed that emotional incentives,
beyond financial rewards, can motivate voluntary collaboration. “Money is not the greatest of
motivators,” Torvalds said. “Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion. When
they are having fun. This is as true for playwrights and sculptors and entrepreneurs as it is for
software engineers.” There is also, intended or not, some self-interest involved. “Hackers are
also motivated, in large part, by the esteem they can gain in the eyes of their peers by making
solid contributions. . . . Everybody wants to impress their peers, improve their reputation,
elevate their social status. Open source development gives programmers the chance.”
Gates’s “Letter to Hobbyists,” complaining about the unauthorized sharing of Microsoft
BASIC, asked in a chiding way, “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”
Torvalds found that an odd outlook. He and Gates were from two very different cultures, the
communist-tinged radical academia of Helsinki versus the corporate elite of Seattle. Gates
may have ended up with the bigger house, but Torvalds reaped antiestablishment adulation.
“Journalists seemed to love the fact that, while Gates lived in a high-tech lakeside mansion, I
was tripping over my daughter’s playthings in a three-bedroom ranch house with bad
plumbing in boring Santa Clara,” he said with ironic self-awareness. “And that I drove a
boring Pontiac. And answered my own phone. Who wouldn’t love me?”
Torvalds was able to master the digital-age art of being an accepted leader of a massive,
decentralized, nonhierarchical collaboration, something that Jimmy Wales at Wikipedia was
doing at around the same time. The first rule for such a situation is to make decisions like an
engineer, based on technical merit rather than personal considerations. “It was a way of
getting people to trust me,” Torvalds explained. “When people trust you, they take your
advice.” He also realized that leaders in a voluntary collaborative have to encourage others to
follow their passion, not boss them around. “The best and most effective way to lead is by
letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to.” Such a
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leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it’s done right, a governance
structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia.
“What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works,” Torvalds
said. “People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens. No
voting. No orders. No recounts.”140
The combination of GNU with Linux represented, at least in concept, the triumph of Richard
Stallman’s crusade. But moral prophets rarely indulge in victory celebrations. Stallman was a
purist. Torvalds wasn’t. The Linux kernel he eventually distributed contained some binary
blobs with proprietary features. That could be remedied; indeed Stallman’s Free Software
Foundation created a version that was completely free and nonproprietary. But there was a
deeper and more emotional issue for Stallman. He complained that referring to the operating
system as “Linux,” which almost everybody did, was misleading. Linux was the name of the
kernel. The system as a whole should be called GNU/Linux, he insisted, sometimes angrily.
One person who was at a software expo recounted how Stallman had reacted when a nervous
fourteen-year-old boy asked him about Linux. “You ripped into that boy and tore him a brand
new asshole, and I watched as his face fell and his devotion to you and our cause crumpled in
a heap,” the onlooker later berated Stallman.141
Stallman also insisted that the goal should be to create what he called free software, a
phrase that reflected a moral imperative to share. He objected to the phrase that Torvalds and
Eric Raymond began to use, open-source software, which emphasized the pragmatic goal of
getting people to collaborate in order to create software more effectively. In practice, most
free software is also open-source and vice versa; they are usually thrown together under the
rubric of free and open-source software. But to Stallman it mattered not only how you made
your software but also your motivations. Otherwise the movement might be susceptible to
compromise and corruption.
The disputes went beyond mere substance and became, in some ways, ideological.
Stallman was possessed by a moral clarity and unyielding aura, and he lamented that “anyone
encouraging idealism today faces a great obstacle: the prevailing ideology encourages people
to dismiss idealism as ‘impractical.’ ”142 Torvalds, on the contrary, was unabashedly practical,
like an engineer. “I led the pragmatists,” he said. “I have always thought that idealistic people
are interesting, but kind of boring and scary.”143
Torvalds admitted to “not exactly being a huge fan” of Stallman, explaining, “I don’t like
single-issue people, nor do I think that people who turn the world into black and white are
very nice or ultimately very useful. 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.”144 He also believed that it should be permissible to make money from open-
source software. “Open source is about letting everybody play. Why should business, which
fuels so much of society’s technological advancement, be excluded?”145 Software may want
to be free, but the people who write it may want to feed their kids and reward their investors.
These disputes should not overshadow the astonishing accomplishment that Stallman and
Torvalds and their thousands of collaborators wrought. The combination of GNU and Linux
created an operating system that has been ported to more hardware platforms, ranging from
the world’s ten biggest supercomputers to embedded systems in mobile phones, than any
other operating system. “Linux is subversive,” wrote Eric Raymond. “Who would have
thought that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time
hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the
tenuous strands of the Internet?”146 Not only did it become a great operating system; it
became a model for commons-based peer production in other realms, from Mozilla’s Firefox
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browser to Wikipedia’s content.
By the 1990s there were many models for software development. There was the Apple
approach, in which the hardware and the operating system software were tightly bundled, as
with the Macintosh and iPhone and every iProduct in between. It made for a seamless user
experience. There was the Microsoft approach, in which the operating system was unbundled
from the hardware. That allowed more user choices. In addition, there were the free and
open-source approaches, which allowed the software to be completely unfettered and
modifiable by any user. Each model had its advantages, each had its incentives for creativity,
and each had its prophets and disciples. But the approach that worked best was having all
three models coexisting, along with various combinations of open and closed, bundled and
unbundled, proprietary and free. Windows and Mac, UNIX and Linux, iOS and Android: a
variety of approaches competed over the decades, spurring each other on—and providing a
check against any one model becoming so dominant that it stifled innovation.
Larry Brilliant (1944– ) and Stewart Brand on Brand’s houseboat in 2010.
William von Meister (1942–1995).
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Steve Case (1958– ).
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CHAPTER TEN

