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tv   After Words  CSPAN  August 30, 2014 10:51pm-11:01pm EDT

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>> that was "after words" booktv signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journals public policymakers legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10:00 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9:00 p.m. on sunday and 12:00 a.m. on monday. you can also watch "after words" on line. go to booktv.org and click on on "after words" in the on "after words" in the booktv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. >> guest: walter isaacson you have a new book coming out this fall. what's it about? >> guest: we have talked about innovation and the word has almost become devoid of meaning. he gets overused. i want to look at how real people invented the computer and the internet and how innovation really happens in the usual way. it was something that came out of working with steve jobs and before that bill gates to say
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who made that type of process and how did they end up being successful? the book is not just about singular people about teams, but collaboration. it's one of the things i discovered in doing this book their real innovation comes in great teams not just great leaders. >> host: was surprised to? what to do when a surprise to price to? >> guest: the importance of connecting technology. the importance of like steve jobs talks about the liberal arts and engineering and it begins with ada whose father was a great poet lord byron. she loves poetry but her mother wanted to be a mathematician. by the end she was able to combine the ocean of poetry and the notion of math to come up with the idea of a computer program. she's the first person to understand that these calculating machines that do numbers will also be able to
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leave pattern simmons and the also be able to do words and music. there is the notion of the modern computer icons from this idea which really begins with ada lovelace of connecting the arts to the technology. >> host: when we think of early computers in the u.s. we think of any act. >> guest: at any act was a great computer and the first programmable all digital computer. one of the interesting things is at the same time in iowa there was this lone professor doing a computer in the basement of the physics building and in some ways he is the first but it doesn't have a team around him unlike any act folks who have this whole team at the university of pennsylvania. he never gets the computer fully working and ends up being abandoned to its yet another example of the importance of teamwork and that is where the eniac is so successful.
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>> host: water is examine this book comes out in the fall and you are asked who invented the computer? >> guest: you? >> guest: you would have to save the people who invented eniac were the first to do a programmable electronic computer and they get it working in teams but john markley who is one of the leaders goes to iowa and takes ideas from there. he goes up to harvard and sees the computing machine a guy named howard aiken had made there. what he does is he collects ideas like a bumblebee collects pollen and fertilizes it in various ways and brings it all together. that as i was saying earlier is how innovation really works. it's not some guy sitting in a garage all alone where lightbulb goes off in his head. you gather ideas from many places. you pull together a team and you say we are going to execute on it now. if i were to give credit for the invention of the computer or the people that did any act
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especially because there took their ideas from a lot of other people. >> host: who is steve lesniak? >> guest: wozniak with steve jobs partner in the founding of apple. once again it shows how partnership and teamwork should work. was the act creates a circuit board for what becomes the apple wanted in the apple ii. he's an absolute genius at knowing how to create with very few components in order to turn it into a hobbyist computer that type of computer you can use at home. he loved giving it away. it's part of the hacker ethos. he takes a sheet, this grammatic sheet and gives it away to the computer club so they can build one but what happens is his friend from just down the street steve jobs says no we should build a similar should sell them so they create a little company which they call apple. what it takes to innovate is not just a person who has the idea which is what the yak, it also
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takes a person a says howard going to execute at? our going to turn us into a commercial machine which is what steve jobs did. how we are we going to put a bit of a case on to? how are we going to get a power supply? how we gather it all together so the greatest teams whether it's the people inventing the personal computer like steve jobs and wozniak have a visionary engineering type but also hard-nosed business type in the team pulled together and creates things like apple or intel. >> host: walter isaacson and putting the innovators together you crowdsourced this book. >> guest: the internet was invented in order to allow people to collaborate on their research. that was the original internet which is if you are at a research center and you want people at different research centers far away to help you say we will have this internet so we can share things.
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i thought one night why don't i see it but still works that way. i took some of the chapters in my book and early drafts come up very early drafts and put them on line for everyone to read. oddly enough some of the people i got 18,000 comments in the first week for one chapter. a lot of that led to some good stuff like stewart graham one of the great wonderful colorful characters in this book. stewart graham was the guy who invented the whole earth catal catalog, the on line services. he invented, he helped to the demos when angle brett shows a computer system for the first time he was there at the creation of so many different things. he was with ken kesey and electric kool-aid acid test. he is been involved in things like that. he read my whole chapter and he said here's who was there and
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here's what we did when we started to well. he puts all these notes on it and other people say i was at the first homebrew meeting and it was more like these types of people. like wikipedia the wisdom of the crowd helps crowdsourcing. so i put a lot of that in the book and obviously gave them credit. like stewart brand said when he read an early version. >> host: is it tough to write a book like this when we are in the middle of of what is a continual innovation. matt? >> guest: no that there's a wonderful trajectory where there are a couple of big old themes. team one as i said is creative people understand beauty and the arts in liberal arts and the humanities connect their imagination to the machines in the technology and engineering. that is happen with ada lovelace in the 1830s and it's what larry page and sergey brin did in creating google so i want to show that narrative. secondly another theme is that
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technology is used to bring people together. it's a social networking tool. sometimes you invent something like the personal computer and it becomes like a little thing you do in your basement or in your house but soon we create networks, social networks to bring computers together. that's the thing that continues as well. one of the things about this book, the things that you thought were totally new actually is a lot of progress of a lot of people coming up with good ideas. >> host: were you keeping notes on this why you were doing the job? >> guest: i actually started writing it 10 years ago. 10 years or so writing a book on how the internet came to be. all these unknown people who helped put together and when i was working the steve jobs he said that's interesting but what's more interesting is in the 1970s and 80s the internet came together at the
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exact same time personal computers came together so you should make it a book about the joint connection of computers and networks. so i change the thrust of the book and bill gates said that too when i was interviewing gates. he said that's fine but networks are only half the story. it's networks and computers together that make the world magical. so i have been working on this as i say 10 or 12 years and keeping notes and trying to write this but by talking to bill gates a lot and by doing the book on steve jobs on steve jobs expanded the nature of what i was trying to do. >> host: burgess bill gates fit into this narrative? ..

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