Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Babbage was charming when he wished, but he could also be cranky, stubborn, and defiant, like most innovators.

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

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.

The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.

Sometimes the difference between geniuses and jerks hinges on whether their ideas turn out to be right.

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

special trip to Japan with

nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for

Engelbart showed, back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today.

Eve in Foothills Park, Palo Alto: "She's a pistol and has the strongest

Like most artist-craftsmen of his era, he did not sign his work.

Sometimes it's nice to be in the hands of a control freak.

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.

that year. "Then, in 1983, I got the award. I had learned you had to stand up for what you believe, which Steve respected. I started getting promoted by him after that." Eventually she rose to become head of manufacturing. One day Jobs barged

Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a part of him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple's president. So they launched a search for someone from the outside.

There is one note on the page that seems disconnected from everything else. It is a recipe for making blond-brown hair dye: "To make hair tawny, take nuts and boil them in lye and immerse the comb in it, then comb the hair and let it dry in the sun." This may have been a notation in preparation for a court pageant. But it is more likely, I think, that the recipe is a rare intimate jotting. Leonardo was deep into his thirties by now. Perhaps he was resisting going gray.

Everyone must, from time to time, make a sacrifice on the altar of stupidity, to please the deity and mankind.

Tolerance of free expression and independence of thought, he repeatedly argued, were the core values that Americans, to his delight, most cherished.

stuck with him. He saw a calf being born, and he was amazed

there's your answer." It was not, however, a definitive answer. Jobs had a way of focusing on something with insane intensity for a while and then, abruptly, turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and on other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to engage. In his personal life, he was the same way.

Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of simple modern homes for the American "everyman," Eichler built inexpensive houses

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention." For Steve Jobs, the ascent to the brightest heaven

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.

In it he argued that unrestrained capitalism produced great disparities of wealth, cycles of boom and depression, and festering levels of unemployment. The system encouraged selfishness instead of cooperation, and acquiring wealth rather than serving others. People were educated for careers rather than for a love of work and creativity. And political parties became corrupted by political contributions from owners of great capital.