Quotes About Innovation

Unlike Davies, he didn't have to work through the British Postal Service. And unlike Baran, he didn't have to work through the Defense Communications Agency. Roberts was backed by ARPA, whose whole reason for existing was to cut through the bureaucracy. His bosses were giving him a free hand. And he meant to exercise that freedom. He meant to get this network ready to

However fierce the controversy surrounding its birth, the stored-program concept now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age—arguably the great idea.

computer science is the study of "the phenomena surrounding computers"—all the phenomena,

They believe that they are forging the first rigorous alternative to the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton—and that has now gone about as far as it can go in addressing the problems of our modern world.

Clark, that was the idea: small, independent routing computers.

In April 1974, for example, Intel introduced its 8-bit 8080 chip, the first microprocessor to come within shouting distance of, say, a 12-bit mini such as the PDP-8.

You can go extinct, or broke. But here we are on the edge of chaos because that's where, on average, we all do the best.

AT&T engineers, most of whom had spent a lifetime perfecting their circuit-switching network, found Baran's packet-switching concept ludicrous

The Truly SAGE System, or Toward a Man-Machine System for Thinking

Altair was not the first commercial microcomputer; that honor goes to the Micral, an Intel 8008—based machine that was sold in France starting in May 1973.

The father of the Altair was H. Edward Roberts of Albuquerque, New Mexico,

William B. Shockley, coinventor of the transistor,

M. Mitchell Waldrop

first personal computer—that was the LINC of Wes Clark

the integrated circuit itself; that honor goes to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who demonstrated his first device in Dallas on September 19, 1958.

1959, Fairchild cofounder Robert Noyce did devise a way to mass-produce integrated circuits by etching thousands of transistors simultaneously onto the surface of a single silicon wafer.

Lisp was John McCarthy's invention.

we divided the scope into four quadrants and let each person have a quadrant of the scope." That was one each for Fredkin, Lick, Minsky, and McCarthy—a format that quite possibly represented the first "windows" ever to appear on a computer screen.

Computers and the World of the Future,

The real significance of computing was to be found not in this gadget or that gadget, but in how the technology was woven into the fabric of human life—how computers could change the way people thought, the way they created, the way they communicated, the way they worked together, the way they organized themselves, even the way they apportioned power and responsibility.

windows"—a brainstorm that had hit Kay one day while he was in the shower, his favorite place to think.

a new open-interface standard that would allow hardware and software to evolve independently.

There was this thread of ideas that led from Vannevar Bush through J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay

By the summer of 1972, says Thacker, "it was personal-computer time, just like it was railroad time in the eighteen-fifties.