Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born In the Homestead High yearbook, 1972

inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology

It was a story filled with the most unhappy, mean characters that I've ever seen.

no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements. On this day Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection. Some would find it odd that the head of design would fret

stipulation that the couple promise—indeed sign a pledge—to fund a savings account to pay for the boy's college education. There was another

By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox's $1 million worth of shares were worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see Xerox PARC's technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn't been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox scientists called

I could stay at the bottom of the organization chart, as an engineer.

Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck in their ways.

stories on the company's woes. "NeXT is incompatible with other computers at a time when the industry is moving toward interchangeable systems," Bart Ziegler of Associated Press reported. "Because relatively little software exists to run on NeXT

Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple II DOS program in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. "You're just wasting your time with that!" Jobs replied. "Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you're going to start on it now!" With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord to Hertzfeld's Apple II, causing the code he was working on to vanish.

what would have been a dining room. He wanted around him only things

Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but

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.

The same traits that make them inventive, such as stubbornness and focus, can make them resistant to change when new ideas come along.

create a new standard takes not just making something that's a little bit different, it takes something that's really new and captures people's imagination.

It was in Jobs's nature to mislead or be secretive when he felt it was warranted. But he also indulged in being brutally honest at times, telling the truths that most of us sugarcoat or suppress. Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules didn't apply to him.

Steve Jobs was famously stubborn and

That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas.

rock—Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era.

Computers today are brilliant idiots

They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a "repo man

En palabras de George Dyson: «El computador de programa almacenado, tal y como lo imaginó Alan Turing y lo plasmó John von Neumann, diluyó la distinción entre números que significan cosas y números que hacen cosas. Nuestro universo nunca volvería a ser el mismo».

When he hurt people, it was not because he was lacking in emotional awareness. Quite the contrary: He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.

His management mantra was "Focus." He eliminated excess product lines and cut extraneous features in the new operating system software that Apple was developing