THE INNOVATORS
How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster UK
542 pages; Rs 799
Why does India lack the digital innovation and invention ecosystem of the United States and, specifically, Silicon Valley?
An oft-repeated answer is that the brightest youngsters in the world are over there. And the smartest thrive in an environment that is designed to bring out the best. But what possibly could have led to this environment that attracted the brightest and smartest that, in turn, led to the birth of giants like Microsoft, Intel, Apple and Google?
To understand and appreciate the answer to these questions, you should read Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
Mr Isaacson's principal themes are about collaboration and innovation. He highlights this through many little-known stories of less famous engineers and inventors who worked on the early computers and the internet itself. The larger thrust of the book, of course, is the creation of the digital revolution. And this came, as Mr Isaacson emphasises, not from iconic individuals but through partnerships between people and organisations, across government, industry and academia.
Before we dwell on that, some history is worth recounting. The foundation to the digital age as we know it was laid, says Mr Isaacson, in 1843 when Ada, Countess of Lovelace and also daughter of poet Lord Byron, published notes for Charles Babbage, "a 41-year-old widowed science and math eminence who had established himself as a luminary on London's social circuit".
Ada wrote of four concepts in her notes, the first of a general purpose machine that could perform a pre-set task but also be programmed and reprogrammed to do a limitless array of tasks. This was the Analytical Engine.
Second, she said, this machine's operations need not be limited to math and numbers, rather could act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols: words and logic and music and other things we might use symbols to convey.
Third, she spoke of the computer program or algorithm. And also became the author of the first computer program ever to be published. Finally, she showed with a table and diagram how an algorithm would be fed into the computer.
Ada died in 1852 at age 36 and was buried next to her poet father who apparently she never knew and who died at the same age. The Industrial Revolution came up soon after and efforts were feverishly under way to mechanise steps so they could be performed by machines, mostly powered by steam engines.
By the early 20th century, things got really exciting. Across universities and in war rooms from Boston to Berlin scientists and academicians alike were trying to find ways to build a computer that would solve problems. And here is where more names - surely unknown to most of us - crop up.
Although it is fascinating to read of the contribution of so many individuals to what finally became the throbbing digital age, not all got the due they deserved. Many fought bitterly for credit. Some got rich thanks to their inventions though more learnt that important lesson - what finally matters is the ability that can combine a smart invention with a workable business model and a sustainable organisation. Otherwise, you are mostly forgotten.
To return to the question we posed at the start: what created the entire digital innovation ecosystem? This story begins with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Vanevar Bush, who also built the early analogue computer in 1931.
It was Bush who wrote a report in 1945 at the behest of president Franklin Roosevelt (delivered subsequently to president Harry Truman) that advocated government funding of basic research in partnership with universities and industry.
"Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn," he said. He also said the war had made it clear beyond all doubt that basic science - discovering the fundamentals of nuclear physics, lasers, computers science, radar - is absolutely essential to national security and economic security.
Based on this report, the United States Congress established the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Defense Department and the NSF soon became the prime funders of much of America's basic research, spending as much as private industry during the 1950s till the 1980s.
A few corporate research centres like Bell Labs existed before the war, but after government money started pouring in, hybrid research centres began to spring up, including the RAND Corporation, Stanford Research Institute and Xerox PARC. As Mr Isaacson says, all would play a role in the development of the internet.
The internet was driven by the urge to create collaboration networks, between universities, mind you. The personal computer followed. Bill Gates appeared on the scene, as a nerd but a smart businessman, and Steve Jobs was not far away. The venture capital industry was born and bigger bets were taken.
Mr Isaacson leaves us with a final message, one that resounds throughout the book. "Creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses," he says. Having written the authoritative biography of Jobs, he has some perspective on the matter.
Recently, when Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, began taking a lot of credit in media interviews for "inventing" Twitter, another co-founder, Evan Williams, who also created Blogger, told him to chill. "No, you didn't invent Twitter. I didn't invent it either. Neither did Stone [another co-founder]. People don't invent things on the internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists."
And that, in some ways, is the moral of this story.
