Quotes from Walter Isaacson

There was no CD tray, just a subtle slot. And as with the original Macintosh, there was no

From the eyes of his angel in the Baptism of Christ to the smile of the Mona Lisa, the blurred and smoke-veiled edges allow a role for our own imagination

Betty Snyder, who, under her married name, Betty Holberton, went on to become a pioneer programmer who helped develop the COBOL and Fortran languages

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs's approach to business and design. He appreciated the user-friendliness of Atari's insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. "That simplicity rubbed off on him

something that's so thoughtful on the outside you say, 'Oh, wow, it must be really thoughtful

Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence's leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia's forces. Maybe it was both. But either way, Leonardo was no mere pawn or agent. He would not have gone to work for Borgia unless he wanted to.

desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point

Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.

The evolutionary process cares little about what happens to us after we have children and get them to a safe age, so there are a whole bunch of middle-aged maladies, including Huntington's and most forms of cancer, that we humans would want to eliminate, even though nature sees no need to.

The journey is the reward

I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.

things, by removing the superfluous." The G4 Cube was almost ostentatious

love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn't cost much," he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. "It was the original vision for Apple.

asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. "I think you're good at getting people to talk," he replied.

A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because he had discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal was the same 2600 Hertz tone used by the phone network's call-routing switches.

Every time I'd design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us," said Wozniak.

As Leonardo's well-attended baptism attests, being born out of wedlock was not a cause for public shame. The nineteenth-century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt went so far as to label Renaissance Italy "a golden age for bastards.

On Thanksgiving weekend of his senior year, Wozniak visited the University of Colorado.

Leonardo's interest in machinery was linked to his fascination with motion.

At that time in IBM you had to wear a white shirt, dark pants and a black tie with your badge stapled to your shoulder or something," said Steve Bristow, an engineer. "At Atari the work people did counted more than how they looked.

perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let

There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.

Intel's chips ended up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its computers were incompatible with it.

I'll just walk into Steve's office, pull down my pants and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that. It's guaranteed to work.