he takes the sheet about works out and gives it away to all the members of the homebrew computer club so they can build one. what happens is his friend just down the street, steve jobs, said no, we should build these and we should sell them. so they create a little company which they call apple. so what it takes to innovate is not just the person who has the idea which is wozniak but it takes the person this is how we going to execute, how are we going to turn this into a commercial machine, which is what steve jobs did. how we put a beautiful face around the? how can we get a power supply? how are we going to gather it all together? so the greatest teams, whether it's the people inventing the transistor, the microchip, the personal computer like steve jobs and wozniak usually have sort of a visionary engineering type but also a hard-nosed business type, and that team pulled together a great things like apple or intel.

>> walter isaacson, inputting the innovators together, you crowdsourced this book a little bit. >> the internet was invented in order to allow people to collaborate on the research. that was the original done by the defense department and the internet which is if you want people in different resource centers far away to help you save your work, we will have this internet. so we can share things. so i thought one night, well, why don't i see if it still works that way? so i took some of chapters in my book, early drafts of them, very early drafts and put them online for everybody to read. comment, tell me. oddly enough some of the people, i got 18,000 comments in the first week for one chapter. and a lot of it led to some good stuff, like stewart brand, one of the great, wonderful, colorful characters in this book. stuart graham was a who invented the catalog, the well which is one of the early online

services. he invented, he helped do the mother of all demos. he was at the gracious so may different things. the electric kool-aid acid test. so he's been involved in sony things in the red old japanese said, here's who was there, who was at the homebrew computer club me. here's what we did when we started the well. able to all business on a. and other people said i was at the first homebrew meeting and it was more like these type of people. so it was like wikipedia. the wisdom of the crowd helps to crowdsourced. so i put a lot of that in the book, and obvious he gave them credit and said here's what stewart brand said wind he was an early version of this chapter. >> is a tough to a book like this when we're in the middle of what is a continual innovation period? >> no. there's a wonderful art,

wonderful trajectory where there's a couple of big old games. in one as this is creating people understand beauty and the arts in liberal arts and humanities connect their imaginations to the machines and the technology and engineering. that's happened in the 1830s, it's what larry and others did integrating google. so i want to show that narrative art. secondly, another thing is that technology is used to bring people together. it's a social networking tool. sometimes you that something and it becomes a little thing you do in your basement or in your house. but soon we trad create network, social networks to bring us computers together. so that's a theme that continues as well. one of the things about this book is things that you thought were totally new, they're actually part of the wonderful progress of a lot of people

coming up with ideas. >> were you working or keeping notes for this book as you are working on the job? >> i started this book 10 years ago because i do write it so fast. 10 years ago i was trying to write a book on how the internet came to be. all these unknown people who helped pull it together. when i was working with steve jobs he said, that's interesting but what's more interesting is in the 1970s and 80s, the internet came together at the exact same time personal computers came together. so you should make it a book about the joint connectedness of computers and networks. so i changed the thrust of the book. and bill gates said that, too. he said that's fine, but networks are only half the story. it's networks and computers together and make the world a magical. so i've been working on this, you know, as i say 10, 12 years, keeping notes and trying to write this. but by talking to bill gates a lot, by doing the book on steve

jobs, it expanded the nature of what i was trying to do. >> where does bill gates fit into this narrative? >> there is i think to meet a fascinating chapter, i spent a lot of time with them. he invents something that's pretty interesting, which is the notion that software matters, that is not going to be whether ibm, compaq, hewlett-packard who makes the hardware. what is really going to count is who makes the software. so when the first personal computer appears on the cover of popular electronics magazine, and he at harvard as a sophomore and his friend paul allen either magazine, once the storm and says it's happening without us. we are not going to build a computer. we're going to build the operating system for this computer. they first did basic which is a programming language but then by the time these can become a long and they create what's called dos, disk operating system. that changes the nature of what

computers are because we realized as a limited when they're doing, they're programming eniac, that the program is where the magic comes. >> quick preview of walter isaacson's fall 2014 book, "the innovators: how a group of inventors, hackers, and geeks created the digital revolution." you are watching booktv on c-span2, tv for serious readers. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. tv.org. >> one of the first things i did when i was researching this book in 2012 was to go to the big

hacker convention. yes, hackers have conventions. in las vegas of all places it's called defcon and this was at defcon 20. i met some really strange people, supersmart but they have something scrolling walking they call th a wall of sheep which ae scrolling in real time, all of the usernames and passwords that have been cracked in that moment by the software from people's computers. it's like, you realize how vulnerable you are. for our intelligence agencies it's no secret -- >> ugv her name go across the? i had been told before i went by someone who is a republican in this book who i think and acknowledgments, matthew, don't bring any computer, don't bring your cell phone, don't bring anything but as soon as you come

in, a false wi-fi network will come up and try to capture your. so these have been recruiting grounds famously for our intelligence agencies for a long time. if you were to go after, for me, go out to nsa tomorrow or six month ago a year ago as i did, you would see something pretty interesting. it would see a lot of military officers in uniform, men and women, much would see a lot of people with super long hair and black t-shirts come you, people like you see at deathcon and that's because they've been recruited. and i think the hacker ethos is because i'm serving my country. no, not touching it's like if you can hack it, hack it but it's like why climb everest? hillary's famous and to come because it's there. that sort of the spirit.

and is part of what got out of innocent. every direction, supersmart kits, wow, we can take that down. and so i think that's why it's very, very good mature managers are needed in that world more than anywhere else. >> you can watch this and other programs on like that booktv.org. ..