ONLINE
The Internet and the personal computer were both born in the 1970s, but they grew up apart
from one another. This was odd, and all the more so when they continued to develop on
separate tracks for more than a decade. This was partly because there was a difference in
mind-set between those who embraced the joys of networking and those who got giddy at the
thought of a personal computer of their very own. Unlike the utopians of the Community
Memory project who loved forming virtual communities, many early fans of personal
computers wanted to geek out alone on their own machines, at least initially.
There was also a more tangible reason that personal computers arose in a way that was
disconnected from the rise of networks. The ARPANET of the 1970s was not open to
ordinary folks. In 1981 Lawrence Landweber at the University of Wisconsin pulled together a
consortium of universities that were not connected to the ARPANET to create another
network based on TCP/IP protocols, which was called CSNET. “Networking was available
only to a small fraction of the U.S. computer research community at the time,” he said.1
CSNET became the forerunner of a network funded by the National Science Foundation,
NSFNET. But even after these were all woven together into the Internet in the early 1980s, it
was hard for an average person using a personal computer at home to get access. You
generally had to be affiliated with a university or research institution to jack in.
So for almost fifteen years, beginning in the early 1970s, the growth of the Internet and the
boom in home computers proceeded in parallel. They didn’t intertwine until the late 1980s,
when it became possible for ordinary people at home or in the office to dial up and go online.
This would launch a new phase of the Digital Revolution, one that would fulfill the vision of
Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart that computers would augment human intelligence by being
tools both for personal creativity and for collaborating.
EMAIL AND BULLETIN BOARDS
“The street finds its own uses for things,” William Gibson wrote in “Burning Chrome,” his
1982 cyberpunk story. Thus it was that the researchers who had access to the ARPANET
found their own use for it. It was supposed to be a network for time-sharing computer
resources. In that it was a modest failure. Instead, like many technologies, it shot to success
by becoming a medium for communications and social networking. One truth about the
digital age is that the desire to communicate, connect, collaborate, and form community tends
to create killer apps. And in 1972 the ARPANET got its first. It was email.
Electronic mail was already used by researchers who were on the same time-sharing
computer. A program called SNDMSG allowed a user of a big central computer to send a
message to the personal folder of another user who was sharing the same computer. In late
1971 Ray Tomlinson, an MIT engineer working at BBN, decided to concoct a cool hack that
would allow such messages to be sent to folders on other mainframes. He did it by combining
SNDMSG with an experimental file transfer program called CPYNET, which could exchange
files between distant computers on the ARPANET. Then he came up with something that was
even more ingenious: in order to instruct a message to go to the file folder of a user at a
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different site, he used the @ sign on his keyboard to create the addressing system that we all
use now, username@hostname. Thus Tomlinson created not only email but the iconic symbol
of the connected world.2
The ARPANET allowed researchers at one center to tap into the computing resources
somewhere else, but that rarely happened. Instead email became the main method for
collaborating. ARPA’s director, Stephen Lukasik, became one of the first email addicts, thus
causing all researchers who needed to deal with him to follow suit. He commissioned a study
in 1973 which found that, less than two years after it was invented, email accounted for 75
percent of the traffic on the ARPANET. “The largest single surprise of the ARPANET
program has been the incredible popularity and success of network mail,” a BBN report
concluded a few years later. It should not have been a surprise. The desire to socially network
not only drives innovations, it co-opts them.
Email did more than facilitate the exchange of messages between two computer users. It
led to the creation of virtual communities, ones that, as predicted in 1968 by Licklider and
Taylor, were “selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of
proximity.”
The earliest virtual communities began with email chains that were distributed to large
self-selected groups of subscribers. They became known as mailing lists. The first major list,
in 1975, was SF-Lovers, for science fiction fans. The ARPA managers initially wanted to
shut it down out of fear that some senator might not be amused by the use of military money
to support a sci-fi virtual hangout, but the moderators of the group successfully argued that it
was a valuable training exercise in juggling large information exchanges.
Soon other methods of forming online communities arose. Some used the backbone of the
Internet; others were more jury-rigged. In February 1978 two members of the Chicago Area
Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, found themselves
snowed in by a huge blizzard. They spent the time developing the first computer Bulletin
Board System, which allowed hackers and hobbyists and self-appointed “sysops” (system
operators) to set up their own online forums and offer files, pirated software, information, and
message posting. Anyone who had a way to get online could join in. The following year,
students at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, which were not yet
connected to the Internet, developed another system, hosted on personal computers, which
featured threaded message-and-reply discussion forums. It became known as “Usenet,” and
the categories of postings on it were called “newsgroups.” By 1984 there were close to a
thousand Usenet terminals at colleges and institutes around the country.
Even with these new bulletin boards and newsgroups, most average PC owners could not
easily join virtual communities. Users needed a way to connect, which wasn’t easy from
home or even most offices. But then, in the early 1980s, an innovation came along, part
technological and part legal, that seemed small but had a huge impact.
MODEMS
The little device that finally created a connection between home computers and global
networks was called a modem. It could modulate and demodulate (hence the name) an analog
signal, like that carried by a telephone circuit, in order to transmit and receive digital
information. It thus allowed ordinary people to connect their computers to others online by
using phone lines. The online revolution could now begin.
It was slow in coming because AT&T had a near-monopoly over the nation’s phone
system, even controlling the equipment you could use in your home. You couldn’t connect
anything to your phone line, or even to your phone, unless Ma Bell leased it to you or
approved it. Although AT&T offered some modems in the 1950s, they were clunky and
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costly and designed mainly for industrial or military use, rather than being conducive to
homebrew hobbyists creating virtual communities.
Then came the Hush-A-Phone case. It involved a simple plastic mouthpiece that could be
snapped onto a phone to amplify your voice while making it harder for those nearby to
overhear you. It had been around for twenty years, causing no harm, but then an AT&T
lawyer spotted one in a shopwindow, and the company decided to sue on the absurd ground
that any external device, including a little plastic cone, could damage its network. It showed
how far the company would go to protect its monopoly.
Fortunately, AT&T’s effort backfired. A federal appeals court dismissed the company’s
claim, and the barriers to jacking into its network began to crumble. It was still illegal to
connect a modem into the phone system electronically, but you could do so mechanically,
such as by taking your phone’s handset and cradling it into the suction cups of an acoustical
coupler. By the early 1970s there were a few modems of this type, including the
Pennywhistle, designed for the hobbyist crowd by Lee Felsenstein, that could send and
receive digital signals at three hundred bits per second.37
The next step came when, a headstrong Texas cowboy won, after a twelve-year legal battle
he financed by selling off his cattle, the right for his customers to use a radio-enabled
extension phone he had invented. It took a few years for all of the regulations to be worked
out, but by 1975 the Federal Communications Commission opened the way for consumers to
attach electronic devices to the network.
The rules were stringent, due to AT&T lobbying, so electronic modems were initially
expensive. But in 1981 the Hayes Smartmodem came on the market. It could be plugged
directly into a phone line and connected to a computer, with no need for a clunky acoustic
coupler. Pioneering hobbyists and cyberpunks, along with ordinary home computer users,
could type in the phone number of an online service provider, hold their breath while they
waited for the staticky screech that indicated a data connection had been made, and then tap
into the virtual communities that formed around bulletin boards, newsgroups, mailing lists,
and other online hangouts.
THE WELL
In almost every decade of the Digital Revolution, the amused and amusing Stewart Brand
found a way to stand at the locus where technology overlapped with community and the
counterculture. He had produced the techno-psychedelic show at Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival,
reported on Spacewar and Xerox PARC for Rolling Stone, aided and abetted Doug
Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos, and founded the Whole Earth Catalog. So in the fall of
1984, just as modems were becoming easily available and personal computers were
becoming user-friendly, it was not surprising that Brand helped to conjure up the idea for the
prototypic online community, The WELL.
It began when Brand was visited by another of the playfully earnest and creative denizens
of the idealistic techno-counterculture, Larry Brilliant. A physician and epidemiologist,
Brilliant had a compulsion to change the world and have fun while doing so. He had served
as the doctor for an American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, sought enlightenment at a
Himalayan ashram with the famed guru Neem Karoli Baba (where he first crossed paths with
Steve Jobs), enlisted in the World Health Organization’s campaign to eliminate smallpox, and
with support from Jobs and the counterculture luminaries Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy
founded the Seva Foundation, which focused on curing blindness in poor communities
around the world.
When one of the helicopters used by the Seva Foundation in Nepal had mechanical
problems, Brilliant used a computer conferencing system and an Apple II that Jobs had
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donated to organize online a repair mission. The potential power of online discussion groups
impressed him. When he went to teach at the University of Michigan, he helped to build a
company around a computer conferencing system that had been created on the university’s
network. Known as PicoSpan, it allowed users to post comments on different topics and
strung them into threads for all to read. Brilliant’s idealism, techno-utopianism, and
entrepreneurialism flowed together. He used the conferencing system to bring medical
expertise to Asian hamlets and organize missions when something went wrong.
When Brilliant went to a conference in San Diego, he called his old friend Stewart Brand
for lunch. They met at a beachside restaurant near where Brand planned to spend the day
skinny-dipping. Brilliant had two interwoven goals: to popularize the PicoSpan conferencing
software and to create an online intellectual commune. He pitched Brand on a partnership in
which Brilliant would put up $200,000 in capital, buy a computer, and provide the software.
“Stewart would then manage the system and extend it throughout his network of smart,
interesting people,” Brilliant explained.3 “My idea was to use this new technology as a way of
discussing everything in the Whole Earth Catalog. There can be a social network around
Swiss Army knives or solar stoves or anything.”4
Brand turned the idea into something grander: creating the world’s most stimulating online
community where people could discuss anything they wanted. “Let’s just have a conversation
and get the smartest people in the world,” he suggested, “and let them figure out whatever
they want to talk about.”5 Brand came up with a name, The WELL, and reverse-engineered
an acronym for it: the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link. A playful apostrophe, he later said, was
“always worth having in a name.”6
Brand championed a concept, abandoned by many later virtual communities, that was
critical to making The WELL a seminal service. The participants could not be totally
anonymous; they could use a handle or pseudonym, but they had to provide their real name
when they joined, and other members could know who they were. Brand’s credo, which
popped up on the opening screen, was “You own your own words.” You were accountable
for what you posted.
Like the Internet itself, The WELL became a system designed by its users. By 1987 the
topics of its online forums, known as conferences, ranged from the Grateful Dead (the most
popular) to UNIX programming, from art to parenting, aliens to software design. There was
minimal hierarchy or control, so it evolved in a collaborative way. That made it both an
addictive experience and a fascinating social experiment. Whole books were written about it,
including ones by the influential tech chroniclers Howard Rheingold and Katie Hafner. “Just
being on The Well, talking with people you might not consider befriending in any other
context, was its own seduction,” Hafner wrote.7 In his book Rheingold explained, “It’s like
having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools
waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat,
shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom
program and there they are.”8 When Rheingold discovered that his two-year-old daughter had
a tick in her scalp, he found out how to treat it from a doctor on The WELL before his own
physician had called him back.
Online conversations could be intense. A discussion leader named Tom Mandel, who
became a central character in Hafner’s book and also helped me and my colleagues at Time
manage our online forums, regularly engaged in fiery exchanges, known as flame wars, with
other members. “I expressed opinions about everything,” he recalled. “I even started an
altercation that dragged half of West Coast cyberspace into an electronic brawl and got
myself banished from the WELL.”9 But when he revealed he was dying of cancer, they
rallied around him emotionally. “I’m sad, terribly sad, I cannot tell you how sad and grief
stricken I am that I cannot stay to play and argue with you much longer,” he wrote in one of
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his last posts.10
The WELL was a model of the type of intimate, thoughtful community that the Internet
used to feature. It still remains, after three decades, a tight-knit community, but it was long
ago overtaken in popularity by more commercial online services and then by less communal
discussion venues. The widespread retreat into anonymity online has undermined Brand’s
creed that people should be accountable for what they say, thus making many online
comments less thoughtful and discussions less intimate. As the Internet goes through
different cycles—it has been a platform for time-sharing, community, publishing, blogging,
and social networking—there may come a time when the natural yearning that humans have
for forging trusted communities, akin to corner bars, will reassert itself, and The WELL or
startups that replicate its spirit will become the next hot innovation. Sometimes innovation
involves recovering what has been lost.
AMERICA ONLINE
William von Meister was an early example of the new frontiersmen who would drive digital
innovation beginning in the late 1970s. Like Ed Roberts of Altair, von Meister was a
supercharged serial entrepreneur. Fueled by the proliferation of venture capitalists, this breed
of innovators threw off ideas like sparks, got an adrenaline rush from risk taking, and touted
new technologies with the zeal of evangelists. Von Meister was both an exemplar and a
caricature. Unlike Noyce and Gates and Jobs, he did not set out to build companies but
instead to launch them and see where they landed. Rather than being afraid of failure, he was
energized by it, and his ilk made forgiving failure a feature of the Internet age. A magnificent
rogue, he started nine companies in ten years, most of which either crashed or ejected him.
But through his serial failures, he helped to define the archetype of the Internet entrepreneur
and, in the process, invent the online business.11
Von Meister’s mother was an Austrian countess and his father, a godson of Kaiser
Wilhelm II, ran the U.S. division of the German zeppelin company that operated the
Hindenburg until its 1937 explosion, and then ran a division of a chemical company until he
was indicted for fraud. His style rubbed off on young Bill, born in 1942, who seemed hell-
bent on matching his father’s flameouts in flamboyance if not in severity. Growing up in a
whitewashed brick mansion known as Blue Chimneys on a twenty-eight-acre estate in New
Jersey, he loved escaping to the attic to operate his ham radio and build electronic gadgets.
Among the devices he made was a radio transmitter that his father kept in his car and used to
signal when he was nearing home from work so that the household staff could prepare his tea.
After a desultory academic career that consisted of dropping into and out of colleges in
Washington, DC, von Meister joined Western Union. He made money with a bunch of side
ventures, including salvaging some of the company’s discarded equipment, and then
launched a service that allowed people to dictate important letters to call centers for overnight
delivery. It was successful, but in what became a pattern, von Meister was forced out for
spending wildly and not paying any attention to operations.38
Von Meister was one of the original breed of media entrepreneurs—think Ted Turner
rather than Mark Zuckerberg—who lived larger than life and mixed craziness with
shrewdness so thoroughly that they became almost indistinguishable. He had a taste for
flashy women and fine red wine, race cars and private planes, single-malt Scotch and
contraband cigars. “Bill von Meister was not just a serial entrepreneur, he was a pathological
entrepreneur,” according to Michael Schrage, who covered him for the Washington Post.
“Bill von Meister’s ideas, on average, when you look back at them, don’t seem stupid. But at
the time they seemed outlandish. The big risk was he was such a loon that his looniness
would get confused with the idea, because they’re so intertwined.”12
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Von Meister continued to prove adept at coming up with new notions and raising money
from venture capitalists, though not at running anything. Among his startups: a bulk
telephone routing service for businesses, a restaurant in suburban Washington called McLean
Lunch and Radiator that allowed customers to make free long-distance calls from phones at
their table, and a service called Infocast that sent information to computers by piggybacking
digital data on FM radio signals. Then in 1978, when he had become bored or unwelcome at
these ventures, he combined his interests in phones, computers, and information networks to
create a service that he called The Source.
The Source linked home computers via telephone lines into a network that offered bulletin
boards, message exchanges, news stories, horoscopes, restaurant guides, wine rankings,
shopping, weather, airline schedules, and stock quotes. In other words, it was one of the first
consumer-oriented online services. (The other was CompuServe, a business-oriented time-
sharing network that in 1979 was just venturing into the consumer dial-up market.) “It can
take your personal computer anywhere in the world,” proclaimed an early marketing
brochure. Von Meister told the Washington Post that it would become a “utility” that would
provide information “like water comes out of a faucet.” In addition to piping information into
the home, The Source focused on creating community: forums and chat rooms and private
file-sharing areas where users could post their own writings for others to download. At the
official launch of the service in July 1979 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, the sci-fi writer and
pitchman Isaac Asimov proclaimed, “This is the beginning of the Information Age!”13
As usual, von Meister was soon mismanaging the company and squandering money,
causing him to be ousted after a year by his principal funder, who said, “Billy von Meister is
a terrific entrepreneur but he didn’t know how to stop entrepreneuring.” The Source was
eventually sold to Reader’s Digest, which later sold it to CompuServe. But despite being
short-lived, it pioneered the online era by showing that consumers wanted not just
information piped to them but also the chance to connect with friends and generate their own
content to be shared.
Von Meister’s next idea, also slightly ahead of its time, was a home music store that would
sell streaming music through cable TV networks. Record stores and recording companies
ganged up to block his access to songs, so the idea-a-minute von Meister switched his focus
to video games. It was an even riper target; at the time, there were 14 million Atari home
game consoles. Thus was born Control Video Corporation (CVC). Von Meister’s new service
allowed users to download games for purchase or rent. He dubbed the service GameLine, and
he began to bundle with it some of the information services that had been in The Source.
“We’re going to turn the videogame jockey into an information junkie,” he proclaimed.14
GameLine and CVC set up shop in a strip mall on the way to Washington’s Dulles Airport.
Von Meister selected a board of directors that symbolized the official passing of the torch to a
new breed of Internet pioneers. Among its members were Larry Roberts and Len Kleinrock,
architects of the original ARPANET. Another was the pathbreaking venture capitalist Frank
Caufield of what had become Silicon Valley’s most influential financial firm, Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers. Representing the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist was Dan Case, a
smooth and energetic young Rhodes Scholar from Hawaii and Princeton.
Dan Case joined von Meister in Las Vegas for the January 1983 Consumer Electronics
Show, where CVC’s GameLine was hoping to make a splash. Von Meister, ever the
showman, paid for a hot air balloon shaped like a joystick and emblazoned with the name
GameLine to float above the town, and he rented a sprawling suite at the Tropicana Hotel,
which he festooned with hired showgirls.15 Case relished the scene. Hovering in the corner
was his younger brother, Steve, who was more reticent and, with his enigmatic smile and
equable face, harder to read.
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Born in 1958 and raised in Hawaii, with a placid temperament that made it seem as if he had
been nurtured by dolphins, Steve Case had a pacific façade. Called by some “the Wall”
because his face rarely flickered with emotion, he was shy but not insecure. To some people
who didn’t really know him, that made him appear aloof or arrogant, which he wasn’t. As he
grew up, he taught himself to joke and trade friendly insults in a flat and nasal tone, like a
newbie at a fraternity. But beneath the banter he was deeply thoughtful and earnest.
In high school, Dan and Steve turned their bedrooms into offices from which they ran a
series of businesses that, among other things, sold greeting cards and distributed magazines.
“The first lesson of Case entrepreneurship,” Steve recalled, “was I came up with the idea and
he provided the funding and then owned half the company.”16
Steve 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
computer class and hated it “because this was the punch-card era and you’d write a program
and then have to wait hours to get the results.”18 The lesson he learned was that computers
needed to be made more accessible and interactive.
One aspect of computers he liked was the notion of using them to tap into networks. “The
far-away connections seemed magical,” he told the journalist Kara Swisher. “It struck me as
the most completely obvious use for them, and the rest was just for computer wonks.”19 After
reading The Third Wave by the futurist Alvin Toffler, he became riveted by the concept of
“the electronic frontier,” in which technology would connect people to each other and all of
the world’s information.20
In early 1980 he applied for a job at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. “I firmly
believe that technological advances in communications are on the verge of significantly
altering our way of life,” he wrote in his application letter. “Innovations in
telecommunications (especially two-way cable systems) will result in our television sets (big-
screen, of course!) becoming an information line, newspaper, school, computer, referendum
machine, and catalog.”21 He didn’t get the job, and he was also initially turned down by
Proctor & Gamble. But he talked his way into having a second interview at P&G, traveling to
Cincinnati at his own expense, and ended up as a junior brand manager in a group that
handled a soon-defunct hair conditioner towelette called Abound. There Case learned the
trick of giving away free samples in order to launch a new product. “That was in part the
inspiration behind AOL’s free disk trial strategy a decade later,” he said.22 After two years he
left to work at PepsiCo’s Pizza Hut division. “The reason I did that was because it was highly
entrepreneurial. It was a company run by the franchisees, almost the opposite of Procter &
Gamble, which is more of a top-down, process-oriented company where all the key decisions
were made in Cincinnati.”23
As a young bachelor based in Wichita, Kansas, where there was not a whole lot to do in the
evenings, he became a fan of The Source. It was a perfect refuge for someone with his mix of
shyness and desire for connection. He learned two lessons: that people like to be part of
communities and that technology needs to be simple if it is going to appeal to the masses.
When he first tried to log on to The Source, he had trouble getting his Kaypro portable
computer configured. “It was like climbing Mount Everest, and my first thought was to figure
out why it had to be so hard,” he recalled. “But when I finally logged in and found myself
linked to all over the country from this sorry little apartment in Wichita, it was
exhilarating.”24
On the side, Case formed his own small marketing company. He was at heart an
entrepreneur in an era when most other college kids sought jobs at big companies. He rented
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a maildrop with an upscale address in San Francisco, got it printed on stationery, and had his
business correspondence forwarded to his little apartment in Wichita. His passion was to help
companies that wanted to pioneer the electronic frontier, so when his brother Dan joined
Hambrecht & Quist in 1981, he began sending Steve business plans for interesting
companies. One of them was for von Meister’s Control Video Corporation. During a
Colorado ski vacation in December 1982, they discussed whether Dan should invest, and they
also decided to go together to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the following
month.25
The irrepressible von Meister and the repressible Steve spent a long dinner in Las Vegas
talking about ways to market GameLine. Perhaps because they had shared interests but
different personalities, they hit it off. During a drunken conversation in the bathroom halfway
through the dinner, von Meister asked Dan whether it would be all right for him to hire young
Steve. Dan allowed that it would be just fine. Steve started at CVC as a part-time consultant,
then was hired full-time in September 1983 and moved to Washington, DC. “I thought the
GameLine idea had real promise,” Case said. “But I also felt that even if it failed, the lessons
I’d learn by working alongside Bill would be a valuable education. And that certainly proved
to be accurate.”26
Within a few months, CVC was on the brink of bankruptcy. Von Meister had still not
learned to be a prudent manager, and the Atari game market had deflated. When told the sales
numbers at a board meeting that year, the venture capitalist Frank Caufield responded, “You
would’ve thought they would’ve shoplifted more than that.” So Caufield insisted that a
disciplined manager be brought in. The person he tapped was a close friend and classmate
from West Point, Jim Kimsey, who had the gruff exterior of a Special Forces commando
cloaking the personable heart of a bartender.
Kimsey was not the obvious person to whip into shape an interactive digital service; he was
far more familiar with guns and whiskey glasses than keyboards. But he had the mix of
tenacity and rebelliousness that makes for a good entrepreneur. Born in 1939, he grew up in
Washington, DC, and in his senior year was kicked out of the town’s top Catholic school,
Gonzaga High, for being disruptive. Nevertheless, he was eventually able to wrangle an
appointment to West Point, where he was suited to an atmosphere that celebrated, channeled,
and controlled aggression. Upon graduation, he was deployed to the Dominican Republic,
then served two tours in Vietnam in the late 1960s. While there as a major with the Airborne
Rangers, he took charge of building an orphanage for a hundred Vietnamese kids. Had it not
been for his tendency to mouth off to those higher in the chain of command, he may have
made the military a career.27
Instead he went back to Washington in 1970, bought an office building downtown, rented
out much of it to brokerage firms, and on the ground floor opened a bar called The Exchange
that had a working ticker-tape machine. He soon opened other popular singles bars, with
names like Madhatter and Bullfeathers, while embarking on additional real estate ventures.
Part of his routine was going on adventure trips with his West Point pal Frank Caufield and
their sons. It was on a 1983 rafting trip that Caufield recruited him to CVC as a minder for
von Meister and, eventually, as CEO.
Faced with sluggish sales, Kimsey fired most of the staff except for Steve Case, whom he
promoted to vice president of marketing. Kimsey had a colorful saloonkeeper’s way with
words, especially scatological ones. “My job is to make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” he
declared. And he was fond of the old joke about a young boy who merrily digs through a pile
of horse manure and, when asked why, declares, “There must be a pony somewhere in this
shit.”
It was an odd triumvirate: the undisciplined idea generator von Meister, the coolly strategic
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Case, and the rough-edged commando Kimsey. While von Meister played showman and
Kimsey played backslapping barkeep, Case hovered in the corner observing and coming up
with new ideas. Together they showed once again how a diverse team can promote
innovation. Ken Novack, an outside counsel, later observed, “It was no accident that they
created this business together.”28
Case and von Meister had long been interested in building computer networks that could
connect ordinary users. When CBS, Sears, and IBM joined forces in 1984 to launch such a
service that became known as Prodigy, other computer makers realized that there might be a
real market. Commodore came to CVC and asked it to create an online service. So Kimsey
reconfigured CVC into a company called Quantum, which launched a service named Q-Link
for Commodore users in November 1985.
For $10 a month, Q-Link had everything that von Meister—who was then being eased out
of the company—and Case had envisioned: news, games, weather, horoscopes, reviews,
stocks, soap opera updates, a shopping mall, and more, along with the regular crashes and
downtime that became endemic in the online world. But most important, Q-Link had an area
filled with active bulletin boards and live chat rooms, dubbed People Connection, which
enabled members to form communities.
Within two months, by the beginning of 1986, Q-Link had ten thousand members. But
growth began to taper off, largely because Commodore’s computer sales were slumping in
the face of new competition from Apple and others. “We have to take control of our destiny,”
Kimsey told Case.29 It was clear that for Quantum to succeed, it had to create its Link online
services for other computer makers, most notably Apple.
With the tenacity that came with his patient personality, Case targeted the executives at
Apple. Even after its brilliantly controlling cofounder Steve Jobs had been forced out of the
company, at least for the time being, Apple was difficult to partner with. So Case moved
across the country to Cupertino and took an apartment near Apple’s headquarters. From there
he waged his siege. There were many possible units within Apple he could try to conquer,
and he was eventually able to get a little desk inside the company. Despite his reputation for
being aloof, he had a whimsical sense of humor; on his desk, he put up a sign that said “Steve
Held Hostage”39 along with the number of days he had been there.30 In 1987, after three
months of daily campaigning, he was successful: Apple’s customer service department
agreed to strike a deal with Quantum for a service called AppleLink. When it launched a year
later, the first live chat forum featured Apple’s lovable cofounder Steve Wozniak.
Case went on to make a similar deal with Tandy to launch PC-Link. But he soon realized
that his strategy of creating separate private-label services for different computer makers
needed to be revised. Users of one service could not connect with those on another. In
addition, the computer makers were controlling Quantum’s products, marketing, and future.
“Look, we can no longer rely on these partnerships,” Case told his team. “We really need to
stand on our own two feet and kind of have our own brand.”31
This became a more urgent problem—but also an opportunity—when relations with Apple
frayed. “The powers that be at Apple decided they were uncomfortable with a third-party
company using the Apple brand name,” Case said. “Apple’s decision to pull the rug out on us
led to the need to rebrand.”32 Case and Kimsey decided to combine the users of all three of
their services into one integrated online service with a brand name all its own. The software
approach pioneered by Bill Gates would apply to the online realm as well: online services
would be unbundled from the hardware and would work on all computer platforms.
Now they needed to come up with a name. There were many suggestions, such as
Crossroads and Quantum 2000, but they all sounded like religious retreats or mutual funds.
Case came up with America Online, which caused many of his colleagues to gag. It was
hokey and awkwardly patriotic. But Case liked it. He knew, just as Jobs had when he named
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his company Apple, that it was important to be, as he later said, “simple, unintimidating, and
even a bit sappy.”33 With no marketing dollars, Case needed a name that clearly described
what the service did. And the name America Online accomplished that.
AOL, as it became known, was like going online with training wheels. It was
unintimidating and easy to use. Case applied the two lessons he had learned at Proctor &
Gamble: make a product simple and launch it with free samples. America was carpet-bombed
with software disks offering two months of free service. A voice-over actor named Elwood
Edwards, who was the husband of an early employee of AOL, recorded perky greetings
—“Welcome!” and “You’ve got mail!”—that made the service seem friendly. So America
went online.
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.”34 Among AOL’s
primary offerings were chat rooms, instant messaging, buddy lists, and text messaging. As on
The Source, there was news, sports, weather, and horoscopes. But social networking was the
focus. “Everything else—commerce and entertainment and financial services—was
secondary,” Case said. “We thought community trumped content.”35
Particularly popular were the chat rooms, where people with similar interests—computers,
sex, soap operas—could gather. They could even go off into “private rooms” to talk by
mutual consent or, at the other extreme, visit one of the “auditoriums” that might feature a
session with a celebrity. AOL’s users were not called customers or subscribers; they were
members. AOL thrived because it helped to create a social network. CompuServe and
Prodigy, which began primarily as information and shopping services, did the same with
tools such as CompuServe’s CB Simulator, which replicated in text the wacky pleasure of
talking on a citizens-band radio.
Kimsey the bar owner could never quite get why healthy people would spend their
Saturday nights in chat rooms and on bulletin boards. “Admit it, don’t you think it’s all
horseshit?” he would ask Case half jokingly.36 Case would shake his head. He knew that there
was a pony in it.
AL GORE AND THE ETERNAL SEPTEMBER
Online services such as AOL developed independently of the Internet. An entanglement of
laws, regulations, traditions, and practices made it impossible for commercial companies to
offer direct Internet access to ordinary folks who were not connected to an educational or
research institution. “It now seems really silly, but up until 1992, it was illegal to connect a
commercial service like AOL to the Internet,” Steve Case said.37
But beginning in 1993, the barrier was lowered and the Internet was made accessible to
everyone. This disrupted the online services, which until then had been walled gardens where
members were coddled in a controlled environment. It also transformed the Internet by
producing a flood of new users. But most important was that it began to connect the strands
of the Digital Revolution in the way that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had envisioned.
Computers and communications networks and repositories of digital information were woven
together and put at the fingertips of every individual.
It began in earnest when AOL, following the lead of a smaller competitor named Delphi,
opened a portal in September 1993 to allow its members access to the newsgroups and
bulletin boards of the Internet. In Internet lore, the deluge was called, especially by
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contemptuous veteran netizens, the Eternal September. The name referred to the fact that
every September a new wave of freshmen would enter universities and, from their campus
networks, get access to the Internet. Their postings tended to be annoying at first, but within
weeks most had acquired enough netiquette to assimilate into the Internet culture. The opened
floodgates of 1993, however, produced a never-ending flow of newbies, overwhelming the
social norms and clubbiness of the net. “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the
September that never ended,” an Internet hand named Dave Fischer posted in January 1994.38
A newsgroup sprang up named alt.aol-sucks, where old-timers posted their diatribes. The
AOL interlopers, read one, “couldn’t get a clue if they stood in a clue field in clue mating
season, dressed as a clue, and drenched with clue pheromones.”39 In fact, the Eternal
September’s democratization of the Internet was a good thing, but it took a while for veterans
to appreciate this.
This opening up of the Internet, which paved the way for an astonishing era of innovation,
did not happen by chance. It was the result of government policies, carefully crafted in a
thoughtful and bipartisan atmosphere, that assured America’s lead in building an information-
age economy. The most influential person in this process, which may come as a surprise to
those who know of his role only as a punch line to jokes, was Senator Al Gore Jr. of
Tennessee.
Gore’s father was also a senator. “I remember driving with my dad from Carthage to
Nashville listening to him say how we needed better than these two-lane roads,” the younger
Gore recalled. “They won’t handle our needs.”40 Gore Sr. helped craft the bipartisan
legislation for the interstate highway program, and his son took that as an inspiration for
helping to promote what he dubbed the “Information Superhighway.”
In 1986 Gore launched a congressional study that looked at a variety of topics, including
creating supercomputer centers, interconnecting the various research networks, increasing
their bandwidth, and opening them up to more users. It was chaired by the ARPANET
pioneer Len Kleinrock. Gore followed up with detailed hearings that led to the High
Performance Computing Act of 1991, known as the Gore Act, and the Scientific and
Advanced Technology Act of 1992. These allowed commercial networks, such as AOL, to
connect with the research network run by the National Science Foundation, and hence to the
Internet itself. After he was elected vice president in 1992, Gore pushed the National
Information Infrastructure Act of 1993, which made the Internet widely available to the
general public and moved it into the commercial sphere so that its growth could be funded by
private as well as government investment.
When I told people I was writing a book about the people who helped invent computers
and the Internet, the most predictable quip I got, especially from those who knew little about
Internet history, was “Oh, you mean Al Gore?” Then they would laugh. It’s a mark of our
political discourse that one of the significant nonpartisan achievements on behalf of
American innovation got turned into a punch line because of something that Gore never quite
said—that he “invented” the Internet. When he was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in March
1999 to list his qualifications to be a candidate for president, he cited, among other things,
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the
Internet.”41 It was inelegantly phrased, as answers on cable news shows often are, but he
never used the word invented.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the people who did in fact invent the Internet’s protocols,
spoke up on Gore’s behalf. “No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in
helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President,” they wrote.42
Even Republican Newt Gingrich defended him, observing, “It’s something Gore had worked
on a long time. . . . Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person
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who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”43
The takedown of Gore was the harbinger of a new era of rising partisanship accompanied
by a lack of faith in what government could do. That’s why it’s useful to reflect on what led
to the Eternal September of 1993. Over the course of more than three decades, the federal
government, working with private industry and research universities, had designed and built a
massive infrastructure project, like the interstate highway system but vastly more complex,
and then threw it open to ordinary citizens and commercial enterprises. It was funded
primarily by public dollars, but it paid off thousands of times over by seeding a new economy
and an era of economic growth.
Tim Berners-Lee (1955– ).
Marc Andreessen (1971– ).
Justin Hall (1974– ) and Howard Rheingold (1947– ) in 1995.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE WEB
There was a limit to how popular the Internet could be, at least among ordinary computer
users, even after the advent of modems and the rise of online services made it possible for
almost anyone to get connected. It was a murky jungle with no maps, filled with clusters of
weird foliage with names like alt.config and Wide Area Information Servers that could
intimidate all but the most intrepid pathfinder.
But just when the online services began opening up to the Internet in the early 1990s, a
new method of posting and finding content miraculously appeared, as if it had burst into life
from an underground atom smasher, which in fact was close to what happened. It made the
carefully packaged online services obsolete, and it fulfilled—indeed far surpassed—the
utopian dreams of Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart. More than most innovations of the digital
age it was invented primarily by one man, who gave it a name that managed to be, as he was
personally, both expansive and simple: the World Wide Web.
TIM BERNERS-LEE
As a kid growing up on the edge of London in the 1960s, Tim Berners-Lee came to a
fundamental insight about computers: they were very good at crunching step by step through
programs, but they were not very good at making random associations and clever links, the
way that an imaginative human could.
This is not something that most kids ponder, but both of Berners-Lee’s parents were
computer scientists. They worked as programmers on the Ferranti Mark I, the commercial
version of the Manchester University stored-program computer. One evening at home his
father, who had been asked by his boss to draft a speech on how to make computers more
intuitive, talked about some books on the human brain that he was reading. His son recalled,
“The idea stayed with me that computers could become much more powerful if they could be
programmed to link otherwise unconnected information.”1 They also talked about Alan
Turing’s concept of a universal machine. “It made me realize that the limitations on what you
could do with a computer were just the limitations of your imagination.”2
Berners-Lee was born in 1955, the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and he
considered it a lucky time to be interested in electronics. Kids of that era found it easy to get
hold of basic equipment and components that they could play with. “Things came along at the
right time,” he explained. “Anytime we understood one technology, then industry produced
something more powerful that we could afford with our pocket money.”3
In primary school, Berners-Lee and a friend hung around hobby shops, where they used
their allowance to buy electromagnets and make their own relays and switches. “You’d have
an electromagnet banged into a bit of wood,” he recalled. “When you turned it on, it would
attract a bit of tin and that would complete a circuit.” From that they developed a deep
understanding of what a bit was, how it could be stored, and the things that could be done
with a circuit. Just when they were outgrowing simple electromagnetic switches, transistors
became common enough that he and his friends could buy a bag of a hundred pretty cheaply.
“We learned how to test transistors and use them to replace the relays we had built.”4 In
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doing so, he could visualize clearly what each component was doing by comparing them to
the old electromagnetic switches they superseded. He used them to make audio sounds for his
train set and to create circuits that controlled when the train should slow down.
“We began to imagine quite complicated logical circuits, but those became impractical
because you would have to use too many transistors,” he said. But just as he ran into that
problem, microchips became available at the local electronics store. “You buy these little
bags of microchips with your pocket money and you’d realize you could make the core of a
computer.”5 Not only that, but you could understand the core of the computer because you
had progressed from simple switches to transistors to microchips and knew how each worked.
One summer just before he went off to Oxford, Berners-Lee had a job in a lumber yard.
When he was dumping a pile of sawdust into a Dumpster, he spied an old calculator, partly
mechanical and partly electronic, with rows of buttons. He salvaged it, wired it up with some
of his switches and transistors, and soon had it working as a rudimentary computer. At a
repair shop he bought a broken television set and used the monitor to serve as a display, after
figuring out how the circuit of vacuum tubes worked.6
During his Oxford years, microprocessors became available. So, just as Wozniak and Jobs
had done, he and his friends designed boards that they tried to sell. They were not as
successful as the Steves, partly because, as Berners-Lee later said, “we didn’t have the same
ripe community and cultural mix around us like there was at the Homebrew and in Silicon
Valley.”7 Innovation emerges in places with the right primordial soup, which was true of the
Bay Area but not of Oxfordshire in the 1970s.
His step-by-step hands-on education, starting with electromagnetic switches and
progressing to microprocessors, gave him a deep understanding of electronics. “Once you’ve
made something with wire and nails, when someone says a chip or circuit has a relay you feel
confident using it because you know you could make one,” he said. “Now kids get a
MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be
filled with good things, but they don’t know how it works. They don’t fully understand what I
knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only
by your imagination.”8
There was a second childhood memory that lingered: that of a Victorian-era almanac and
advice book in his family home with the magical and musty title Enquire Within Upon
Everything. The introduction proclaimed, “Whether You Wish to Model a Flower in Wax; to
Study the Rules of Etiquette; to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper; to Plan a Dinner for a
Large Party or a Small One; to Cure a Headache; to Make a Will; to Get Married; to Bury a
Relative; Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make, or to Enjoy, Provided Your Desire has
Relation to the Necessities of Domestic Life, I Hope You will not Fail to ‘Enquire Within.’ ”9
It was, in some ways, the Whole Earth Catalog of the nineteenth century, and it was filled
with random information and connections, all well indexed. “Enquirers are referred to the
index at the end,” the title page instructed. By 1894 it had gone through eighty-nine editions
and sold 1,188,000 copies. “The book served as a portal to a world of information, everything
from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money,” Berners-Lee observed. “Not
a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point.”10
Another concept that Berners-Lee had been chewing on since childhood was how the
human brain makes random associations—the smell of coffee conjures up the dress a friend
wore when you last had coffee with her—whereas a machine can make only the associations
that it has been programmed to make. He was also interested in how people work together.
“You got half the solution in your brain, and I got half in my brain,” he explained. “If we are
sitting around a table, I’ll start a sentence and you might help finish it, and that’s the way we
all brainstorm. Scribble stuff on whiteboard, and we edit each other’s stuff. How can we do
that when we are separated?”11
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All of these elements, from Enquire Within to the brain’s ability to make random
associations and to collaborate with others, were jangling around in Berners-Lee’s head when
he graduated from Oxford. Later he would realize a truth about innovation: New ideas occur
when a lot of random notions churn together until they coalesce. He described the process
this way: “Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the
mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they
fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it’s better.”12
For Berners-Lee, his own innovative concepts began to coalesce when he took a consulting
job at CERN, the mammoth supercollider and particle physics lab near Geneva. He needed a
way to catalogue the connections among the ten thousand or so researchers, their projects,
and their computer systems. Both the computers and the people spoke many different
languages and tended to make ad hoc links to one another. Berners-Lee needed to keep track
of them, so he wrote a program to help him do so. He noticed that when people explained to
him the various relationships at CERN, they tended to scribble diagrams with a lot of arrows.
So he devised a method to replicate these in his program. He would type in the name of a
person or project and then create links that would show which were related. Thus it was that
Berners-Lee created a computer program that he named, after the Victorian almanac of his
childhood, Enquire.
“I liked Enquire,” he wrote, “because it stored information without using structures like
matrices or trees.”13 Such structures are hierarchical and rigid, whereas the human mind
makes more random leaps. As he worked on Enquire, he developed a grander vision for what
it could become. “Suppose all the information stored on computers everywhere were linked.
There would be a single global information space. A web of information would form.”14
What he imagined, although he didn’t know it at the time, was Vannevar Bush’s memex
machine—which could store documents, cross-reference them, retrieve them—writ global.
But before he got very far in creating Enquire, his consultancy at CERN came to an end.
He left behind his computer and his eight-inch floppy disk containing all of the code, and it
was promptly lost and forgotten. For a few years he worked in England for a company that
made software for publishing documents. But he got bored and applied for a fellowship at
CERN. In September 1984 he arrived back there to work with the group that was responsible
for gathering the results of all of the experiments being done at the institute.
CERN was a cauldron of diverse peoples and computer systems using dozens of languages,
both verbal and digital. All had to share information. “In this connected diversity,” Berners-
Lee recalled, “CERN was a microcosm of the rest of the world.”15 In such a setting, he found
himself returning to his childhood ruminations about how people with different perspectives
work together to turn each other’s half-formed notions into new ideas. “I’ve always been
interested in how people work together. I was working with a lot of people at other institutes
and universities, and they had to collaborate. If they had been in the same room, they would
have written all over the blackboard. I was looking for a system that would allow people to
brainstorm and to keep track of the institutional memory of a project.”16
Such a system, he felt, would connect people from afar so that they could complete each
other’s sentences and add useful ingredients to each other’s half-formed notions. “I wanted it
to be something which would allow us to work together, design things together,” he said.
“The really interesting part of the design is when we have lots of people all over the planet
who have part of it in their heads. They have parts of the cure for AIDS, part of an
understanding of cancer.”17 The goal was to facilitate team creativity—the brainstorming that
occurs when people sit around fleshing out each other’s ideas—when the players are not in
the same place.
So Berners-Lee reconstructed his Enquire program and began thinking about ways to
expand it. “I wanted to access different kinds of information, such as a researcher’s technical
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papers, the manual for different software modules, minutes of meetings, hastily scribbled
notes, and so on.”18 Actually, he wanted to do much more than that. He had the placid
exterior of a congenital coder, but lurking underneath he harbored the whimsical curiosity of
a child who stayed up late reading Enquire Within Upon Everything. Rather than merely
devising a data management system, he yearned to create a collaborative playground. “I
wanted to build a creative space,” he later said, “something like a sandpit where everyone
could play together.”19
He hit upon a simple maneuver that would allow him to make the connections he wanted:
hypertext. Now familiar to any Web surfer, hypertext is a word or phrase that is coded so that
when clicked it sends the reader to another document or piece of content. Envisioned by Bush
in his description of a memex machine, it was named in 1963 by the tech visionary Ted
Nelson, who dreamed up a brilliantly ambitious project called Xanadu, never brought to
fruition, in which all pieces of information would be published with two-way hypertext links
to and from related information.
Hypertext was a way to allow the connections that were at the core of Berners-Lee’s
Enquire program to proliferate like rabbits; anyone could link to documents on other
computers, even those with different operating systems, without asking permission. “An
Enquire program capable of external hypertext links was the difference between
imprisonment and freedom,” he exulted. “New webs could be made to bind different
computers together.” There would be no central node, no command hub. If you knew the web
address of a document, you could link to it. That way the system of links could spread and
sprawl, “riding on top of the Internet,” as Berners-Lee put it.20 Once again, an innovation was
created by weaving together two previous innovations: in this case, hypertext and the
Internet.
Using a NeXT computer, the handsome hybrid of a workstation and personal computer that
Jobs created after being ousted from Apple, Berners-Lee adapted a protocol that he had been
working on, called a Remote Procedure Call, that allowed a program running on one
computer to call up a subroutine that was on another computer. Then he drew up a set of
principles for naming each document. Initially he called these Universal Document
Identifiers. The folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force in charge of approving standards
balked at what they said was his “arrogance” in calling his scheme universal. So he agreed to
change it to uniform. In fact he was pushed into changing all three words, turning it into
Uniform Resource Locators—those URLs, such as http://www.cern.ch, that we now use
every day.21 By the end of 1990 he had created a suite of tools that allowed his network to
come to life: a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to allow hypertext to be exchanged
online, a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for creating pages, a rudimentary browser to
serve as the application software that retrieved and displayed information, and server
software that could respond to requests from the network.
In March 1989 Berners-Lee had his design in place and officially submitted a funding
proposal to the top managers at CERN. “The hope would be to allow a pool of information to
develop which could grow and evolve,” he wrote. “A ‘web’ of notes with links between them
is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system.”22 Unfortunately, his proposal elicited as
much bafflement as enthusiasm. “Vague, but exciting,” his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote atop
the memo. “When I read Tim’s proposal,” he later admitted, “I could not figure out what it
was, but I thought it was great.”23 Once again, a brilliant inventor found himself in need of a
collaborator to turn a concept into a reality.
More than most digital-age innovations, the conception of the Web was driven primarily by
one person. But Berners-Lee did need a partner in bringing it to fruition. Fortunately, he was
able to find one in Robert Cailliau, a Belgian engineer at CERN, who had been toying with
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similar ideas and was willing to join forces. “In the marriage of hypertext and the Internet,”
said Berners-Lee, “Robert was best man.”
With his personable demeanor and bureaucratic skills, Cailliau was the perfect person to be
the evangelist for the project within CERN and the project manager who got things done. A
fastidious dresser who methodically scheduled his haircuts, he was “the kind of engineer who
can be driven mad by the incompatibility of power plugs in different countries,” according to
Berners-Lee.24 They formed a partnership often seen in innovative teams: the visionary
product designer paired with the diligent project manager. Cailliau, who loved planning and
organizational work, cleared the way, he said, for Berners-Lee to “bury his head in the bits
and develop his software.” One day Cailliau tried to go over a project plan with Berners-Lee
and realized, “He just did not understand the concept!”25 Because of Cailliau, he didn’t have
to.
Cailliau’s first contribution was to sharpen the funding proposal that Berners-Lee had
submitted to CERN administrators by making it less vague while keeping it exciting. He
began with its title, “Information Management.” Cailliau insisted that they figure out a
catchier name for the project, which shouldn’t be too hard. Berners-Lee had a few ideas. The
first was Mine of Information, but that abbreviated to MOI, French for me, which sounded a
bit egocentric. The second idea was The Information Mine, but that abbreviated to TIM,
which was even more so. Cailliau rejected the approach, often used at CERN, of plucking the
name of some Greek god or Egyptian pharaoh. Then Berners-Lee came up with something
that was direct and descriptive. “Let’s call it the World Wide Web,” he said. It was the
metaphor he had used in his original proposal. Cailliau balked. “We can’t call it that, because
the abbreviation WWW sounds longer than the full name!”26 The initials have three times the
syllables as the name itself. But Berners-Lee could be quietly stubborn. “It sounds good,” he
declared. So the title of the proposal was changed to “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a
HyperText Project.” Thus the Web was named.
Once the project was officially embraced, the CERN administrators wanted to patent it.
When Cailliau raised the issue, Berners-Lee objected. He wanted the Web to spread and
evolve as quickly as possible, and that meant it should be free and open. At one point he
looked at Cailliau and asked accusingly, “Robert, do you want to be rich?” As Cailliau
recalled, his initial reaction was “Well, it helps, no?”27 That was the incorrect response. “He
apparently didn’t care about that,” Cailliau realized. “Tim’s not in it for the money. He
accepts a much wider range of hotel-room facilities than a CEO would.”28
Instead Berners-Lee insisted that the Web protocols should be made available freely,
shared openly, and put forever in the public domain. After all, the whole point of the Web,
and the essence of its design, was to promote sharing and collaboration. CERN issued a
document declaring that it “relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both
source and binary form, and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and
redistribute it.”29 Eventually CERN joined forces with Richard Stallman and adopted his
GNU General Public License. The result was one of the grandest free and open-source
projects in history.
That approach reflected Berners-Lee’s self-effacing style. He was averse to any hint of
personal aggrandizement. Its wellsprings also came from someplace deeper within him: a
moral outlook based on peer sharing and respect, something he found in the Unitarian
Universalist Church that he adopted. As he said of his fellow Unitarians, “They meet in
churches instead of wired hotels, and discuss justice, peace, conflict, and morality rather than
protocols and data formats, but in other ways the peer respect is very similar to that of the
Internet Engineering Task Force. . . . The design of the Internet and the Web is a search for a
set of rules which will allow computers to work together in harmony, and our spiritual and
social quest is for a set of rules which allow people to work together in harmony.”30
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Despite the hoopla that accompanies many product announcements—think Bell Labs
unveiling the transistor or Steve Jobs the Macintosh—some 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 project aims to allow links to be
made to any information anywhere,” he began. “If you’re interested in using the code, mail
me.”31
With his low-key personality and even lower-key posting, Berners-Lee did not fathom
what a profound idea he had unleashed. Any information anywhere. “I spent a lot of time
trying to make sure people could put anything on the web,” he said more than two decades
later. “I had no idea that people would put literally everything on it.”32 Yes, everything.
Enquire Within Upon Everything.
MARC ANDREESSEN AND MOSAIC
For people to summon forth sites on the Web, they needed a piece of client software on their
own computers that became known as a browser. Berners-Lee wrote one that could both read
and edit documents; his hope was that the Web would become a place where users could
collaborate. But his browser worked only on NeXT computers, of which there were few, and
he had neither the time nor the resources to create other browser versions. So he enlisted a
young intern at CERN, an undergraduate named Nicola Pellow who was majoring in math at
Leicester Polytechnic, to write the first all-purpose browser for UNIX and Microsoft
operating systems. It was rudimentary, but it worked. “It was to be the vehicle that allowed
the Web to take its first tentative step on to the world stage, but Pellow was unfazed,”
Cailliau recalled. “She was given the task and she simply sat down to do it, little realizing the
enormity of what she was about to unleash.”33 Then she went back to Leicester Polytechnic.
Berners-Lee began urging others to improve on Pellow’s work: “We energetically
suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful
projects.”34 By the fall of 1991 there were a half-dozen experimental versions, and the Web
quickly spread to other research centers in Europe.
That December it made the leap across the Atlantic. Paul Kunz, a particle physicist at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, was visiting CERN, and Berners-Lee recruited him to the
world of the Web. “He twisted my arm and insisted that I come see him,” according to Kunz,
who worried that he was in for a boring demonstration of information management. “But then
he showed me something that opened my eyes.”35 It was a Web browser on Berners-Lee’s
NeXT calling up information from an IBM machine somewhere else. Kunz brought the
software back with him, and http://slacvm.slac.stanford.edu/ became the first Web server in
the United States.
The World Wide Web hit orbital velocity in 1993. The year began with fifty Web servers in
the world, and by October there were five hundred. One reason was that the primary
alternative to the Web for accessing information on the Internet was a sending and fetching
protocol developed at the University of Minnesota called Gopher,40 and word leaked out that
the developers were planning to charge a fee for use of the server software. A more important
impetus was the creation of the first easy-to-install Web browser with graphic capabilities,
named Mosaic. It was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which had been funded by the
Gore Act.
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The man, or overgrown kid, most responsible for Mosaic was a gentle but intense
undergraduate named Marc Andreessen, a corn-fed six-foot-four jolly giant born in Iowa in
1971 and raised in Wisconsin. Andreessen was a fan of the pioneers of the Internet, and their
writings inspired him: “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!’ Bush envisioned the Internet as fully as you
could, given that you didn’t have digital computers. He and Charles Babbage are in the same
league.” Another hero was Doug Engelbart. “His lab was node four on the Internet, which
was like having the fourth telephone in the world. He had the amazing foresight to understand
what the Internet would be before it got built.”36
When Andreessen saw the Web demonstrated in November 1992, he was blown away. So
he enlisted an NCSA staffer, Eric Bina, a first-class programmer, to partner with him in
building a more exciting browser. They loved Berners-Lee’s concepts, but they thought
CERN’s implementation software was drab and devoid of cool features. “If someone were to
build the right browser and server, that would be really interesting,” Andreessen told Bina.
“We can run with this and really make it work.”37
For two months they engaged in a programming binge that rivaled those of Bill Gates and
Paul Allen. For three or four days straight they would code around the clock—Andreessen
fueled by milk and cookies, Bina by Skittles and Mountain Dew—and then crash for a full
day to recover. They were a great team: Bina was a methodical programmer, Andreessen a
product-driven visionary.38
On January 23, 1993, with just a little more fanfare than Berners-Lee had indulged in when
launching the Web, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu announced Mosaic on the www-talk Internet
newsgroup. “By the power vested in me by nobody in particular,” Andreessen began,
“alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World
Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released.” Berners-Lee, who was initially pleased,
posted a response two days later: “Brilliant! Every new browser is sexier than the last.” He
added it to the growing list of browsers available for download from info.cern.ch.39
Mosaic was popular because it could be installed simply and enabled images to be
embedded in Web pages. But it became even more popular because Andreessen knew one of
the secrets of digital-age entrepreneurs: he fanatically heeded user feedback and spent time
on Internet newsgroups soaking up suggestions and complaints. Then he persistently released
updated versions. “It was amazing to launch a product and get immediate feedback,” he
enthused. “What I got out of that feedback loop was an instant sense of what was working
and what wasn’t.”40
Andreessen’s focus on continual improvement impressed Berners-Lee: “You’d send him a
bug report and then two hours later he’d mail you a fix.”41 Years later, as a venture capitalist,
Andreessen made a rule of favoring startups whose founders focused on running code and
customer service rather than charts and presentations. “The former are the ones who become
the trillion-dollar companies,” he said.42
There was something about Andreessen’s browser, however, that disappointed and then
began to annoy Berners-Lee. It was beautiful, even dazzling, but Andreessen’s emphasis was
on enabling rich media for publishing eye-catching pages, and Berners-Lee felt that the focus
should instead be on providing tools that would facilitate serious collaboration. So in March
1993, after a meeting in Chicago, he drove “across the seemingly interminable cornfields” of
central Illinois to visit Andreessen and Bina at NCSA.
It was not a pleasant session. “All of my earlier meetings with browser developers had
been meetings of minds,” Berners-Lee recalled. “But this one had a strange tension to it.” He
felt that the Mosaic developers, who had their own public relations staff and were garnering a
lot of publicity, were “attempting to portray themselves as the center of Web development
and to basically rename the Web as Mosaic.”43 They seemed to be trying to own the Web, he
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thought, and perhaps profit from it.41
Andreessen found Berners-Lee’s recollection amusing. “When Tim came, it was more of a
state visit than a working session. The Web had already become a brush fire, and he was
uncomfortable that he was no longer controlling it.” Berners-Lee’s opposition to embedding
images struck him as quaint and purist. “He only wanted text,” Andreessen remembered. “He
specifically didn’t want magazines. He had a very pure vision. He basically wanted it used
for scientific papers. His view was that images are the first step on the road to hell. And the
road to hell is multimedia content and magazines, garishness and games and consumer stuff.”
Because he was customer-focused, Andreessen thought that this was academic hogwash.
“I’m a Midwestern tinkerer type. If people want images, they get images. Bring it on.”44
Berners-Lee’s more fundamental criticism was that by focusing on fancy display features,
such as multimedia and ornamental fonts, Andreessen was ignoring a capability that should
have been in the browser: editing tools that would allow users to interact with and contribute
to the content on a Web page. The emphasis on display rather than editing tools nudged the
Web into becoming a publishing platform for people who had servers rather than a place for
collaboration and shared creativity. “I was disappointed that Marc didn’t put editing tools in
Mosaic,” Berners-Lee said. “If there had been more of an attitude of using the Web as a
collaborative medium rather than a publishing medium, then I think it would be much more
powerful today.”45
Early versions of Mosaic did have a “collaborate” button, which allowed users to
download a document, work on it, and repost it. But the browser was not a full-fledged editor,
and Andreessen felt it was impractical to turn it into one. “I was amazed at this near-universal
disdain for creating an editor,” complained Berners-Lee. “Without a hypertext editor, people
would not have the tools to really use the Web as an intimate collaborative medium.
Browsers would let them find and share information, but they could not work together
intuitively.”46 To some extent, he was right. Despite the astonishing success of the Web, the
world would have been a more interesting place if the Web had been bred as a more
collaborative medium.
Berners-Lee also paid a visit to Ted Nelson, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito in the
shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Twenty-five years earlier, Nelson had pioneered the
concept of a hypertext network with his proposed Xanadu project. It was a pleasant meeting,
but Nelson was annoyed that the Web lacked key elements of Xanadu.47 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 more money than content producers. Journalists at both big media
companies and little blogging sites had fewer options for getting paid. As Jaron Lanier, the
author of Who Owns the Future?, has argued, “The whole business of using advertising to
fund communication on the Internet is inherently self-destructive. If you have universal
backlinks, you have a basis for micropayments from somebody’s information that’s useful to
somebody else.”49 But a system of two-way links and micropayments would have required
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some central coordination and made it hard for the Web to spread wildly, so Berners-Lee
resisted the idea.
As the Web was taking off in 1993–94, I was the editor of new media for Time Inc., in charge
of the magazine company’s Internet strategy. Initially we had made deals with the dial-up
online services, such as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. We supplied our content, marketed
their services to our subscribers, and moderated chat rooms and bulletin boards that built up
communities of members. For that we were able to command between one and two million
dollars in annual royalties.
When the open Internet became an alternative to these proprietary online services, it
seemed to offer an opportunity to take control of our own destiny and subscribers. At the
April 1994 National Magazine Awards lunch, I had a conversation with Louis Rossetto, the
editor and founder of Wired, about which of the emerging Internet protocols and finding tools
—Gopher, Archie, FTP, the Web—might be best to use. He suggested that the best option
was the Web because of the neat graphic capabilities being built into browsers such as
Mosaic. In October 1994 both HotWired and a collection of Time Inc. websites launched.
At Time Inc. we experimented with using our established brands—Time, People, Life,
Fortune, Sports Illustrated—as well as creating a new portal named Pathfinder. We also
conjured up new brands, ranging from the Virtual Garden to the Netly News. Initially we
planned to charge a small fee or subscription, but Madison Avenue ad buyers were so
enthralled by the new medium that they flocked to our building offering to buy the banner ads
we had developed for our sites. Thus we and other journalism enterprises decided that it was
best to make our content free and garner as many eyeballs as we could for eager advertisers.
It turned out not to be a sustainable business model.50 The number of websites, and thus the
supply of slots for ads, went up exponentially every few months, but the total amount of
advertising dollars remained relatively flat. That meant advertising rates eventually tumbled.
It was also not an ethically healthy model; it encouraged journalists to cater primarily to the
desires of their advertisers rather than the needs of their readers. By then, however,
consumers had been conditioned to believe that content should be free. It took two decades to
start trying to put that genie back in the bottle.
In the late 1990s Berners-Lee tried to develop a micropayments system for the Web
through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which he headed. The idea was to devise a
way to embed in a Web page the information needed to handle a small payment, which would
allow different “electronic wallet” services to be created by banks or entrepreneurs. It was
never implemented, partly because of the changing complexity of banking regulations.
“When we started, the first thing we tried to do was enable small payments to people who
posted content,” Andreessen explained. “But we didn’t have the resources at the University
of Illinois to implement that. The credit card systems and banking system made it impossible.
We tried hard, but it was so painful to deal with those guys. It was cosmically painful.”51
In 2013 Berners-Lee began reviving some of the activities of the W3C’s Micropayments
Markup Working Group. “We are looking at micropayment protocols again,” he said. “It
would make the Web a very different place. It might be really enabling. Certainly the ability
to pay for a good article or song could support more people who write things or make
music.”52 Andreessen said he hoped that Bitcoin,42 a digital currency and peer-to-peer
payment system created in 2009, might turn out to be a model for better payment systems. “If
I had a time machine and could go back to 1993, one thing I’d do for sure would be to build
in Bitcoin or some similar form of cryptocurrency.”53
We at Time Inc. and other media companies made one other mistake, I think: we abandoned
our focus on creating community after we settled into the Web in the mid-1990s. On our
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AOL and CompuServe sites, much of our effort had been dedicated to creating communities
with our users. One of the early denizens of The WELL, Tom Mandel, was hired to moderate
Time’s bulletin boards and emcee our chat rooms. Posting articles from the magazine was
secondary to creating a sense of social connection and community among our users. When
we migrated to the Web in 1994, we initially tried to replicate that approach. We created
bulletin boards and chat groups on Pathfinder and pushed our engineers to replicate AOL’s
simple discussion threads.
But as time went on, we began to pay more attention to publishing our own stories online
rather than creating user communities or enabling user-generated content. We and other
media companies repurposed our print publications into Web pages to be passively consumed
by our readers, and we relegated the discussions to a string of reader comments at the bottom
of the page. These were often unmoderated rants and blather that few people, including us,
ever read. Unlike the Usenet newsgroups or The WELL or AOL, the focus was not on
discussions and communities and content created by users. Instead, the Web became a
publishing platform featuring old wine—the type of content you could find in print
publications—being poured into new bottles. It was like the early days of television, when the
offerings were nothing more than radio shows with pictures. Thus we failed to thrive.
Fortunately, the street finds its own uses for things, and new forms of media soon arose to
take advantage of the new technology. Led by the growth of blogs and wikis, both of which
emerged in the mid-1990s, a revitalized Web 2.0 arose that allowed users to collaborate,
interact, form communities, and generate their own content.
JUSTIN HALL AND HOW WEB LOGS BECAME BLOGS
As a freshman at Swarthmore College in December 1993, Justin Hall picked up a stray copy
of the New York Times in the student lounge and read a story by John Markoff about the
Mosaic browser. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” it
began. “A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even
novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that
is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate.”54 A willowy computer geek with an
impish smile and blond hair flowing over his shoulders, Hall seemed to be a cross between
Huck Finn and a Tolkien elf. Having spent his childhood in Chicago dialing into computer
bulletin boards, he immediately downloaded the browser and began surfing. “The whole
concept blew me away,” he remembered.55
Hall quickly realized something: “Nearly all of the online publishing efforts were amateur,
people who didn’t have anything to say.” So he decided to create a website, using an Apple
PowerBook and MacHTTP software he downloaded for free, that would amuse himself and
others who shared his cheeky outlook and teenage obsessions. “I could put my writings and
words up electronically, make them look pretty, and engage the web with links.”56 He got his
site up in mid-January 1994, and a few days later, to his delight, strangers from around the
Web began to stumble across it.
His first home page had a tone of mischievous intimacy. It included a photo of Hall
mugging behind Colonel Oliver North, another of Cary Grant taking acid, and a sincere
shout-out to “Al Gore, the information tollroad’s first official pedestrian.” The tone was
conversational. “Howdy,” the home page declared. “This is twenty-first century computing.
Is it worth our patience? I’m publishing this, and I guess you’re readin’ this, in part to figure
that out, huh?”
At the time, there were no Web directories or search engines, other than very staid ones
like the W3 Catalog from the University of Geneva and a “What’s New” page from NCSA at
the University of Illinois. So Hall invented one for his site, which he elegantly titled “Here’s
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a Menu of Cool Shit.” Shortly thereafter, in an homage to Dostoevsky, he renamed it
“Justin’s Links from the Underground.” It included links to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the World Bank, and websites created by beer connoisseurs, fans of the rave
music scene, and a guy at the University of Pennsylvania named Ranjit Bhatnagar who had
created a similar Web page. “Believe me, the author is a very cool guy,” Hall noted. He also
included a list of bootleg concert recordings, featuring Jane’s Addiction and Porno for Pyros.
“Leave me a note if you are interested in these, or if you have any of your own,” he wrote.
Not surprisingly, given the fixations of Justin and his users, there were also many sections
devoted to erotica, including pages called “Survey of Sexuality on the Sprawl” and “Pointers
to Pages o’ Purveyed Prurience.” He helpfully reminded his users, “Don’t forget to wipe the
semen off your keyboards!”
Justin’s Links from the Underground became the spiky pathfinder for a proliferation of
directories, such as Yahoo and then Lycos and Excite, that began to blossom later that year.
But in addition to providing a portal to the wonderland of the Web, Hall created something
weirdly beguiling that turned out to be even more significant: a running Web log of his
personal activities, random thoughts, deep musings, and intimate encounters. It became the
first wholly new form of content to be created for, and take advantage of, personal computer
networks. His Web log included poignant poems about his father’s suicide, musings about his
diverse sexual desires, pictures of his penis, endearingly edgy stories about his stepfather, and
other effusions that darted back and forth across the line of Too Much Information. In short,
he became the founding scamp of blogging.
“I was on the literary magazine in high school,” he said, “and I had published some very
personal things.” That became the recipe for his and many future blogs: stay casual, get
personal, be provocative. He posted a picture of himself standing nude onstage that he had
been prevented from using in his high school yearbook, along with the tale of the girl editors
“giggling while checking out the black-and-white photo of my tweeter.” He later told the
story of an evening of painful intercourse with a girl, after which his foreskin had swelled; it
was illustrated with many close-ups of his genital situation. In so doing, he helped innovate a
sensibility for a new age. “I always tried to provoke, and nudity was part of the provocation,”
he explained, “so I have a long tradition of doing things that would make my mom blush.”57
Hall’s willingness to push the boundaries of Too Much Information became a hallmark of
blogging. It was cheekiness raised to a moral attitude. “TMI is like the deep lab data from all
of our human experiments,” he later explained. “If you reveal TMI, it can make people feel a
little less alone.” That was no trivial feat. Indeed, making people feel a little less alone was
part of the essence of the Internet.
The case of his swollen foreskin was an example; within a few hours people from around
the world posted comments offering their own stories, cures, and assurance that the condition
was temporary. A more poignant case came from his postings about his father, an alcoholic
who had committed suicide when Justin was eight. “My father was a wry, humanistic,
sensitive man,” he wrote. “Also an intolerant spiteful bastard.” Hall recounted how his father
would sing Joan Baez folk songs to him, but also down bottles of vodka and wave guns and
berate waitresses. After Hall learned that he was the last person to talk to his father before he
killed himself, he posted a poem: “What did we say / I wonder / and / what did it matter? /
Could I have changed your mind?” These entries gave rise to a virtual support group. Readers
sent in their own stories, and Hall posted them. Sharing led to connections. Emily Ann
Merkler wrestled with losing her father to epilepsy. Russell Edward Nelson included scans of
his late father’s driver’s license and other documents. Werner Brandt put up a remembrance
page of his father that featured piano songs he had liked. Justin posted them along with his
own musings. It became a social network. “The Internet encourages participation,” he noted.
“By exposing myself on the Web, I hope folks will be inspired to put a little soul in their
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systems.”
A few months after he started his Web log, Hall managed to wrangle, through a tenacious
volley of phone calls and emails, an internship for the summer of 1994 at HotWired.com in
San Francisco. Wired magazine, under its charismatic editor Louis Rossetto, was in the
process of creating one of the first magazine websites. Its executive editor was Howard
Rheingold, an insightful online sage who had just published The Virtual Community, which
described the social mores and satisfactions that came from “homesteading on the electronic
frontier.” Hall became Rheingold’s friend and protégé, and together they engaged in a
struggle with Rossetto over the soul of the new site.58
Rheingold felt that HotWired.com, in contrast to the printed magazine, should be a loosely
controlled community, a “global jam session” filled with user-generated material. “I was part
of Howard’s faction that really felt that community was important and wanted to build user
forums and tools that made it easy for people to comment to each other,” Hall recalled. One
idea they pushed was devising ways that members of the community could develop their own
online identities and reputations. “The value is users talking to users,” Hall argued to
Rossetto. “People are the content.”
Rossetto instead felt that HotWired should be a well-crafted and highly designed
publishing platform, featuring rich imagery, that would extend the brand of the magazine and
create a striking Wired-like identity online. “We have these great artists and we should
feature them,” he argued. “We are going to make something beautiful and professional and
polished, which is what the Web lacks.” Building a lot of tools for user-generated content and
comments would be “too much of a sideshow.”59
The debate was waged in long meetings and impassioned email chains. But Rossetto
prevailed, and his outlook, which was shared by many other print-world editors, ended up
shaping the evolution of the Web. It became primarily a platform for publishing content
rather than for creating virtual communities. “The era of public-access Internet has come to
an end,” Rossetto declared.60
When Hall returned from his extended summer gig at HotWired, he decided to become an
evangelist for the other side of the argument, believing that the public-access aspects of the
Internet should be celebrated and supported. With less sociological sophistication than
Rheingold but more youthful exuberance, he began to preach the redemptive nature of virtual
communities and Web logs. “I’ve been putting my life online, telling stories about the people
I know and the things that happen to me when I’m not geeking out,” he explained online after
a year. “Talking about myself keeps me going.”
His manifestos described the appeal of a new public-access medium. “When we tell stories
on the Internet, we claim computers for communication and community over crass
commercialism,” he declared in one of his early postings. As someone who had spent hours
on the Internet’s early bulletin boards when he was growing up, he wanted to recapture the
spirit of the Usenet newsgroups and The WELL.
And so Hall became the Johnny Appleseed of Web logging. On his site, he posted an offer
to teach people HTML publishing if they would host him for a night or two, and in the
summer of 1996 he traveled by bus across the United States, dropping in on those who took
him up on the offer. “He took a medium that had been conceived as a repository for
scholarship and scaled it down to personal size,” Scott Rosenberg wrote in his history of
blogging, Say Everything.61 Yes, but he also helped to do something more: return the Internet
and the Web to what they were intended to be, tools for sharing rather than platforms for
commercial publishing. Web logging made the Internet more humanizing, which was no
small transformation. “The best use of our technology enhances our humanity,” Hall insisted.
“It lets us shape our narrative and share our story and connect us.”62
The phenomenon quickly spread. In 1997 John Barger, who produced a fun website called
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Robot Wisdom, coined the term weblog, and two years later a web designer named Peter
Merholz jokingly broke the word back into two by saying he was going to use the phrase we
blog. The word blog entered the common parlance.43 By 2014 there would be 847 million
blogs in the world.
It was a social phenomenon that was not fully appreciated by the traditional wordcrafting
elite. It was easy, and not altogether incorrect, to denigrate much of the self-centered
blatherings that appeared on blogs and to smirk at those who spent their evenings posting on
little-read pages. But as Arianna Huffington pointed out early on when she created her
blogging outlet, the Huffington Post, people decided to partake in these acts of social
discourse because they found them fulfilling.63 They got the chance to express their ideas,
tailor them for public consumption, and get feedback. This was a new opportunity for people
who had previously spent evenings passively consuming what was fed to them through their
television screens. “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all
for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Clive
Thompson noted in his book, Smarter Than You Think. “This is something that’s particularly
hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics,
journalists, lawyers or marketers.”64
In his own sweet way, Justin Hall understood the glory of this. It was what would make the
digital age different from the era of television. “By publishing ourselves on the web, we
reject the role of passive media marketing recipient,” he wrote. “If we all have a place to post
our pages—the Howard Rheingold channel, the Rising City High School channel—there’s no
way the web will end up as banal and mediocre as television. There will be as many places to
find fresh and engaging content as there are people who yearn to be heard. Good telling of
human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a
waste vastland.”65
EV WILLIAMS AND BLOGGER
By 1999 blogs were proliferating. They were no longer mainly the playpen of offbeat
exhibitionists like Justin Hall who posted personal journals about their lives and fancies.
They had become a platform for freelance pundits, citizen journalists, advocates, activists,
and analysts. But there was one problem: to publish and maintain an independent blog
required some coding skills and access to a server. Creating user simplicity is one of the keys
to successful innovation. For blogging to become a whole new medium that would transform
publishing and democratize public discourse, someone had to make it easy, as easy as “Type
in this box and then press this button.” Enter Ev Williams.
Born in 1972 on a corn and soybean farm on the edge of the hamlet of Clarks, Nebraska
(population: 374), Ev Williams grew up as a lanky, shy, and often lonely boy who never got
into hunting and football, which made him a bit of an oddity. Instead he played with Legos,
built wooden skateboards, took apart bikes, and spent a lot of time on of his family’s green
tractor, after he had finished his irrigation chores, staring into the distance and daydreaming.
“Books and magazines were my outlet to the larger world,” he recalled. “My family never
really traveled, so I never went anywhere.”66
He didn’t have a computer growing up, but when he went to the University of Nebraska in
1991 he discovered the world of online services and bulletin boards. He began reading all he
could about the Internet, even subscribing to a magazine about electronic bulletin boards.
After dropping out of college, he decided to start a company to make CD-ROMs explaining
the online world for local businessmen. Shot in his basement with a borrowed camera, the
videos looked like a no-budget community access show, and they didn’t sell. So he wandered
off to California and took a job as a junior writer at the tech publisher O’Reilly Media, where
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he revealed his prickly independence by sending an email to the entire staff refusing to write
material for one of the company’s products because it “was a piece of shit.”
With the instincts of a serial entrepreneur, he was always itching to start his own
companies, and at the beginning of 1999 he launched one called Pyra Labs with a savvy
woman named Meg Hourihan, whom he’d briefly dated. Unlike others jumping into the
dotcom frenzy of that period, they focused on using the Internet for its original purpose:
online collaboration. Pyra Labs offered a suite of Web-based applications that allowed teams
to share project plans, lists of things to do, and jointly created documents. Williams and
Hourihan found that they needed a simple way to share their own random notions and
interesting items, so they began posting on a little internal website, which they dubbed
“Stuff.”
By this time Williams, who had always loved magazines and publications, had gotten into
reading blogs. Rather than personal journals such as Hall’s, he became a fan of the
technology commentators who were pioneering serious Web journalism, such as Dave Winer,
who had created one of the first weblogs, Scripting News, and designed an XML syndication
format for it.67
Williams had his own home page, called EvHead, on which he posted a section of updated
notes and comments. Like others who added such logs to their home pages, he had to type
each item and update using HTML code. Wanting to streamline the process, he wrote a
simple software script that automatically converted his posts into the proper format. It was a
little hack that had a transforming effect. “The idea that I could have a thought and I could
type in a form and it would be on my website in a matter of seconds completely transformed
the experience. It was one of those things that, by automating the process, completely
morphed what it was I was doing.”68 He soon began to wonder whether this little side dish
could become a product of its own.
One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused. 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. Williams acquiesced, but in
March he quietly registered the domain name blogger.com. He couldn’t resist. “I have always
been a product guy, and am just always thinking about products and thought this would be a
cool little idea.” In July, when Hourihan was on vacation, he launched Blogger as a separate
product, without telling her. He was following another basic lesson for innovation: Don’t stay
too focused.
When Hourihan returned and discovered what had happened, she started shouting and
threatened to quit. Pyra had only one other employee besides themselves, and there was no
capacity to take on distractions. “She was pissed,” Williams recalled. “But we talked her into
thinking that it made sense.” It did. Blogger attracted enough fans in the ensuing months that
Williams, with his laconic and awkward charm, became one of the stars of the March 2000
South by Southwest conference. By the end of the year, Blogger had 100,000 accounts.
What it did not have, however, was revenue. Williams had been offering Blogger for free
in the vague hope that it would entice folks into buying the Pyra app. But by the summer of
2000 he had pretty much abandoned Pyra. With the Internet bubble bursting, it was not an
easy time to raise money. The relationship between Williams and Hourihan, always a bit
fraught, degenerated to the point that shouting matches at the office were a regular
occurrence.
In January 2001 the cash crisis came to a head. Desperately in need of new servers,
Williams made an appeal to Blogger’s users for donations. Close to $17,000 came in, which
was enough to buy new hardware but not to pay salaries.69 Hourihan demanded that Williams
step aside as CEO, and when he refused, she quit. “On Monday I resigned from the company
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I co-founded,” she wrote on her blog. “I’m still crying and crying and crying.”70 The other
employees, by then six in total, walked out as well.
Williams posted a long entry titled “And Then There Was One” on his own blog. “We are
out of money, and I have lost my team. . . . The last two years have been a long, hard,
exciting, educational, once-in-a-lifetime, painful, and, ultimately, very rewarding and
worthwhile journey for me.” Vowing to keep the service alive, even if he had to do it alone,
he ended with a postscript: “If anyone wants to share some office space for a while, lemme
know. I could use the cost savings (and the company).”71
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
But ingrained in Williams’s hardscrabble heritage was the patience of a corn farmer and
the stubbornness of an entrepreneur. He had an abnormally high level of immunity to
frustration. So he persevered, testing that hazy borderline between persistence and
cluelessness, remaining placid as problems bombarded him. He would run the company by
himself, from his apartment. He would tend to the servers and the coding himself. “I basically
went underground and did nothing but try to keep Blogger going.”73 Revenues were close to
zero, but he could bring his costs in line with that. As he wrote in his Web posting, “I’m
actually in surprisingly good shape. I’m optimistic. (I’m always optimistic.) And I have
many, many ideas. (I always have many ideas.)”74
A few people expressed sympathy and offered help, most notably Dan Bricklin, a beloved
and collaborative tech leader who had cocreated VisiCalc, the first computer spreadsheet
program. “I didn’t like the idea of Blogger being lost in the dotcom crash,” Bricklin said.75
After reading Williams’s forlorn post, he sent an email asking if there was anything he could
do to help. They agreed to meet when Bricklin, who lived in Boston, came to an O’Reilly
conference in San Francisco. Over sushi at a nearby restaurant, Bricklin told the tale of how,
years earlier, when his own company was foundering, he had run into Mitch Kapor of Lotus.
Though competitors, they shared a collaborative hacker ethic, so Kapor offered a deal that
helped Bricklin stay personally solvent. Bricklin went on to found a company, Trellix, that
made its own website publishing system. Paying forward Kapor’s band-of-hackers
helpfulness to a semicompetitor, Bricklin worked out a deal for Trellix to license Blogger’s
software for $40,000, thus keeping it alive. Bricklin was, above all, a nice guy.
Throughout 2001 Williams worked around the clock from his apartment or in borrowed
space to keep Blogger running. “Everybody I knew just thought I was crazy,” he
remembered. The low point came at Christmas when he went to visit his mother, who had
moved to Iowa. His site got hacked on Christmas Day. “I was in Iowa trying to assess the
damage over a dial-up connection and a tiny laptop. And I didn’t have a system administrator
or anyone else working for me at the time. I ended up spending most of the day in a Kinko’s
doing damage control.”76
Things began to turn around in 2002. He launched Blogger Pro, which users paid for, and
with the help of a new partner got a licensing deal in Brazil. The world of blogging was
growing exponentially, which made Blogger a hot commodity. In October, with some
prodding from Williams’s old publishing boss, Tim O’Reilly, Google came calling. It was
still mainly a search engine and had no history of buying other companies, but it made an
offer to buy Blogger. Williams accepted.
Williams’s simple little product helped to democratize publishing. “Push-button publishing
for the people” was his mantra. “I love the world of publishing, and I’m fiercely independent
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minded, both of which came from growing up on a remote farm,” he said. “When I found a
way to let people publish on the Internet, I knew I could help give power and voice to
millions.”
At least initially, Blogger was primarily a tool for publishing rather than for interactive
discussion. “Instead of promoting dialogue, it let people just get on a soap box,” Williams
admitted. “The Internet has a community side and a publishing side to it. There are people
who obsess about the community part more than I do. I’m more driven by the publishing of
knowledge side of it, because I grew up learning about the world from what other people
published, and I’m not a huge participant in the community side.”77
However, most digital tools eventually get commandeered for social purposes, that being
the nature of humans. The blogosphere evolved into being a community rather than merely a
collection of soap boxes. “It ended up turning into a community, even though we all had our
own blogs, because we would comment on and link to each other,” Williams said years later.
“There was definitely a community there, just as real as any mailing list or bulletin board, and
eventually I came to appreciate that.”78
Williams went on to be a cofounder of Twitter, a social networking and micropublishing
service, and then Medium, a publishing site designed to promote collaboration and sharing. In
the process, he realized that he did indeed value that community aspect of the Internet as
much as the publishing side of it. “As a farm boy from Nebraska, connecting and finding a
community of like-minded people prior to the Internet was very difficult, and the core desire
of connecting with a community is always a part of you. I came to realize, well after I
founded Blogger, that it was a tool that served this need. Connecting into a community is one
of the basic desires that drive the digital world.”79
WARD CUNNINGHAM, JIMMY WALES, AND WIKIS
When he launched the Web in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee intended it to be used as a
collaboration tool, which is why he was dismayed that the Mosaic browser did not give users
the ability to edit the Web pages they were viewing. It turned Web surfers into passive
consumers of published content. That lapse was partly mitigated by the rise of blogging,
which encouraged user-generated content. In 1995 another medium was invented that went
further toward facilitating collaboration on the Web. It was called a wiki, and it worked by
allowing users to modify Web pages—not by having an editing tool in their browser but by
clicking and typing directly onto Web pages that ran wiki software.
The application was developed by Ward Cunningham, another of those congenial Midwest
natives (Indiana, in his case) who grew up making ham radios and getting turned on by the
global communities they fostered. After graduating from Purdue, he got a job at an electronic
equipment company, Tektronix, where he was assigned to keep track of projects, a task
similar to what Berners-Lee faced when he went to CERN.
To do this he modified a superb software product developed by one of Apple’s most
enchanting innovators, Bill Atkinson. It was called HyperCard, and it allowed users to make
their own hyperlinked cards and documents on their computers. Apple had little idea what to
do with the software, so at Atkinson’s insistence Apple gave it away free with its computers.
It was easy to use, and even kids—especially kids—found ways to make HyperCard stacks of
linked pictures and games.
Cunningham was blown away by HyperCard when he first saw it, but he found it
cumbersome. So he created a supersimple way of creating new cards and links: a blank box
on each card in which you could type a title or word or phrase. If you wanted to make a link
to Jane Doe or Harry’s Video Project or anything else, you simply typed those words in the
box. “It was fun to do,” he said.80
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Then he created an Internet version of his HyperText program, writing it in just a few
hundred lines of Perl code. The result was a new content management application that
allowed users to edit and contribute to a Web page. Cunningham used the application to build
a service, called the Portland Pattern Repository, that allowed software developers to
exchange programming ideas and improve on the patterns that others had posted. “The plan is
to have interested parties write web pages about the People, Projects and Patterns that have
changed the way they program,” he wrote in an announcement posted in May 1995. “The
writing style is casual, like email. . . . Think of it as a moderated list where anyone can be
moderator and everything is archived. It’s not quite a chat, still, conversation is possible.”81
Now he needed a name. What he had created was a quick Web tool, but QuickWeb
sounded lame, as if conjured up by a committee at Microsoft. Fortunately, there was another
word for quick that popped from the recesses of his memory. When he was on his
honeymoon in Hawaii thirteen years earlier, he remembered, “the airport counter agent
directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.” When he asked what it meant, he
was told that wiki was the Hawaiian word for quick, and wiki wiki meant superquick. So he
named his Web pages and the software that ran them WikiWikiWeb, wiki for short.82
Dan Bricklin (1951– ) and Ev Williams (1972– ) in 2001.
Jimmy Wales (1966– ).
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Sergey Brin (1973– ) and Larry Page (1973– ).
In his original version, the syntax Cunningham used for creating links in a text was to
smash words together so that there would be two or more capital letters—as in CapitalLetters
—in a term. It became known as CamelCase, and its resonance would later be seen in scores
of Internet brands such as AltaVista, MySpace, and YouTube.
WardsWiki (as it became known) allowed anyone to edit and contribute, without even
needing a password. Previous versions of each page would be stored, in case someone
botched one up, and there would be a “Recent Changes” page so that Cunningham and others
could keep track of the edits. But there would be no supervisor or gatekeeper preapproving
the changes. It would work, he said with cheery midwestern optimism, because “people are
generally good.” It was just what Berners-Lee had envisioned, a Web that was read-write
rather than read-only. “Wikis were one of the things that allowed collaboration,” Berners-Lee
said. “Blogs were another.”83.
Like Berners-Lee, Cunningham made his basic software available for anyone to modify
and use. Consequently, there were soon scores of wiki sites as well as open-source
improvements to his software. But the wiki concept was not widely known beyond software
engineers until January 2001, when it was adopted by a struggling Internet entrepreneur who
was trying, without much success, to build a free, online encyclopedia.
Jimmy Wales was born in 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama, a town of rednecks and rocket
scientists. Six years earlier, in the wake of Sputnik, President Eisenhower had personally gone
there to open the Marshall Space Flight Center. “Growing up in Huntsville during the height
of the space program kind of gave you an optimistic view of the future,” Wales observed.84
“An early memory was of the windows in our house rattling when they were testing the
rockets. The space program was basically our hometown sports team, so it was exciting and
you felt it was a town of technology and science.”85
Wales, whose father was a grocery store manager, went to a one-room private school that
was started by his mother and grandmother, who taught music. When he was three, his
mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman; as he learned to
read, it became an object of veneration. It put at his fingertips a cornucopia of knowledge
along with maps and illustrations and even a few cellophane layers of transparencies you
could lift to explore such things as the muscles, arteries, and digestive system of a dissected
frog. But Wales soon discovered that the World Book had shortcomings: no matter how much
was in it, there were many more things that weren’t. And this became more so with time.
After a few years, there were all sorts of topics—moon landings and rock festivals and protest
marches, Kennedys and kings—that were not included. World Book sent out stickers for
owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was fastidious
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about doing so. “I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one
my mother bought.”86
After graduating from Auburn and a halfhearted stab at graduate school, Wales took a job
as a research director for a Chicago financial trading firm. But it did not fully engage him.
His scholarly attitude was combined with a love for the Internet that had been honed by
playing Multi-User Dungeons fantasies, which were essentially crowdsourced games. He
founded and moderated an Internet mailing list discussion on Ayn Rand, the Russian-born
American writer who espoused an objectivist and libertarian philosophy. He was very open
about who could join the discussion forum, frowned on rants and the personal attack known
as flaming, and managed comportment with a gentle hand. “I have chosen a ‘middle-ground’
method of moderation, a sort of behind-the-scenes prodding,” he wrote in a posting.87
Before the rise of search engines, among the hottest Internet services were Web directories,
which featured human-assembled lists and categories of cool sites, and Web rings, which
created through a common navigation bar a circle of related sites that were linked to one
another. Jumping on these bandwagons, Wales and two friends in 1996 started a venture that
they dubbed BOMIS, for Bitter Old Men in Suits, and began casting around for ideas. They
launched a panoply of startups that were typical of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s: a
used-car ring and directory with pictures, a food-ordering service, a business directory for
Chicago, and a sports ring. After Wales relocated to San Diego, he launched a directory and
ring that served as “kind of a guy-oriented search engine,” featuring pictures of scantily clad
women.88
The rings showed Wales the value of having users help generate the content, a concept that
was reinforced as he watched how the crowds of sports bettors on his site provided a more
accurate morning line than any single expert could. He also was impressed by Eric
Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explained why an open and crowd-
generated bazaar was a better model for a website than the carefully controlled top-down
construction of a cathedral.89
Wales next tried an idea that reflected his childhood love of the World Book: an online
encyclopedia. He dubbed it Nupedia, and it had two attributes: it would be written by
volunteers, and it would be free. It was an idea that had been proposed in 1999 by Richard
Stallman, the pioneering advocate of free software.90 Wales hoped eventually to make money
by selling ads. To help develop it, he hired a doctoral student in philosophy, Larry Sanger,
whom he first met in online discussion groups. “He was specifically interested in finding a
philosopher to lead the project,” Sanger recalled.91
Sanger and Wales developed a rigorous, seven-step process for creating and approving
articles, which included assigning topics to proven experts, whose credentials had been
vetted, and then putting the drafts through outside expert reviews, public reviews,
professional copy editing, and public copy editing. “We wish editors to be true experts in
their fields and (with few exceptions) possess Ph.Ds.,” the Nupedia policy guidelines
stipulated.92 “Larry’s view was that if we didn’t make it more academic than a traditional
encyclopedia, people wouldn’t believe in it and respect it,” Wales explained. “He was wrong,
but his view made sense given what we knew at the time.”93 The first article, published in
March 2000, was on atonality by a scholar at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz,
Germany.
It was a painfully slow process and, worse yet, not a lot of fun. The whole point of writing
for free online, as Justin Hall had shown, was that it produced a jolt of joy. After a year,
Nupedia had only about a dozen articles published, making it useless as an encyclopedia, and
150 that were still in draft stage, which indicated how unpleasant the process had become. It
had been rigorously engineered not to scale. This hit home to Wales when he decided that he
would personally write an article on Robert Merton, an economist who had won the Nobel
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Prize for creating a mathematical model for markets containing derivatives. Wales had
published a paper on option pricing theory, so he was very familiar with Merton’s work. “I
started to try to write the article and it was very intimidating, because I knew they were going
to send my draft out to the most prestigious finance professors they could find,” Wales said.
“Suddenly I felt like I was back in grad school, and it was very stressful. I realized that the
way we had set things up was not going to work.”94
That was when Wales and Sanger discovered Ward Cunningham’s wiki software. Like
many digital-age innovations, the application of wiki software to Nupedia in order to create
Wikipedia—combining two ideas to create an innovation—was a collaborative process
involving thoughts that were already in the air. But in this case a very non-wiki-like dispute
erupted over who deserved the most credit.
The way Sanger remembered the story, he was having lunch in early January 2001 at a
roadside taco stand near San Diego with a friend named Ben Kovitz, a computer engineer.
Kovitz had been using Cunningham’s wiki and described it at length. It then dawned on
Sanger, he claimed, that a wiki could be used to help solve the problems he was having with
Nupedia. “Instantly I was considering whether wiki would work as a more open and simple
editorial system for a free, collaborative encyclopedia,” Sanger later recounted. “The more I
thought about it, without even having seen a wiki, the more it seemed obviously right.” In his
version of the story, he then convinced Wales to try the wiki approach.95
Kovitz, for his part, contended that he was the one who came up with the idea of using
wiki software for a crowdsourced encyclopedia and that he had trouble convincing Sanger. “I
suggested that instead of just using the wiki with Nupedia’s approved staff, he open it up to
the general public and let each edit appear on the site immediately, with no review process,”
Kovitz recounted. “My exact words were to allow ‘any fool in the world with Internet access’
to freely modify any page on the site.” Sanger raised some objections: “Couldn’t total idiots
put up blatantly false or biased descriptions of things?” Kovitz replied, “Yes, and other idiots
could delete those changes or edit them into something better.”96
As for Wales’s version of the story, he later claimed that he had heard about wikis a month
before Sanger’s lunch with Kovitz. Wikis had, after all, been around for more than four years
and were a topic of discussion among programmers, including one who worked at BOMIS,
Jeremy Rosenfeld, a big kid with a bigger grin. “Jeremy showed me Ward’s wiki in
December 2000 and said it might solve our problem,” Wales recalled, adding that when
Sanger showed him the same thing, he responded, “Oh, yes, wiki, Jeremy showed me this last
month.”97 Sanger challenged that recollection, and a nasty crossfire ensued on Wikipedia’s
discussion boards. Wales finally tried to de-escalate the sniping with a post telling Sanger,
“Gee, settle down,” but Sanger continued his battle against Wales in a variety of forums.98
The dispute presented a classic case of a historian’s challenge when writing about
collaborative creativity: each player has a different recollection of who made which
contribution, with a natural tendency to inflate his own. We’ve all seen this propensity many
times in our friends, and perhaps even once or twice in ourselves. But it is ironic that such a
dispute attended the birth of one of history’s most collaborative creations, a site that was
founded on the faith that people are willing to contribute without requiring credit.44.
More important than determining who deserved credit is appreciating the dynamics that
occur when people share ideas. Ben Kovitz, for one, understood this. He was the player who
had the most insightful view—call it the “bumblebee at the right time” theory—on the
collaborative way that Wikipedia was created. “Some folks, aiming to criticize or belittle
Jimmy Wales, have taken to calling me one of the founders of Wikipedia, or even ‘the true
founder,’ ” he said. “I suggested the idea, but I was not one of the founders. I was only the
bumblebee. I had buzzed around the wiki flower for a while, and then pollinated the free-
encyclopedia flower. I have talked with many others who had the same idea, just not in times
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or places where it could take root.”99
That is the way that good ideas often blossom: a bumblebee brings half an idea from one
realm, and pollinates another fertile realm filled with half-formed innovations. This is why
Web tools are valuable, as are lunches at taco stands.
Cunningham was supportive, indeed delighted when Wales called him up in January 2001 to
say he planned to use the wiki software to juice up his encyclopedia project. Cunningham had
not sought to patent or copyright either the software or the wiki name, and he was one of
those innovators who was happy to see his products become tools that anyone could use or
adapt.
At first Wales and Sanger conceived of Wikipedia merely as an adjunct to Nupedia, sort of
like a feeder product or farm team. The wiki articles, Sanger assured Nupedia’s expert
editors, would be relegated to a separate section of the website and not be listed with the
regular Nupedia pages. “If a wiki article got to a high level it could be put into the regular
Nupedia editorial process,” he wrote in a post.100Nevertheless, the Nupedia purists pushed
back, insisting that Wikipedia be kept completely segregated, so as not to contaminate the
wisdom of the experts. The Nupedia Advisory Board tersely declared on its website, “Please
note: the editorial processes and policies of Wikipedia and Nupedia are totally separate;
Nupedia editors and peer reviewers do not necessarily endorse the Wikipedia project, and
Wikipedia contributors do not necessarily endorse the Nupedia project.”101 Though they
didn’t know it, the pedants of the Nupedia priesthood were doing Wikipedia a huge favor by
cutting the cord.
Unfettered, Wikipedia took off. It became to Web content what GNU/Linux was to
software: a peer-to-peer commons collaboratively created and maintained by volunteers who
worked for the civic satisfactions they found. It was a delightful, counterintuitive concept,
perfectly suited to the philosophy, attitude, and technology of the Internet. Anyone could edit
a page, and the results would show up instantly. You didn’t have to be an expert. You didn’t
have to fax in a copy of your diploma. You didn’t have to be authorized by the Powers That
Be. You didn’t even have to be registered or use your real name. Sure, that meant vandals
could mess up pages. So could idiots or ideologues. But the software kept track of every
version. If a bad edit appeared, the community could simply get rid of it by clicking on a
“revert” link. “Imagine a wall where it was easier to remove graffiti than add it” is the way
the media scholar Clay Shirky explained the process. “The amount of graffiti on such a wall
would depend on the commitment of its defenders.”102 In the case of Wikipedia, its defenders
were fiercely committed. Wars have been fought with less intensity than the reversion battles
on Wikipedia. And somewhat amazingly, the forces of reason regularly triumphed.
One month after Wikipedia’s launch, it had a thousand articles, approximately seventy
times the number that Nupedia had after a full year. By September 2001, after eight months
in existence, it had ten thousand articles. That month, when the September 11 attacks
occurred, Wikipedia showed its nimbleness and usefulness; contributors scrambled to create
new pieces on such topics as the World Trade Center and its architect. A year after that, the
article total reached forty thousand, more than were in the World Book that Wales’s mother
had bought. By March 2003 the number of articles in the English-language edition had
reached 100,000, with close to five hundred active editors working almost every day. At that
point, Wales decided to shut Nupedia down.
By then Sanger had been gone for a year. Wales had let him go. They had increasingly
clashed on fundamental issues, such as Sanger’s desire to give more deference to experts and
scholars. In Wales’s view, “people who expect deference because they have a PhD and don’t
want to deal with ordinary people tend to be annoying.”103 Sanger felt, to the contrary, that it
was the nonacademic masses who tended to be annoying. “As a community, Wikipedia lacks
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the habit or tradition of respect for expertise,” he wrote in a New Year’s Eve 2004 manifesto
that was one of many attacks he leveled after he left. “A policy that I attempted to institute in
Wikipedia’s first year, but for which I did not muster adequate support, was the policy of
respecting and deferring politely to experts.” Sanger’s elitism was rejected not only by Wales
but by the Wikipedia community. “Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but
little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia,” Sanger lamented.104
Sanger turned out to be wrong. The uncredentialed crowd did not run off the experts.
Instead the crowd itself became the expert, and the experts became part of the crowd. Early
on in Wikipedia’s development, I was researching a book about Albert Einstein and I noticed
that the Wikipedia entry on him claimed that he had traveled to Albania in 1935 so that King
Zog could help him escape the Nazis by getting him a visa to the United States. This was
completely untrue, even though the passage included citations to obscure Albanian websites
where this was proudly proclaimed, usually based on some thirdhand series of recollections
about what someone’s uncle once said a friend had told him. Using both my real name and a
Wikipedia handle, I deleted the assertion from the article, only to watch it reappear. On the
discussion page, I provided sources for where Einstein actually was during the time in
question (Princeton) and what passport he was using (Swiss). But tenacious Albanian
partisans kept reinserting the claim. The Einstein-in-Albania tug-of-war lasted weeks. I
became worried that the obstinacy of a few passionate advocates could undermine
Wikipedia’s reliance on the wisdom of crowds. But after a while, the edit wars ended, and the
article no longer had Einstein going to Albania. At first I didn’t credit that success to the
wisdom of crowds, since the push for a fix had come from me and not from the crowd. Then I
realized that I, like thousands of others, was in fact a part of the crowd, occasionally adding a
tiny bit to its wisdom.
A key principle of Wikipedia was that articles should have a neutral point of view. This
succeeded in producing articles that were generally straightforward, even on controversial
topics such as global warming and abortion. It also made it easier for people of different
viewpoints to collaborate. “Because of the neutrality policy, we have partisans working
together on the same articles,” Sanger explained. “It’s quite remarkable.”105 The community
was usually able to use the lodestar of the neutral point of view to create a consensus article
offering competing views in a neutral way. It became a model, rarely emulated, of how
digital tools can be used to find common ground in a contentious society.
Not only were Wikipedia’s articles created collaboratively by the community; so were its
operating practices. Wales fostered a loose system of collective management, in which he
played guide and gentle prodder but not boss. There were wiki pages where users could
jointly formulate and debate the rules. Through this mechanism, guidelines were evolved to
deal with such matters as reversion practices, mediation of disputes, the blocking of
individual users, and the elevation of a select few to administrator status. All of these rules
grew organically from the community rather than being dictated downward by a central
authority. Like the Internet itself, power was distributed. “I can’t imagine who could have
written such detailed guidelines other than a bunch of people working together,” Wales
reflected. “It’s common in Wikipedia that we’ll come to a solution that’s really well thought
out because so many minds have had a crack at improving it.”106
As it grew organically, with both its content and its governance sprouting from its
grassroots, Wikipedia was able to spread like kudzu. At the beginning of 2014, there were
editions in 287 languages, ranging from Afrikaans to Žemaitška. The total number of articles
was 30 million, with 4.4 million in the English-language edition. In contrast, the
Encyclopedia Britannica, which quit publishing a print edition in 2010, had eighty thousand
articles in its electronic edition, less than 2 percent of the number in Wikipedia. “The
cumulative effort of Wikipedia’s millions of contributors means you are a click away from
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figuring out what a myocardial infarction is, or the cause of the Agacher Strip War, or who
Spangles Muldoon was,” Clay Shirky has written. “This is an unplanned miracle, like ‘the
market’ deciding how much bread goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than
the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free.”107 The
result has been the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history.
So why do people contribute? Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler dubbed Wikipedia, along
with open-source software and other free collaborative projects, examples of “commons-
based peer production.” He explained, “Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals
successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational
drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.”108 These
motivations include the psychological reward of interacting with others and the personal
gratification of doing a useful task. We all have our little joys, such as collecting stamps or
being a stickler for good grammar, knowing Jeff Torborg’s college batting average or the
order of battle at Trafalgar. These all find a home on Wikipedia.
There is something fundamental, almost primordial at work. Some Wikipedians refer to it
as “wiki-crack.” It’s the rush of dopamine that seems to hit the brain’s pleasure center when
you make a smart edit and it appears instantly in a Wikipedia article. Until recently, being
published was a pleasure afforded only to a select few. Most of us in that category can
remember the thrill of seeing our words appear in public for the first time. Wikipedia, like
blogs, made that treat available to anyone. You didn’t have to be credentialed or anointed by
the media elite.
For example, many of Wikipedia’s articles on the British aristocracy were largely written
by a user known as Lord Emsworth. They were so insightful about the intricacies of the
peerage system that some were featured as the “Article of the Day,” and Lord Emsworth rose
to become a Wikipedia administrator. It turned out that Lord Emsworth, a name taken from P.
G. Wodehouse’s novels, was actually a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in South Brunswick, New
Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody knows you’re a commoner.109
Connected to that is the even deeper satisfaction that comes from helping to create the
information that we use rather than just passively receiving it. “Involvement of people in the
information they read,” wrote the Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, “is an important end
itself.”110 A Wikipedia that we create in common is more meaningful than would be the same
Wikipedia handed to us on a platter. Peer production allows people to be engaged.
Jimmy Wales often repeated a simple, inspiring mission for Wikipedia: “Imagine a world
in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. But it
badly understated what Wikipedia did. It was about more than people being “given” free
access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history,
to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wales came to realize that.
“Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their
own,” he said. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far
more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111
Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush
in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which predicted, “Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through
them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” It also harkened back to Ada
Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on
their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was
instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the
processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry. When Wales and his
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new wife had a daughter in 2011, they named her Ada, after Lady Lovelace.112
LARRY PAGE, SERGEY BRIN, AND SEARCH
When Justin Hall created his quirky home page in January 1994, there were only seven
hundred websites in the world. By the end of that year there were ten thousand, and by the
end of the following year there were 100,000. The combination of personal computers and
networks had led to something amazing: anyone could get content from anywhere and
distribute their own content everywhere. But for this exploding universe to be useful, it was
necessary to find an easy way, a simple human-computer-network interface, that would
enable people to find what they needed.
The first attempts to do this were hand-compiled directories. Some were quirky and
frivolous, like Hall’s Links from the Underground and Paul Phillips’s Useless Pages. Others
were sober and serious, like Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Virtual Library, NCSA’s
“What’s New” page, and Tim O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator. Somewhere in between,
and taking the concept to a new level, was a site created in early 1994 by two Stanford
graduate students that was called, in one of its many early incarnations, Jerry and David’s
Guide to the Web.
As they were finishing their doctoral dissertations, Jerry Yang and David Filo would
procrastinate by playing fantasy league basketball. “We did everything we could to avoid
writing our theses,” Yang recalled.113 Yang spent time devising ways to ferret out player stats
from servers that used FTP and Gopher, two protocols for distributing documents on the
Internet that were popular before the rise of the Web.
When the Mosaic browser was released, Yang turned his attention to the Web, and he and
Filo began compiling by hand an ever-expanding directory of sites. It was organized by
categories—such as business, education, entertainment, government—each of which had
dozens of subcategories. By the end of 1994, they had renamed their guide to the Web
“Yahoo!”
There was one obvious problem: with the number of websites increasing tenfold each year,
there was no way to keep a directory updated by hand. Fortunately, there was a tool that was
already being used to ferret out information that resided on FTP and Gopher sites. It was
called a crawler, because it crawled from server to server on the Internet compiling an index.
The two most famous were named, like the comic book couple, Archie (for FTP archives)
and Veronica (for Gopher). By 1994 a variety of enterprising engineers were creating
crawlers that would serve as search tools for the Web. These included the WWW Wanderer
built by Matthew Gray at MIT, WebCrawler by Brian Pinkerton at the University of
Washington, AltaVista by Louis Monier at the Digital Equipment Corporation, Lycos by
Michael Mauldin at Carnegie Mellon University, OpenText by a team from Canada’s
University of Waterloo, and Excite by six friends from Stanford. All of them used link-
hopping robots, or bots, that could dart around the Web like a binge drinker on a pub crawl,
scarfing up URLs and information about each site. This would then be tagged, indexed, and
placed in a database that could be accessed by a query server.
Filo and Yang did not build their own web crawler; instead they decided to license one to
add to their home page. Yahoo! continued to emphasize the importance of its directory,
which was compiled by humans. When a user typed in a phrase, the Yahoo! computers would
see if it related to an entry in the directory, and if so that handcrafted list of sites would pop
up. If not, the query would be handed off to the Web-crawling search engine.
The Yahoo! team believed, mistakenly, that most users would navigate the Web by
exploring rather than seeking something specific. “The shift from exploration and discovery
to the intent-based search of today was inconceivable,” recalled Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo!’s
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first editor in chief, who oversaw a newsroom of more than sixty young editors and directory
compilers.114 This reliance on the human factor meant that Yahoo! would be much better than
its rivals over the years (and even to the present) in choosing news stories, although not in
providing search tools. But there was no way that Srinivasan and her team could keep up with
the number of Web pages being created. Despite what she and her colleagues at Yahoo!
believed, automated search engines would become the primary method for finding things on
the Web, with another pair of Stanford graduate students leading the way.
Larry Page was born and bred in the world of computing.115 His father was a professor of
computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Michigan, and his mother
taught programming there. In 1979, when Larry was six, his father brought home an Exidy
Sorcerer, a hobbyist home computer.45. “I remember being really excited that we had a
computer, because it was a big deal, and it was probably expensive, kind of like buying a
car,” he said.116 Larry soon mastered it and was using it for his schoolwork. “I think I was the
first kid in my elementary school to turn in a word-processed document.”117
One of his childhood heroes was Nikola Tesla, the imaginative pioneer of electricity and
other inventions who was outmaneuvered in business by Thomas Edison and died in
obscurity. When he was twelve, Page read a biography of Tesla and found the story troubling.
“He was one of the greatest inventors, but it’s a sad, sad story,” he said. “He couldn’t
commercialize anything, he could barely fund his own research. You’d want to be more like
Edison. If you invent something, that doesn’t necessarily help anybody. You’ve got to
actually get it into the world; you’ve got to produce, make money doing it so you can fund
it.”118
Larry’s parents used to take him and his brother, Carl, on long road trips, sometimes to
computer conferences. “I think I ended up being in almost every state by the time I left for
college,” he observed. One such trip was to the International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence in Vancouver, which was filled with wondrous robots. Because he was under
sixteen, Larry was told he couldn’t come in, but his father insisted. “He just basically yelled
at them. It’s one of the few times I’d seen him argue.”119
Like Steve Jobs and Alan Kay, Larry’s other love besides computers was music. He played
the saxophone and studied composition. During summers, he went to the famous music camp
at Interlochen in northern Michigan. It had a method for crowdsourcing the rank of each kid:
at the beginning of camp, kids were assigned chairs in the orchestra, and anyone could
challenge the person a seat above them; the two competitors were given a selection of music,
and all of the other kids would face the other direction and then vote on who sounded better.
“After a while, things would kind of calm down, and everyone would kind of know where
they were,” he said.120
Page’s parents not only taught at Michigan but had met as students there, so they were only
half joking when they told him that he would go there as well. He did. He made a point of
majoring in business as well as computer science, partly because of the cautionary tale of
Tesla, who could invent but not commercialize. In addition, he had a role model in his
brother, Carl, nine years older, who after college became a cofounder of an early social
network company that was later sold to Yahoo! for $413 million.
The college course that made the greatest impression on him, Page said, was one on
human-computer interaction taught by Judith Olson. The goal was to understand how to
design interfaces that were easy and intuitive. Page did his research paper on the display of
the Eudora mail client, estimating and then testing how long it would take to perform various
tasks. He discovered, for example, that command keys actually slowed people down by 0.9
second compared to using a mouse. “I feel like I developed an intuition for how people will
interact with a screen, and I realized those things were pretty important,” he said. “But
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they’re not well understood, even to this day.”121
One summer during his college years, Page went to a camp run by a leadership training
institute called LeaderShape. It encouraged students to have a “healthy disregard for the
impossible.” The institute inculcated in him a desire, which he would indulge at Google, to
launch projects that others considered to be on the borderline between audacious and insane.
In particular, both at Michigan and later, he pushed futuristic ideas for personal transportation
systems and driverless cars.122
When it came time to go to graduate school, Page was rejected by MIT but accepted by
Stanford. That was fortuitous; for someone interested in the intersection of technology and
business, Stanford was the place to be. Ever since the Stanford grad Cyril Elwell had founded
Federal Telegraph in 1909, tech entrepreneurship was not merely tolerated but expected
there, an attitude that was reinforced when the engineering dean Fred Terman built an
industrial park on university land in the early 1950s. Even among the faculty, the focus was
on startup business plans as much as on scholarly publications. “That’s the kind of professor I
wanted, one who has one foot in industry and wants to do crazy stuff that’s world-breaking,”
Page said. “A lot of Stanford computer science professors are that way.”123
At the time, most other elite universities emphasized scholarly research and avoided
commercial endeavors. Stanford led the way in regarding the university not just as an
academy but as an incubator. Among the companies spawned by Stanford were Hewlett-
Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. Page, who would eventually add the biggest
name of all to that list, believed that this outlook actually improved the research. “I think the
productivity of pure research was a lot higher, because it had a real-world grounding,” he
maintained. “It’s not just theoretical. You want what you’re working on to apply to a real
problem.”124
As he was preparing to enroll in Stanford’s graduate school in the fall of 1995, Page
participated in an orientation program that included a day in San Francisco. His guide was a
gregarious second-year grad student named Sergey Brin. Page was naturally quiet, but Brin
kept peppering him with opinions, and soon they were arguing about topics ranging from
computers to urban zoning. They hit it off perfectly. “I remember thinking he was pretty
obnoxious,” Page admitted. “That’s still the case. And maybe vice versa.”125 Yes, the feeling
was mutual. “We both found each other obnoxious,” Brin conceded. “But we say it a little bit
jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something
there. We had a kind of bantering thing going.”126
Sergey Brin’s parents were also academics, both mathematicians, but his childhood was
very different from Page’s. Brin was born in Moscow, where his father taught math at
Moscow State University and his mother was a research engineer at the Soviet Oil and Gas
Institute. Because they were Jewish, their careers were curtailed. “We were quite poor,”
Sergey told the journalist Ken Auletta. “My parents, both of them, went through periods of
hardship.” When his father applied to emigrate, he and his wife lost their jobs. Their exit
visas came through in May 1979, when Sergey was five. With the help of the Hebrew
Immigrant Aid Society, they settled in a working-class neighborhood near the University of
Maryland, where his father got a job as a math professor and his mother became a researcher
at the nearby NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Sergey went to a Montessori school, where independent thinking was nurtured. “It’s not
like somebody is telling you what to do,” he said. “You have to plot your own path.”127 It was
something he shared with Page. When asked later whether having parents who were
professors was a key to their success, they both cited going to Montessori schools as a more
important factor. “I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and
being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit
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differently,” Page contended.128
Another thing Brin shared with Page was that his parents gave him a computer when he
was very young, a Commodore 64 for his ninth birthday. “The ability to program your own
computer was much more accessible than it is today,” he recalled. “The computer came with
a built-in BASIC interpreter,46. and you could right away start writing your own programs.”
In middle school, Brin and a friend wrote programs that tried to simulate artificial
intelligence by carrying on a text conversation with the user. “I don’t think that kids starting
out with computers today get as welcome of an entry to programming as I did.”129
His rebellious attitude toward authority almost got him in trouble when his father took him
back to Moscow for a visit when he was turning seventeen. Seeing a police car, he started
throwing pebbles at it. The two officers got out of the car to confront Sergey, but his parents
were able to defuse the situation. “My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in
Moscow. I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”130
Among the books that inspired Brin were the memoirs of the physicist Richard Feynman,
who touted the power that comes from joining art to science the way that Leonardo da Vinci
did. “I remember he had an excerpt where he was explaining how he really wanted to be a
Leonardo, an artist and a scientist,” said Brin. “I found that pretty inspiring. I think that leads
to having a fulfilling life.”131
He was able to graduate from high school in three years and do the same at the University
of Maryland, where he got an undergraduate degree in math and computer science. For a
while, he and his fellow computer geeks liked to hang around on the Internet’s bulletin
boards and chat rooms, until he got bored with “ten-year-old boys trying to talk about sex.”
He then got involved in the text-based online games known as Multi-User Dungeons, writing
one of his own that involved a mailman who delivered explosive packages. “I spent enough
time MUDding to think it was cool,” Brin recalled.132 In the spring of 1993, his final year at
Maryland, he downloaded the Mosaic browser, which Andreessen had just released, and
became mesmerized by the Web.
Brin went to Stanford on a National Science Foundation scholarship, where he decided to
focus on the study of data mining. (In a double whammy, to itself if not to them, MIT
rejected him as well as Page.) There were eight comprehensive tests he needed to pass for his
doctorate, and he aced seven of them soon after he arrived. “The one I thought I was best at, I
didn’t pass,” he recalled. “I went to the prof and debated the answers. I wound up talking him
into it. So I passed all eight.”133 That left him free to dabble in whatever courses he wanted
and to indulge his quirky athletic interests in acrobatics, trapeze, sailing, gymnastics, and
swimming. He could walk on his hands and, so he claimed, once considered running away
and joining the circus. He was also an avid rollerblader, and was often seen zipping through
the halls.
A few weeks after Page arrived at Stanford, he and Brin moved with the rest of the Computer
Science Department into the new Gates Computer Science Building.47. Annoyed by the
uninspired numbering system for offices that the architect had provided, Brin devised a new
system, which was adopted, that conveyed better the location of each room and the distance
between them. “It was very intuitive, if I may say so,” he said.134 Page was assigned to a room
with three other graduate students, and Brin made that his base as well. There were hanging
plants with a computer-controlled watering system, a piano connected to a computer, an
assortment of electronic toys, and sleeping pads for naps and all-nighters.
The inseparable duo became linked, in CamelCase fashion, as LarryAndSergey, and when
engaged in argument or banter they were like two swords sharpening each other. Tamara
Munzner, the only woman in the group, had a phrase for it: “goofy smart,” she called them,
especially when they took to debating absurd concepts, such as whether it was possible to
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construct something the size of a building using only lima beans. “They were fun guys to
share an office with,” she said. “We all kept crazy hours. I remember once at three in the
morning on a Saturday night, the office was full.”135 The duo was notable not only for their
brilliance but for their boldness. “They didn’t have this false respect for authority,” according
to Professor Rajeev Motwani, one of their advisors. “They were challenging me all the time.
They had no compunction in saying to me, ‘You’re full of crap!’ ”136
Like many great partners in innovation, LarryAndSergey had complementary personalities.
Page was not a social animal; he could make eye contact with a screen more easily than with
a stranger. A chronic vocal cord problem, stemming from a viral infection, meant that he
spoke in a whispery and raspy voice, and he had a disconcerting (although in many ways
admirable) habit of simply not talking at times, which made his utterances, when they did
occur, all the more memorable. He could be impressively detached but was sometimes
intensely engaging. His smile was quick and real, his face expressive, and he listened with a
focus that could be both flattering and unnerving. Intellectually rigorous, he could find
logical flaws in the most mundane comments and effortlessly steer a shallow conversation
into a deep discussion.
Brin, for his part, could be charmingly brash. He would barge into offices without
knocking, blurt out ideas and requests, and engage on any subject. Page was more reflective
and reserved. Whereas Brin was satisfied knowing that something worked, Page would
ruminate about why it worked. The intense and talkative Brin dominated a room, but Page’s
quiet comments at the end of a discussion made people lean forward and listen. “I was
probably a little bit more shy than Sergey, although he’s shy in some ways,” Page observed.
“We had a great partnership, because I maybe thought more broadly and had different skills.
I’m trained as a computer engineer. I’m more knowledgeable about the hardware. He has
more of a mathematical background.”137
What particularly amazed Page was how smart Brin was. “I mean, he was just unusually
smart, even for somebody at the Computer Science Department.” In addition, Brin’s outgoing
personality helped him bring people together. When Page arrived at Stanford, he was given a
desk in an open room known as the bullpen with the other new graduate students. “Sergey
was pretty social,” Page said. “He would meet all the students and come hang out in the
bullpen with us.” Brin even had a knack for befriending the professors. “Sergey had this way
of walking into professors’ offices and hanging out with them, which was kind of unusual for
a grad student. I think they tolerated it because he was so smart and knowledgeable. He could
contribute on all sorts of random things.”138
Page joined the Human-Computer Interaction Group, which explored ways to enhance the
symbiosis between humans and machines. It was the field that had been pioneered by
Licklider and Engelbart, and it had been the subject of his favorite course at Michigan. He
became an adherent of the concept of user-centered design, which insisted that software and
computer interfaces must be intuitive and that the user was always right. He had gone to
Stanford knowing that he wanted as his advisor Terry Winograd, a joyful, Einstein-haired
professor. Winograd had studied artificial intelligence but, after reflecting on the essence of
human cognition, changed his focus, as Engelbart had, to how machines could augment and
amplify (rather than replicate and replace) human thinking. “I shifted my view away from
what would be thought of as artificial intelligence to the broader question, ‘How do you want
to interact with a computer?’ ” Winograd explained.139
The field of human-computer interactions and interface design, despite its noble heritage
from Licklider, was still considered a rather soft discipline, looked down upon by hardnosed
computer scientists as something usually taught by mere psychology professors, which
Licklider and Judith Olson had once been. “For people studying Turing machines or
whatever, dealing with human responses was considered very touchy-feely, almost like
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you’re stuck in the humanities,” according to Page. Winograd helped make the field more
reputable. “Terry had a hard computer science background from his time working on artificial
intelligence, but he was also interested in human-computer interaction, a field that nobody
much was working on and I think didn’t get enough respect.” One of Page’s favorite courses
was Film Craft in User Interface Design. “It showed how the language and techniques of film
can actually be applied to computer interface designs,” he said.140
Brin’s academic focus was on data mining. With Professor Motwani, he started a group
called Mining Data at Stanford, or MIDAS. Among the papers they produced (along with
another graduate student, Craig Silverstein, who would become the first hire when they
founded Google) were two on market basket analysis, a technique that assesses to what extent
a consumer who buys items A and B is more or less likely also to buy items C and D.141 From
that Brin became interested in ways to analyze patterns from the data trove on the Web.
With Winograd’s help, Page began casting around for a dissertation topic. He considered
close to a dozen ideas, including one on how to design self-driving cars, as Google would
later do. Eventually he homed in on studying how to assess the relative importance of
different sites on the Web. His method came from growing up in an academic environment.
One criterion that determines the value of a scholarly paper is how many other researchers
cite it in their notes and bibliography. By the same theory, one way to determine the value of
a Web page was to look at how many other Web pages linked to it.
There was a problem. The way that Tim Berners-Lee had designed the Web, much to the
consternation of hypertext purists such as Ted Nelson, anyone could create a link to another
page without getting permission, registering the link in a database, or having the link work in
both directions. That permitted the Web to expand willy-nilly. But it also meant that there
was no simple way of knowing the number of links pointing to a Web page or where those
links might be coming from. You could look at a Web page and see all the links going out,
but you couldn’t see the number or the quality of the links pointing into it. “The Web was a
poorer version of other collaboration systems I had seen because its hypertext had a flaw: it
didn’t have bidirectional links,” said Page.142
So Page set about trying to figure out a way to gather a huge database of the links so that
he could follow them in reverse and see which sites were linking to each page. One
motivation was to foster collaboration. His scheme would allow folks to annotate another
page. If Harry wrote a comment and linked it to Sally’s website, then people looking at her
website could go see his comment. “By reversing the links, making it possible to trace them
backwards, it would allow people to comment on or annotate a site simply by linking to it,”
Page explained.143
Page’s method for reversing links was based on an audacious idea that struck him in the
middle of the night when he woke up from a dream. “I was thinking: What if we could
download the whole Web, and just keep the links,” he recalled. “I grabbed a pen and started
writing. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it
would work.”144 His nocturnal burst of activity served as a lesson. “You have to be a little
silly about the goals you are going to set,” he later told a group of Israeli students. “There is a
phrase I learned in college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.’ That is a
really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.”145
Mapping the web was not a simple task. Even back then, in January 1996, there were
100,000 websites with a total of 10 million documents and close to a billion links between
them, and it was growing exponentially each year. Early that summer, Page created a Web
crawler that was designed to start on his home page and follow all of the links it encountered.
As it darted like a spider through the Web, it would store the text of each hyperlink, the titles
of the pages, and a record of where each link came from. He called the project BackRub.
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Page told his advisor Winograd that, according to his rough estimate, his Web crawler
would be able to accomplish the task in a few weeks. “Terry nodded knowingly, fully aware
it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me,” Page recalled. “The optimism of
youth is often underrated!”146 The project was soon taking up almost half of Stanford’s entire
Internet bandwidth, and it caused at least one campuswide outage. But university officials
were indulgent. “I am almost out of disk space,” Page emailed Winograd on July 15, 1996,
after he had collected 24 million URLs and more than 100 million links. “I have only about
15% of the pages but it seems very promising.”147
Both the audacity and the complexity of Page’s project appealed to the mathematical mind
of Sergey Brin, who had been searching for a dissertation topic. He was thrilled to join forces
with his friend: “This was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which
represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry.”148
BackRub was still, at that point, intended to be a compilation of backlinks on the Web that
would serve as the basis for a possible annotation system and citation analysis. “Amazingly, I
had no thought of building a search engine,” Page admitted. “The idea wasn’t even on the
radar.” As the project evolved, he and Brin conjured up more sophisticated ways to assess the
value of each page, based on the number and quality of links coming into it. That’s when it
dawned on the BackRub Boys that their index of pages ranked by importance could become
the foundation for a high-quality search engine. Thus was Google born. “When a really great
dream shows up,” Page later said, “grab it!”149
At first the revised project was called PageRank, because it ranked each page captured in
the BackRub index and, not incidentally, played to Page’s wry humor and touch of vanity.
“Yeah, I was referring to myself, unfortunately,” he later sheepishly admitted. “I feel kind of
bad about it.”150
That page-ranking goal led to yet another layer of complexity. Instead of just tabulating the
number of links that pointed to a page, Page and Brin realized that it would be even better if
they could also assign a value to each of those incoming links. For example, an incoming link
from the New York Times should count for more than a link from Justin Hall’s dorm room at
Swarthmore. That set up a recursive process with multiple feedback loops: each page was
ranked by the number and quality of links coming into it, and the quality of these links was
determined by the number and quality of links to the pages that originated them, and so on.
“It’s all recursive,” Page explained. “It’s all a big circle. But mathematics is great. You can
solve this.”151
This was the type of mathematical complexity that Brin could truly appreciate. “We
actually developed a lot of math to solve that problem,” he recalled. “We converted the entire
web into a big equation with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of
all the web pages.”152 In a paper they coauthored with their two academic advisors, they
spelled out the complex math formulas based on how many incoming links a page had and
the relative rank of each of these links. Then they put it in simple words for the layperson: “A
page has a high rank if the sum of the ranks of its backlinks is high. This covers both the case
when a page has many backlinks and when a page has a few highly ranked backlinks.”153
The billion-dollar question was whether PageRank would actually produce better search
results. So they did a comparison test. One example they used was searching university. In
AltaVista and other engines, that would turn up a list of random pages that might happen to
use that word in their title. “I remember asking them, ‘Why are you giving people garbage?’ ”
Page said. The answer he got was that the poor results were his fault, that he should refine his
search query. “I had learned from my human-computer interaction course that blaming the
user is not a good strategy, so I knew they fundamentally weren’t doing the right thing. That
insight, the user is never wrong, led to this idea that we could produce a search engine that
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was better.”154 With PageRank, the top results for a search on university were Stanford,
Harvard, MIT, and the University of Michigan, which pleased them immensely. “Wow,”
Page recalled saying to himself. “It was pretty clear to me and the rest of the group that if you
have a way of ranking things based not just on the page itself but based on what the world
thought of that page, that would be a really valuable thing for search.”155
Page and Brin proceeded to refine PageRank by adding more factors, such as the frequency,
type size, and location of keywords on a Web page. Extra points were added if the keyword
was in the URL or was capitalized or was in the title. They would look at each set of results,
then tweak and refine the formula. They discovered that it was important to give a lot of
weight to the anchor text, the words that were underlined as a hyperlink. For example, the
words Bill Clinton were the anchor text for many links leading to whitehouse.gov, so that
Web page went to the top when a user searched Bill Clinton, even though the whitehouse.gov
site did not have Bill Clinton’s name prominently on its home page. One competitor, by
contrast, had “Bill Clinton Joke of the Day” as its number-one result when a user searched
Bill Clinton.156
Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their
search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred
zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and
when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. So Page snapped
it up. “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. “But
googol was taken, anyway. There was this guy who’d already registered Googol.com, and I
tried to buy it from him, but he was fond of it. So we went with Google.”157 It was a playful
word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.48.
Page and Brin pushed to make Google better in two ways. First, they deployed far more
bandwidth, processing power, and storage capacity to the task than any rival, revving up their
Web crawler so that it was indexing a hundred pages per second. In addition, they were
fanatic in studying user behavior so that they could constantly tweak their algorithms. If users
clicked on the top result and then didn’t return to the results list, it meant they had gotten
what they wanted. But if they did a search and returned right away to revise their query, it
meant that they were dissatisfied and the engineers should learn, by looking at the refined
search query, what they had been seeking in the first place. Anytime users scrolled to the
second or third page of the search results, it was a sign that they were unhappy with the order
of results they received. As the journalist Steven Levy pointed out, this feedback loop helped
Google learn that when users typed in dogs they also were looking for puppies, and when
they typed in boiling they might also be referring to hot water, and eventually Google also
learned that when they typed in hot dog they were not looking for boiling puppies.158
One other person came up with a link-based scheme very similar to PageRank: a Chinese
engineer named Yanhong (Robin) Li, who studied at SUNY Buffalo and then joined a
division of Dow Jones based in New Jersey. In the spring of 1996, just as Page and Brin were
creating PageRank, Li came up with an algorithm he dubbed RankDex that determined the
value of search results by the number of inbound links to a page and the content of the text
that anchored those links. He bought a self-help book on how to patent the idea, and then did
so with the help of Dow Jones. But the company did not pursue the idea, so Li moved west to
work for Infoseek and then back to China. There he cofounded Baidu, which became that
country’s largest search engine and one of Google’s most powerful global competitors.
By early 1998 Page and Brin’s database contained maps of close to 518 million hyperlinks,
out of approximately 3 billion by then on the Web. Page was eager that Google not remain
just an academic project but would also become a popular product. “It was like Nikola
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Tesla’s problem,” he said. “You make an invention you think is great, and so you want it to
be used by many people as soon as possible.”159
The desire to turn their dissertation topic into a business made Page and Brin reluctant to
publish or give formal presentations on what they had done. But their academic advisors kept
pushing them to publish something, so in the spring of 1998 they produced a twenty-page
paper that managed to explain the academic theories behind PageRank and Google without
opening their kimono so wide that it revealed too many secrets to competitors. Titled “The
Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” it was delivered at a
conference in Australia in April 1998.
“In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes
heavy use of the structure present in hypertext,” they began.160 By mapping more than a half
billion of the Web’s 3 billion links, they were able to calculate a PageRank for at least 25
million Web pages, which “corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance.”
They detailed the “simple iterative algorithm” that produced PageRanks for every page.
“Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or
backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality.
PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally.”
The paper included many technical details about ranking, crawling, indexing, and iterating
the algorithms. There were also a few paragraphs about useful directions for future research.
But by the end, it was clear this was not an academic exercise or purely scholarly pursuit.
They were engaged in what would clearly become a commercial enterprise. “Google is
designed to be a scalable search engine,” they declared in conclusion. “The primary goal is to
provide high quality search results.”
This may have been a problem at universities where research was supposed to be pursued
primarily for scholarly purposes, not commercial applications. But Stanford not only
permitted students to work on commercial endeavors, it encouraged and facilitated it. There
was even an office to assist with the patenting process and licensing arrangements. “We have
an environment at Stanford that promotes entrepreneurship and risk-taking research,”
President John Hennessy declared. “People really understand here that sometimes the biggest
way to deliver an effect to the world is not by writing a paper but by taking technology you
believe in and making something of it.”161
Page and Brin began by trying to license their software to other companies, and they met
with the CEOs of Yahoo!, Excite, and Alta-Vista. They asked for a $1 million fee, which was
not exorbitant since it would include the rights to their patents as well as the personal services
of the two of them. “Those companies were worth hundreds of millions or more at the time,”
Page later said. “It wasn’t that significant of an expense to them. But it was a lack of insight
at the leadership level. A lot of them told us, ‘Search is not that important.’ ”162
As a result, Page and Brin decided to start a company of their own. It helped that within a
few miles of the campus there were successful entrepreneurs to act as angel investors, as well
as eager venture capitalists just up Sand Hill Road to provide working capital. David
Cheriton, one of their professors at Stanford, had founded an Ethernet product company with
one such investor, Andy Bechtolsheim, which they had sold to Cisco Systems. In August
1998 Cheriton suggested to Page and Brin that they meet with Bechtolsheim, who had also
cofounded Sun Microsystems. Late one night, Brin sent him an email. He got an instant
reply, and early the next morning they all met on Cheriton’s Palo Alto porch.
Even at that unholy hour for students, Page and Brin were able to give a compelling demo
of their search engine, showing that they could download, index, and page-rank much of the
Web on racks of minicomputers. It was a comfortable meeting at the height of the dotcom
boom, and Bechtolsheim’s questions were encouraging. Unlike the scores of pitches that
came to him each week, this was not a PowerPoint presentation of some vaporware that
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didn’t yet exist. He could actually type in queries, and answers popped up instantly that were
far better than what AltaVista produced. Plus the two founders were whip smart and intense,
the type of entrepreneurs he liked to bet on. Bechtolsheim appreciated that they were not
throwing large amounts of money—or any money, for that matter—at marketing. They knew
that Google was good enough to spread by word of mouth, so every penny they had went to
components for the computers they were assembling themselves. “Other Web sites took a
good chunk of venture funding and spent it on advertising,” Bechtolsheim said. “This was the
opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that
people would just use it.”163
Even though Brin and Page were averse to accepting advertising, Bechtolsheim knew that
it would be simple—and not corrupting—to put clearly labeled display ads on the search
results page. That meant there was an obvious revenue stream waiting to be tapped. “This is
the single best idea I have heard in years,” he told them. They talked about valuation for a
minute, and Bechtolsheim said they were setting their price too low. “Well, I don’t want to
waste time,” he concluded, since he had to get to work. “I’m sure it’ll help you guys if I just
write a check.” He went to the car to get his checkbook and wrote one made out to Google
Inc. for $100,000. “We don’t have a bank account yet,” Brin told him. “Deposit it when you
get one,” Bechtolsheim replied. Then he rode off in his Porsche.
Brin and Page went to Burger King to celebrate. “We thought we should get something
that tasted really good, though it was really unhealthy,” Page said. “And it was cheap. It
seemed like the right combination of ways to celebrate the funding.”164
Bechtolsheim’s check made out to Google Inc. provided a spur to get themselves
incorporated. “We had to quickly get a lawyer,” Brin said.165 Page recalled, “It was like,
wow, maybe we really should start a company now.”166 Because of Bechtolsheim’s reputation
—and because of the impressive nature of Google’s product—other funders came in,
including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos declared.
“They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.”167 The favorable buzz around
Google grew so loud that, a few months later, it was able to pull off the rare feat of getting
investments from both of the valley’s rival top venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and
Kleiner Perkins.
Silicon Valley had one other ingredient, in addition to a helpful university and eager
mentors and venture capitalists: a lot of garages, like the ones in which Hewlett and Packard
designed their first products and Jobs and Wozniak assembled the first Apple I boards. When
Page and Brin realized that it was time to put aside plans for dissertations and leave the
Stanford nest, they found a garage—a two-car garage, which came with a hot tub and a
couple of spare rooms inside the house—that they could rent for $1,700 a month at the Menlo
Park house of a Stanford friend, Susan Wojcicki, who soon joined Google. In September
1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their
company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up
a whiteboard emblazoned “Google Worldwide Headquarters.”
In addition to making all of the World Wide Web’s information accessible, Google
represented a climactic leap in the relationship between humans and machines—the “man-
computer symbiosis” that Licklider had envisioned four decades earlier. Yahoo! had
attempted a more primitive version of this symbiosis by using both electronic searches and
human-compiled directories. The approach that Page and Brin took might appear, at first
glance, to be a way of removing human hands from this formula by having the searches
performed by Web crawlers and computer algorithms only. But a deeper look reveals that
their approach was in fact a melding of machine and human intelligence. Their algorithm
relied on the billions of human judgments made by people when they created links from their
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own websites. It was an automated way to tap into the wisdom of humans—in other words, a
higher form of human-computer symbiosis. “The process might seem completely automated,”
Brin explained, “but in terms of how much human input goes into the final product, there are
millions of people who spend time designing their webpages, determining who to link to and
how, and that human element goes into it.”168
In his seminal 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush had set forth the
challenge: “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and
the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important
item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.” In the paper they submitted
to Stanford just before they left to launch their company, Brin and Page made the same point:
“The number of documents in the indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude,
but the user’s ability to look at documents has not.” Their words were less eloquent than
Bush’s, but they had succeeded in fulfilling his dream of a human-machine collaboration to
deal with information overload. In doing so, Google became the culmination of a sixty-year
process to create a world in which humans, computers, and networks were intimately linked.
Anyone could share with people anywhere and, as the Victorian-era almanac promised,
enquire within upon everything.
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CHAPTER TWELVE

