Quotes from Walter Isaacson

we really fucked up the engineering on this

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.

usual, he threw himself into the marketing, working with James Vincent and Duncan Milner at the ad agency (now called TBWA/ Media Arts Lab), with Lee Clow advising from a semiretired perch. The commercial they first produced was a gentle scene of a guy in faded jeans and sweatshirt reclining in a chair, looking at email, a photo album, the New York Times, books, and video on an iPad propped on his lap. There were no words, just

Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

The Autobiography of a Yogi

suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman's pushback, from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear

A Benjamin Franklin Reader Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kissinger: A Biography

Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the "Menagerie" episodes of Star Trek, "in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force." He meant the phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: "It was dangerous to get caught in Steve's distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.

The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-bit microprocessor, rather than

Sea curioso, infatigablemente curioso.

He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he'd ever read any of my books. Maybe someday, I continued to say. But in 2009 his wife, Laurene Powell, said bluntly, "If you're ever going to do a book on Steve, you'd better do it now." He had just taken a second medical leave. I confessed to her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn't known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she said.

Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.' That is a really good phrase.

The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain

Ginevra de Benci was made by a young artist with astonishing skills of observation. The Mona Lisa is the work of a man who had used those skills to immerse himself in a lifetime of intellectual passions.

The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC.

Almost nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained.

the calm in the vortex.

shaping some of the greatest technological innovations of our time." —The Washington Post "A wonderfully robust biography that not only tracks Jobs's life but also serves as a history of digital technology. What makes the book come alive, though, is Isaacson's ability to shape the story as a kind

More than three thousand people showed up at the event, lining up two hours before curtain time. They were not disappointed, at least by the show. Jobs was onstage for three hours, and he again proved to be, in the words of Andrew Pollack

Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.

That started an exchange about the early history

their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.

way that reduced the role of direct sales to universities.

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.