The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

Can you imagine this woman, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is the first person featured in this history of technology - the internet and computers? I read about Lord Byron in the Georgette Heyer Regency novels that I love. He was a famous, romantic novelist. In this book, The Innovators, it sounds as if he married for money and the marriage did not last long. Ada's mother must have disliked Bryon a lot because she had Ada tutored in Math in order to "counteract" any tendencies Ada might have to poetry.

It turned out Ada had a love for the poetry of mathematics and science. I did not know this but it turns out that Steve Jobs always featured an image of the intersection of technology and liberal arts when he gave demos of new products. The book had this intersection as a theme, writing about the many different people who exemplified that intersection, and who built on each others' ideas to develop computers, networking and the internet.

Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Steve Jobs that was a bestseller, and that I also read. It was great. I was thinking at first to describe The Innovators as a bunch of short biographies. But really, it's a biography of technology.

One of the things that surprised me as I read it was the communal aspect of the technology world. When they said, "Power to the people," they meant it. Or many of them did. Many of the creators and inventors who were a part of the development of technology strongly believed in NOT having a central authority that determined rules and so on. They believed in spreading the control throughout the system, with no one person or entity in charge. There was even an early technology company called "The Love and Grace Company."

The structure of the internet is kind of like a fishnet, with multiple paths from one thing to another. There's a piece of equipment in our server room, and millions of other server rooms, called a "router" because that's truly what it is. It routes the data from place to place. And if one router goes down, the data is routed around it.

I was also surprised by the women featured in the book, who were integral parts of the growth of technology. There were a team of women who did the programming of the huge, early computers. They configured the pathways and plugged the cables in and out to program the computers manually. They were usually very much unacknowledged, but they still loved their work.

There's a story of the "mother of all demos" that early inventors had in order to show others the power of computers. It is mentioned not only in the history itself, as an event and what happened, but often referred to by people who attended it as being a big influence for them. For this demo, 4 women did the programming and worked 24x7. The book recounts how the night before the demo they were all exhausted and even though there was still an unsolved problem, they had to go home and go to bed. One woman woke up at 4am with the solution in her head and she went over to the room at that wee hour in the morning to put in the fix.

But these women were not even invited to the demo. There was a big dinner afterward to celebrate and the women were not included. As the men went off to their dinner, the women walked to their hotels in the cold. Sheesh. However, one of those women was in the Navy, became a brigadier general, and had the longest career of anyone in the Navy.

With my work being in the technology arena, it's not surprising I found the book interesting. But I think people not even as geeky as I am would enjoy it, too. It's about people and how they worked together and alone, how they built on each others' ideas, how ideas came to them, how technology involved, the culture surrounding them -- so much more than just how computers were invented.

I highly recommend it.