ADA FOREVER
LADY LOVELACE’S OBJECTION
Ada Lovelace would have been pleased. To the extent that we are permitted to surmise the
thoughts of someone who’s been dead for more than 150 years, we can imagine her writing a
proud letter boasting about her intuition that calculating devices would someday become
general-purpose computers, beautiful machines that can not only manipulate numbers but
make music and process words and “combine together general symbols in successions of
unlimited variety.”
Machines such as these emerged in the 1950s, and during the subsequent thirty years there
were two historic innovations that caused them to revolutionize how we live: microchips
allowed computers to become small enough to be personal appliances, and packet-switched
networks allowed them to be connected as nodes on a web. This merger of the personal
computer and the Internet allowed digital creativity, content sharing, community formation,
and social networking to blossom on a mass scale. It made real what Ada called “poetical
science,” in which creativity and technology were the warp and woof, like a tapestry from
Jacquard’s loom.
Ada might also be justified in boasting that she was correct, at least thus far, in her more
controversial contention: that no computer, no matter how powerful, would ever truly be a
“thinking” machine. A century after she died, Alan Turing dubbed this “Lady Lovelace’s
Objection” and tried to dismiss it by providing an operational definition of a thinking
machine—that a person submitting questions could not distinguish the machine from a
human—and predicting that a computer would pass this test within a few decades. But it’s
now been more than sixty years, and the machines that attempt to fool people on the test are
at best engaging in lame conversation tricks rather than actual thinking. Certainly none has
cleared Ada’s higher bar of being able to “originate” any thoughts of its own.
Ever since Mary Shelley conceived her Frankenstein tale during a vacation with Ada’s father,
Lord Byron, the prospect that a man-made contraption might originate its own thoughts has
unnerved generations. The Frankenstein motif became a staple of science fiction. A vivid
example was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring the
frighteningly intelligent computer HAL. With its calm voice, HAL exhibits attributes of a
human: the ability to speak, reason, recognize faces, appreciate beauty, show emotion, and
(of course) play chess. When HAL appears to malfunction, the human astronauts decide to
shut it down. HAL becomes aware of the plan and kills all but one of them. After a lot of
heroic struggle, the remaining astronaut gains access to HAL’s cognitive circuits and
disconnects them one by one. HAL regresses until, at the end, it intones “Daisy Bell”—an
homage to the first computer-generated song, sung by an IBM 704 at Bell Labs in 1961.
Artificial intelligence enthusiasts have long been promising, or threatening, that machines
like HAL would soon emerge and prove Ada wrong. Such was the premise of the 1956
conference at Dartmouth organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, where the field of
artificial intelligence was launched. The conferees concluded that a breakthrough was about
twenty years away. It wasn’t. Decade after decade, new waves of experts have claimed that
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artificial intelligence was on the visible horizon, perhaps only twenty years away. Yet it has
remained a mirage, always about twenty years away.
John von Neumann was working on the challenge of artificial intelligence shortly before
he died in 1957. Having helped devise the architecture of modern digital computers, he
realized that the architecture of the human brain is fundamentally different. Digital computers
deal in precise units, whereas the brain, to the extent we understand it, is also partly an analog
system, which deals with a continuum of possibilities. In other words, a human’s mental
process includes many signal pulses and analog waves from different nerves that flow
together to produce not just binary yes-no data but also answers such as “maybe” and
“probably” and infinite other nuances, including occasional bafflement. Von Neumann
suggested that the future of intelligent computing might require abandoning the purely digital
approach and creating “mixed procedures” that include a combination of digital and analog
methods. “Logic will have to undergo a pseudomorphosis to neurology,” he declared, which,
roughly translated, meant that computers were going to have to become more like the human
brain.1
In 1958 a Cornell professor, Frank Rosenblatt, attempted to do this by devising a
mathematical approach for creating an artificial neural network like that of the brain, which
he called a Perceptron. Using weighted statistical inputs, it could, in theory, process visual
data. When the Navy, which was funding the work, unveiled the system, it drew the type of
press hype that has accompanied many subsequent artificial intelligence claims. “The Navy
revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk,
see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence,” the New York Times reported.
The New Yorker was equally enthusiastic: “The Perceptron, . . . as its name implies, is
capable of what amounts to original thought. . . . It strikes us as the first serious rival to the
human brain ever devised.”2
That was almost sixty years ago. The Perceptron still does not exist.3 Nevertheless, almost
every year since then there have been breathless reports about some marvel on the horizon
that would replicate and surpass the human brain, many of them using almost the exact same
phrases as the 1958 stories about the Perceptron.
Discussion about artificial intelligence flared up a bit, at least in the popular press, after
IBM’s Deep Blue, a chess-playing machine, beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in
1997 and then Watson, its natural-language question-answering computer, won at Jeopardy!
against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in 2011. “I think it awakened the entire
artificial intelligence community,” said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.4 But as she was the first to
admit, these were not true breakthroughs of humanlike artificial intelligence. Deep Blue won
its chess match by brute force; it could evaluate 200 million positions per second and match
them against 700,000 past grandmaster games. Deep Blue’s calculations were fundamentally
different, most of us would agree, from what we mean by real thinking. “Deep Blue was only
intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent,” Kasparov said. “Not that
losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.”5
Likewise, Watson won at Jeopardy! by using megadoses of computing power: it had 200
million pages of information in its four terabytes of storage, of which the entire Wikipedia
accounted for merely 0.2 percent. It could search the equivalent of a million books per
second. It was also rather good at processing colloquial English. Still, no one who watched
would bet on its passing the Turing Test. In fact, the IBM team leaders were afraid that the
show’s writers might try to turn the game into a Turing Test by composing questions
designed to trick a machine, so they insisted that only old questions from unaired contests be
used. Nevertheless, the machine tripped up in ways that showed it wasn’t human. For
example, one question was about the “anatomical oddity” of the former Olympic gymnast
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George Eyser. Watson answered, “What is a leg?” The correct answer was that Eyser was
missing a leg. The problem was understanding oddity, explained David Ferrucci, who ran the
Watson project at IBM. “The computer wouldn’t know that a missing leg is odder than
anything else.”6
John Searle, the Berkeley philosophy professor who devised the “Chinese room” rebuttal
to the Turing Test, scoffed at the notion that Watson represented even a glimmer of artificial
intelligence. “Watson did not understand the questions, nor its answers, nor that some of its
answers were right and some wrong, nor that it was playing a game, nor that it won—because
it doesn’t understand anything,” Searle contended. “IBM’s computer was not and could not
have been designed to understand. Rather, it was designed to simulate understanding, to act
as if it understood.”7
Even the IBM folks agreed with that. They never held Watson out to be an “intelligent”
machine. “Computers today are brilliant idiots,” said the company’s director of research,
John E. Kelly III, after the Deep Blue and Watson victories. “They have tremendous
capacities for storing information and performing numerical calculations—far superior to
those of any human. Yet when it comes to another class of skills, the capacities for
understanding, learning, adapting, and interacting, computers are woefully inferior to
humans.”8
Rather than demonstrating that machines are getting close to artificial intelligence, Deep
Blue and Watson actually indicated the contrary. “These recent achievements have,
ironically, underscored the limitations of computer science and artificial intelligence,” argued
Professor Tomaso Poggio, director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines at MIT.
“We do not yet understand how the brain gives rise to intelligence, nor do we know how to
build machines that are as broadly intelligent as we are.”9
Douglas Hofstadter, a professor at Indiana University, combined the arts and sciences in
his unexpected 1979 best seller, Gödel, Escher, Bach. He believed that the only way to
achieve meaningful artificial intelligence was to understand how human imagination worked.
His approach was pretty much abandoned in the 1990s, when researchers found it more cost-
effective to tackle complex tasks by throwing massive processing power at huge amounts of
data, the way Deep Blue played chess.10
This approach produced a peculiarity: computers can do some of the toughest tasks in the
world (assessing billions of possible chess positions, finding correlations in hundreds of
Wikipedia-size information repositories), but they cannot perform some of the tasks that
seem most simple to us mere humans. Ask Google a hard question like “What is the depth of
the Red Sea?” and it will instantly respond, “7,254 feet,” something even your smartest
friends don’t know. Ask it an easy one like “Can a crocodile play basketball?” and it will
have no clue, even though a toddler could tell you, after a bit of giggling.11
At Applied Minds near Los Angeles, you can get an exciting look at how a robot is being
programmed to maneuver, but it soon becomes apparent that it still has trouble navigating an
unfamiliar room, picking up a crayon, and writing its name. A visit to Nuance
Communications near Boston shows the wondrous advances in speech-recognition
technologies that underpin Siri and other systems, but it’s also apparent to anyone using Siri
that you still can’t have a truly meaningful conversation with a computer, except in a fantasy
movie. At the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT, interesting
work is being done on getting computers to perceive objects visually, but even though the
machine can discern pictures of a girl with a cup, a boy at a water fountain, and a cat lapping
up cream, it cannot do the simple abstract thinking required to figure out that they are all
engaged in the same activity: drinking. A visit to the New York City police command system
in Manhattan reveals how computers scan thousands of feeds from surveillance cameras as
part of a Domain Awareness System, but the system still cannot reliably identify your
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mother’s face in a crowd.
All of these tasks have one thing in common: even a four-year-old can do them. “The main
lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy
problems are hard,” according to Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist.12 As the
futurist Hans Moravec and others have noted, this paradox stems from the fact that the
computational resources needed to recognize a visual or verbal pattern are huge.
Moravec’s paradox reinforces von Neumann’s observations from a half century ago about
how the carbon-based chemistry of the human brain works differently from the silicon-based
binary logic circuits of a computer. Wetware is different from hardware. The human brain not
only combines analog and digital processes, it also is a distributed system, like the Internet,
rather than a centralized one, like a computer. A computer’s central processing unit can
execute instructions much faster than a brain’s neuron can fire. “Brains more than make up
for this, however, because all the neurons and synapses are active simultaneously, whereas
most current computers have only one or at most a few CPUs,” according to Stuart Russell
and Peter Norvig, authors of the foremost textbook on artificial intelligence.13
So why not make a computer that mimics the processes of the human brain? “Eventually
we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a
carbon-based system,” Bill Gates speculates. “It’s like reverse-engineering someone else’s
product in order to solve a challenge.”14 That won’t be easy. It took scientists forty years to
map the neurological activity of the one-millimeter-long roundworm, which has 302 neurons
and 8,000 synapses.49. The human brain has 86 billion neurons and up to 150 trillion
synapses.15
At the end of 2013, the New York Times reported on “a development that is about to turn
the digital world on its head” and “make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence
systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen,
navigate, manipulate and control.” The phrases were reminiscent of those used in its 1958
story on the Perceptron (“will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be
conscious of its existence”). Once again, the strategy was to replicate the way the human
brain’s neural networks operate. As the Times explained, “the new computing approach is
based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and
connect with other neurons to interpret information.”16 IBM and Qualcomm each disclosed
plans to build “neuromorphic,” or brainlike, computer processors, and a European research
consortium called the Human Brain Project announced that it had built a neuromorphic
microchip that incorporated “fifty million plastic synapses and 200,000 biologically realistic
neuron models on a single 8-inch silicon wafer.”17
Perhaps this latest round of reports does in fact mean that, in a few more decades, there
will be machines that think like humans. “We are continually looking at the list of things
machines cannot do—play chess, drive a car, translate language—and then checking them off
the list when machines become capable of these things,” said Tim Berners-Lee. “Someday
we will get to the end of the list.”18
These latest advances may even lead to the singularity, a term that von Neumann coined
and the futurist Ray Kurzweil and the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge popularized, which
is sometimes used to describe the moment when computers are not only smarter than humans
but also can design themselves to be even supersmarter, and will thus no longer need us
mortals. Vinge says this will occur by 2030.19
On the other hand, these latest stories might turn out to be like the similarly phrased ones
from the 1950s, glimpses of a receding mirage. True artificial intelligence may take a few
more generations or even a few more centuries. We can leave that debate to the futurists.
Indeed, depending on your definition of consciousness, it may never happen. We can leave
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that debate to the philosophers and theologians. “Human ingenuity,” wrote Leonardo da
Vinci, whose Vitruvian Man became the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and
science, “will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the
purpose than Nature does.”
There is, however, yet another possibility, one that Ada Lovelace would like, which is
based on the half century of computer development in the tradition of Vannevar Bush, J. C.
R. Licklider, and Doug Engelbart.
HUMAN-COMPUTER SYMBIOSIS: “WATSON, COME HERE”
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” Ada Lovelace
declared. “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” In her mind, machines
would not replace humans but instead become their partners. What humans would bring to
this relationship, she said, was originality and creativity.
This was the idea behind an alternative to the quest for pure artificial intelligence: pursuing
instead the augmented intelligence that occurs when machines become partners with people.
The strategy of combining computer and human capabilities, of creating a human-computer
symbiosis, turned out to be more fruitful than the pursuit of machines that could think on
their own.
Licklider helped chart that course back in 1960 in his paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis,”
which proclaimed: “Human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very
tightly, and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and
process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know
today.”20 His ideas built on the memex personal computer that Vannevar Bush had imagined
in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think.” Licklider also drew on his work designing the SAGE
air defense system, which required an intimate collaboration between humans and machines.
The Bush-Licklider approach was given a friendly interface by Engelbart, who in 1968
demonstrated a networked computer system with an intuitive graphical display and a mouse.
In a manifesto titled “Augmenting Human Intellect,” he echoed Licklider. The goal,
Engelbart wrote, should be to create “an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try,
intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with . . . high-powered
electronic aids.” Richard Brautigan, in his poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving
Grace,” expressed that dream a bit more lyrically: “a cybernetic meadow / where mammals
and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony.”
The teams that built Deep Blue and Watson have adopted this symbiosis approach rather than
pursue the objective of the artificial intelligence purists. “The goal is not to replicate human
brains,” says John Kelly, the director of IBM Research. Echoing Licklider, he adds, “This
isn’t about replacing human thinking with machine thinking. Rather, in the era of cognitive
systems, humans and machines will collaborate to produce better results, each bringing their
own superior skills to the partnership.”21
An example of the power of this human-computer symbiosis arose from a realization that
struck Kasparov after he was beaten by Deep Blue. Even in a rule-defined game such as
chess, he came to believe, “what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice
versa.” That gave him an idea for an experiment: “What if instead of human versus machine
we played as partners?” When he and another grandmaster tried that, it created the symbiosis
that Licklider had envisioned. “We could concentrate on strategic planning instead of
spending so much time on calculations,” Kasparov said. “Human creativity was even more
paramount under these conditions.”
A tournament along these lines was held in 2005. Players could work in teams with
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computers of their choice. Many grandmasters entered the fray, as did the most advanced
computers. But neither the best grandmaster nor the most powerful computer won. Symbiosis
did. “The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers,” Kasparov
noted. “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was
overwhelming.” The final winner was not a grandmaster nor a state-of-the-art computer, nor
even a combination of both, but two American amateurs who used three computers at the
same time and knew how to manage the process of collaborating with their machines. “Their
skill at manipulating and coaching their computers to look very deeply into positions
effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and
the greater computational power of other participants,” according to Kasparov.22
In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate
with computers.
In a similar fashion, IBM decided that the best use of Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing
computer, would be for it to collaborate with humans rather than try to top them. One project
involved using the machine to work in partnership with doctors on cancer treatment plans.
“The Jeopardy! challenge pitted man against machine,” said IBM’s Kelly. “With Watson and
medicine, man and machine are taking on a challenge together—and going beyond what
either could do on its own.”23 The Watson system was fed more than 2 million pages from
medical journals and 600,000 pieces of clinical evidence, and could search up to 1.5 million
patient records. When a doctor put in a patient’s symptoms and vital information, the
computer provided a list of recommendations ranked in order of its confidence.24
In order to be useful, the IBM team realized, the machine needed to interact with human
doctors in a manner that made collaboration pleasant. David McQueeney, the vice president
of software at IBM Research, described programming a pretense of humility into the
machine: “Our early experience was with wary physicians who resisted by saying, ‘I’m
licensed to practice medicine, and I’m not going to have a computer tell me what to do.’ So
we reprogrammed our system to come across as humble and say, ‘Here’s the percentage
likelihood that this is useful to you, and here you can look for yourself.’ ” Doctors were
delighted, saying that it felt like a conversation with a knowledgeable colleague. “We aim to
combine human talents, such as our intuition, with the strengths of a machine, such as its
infinite breadth,” said McQueeney. “That combination is magic, because each offers a piece
that the other one doesn’t have.”25
That was one of the aspects of Watson that impressed Ginni Rometty, an engineer with a
background in artificial intelligence who took over as CEO of IBM at the beginning of 2012.
“I watched Watson interact in a collegial way with the doctors,” she said. “It was the clearest
testament of how machines can truly be partners with humans rather than try to replace them.
I feel strongly about that.”26 She was so impressed that she decided to launch a new IBM
division based on Watson. It was given a $1 billion investment and a new headquarters in the
Silicon Alley area near Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Its mission was to commercialize
“cognitive computing,” meaning computing systems that can take data analysis to the next
level by teaching themselves to complement the thinking skills of the human brain. Instead of
giving the new division a technical name, Rometty simply called it Watson. It was in honor
of Thomas Watson Sr., the IBM founder who ran the company for more than forty years, but
it also evoked Sherlock Holmes’s companion Dr. John (“Elementary, my dear”) Watson and
Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Thomas (“Come here, I want to see you”) Watson. Thus
the name helped to convey that Watson the computer should be seen as a collaborator and
companion, not a threat like 2001’s HAL.
Watson was a harbinger of a third wave of computing, one that blurred the line between
augmented human intelligence and artificial intelligence. “The first generation of computers
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were machines that counted and tabulated,” Rometty says, harking back to IBM’s roots in
Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulators used for the 1890 census. “The second generation
involved programmable machines that used the von Neumann architecture. You had to tell
them what to do.” Beginning with Ada Lovelace, people wrote algorithms that instructed
these computers, step by step, how to perform tasks. “Because of the proliferation of data,”
Rometty adds, “there is no choice but to have a third generation, which are systems that are
not programmed, they learn.”27
But even as this occurs, the process could remain one of partnership and symbiosis with
humans rather than one designed to relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Larry Norton, a
breast cancer specialist at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, was part of
the team that worked with Watson. “Computer science is going to evolve rapidly, and
medicine will evolve with it,” he said. “This is coevolution. We’ll help each other.”28
This belief that machines and humans will get smarter together is a process that Doug
Engelbart called “bootstrapping” and “coevolution.”29 It raises an interesting prospect:
perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the
intelligence of the human-machine partnership.
Let us assume, for example, that a machine someday exhibits all of the mental capabilities
of a human: giving the outward appearance of recognizing patterns, perceiving emotions,
appreciating beauty, creating art, having desires, forming moral values, and pursuing goals.
Such a machine might be able to pass a Turing Test. It might even pass what we could call
the Ada Test, which is that it could appear to “originate” its own thoughts that go beyond
what we humans program it to do.
There would, however, be still another hurdle before we could say that artificial
intelligence has triumphed over augmented intelligence. We can call it the Licklider Test. It
would go beyond asking whether a machine could replicate all the components of human
intelligence to ask whether the machine accomplishes these tasks better when whirring away
completely on its own or when working in conjunction with humans. In other words, is it
possible that humans and machines working in partnership will be indefinitely more powerful
than an artificial intelligence machine working alone?
If so, then “man-computer symbiosis,” as Licklider called it, will remain triumphant.
Artificial intelligence need not be the holy grail of computing. The goal instead could be to
find ways to optimize the collaboration between human and machine capabilities—to forge a
partnership in which we let the machines do what they do best, and they let us do what we do
best.
SOME LESSONS FROM THE JOURNEY
Like all historical narratives, the story of the innovations that created the digital age has many
strands. So what lessons, in addition to the power of human-machine symbiosis just
discussed, might be drawn from the tale?
First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from
teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This was true of every
era of creative ferment. The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial
Revolution all had their institutions for collaborative work and their networks for sharing
ideas. But to an even greater extent, this has been true of the digital age. As brilliant as the
many inventors of the Internet and computer were, they achieved most of their advances
through teamwork. Like Robert Noyce, some of the best of them tended to resemble
Congregational ministers rather than lonely prophets, madrigal singers rather than soloists.
Twitter, for example, was invented by a team of people who were collaborative but also
quite contentious. When one of the cofounders, Jack Dorsey, started taking a lot of the credit
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in media interviews, another cofounder, Evan Williams, a serial entrepreneur who had
previously created Blogger, told him to chill out, according to Nick Bilton of the New York
Times. “But I invented Twitter,” Dorsey said.
“No, you didn’t invent Twitter,” Williams replied. “I didn’t invent Twitter either. Neither
did Biz [Stone, another cofounder]. People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply
expand on an idea that already exists.”30
Therein lies another lesson: the digital age may seem revolutionary, but it was based on
expanding the ideas handed down from previous generations. The collaboration was not
merely among contemporaries, but also between generations. The best innovators were those
who understood the trajectory of technological change and took the baton from innovators
who preceded them. Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart,
who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush. When Howard Aiken was devising his
digital computer at Harvard, he was inspired by a fragment of Charles Babbage’s Difference
Engine that he found, and he made his crew members read Ada Lovelace’s “Notes.”
The most productive teams were those that brought together people with a wide array of
specialties. Bell Labs was a classic example. In its long corridors in suburban New Jersey,
there were theoretical physicists, experimentalists, material scientists, engineers, a few
businessmen, and even some telephone-pole climbers with grease under their fingernails.
Walter Brattain, an experimentalist, and John Bardeen, a theorist, shared a workspace, like a
librettist and a composer sharing a piano bench, so they could perform a call-and-response all
day about how to make what became the first transistor.
Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another
lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial.
There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which
cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open
workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a
model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow
workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO
of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that
“people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs
designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and
even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur.
Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with
rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard.
Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with
complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders
included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams;
and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included
visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts,
politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as
Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf.
Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with
operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31
Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that
their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management
procedures, force people to focus, and get things done.
Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely
footnotes. There is a lingering historical debate over who most deserves to be dubbed the
inventor of the electronic digital computer: John Atanasoff, a professor who worked almost
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alone at Iowa State, or the team led by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert at the University of
Pennsylvania. In this book I give more credit to members of the latter group, partly because
they were able to get their machine, ENIAC, up and running and solving problems. They did
so with the help of dozens of engineers and mechanics plus a cadre of women who handled
programming duties. Atanasoff ’s machine, by contrast, never fully worked, partly because
there was no team to help him figure out how to make his punch-card burner operate. It ended
up being consigned to a basement, then discarded when no one could remember exactly what
it was.
Like the computer, the ARPANET and Internet were designed by collaborative teams.
Decisions were made through a process, begun by a deferential graduate student, of sending
around proposals as “Requests for Comments.” That led to a weblike packet-switched
network, with no central authority or hubs, in which power was fully distributed to every one
of the nodes, each having the ability to create and share content and route around attempts to
impose controls. A collaborative process thus produced a system designed to facilitate
collaboration. The Internet was imprinted with the DNA of its creators.
The Internet facilitated collaboration not only within teams but also among crowds of
people who didn’t know each other. This is the advance that is closest to being revolutionary.
Networks for collaboration have existed ever since the Persians and Assyrians invented postal
systems. But never before has it been easy to solicit and collate contributions from thousands
or millions of unknown collaborators. This led to innovative systems—Google page ranks,
Wikipedia entries, the Firefox browser, the GNU/Linux software—based on the collective
wisdom of crowds.
There were three ways that teams were put together in the digital age. The first was through
government funding and coordination. That’s how the groups that built the original
computers (Colossus, ENIAC) and networks (ARPANET) were organized. This reflected the
consensus, which was stronger back in the 1950s under President Eisenhower, that the
government should undertake projects, such as the space program and interstate highway
system, that benefited the common good. It often did so in collaboration with universities and
private contractors as part of a government-academic-industrial triangle that Vannevar Bush
and others fostered. Talented federal bureaucrats (not always an oxymoron), such as
Licklider, Taylor, and Roberts, oversaw the programs and allocated public funds.
Private enterprise was another way that collaborative teams were formed. This happened at
the research centers of big companies, such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and at
entrepreneurial new companies, such as Texas Instruments and Intel, Atari and Google,
Microsoft and Apple. A key driver was profits, both as a reward for the players and as a way
to attract investors. That required a proprietary attitude to innovation that led to patents and
intellectual property protections. Digital theorists and hackers often disparaged this approach,
but a private enterprise system that financially rewarded invention was a component of a
system that led to breathtaking innovation in transistors, chips, computers, phones, devices,
and Web services.
Throughout history, there has been a third way, in addition to government and private
enterprises, that collaborative creativity has been organized: through peers freely sharing
ideas and making contributions as part of a voluntary common endeavor. Many of the
advances that created the Internet and its services occurred in this fashion, which the Harvard
scholar Yochai Benkler has labeled “commons-based peer production.”32 The Internet
allowed this form of collaboration to be practiced on a much larger scale than before. The
building of Wikipedia and the Web were good examples, along with the creation of free and
open-source software such as Linux and GNU, OpenOffice and Firefox. As the technology
journalist Steven Johnson has noted, “their open architecture allows others to build more
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easily on top of existing ideas, just as Berners-Lee built the Web on top of the Internet.”33
This commons-based production by peer networks was driven not by financial incentives but
by other forms of reward and satisfaction.
The values of commons-based sharing and of private enterprise often conflict, most
notably over the extent to which innovations should be patent-protected. The commons
crowd had its roots in the hacker ethic that emanated from the MIT Tech Model Railroad
Club and the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Wozniak was an exemplar. He went to
Homebrew meetings to show off the computer circuit he built, and he handed out freely the
schematics so that others could use and improve it. But his neighborhood pal Steve Jobs, who
began accompanying him to the meetings, convinced him that they should quit sharing the
invention and instead build and sell it. Thus Apple was born, and for the subsequent forty
years it has been at the forefront of aggressively patenting and profiting from its innovations.
The instincts of both Steves were useful in creating the digital age. Innovation is most vibrant
in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones.
Sometimes people advocate one of these modes of production over the others based on
ideological sentiments. They prefer a greater government role, or exalt private enterprise, or
romanticize peer sharing. In the 2012 election, President Barack Obama stirred up
controversy by saying to people who owned businesses, “You didn’t build that.” His critics
saw it as a denigration of the role of private enterprise. Obama’s point was that any business
benefits from government and peer-based community support: “If you were successful,
somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your
life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed
you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” It was not the most elegant way for
him to dispel the fantasy that he was a closet socialist, but it did point to a lesson of modern
economics that applies to digital-age innovation: that a combination of all of these ways of
organizing production—governmental, market, and peer sharing—is stronger than favoring
any one of them.
None of this is new. Babbage got most of his funding from the British government, which
was generous in financing research that could strengthen its economy and empire. He adopted
ideas from private industry, most notably the punch cards that had been developed by the
textile firms for automated looms. He and his friends were founders of a handful of new peer-
network clubs, including the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and though
it may seem a stretch to view that august group as a fancy-dress forerunner to the Homebrew
Computer Club, both existed to facilitate commons-based peer collaboration and the sharing
of ideas.
The most successful endeavors in the digital age were those run by leaders who fostered
collaboration while also providing a clear vision. Too often these are seen as conflicting
traits: a leader is either very inclusive or a passionate visionary. But the best leaders could be
both. Robert Noyce was a good example. He and Gordon Moore drove Intel forward based
on a sharp vision of where semiconductor technology was heading, and they both were
collegial and nonauthoritarian to a fault. Even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all of their
prickly intensity, knew how to build strong teams around them and inspire loyalty.
Brilliant individuals who could not collaborate tended to fail. Shockley Semiconductor
disintegrated. Similarly, collaborative groups that lacked passionate and willful visionaries
also failed. After inventing the transistor, Bell Labs went adrift. So did Apple after Jobs was
ousted in 1985.
Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common:
they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and
design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks
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took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales
guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn
off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest
understanding of the engineering and product design.”34
Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else
could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost
every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social
purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable
social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for
individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually
Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare.
Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own
volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines
would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to
show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to
feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more
than almost anyone, would probably know the difference.
According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers
suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the
proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have
no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.
ADA’S LASTING LESSON: POETICAL SCIENCE
That leads to a final lesson, one that takes us back to Ada Lovelace. As she pointed out, in
our symbiosis with machines we humans have brought one crucial element to the partnership:
creativity. The history of the digital age—from Bush to Licklider to Engelbart to Jobs, from
SAGE to Google to Wikipedia to Watson—has reinforced this idea. And as long as we
remain a creative species, this is likely to hold true. “The machines will be more rational and
analytic,” IBM’s research director John Kelly says. “People will provide judgment, intuition,
empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.”35
We humans can remain relevant in an era of cognitive computing because we are able to
think different, something that an algorithm, almost by definition, can’t master. We possess
an imagination that, as Ada said, “brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new,
original, endless, ever-varying combinations.” We discern patterns and appreciate their
beauty. We weave information into narratives. We are storytelling as well as social animals.
Human creativity involves values, intentions, aesthetic judgments, emotions, personal
consciousness, and a moral sense. These are what the arts and humanities teach us—and why
those realms are as valuable a part of education as science, technology, engineering, and
math. If we mortals are to uphold our end of the human-computer symbiosis, if we are to
retain a role as the creative partners of our machines, we must continue to nurture the
wellsprings of our imagination and originality and humanity. That is what we bring to the
party.
At his product launches, Steve Jobs would conclude with a slide, projected on the screen
behind him, of street signs showing the intersection of the Liberal Arts and Technology. At
his last such appearance, for the iPad 2 in 2011, he stood in front of that image and declared,
“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—that it’s technology married with
liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”
That’s what made him the most creative technology innovator of our era.
The converse to this paean to the humanities, however, is also true. People who love the
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arts and humanities should endeavor to appreciate the beauties of math and physics, just as
Ada did. Otherwise, they will be left as bystanders at the intersection of arts and science,
where most digital-age creativity will occur. They will surrender control of that territory to
the engineers.
Many people who celebrate the arts and the humanities, who applaud vigorously the
tributes to their importance in our schools, will proclaim without shame (and sometimes even
joke) that they don’t understand math or physics. They extoll the virtues of learning Latin,
but they are clueless about how to write an algorithm or tell BASIC from C++, Python from
Pascal. They consider people who don’t know Hamlet from Macbeth to be Philistines, yet
they might merrily admit that they don’t know the difference between a gene and a
chromosome, or a transistor and a capacitor, or an integral and a differential equation. These
concepts may seem difficult. Yes, but so, too, is Hamlet. And like Hamlet, each of these
concepts is beautiful. Like an elegant mathematical equation, they are expressions of the
glories of the universe.
C. P. Snow was right about the need to respect both of “the two cultures,” science and the
humanities. But even more important today is understanding how they intersect. Those who
helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could
combine science and the humanities. From her father came a poetic streak and from her
mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical
science.” Her father defended the Luddites who smashed mechanical looms, but Ada loved
how punch cards instructed those looms to weave beautiful patterns, and she envisioned how
this wondrous combination of art and technology could be manifest in computers.
The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying
technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment,
education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old
wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into
new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly
enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity.
Roleplaying games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling
and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result
in completely new forms of expression and formats of media.
This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering,
humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the
spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the
sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
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342

