Quotes from Walter Isaacson

It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done.

The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born

the key to innovation is connecting a curiosity about basic science to the practical work of devising tools that can be applied to our lives—moving discoveries from lab bench to bedside.

Mozart's music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself

The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.

In February 2006 the store sold its one billionth song when Alex Ostrovsky, sixteen, of West Bloomfield, Michigan, bought Coldplay's "Speed of Sound" and got a congratulatory call from Jobs, bestowing upon him ten iPods, an iMac, and a $10,000 music gift certificate. The

Venture capital, a realm that had just begun in Silicon Valley with Arthur Rock's financing of Intel

J. C. R. LICKLIDER

If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

great innovations are usually the result of ideas that flow from a large

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and Kissinger: A Biography, and is the coauthor, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World

One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his apartment, engaging as they often did in philosophical discussions, when Wayne said that there was something he needed to tell him. "Yeah, I think I know what it is," Jobs replied. "I think you like men." Wayne said yes. "It was my first encounter with someone who I knew was gay," Jobs recalled.

While a student in McCollum's class, Jobs became friends with a graduate who was the teacher's all- time favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs, was almost five years older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable about electronics. But emotionally and socially he was still a high school geek.

It's best not to mess with karma." Why

War mobilizes science.

Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonardo occasionally made sketches of the technique in his notebooks.

Gore pushed the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993, which made the Internet widely available to the general public and moved it into the commercial sphere so that its growth could be funded by private as well as government investment.

After the settlement Jobs continued to court Esslinger until the designer decided to wind down his contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work with NeXT at the end of 1986. Esslinger insisted on having free rein, just as Paul Rand had. "Sometimes you have to use a big stick with Steve," he said. Like Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was willing to grant him indulgences he denied other mortals. Jobs

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, born in 1915 and known to everyone as "Lick." He pioneered the two most important concepts underlying the Internet: decentralized networks that would enable the distribution of information to and from anywhere, and interfaces that would facilitate human-machine interaction in real time.

that he asked to have input in designing a new version. I was both amused and willing, so I readily assented. I ended up having more than forty interviews and conversations with him. Some were formal ones in his Palo Alto living room

Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by Jobs, is that what transpired was less a heist by Apple than a fumble by Xerox. "They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do," he said of Xerox's management. "They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could

rise of computers could mean that "man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the people who did in fact invent the Internet's protocols, spoke up on Gore's behalf.