Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Why would a person whose notebook aphorisms decry killing and whose personal morality led him to be a vegetarian go to work for the most brutal murderer of the era? Partly this choice reflects Leonardo's pragmatism. In a land where the Medici, Sforzas, and Borgias jostled for power, Leonardo was able to time his patronage affiliations well and know when to move on. But there is more. Even as he remained aloof from most current events, he seemed to be attracted to power.

An irresistible glimpse into his complex and often contradictory life.

Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs's attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.

the true birth of the digital age, the era in which electronic devices became embedded in every aspect of our lives, occurred in Murray Hill, New Jersey, shortly after lunchtime on Tuesday, December 16, 1947.

Indifferent to the shifting political agendas of Italy yet attracted to military engineering and strongmen, Leonardo had a chance to live out his military fantasies, which he did until he realized they could become nightmares.

He was able (this being the Depression) to buy used desk calculators cheaply from ailing banks and to hire a group of young people, through the New Deal's National Youth Administration, to do computations at fifty cents an hour.

released that year, and the following year Apple's purchase of NeXT offered him reentry into the company he had founded.

Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs's obsession with typography.

innovación. Creo que los grandes artistas y los grandes ingenieros se parecen, porque ambos sienten el deseo de expresarse.

Steve Jobs has designed a powerful computer that an illiterate six-year-old can use without instruction," Noer wrote. "If that isn't magical, I don't know what is.

Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly," Pestalozzi wrote, and "the learning of numbers and language must be definitely subordinated." 58

La mejor forma de predecir el futuro es inventarlo

Don't worry about people stealing an idea," he once told a student. "If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Uno de los rasgos que distinguen a una gran inteligencia es su disposición a cambiar de parecer, como podemos constatar en el caso de Leonardo.

Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical, disciplined, and abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more intuitive and romantic and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and interfaces friendly. He had a passion for perfection, which made him fiercely demanding, and he managed by charisma and scattershot intensity.

Quieres pasarte el resto de tu vida vendiendo agua azucarada o quieres una oportunidad para cambiar el mundo?

ocupó el puesto de directora técnica y coordinó la creación de COBOL, el primer lenguaje de programación empresarial, multiplataforma y estandarizado.

sure to become mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in big business and popular culture . . . Isaacson is to be commended for explaining the genius of Jobs in fascinating fashion, launching a discussion that could reach infinity and beyond.

Well, it's a start," Jobs said, "but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines

modern life in the information age as about its supernaturally gifted and driven subject … In the end, we can't help but agree with Isaacson's assessment: "Was

Sometimes, in supernatural fashion, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that his every act is divine and everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.

summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product

El test de Turing, que él llamaba «juego de imitación», es sencillo: un interrogador remite preguntas por escrito a un humano y a una máquina que se encuentran en otra habitación, y trata de determinar a partir de sus respuestas cuál de los dos es el humano.

Isaacson's vivid and beautifully executed book unveils Jobs's creative process' Murad Ahmed