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank the people who gave me interviews and provided information, including Bob
Albrecht, Al Alcorn, Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Stewart Brand, Dan Bricklin, Larry
Brilliant, John Seeley Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Jean Case, Steve Case, Vint Cerf, Wes Clark,
Steve Crocker, Lee Felsenstein, Bob Frankston, Bob Kahn, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, Al Gore,
Andy Grove, Justin Hall, Bill Joy, Jim Kimsey, Leonard Kleinrock, Tracy Licklider, Liza
Loop, David McQueeney, Gordon Moore, John Negroponte, Larry Page, Howard Rheingold,
Larry Roberts, Arthur Rock, Virginia Rometty, Ben Rosen, Steve Russell, Eric Schmidt, Bob
Taylor, Paul Terrell, Jimmy Wales, Evan Williams, and Steve Wozniak. I’m also grateful to
people who gave useful advice along the way, including Ken Auletta, Larry Cohen, David
Derbes, John Doerr, John Hollar, John Markoff, Lynda Resnick, Joe Zeff, and Michael
Moritz.
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
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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.
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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.
12. Woolley, The Bride of Science, 60.
13. Stein, Ada, 16; Woolley, The Bride of Science, 72.
14. Woolley, The Bride of Science, 92.
15. Woolley, The Bride of Science, 94.
16. John Galt, The Life of Lord Byron (Colburn and Bentley, 1830), 316.
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17. Ada to Dr. William King, Mar. 9, 1834, Dr. King to Ada, Mar. 15, 1834; Stein, Ada, 42.
18. Ada to Dr. William King, Sept. 1, 1834; Stein, Ada, 46.
19. Woolley, The Bride of Science, 172.
20. Catherine Turney, Byron’s Daughter: A Biography of Elizabeth Medora Leigh (Readers
Union, 1975), 160.
21. Velma Huskey and Harry Huskey, “Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage,” IEEE Annals
of the History of Computing, Oct.–Dec. 1980.
22. Ada to Charles Babbage, Nov. 1839.
23. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 30, 1843.
24. Ada to Lady Byron, Jan. 11, 1841.
25. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 136.
26. Ada to Lady Byron, Feb. 6, 1841; Stein, Ada, 87.
27. Stein, Ada, 38.
28. Harry Wilmot Buxton and Anthony Hyman, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late
Charles Babbage (ca. 1872; reprinted by Charles Babbage Institute/MIT Press, 1988), 46.
29. Martin Campbell Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information
Machine (Westview, 2009), 6.
30. Swade, The Difference Engine, 42; Bernstein, The Analytical Engine, 46 and passim.
31. James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web (Oxford, 2004), 23.
32. Ada to Charles Babbage, Feb. 16, 1840.
33. Ada to Charles Babbage, Jan. 12, 1841.
34. Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Longman Green, 1864), 136.
35. Luigi Menabrea, with notes upon the memoir by the translator, Ada, Countess of
Lovelace, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Invented by Charles Babbage,” Oct. 1842,
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html.
36. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 136; John Füegi and Jo Francis,
“Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 ‘Notes,’ ” Annals of the History of
Computing, Oct. 2003.
37. All quotes from Menabrea and Lovelace’s notes are from Menabrea, “Sketch of the
Analytical Engine.”
38. Charles Babbage to Ada, 1843, in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 197.
39. Spoken in the film Ada Byron Lovelace: To Dream Tomorrow, directed and produced by
John Füegi and Jo Francis (Flare Productions, 2003); also, Füegi and Francis, “Lovelace &
Babbage.”
40. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 5, 1843.
41. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 2, 1843.
42. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 6, 1843; Woolley, The Bride of Science, 278; Stein, Ada,
114.
43. Ada to Lady Byron, Aug. 8, 1843.
44. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843.
45. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843.
46. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843.
47. Ada to Lady Lovelace, Aug. 15, 1843.
48. Stein, Ada, 120.
49. Ada to Lady Byron, Aug. 22, 1843.
50. Ada to Robert Noel, Aug. 9, 1843.
CHAPTER TWO: THE COMPUTER
1. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Simon & Schuster, 1983; locations refer to the
Kindle “Centenary Edition”), 439. In addition to the sources cited below, this section
draws on Hodges’s biography and his website, http://www.turing.org.uk/; the
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correspondence and documents in the Turing Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org/;
David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Atlas Books, 2006); S. Barry Cooper and
Jan van Leeuwen, Alan Turing: His Work and Impact (Elsevier, 2013); Sara Turing, Alan
M. Turing (Cambridge, 1959; locations refer to the Kindle “Centenary Edition,” with an
afterword by John F. Turing, published in 2012); Simon Lavington, editor, Alan Turing
and His Contemporaries (BCS, 2012).
2. John Turing in Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing, 146.
3. Hodges, Alan Turing, 590.
4. Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing, 56.
5. Hodges, Alan Turing, 1875.
6. Alan Turing to Sara Turing, Feb. 16, 1930, Turing archive; Sara Turing, Alan M. Turing,
25.
7. Hodges, Alan Turing, 2144.
8. Hodges, Alan Turing, 2972.
9. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical
Society, read on Nov. 12, 1936.
10. Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers,” 241.
11. Max Newman to Alonzo Church, May 31, 1936, in Hodges, Alan Turing, 3439; Alan
Turing to Sara Turing, May 29, 1936, Turing Archive.
12. Alan Turing to Sara Turing, Feb. 11 and Feb. 22, 1937, Turing Archive; Alonzo Church,
“Review of A. M. Turing’s ‘On computable numbers,’ ” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1937.
13. This Shannon section draws on Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great
Age of American Innovation (Penguin, 2012; locations refer to the Kindle edition), chapter
7; M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Claude Shannon: Reluctant Father of the Digital Age,” MIT
Technology Review, July 2001; Graham Collins, “Claude E. Shannon: Founder of
Information Theory,” Scientific American, Oct. 2012; James Gleick, The Information
(Pantheon, 2011), chapter 7.
14. Peter Galison, Image and Logic (University of Chicago, 1997), 781.
15. Claude Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,” Transactions
of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Dec. 1938. For a clear explanation, see
Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone (Perseus, 1998), 2–10.
16. Paul Ceruzzi, Reckoners: The Prehistory of the Digital Computer (Greenwood, 1983), 79.
See also Computer History Museum, “George Stibitz,”
http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-computer/4/85.
17. Howard Aiken oral history, conducted by Henry Tropp and I. Bernard Cohen,
Smithsonian Institution, Feb. 1973.
18. Howard Aiken, “Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine,” IEEE Spectrum, Aug. 1964;
Cassie Ferguson, “Howard Aiken: Makin’ a Computer Wonder,” Harvard Gazette, Apr. 9,
1998.
19. I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (MIT, 1999), 9.
20. Kurt Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (MIT, 2009), 75.
21. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 115.
22. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 98 and passim.
23. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 80.
24. Ceruzzi, Reckoners, 65.
25. Horst Zuse (son), The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse, http://www.horst-zuse.homepage.t-
online.de/Konrad_Zuse_index_english_html/biography.html.
26. Konrad Zuse archive, http://www.zib.de/zuse/home.php/Main/KonradZuse; Ceruzzi,
Reckoners, 26.
27. Horst Zuse, The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse, part 4; Ceruzzi, Reckoners, 28.
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28. The story of John Atanasoff and the controversy over the credit he deserves has led to
some impassioned writings. A historical and legal battle pitted him against the creators of
ENIAC, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. The four main books about Atanasoff are all
written by people who sought to take his side in this dispute. Alice Burks, Who Invented
the Computer? (Prometheus, 2003; locations refer to the Kindle edition), is partly based on
the documents of the legal battle. Alice Burks and Arthur Burks, The First Electronic
Computer: The Atanasoff Story (University of Michigan, 1988) is an earlier, more
technical book; Arthur Burks was an engineer on the ENIAC team who ended up being
critical of Eckert and Mauchly. Clark Mollenhoff, Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the
Computer (Iowa State, 1988) was written by a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who was
the Washington bureau chief of the Des Moines Register and after hearing of Atanasoff
sought to resurrect him from being forgotten by history. Jane Smiley, The Man Who
Invented the Computer (Doubleday, 2010) is by the acclaimed novelist who immersed
herself in computer history and became an advocate for Atanasoff. For the personal
background and involvement of Alice and Arthur Burks, see their “Memoir of the 1940s,”
Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 1997,
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0036.201. This section also draws on Allan
Mackintosh, “Dr. Atanasoff’s Computer,” Scientific American, Aug. 1988; Jean Berry,
“Clifford Edward Berry: His Role in Early Computers,” Annals of the History of
Computing, July 1986; William Broad, “Who Should Get the Glory for Inventing the
Computer?” New York Times, Mar. 22, 1983.
29. John Atanasoff, “Advent of Electronic Digital Computing,” Annals of the History of
Computing, July 1984, 234.
30. Atanasoff, “Advent of Electronic Digital Computing,” 238.
31. Atanasoff, “Advent of Electronic Digital Computing,” 243.
32. Katherine Davis Fishman, The Computer Establishment (Harper and Row, 1981), 22.
33. Atanasoff testimony, Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, June 15, 1971, transcript p. 1700, in
Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 1144. The archives for the trial are at the University
of Pennsylvania, http://www.archives.upenn.edu/faids/upd/eniactrial/upd8_10.html, and at
the Charles Babbage Institute of the University of Minnesota,
http://discover.lib.umn.edu/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?
c=umfa;cc=umfa;rgn=main;view=text;didno=cbi00001.
34. Atanasoff testimony, transcript p. 1703.
35. Atanasoff, “Advent of Electronic Digital Computing,” 244.
36. John Atanasoff, “Computing Machine for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear
Algebraic Equations,” 1940, available online from Iowa State,
http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/img/Computing%20machine . For detailed analysis, see Burks
and Burks, The First Electronic Computer, 7 and passim.
37. Robert Stewart, “The End of the ABC,” Annals of the History of Computing, July 1984;
Mollenhoff, Atanasoff, 73.
38. This section draws on John Mauchly oral history, conducted by Henry Tropp, Jan. 10,
1973, Smithsonian Institution; John Mauchly oral history, conducted by Nancy Stern, May
6, 1977, American Institute of Physics (AIP); Scott McCartney, ENIAC (Walker, 1999);
Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, 1972;
locations refer to Kindle edition); Kathleen Mauchly, “John Mauchly’s Early Years,”
Annals of the History of Computing, Apr. 1984; David Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers
(Simon & Schuster, 1986); Bill Mauchly and others, “The ENIAC” website, http://the-
eniac.com/first/; Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (MIT, 2000); Joel Shurkin,
Engines of the Mind: A History of the Computer (Washington Square Press, 1984).
39. John Costello, “The Twig Is Bent: The Early Life of John Mauchly,” IEEE Annals of the
348

