Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

The little device that finally created a connection between home computers and global networks was called a modem.

The Defiant Ones and 48 Hours, in which two characters with different attitudes are thrown together and have to bond.

A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested

It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening.

It could modulate and demodulate (hence the name) an analog signal, like that carried by a telephone circuit, in order to transmit and receive digital information.

In the seventy years since von Neumann effectively placed his "Draft Report" on the EDVAC into the public domain, the trend for computers has been, with a few notable exceptions, toward a more proprietary approach. In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.64

Who said your job was to think, spring-wiener?

When I look into most people's eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.

Look, Steve, you're my best friend, and Apple is your company. I'll do whatever you want.

Jobs took McCollum's class for only one year, rather than the three that it was offered. For one of his projects, he made a device

That seemed a bit odd. I didn't yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way

sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery." Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes of products that the engineers

use as few chips as possible, both as a personal challenge and because he did not want to take advantage of his colleague's largesse. Much of the work was done in the garage of a friend just around the corner, Bill Fernandez, who was still at Homestead High. To lubricate their efforts, they drank large amounts of Cragmont cream soda, riding their bikes to the Sunnyvale

In other words, there is no single underlying reality that is independent of our observations. "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is," Bohr declared. "Physics concerns what we can say about nature."62 This

When Jobs saw the corporate fitness center, he was astonished that executives had an area, with its own whirlpool, separate from that of the regular employees.

Money is not the greatest of motivators," Torvalds said. "Folks do their best work when they are driven by passion.

The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.

You're better off to go out and start your own company and fail than it is to stick at one company for thirty years.

Embrace uncertainty," the ads read.

a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.

His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last." Markkula

The Duke of Milan's cavalcade was dazzling even to Florentines who were used to Medicean public spectacles. It included two thousand horses, six hundred soldiers, a thousand hunting hounds, falcons, falconers, trumpeters, pipers, barbers, dog trainers, musicians, and poets.33 It's hard not to admire an entourage that travels with its own barbers and poets.

When one early employee wanted to see the company's organization chart, Noyce made an X in the center of a page and then drew a bunch of other Xs around it, with lines leading to each. The employee was at the center, and the others were people he would be dealing with.