History of Computing, 1996.
40. Mauchly oral history, AIP.
41. Costello, “The Twig Is Bent.”
42. McCartney, ENIAC, 82.
43. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, “The Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Story,”
Mar. 26, 2004, ENIAC website, https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-
mcnulty-mauchly-antonelli; McCartney, ENIAC, 32.
44. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 129; Rheingold, Tools for Thought, 80.
45. McCartney, ENIAC, 34.
46. Kathleen Mauchly, “John Mauchly’s Early Years.”
47. McCartney, ENIAC, 36.
48. Kathleen Mauchly, “John Mauchly’s Early Years.”
49. John Mauchly to H. Helm Clayton, Nov. 15, 1940.
50. John Mauchly to John de Wire, Dec. 4, 1940; Kathleen Mauchly, “John Mauchly’s Early
Years.”
51. Mauchly to Atanasoff, Jan. 19, 1941; Atanasoff to Mauchly, Jan. 23, 1941; Mauchly oral
history, Smithsonian; Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 668.
52. The battle over what happened was fought out in the Annals of the History of Computing,
with multiple articles, comments, and bitter letters. This section and that on the legal battle,
below, derive from them. They include Arthur Burks and Alice Burks, “The ENIAC: First
General-Purpose Electronic Computer,” with comments by John Atanasoff, J. Presper
Eckert, Kathleen R. Mauchly, and Konrad Zuse, and a response by Burks and Burks,
Annals of the History of Computing, Oct. 1981, 310–99 (more than eighty pages of this
issue were devoted to the assertions and rebuttals, prompting some discomfort on the part
of the editors); Kathleen Mauchly, “John Mauchly’s Early Years,” Annals of the History of
Computing, Apr. 1984; John Mauchly, “Mauchly: Unpublished Remarks,” with an
afterword by Arthur Burks and Alice Burks, Annals of the History of Computing, July
1982; Arthur Burks, “Who Invented the General Purpose Computer?” talk at the
University of Michigan, Apr. 2, 1974; James McNulty, letter to the editor, Datamation,
June 1980.
53. Lura Meeks Atanasoff testimony, Sperry v. Honeywell; Burks, Who Invented the
Computer?, 1445.
54. Mollenhoff, Atanasoff, 114.
55. Mauchly oral history, Smithsonian; John Mauchly, “Fireside Chat,” Nov. 13, 1973,
Annals of the History of Computing, July 1982.
56. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 142.
57. Mauchly oral history, Smithsonian.
58. John Mauchly testimony, Sperry v. Honeywell; Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 429.
59. John Mauchly to John Atanasoff, Sept. 30, 1941, Sperry v. Honeywell trial records.
60. Atanasoff to Mauchly, Oct. 7, 1941, Sperry v. Honeywell trial records.
61. In addition to the sources cited below, this section draws from Peter Eckstein, “Presper
Eckert,” Annals of the History of Computing, Spring 1996; J. Presper Eckert oral history,
conducted by Nancy Stern, Oct. 28, 1977, Charles Babbage Institute, University of
Minnesota; Nancy Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC (Digital Press, 1981); J. Presper Eckert,
“Thoughts on the History of Computing,” Computer, Dec. 1976; J. Presper Eckert, “The
ENIAC,” John Mauchly, “The ENIAC,” and Arthur W. Burks, “From ENIAC to the
Stored Program Computer,” all in Nicholas Metropolis et al., editors, A History of
Computing in the Twentieth Century (Academic Press, 1980); Alexander Randall, “A Lost
Interview with Presper Eckert,” Computerworld, Feb. 4, 2006.
62. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
349

63. Eckstein, “Presper Eckert.”
64. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 148.
65. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
66. John W. Mauchly, “The Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating,”
1942, in Brian Randell, editor, The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers
(Springer-Verlag, 1973), 329. See also John G. Brainerd, “Genesis of the ENIAC,”
Technology and Culture, July 1976, 482.
67. Mauchly oral history, Smithsonian; Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von
Neumann, 3169; McCartney, ENIAC, 61.
68. Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 71.
69. McCartney, ENIAC, 89.
70. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
71. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
72. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute; Randall, “A Lost Interview with Presper
Eckert.”
73. Hodges, Alan Turing, 3628.
74. In addition to the Hodges biography, Alan Turing, this section draws on B. Jack
Copeland, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers (Oxford,
2006); I. J. Good, “Early Work on Computers at Bletchley,” Annals of the History of
Computing, July 1979; Tommy Flowers, “The Design of Colossus,” Annals of the History
of Computing, July 1983; Simon Lavington, editor, Alan Turing and His Contemporaries
(BCS, 2012); Sinclair McKay, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The History of the
Wartime Codebreaking Centre by the Men and Women Who Were There (Aurum Press,
2010); and my visit to Bletchley Park and the scholars, tour guides, displays, and material
available there.
75. Randall, “A Lost Interview with Presper Eckert.”
76. The archives for the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand trial. See also Charles E. McTiernan, “The
ENIAC Patent,” Annals of the History of Computing, Apr. 1998.
77. Judge Earl Richard Larson decision, Honeywell v. Sperry Rand.
78. Randall, “A Lost Interview with Presper Eckert.”
CHAPTER THREE: PROGRAMMING
1. Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery,” National Physical Laboratory report, July 1948,
available at http://www.AlanTuring.net/intelligent_machinery.
2. In addition to the sources cited below, this section draws from Kurt Beyer, Grace Hopper
and the Invention of the Information Age (MIT, 2009), and the following trove of Grace
Hopper oral histories: Smithsonian (five sessions), July 1968, Nov. 1968, Jan. 7, 1969,
Feb. 4, 1969, July 5, 1972; the Computer History Museum, Dec. 1980; Grace Hopper
interview, Sept. 1982, Women in Federal Government oral history project, Radcliffe
Institute, Harvard.
3. Kurt Beyer mistakenly calls her the first to get a math doctorate from Yale. Charlotte
Barnum was the first in 1895, and there were ten before Hopper. See Judy Green and
Jeanne LaDuke, Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The pre-1940 PhDs
(American Mathematical Society, 2009), 53; Beyer, Grace Hopper, 25 and 26.
4. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, July 5, 1972.
5. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, July 1968; Rosario Rausa, “In Profile, Grace Murray
Hopper,” Naval History, Fall 1992.
6. Hopper oral histories (she told the same story), Computer History Museum and
Smithsonian, July 5, 1972.
7. The Staff of the Harvard Computation Library [Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken], A
Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard, 1946).
350

8. Grace Hopper oral history, Computer History Museum.
9. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 130.
10. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 135.
11. Richard Bloch oral history, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
12. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 53.
13. Grace Hopper and Richard Bloch panel discussion comments, Aug. 30, 1967, in Henry S.
Tropp, “The 20th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery,”
IEEE Annals, July 1987.
14. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 5.
15. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, July 5, 1972.
16. Howard Aiken oral history, conducted by Henry Tropp and I. Bernard Cohen,
Smithsonian Institution, Feb. 1973.
17. Grace Hopper and John Mauchly, “Influence of Programming Techniques on the Design
of Computers,” Proceedings of the IRE, Oct. 1953.
18. Harvard computer log, Sept. 9, 1947,
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96566k .
19. Grace Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Nov. 1968.
20. The Moore School Lectures, Charles Babbage Institute, reprint (MIT Press, 1985).
21. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Nov. 1968.
22. In addition to the sources cited below, this section draws on Jean Jennings Bartik, Pioneer
Programmer (Truman State, 2013; locations refer to the Kindle edition); Jean Bartik oral
history, conducted by Gardner Hendrie, Computer History Museum, July 1, 2008; Jean
Bartik oral history, conducted by Janet Abbate, IEEE Global History Network, Aug. 3,
2001; Steve Lohr, “Jean Bartik, Software Pioneer, Dies at 86,” New York Times, Apr. 7,
2011; Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture, July
1999.
23. Jordynn Jack, Science on the Home Front: American Women Scientists in World War II
(University of Illinois, 2009), 3.
24. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1282.
25. W. Barkley Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing,
Fall 1996.
26. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”
27. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1493. See also LeAnn Erickson, “Top Secret
Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII” (Video, PBS, 2002); Bill Mauchly, ENIAC
website, https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/; Thomas Petzinger Jr., “History of
Software Begins with Work of Some Brainy Women,” Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 1996.
Kathy Kleiman helped bring recognition to the women programmers after first meeting
them when researching her Harvard undergraduate thesis on women in computing in 1986,
and she coproduced a twenty-minute documentary called The Computers, which premiered
in 2014. See ENIAC Programmers Project website, http://eniacprogrammers.org/.
28. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, “The Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli Story,”
ENIAC website, https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/kay-mcnulty-mauchly-
antonelli.
29. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”
30. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1480.
31. Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention (Rutgers, 1995), 443.
32. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”
33. Oral history of Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton, conducted by Henry
Tropp, Smithsonian, Apr. 27, 1973.
34. Jennings Bartik oral history, Computer History Museum.
351

35. Jennings Bartik oral history, Computer History Museum.
36. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 557.
37. Eckert and Mauchly, “Progress Report on ENIAC,” Dec. 31, 1943, in Nancy Stern, From
ENIAC to UNIVAC (Digital Press, 1981).
38. John Mauchly, “Amending the ENIAC Story,” letter to the editor of Datamation, Oct.
1979.
39. Presper Eckert, “Disclosure of a Magnetic Calculating Machine,” Jan. 29, 1944,
declassified trial exhibit, in Don Knuth archives, Computer History Museum; Mark
Priestley, A Science of Operations (Springer, 2011), 127; Stern, From ENIAC to UNIVAC,
28.
40. In addition to specific notes below, this section draws on William Aspray, John von
Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (MIT, 1990); Nancy Stern, “John von
Neumann’s Influence on Electronic Digital Computing, 1944–1946,” IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing, Oct.–Dec. 1980; Stanislaw Ulam, “John von Neumann,” Bulletin of
the American Mathematical Society, Feb. 1958; George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral
(Random House, 2012; locations refer to Kindle edition); Herman Goldstine, The
Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, 1972; locations refer to Kindle
edition).
41. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 41.
42. Nicholas Vonneumann, “John von Neumann as Seen by His Brother” (Privately printed,
1987), 22, excerpted as “John von Neumann: Formative Years,” IEEE Annals, Fall 1989.
43. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 45.
44. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3550.
45. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1305.
46. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1395.
47. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Jan. 7, 1969.
48. Bloch oral history, Feb. 22, 1984, Charles Babbage Institute.
49. Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon (MIT Press, 1987), 88; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the
Invention of the Information Age, 9.
50. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3634.
51. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3840.
52. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 199; Goldstine to Gillon, Sept. 2,
1944; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, 120. See also John
Mauchly, “Amending the ENIAC Story,” letter to the editor of Datamation, Oct. 1979;
Arthur W. Burks, “From ENIAC to the Stored Program Computer,” in Nicholas
Metropolis et al., editors, A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century (Academic
Press, 1980).
53. Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton oral history, Smithsonian, Apr. 27,
1973.
54. McCartney, ENIAC, 116.
55. Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton oral history, Smithsonian, Apr. 27,
1973.
56. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 53.
57. Burks, Who Invented the Computer?, 161; Norman Macrae, John von Neumann
(American Mathematical Society, 1992), 281.
58. Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers, 178.
59. Presper Eckert oral history, conducted by Nancy Stern, Charles Babbage Institute, Oct.
28, 1977; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1952.
60. John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” U.S. Army Ordnance
Department and the University of Pennsylvania, June 30, 1945. The report is available at
352

http://www.virtualtravelog.net/wp/wp-content/media/2003-08-TheFirstDraft .
61. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1957. See also Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of
Modern Computing.
62. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute. See also McCartney, ENIAC, 125, quoting
Eckert: “We were clearly suckered by John von Neumann, who succeeded in some circles
at getting my ideas called the ‘von Neumann architecture.’ ”
63. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 518.
64. Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr, “The Patent, Used as a Sword,” New York Times, Oct. 7,
2012.
65. McCartney, ENIAC, 103.
66. C. Dianne Martin, “ENIAC: The Press Conference That Shook the World,” IEEE
Technology and Society, Dec. 1995.
67. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1878.
68. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”
69. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 1939.
70. Jean Jennings Bartik and Betty Snyder Holberton oral history, Smithsonian, Apr. 27,
1973.
71. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 672, 1964, 1995, 1959.
72. T. R Kennedy, “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 1946.
73. McCartney, ENIAC, 107.
74. Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 2026, 2007.
75. Jean Jennings Bartik oral history, Computer History Museum.
76. McCartney, ENIAC, 132.
77. Steven Henn, “The Night a Computer Predicted the Next President,” NPR, Oct. 31, 2012;
Alex Bochannek, “Have You Got a Prediction for Us, UNIVAC?” Computer History
Museum, http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/have-you-got-a-prediction-for-us-
univac/. Some reports say that CBS did not air the Eisenhower prediction because
preelection polls had predicted that Stevenson would win. This is not true; polls had
predicted an Eisenhower win.
78. Hopper oral history, Computer History Museum, Dec. 1980.
79. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 277.
80. Von Neumann to Stanley Frankel, Oct. 29, 1946; Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind
(Washington Square Press, 1984), 204; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 1980; Stern, “John von
Neumann’s Influence on Electronic Digital Computing.”
81. Eckert oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
82. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 5077.
83. Crispin Rope, “ENIAC as a Stored-Program Computer: A New Look at the Old
Records,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Oct. 2007; Dyson, Turing’s
Cathedral, 4429.
84. Fritz, “The Women of ENIAC.”
85. Maurice Wilkes, “How Babbage’s Dream Came True,” Nature, Oct. 1975.
86. Hodges, Alan Turing, 10622.
87. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 2024. See also Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von
Neumann, 5376.
88. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 6092.
89. Hodges, Alan Turing, 6972.
90. Alan Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society,” Feb. 20, 1947, available at
http://www.turingarchive.org/; Hodges, Alan Turing, 9687.
91. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 5921.
92. Geoffrey Jefferson, “The Mind of Mechanical Man,” Lister Oration, June 9, 1949, Turing
353

Archive, http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/44.
93. Hodges, Alan Turing, 10983.
94. For an online version, see http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html.
95. John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980. See
also “The Chinese Room Argument,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/.
96. Hodges, Alan Turing, 11305; Max Newman, “Alan Turing, An Appreciation,” the
Manchester Guardian, June 11, 1954.
97. M. H. A. Newman, Alan M. Turing, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, and R. B. Braithwaite, “Can
Automatic Calculating Machines Be Said to Think?” 1952 BBC broadcast, reprinted in
Stuart Shieber, editor, The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence
(MIT, 2004); Hodges, Alan Turing, 12120.
98. Hodges, Alan Turing, 12069.
99. Hodges, Alan Turing, 12404. For discussions of Turing’s suicide and character, see Robin
Gandy, unpublished obituary of Alan Turing for the Times, and other items in the Turing
Archives, http://www.turingarchive.org/. His mother, Sara, liked to believe that Turing’s
suicide was actually an accident caused when he was using cyanide to gold-plate a spoon.
She sent to his archive a spoon she found in his lab with her note, “This is the spoon which
I found in Alan Turing’s laboratory. It is similar to the one which he gold-plated himself. It
seems quite probable he was intending to gold-plate this one using cyanide of potassium of
his own manufacture.” Exhibit AMT/A/12, Turing Archive,
http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/A/12.
CHAPTER FOUR: THE TRANSISTOR
1. Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
(Penguin, 2012; locations refer to the Kindle edition). In addition to specific citations
below, sources for this section include Joel Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of
William Shockley (Macmillan, 2006; locations refer to the Kindle edition); Lillian
Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch, True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen (National
Academies, 2002); Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of
the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (Norton, 1998); William Shockley,
“The Invention of the Transistor—An Example of Creative-Failure Methodology,”
National Bureau of Standards Special Publication, May 1974, 47–89; William Shockley,
“The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor,” IEEE Transactions of Electron
Device, July 1976; David Pines, “John Bardeen,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, Sept. 2009; “Special Issue: John Bardeen,” Physics Today, Apr.
1992, with remembrances by seven of his colleagues; John Bardeen, “Semiconductor
Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor,” Nobel Prize lecture, Dec. 11, 1956;
John Bardeen, “Walter Houser Brattain: A Biographical Memoir,” National Academy of
Sciences, 1994; Transistorized!, PBS, transcripts and interviews, 1999,
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/index.html; William Shockley oral history, American
Institute of Physics (AIP), Sept. 10, 1974; Oral History of Shockley Semiconductor,
Computer History Museum, Feb. 27, 2006; John Bardeen oral history, AIP, May 12, 1977;
Walter Brattain oral history, AIP, Jan. 1964.
2. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 2255.
3. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 2547.
4. John Pierce, “Mervin Joe Kelly: 1894–1971,” National Academy of Sciences, Biographical
Memoirs, 1975, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-
pdfs/kelly-mervin ; Gertner, The Idea Factory, 2267.
5. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 178.
6. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 231.
354

7. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 929; Lillian Hoddeson, “The Discovery of the Point-Contact
Transistor,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12, no. 1 (1981): 76.
8. John Pierce interview, Transistorized!, PBS, 1999.
9. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 935; Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction
Transistor.”
10. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1022.
11. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1266.
12. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1336.
13. Brattain oral history, AIP.
14. Pines, “John Bardeen.”
15. Bardeen, “Walter Houser Brattain.”
16. Brattain oral history, AIP.
17. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 126.
18. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor”; Michael Riordan,
“The Lost History of the Transistor,” IEEE Spectrum, May 2004.
19. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 121.
20. Brattain oral history, AIP.
21. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 131.
22. Bardeen, “Semiconductor Research Leading to the Point Contact Transistor,” Nobel Prize
lecture.
23. Brattain oral history, AIP.
24. Brattain oral history, AIP.
25. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 1876.
26. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 4, 137.
27. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 139.
28. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 1934.
29. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”
30. Brattain oral history, AIP.
31. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 148.
32. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”
33. Shockley, “The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor.”
34. Shockley, “The Invention of the Transistor”; Gertner, The Idea Factory, 1717.
35. Brattain interview, “Naming the Transistor,” PBS, 1999; Pierce interview, PBS, 1999.
36. Mervin Kelly, “The First Five Years of the Transistor,” Bell Telephone magazine,
Summer 1953.
37. Nick Holonyak oral history, AIP, Mar. 23, 2005.
38. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 207; Mark Burgess, “Early Semiconductor History
of Texas Instruments,” https://sites.google.com/site/transistorhistory/Home/us-
semiconductor-manufacturers/ti.
39. Gordon Teal talk, “Announcing the Transistor,” Texas Instruments strategic planning
conference, Mar. 17, 1980.
40. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 211; Regency TR1 manual,
http://www.regencytr1.com/images/Owners%20Manual%20-%20TR-1G .
41. T. R. Reid, The Chip (Simon & Schuster, 1984; locations refer to the Kindle edition),
2347.
42. Regency trivia page, http://www.regencytr1.com/TRivia_CORNER.html.
43. Brattain oral history, AIP.
44. John Bardeen to Mervin Kelly, May 25, 1951; Ronald Kessler, “Absent at the Creation,”
Washington Post magazine, Apr. 6, 1997; Pines, “John Bardeen.”
45. Gertner, The Idea Factory, 3059; Shurkin, Broken Genius, 2579.
355

46. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 231 and passim.
47. Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers, Arnold O. Beckman: One Hundred Years of
Excellence, vol. 1 (Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2000), 6.
48. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9.
49. Sources for the passages on Silicon Valley include Leslie Berlin’s The Man Behind the
Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley (Oxford, 2005; locations
refer to the Kindle edition), 1332 and passim. Berlin is the project historian for the Silicon
Valley Archives at Stanford and is writing a book on the rise of Silicon Valley. Also:
Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford
(University of California, 1997); Michael Malone, The Intel Trinity (HarperBusiness,
2014), Infinite Loop (Doubleday, 1999), The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon
Valley (Doubleday, 1985), The Valley of Heart’s Delight: A Silicon Valley Notebook,
1963–2001 (Wiley, 2002), Bill and Dave (Portfolio, 2007); Christophe Lécuyer, Making
Silicon Valley (MIT, 2007); C. Stewart Gillmore, Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a
Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley (Stanford, 2004); Margaret Pugh O’Mara,
Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley
(Princeton, 2005); Thomas Heinrich, “Cold War Armory: Military Contracting in Silicon
Valley,” Enterprise & Society, June 1, 2002; Steve Blank, “The Secret History of Silicon
Valley,” http://steveblank.com/secret-history/.
50. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 1246; Reid, The Chip, 1239. In addition to these
two sources and those cited below, the section draws on my interviews with Gordon
Moore and Andy Grove; Shurkin, Broken Genius; Michael Malone, The Intel Trinity
(Harpers, 2014); Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, Dec. 1983; Bo
Lojek, History of Semiconductor Engineering (Springer, 2007); notebooks and items in the
Computer History Museum; Robert Noyce oral history, conducted by Michael F. Wolff,
IEEE History Center, Sept. 19, 1975; Gordon Moore oral history, conducted by Michael F.
Wolff, IEEE History Center, Sept. 19, 1975; Gordon Moore oral history, conducted by
Daniel Morrow, Computerworld Honors Program, Mar. 28, 2000; Gordon Moore and Jay
Last oral history, conducted by David Brock and Christophe Lécuyer, Chemical Heritage
Foundation, Jan. 20, 2006; Gordon Moore oral history, conducted by Craig Addison,
SEMI, Jan. 25, 2008; Gordon Moore interview, conducted by Jill Wolfson and Teo
Cervantes, San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 26, 1997; Gordon Moore, “Intel: Memories and
the Microprocessor,” Daedalus, Spring 1966.
51. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 2980, from Fred Warshorfsky, The Chip War (Scribner’s Sons,
1989).
52. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 276.
53. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 432, 434.
54. Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.”
55. Robert Noyce interview, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013; Malone, The Big Score, 74.
56. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 552; Malone, Intel Trinity, 81.
57. Leslie Berlin writes that the transistors did not arrive until 1950, after Noyce graduated:
“[Bell’s research head] Buckley did not have any devices to spare, but he did send Gale
copies of several technical monographs that Bell Labs had written on the transistor. These
monographs formed the basis of Noyce’s initial exposure to the device. No textbooks
addressed transistors, and (although prevailing mythology claims otherwise) Bell Labs did
not ship Gale a transistor until after Noyce graduated” (The Man Behind the Microchip,
650). Berlin cites as her source for this a March 1984 letter written by Professor Gale to a
friend; Berlin writes in an endnote, “Gale mentions an ‘attached original shipping invoice
[for the transistors, sent from Bardeen to Gale] dated March 6, 1950’ (now lost).” Berlin’s
reporting conflicts with Noyce’s recollections. Noyce’s quote that “Grant Gale got hold of
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one of the first point contact transistors . . . during my junior year” is from Noyce’s
September 1975 IEEE History Center oral history, cited above. Tom Wolfe’s Esquire
profile of Noyce, based on his visits with Noyce, reports, “By the fall of 1948 Gale had
obtained two of the first transistors ever made, and he presented the first academic
instruction in solid-state electronics available anywhere in the world, for the benefit of the
eighteen students [including Noyce] majoring in physics at Grinnell College” (“The
Tinkerings of Robert Noyce”). Reid, The Chip, 1226, based on his 1982 interviews with
Robert Noyce, writes, “Gale had been a classmate of John Bardeen in the engineering
school at the University of Wisconsin, and thus he was able to obtain one of the first
transistors and demonstrate it to his students. It was not a lecture the student was to forget.
‘It hit me like the atom bomb,’ Noyce recalled forty years later.” Bardeen and other
engineers at Bell Labs did send out many transistor samples to academic institutions that
requested them beginning in July 1948.
58. Reid, The Chip, 1266; Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 1411.
59. Gordon Moore interview, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
60. Author’s interview with Gordon Moore.
61. Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 239.
62. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 1469.
63. Jay Last interview, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
64. Malone, Intel Trinity, 107.
65. Jay Last interview, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013; Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip,
1649; Riordan and Hoddeson, Crystal Fire, 246.
66. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 1641.
67. Shurkin, Broken Genius, 3118.
68. Author’s interview with Gordon Moore.
69. Arnold Beckman oral history, conducted by Jeffrey L. Sturchio and Arnold Thackray,
Chemical Heritage Foundation, July 23, 1985.
70. Gordon Moore and Jay Last interviews, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
71. Regis McKenna and Michael Malone interviews, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
72. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 1852; author’s interview with Arthur Rock.
73. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock.
74. Arthur Rock interview, “Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013; author’s interview and papers
provided to me by Arthur Rock.
75. “Multifarious Sherman Fairchild,” Fortune, May 1960; “Yankee Tinkerer” (cover story
on Sherman Fairchild), Time, July 25, 1960.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE MICROCHIP
1. In addition to the sources cited below, this section draws from Jack Kilby, “Turning
Potentials into Realities,” Nobel Prize lecture, Dec. 8, 2000; Jack Kilby, “Invention of the
Integrated Circuit,” IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, July 1976; T. R. Reid, The
Chip (Simon & Schuster, 1984; locations refer to the Kindle edition).
2. Jack Kilby, biographical essay, Nobel Prize organization, 2000.
3. Reid, The Chip, 954.
4. Reid, The Chip, 921.
5. Reid, The Chip, 1138.
6. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 2386. The Fairchild notebooks are being preserved
and are on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
7. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 2515.
8. Robert Noyce oral history, IEEE.
9. Reid, The Chip, 1336; Robert Noyce oral history, IEEE.
10. Robert Noyce journal entry, Jan. 23, 1959, Computer History Museum, Mountain View,
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California. For a picture of the page, see http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-relics-
of-st-bob/.
11. J. S. Kilby, “Capacitor for Miniature Electronic Circuits or the Like,” patent application
US 3434015 A, Feb. 6, 1959; Reid, The Chip, 1464.
12. R. N. Noyce, “Semiconductor Device-and-Lead Structure,” patent application US
2981877 A, July 30, 1959; Reid, The Chip, 1440.
13. Reid, The Chip, 1611 and passim.
14. Noyce v. Kilby, U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, Nov. 6, 1969.
15. Reid, The Chip, 1648.
16. Jack Kilby oral history, conducted by Arthur L. Norberg, Charles Babbage Institute,
University of Minnesota, June 21, 1984.
17. Craig Matsumoto, “The Quiet Jack Kilby,” Valley Wonk column, Heavy Reading, June
23, 2005.
18. Reid, The Chip, 3755, 3775; Jack Kilby, Nobel Prize lecture, Dec. 8, 2000.
19. Paul Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 1998), 187.
20. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing, chapter 6.
21. Reid, The Chip, 2363, 2443.
22. Robert Noyce, “Microelectronics,” Scientific American, Sept. 1977.
23. Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics,
Apr. 1965.
24. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 3177.
25. Gordon Moore interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
26. Author’s interview with Gordon Moore.
27. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 3529.
28. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock.
29. John Wilson, The New Venturers (Addison-Wesley, 1985), chapter 2.
30. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock; David Kaplan, The Silicon Boys (Morrow, 1999),
165 and passim.
31. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock.
32. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock.
33. Malone, Intel Trinity, 4, 8.
34. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 4393.
35. Andrew Grove, Swimming Across (Grand Central, 2001), 2. This section is also based on
author’s interviews and conversations with Grove over the years and on Joshua Ramo,
“Man of the Year: A Survivor’s Tale,” Time, Dec. 29, 1997; Richard Tedlow, Andy Grove
(Portfolio, 2006).
36. Tedlow, Andy Grove, 92.
37. Tedlow, Andy Grove, 96.
38. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 129.
39. Andrew Grove interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
40. Tedlow, Andy Grove, 74; Andy Grove oral history conducted by Arnold Thackray and
David C. Brock, July 14 and Sept. 1, 2004, Chemical Heritage Foundation.
41. Author’s interview with Arthur Rock.
42. Michael Malone interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
43. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 4400.
44. Ann Bowers interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
45. Ted Hoff interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
46. Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.”
47. Malone, Intel Trinity, 115.
48. Author’s interview with Gordon Moore.
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49. Malone, Intel Trinity, 130.
50. Ann Bowers interview, “American Experience”; author’s interview with Ann Bowers.
51. Reid, The Chip, 140; Malone, Holy Trinity, 148.
52. Ted Hoff interview, “American Experience: Silicon Valley,” PBS, 2013.
53. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 4329.
54. Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, 4720.
55. Don Hoefler, “Silicon Valley USA,” Electronic News, Jan. 11, 1971.
CHAPTER SIX: VIDEO GAMES
1. Steven Levy, Hackers (Anchor/Doubleday, 1984; locations refer to the twenty-fifth
anniversary reissue, O’Reilly, 2010), 28. In this classic and influential book, which begins
with a detailed account of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club, Levy describes a “hacker
ethic” that includes the following: “Access to computers—and anything else which might
teach you about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to
the Hands-On Imperative!” In addition to Levy’s book and specific sources cited below,
sources for this chapter include author’s interviews with Steve Russell and Stewart Brand;
Steve Russell oral history, conducted by Al Kossow, Aug. 9, 2008, Computer History
Museum; J. Martin Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar,” Creative Computing, Aug. 1981;
Stewart Brand, “Spacewar,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.
2. Levy, Hackers, 7.
3. “Definition of Hackers,” website of the Tech Model Railroad Club,
http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html.
4. Brand, “Spacewar.”
5. Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar.”
6. Steve Russell oral history, Computer History Museum; Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar.”
7. Author’s interview with Steve Russell.
8. Graetz, “The Origin of Spacewar.”
9. Brand, “Spacewar.”
10. Author’s interview with Steve Russell.
11. Sources for this section include author’s interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn,
Steve Jobs (for previous book), and Steve Wozniak; Tristan Donovan, Replay: The Story
of Video Games (Yellow Ant, 2010; locations refer to the Kindle edition); Steven Kent,
The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon (Three Rivers, 2001); Scott
Cohen, Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari (McGraw-Hill, 1984); Henry Lowood,
“Videogames in Computer Space: The Complex History of Pong,” IEEE Annals, July
2009; John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005, locations refer to the Kindle
edition); Al Alcorn interview, Retro Gaming Roundup, May 2011; Al Alcorn interview,
conducted by Cam Shea, IGN, Mar. 10, 2008.
12. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 12.
13. Author’s interview with Nolan Bushnell.
14. Nolan Bushnell talk to young entrepreneurs, Los Angeles, May 17, 2013 (author’s notes).
15. Donovan, Replay, 429.
16. Donovan, Replay, 439.
17. Eddie Adlum, quoted in Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 42.
18. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games, 45.
19. Author’s interview with Nolan Bushnell.
20. Author’s interview with Nolan Bushnell.
21. Author’s interview with Al Alcorn.
22. Donovan, Replay, 520.
23. Author’s interviews with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn. This tale is told in much the
same way in other sources, often with a few embellishments.
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24. Author’s interview with Nolan Bushnell.
25. Nolan Bushnell talk to young entrepreneurs, Los Angeles, May 17, 2013.
26. Author’s interview with Nolan Bushnell.
27. Donovan, Replay, 664.
28. Author’s interview with Nolan Bushnell.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE INTERNET
1. Sources for Vannevar Bush include Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (Morrow, 1970);
Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
(MIT, 1999); “Yankee Scientist,” Time cover story, Apr. 3, 1944; Jerome Weisner,
“Vannevar Bush: A Biographical Memoir,” National Academy of Sciences, 1979; James
Nyce and Paul Kahn, editors, From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind’s
Machine (Academic Press, 1992); Jennet Conant, Tuxedo Park (Simon & Schuster, 2002);
Vannevar Bush oral history, American Institute of Physics, 1964.
2. Weisner, “Vannevar Bush.”
3. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 23.
4. Time, Apr. 3, 1944.
5. Time, Apr. 3, 1944.
6. Bush, Pieces of the Action, 41.
7. Weisner, “Vannevar Bush.”
8. Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (National Science Foundation, July 1945),
vii.
9. Bush, Science, 10.
10. Bush, Pieces of the Action, 65.
11. Joseph V. Kennedy, “The Sources and Uses of U.S. Science Funding,” The New Atlantis,
Summer 2012.
12. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made
Computing Personal (Penguin, 2001), 470. Other sources for this section include author’s
interviews with Tracy Licklider (son), Larry Roberts, and Bob Taylor; Katie Hafner and
Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Simon &
Schuster, 1998); J. C. R. Licklider oral history, conducted by William Aspray and Arthur
Norberg, Oct. 28, 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; J. C. R.
Licklider interview, conducted by James Pelkey, “A History of Computer
Communications,” June 28, 1988 (Pelkey’s material is only online,
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/index.html); Robert M. Fano, Joseph
Carl Robnett Licklider 1915–1990, a Biographical Memoir (National Academies Press,
1998).
13. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
14. Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist’s Dilemma in a Materialistic World” (1957), in Collected
Works, vol. 4 (MIT, 1984), 709.
15. Author’s interview with Tracy Licklider.
16. Author’s interview with Tracy Licklider.
17. Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 237.
18. Bob Taylor, “In Memoriam: J. C. R. Licklider,” Aug. 7, 1990, Digital Equipment
Corporation publication.
19. J. C. R. Licklider interview, conducted by John A. N. Lee and Robert Rosin, “The Project
MAC Interviews,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Apr. 1992.
20. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
21. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
22. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in
Electronics, Mar. 1960, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html.
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23. David Walden and Raymond Nickerson, editors, A Culture of Innovation: Insider
Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN (privately printed at the Harvard bookstore,
2011), see http://walden-family.com/bbn/.
24. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
25. J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (MIT, 1965), 53.
26. Licklider, Libraries of the Future, 4.
27. Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report (Harper, 1961), 415; Hafner and Lyon, Where
Wizards Stay Up Late, 17.
28. James Killian interview, “War and Peace,” WGBH, Apr. 18, 1986; James Killian,
Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower (MIT, 1982), 20.
29. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago, 2006), 108.
30. Licklider oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
31. Licklider interview, conducted by James Pelkey; see also James Pelkey, “Entrepreneurial
Capitalism and Innovation,”
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/2/2.1-
IntergalacticNetwork_1962-1964.html#_ftn1.
32. J. C. R. Licklider, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic
Computer Network,” ARPA, Apr. 23, 1963. See also J. C. R. Licklider and Welden Clark,
“Online Man-Computer Communications,” Proceedings of AIEE-IRE, Spring 1962.
33. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
34. Author’s interview with Larry Roberts.
35. Bob Taylor oral history, Computer History Museum, 2008; author’s interview with Bob
Taylor.
36. Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning (Harper, 1999; locations refer to the Kindle
edition), 536. 530.
37. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
38. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
39. Robert Taylor oral history, Computer History Museum; author’s interview with Bob
Taylor; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 86.
40. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 591, has the fullest description of this
meeting. See also Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 1120; Kleinrock oral history, “How the
Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008.
41. Charles Herzfeld interview with Andreu Vea, “The Unknown History of the Internet,”
2010, http://www.computer.org/comphistory/pubs/2010-11-vea .
42. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
43. Author’s interview with Larry Roberts.
44. Author’s interview with Larry Roberts.
45. As with the tale of Herzfeld funding ARPANET after a twenty-minute meeting, this story
of Taylor recruiting Roberts down to Washington has been oft-told. This version comes
from author’s interviews with Taylor and Roberts; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay
Up Late, 667; Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1 (TV Books, 1998), 47; Bob Taylor oral
history, Computer History Museum; Larry Roberts, “The Arpanet and Computer
Networks,” Proceedings of the ACM Conference on the History of Personal Workstations,
Jan. 9, 1986.
46. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
47. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
48. Author’s interview with Larry Roberts.
49. Larry Roberts oral history, Charles Babbage Institute.
50. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
51. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (MIT, 1999), 1012; Larry Roberts oral history,
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Charles Babbage Institute.
52. Wes Clark oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, May 3, 1990, Charles Babbage
Institute.
53. There are differing versions of this story, including some that say it was a taxi ride. Bob
Taylor insists it was in a car he had rented. Author’s interviews with Bob Taylor and Larry
Roberts; Robert Taylor oral history, conducted by Paul McJones, Oct. 2008, Computer
History Museum; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1054; Segaller, Nerds,
62.
54. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf.
55. Paul Baran, “On Distributed Computer Networks,” IEEE Transactions on
Communications Systems, Mar. 1964. This section on Baran draws on John Naughton, A
Brief History of the Future (Overlook, 2000), chapter 6; Abbate, Inventing the Internet,
314 and passim; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 723, 1119.
56. Paul Baran interview, in James Pelkey, “Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation,”
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/2/2.4-Paul%20Baran-59-
65.html#_ftn9.
57. Paul Baran oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008; interview
with Paul Baran, by Stewart Brand, Wired, Mar. 2001; Paul Baran oral history, conducted
by David Hochfelder, Oct. 24, 1999, IEEE History Center; Clayton Christensen, The
Innovator’s Dilemma (Harper, 1997).
58. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,” Computer
Journal, British Computer Society, 2001; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 558; author’s
interview with Larry Roberts; Trevor Harris, “Who Is the Father of the Internet? The Case
for Donald Davies,” http://www.academia.edu.
59. Author’s interview with Leonard Kleinrock; Leonard Kleinrock oral history, conducted
by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Feb. 21, 2004.
60. Author’s interview with Leonard Kleinrock.
61. Kleinrock oral history, IEEE.
62. Segaller, Nerds, 34.
63. Author’s interviews with Kleinrock, Roberts; see also Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards
Stay Up Late, 1009; Segaller, Nerds, 53.
64. Leonard Kleinrock, “Information Flow in Large Communications Nets,” proposal for a
PhD thesis, MIT, May 31, 1961. See also Leonard Kleinrock, Communication Nets:
Stochastic Message Flow and Design (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
65. Leonard Kleinrock personal website, http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/index.html.
66. Leonard Kleinrock, “Memoirs of the Sixties,” in Peter Salus, The ARPANET Sourcebook
(Peer-to-Peer, 2008), 96.
67. Leonard Kleinrock interview, Computing Now, IEEE Computer Society, 1996. Kleinrock
is quoted in Peter Salus, Casting the Net (Addison-Wesley, 1995), 52: “I was the first to
discuss the performance gains to be had by packet switching.”
68. Author’s interview with Taylor.
69. Author’s interview with Kleinrock.
70. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,” Computer
Journal, British Computer Society, 2001.
71. Alex McKenzie, “Comments on Dr. Leonard Kleinrock’s Claim to Be ‘the Father of
Modern Data Networking,’ ” Aug. 16, 2009, http://alexmckenzie.weebly.com/comments-
on-kleinrocks-claims.html.
72. Katie Hafner, “A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers,” New York Times, Nov. 8,
2001; Les Earnest, “Birthing the Internet,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 2001. Earnest
minimizes the distinction between a “store and forward” system and a “packet switch” one.
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73. Leonard Kleinrock, “Principles and Lessons in Packet Communications,” Proceedings of
the IEEE, Nov. 1978.
74. Kleinrock oral history, Charles Babbage Institute, Apr. 3, 1990.
75. Leonard Kleinrock, “On Resource Sharing in a Distributed Communication
Environment,” IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2002. One loyalist did support
Kleinrock’s claims: his longtime friend, casino mate, and colleague Larry Roberts. “If you
read Len’s 1964 book, it’s clear that he’s breaking files into message units,” Roberts told
me in 2014. However, like Kleinrock, Roberts had previously given primary credit for
packet switching to Baran. Roberts wrote in 1978, “The first published description of what
we now call packet switching was an 11-volume analysis, On Distributed
Communications, prepared by Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation in August 1964.” See
Lawrence Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Nov.
1978.
76. Paul Baran oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008.
77. Paul Baran interview, by Stewart Brand, Wired, Mar. 2001.
78. Paul Baran, “Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks,” RAND, 1964,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420/RM3420-chapter1.html.
79. Segaller, Nerds, 70.
80. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor. I was an editor of Time and remember the dispute.
81. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine (Viking, 2001), 279.
82. Stephen Lukasik, “Why the ARPANET Was Built,” IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing, Mar. 2011; Stephen Lukasik oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Charles
Babbage Institute, Oct. 17, 1991.
83. Charles Herzfeld, “On ARPANET and Computers,” undated,
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Charles_Herzfeld.htm.
84. “A Brief History of the Internet,” Internet Society, Oct. 15, 2012,
http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-
internet.
85. “NSFNET: A Partnership for High-Speed Networking: Final Report,” 1995,
http://www.merit.edu/documents/pdf/nsfnet/nsfnet_report .
86. Author’s interview with Steve Crocker.
87. Author’s interview with Leonard Kleinrock.
88. Author’s interview with Robert Taylor.
89. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf; Radia Joy Perlman, “Network Layer Protocols with
Byzantine Robustness,” PhD dissertation, MIT, 1988,
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/14403.
90. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 180.
91. Author’s interview with Taylor.
92. Larry Roberts interview, conducted by James Pelkey,
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/2/2.9-BoltBeranekNewman-
WinningBid-68%20.html#_ftn26.
93. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1506 and passim.
94. Pelkey, “A History of Computer Communications,”
http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/index.html, 2.9; Hafner and Lyon,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1528.
95. The tale of Steve Crocker’s RFCs has been told in many variations. This account comes
from my interviews with Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock; Hafner and Lyon,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2192 and passim; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 1330 and
passim; Stephen Crocker oral history, conducted by Judy E. O’Neill, Oct. 24, 1991,
Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; Stephen Crocker, “How the Internet
363

Got Its Rules,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 2009; Cade Metz, “Meet the Man Who Invented
the Instructions for the Internet,” Wired, May 18, 2012; Steve Crocker, “The Origins of
RFCs,” in “The Request for Comments Guide,” RFC 1000, Aug. 1987, http://www.rfc-
editor.org/rfc/rfc1000.txt; Steve Crocker, “The First Pebble: Publication of RFC 1,” RFC
2555, Apr. 7, 1999.
96. Author’s interview with Steve Crocker.
97. Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules.”
98. Stephen Crocker, “Host Software,” RFC 1, Apr. 7, 1969, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1.
99. Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules.”
100. Vint Cerf, “The Great Conversation,” RFC 2555, Apr. 7, 1999, http://www.rfc-
editor.org/rfc/rfc2555.txt.
101. “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970,” Kleinrock Center for Internet Studies,
UCLA, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/the-imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970/; Segaller,
Nerds, 92; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2336.
102. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Daniel Morrow, Nov. 21, 2001, Computerworld
Honors Program; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2070 and passim;
Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 127 and passim.
103. Cerf oral history, Computerworld.
104. Robert Kahn oral history, conducted by Michael Geselowitz, Feb. 17, 2004, IEEE
History Center.
105. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Apr. 24, 1990, Charles Babbage
Institute; Vint Cerf, “How the Internet Came to Be,” Nov. 1993,
http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html.
106. Robert Kahn oral history, conducted by David Allison, Apr. 20, 1995, Computerworld
Honors Program.
107. “The Poems,” RFC 1121, Sept. 1989.
108. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf.
109. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1163.
110. David D. Clark, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball,” MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, July
1992, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/People/DDC/future_ietf_92 .
111. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device,”
Science and Technology, Apr. 1968.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PERSONAL COMPUTER
1. Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945.
2. Dave Ahl, who was at the meeting, said, “It fell to Ken Olsen to make a decision. I’ll never
forget his fateful words, “I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his
own.” John Anderson, “Dave Tells Ahl,” Creative Computing, Nov. 1984. For Olsen’s
defense, see http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp, but this piece does not address
Ahl’s assertion that he made the statement when discussing with his staff whether a
personal version of the PDP-8 should be developed.
3. In 1995, Stewart Brand wrote an essay for Time, which I had assigned, called “We Owe it
All to the Hippies.” It stressed the role of the counterculture in the birth of the personal
computer. This chapter also draws on five well-reported and insightful books about how
the counterculture helped to shape the personal computer revolution: Steven Levy,
Hackers (Anchor/Doubleday, 1984; locations refer to the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue,
O’Reilly, 2010); Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley (Osborne, 1984);
John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005, locations refer to the Kindle
edition); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago,
2006); Theodore Roszak, From Satori to Silicon Valley (Don’t Call It Frisco Press, 1986).
4. Liza Loop post on my crowdsourced draft on Medium and email to me, 2013.
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5. Lee Felsenstein post on my crowdsourced draft on Medium, 2013. See also, “More Than
Just Digital Quilting,” Economist, Dec. 3, 2011; Victoria Sherrow, Huskings, Quiltings,
and Barn Raisings: Work-Play Parties in Early America (Walker, 1992).
6. Posters and programs for the acid tests, in Phil Lesh, “The Acid Test Chronicles,”
http://www.postertrip.com/public/5586.cfm; Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 251 and passim.
7. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 29, from Lewis Mumford, Myth of the
Machine (Harcourt, Brace, 1967), 3.
8. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 165.
9. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (Random House, 1970), 5.
10. Author’s interview with Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius; Mark Dery, Escape Velocity:
Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove, 1966), 22; Timothy Leary, Cyberpunks
CyberFreedom (Ronin, 2008), 170.
11. First published in limited distribution by the Communication Company, San Francisco,
1967.
12. Brand’s story was in a March 1995 special issue of Time on “Cyberspace,” which was a
sequel to a February 8, 1993, Time cover by Phil Elmer-Dewitt called “Cyberpunks” that
also explored the countercultural influences surrounding the computer, online services
such as The WELL, and the Internet.
13. This section is based on author’s interviews with Stewart Brand; Stewart Brand, “ ‘Whole
Earth’ Origin,” 1976, http://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/WholeEarth_buton.html;
Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said.
Turner’s book is focused on Brand.
14. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; Stewart Brand public comments on early draft of
this chapter posted on Medium.com.
15. Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer
Bums,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.
16. Stewart Brand comments on my crowdsourced draft on Medium; Stewart Brand
interviews and emails with the author, 2013; poster and programs for the Trips Festival,
http://www.postertrip.com/public/5577.cfm and
http://www.lysergia.com/MerryPranksters/MerryPranksters_post.htm; Wolfe, Electric
Kool-Aid Test, 259.
17. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 67.
18. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; Brand, “ ‘Whole Earth’ Origin.”
19. Brand, “ ‘Whole Earth’ Origin”; author’s interview with Stewart Brand.
20. Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, http://www.wholeearth.com/.
21. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
22. The best account of Engelbart is Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Co-
evolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, 2000). This section also
draws on Douglas Engelbart oral history (four sessions), conducted by Judy Adams and
Henry Lowood, Stanford, http://www-
sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/engelbart/start1.html; Douglas Engelbart oral
history, conducted by Jon Eklund, the Smithsonian Institution, May 4, 1994; Christina
Engelbart, “A Lifetime Pursuit,” a biographical sketch written in 1986 by his daughter,
http://www.dougengelbart.org/history/engelbart.html#10a; “Tribute to Doug Engelbart,” a
series of reminiscences by colleagues and friends, http://tribute2doug.wordpress.com/;
Douglas Engelbart interviews, in Valerie Landau and Eileen Clegg, The Engelbart
Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart (Next Press, 2009) and
http://engelbartbookdialogues.wordpress.com/; The Doug Engelbart Archives (includes
many videos and interviews), http://dougengelbart.org/library/engelbart-archives.html;
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Susan Barnes, “Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for
Contemporary Computing,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July 1997;
Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 417; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture,
110; Bardini, Bootstrapping, 138.
23. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986.
24. The Life excerpt, Sept. 10, 1945, was heavily illustrated with drawings of the proposed
memex. (The issue also had aerial photographs of Hiroshima after the dropping of the
atom bomb.)
25. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Smithsonian, 1994.
26. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986.
27. Landau and Clegg, The Engelbart Hypothesis.
28. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 1, Dec. 19, 1986.
29. The quote is from Nilo Lindgren, “Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop,”
Innovation, Sept. 1971, quoted in Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (MIT, 2000), 178.
See also Steven Levy, Insanely Great (Viking, 1994), 36.
30. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987.
31. Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” prepared for the director of
Information Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Oct. 1962.
32. Douglas Engelbart to Vannevar Bush, May 24, 1962, MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush
Symposium, archives, http://www.dougengelbart.org/events/vannevar-bush-
symposium.html.
33. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 2, Jan. 14, 1987.
34. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
35. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987.
36. Landau and Clegg, “Engelbart on the Mouse and Keyset,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis;
William English, Douglas Engelbart, and Melvyn Berman, “Display Selection Techniques
for Text Manipulation,” IEEE Transactions on Human-Factors in Electronics, Mar. 1967.
37. Douglas Engelbart oral history, Stanford, interview 3, Mar. 4, 1987.
38. Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All Demos,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis.
39. The video of the “Mother of All Demos” can be viewed at
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html#complete. This section also draws
from Landau and Clegg, “Mother of All Demos,” in The Engelbart Hypothesis.
40. Rheingold, Tools for Thought, 190.
41. Author’s interview with Stewart Brand; video of the Mother of All Demos.
42. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2734. John Markoff found the reports of the Les
Earnest demonstration in the Stanford microfilm archives. Markoff’s book provides a good
analysis of the distinction between augmented intellect and artificial intelligence.
43. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2838.
44. Author’s interview with Alan Kay. Kay read sections of this book and made comments
and corrections. This section also draws on Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,”
ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Mar. 1993; Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning (Harper, 1999;
locations refer to the Kindle edition), chapter 6.
45. Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Landau and Clegg, “Reflections by Fellow Pioneers,”
in The Engelbart Hypothesis; Alan Kay talk, thirtieth-anniversary panel on the Mother of
All Demos, Internet archive,
https://archive.org/details/XD1902_1EngelbartsUnfinishedRev30AnnSes2. See also Paul
Spinrad, “The Prophet of Menlo Park,” http://coe.berkeley.edu/news-
center/publications/forefront/archive/copy_of_forefront-fall-2008/features/the-prophet-of-
menlo-park-douglas-engelbart-carries-on-his-vision. After reading an early draft of this
section, Kay clarified some of what he had said in earlier talks and interviews, and I
366

modified a few of his quotes based on his suggestions.
46. Cathy Lazere, “Alan C. Kay: A Clear Romantic Vision,” 1994,
http://www.cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall04/G22.2110-001/kaymini .
47. Author’s interview with Alan Kay. See also Alan Kay, “The Center of Why,” Kyoto Prize
lecture, Nov. 11, 2004.
48. Author’s interview with Alan Kay; Ivan Sutherland, “Sketchpad,” PhD dissertation, MIT,
1963; Howard Rheingold, “Inventing the Future with Alan Kay,” The WELL,
http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/Alan%20Kay.
49. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 1895; author’s email exchange with Alan Kay.
50. Alan Kay talk, thirtieth-anniversary panel on the Mother of All Demos; Kay, “The Early
History of Smalltalk.”
51. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk.”
52. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk.” (Includes all quotes in preceding paragraphs.)
53. John McCarthy, “The Home Information Terminal—A 1970 View,” June 1, 2000,
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/hoter2 .
54. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 4535.
55. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 2381.
56. In addition to citations below and Hiltzik’s Dealers of Lightning and Kay’s “The Early
History of Smalltalk” cited above, this section draws on Douglas Smith and Robert
Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal
Computer (Morrow, 1988) and author’s interviews with Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, and John
Seeley Brown.
57. Charles P. Thacker, “Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Hardware,”
ACM Conference on History of Personal Workstations, 1986. See also Butler W.
Lampson, “Personal Distributed Computing: The Alto and Ethernet Software,” ACM
Conference on History of Personal Workstations, 1986. Both papers, with the same title,
can be accessed at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/blampson/38-
AltoSoftware/Abstract.html.
58. Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Linebeck, Collective Genius: The
Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014); Hiltzik,
Dealers of Lightning, 2764; author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
59. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
60. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 1973, 2405.
61. Stewart Brand, “Spacewar,” Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.
62. Alan Kay, “Microelectronics and the Personal Computer,” Scientific American, Sept.
1977.
63. Alan Kay, “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” in Proceedings of the ACM
Annual Conference, 1972. His typescript is at
http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a .
64. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; author’s interview with Alan Kay.
65. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 3069.
66. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 3102.
67. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk”; author’s interview with Alan Kay.
68. Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk” (see section IV, “The First Real Smalltalk”);
author’s interviews with Alan Kay and Bob Taylor; Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 3128;
Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 3940; Butler Lampson, “Why Alto?” Xerox interoffice
memo, Dec. 19, 1972, http://www.digibarn.com/friends/butler-lampson/.
69. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor; Thacker, “Personal Distributed Computing.”
70. Engelbart Oral History, Stanford, interview 4, Apr. 1, 1987.
71. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor.
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72. Alan Kay interview, conducted by Kate Kane, Perspectives on Business Innovation, May
2002.
73. Bob Taylor discussion, University of Texas, Sept. 17, 2009, conducted by John Markoff,
http://transcriptvids.com/v/jvbGAPJSDJI.html.
74. Author’s interview with Bob Taylor; Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 4834.
75. Fred Moore’s tale is detailed in Levy’s Hackers and Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said.
76. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
77. Video of the Whole Earth Demise Party, http://mediaburn.org/video/aspects-of-demise-
the-whole-earth-demise-party-2/; Levy, Hackers, 197; author’s interview with Stewart
Brand; Stewart Brand, “Demise Party, etc.,”
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1180/article/321/history.-.demise.party.etc.
78. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 3335.
79. In addition to the sources just cited, see Thomas Albright and Charles Moore, “The Last
Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth,” Rolling Stone, July 8, 1971; Barry Lopez, “Whole
Earth’s Suicide Party,” Washington Post, June 14, 1971.
80. Author’s interview with Bob Albrecht; Albrecht’s notes provided to me.
81. Archive of the People’s Computer Company and its related newsletters,
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/.
82. Author’s interview with Bob Albrecht.
83. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein. This section is also based on a seventeen-
chapter unpublished memoir Felsenstein wrote, which he provided to me; Felsenstein’s
articles “Tom Swift Lives!” and “Convivial Design” in People’s Computer Company; his
article “My Path through the Free Speech Movement and Beyond,” February 22, 2005,
which he provided to me; the autobiographical essays he has posted at
http://www.leefelsenstein.com/; Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 99–102; Levy,
Hackers, 153 and passim; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 4375 and passim.
84. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
85. Author’s interview with Felsenstein; Lee Felsenstein, “Philadelphia 1945–1963,”
http://www.leefelsenstein.com/?page_id=16; oral history of Lee Felsenstein, by Kip
Crosby, May 7, 2008, Computer History Museum.
86. Felsenstein, “My Path through the Free Speech Movement and Beyond.”
87. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
88. Felsenstein, “My Path through the Free Speech Movement and Beyond.”
89. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein; Felsenstein unpublished memoir.
90. Felsenstein’s unpublished memoir, provided to me, has an entire chapter on the police
radio incident.
91. Felsenstein, “My Path through the Free Speech Movement and Beyond.”
92. Lee Felsenstein, “Explorations in the Underground,” http://www.leefelsenstein.com/?
page_id=50.
93. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
94. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein; Felsenstein’s unpublished memoir.
95. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
96. Levy, Hackers, 160.
97. Ken Colstad and Efrem Lipkin, “Community Memory: A Public Information Network,”
ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, Dec. 1975. For an archive of the Resource One
Newsletter, see http://www.well.com/~szpak/cm/index.html.
98. Doug Schuler, “Community Networks: Building a New Participatory Medium,”
Communications of the ACM, Jan. 1994. See also Community Memory flyer, on The
WELL, http://www.well.com/~szpak/cm/cmflyer.html: “We have a powerful tool—a
genie—at our disposal.”
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99. R. U. Sirius and St. Jude, How to Mutate and Take Over the World (Ballantine, 1996);
Betsy Isaacson, “St. Jude,” undergraduate thesis, Harvard University, 2012.
100. Lee Felsenstein, “Resource One/Community Memory,” http://www.leefelsenstein.com/?
page_id=44.
101. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein; Felsenstein, “Resource One/Community
Memory.”
102. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (Harper, 1973), 17.
103. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
104. Lee Felsenstein, “The Maker Movement—Looks Like Revolution to Me,” speech at Bay
Area Maker Faire, May 18, 2013. See also Evgeny Morozov, “Making It,” New Yorker,
Jan. 13, 2014.
105. Lee Felsenstein, “Tom Swift Terminal, or a Convivial Cybernetic Device,”
http://www.leefelsenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/TST_scan_150 ; Lee
Felsenstein, “Social Media Technology,” http://www.leefelsenstein.com/?page_id=125.
106. Homebrew Computer Club newsletter #1, DigiBarn Computer Museum,
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V1_01/; Levy, Hackers, 167.
107. Lee Felsenstein’s comments on my crowdsourced first draft, Medium.com, Dec. 20,
2013. There is no evidence that any of Eisenhower’s personal pilots ever had a sex change.
108. This section draws from Ed Roberts interview, conducted by Art Salsberg, Modern
Electronics, Oct. 1984; Ed Roberts interview, conducted by David Greelish, Historically
Brewed magazine, 1995; Levy, Hackers, 186 and passim; Forrest M. Mims III, “The Altair
Story: Early Days at MITS,” Creative Computing, Nov. 1984; Freiberger and Swaine, Fire
in the Valley, 35 and passim.
109. Levy, Hackers, 186.
110. Mims, “The Altair Story.”
111. Levy, Hackers, 187.
112. Levy, Hackers, 187.
113. Les Solomon, “Solomon’s Memory,” Atari Archives,
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/solomons_memory.php; Levy, Hackers, 189 and passim;
Mims, “The Altair Story.”
114. H. Edward Roberts and William Yates, “Altair 8800 Minicomputer,” Popular
Electronics, Jan. 1975.
115. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
116. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, “Crystal Fire,” IEEE SCS News, Spring 2007,
adapted from Crystal Fire (Norton, 1977).
117. Author’s interviews with Lee Felsenstein, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Bob
Albrecht. This section also draws from the accounts of the Homebrew Computer Club
origins in Wozniak, iWoz (Norton, 2006); Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 4493 and
passim; Levy, Hackers, 201 and passim; Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 109
and passim; Steve Wozniak, “Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be,”
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php; the Homebrew
archives exhibit at the Computer History Museum; the Homebrew newsletter archives,
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/; Bob Lash, “Memoir of a
Homebrew Computer Club Member,” http://www.bambi.net/bob/homebrew.html.
118. Steve Dompier, “Music of a Sort,” Peoples Computer Company, May 1975. See also
Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 129; Levy, Hackers, 204. For Dompier’s code,
see http://kevindriscoll.org/projects/ccswg2012/fool_on_a_hill.html.
119. Bill Gates, “Software Contest Winners Announced,” Computer Notes, July 1975.
CHAPTER NINE: SOFTWARE
1. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Paul Allen, Idea Man (Portfolio, 2011, locations refer
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to the Kindle edition), 129. This section also draws from a formal interview in 2013 and
other conversations I had with Bill Gates; the time I spent with him, his father, and
colleagues for a Time cover story I wrote, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates,” Time, Jan.
13, 1997; emails from Bill Gates Sr.; Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates
(Doubleday, 1993, locations refer to Kindle edition); James Wallace and Jim Erickson,
Hard Drive (Wiley, 1992); Bill Gates oral history, conducted by Mark Dickison, Henry
Ford Innovation Series, June 30, 2009; Bill Gates interview, conducted by David Allison,
Smithsonian Institution, Apr. 1995; other nonpublic oral histories provided by Bill Gates.
2. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 38.
3. Allen, Idea Man, 1069.
4. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. See also Bill Gates oral history, Ford Innovation
Series.
5. Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.”
6. Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.”
7. Author’s interview with Bill Gates Sr.
8. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 715.
9. Author’s interview with Bill Gates Sr. The law says: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal,
helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”
10. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 583, 659.
11. Author’s interview with Bill Gates Sr.
12. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 21.
13. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
14. Allen, Idea Man, 502.
15. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 25.
16. Allen, Idea Man, 511.
17. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 26.
18. Allen, Idea Man, 751.
19. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.”
20. Author’s interview with Bill Gates. (Also in other oral histories.)
21. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 924.
22. Author’s interviews with Bill Gates and Bill Gates Sr.
23. Author’s interview with Steve Russell.
24. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 31.
25. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
26. Allen, Idea Man, 616; author’s interviews with Steve Russell and Bill Gates.
27. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
28. Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley (Osborne, 1984), 21; author’s
interview with Bill Gates; Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 35.
29. Allen, Idea Man, 719.
30. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 42.
31. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Isaacson, “In Search of the Real Bill Gates.”
32. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Bill Gates oral history with Larry Cohen and Brent
Schlender, provided to me by Bill Gates.
33. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 43.
34. Author’s interviews with Bill Gates.
35. Allen, Idea Man, 811.
36. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 43.
37. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Allen, Idea Man, 101.
38. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Allen, Idea Man, 849.
39. Allen, Idea Man, 860.
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40. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 45; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 458.
41. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 1445; Allen, Idea Man, 917; author’s interview with Bill
Gates.
42. Allen, Idea Man, 942.
43. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
44. Allen, Idea Man, 969.
45. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 55. An earlier version of this section was published in
the Harvard Gazette, and the current version reflects comments and corrections made by
Gates and others on it.
46. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
47. Nicholas Josefowitz, “College Friends Remember Bill Gates,” Harvard Crimson, June 4,
2002.
48. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 1564.
49. “Bill Gates to Sign Off at Microsoft,” AFP, June 28, 2008.
50. William H. Gates and Christos P. Papadimitriou, “Bounds for Sorting by Prefix
Reversal,” Discrete Mathematics, 1979; Harry Lewis, “Reinventing the Classroom,”
Harvard Magazine, Sept. 2012; David Kestenbaum, “Before Microsoft, Gates Solved a
Pancake Problem,” NPR, July 4, 2008.
51. Allen, Idea Man, 62.
52. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
53. Allen, Idea Man, 1058.
54. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
55. Bill Gates and Paul Allen to Ed Roberts, Jan. 2, 1975; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 1810.
56. Allen, Idea Man, 160.
57. Allen, Idea Man, 1103.
58. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 1874.
59. Author’s interview with Bill Gates; Allen, Idea Man, 1117.
60. Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 76.
61. Allen, Idea Man, 1163.
62. Allen, Idea Man, 1204.
63. Allen, Idea Man, 1223; Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 81.
64. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
65. Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Gazette, June 7, 2007.
66. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
67. The section on Gates in Albuquerque draws on Allen, Idea Man, 1214 and passim; Manes
and Andrews, Gates, 2011 and passim; Wallace and Erickson, Hard Drive, 85 and passim.
68. Bill Gates oral history, Henry Ford Innovation Series.
69. Allen, Idea Man, 1513.
70. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
71. Allen, Idea Man, 1465; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 2975; Wallace and Erickson, Hard
Drive, 130.
72. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
73. Allen, Idea Man, 1376.
74. Fred Moore, “It’s a Hobby,” Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, June 7, 1975.
75. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005; locations refer to the Kindle
edition), 4633; Steven Levy, Hackers (Anchor/Doubleday, 1984; locations refer to the
twenty-fifth anniversary reissue, O’Reilly, 2010), 231.
76. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein; Lee Felsenstein oral history, by Kip Crosby,
Computer History Museum, May 7, 2008.
77. Homebrew Computer Club newsletter, Feb. 3, 1976,
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http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html.
78. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
79. Harold Singer, “Open Letter to Ed Roberts,” Micro-8 Computer User Group newsletter,
Mar. 28, 1976.
80. Author’s interview with Lee Felsenstein.
81. Bill Gates interview, Playboy, July 1994.
82. This section draws from my Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), which was based on
interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, and others. The
Jobs biography includes a bibliography and source notes. For this book, I reinterviewed
Bushnell, Alcorn, and Wozniak. This section also draws on Steve Wozniak, iWoz (Norton,
1984); Steve Wozniak, “Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be,”
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php.
83. When I posted an early draft of parts of this book for crowdsourced comments and
corrections on Medium, Dan Bricklin offered useful suggestions. We got into an exchange
about the creation of VisiCalc, and I subsequently added this section to the book. It is
partly based on email exchanges with Bricklin and Bob Frankston and on chapter 12,
“VisiCalc,” in Dan Bricklin, Bricklin on Technology (Wiley, 2009).
84. Email from Dan Bricklin to the author; Dan Bricklin, “The Idea,”
http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiidea.htm.
85. Peter Ruell, “A Vision of Computing’s Future,” Harvard Gazette, Mar. 22, 2012.
86. Bob Frankston, “Implementing VisiCalc,” unpublished, Apr. 6, 2002.
87. Frankston, “Implementing VisiCalc.”
88. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs.
89. IBM corporate history, “The Birth of the IBM PC,” http://www-
03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html.
90. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3629.
91. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3642; Steve Ballmer interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part
II, PBS, June 1996. See also James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic (Facts on File,
1988), chapter 9.
92. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995.
93. Steve Ballmer interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996.
94. Jack Sams interview, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June 1996. See also Steve
Hamm and Jay Greene, “The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates,” Business Week,
Oct. 24, 2004.
95. Tim Paterson and Paul Allen interviews, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June
1996.
96. Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen interviews, “Triumph of the Nerds,” part II, PBS, June
1996; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3798.
97. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995; Manes
and Andrews, Gates, 3868.
98. Manes and Andrews, Gates, 3886, 3892.
99. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
100. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995.
101. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
102. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
103. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995.
104. Bill Gates interview by David Rubenstein, Harvard, Sept. 21, 2013, author’s notes.
105. Bill Gates and Paul Allen interview, by Brent Schlender, Fortune, Oct. 2, 1995.
106. Bill Gates interview, conducted by David Bunnell, PC magazine, Feb. 1, 1982.
107. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 135.
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108. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 94.
109. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs.
110. Steve Jobs presentation, Jan. 1984, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY.
111. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 173.
112. Author’s interview with Andy Hertzfeld.
113. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
114. Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly Media, 2005), 191. See also Andy
Hertzfeld, http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?
story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt.
115. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
116. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs.
117. In addition to the sources cited below, this section is based on my interview with
Richard Stallman; Richard Stallman, essays and philosophy, on
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu.html; Sam Williams, with revisions by Richard M. Stallman,
Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution (Free
Software Foundation, 2010). An earlier edition of the Williams book was published by
O’Reilly Media in 2002. As that edition was being completed, Stallman and Williams
“parted on less than cordial terms” based on Stallman’s objections and requests for
corrections. Version 2.0 incorporated Stallman’s objections and a significant rewriting of
some segments of the book. These are described by Stallman in his foreword and Williams
in his preface to version 2.0, which Stallman later called “my semi-autobiography.” For
comparison, the original text of the book can be found at
http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/.
118. Author’s interview with Richard Stallman. See also K. C. Jones, “A Rare Glimpse into
Richard Stallman’s World,” InformationWeek, Jan. 6, 2006; Richard Stallman interview, in
Michael Gross, “Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software,
MacArthur-Certified Genius,” 1999, www.mgross.com/interviews/stallman1.html;
Williams, Free as in Freedom, 26 and passim.
119. Richard Stallman, “The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement,” in
Chris DiBona and Sam Ockman, editors, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source
Revolution (O’Reilly, 1999).
120. Author’s interview with Richard Stallman.
121. Richard Stallman, “The GNU Project,” http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html.
122. Williams, Free as in Freedom, 75.
123. Richard Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto,” http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html.
124. Richard Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” and “Why Open Source Misses the Point of
Free Software,” https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/.
125. Richard Stallman, “The GNU System,” https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/.
126. Interview with Richard Stallman, conducted by David Betz and Jon Edwards, BYTE,
July 1986.
127. “Linus Torvalds,” Linux Information Project, http://www.linfo.org/linus.html.
128. Linus Torvalds with David Diamond, Just for Fun (HarperCollins, 2001), 4.
129. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 74, 4, 17; Michael Learmonth, “Giving It All
Away,” San Jose Metro, May 8, 1997.
130. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 52, 55, 64, 78, 72.
131. Linus Torvalds pronouncing “Linux”:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Linus-linux.ogg.
132. Learmonth, “Giving It All Away.”
133. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 58.
134. Linus Torvalds, “Free Minix-like Kernel Sources for 386-AT,” posting to Newsgroups:
373

comp.os.minix, Oct. 5, 1991, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html.
135. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 87, 93, 97, 119.
136. Gary Rivlin, “Leader of the Free World,” Wired, November 2003.
137. Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-
Interest (Crown, 2011); Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of
the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002), http://soc.ics.uci.edu/Resources/bibs.php?793.
138. Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 1999), 30.
139. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (originally published 1835–40; Packard
edition), Kindle location 3041.
140. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 122, 167, 120, 121.
141. Richard Stallman interview, Reddit, July 29, 2010,
http://www.redditblog.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html.
142. Richard Stallman, “What’s in a Name?” https://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html.
143. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 164.
144. Linus Torvalds blog post, “Black and White,” Nov. 2, 2008, http://torvalds-
family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html.
145. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 163.
146. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1.
CHAPTER TEN: ONLINE
1. Lawrence Landweber email to the author, Feb. 5, 2014.
2. Ray Tomlinson, “The First Network Email,”
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html.
3. Larry Brilliant email to the author, Feb. 14, 2014.
4. Larry Brilliant interview, Wired, Dec. 20, 2007.
5. Larry Brilliant interview, Wired, Dec. 20, 2007.
6. Katie Hafner, The Well (Carroll & Graf, 2001), 10.
7. Hafner, The Well, 30; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 145.
8. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (Perseus, 1993), 9.
9. Tom Mandel, “Confessions of a Cyberholic,” Time, Mar. 1, 1995. At that point, Mandel
knew he was dying, and he asked his editors at Time—Phil Elmer-DeWitt, Dick Duncan,
and myself—if he could write a farewell reflection about the online world.
10. Tom Mandel, posting on The WELL, http://www.well.com/~cynsa/tom/tom13.html. See
also “To Our Readers” [signed by the publisher Elizabeth Long but written by Phil Elmer-
DeWitt], Time, Apr. 17, 1995.
11. This section draws from interviews with Steve Case, Jim Kimsey, and Jean Case; Julius
Duscha, “For Computers, a Marrying Sam,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1977; Michael
Banks, On the Way to the Web (APress, 2008, locations refer to the Kindle edition); Kara
Swisher, AOL.com (Random House, 1998); Alec Klein, Stealing Time (Simon & Schuster,
2003). Steve Case, a longtime friend and colleague, provided comments and corrections on
an early draft.
12. Klein, Stealing Time, 11.
13. Banks, On the Way to the Web, 792, 743.
14. Banks, On the Way to the Web, 602, 1467.
15. Author’s interview with Steve Case; Banks, On the Way to the Web, 1503; Swisher,
AOL.com, 27.
16. Steve Case talk, JP Morgan Technology Conference, San Francisco, May 1, 2001.
17. Nina Munk, Fools Rush In (Collins, 2004), 73.
18. Author’s interview with Steve Case.
19. Swisher, AOL.com, 25.
20. Steve Case speech, Stanford, May 25, 2010.
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21. Steve Case speech, Stanford, May 25, 2010.
22. Author’s interview with Steve Case.
23. Steve Case speech, Stanford, May 25, 2010.
24. Swisher, AOL.com, 27.
25. Author’s interview with Steve Case.
26. Author’s interview with Steve Case; Case email to author and comments on first draft
published on Medium. Accounts differ on whether or not von Meister was eager to hire
Steve Case or whether Dan Case pushed him to do it. Swisher, AOL.com, 28, says it was
the former. Banks, On the Way to the Web, 1507, says it was the latter. There are probably
elements of truth in both versions.
27. Author’s interview with Jim Kimsey.
28. Swisher, AOL.com, 53.
29. Swisher, AOL.com, 48.
30. Author’s interviews with Steve Case, Steve Wozniak.
31. Steve Case speech, Stanford, May 25, 2010.
32. Author’s interview with Steve Case.
33. Author’s interview with Steve Case.
34. Steve Case oral history, conducted by Walter Isaacson, 2013, the Riptide Project,
Harvard, http://www.niemanlab.org/riptide/person/steve-case/. I participated in this oral
history project on the digital disruption of journalism, which was curated by John Huey,
Paul Sagan, and Martin Nisenholtz.
35. Steve Case oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008.
36. Author’s interview with Jim Kimsey.
37. Steve Case speech, Stanford, May 25, 2010.
38. Dave Fischer post, newsgroup: alt.folklore.computers, Jan. 25, 1994,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.folklore.computers/wF4CpYbWuuA/jS6ZOyJd10sJ.
39. Wendy Grossman, Net.Wars (NYU, 1977), 33.
40. Author’s interview with Al Gore.
41. Al Gore interview with Wolf Blitzer, “Late Edition,” CNN, Mar. 9, 1999,
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/.
42. Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, “Al Gore and the Internet,” an email to Declan
McCullaugh and others, Sept. 28, 2000, http://www.politechbot.com/p-01394.html.
43. Newt Gingrich, speech to the American Political Science Association, Sept. 1, 2000.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE WEB
1. Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (HarperCollins, 1999), 4. See also Mark Fischetti,
“The Mind Behind the Web,” Scientific American, Mar. 12, 2009.
2. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
3. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
4. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
5. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
6. Tim Berners-Lee interview, Academy of Achievement, June 22, 2007.
7. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
8. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
9. Enquire Within Upon Everything (1894), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10766/10766-
h/10766-h.htm.
10. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1.
11. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
12. Tim Berners-Lee interview, Academy of Achievement, June 22, 2007.
13. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 10.
14. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 4.
375

15. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 14.
16. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
17. Tim Berners-Lee interview, Academy of Achievement, June 22, 2007.
18. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 15.
19. John Naish, “The NS Profile: Tim Berners-Lee,” New Statesman, Aug. 15, 2011.
20. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 16, 18.
21. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 61.
22. Tim Berners-Lee, “Information Management: A Proposal,” CERN, Mar. 1989,
http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html.
23. James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web Was Born (Oxford, 2000), 180.
24. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 26.
25. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 198.
26. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 190.
27. Robert Cailliau interview, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008.
28. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 234.
29. Tim Smith and François Flückiger, “Licensing the Web,” CERN,
http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web/licensing-web.
30. Tim Berners-Lee, “The World Wide Web and the ‘Web of Life,’ ” 1998,
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/UU.html.
31. Tim Berners-Lee, posting to the Newsgroup alt.hypertext, Aug. 6, 1991,
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1991/08/art-6484.txt.
32. Nick Bilton, “As the Web Turns 25, Its Creator Talks about Its Future,” New York Times,
Mar. 11, 2014.
33. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 203. See also Matthew Lasar, “Before
Netscape,” Ars Technica, Oct. 11, 2011.
34. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 56.
35. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 217.
36. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
37. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
38. Robert Reid, Architects of the Web (Wiley, 1997), 7.
39. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 239; alt.hypertext Newsgroup, Friday, Jan.
29, 1993, 12:22:43 GMT, http://www.jmc.sjsu.edu/faculty/rcraig/mosaic.txt.
40. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
41. Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 240.
42. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
43. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 70; author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
44. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
45. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
46. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 70.
47. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 65.
48. Ted Nelson, “Computer Paradigm,”
http://xanadu.com.au/ted/TN/WRITINGS/TCOMPARADIGM/tedCompOneLiners.html.
49. Jaron Lanier interview, by Eric Allen Bean, Nieman Journalism Lab, May 22, 2013.
50. John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz, and Paul Sagan, “Riptide,” Harvard Kennedy School,
http://www.niemanlab.org/riptide/.
51. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
52. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
53. Author’s interview with Marc Andreessen.
54. John Markoff, “A Free and Simple Computer Link,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1993.
55. This section is primarily based on my interviews with Justin Hall and his own postings at
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http://www.links.net/.
56. Justin Hall, “Justin’s Links,” http://www.links.net/vita/web/story.html.
57. Author’s interviews with Justin Hall, Joan Hall.
58. Author’s interview with Howard Rheingold; Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community
(Perseus, 1993).
59. Author’s interviews with Justin Hall, Howard Rheingold; Gary Wolf, Wired—A Romance
(Random House, 2003), 110.
60. Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything (Crown, 2009), 24.
61. Rosenberg, Say Everything, 44.
62. Justin Hall, “Exposing Myself,” posted by Howard Rheingold,
http://www.well.com/~hlr/jam/justin/justinexposing.html.
63. Author’s interview with Arianna Huffington.
64. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think (Penguin, 2013), 68.
65. Hall, “Exposing Myself.”
66. Author’s interview with Ev Williams. This section also draws from the Ev Williams
interview in Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work (Apress, 2007), 2701 and passim; Nick
Bilton, Hatching Twitter (Portfolio, 2013), 9 and passim; Rosenberg, Say Everything, 104
and passim; Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog,” New Yorker, Nov. 13, 2000.
67. Dave Winer, “Scripting News in XML,” Dec. 15, 1997,
http://scripting.com/davenet/1997/12/15/scriptingNewsInXML.html.
68. Livingston, Founders at Work, 2094.
69. Livingston, Founders at Work, 2109, 2123, 2218.
70. Meg Hourihan, “A Sad Kind of Day,”
http://web.archive.org/web/20010917033719/http://www.megnut.com/archive.asp?
which=2001_02_01_archive.inc; Rosenberg, Say Everything, 122.
71. Ev Williams, “And Then There Was One,” Jan. 31, 2001,
http://web.archive.org/web/20011214143830/http://www.evhead.com/longer/2200706_essays.asp.
72. Livingston, Founders at Work, 2252.
73. Livingston, Founders at Work, 2252.
74. Williams, “And Then There Was One.”
75. Dan Bricklin, “How the Blogger Deal Happened,” blog posting, Apr. 15, 2001,
http://danbricklin.com/log/blogger.htm; Dan Bricklin, Bricklin on Technology (Wiley,
2009), 206.
76. Livingston, Founders at Work, 2289, 2302.
77. Author’s interview with Ev Williams.
78. Author’s interview with Ev Williams.
79. Author’s interview with Ev Williams.
80. Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution (Hyperion, 2009), 1111. See also Ward
Cunningham and Bo Leuf, The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Addison-
Wesley, 2001); Ward Cunningham, “HyperCard Stacks,”
http://c2.com/~ward/HyperCard/; Ward Cunningham, keynote speech, Wikimania, Aug. 1,
2005.
81. Ward Cunningham, “Invitation to the Pattern List,” May 1, 1995, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?
InvitationToThePatternsList.
82. Ward Cunningham, correspondence on the etymology of wiki,
http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html.
83. Tim Berners-Lee interview, Riptide Project, Schornstein Center, Harvard, 2013.
84. Kelly Kazek, “Wikipedia Founder, Huntsville Native Jimmy Wales, Finds Fame Really
Cool,” News Courier (Athens, AL), Aug. 12, 2006.
85. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales.
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86. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 585.
87. Marshall Poe, “The Hive,” Atlantic, Sept. 2006.
88. Jimmy Wales interview, conducted by Brian Lamb, C-SPAN, Sept. 25, 2005.
89. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,”
first presented in 1997, reprinted in The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 1999).
90. Richard Stallman, “The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource” (1999),
http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html.
91. Larry Sanger, “The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia,” Slashdot,
http://beta.slashdot.org/story/56499; and O’Reilly Commons,
http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Open_Sources_2.0/Beyond_Open_Source:_Collaboration_and_Community/The_Early_History_of_Nupedia_and_Wikipedia:_A_Memoir.
92. Larry Sanger, “Become an Editor or Peer Reviewer!” Nupedia, http://archive.is/IWDNq.
93. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales; Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 960.
94. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales.
95. Larry Sanger, “Origins of Wikipedia,” Sanger user page,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Origins_of_Wikipedia; Lih, The
Wikipedia Revolution, 1049.
96. Ben Kovitz, “The Conversation at the Taco Stand,” Kovitz user page,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BenKovitz.
97. Jimmy Wales, “Re: Sanger’s Memoirs” thread, Apr. 2005,
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021463.html.
98. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, “Re: Sanger’s Memoirs” thread, Apr. 2005,
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021460.html,
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-April/021469.html, and subsequent.
See also Larry Sanger, “My Role in Wikipedia,” http://larrysanger.org/roleinwp.html;
“User:Larry Sanger/Origins of Wikipedia,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Origins_of_Wikipedia; “History of
Wikipedia” and its talk page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia, along
with Jimmy Wales edit changes to the article, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Jimmy_Wales&diff=next&oldid=29849184; Talk: Bomis, revisions made by Jimmy
Wales, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=11139857.
99. Kovitz, “The Conversation at the Taco Stand.”
100. Larry Sanger, “Let’s Make a Wiki,” Nupedia message thread, Jan. 10, 2001,
http://archive.is/yovNt.
101. Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, 1422.
102. Clay Shirky, “Wikipedia—An Unplanned Miracle,” Guardian, Jan. 14, 2011; see also
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations
(Penguin, 2008) and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
(Penguin, 2010).
103. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales.
104. Larry Sanger, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism,” Dec. 31, 2004,
www.LarrySanger.org.
105. Wikipedia press release, Jan. 15, 2002,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/January_2002.
106. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales.
107. Shirky, “Wikipedia—An Unplanned Miracle.”
108. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law
Journal (2002), http://soc.ics.uci.edu/Resources/bibs.php?793; Yochai Benkler, The
Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (Crown, 2011).
109. Daniel Pink, “The Buck Stops Here,” Wired, Mar. 2005; Tim Adams, “For Your
Information,” Guardian, June 30, 2007; Lord Emsworth user page,
378

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lord_Emsworth; Peter Steiner, New Yorker cartoon, July
5, 1993, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog.
110. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale, 2008), 147.
111. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales.
112. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales.
113. John Battelle, The Search (Portfolio, 2005; locations refer to the Kindle edition), 894.
114. Battelle, The Search, 945; author’s visit with Srinija Srinivasan.
115. In addition to the sources cited below, this section is based on my interview and
conversations with Larry Page; Larry Page commencement address at the University of
Michigan, May 2, 2009; Larry Page and Sergey Brin interviews, Academy of
Achievement, Oct. 28, 2000; “The Lost Google Tapes,” interviews by John Ince with
Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and others, Jan. 2000, http://www.podtech.net/home/?
s=Lost+Google+Tapes; John Ince, “Google Flashback—My 2000 Interviews,” Huffington
Post, Feb. 6, 2012; Ken Auletta, Googled (Penguin, 2009); Battelle, The Search; Richard
Brandt, The Google Guys (Penguin, 2011); Steven Levy, In the Plex (Simon & Schuster,
2011); Randall Stross, Planet Google (Free Press, 2008); David Vise, The Google Story
(Delacorte, 2005); Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google
Employee Number 59 (Mariner, 2012); Brenna McBride, “The Ultimate Search,” College
Park magazine, Spring 2000; Mark Malseed, “The Story of Sergey Brin,” Moment
magazine, Feb. 2007.
116. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
117. Larry Page interview, Academy of Achievement.
118. Larry Page interview, by Andy Serwer, Fortune, May 1, 2008.
119. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
120. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
121. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
122. Larry Page, Michigan commencement address.
123. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
124. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
125. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
126. Battelle, The Search, 1031.
127. Auletta, Googled, 28.
128. Interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, conducted by Barbara Walters, ABC News,
Dec. 8, 2004.
129. Sergey Brin talk, Breakthrough Learning conference, Google headquarters, Nov. 12,
2009.
130. Malseed, “The Story of Sergey Brin.”
131. Sergey Brin interview, Academy of Achievement.
132. McBride, “The Ultimate Search.”
133. Auletta, Googled, 31.
134. Auletta, Googled, 32.
135. Vise, The Google Story, 33.
136. Auletta, Googled, 39.
137. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
138. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
139. Terry Winograd interview, conducted by Bill Moggridge,
http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/TerryWinograd.
140. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
141. Craig Silverstein, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Jeff Ullman, “Scalable Techniques
for Mining Causal Structures,” Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, July 2000.
379

142. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
143. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
144. Larry Page, Michigan commencement address.
145. Vise, The Google Story, 10.
146. Larry Page, Michigan commencement address.
147. Battelle, The Search, 1183.
148. Battelle, The Search, 1114.
149. Larry Page, Michigan commencement address.
150. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
151. Levy, In the Plex, 415, citing Page’s remarks at the 2001 PC Forum, held in Scottsdale,
Arizona.
152. Sergey Brin interview, conducted by John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” part 2.
153. Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, Larry Page, Terry Winograd, “What Can You Do with a
Web in Your Pocket?” Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on
Data Engineering, 1998.
154. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
155. Levy, In the Plex, 358.
156. Levy, In the Plex, 430.
157. Sergey Brin interview, conducted by John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” part 2,
http://www.podtech.net/home/1728/podventurezone-lost-google-tapes-part-2-sergey-brin.
158. Levy, In the Plex, 947.
159. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
160. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search
Engine,” seventh International World-Wide Web Conference, Apr. 1998, Brisbane,
Australia.
161. Vise, The Google Story, 30.
162. Author’s interview with Larry Page.
163. David Cheriton, Mike Moritz, and Sergey Brin interviews, conducted by John Ince,
“The Lost Google Tapes”; Vise, The Google Story, 47; Levy, In the Plex, 547.
164. Vise, The Google Story, 47; Battelle, The Search, 86.
165. Sergey Brin interview, conducted by John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes.”
166. Larry Page interview, conducted by John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes.”
167. Auletta, Googled, 44.
168. Sergey Brin interview, conducted by John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” part 2.
CHAPTER TWELVE: ADA FOREVER
1. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 6321; John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (Yale,
1958), 80.
2. Gary Marcus, “Hyping Artificial Intelligence, Yet Again,” New Yorker, Jan. 1, 2014, citing
“New Navy Device Learns by Doing” (UPI wire story), New York Times, July 8, 1958;
“Rival,” New Yorker, Dec. 6, 1958.
3. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, the original gurus of artificial intelligence,
challenged some of Rosenblatt’s premises, after which the excitement surrounding the
Perceptron faded and the entire field entered a decline known as the “AI winter.” See
Danny Wilson, “Tantalizingly Close to a Mechanized Mind: The Perceptrons Controversy
and the Pursuit of Artificial Intelligence,” undergraduate thesis, Harvard, December 2012;
Frank Rosenblatt, “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and
Organization in the Brain,” Psychological Review, Fall 1958; Marvin Minsky and
Seymour Papert, Perceptrons (MIT, 1969).
4. Author’s interview with Ginni Rometty.
5. Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer,” New York Review of Books, Feb.
380

11, 2010; Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think (Penguin, 2013), 3.
6. “Watson on Jeopardy,” IBM’s Smarter Planet website, Feb. 14, 2011,
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/02/watson-on-jeopardy-day-one-man-vs-machine-for-
global-bragging-rights.html.
7. John Searle, “Watson Doesn’t Know It Won on Jeopardy,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 23,
2011.
8. John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm, Smart Machines (Columbia, 2013), 4. Steve Hamm is a
technology journalist now working as a writer and communications strategist at IBM. I
have attributed the opinions in the book to Kelly, who is the director of IBM research.
9. Larry Hardesty, “Artificial-Intelligence Research Revives Its Old Ambitions,” MIT News,
Sept. 9, 2013.
10. James Somers, “The Man Who Would Teach Computers to Think,” Atlantic, Nov. 2013.
11. Gary Marcus, “Why Can’t My Computer Understand Me,” New Yorker, Aug. 16, 2013.
12. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (Harper, 1994), 191.
13. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice
Hall, 1995), 566.
14. Author’s interview with Bill Gates.
15. Nicholas Wade, “In Tiny Worm, Unlocking Secrets of the Brain,” New York Times, June
20, 2011; “The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network,” Science, July 27,
2012; The Dana Foundation, https://www.dana.org/News/Details.aspx?id=43512.
16. John Markoff, “Brainlike Computers, Learning from Experience,” New York Times, Dec.
28, 2013. Markoff, who has long done thoughtful reporting on this field, is writing a book
that explores the implications of machines that can replace human labor.
17. “Neuromorphic Computing Platform,” the Human Brain Project,
https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/neuromorphic-computing-platform1; Bennie Mols,
“Brainy Computer Chip Ditches Digital for Analog,” Communications of the ACM, Feb.
27, 2014; Klint Finley, “Computer Chips That Work Like a Brain Are Coming—Just Not
Yet,” Wired, Dec. 31, 2013. Beau Cronin of O’Reilly Media has proposed a drinking
game: “take a shot every time you find a news article or blog post that describes a new AI
system as working or thinking ‘like the brain’ ” (http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/05/it-works-
like-the-brain-so.html), and he maintains a pinboard of stories making such claims
(https://pinboard.in/u:beaucronin/t:like-the-brain/#).
18. Author’s interview with Tim Berners-Lee.
19. Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Whole Earth Review, Winter
1993. See also Ray Kurzweil, “Accelerating Intelligence,” http://www.kurzweilai.net/.
20. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in
Electronics, Mar. 1960.
21. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 7.
22. Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.”
23. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 2.
24. “Why Cognitive Systems?” IBM Research website,
http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/why-cognitive-systems.shtml.
25. Author’s interview with David McQueeney.
26. Author’s interview with Ginni Rometty.
27. Author’s interview with Ginni Rometty.
28. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 3.
29. “Accelerating the Co-Evolution,” Doug Engelbart Institute,
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/co-evolution.html; Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping:
Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, 2000).
30. Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter (Portfolio, 2013), 203.
381

31. Usually misattributed to Thomas Edison, although there is no evidence he ever said it.
Often used by Steve Case.
32. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law
Journal (2002).
33. Steven Johnson, “The Internet? We Built That,” New York Times, Sept. 21, 2012.
34. Author’s interview with Larry Page. The quote form Steve Jobs comes from an interview
I did with him for my previous book.
35. Kelly and Hamm, Smart Machines, 7.
382

PHOTO CREDITS
Lovelace: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Lord Byron: © The Print Collector/Corbis
Babbage: Popperfoto/Getty Images
Difference Engine: Allan J. Cronin
Analytical Engine: Science Photo Library/Getty Images
Jacquard loom: David Monniaux
Jacquard portrait: © Corbis
Bush: © Bettmann/Corbis
Turing: Wikimedia Commons/Original at the Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge
Shannon: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Stibitz: Denison University, Department of Math and Computer Science
Zuse: Courtesy of Horst Zuse
Atanasoff: Special Collections Department/Iowa State University
Atanasoff-Berry Computer: Special Collections Department/Iowa State University
Aiken: Harvard University Archives, UAV 362.7295.8p, B 1, F 11, S 109
Mauchly: Apic/Contributor/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Eckert: © Bettmann/Corbis
ENIAC in 1946: University of Pennsylvania Archives
Aiken and Hopper: By a staff photographer / © 1946 The Christian Science Monitor
(www.CSMonitor.com). Reprinted with permission. Also courtesy of the Grace Murray
Hopper Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian
Institution.
Jennings and Bilas with ENIAC: U.S. Army photo
Jennings: Copyright © Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum—Northwest Missouri State
University. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Snyder: Copyright © Jean Jennings Bartik Computing Museum—Northwest Missouri State
University. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Von Neumann: © Bettmann/Corbis
Goldstine: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Eckert and Cronkite with UNIVAC: U.S. Census Bureau
Bardeen, Shockley, Brattain: Lucent Technologies/Agence France-Presse/Newscom
First transistor: Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.
Shockley Nobel toast: Courtesy of Bo Lojek and the Computer History Museum
Noyce: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos
Moore: Intel Corporation
Fairchild Semiconductor: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos
Kilby: Fritz Goro/ The LIFE Picture Collection/ Getty Images
Kilby’s microchip: Image courtesy of Texas Instruments
Rock: Louis Fabian Bachrach
Grove, Noyce, Moore: Intel Corporation
Spacewar: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Bushnell: © Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis
Licklider: Karen Tweedy-Holmes
383

Taylor: Courtesy of Bob Taylor
Larry Roberts: Courtesy of Larry Roberts
Davies: National Physical Laboratory © Crown Copyright / Science Source Images
Baran: Courtesy of RAND Corp.
Kleinrock: Courtesy of Len Kleinrock
Cerf and Kahn: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis
Kesey: © Joe Rosenthal/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis
Brand: © Bill Young/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis
Whole Earth Catalog cover: Whole Earth Catalog
Engelbart: SRI International
First mouse: SRI International
Brand: SRI International
Kay: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Dynabook: Courtesy of Alan Kay
Felsenstein: Cindy Charles
People’s Computer Company cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum
Ed Roberts: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Popular Electronics cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum
Allen and Gates: Bruce Burgess, courtesy of Lakeside School, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and
Fredrica Rice
Gates: Wikimedia Commons/Albuquerque, NM police department
Microsoft team: Courtesy of the Microsoft Archives
Jobs and Wozniak: © DB Apple/dpa/Corbis
Jobs screenshot: YouTube
Stallman: Sam Ogden
Torvalds: © Jim Sugar/Corbis
Brand and Brilliant: © Winni Wintermeyer
Von Meister: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Case: Courtesy of Steve Case
Berners-Lee: CERN
Andreessen: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis
Hall and Rheingold: Courtesy of Justin Hall
Bricklin and Williams: Don Bulens
Wales: Terry Foote via Wikimedia Commons
Brin and Page: Associated Press
Lovelace: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Vitruvian Man: © The Gallery Collection/Corbis
TIMELINE CREDITS (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)
Lovelace: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hollerith: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons
Bush (first image): © Bettmann/Corbis
Vacuum tube: Ted Kinsman/Science Source
Turing: Wikimedia Commons/Original at the Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge
Shannon: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Aiken: Harvard University Archives, UAV 362.7295.8p, B 1, F 11, S 109
Atanasoff: Special Collections Department/Iowa State University
Bletchley Park: Draco2008 via Wikimedia Commons
Zuse: Courtesy of Horst Zuse
Mauchly: Apic/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Atanasoff-Berry Computer: Special Collections Department/Iowa State University
384

Colossus: Bletchley Park Trust/SSPL via Getty Images
Harvard Mark I: Harvard University
Von Neumann: © Bettmann/Corbis
ENIAC: U.S. Army photo
Bush (second image): © Corbis
Transistor invention at Bell Labs: Lucent Technologies/Agence France-Presse/Newscom
Hopper: Defense Visual Information Center
UNIVAC: U.S. Census Bureau
Regency radio: © Mark Richards/CHM
Shockley: Emilio Segrè Visual Archives / American Institute of Physics / Science Source
Fairchild Semiconductor: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos
Sputnik: NASA
Kilby: Fritz Goro/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Licklider: MIT Museum
Baran: Courtesy of RAND Corp.
Spacewar: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
First mouse: SRI International
Kesey: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
Moore: Intel Corporation
Brand: © Bill Young/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis
Taylor: Courtesy of Bob Taylor
Larry Roberts: Courtesy of Larry Roberts
Noyce, Moore, Grove: Intel Corporation
Whole Earth Catalog cover: Whole Earth Catalog
Engelbart: SRI International
ARPANET nodes: Courtesy of Raytheon BBN Technologies
4004: Intel Corporation
Tomlinson: Courtesy of Raytheon BBN Technologies
Bushnell: © Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis
Kay: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Community Memory: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Cerf and Kahn: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis
Popular Mechanics cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum
Gates and Allen: Bruce Burgess, courtesy of Lakeside School, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and
Fredrica Rice
Apple I: Ed Uthman
Apple II: © Mark Richards/CHM
IBM PC: IBM/Science Source
Gates with Windows disc: © Deborah Feingold/Corbis
Stallman: Sam Ogden
Jobs with Macintosh: Diana Walker/Contour By Getty Images
WELL logo: Image courtesy of The WELL at www.well.com. The logo is a registered
trademark of the Well Group Incorporated.
Torvalds: © Jim Sugar/Corbis
Berners-Lee: CERN
Andreessen: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis
Case: Courtesy of Steve Case
Hall: Courtesy of Justin Hall
Kasparov: Associated Press
Brin and Page: Associated Press
385

Williams: Courtesy of Ev Williams
Wales: Terry Foote via Wikimedia Commons
IBM Watson: Ben Hider/Getty Images
386

INDEX
Abbate, Janet, ref1
Aberdeen Proving Ground, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Abound, ref1
Acid Tests, ref1
acoustic delay line, ref1
“Action Office” console, ref1
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
in affair with tutor, ref1, ref2
algorithms worked out by, ref1
Analytical Engine business plan of, ref1
Analytical Engine potential seen by, ref1
Babbage requested to be tutor of, ref1
Babbage’s first meeting with, ref1
at Babbage’s salons, ref1, ref2
Bernoulli numbers computed by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
on “Combining Faculty,” ref1
on connection between poetry and analysis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
as doubtful about thinking machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
on general purpose machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
illnesses of, ref1, ref2, ref3
marriage of, ref1
“Notes” of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
opiates taken by, ref1, ref2, ref3
programming explored by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
on subroutines, ref1, ref2
temperament and mood swings of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
tutored in math, ref1, ref2, ref3
Ada (programming language), ref1
Adafruit Industries, ref1n
Adams, John, ref1
Adams, Samuel, ref1
Adams, Sherman, ref1
Adcock, Willis, ref1
advertising, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Age of Wonder, The (Holmes), ref1
Aiken, Howard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Difference Engine of, ref1, ref2, ref3
and operation of Mark I, ref1
stubborness of, ref1
Aiken Lab, ref1, ref2, ref3
Air Force, U.S., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Albert, Prince Consort, ref1
Albrecht, Bob, ref1, ref2
387

Alcorn, Al, ref1, ref2
algebra, ref1, ref2
algorithms, ref1
Allen, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
BASIC for Altair designed by, ref1, ref2
8008 language written by, ref1
electronic grid work of, ref1
Gates’s disputes with, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
in Lakeside Programming Group, ref1
PDP-10 work of, ref1, ref2
“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (Brautigan), ref1, ref2
ALOHAnet, ref1
Alpert, Dick, ref1
Altair, ref1, ref2, ref3
Altair 8800, ref1, ref2, ref3
BASIC program for, ref1, ref2, ref3
exhibition of, ref1
AltaVista, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, ref1
American Physical Society, ref1
American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC), ref1
America Online (AOL), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Ames Research Center, ref1
Ampex, ref1, ref2
analog, ref1
digital vs., ref1, ref2, ref3
Analytical Engine, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Differences Engine vs., ref1
Lovelace’s business plan for, ref1
Lovelace’s views on potential of, ref1
Menabrea’s notes on, ref1
punch cards and, ref1, ref2
as reprogrammable, ref1
Analytical Society, ref1
“Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, The” (Brin and Page), ref1
Anderson, Sean, ref1
Andreessen, Marc, ref1, ref2, ref3
Android, ref1
A-O system, ref1
Apollo Guide Computer, ref1
Apollo program, ref1, ref2, ref3
Apple, ref1n, ref2, ref3n, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
creativity of, ref1
headquarters of, ref1, ref2
Jobs ousted from, ref1, ref2
lawsuits of, ref1
Microsoft’s contract with, ref1
patents of, ref1
Apple I, ref1
Apple II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
388

AppleLink, ref1
Apple Writer, ref1
Applied Minds, ref1
Aristotle, ref1
Armstrong, Neil, ref1
ARPA, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
funding for, ref1
ARPANET, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
bids on minicomputers for, ref1
connected to Internet, ref1
distributed network of, ref1, ref2
first four nodes of, ref1, ref2
military defense and, ref1
start of, ref1
ARPANET News, ref1
arsenic, ref1
artificial intelligence, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
human-machine interaction and, ref1, ref2
as mirage, ref1, ref2, ref3
video games and, ref1
Artificial Intelligence Lab, ref1
Asimov, Isaac, ref1
assembly code, ref1
assembly line, ref1, ref2
Association for Computing Machinery, ref1n
“As We May Think” (Bush), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Atanasoff, John Vincent, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
influence of, ref1, ref2
Atanasoff, Lura, ref1
Atanasoff-Berry computer, ref1
AT&T, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Atari, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
founding of, ref1
Atari 800, ref1
Atkinson, Bill, ref1, ref2
Atlantic, ref1, ref2
atom bomb, ref1, ref2
Atomic Energy Commission, ref1
atomic power, ref1
ATS-3 satellite, ref1
Augmentation Research Center, ref1, ref2, ref3
augmented intelligence, ref1
“Augmenting Human Intellect” (Engelbart), ref1, ref2
Auletta, Ken, ref1
Autobiography (Franklin), ref1
automata, ref1
Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), ref1, ref2
automobile industry, ref1
Aydelotte, Frank, ref1

389

Baba, Neem Karoli, ref1
Babbage, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13,
ref14, ref15
Ada’s first meeting with, ref1
government attack published by, ref1
limits of Analytical Engine mistaken by, ref1
logarithm machine considered by, ref1, ref2
Lovelace given credit by, ref1
Lovelace’s Analytic Engine business plan and, ref1
programming as conceptual leap of, ref1
weekly salons of, ref1, ref2, ref3
Babbage, Henry, ref1
BackRub, ref1
Baer, Ralph, ref1
Baidu, ref1
ballistic missiles, ref1, ref2
Ballmer, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Bally Midway, ref1, ref2, ref3
Baran, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
packet-switching suggested by, ref1
Bardeen, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
in dispute with Shockley, ref1, ref2, ref3
Nobel Prize won by, ref1
photovoltaic effect studied by, ref1
solid-state studied by, ref1
surface states studied by, ref1
Barger, John, ref1
Bartik, Jean Jennings, see Jennings, Jean
BASIC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
for Altair, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
batch processing, ref1
BBC, ref1
Beatles, ref1
Bechtolsheim, Andy, ref1
Beckman, Arnold, ref1, ref2, ref3
Beckman Instruments, ref1
Bell, Alexander Graham, ref1, ref2, ref3
Bell & Howell, ref1
Bell Labs, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14,
ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21
founding of, ref1
Murray Hill headquarters of, ref1
patents licensed by, ref1
solid-state physics at, ref1, ref2, ref3
transistor invented at, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Bell System, ref1
Benkler, Yochai, ref1, ref2
Berkeley Barb, ref1, ref2
Berners-Lee, Tim, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
background of, ref1
390

and creation of browsers, ref1
hypertext created by, ref1
and micropayments, ref1
religious views of, ref1
Bernoulli, Jacob, ref1n
Bernoulli numbers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Berry, Clifford, ref1, ref2
Beyer, Kurt, ref1, ref2
Bezos, Jeff, ref1
audaciousness celebrated by, ref1
Bhatnagar, Ranjit, ref1
Big Brother and the Holding Company, ref1, ref2
Bilas, Frances, ref1, ref2
Bilton, Nick, ref1
Bina, Eric, ref1, ref2
binary, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
in code, ref1
in German codes, ref1
on Z1, ref1
Bitcoin, ref1n
bitmapping, ref1
Bletchley Park, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Blitzer, Wolf, ref1
Bloch, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3
Blogger, ref1, ref2
Blogger Pro, ref1
blogs, ref1
coining of term, ref1
McCarthy’s predictions of, ref1
Blue, Al, ref1
Blue Box, ref1, ref2
Board of Patent Interferences, ref1
Bohr, Niels, ref1
Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
bombe, ref1
BOMIS, ref1, ref2
Bonneville Power Administration, ref1
Boole, George, ref1, ref2
Boolean algebra, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Borgia, Cesare, ref1
boron, ref1
Bowers, Ann, ref1
brains, ref1, ref2
Braiterman, Andy, ref1, ref2
Braithwaite, Richard, ref1
Brand, Lois, ref1
Brand, Stewart, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Brattain, Walter, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
in dispute with Shockley, ref1, ref2, ref3
Nobel Prize won by, ref1
391

photovoltaic effect studied by, ref1
solid-state studied by, ref1
in World War II, ref1, ref2
Brautigan, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3
Breakout, ref1, ref2
Bricklin, Dan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Brilliant, Larry, ref1, ref2
Brin, Sergey, ref1, ref2, ref3
Google founded by, ref1, ref2, ref3
PageRank and, ref1
personality of, ref1
Bristow, Steve, ref1
British Association for the Advancement of Science, ref1
Brookhaven National Lab, ref1, ref2
Brown, Ralph, ref1
browsers, ref1
bugs, ref1
Bulletin Board System, ref1
Burks, Arthur, ref1
“Burning Chrome” (Gibson), ref1
Burns, James MacGregor, ref1
Bush, Vannevar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13,
ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17
background of, ref1
computers augmenting human intelligence foreseen by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7,
ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11
linear model of innovation and, ref1
personal computer envisioned by, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
technology promoted by, ref1, ref2
Bushnell, Nolan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
venture capital raised by, ref1
Busicom, ref1
Byrds, ref1
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
incest of, ref1, ref2
Luddites defended by, ref1, ref2, ref3
portrait of, ref1, ref2, ref3
Byron, Lady (Annabella Milbanke), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

Cailliau, Robert, ref1, ref2
Caine Mutiny, The, ref1
calculating machines:
of Leibniz, ref1
of Pascal, ref1, ref2
calculators, pocket, ref1, ref2, ref3
calculus, ref1, ref2
notation of, ref1
California, University of, at Santa Barbara, ref1
Call, Charles, ref1
Caltech, ref1, ref2
392

CamelCase, ref1
capacitors, ref1
CapitalLetters, ref1
Carey, Frank, ref1
Carlyle, Thomas, ref1
Cary, Frank, ref1
Case, Dan, ref1, ref2
Case, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
background of, ref1
Cathedral and the Bazaar, The (Raymond), ref1, ref2
cathode-ray tubs, ref1
Catmull, Ed, ref1
Caufield, Frank, ref1, ref2
CBS, ref1, ref2, ref3
CB Simulator, ref1
Census Bureau, U.S., ref1, ref2
Centralab, ref1
central processing unit, ref1
Cerf, Sigrid, ref1
Cerf, Vint, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
background of, ref1
internet created by, ref1
nuclear attack simulated by, ref1
CERN, ref1, ref2
Cézanne, Paul, ref1
Cheatham, Thomas, ref1
Cheriton, David, ref1
Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange, ref1
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), ref1, ref2
Chinese Room, ref1, ref2
Christensen, Clay, ref1
Christensen, Ward, ref1
Church, Alonzo, ref1, ref2
circuit switching, ref1
Cisco, ref1
Clark, Dave, ref1
Clark, Jim, ref1
Clark, Wes, ref1, ref2, ref3
Clinton, Bill, ref1n
Clippinger, Richard, ref1
COBOL, ref1, ref2n, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Cold War, ref1
Collingwood, Charles, ref1
Colossus, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
as special-purpose machine, ref1
Command and Control Research, ref1
Commodore, ref1
Community Memory, ref1, ref2, ref3
Complex Number Calculator, ref1, ref2, ref3
Compton, Karl, ref1
393

CompuServe, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
computer, ref1, ref2
debate over, ref1, ref2, ref3
“Computer as a Communication Device, The” (Licklider and Taylor), ref1
Computer Center Corporation (C-Cubed), ref1
Computer Quiz, ref1
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, ref1
computers (female calculators), ref1, ref2
Computer Space, ref1, ref2, ref3
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), ref1
Conant, James Bryant, ref1, ref2
condensers, ref1, ref2
conditional branching, ref1
Congregationalist, ref1
Congress, U.S., ref1
Congress of Italian Scientists, ref1
Constitution, U.S., ref1n
content sharing, ref1
Control Video Corporation (CVC), ref1, ref2
copper, ref1
Coupling, J. J., ref1
Courant, Richard, ref1
Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, ref1
Coyle, Bud, ref1
CP/M, ref1, ref2
CPYNET, ref1
Craigslist, ref1
“Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” (Moore), ref1
crawlers, ref1, ref2, ref3
Crocker, Stephen, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Cronkite, Walter, ref1, ref2
Crossroads, ref1
crowdsourcing, ref1, ref2
cryptology, ref1
CSNET, ref1
Cunningham, Ward, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Cybernetics (Wiener), ref1

Dabney, Ted, ref1
“Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” ref1
DARPA, ref1, ref2
Dartmouth University, ref1
AI conference at, ref1
Darwin, Charles, ref1
Data General, ref1
Data General Nova, ref1, ref2
Davidoff, Monte, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Davies, Donald, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
debugging, ref1
decision problem, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
394

Deep Blue, ref1, ref2, ref3
Defense Communications Agency, ref1
Defense Department, U.S., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
ARPA of, see ARPA
de Forest, Lee, ref1
Delphi, ref1
Democratic National Convention, 1968, ref1
De Morgan, Augustus, ref1, ref2
de Prony, Gaspard, ref1
Descartes, René, ref1
Difference Engine, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Aikens version of, ref1, ref2, ref3
Differential Analyzer, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
differential equations, ref1, ref2
digital, analog vs., ref1, ref2, ref3
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10,
ref11
diode, ref1, ref2
Discourse on the Method (Descartes), ref1
Domain Awareness System, ref1
Dompier, Steve, ref1
Don Juan (Byron), ref1
Doriot, Georges, ref1
Dorsey, Jack, ref1
DOS, ref1
Dr. Dobb’s Journal, ref1
Drucker, Peter, ref1
Duke University, ref1
Dummer, Geoffrey, ref1
Dynabook, ref1, ref2
Dyson, Freeman, ref1
Dyson, George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

Earnest, Les, ref1, ref2
Easy Writer, ref1
Eckert, J. Presper, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13,
ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18
patents sought by, ref1, ref2
and public display of ENIAC, ref1
and storage of programs in ENIAC, ref1, ref2
von Neumann accused of stealing ideas by, ref1
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, ref1
Edison, Thomas, ref1, ref2
EDSAC, ref1
EDVAC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Edwards, Dan, ref1, ref2
Edwards, Elwood, ref1
Einstein, Albert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Eisenhower, Dwight, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
electrical circuits, ref1, ref2, ref3
395

needed to break German codes, ref1, ref2
electricity, ref1
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), ref1, ref2
Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator, see EDVAC
Electronic Engineering Times, ref1
Electronic News, ref1, ref2
Electronics, ref1
Electronics Magazine, ref1
electrons, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Elkind, Jerry, ref1, ref2
Elwell, Cyril, ref1
email, ref1
Emsworth, Lord, ref1
Encyclopedia Britannica, ref1
Engelbart, Doug, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13,
ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20
on human-machine interaction, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
English, Bill, ref1, ref2, ref3
ENIAC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
decimal system used by, ref1
as first modern computer, ref1, ref2
hydrogen bomb equations worked out by, ref1
patents for work on, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
public unveiling of, ref1
speed of, ref1, ref2
storage of programs in, ref1, ref2
update of, ref1
women as programmers of, ref1, ref2
Enigma, ref1
Enlightenment, ref1
Enquire, ref1
Enquire Within Upon Everything, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Entscheidungsproblem, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Esquire, ref1, ref2, ref3
Estridge, Don, ref1
Eternal September, ref1, ref2
Ethernet, ref1, ref2n, ref3
Euclidean geometry, ref1
Eudora, ref1
Evans, David, ref1, ref2
Evans, Kent, ref1, ref2
EvHead, ref1
Excite, ref1, ref2
Expensive Planetarium, ref1
Eyser, George, ref1

Facebook, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Fairchild, Sherman, ref1, ref2
Fairchild Camera and Instrument, ref1, ref2, ref3
Fairchild Semiconductor, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
396

formation of, ref1, ref2
microchips sold to weapons makers by, ref1
Noyce’s resignation from, ref1
Farnsworth, Philo, ref1
Federal Communications Commission, ref1
Felsenstein, Lee, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11
Ferranti, ref1
Ferranti Mark I, ref1
Ferrucci, David, ref1
Feynman, Richard, ref1
file sharing, ref1
Filo, David, ref1
Firefox, ref1, ref2, ref3
“First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, by John von Neumann,” ref1
Fischer, Dave, ref1
Flowers, Tommy, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
influence of, ref1
“Fool on the Hill, The,” ref1
formal systems of mathematics, ref1
Fortran, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Fortune, ref1, ref2, ref3
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (Shelley), ref1, ref2, ref3
Franklin, Benjamin, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Frankston, Bob, ref1
Free Software Foundation, ref1
Free Speech Movement, ref1, ref2, ref3
French, Gordon, ref1, ref2
French Revolution, ref1
Fuchs, Klaus, ref1, ref2
Fulghum, Robert, ref1
Fuller, Buckminster, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Fylstra, Dan, ref1

Galaxy Games, ref1
Gale, Grant, ref1
Galison, Peter, ref1
GameLine, ref1, ref2
Garcia, Jerry, ref1
Gates, Bill, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14,
ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18
Allen’s disputes with, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
background of, ref1
BASIC for Altair designed by, ref1, ref2
BASIC learned by, ref1
belief of, in future of personal computer, ref1
copyright issues and, ref1, ref2, ref3
8008 language written by, ref1
electronic grid work of, ref1
Evans’s death and, ref1, ref2
at Harvard, ref1, ref2
397

innovator personality of, ref1
Jobs’s dispute with, ref1
Lakeside Programming Group formed by, ref1
operating system and, ref1, ref2
payroll program written by, ref1, ref2
PDP-10 work of, ref1
programming’s importance seen by, ref1
on reverse-engineering brain, ref1
Gates, Mary, ref1
Gatlinburg conference, ref1, ref2, ref3
General Electric (GE), ref1, ref2
General Post Office, ref1
general-purpose machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Engelbert’s foreseeing of, ref1
see also memex
General Relativity, ref1, ref2
geometry, ref1
germanium, ref1
Germany, codes of, ref1, ref2, ref3
Gertner, Jon, ref1, ref2
Gibson, William, ref1
Gingrich, Newt, ref1
Ginsberg, Allen, ref1
GNU, ref1
GNU/Linux, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Go, ref1
Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter), ref1
Gödel, Kurt, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
gold, ref1
Goldberg, Adele, ref1
Goldstine, Adele, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Goldstine, Herman, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
von Neumann’s first meeting with, ref1
Google, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
creation of, ref1, ref2, ref3
lawsuits of, ref1
page ranks of, ref1
self-driving cars of, ref1
Google Glass, ref1
Gopher, ref1
Gore, Al, ref1, ref2
Gore Act (1991), ref1, ref2, ref3
government funding, ref1, ref2, ref3
see also ARPANET
Graetz, Martin, ref1, ref2
Gran Trak 10, ref1
graphic user interface, ref1, ref2
Grateful Dead, ref1, ref2, ref3
“Great Conversation, The” (Cerf), ref1
Greeks, ref1
398

Greening of America, The (Reich), ref1
Greig, Woronzow, ref1
Grinnell College, ref1, ref2, ref3
Grove, Andy, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
management techniques of, ref1, ref2

hackers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Hackers (Levy), ref1, ref2
Hafner, Katie, ref1, ref2, ref3
Haggerty, Pat, ref1, ref2, ref3
idea for calculator of, ref1
Hall, Justin, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
halting problem, ref1
Hambrecht & Quist, ref1, ref2
harmonic synthesizer, ref1
Hartree, Douglas, ref1
Harvard University, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Hayden, Stone & Co., ref1, ref2
Hayes Smartmodem, ref1
Heart, Frank, ref1
“Heath Robinson,” ref1
Heinlein, Robert, ref1, ref2
Hells Angel, ref1
Hennessy, John, ref1
Herschel, John, ref1
Hertzfeld, Andy, ref1
Herzfeld, Charles, ref1, ref2, ref3
Hewlett, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Hewlett-Packard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
High Performance Computing Act (1991), ref1, ref2
Higinbotham, William, ref1
Hilbert, David, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Hiltzik, Michael, ref1
Hingham Institute Study Group, ref1
hippies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Hiroshima, ref1n
His Majesty’s Government Code and Cypher School, ref1
Hitler, Adolf, ref1, ref2
Hoddeson, Lillian, ref1
Hodges, Andrew, ref1
Hoefler, Don, ref1
Hoerni, Jean, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Hoff, Ted, ref1, ref2
Hofstadter, Douglas, ref1
Holberton, Betty Snyder, see Snyder, Betty
Hollerith, Herman, ref1, ref2
Homebrew Computer Club, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Home Terminal Club, ref1
Honeywell, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Hoover Dam, ref1
399

Hopper, Grace, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
communication skills of, ref1, ref2
on ENIAC’s lack of programmability, ref1
hired at Eckert-Mauchley, ref1
subroutines perfected by, ref1
Hopper, Vincent, ref1
HotWired, ref1
HotWired.com, ref1
Hourihan, Meg, ref1
House, David, ref1
House of Lords, ref1, ref2
Huffington, Arianna, ref1
Huffington Post, ref1
Human Brain Project, ref1
Human-Computer Interaction Group, ref1
human-machine interaction, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11,
ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16
Hush-A-Phone case, ref1
hydrogen bomb, ref1, ref2
HyperCard, ref1
hypertext, ref1, ref2
limitation of, ref1
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), ref1

IAS Machine, ref1
IBM, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15,
ref16, ref17
dress code at, ref1
founding of, ref1
Gates’s deal with, ref1
Jobs’s criticism of, ref1
Mark I history of, ref1, ref2
Mark I of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
IBM 704, ref1
IBM 1401, ref1
Idea Factory, The (Gertner), ref1
Illich, Ivan, ref1, ref2
imitation game, ref1
incompleteness theorem, ref1, ref2
indeterminacy, ref1
individualism, ref1
Industrial Revolution, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
two grand concepts of, ref1
Infocast, ref1
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Information Sciences, Inc. (ISI), ref1, ref2
Infoseek, ref1
innovation, ref1, ref2
assembly lines in, ref1
400

bureaucracies vs., ref1
and corporate culture, ref1, ref2
patents and, ref1
social atmosphere for, ref1
stages of, ref1
synergy and, ref1
teamwork and, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Institute for Advanced Study, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Institute of Radio Engineers, ref1
integrated circuit, see microchips
Integrated Electronics Corp, see Intel
Intel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
culture of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
employees empowered at, ref1
initial investments in, ref1, ref2
microprocessor of, ref1
Intel 8008 microprocessor, ref1
Intel 8080 microprocessor, ref1, ref2, ref3
Interface Message Processors (IMPs), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
see also routers
Internatioal Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ref1
Internet, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
ARPANET as precursor to, ref1; see also ARPANET
built by collaboration, ref1
built to facilitate collaboration, ref1
creation of, ref1, ref2
as decentralized, ref1
legislation on, ref1
nuclear weapons and, ref1
personal computers and, ref1
Internet Engineering Task Force, ref1, ref2, ref3
Internet Protocol (IP), ref1, ref2
interstate highway program, ref1
iOS, ref1
Iowa State, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
iPad 2, ref1
iPhone, ref1

Jacobi, Werner, ref1
Jacquard, Joseph-Marie, ref1, ref2
Jacquard loom, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Jefferson, Geoffrey, ref1, ref2
Jefferson, Thomas, ref1
Jenkins, Jim, ref1
Jennings, Jean, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
on limitations of computers, ref1
and public display of ENIAC, ref1
Jennings, Ken, ref1
Jeopardy!, ref1, ref2
Jerry and David’s Guide to the Web, ref1
401

Jobs, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9n, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14,
ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28
Apple partnership share of, ref1
Atari job of, ref1, ref2
audaciousness celebrated by, ref1
bitmapping praised by, ref1
Breakout work of, ref1, ref2
circuitboard sales plan of, ref1
creativity of, ref1
Gates’s dispute with, ref1
IBM PC studied by, ref1
ousted from Apple, ref1, ref2
paranoia of, ref1
personal computer idea of, ref1
Pixar headquarters designed by, ref1
Johnson, Clifton, ref1
Johnson, Edward “Ned,” III, ref1n
Johnson, Lyndon, ref1
Johnson, Steven, ref1
junction transistor, ref1
patent for, ref1
Justin’s Links from the Underground, ref1
J. Walter Thompson advertising, ref1

Kahn, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Internet created by, ref1
Kapor, Mitch, ref1
Kasparov, Garry, ref1, ref2
Kay, Alan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Dynabook proposed by, ref1, ref2
personal computers foreseen by, ref1, ref2, ref3
recruited to PARC, ref1
Kay, Michael, ref1
Kaypro, ref1
Kelly, John E., III, ref1, ref2
Kelly, Mervin, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Kelvin, Lord, ref1
Kennedy, John F., ref1, ref2
Kennedy, Robert, ref1
Kennedy, Ted, ref1
Kern County Land Co., ref1
Kesey, Ken, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Kilburn, Thomas, ref1
Kilby, Jack, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
calculator development and, ref1, ref2
Nobel Prize won by, ref1, ref2
resistor desinged by, ref1, ref2
solid circuit of, ref1
Kilby v. Noyce, ref1
Kildall, Gary, ref1
402

Killian, James, ref1
Kimsey, Jim, ref1, ref2
King, Martin Luther, ref1
King, William, ref1
Kissinger, Henry, ref1, ref2, ref3
Kleiner, Eugene, ref1, ref2
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, ref1, ref2
Kleinrock, Leonard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
background of, ref1
on nuclear survivability, ref1
packet switching and, ref1
Kline, Charley, ref1
K-Model, ref1, ref2
Knox, Dillwyn “Dilly,” ref1
Kotok, Alan, ref1, ref2
Kovitz, Ben, ref1
Kubrick, Stanley, ref1, ref2
Kun, Bela, ref1
Kunz, Paul, ref1
Kurzweil, Ray, ref1

Lakeside Mothers Club, ref1, ref2
Lakeside Programming Group, ref1
Lamb, Lady Caroline, ref1, ref2
Lampson, Butler, ref1, ref2
Land, Edwin, ref1, ref2
Landweber, Lawrence, ref1
Lanier, Jaron, ref1
Larson, Chris, ref1
Larson, Earl, ref1
Last, Jay, ref1, ref2, ref3
learning, ref1, ref2, ref3
Leary, Timothy, ref1
Leibniz, Gottfried, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Leibniz wheel, ref1
Leicester Polytechnic, ref1
Leigh, Augusta, ref1
Leigh, Medora, ref1, ref2
Lensman (Smith), ref1
Leonardo da Vinci, ref1, ref2, ref3
Levy, Steven, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Lewis, Harry, ref1
Li, Yanhong (Robin), ref1
“Libraries of the Future” (Licklider), ref1, ref2, ref3
Library of Congress, ref1
Lichterman, Ruth, ref1
Licklider, J. C. R, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13,
ref14, ref15
art loved by, ref1
Command and Control Research lead by, ref1
403

on human-machine interaction, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11,
ref12, ref13
online communities and, ref1
time-sharing developed by, ref1, ref2
Licklider, Tracy, ref1
Lilienfeld, Julius, ref1
LINC, ref1
Lincoln Laboratory, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
linear equations, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
linear model of innovation, ref1
Linux, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Lipkin, Efrem, ref1, ref2, ref3
Lisa, ref1
LISP, ref1
Lockheed, ref1
Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, ref1
logarithms, ref1, ref2, ref3
logic, ref1
Logical Computing Machine, see Turing Machine (Logical Computing Machine)
logic gates, ref1
LOGO, ref1
London Mathematical Society, ref1
Loop, Liza, ref1
Lord Emsworth, ref1
Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), ref1
Los Alamos, ref1, ref2, ref3
Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, ref1
Lotus, ref1
Lovelace, Annabella, ref1
Lovelace, Ralph, ref1
Loving Grace Cybernetics, ref1
Lowe, Bill, ref1
LSD, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Ludd, Ned, ref1
Luddites, ref1, ref2, ref3
Lukasik, Stephen, ref1, ref2
Lycos, ref1
Lyon, Matthew, ref1

McCarthy, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
AI conference organized by, ref1
time-sharing developed by, ref1
McGuinn, Roger, ref1
machines, thinking by, ref1, ref2, ref3
AI and, ref1
Lovelace’s doubts about, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Turing on, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Macintosh, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
McKenna, Regis, ref1
McKenzie, Alex, Kleinrock criticized by, ref1
404

McLuhan, Marshall, ref1, ref2
McNulty, Kay, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
McQueeney, David, ref1
Madison, James, ref1
madrigals, ref1
Magnavox Odyssey, ref1, ref2
Mailgram, ref1n
Malone, Michael, ref1, ref2
Manchester Mark I, ref1
Manchester University, ref1
“Man-Computer Symbiosis” (Licklider), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Mandel, Tom, ref1, ref2
Manhattan Project, ref1, ref2
Mansfield, Mike, ref1
Manutius, Aldus, ref1
Mark I, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
bomb calculations done on, ref1
Hopper’s history of, ref1, ref2
operation of, ref1
speed of, ref1, ref2
Mark II, ref1
Markoff, John, ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4
Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, The (von Neumann), ref1
Matsumoto, Craig, ref1
Mauchly, Jimmy, ref1
Mauchly, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13,
ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21
ENIAC public display and, ref1
female programmers aided by, ref1
McNulty married by, ref1
patents sought by, ref1, ref2
patent trial of, ref1, ref2
and storage of programs in ENIAC, ref1, ref2
von Neumann accused of stealing ideas by, ref1
Mauchly, Kay McNulty, see McNulty, Kay
Mayer, Marissa, ref1
Mazor, Stan, ref1
mechanization, ref1
“Meetings with von Neumann,” ref1
Melbourne, Viscount, ref1
Meltzer, Marlyn Wescoff, see Wescoff, Marlyn
memex, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
memory, ref1, ref2
programs stored in, ref1, ref2
memory unit:
on Atenoff’s device, ref1, ref2
on Z1, ref1
Menabrea, Luigi, ref1
mercury delay lines, ref1
Merholz, Peter, ref1
405

Merlin, ref1
Merry Pranksters, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Merton, Robert, ref1
message switching, ref1
Metcalfe, Bob, ref1, ref2
Metropolis, Nick, ref1
Michie, Donald, ref1
microchips, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
dispute over invention of, ref1
initial sales of, ref1
Noyce’s version of, ref1, ref2
number of transistors in, ref1
Micropayments Markup Working Group, ref1
microprocessors, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Microsoft, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Apple’s contract with, ref1
creation of, ref1
operating system of, ref1, ref2
Milbanke, Annabella, see Byron, Lady
Milhon, Jude (St. Jude), ref1, ref2
military, ballistic missiles of, ref1
military-industrial-academic complex, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Miller, Herman, ref1
Millikan, Robert, ref1
Mills, Thomas, ref1
Mims, Forrest, ref1, ref2
Mind, ref1
Mining Data at Stanford (MIDAS), ref1
MINIX, ref1, ref2
Minsky, Marvin, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Minskytron, ref1, ref2
Minuteman II, ref1, ref2
Miracle Month, ref1
MIT, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15,
ref16, ref17
MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
MKUltra, ref1
Model K, ref1, ref2
modems, ref1, ref2
moon landing, ref1, ref2
Moore, Betty, ref1
Moore, Fred, ref1, ref2, ref3
Moore, Gordon, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13
corporate culture and, ref1
Intel founding and, ref1
as nonauthoritarian, ref1
on Noyce’s leadership skills, ref1
and Shockley’s replacement, ref1, ref2, ref3
Moore School Lectures, ref1
Moore’s Law, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
406

Moravec, Hans, ref1
Morcom, Christopher, ref1, ref2
Mosaic, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
“Mother of All Demos, The,” ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Motwani, Rajeev, ref1
mouse, ref1, ref2, ref3
MS-DOS, ref1, ref2
Mumford, Lewis, ref1
Munzner, Tamara, ref1
Murray, Arnold, ref1
music, ref1, ref2, ref3
MySpace, ref1
Myth of the Machine, The (Mumford), ref1

NASA, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
NASA Ames Research Center, ref1
National Center for Atmospheric Research, ref1
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), ref1, ref2
National Defense Research Committee, ref1, ref2
National Information Infrastructure Act (1993), ref1
National Physical Laboratory, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
National Science Foundation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
National Semiconductor, ref1
Navy, U.S., ref1
Nelson, Ted, ref1, ref2, ref3
Netscape, ref1
networks, ref1, ref2
data blocks in, ref1
distributed, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
lack of centralization in, ref1, ref2, ref3
packet switched, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Network Working Group, ref1
Neumann, Max, ref1
neural networks, ref1
neurons, ref1
Newman, Max, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
newsgroups, ref1
Newton, Isaac, ref1
New Yorker, ref1
New York Times, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
New York World’s Fair (1939), ref1, ref2, ref3
NeXT, ref1, ref2
Nishi, Kay, ref1
Nixon, Richard, ref1, ref2
NM Electronics, ref1
noncomputable numbers, ref1
North Carolina, University of, ref1
Norton, Larry, ref1
Norvig, Peter, ref1
Nova, ref1, ref2
407

Novack, Ken, ref1
Noyce, Robert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13
corporate culture and, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Fairchild resignation of, ref1
Intel employees empowered by, ref1
Intel money raised by, ref1
Intel’s organization chart drawn by, ref1
microchip of, ref1, ref2
microprocessor and, ref1
in patent lawsuit, ref1
planar process and, ref1
resistor designed by, ref1
as Shockley’s replacement, ref1
on synergy, ref1
n-p-n junction architecture, ref1
NSFNET, ref1
n-type, ref1
Nuance Communications, ref1
nuclear weapons, ref1
Internet and, ref1
Nupedia, ref1, ref2, ref3
Nutting, Bill, ref1
Nutting Associates, ref1, ref2, ref3

Obama, Barack, ref1
Office of Defense Mobilization, ref1
Office of Scientific Research, ref1
Ohm’s Law, ref1
oil, ref1
Olsen, Ken, ref1
Olson, Judith, ref1
“On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ (Turing), ref1,
ref2
On Distributed Communications (Baran), ref1
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), ref1
online communities, ref1
oNLine System (NLS), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (Somerville), ref1
Opel, John, ref1
open architecture, ref1, ref2
OpenOffice, ref1
open-sourcing, ref1, ref2
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller), ref1
operating systems, ref1
open-source, ref1
operations, ref1
Ordnance Department, U.S. Army, ref1, ref2
O’Reilly, Tim, ref1, ref2
O’Reilly Media, ref1, ref2
oscillators, ref1
408

Osculometer, ref1

Packard, Dave, ref1, ref2, ref3
packets, ref1
packet switching, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Kleinrock’s taking credit for, ref1
Page, Carl, ref1
Page, Larry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Google founded by, ref1, ref2, ref3
hypertext limitations and, ref1
PageRank and, ref1
Web crawler of, ref1
PageRank, ref1
Palevsky, Max, ref1
Palo Alto Community Center, ref1
Papadimitriou, Christos, ref1
Papert, Seymour, ref1
PARC Universal Packet, ref1
Pascal, Blaise, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Patent and Trademark Office, U.S., ref1, ref2n, ref3
patents, ref1, ref2
tension over, ref1
Paterson, Tim, ref1
Pathfinder, ref1, ref2
PC, ref1
PC-DOS, ref1
PC-Link, ref1
PDP-1 computer, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
PDP-8, ref1, ref2
PDP-10, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
PDP-11, ref1
peace movement, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
peer-to-peer connections, ref1, ref2
Pellow, Nicola, ref1
Pendery, Don, ref1
Pennsylvania, University of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11,
ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17
Pennywhistle, ref1
People Connection, ref1
People’s Computer Center, ref1
People’s Computer Company, ref1, ref2
PepsiCo, ref1
Perceptron, ref1, ref2
Perlman, Radia, ref1
“Personal Computer for Children of All Ages, A,” ref1
personal computers, ref1
Gates’s belief in future of, ref1
IBM vs. Apple, ref1
Internet and, ref1
Jobs’s idea for, ref1
409

Kay’s prediction of, ref1, ref2, ref3
software for, ref1
technology needed for, ref1, ref2
Philco, ref1, ref2
Philips, Thomas, ref1
phone circuits, ref1
phone signals, ref1
photovoltaic effect, ref1
Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices (Grove), ref1
PicoSpan, ref1
Pierce, John, ref1
Pinker, Steven, ref1
Pitts, Bill, ref1, ref2
Pixar, ref1, ref2
planar process, ref1
planimeter, ref1
plutonium-239, ref1
p-n junction, ref1
PNP transistor, ref1
Poggio, Tomaso, ref1
Polaris, ref1
Pong, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Popular Electronics, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Post Office Research Station, ref1, ref2
Practice of Management, The (Drucker), ref1
Presley, Elvis, ref1
Princeton University, ref1, ref2, ref3
printing press, ref1
private enterprise, ref1, ref2
PRNET, ref1, ref2, ref3
Processor Technology, ref1
Procter & Gamble, ref1, ref2
Prodigy, ref1, ref2, ref3
programming, ref1, ref2
as Babbage’s conceptual leap, ref1
of ENIAC, ref1
Lovelace’s exploration of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
as true value of computers, ref1
von Neumann’s work on, ref1
on Z1, ref1
“Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection, A” (Kahn and Cerf), ref1
p-type, ref1
punch cards, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
Pyra Labs, ref1, ref2

QDOS, ref1
Q-Link, ref1
Qualcomm, ref1
Quantum, ref1
Quantum 2000, ref1
410

quantum physics, ref1, ref2, ref3
queuing theory, ref1
QuickWeb, ref1

radar, ref1, ref2
radio, ref1
transistors for, ref1
Railway Express Agency, ref1
Ralls, John, ref1
Ram Dass, ref1
RAND Corporation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
RankDex, ref1
Raskin, Jef, ref1
Raymond, Eric, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Raytheon, ref1, ref2
RCA, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
rebel entrepreneurs, ref1
Regency TR-1, ref1
Reich, Charles, ref1
Reid, T. R, ref1, ref2
relays, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
on Z1, ref1
Remington Rand, ref1, ref2, ref3
Remote Procedure Cell, ref1
“Report on an Electronic Diff. Analyzer” (Mauchly and Eckert), ref1
Requests for Comments (RFC), ref1, ref2, ref3
Resource One, ref1
Rheingold, Howard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Riordan, Michael, ref1
Roberts, Ed, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
background of, ref1
Roberts, Larry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
ARPA funding raised by, ref1
ARPA hiring of, ref1
bids solicited for ARPANET minicomputers, ref1
decentralized network favored by, ref1
gambling by, ref1
Kleinrock hired by, ref1
on nuclear weapons myth of Internet origin, ref1
personality of, ref1
robot, ref1
robots, navigating by, ref1
Robot Wisdom, ref1
Rock, Arthur, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Intel money raised by, ref1, ref2
venture capital and, ref1
Rockefeller, John D., Jr, ref1
Rockefeller, Laurence, ref1, ref2, ref3
Rolling Stone, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Rometty, Ginni, ref1, ref2, ref3
411

Roosevelt, Franklin, ref1
Rosen, Ben, ref1
Rosenberg, Scott, ref1
Rosenblatt, Frank, ref1
“Rosencrantz and Ethernet” (Cerf), ref1
Rosenfeld, Jeremy, ref1
Rossetto, Louis, ref1, ref2
routers, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Rubenstein, David, ref1
Russell, Bertrand, ref1
Russell, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5

St. Jude (Jude Milhon), ref1, ref2
Sams, Jack, ref1
Samson, Peter, ref1, ref2, ref3
Sanders, Bob, ref1
San Francisco Chronicle, ref1
Sanger, Larry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Sarofim, Fayez, ref1
SATNET, ref1
Say Everything (Rosenberg), ref1
Scantlebury, Roger, ref1, ref2, ref3
Schreyer, Helmut, ref1, ref2
“Science, the Endless Frontier” (Bush), ref1n
Scientific American, ref1
Scientific and Advanced Technology Act (1992), ref1
Scientific Data System, ref1
Scientific Memoirs, ref1, ref2, ref3
Scientific Revolution, ref1, ref2
Scripting News, ref1
search engines, ref1, ref2, ref3
Searle, John, ref1, ref2
Sears, ref1
Seattle Computer Products, ref1
self-driving cars, ref1
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
semiconductivity theory, ref1
semiconductor amplifier, ref1
semiconductors, ref1, ref2
Sendall, Mike, ref1
Sequoia Capital, ref1n, ref2
Seva Foundation, ref1
Shannon, Claude, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Shapin, Steven, ref1
Shaw, Artie, ref1
Shelley, Mary, ref1, ref2, ref3
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ref1
Shirky, Clay, ref1, ref2
Shockley, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
acoustic delay line developed by, ref1
412

Bardeen and Brattain’s dispute with, ref1, ref2, ref3
credit for transistor taken by, ref1, ref2
IQ of, ref1
midlife crisis of, ref1
Nobel Prize won by, ref1, ref2
poor leadership skills of, ref1, ref2, ref3
racial views of, ref1, ref2
replacement for vacuum tube sought by, ref1, ref2
researchers recruited to company by, ref1, ref2, ref3
semiconductor amplifier idea of, ref1
solid-state studied by, ref1
in World War II, ref1
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Shockley replaced at, ref1, ref2
Siemens, ref1
Signals and Power Subcommittee, ref1
silicon, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Silverstein, Craig, ref1
Simon, Leslie, ref1
Simonyi, Charles, ref1
singularity, ref1
Siri, ref1
Sketchpad, ref1
“Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communications System” (Sutherland), ref1
slide rules, ref1, ref2, ref3
Smalltalk, ref1
Smarter Than You Think (Thompson), ref1
Smith, Adam, ref1
Smith, E. E. “Doc,” ref1, ref2, ref3
SNARC, ref1
SNDMSG, ref1
Snow, C. P., ref1
Snow White, ref1
Snyder, Betty, ref1, ref2, ref3
ENIAC’s glitch fixed by, ref1
and public display of ENIAC, ref1
social networking, ref1, ref2
software, ref1
open-source, ref1, ref2
Software Publishing Industry, ref1n
Sokol, Dan, ref1
solid circuit, ref1
solid-state physics, ref1, ref2, ref3
Solomon, Les, ref1, ref2
Somerville, Mary, ref1, ref2
sonic waves, ref1
Source, ref1, ref2, ref3
source code, ref1
Soviet Union, ref1, ref2
space program, ref1
413

Spacewar, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
speech-recognition technologies, ref1
Spence, Frances Bilas, see Bilas, Frances
Spencer, Herbert, ref1
Sperry Rand, ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4
Sputnik, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
SRI, ref1
Srinivasan, Srinija, ref1
Stallman, Richard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Stanford Industrial Park, ref1
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, ref1
Stanford Research Institute, ref1, ref2, ref3
Stanford Research Park, ref1
steam engine, ref1
stepped reckoner, ref1
Stevenson, Adlai, ref1
Stibitz, George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
store-and-forward switching, ref1
Strachey, Oliver, ref1
Strategic Air Command, ref1, ref2
subroutines, ref1, ref2
in ENIAC, ref1
of video games, ref1
Suess, Randy, ref1
“Summit Ridge Drive,” ref1
Sun Microsystem, ref1, ref2
surface states, ref1
Sutherland, Ivan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Swarthmore University, ref1
Swimming Across (Grove), ref1
Switchboards, ref1
“Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, A,” ref1
symbolic logic, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Symbolics, ref1
Syzygy, ref1

Tanenbaum, Andrew, ref1
Taylor, Bob, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
ARPA funding raised by, ref1
Internet designed as decentralized by, ref1
Kleinrocker criticized by, ref1
on nuclear weapons myth of Internet origin, ref1
On Distributed Communications read by, ref1
online communities and, ref1
PARC leadership style of, ref1
personality of, ref1, ref2
recruited to PARC, ref1
Robert’s hiring suggested by, ref1
TCP/IP protocols, ref1, ref2
414

Teal, Gordon, ref1
teamwork, innovation and, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Tech Model Railroad Club, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
technotribalism, ref1
Teitelbaum, Ruth Lichterman, see Lichterman, Ruth
Tektronix, ref1
Teledyne, ref1, ref2
telephones, ref1, ref2
television, ref1
Teller, Edward, ref1, ref2, ref3
Tennis for Two, ref1
Terman, Fred, ref1n, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Terman, Lewis, ref1
Terrell, Paul, ref1
Tesla, Nikola, ref1, ref2
Texas Instruments, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
military microchips by, ref1
textiles, ref1
Thacker, Chuck, ref1, ref2, ref3
“That’s All Right,” ref1
Third Wave, The (Toffler), ref1
Thompson, Clive, ref1
Time, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Time Inc., ref1, ref2
Times (London), ref1
time-sharing, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Time Warner, ref1
Tocqueville, Alexis de, ref1, ref2
Toffler, Alvin, ref1
Tolkien, J. R. R., ref1
Tomlinson, Ray, ref1
Tom Swift Terminal, ref1
Tools for Conviviality (Illich), ref1
TOPS-10, ref1
Torborg, Jeff, ref1
Torvalds, Linus, ref1, ref2, ref3
traffic jams, ref1
Traf-O-Data, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
transistors, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
on ballistic missiles, ref1
invention of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
licensing fee for, ref1
name coined for, ref1
press conference for, ref1
price of, ref1, ref2
production of, ref1
for radios, ref1
Shockley’s taking credit for, ref1, ref2
Transmission Control Protocol, ref1
Trellix, ref1
415

Triplanetary (Smith), ref1n
Tri-Pos (Minskytron), ref1, ref2
Trips Festival, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Truman, Harry, ref1, ref2, ref3n
“Tube Relay and Techniques of Its Switching, The” (Schreyer), ref1
Tuck, Hugh, ref1, ref2
Turing, Alan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Bletchley Park code-breaking by, ref1
Colossus and, ref1
death of, ref1, ref2
on general-purpose computers, ref1, ref2, ref3
homosexuality of, ref1, ref2, ref3
influence of, ref1, ref2
spartan existence of, ref1
stored-program computer of, ref1, ref2
on thinking machines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Turing, John, ref1
“Turingery,” ref1
Turing Machine (Logical Computing Machine), ref1, ref2
Turing’s Cathedral (Dyson), ref1
Turing Test, ref1, ref2
Watson and, ref1
Turner, Ted, ref1
Twitter, ref1, ref2, ref3
2001: A Space Odyssey, ref1, ref2, ref3
TX-2, ref1

U-2 planes, ref1
UCLA, ref1, ref2, ref3
Ulam, Stanislaw, ref1
Uniform Resource Locators, ref1
Unisys, ref1
Unitarian Universalist Church, ref1
UNIVAC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
UNIX, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
untyped lambda calculus, ref1
uranium-235, ref1
USCO, ref1
Usenet, ref1, ref2
“Use of High Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculating, The” (Mauchly), ref1

vacuum tubes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13
Shockley’s search for replacement for, ref1, ref2
Vail, Theodore, ref1
Valentine, Don, ref1n
Veblen, Oswald, ref1, ref2
Venrock Associates, ref1
venture capital, ref1, ref2, ref3
video games, ref1, ref2, ref3
artificial intelligence and, ref1
416

Vietnam War, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Vinge, Vernor, ref1
Virtual Community, The (Rheingold), ref1
VisiCalc, ref1, ref2, ref3
Vitruvian Man, ref1
von Meister, William Ferdinand, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
von Neumann, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13
AI work of, ref1, ref2
atomic bomb work of, ref1
death of, ref1n
Goldstine’s first meeting with, ref1
singularity coined by, ref1
on stored memory, ref1
stored-program computer work of, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
von Neumann, Klára, ref1, ref2
von Neumann, Nicholas, ref1

Waldrop, Mitchell, ref1
Wales, Ada, ref1
Wales, Jimmy, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Wall Street Journal, ref1, ref2
Wang, ref1
War Department, U.S., ref1, ref2, ref3
Warnock, John, ref1
Washington, George, ref1
Washington Post, ref1, ref2
Watson (computer), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Watson, Dr. John (char.), ref1
Watson, Thomas (Bell’s assistant), ref1, ref2
Watson, Thomas, Jr. (IBM chief), ref1
Watson, Thomas, Sr. (IBM founder), ref1
Wavy Gravy, ref1
Wayne, Ron, ref1
weather patterns, ref1
weather predictions, ref1
weaving looms, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
WebCrawler, ref1
Weiland, Ric, ref1, ref2
WELL, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Wellington, Duke of, ref1, ref2
Wells Fargo, ref1
Wescoff, Marlyn, ref1
Westinghouse, ref1, ref2, ref3
WhatsApp, ref1
What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), ref1, ref2, ref3n
Whitney, John Hay “Jock,” ref1
Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Whole Earth communalists, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Who Owns the Future? (Lanier), ref1
Wiener, Norbert, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
417

Wiesner, Jerome, ref1, ref2
WiFi, ref1n
Wigner, Eugene, ref1
Wikipedia, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
creation of, ref1
WikiWikiWeb, ref1, ref2
Wilkes, Maurice, ref1, ref2
Williams, Evan, ref1, ref2, ref3
Williams, Frederic Calland, ref1
Wilson, Woodrow, ref1
Windows, ref1, ref2, ref3
Winer, Dave, ref1
Winograd, Terry, ref1, ref2
Wired, ref1n, ref2, ref3
Wojcicki, Susan, ref1
Wolfe, Tom, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
women:
as ENIAC programmers, ref1, ref2
math doctorates received by, ref1
word processing, 2467
Wordsworth, William, ref1
World Book Encyclopedia, ref1, ref2
World Health Organization, ref1
World’s Fair (1939), ref1
World War II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
code breaking in, ref1
science promoted by, ref1
Z3 destroyed in, ref1, ref2
World Wide Web, ref1, ref2
Berner-Lee’s collaborative vision of, ref1, ref2, ref3
initial creation of, ref1
placed in public domain, ref1, ref2
profits from, ref1, ref2
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ref1
Wozniak, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3n, ref4n, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13
Apple partnership share of, ref1
Breakout work of, ref1, ref2
terminal designed by, ref1

Xanadu, ref1, ref2
Xerox, ref1
Xerox Alto, ref1, ref2
Xerox PARC, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Ethernet invented at, ref1
Xerox Star, ref1
X Mosaic, ref1

Yahoo!, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Yang, Jerry, ref1
YouTube, ref1
418

Z1, ref1
Z2, ref1
Z3, ref1, ref2
Znaimer, Sam, ref1
Zuckerberg, Mark, ref1
Zuse, Konrad, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
influence of, ref1, ref2
419

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.
420

ENDNOTES
1. It was in a review of this book that one of Babbage’s friends, William Whewell, coined the
term scientist to suggest the connection among these disciplines.
2. Specifically, he wanted to use the method of divided differences to closely approximate
logarithmic and trigonometric functions.
3. Named after the seventeenth-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, who studied
the sums of powers of consecutive integers, they play an intriguing role in number theory,
mathematical analysis, and differential topology.
4. Ada’s example involved tabulating polynomials using difference techniques as a sub-
function, which required a nested loop structure with a varying range for the inner loop.
5. For the equation an + bn = cn, in which a, b, and c are positive integers, there is no solution
when n is greater than 2.
6. Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.
7. A process in which a number is divided by 2 if it is even, and is tripled and the result added
to 1 if odd, when repeated indefinitely, will always eventually lead to a result of 1.
8. By then Atanasoff had retired. His career after World War II had been spent in the field of
military ordnance and artillery, not computers. He died in 1995. John Mauchly remained a
computer scientist, partly as a consultant with Sperry and as the founding president of the
Association for Computing Machinery. He died in 1980. Eckert likewise remained with
Sperry much of his career. He died in 1995.
9. Stirling’s formula, which approximates the value of the factorial of a number.
10. The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention
of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to
highlight her role and that of the programmers.
11. Von Neumann was successful in this. The plutonium implosion design would result in the
first detonation of an atomic device, the Trinity test, in July 1945 near Alamogordo, New
Mexico, and it would be used for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945,
three days after the uranium bomb was used on Hiroshima. With his hatred of both the Nazis
and the Russian-backed communists, von Neumann became a vocal proponent of atomic
weaponry. He attended the Trinity test, as well as later tests on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, and
he argued that a thousand radiation deaths was an acceptable price to pay for the United
States attaining a nuclear advantage. He would die twelve years later, at age fifty-three, of
bone and pancreatic cancer, which may have been caused by the radiation emitted during
those tests.
12. In 1967, at age sixty, Hopper was recalled to active duty in the Navy with the mission of
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standardizing its use of COBOL and validating COBOL compilers. By vote of Congress, she
was permitted to extend her tour beyond retirement age. She attained the rank of rear admiral,
and finally retired in August 1986 at age seventy-nine as the Navy’s oldest serving officer.
13. The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress “to promote the progress of science and useful
arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective writings and discoveries.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office throughout the
1970s generally would not grant patents to innovations whose only departure from existing
technology was the use of a new software algorithm. That became murky in the 1980s with
conflicting appeals court and Supreme Court rulings. Policies changed in the mid-1990s,
when the DC Circuit Court issued a series of rulings permitting patents for software that
produces a “useful, concrete and tangible result” and President Bill Clinton appointed as head
of the Patent Office a person who had been the chief lobbyist for the Software Publishing
Industry.
14. At Christmas 2013 Turing was posthumously granted a formal pardon by Queen
Elizabeth II.
15. For example, the engineers and theorists discovered that silicon (which has four electrons
in its outer orbit) that was doped with phosphorus or arsenic (which have five electrons in
their outer orbits) had spare electrons and thus was a negative-charged carrier. The result was
called an n-type semiconductor. Silicon that was doped with boron (with three electrons in its
outer orbit) had a deficit of electrons—there were “holes” where some electrons would
normally be—and thus was positively charged, making it known as a p-type semiconductor.
16. His son Fred Terman later became the famous dean and provost at Stanford.
17. For a short video of Shannon and his machines juggling, see
https://www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/shortsha.mov.
18. Only living people can be selected for a Nobel.
19. The vehicle he used was convertible debentures, which were loans that could be
converted into common stock if the company became successful but were worthless (at the
end of the line of creditors) if it failed.
20. Edward “Ned” Johnson III, then running the Fidelity Magellan Fund. In 2013 Rock still
had these two sheets, along with the older one seeking the patron for what became Fairchild,
tucked in a filing cabinet in his office overlooking San Francisco Bay.
21. After she married Noyce she had to leave Intel, and she moved to the fledgling Apple
Computer, where she became Steve Jobs’s first director of human resources and also a
calming maternal influence on him.
22. A sample of Doc Smith’s prose, from his novel Triplanetary (1948): “Nerado’s vessel
was completely ready for any emergency. And, unlike her sister-ship, she was manned by
scientists well-versed in the fundamental theory of the weapons with which they fought.
Beams, rods and lances of energy flamed and flared; planes and pencils cut, slashed and
stabbed; defensive screens glowed redly or flashed suddenly into intensely brilliant,
coruscating incandescence. Crimson opacity struggled sullenly against violet curtains of
annihilation. Material projectiles and torpedoes were launched under full-beam control; only
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to be exploded harmlessly in mid-space, to be blasted into nothingness or to disappear
innocuously against impenetrable polycyclic screens.”
23. Three years later, in 1975, when Atari decided to build a home version of Pong, the
venture capital industry had caught fire, and Bushnell was able to get $20 million in funding
from Don Valentine, who had just founded Sequoia Capital. Atari and Sequoia helped to
launch each other.
24. By 2010, federal spending on research had dropped to half of what was spent by private
industry.
25. The government has repeatedly changed whether there should be a “D” for “Defense” in
the acronym. The agency was created in 1958 as ARPA. It was renamed DARPA in 1972,
then reverted to ARPA in 1993, and then became DARPA again in 1996.
26. A high-frequency transformer that can take ordinary voltage, like the 120 volts in a U.S.
outlet, and step it up to superhigh voltages, often discharging energy in cool-looking
electrical arcs.
27. It appeared the same month that he presented to President Truman his other
groundbreaking essay, “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which proposed the creation of a
research collaboration among government, industry, and universities. See chapter 7.
28. The Xerox Star workstation was not introduced until 1981, eight years after the Alto was
invented, and even it was not initially marketed as a stand-alone computer but as part of an
“integrated office system” that included a file server, a printer, and usually other networked
workstations.
29. In 2014 Felsenstein was working on a toy/kit for middle school students that would be
like an electronic logic board Lego set that would help students visualize bits, electronic
components, and logic functions such as not, or, and and.
30. When Wired magazine featured maker culture in its April 2011 issue, it put a woman
engineer on its cover for the first time, the MIT-trained do-it-yourself entrepreneur Limor
Fried, whose moniker “ladyada” and company name Adafruit Industries were homages to
Ada Lovelace.
31. To listen to Dompier’s Altair play “Fool on the Hill,” go to
http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/story.php?ii=46.
32. After they became successful, Gates and Allen donated a new science building to
Lakeside and named its auditorium after Kent Evans.
33. Steve Wozniak’s unwillingness to tackle this tedious task when he wrote BASIC for the
Apple II would later force Apple to have to license BASIC from Allen and Gates.
34. Reading a draft version of this book online, Steve Wozniak said that Dan Sokol made
only eight copies, because they were hard and time-consuming to make. But John Markoff,
who reported this incident in What the Dormouse Said, shared with me (and Woz and
Felsenstein) the transcript of his interview with Dan Sokol, who said he used a PDP-11 with a
high-speed tape reader and punch. Every night he would make copies, and he estimated he
made seventy-five in all.
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35. The lawyers were right to be worried. Microsoft later was involved in a protracted
antitrust suit brought by the Justice Department, which charged that it had improperly
leveraged its dominance of the operating system market to seek advantage in browsers and
other products. The case was eventually settled after Microsoft agreed to modify some of its
practices.
36. By 2009 the Debian version 5.0 of GNU/Linux had 324 million source lines of code, and
one study estimated that it would have cost about $8 billion to develop by conventional
means (http://gsyc.es/~frivas/paper ).
37. An Ethernet or WiFi today can transmit data at a billion bps, which is more than 3 million
times faster.
38. Western Union later bought the business and turned it into its Mailgram service.
39. A reference to the phrase used during the 1980 drama in which Americans were held
hostage in Iran.
40. Like the Web’s HTTP, Gopher was an Internet (TCP/IP) application layer protocol. It
primarily facilitated a menu-based navigation for finding and distributing documents (usually
text-based) online. The links were done by the servers rather than embedded in the
documents. It was named after the university’s mascot and was also a pun on “go for.”
41. A year later, Andreessen would join with the serially successful entrepreneur Jim Clark to
launch a company called Netscape that produced a commercial version of the Mosaic
browser.
42. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies incorporate mathematically coded encryption
techniques and other principles of cryptography to create a secure currency that is not
centrally controlled.
43. In March 2003 blog as both a noun and a verb was admitted into the Oxford English
Dictionary.
44. Tellingly, and laudably, Wikipedia’s entries on its own history and the roles of Wales and
Sanger have turned out, after much fighting on the discussion boards, to be balanced and
objective.
45. Created by the Byte Shop’s owner Paul Terrell, who had launched the Apple I by
ordering the first fifty for his store.
46. The one written by Bill Gates.
47. Gates donated to computer buildings at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon.
The one at Harvard, cofunded with Steve Ballmer, was named Maxwell Dworkin, after their
mothers.
48. The Oxford English Dictionary added google as a verb in 2006.
49. A neuron is a nerve cell that transmits information using electrical or chemical signals. A
synapse is a structure or pathway that carries a signal from a neuron to another neuron or cell.
424

425

Table of Contents
Half-title page
ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrated Timeline
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Ada, Countess of Lovelace
CHAPTER 2 The Computer
CHAPTER 3 Programming
CHAPTER 4 The Transistor
CHAPTER 5 The Microchip
CHAPTER 6 Video Games
CHAPTER 7 The Internet
CHAPTER 8 The Personal Computer
CHAPTER 9 Software
CHAPTER 10 Online
CHAPTER 11 The Web
CHAPTER 12 Ada Forever
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
426

Half-title page
ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Illustrated Timeline
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 Ada, Countess of Lovelace
CHAPTER 2 The Computer
CHAPTER 3 Programming
CHAPTER 4 The Transistor
CHAPTER 5 The Microchip
CHAPTER 6 Video Games
CHAPTER 7 The Internet
CHAPTER 8 The Personal Computer
CHAPTER 9 Software
CHAPTER 10 Online
CHAPTER 11 The Web
CHAPTER 12 Ada Forever
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Credits
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR