be a negotiated settlement would never of happened that even if it would never happen aspiring to it and policy towards it can yield positive benefits i think. so i think that's important number one. number two we as a the u.s. need to change fundamentally our relationship with afghanistan. it's the case today that the afghan government is not unable to raise taxes so the budget for the afghan government comes through employment aid. in other words the international community is propping up the government. if we stop paying for the african government it would stop today in a massive civil war. this is a question of sustainability. this is a question of how to make it the afghan government or the afghan society to have this independent economy so that one day they can disengage. in this goes back to the tension between short-term and long-te

long-term. unfortunately because of the short-term thinking that reigned supreme in this question of sustainability hasn't really come up at all. as i said before for all the money the international community is spending on the afghan government to build the judiciary, the parliament to build capacity worldwide money is also going to warlords and strongmen. the u.s. taxpayer dollars are still going to warlords and strongmen around the country and that's bad in and of itself but it's also bad because it ensures continued weakness of the afghan government. so adjusting that will be the other aspect of the thing that the u.s. should do. >> the last question i'm left here. >> you spoke about growing your beard out in getting a motorcycle and going and actually meeting with the taliban warlord. can you speak a little more about that and were you ever afraid for your life at any point?

>> well you know, in 2008 in 2009 it was different than it is today. at the time the taliban headache coherent command and control structure so i actually did was i got permission from the taliban leadership to do it. the taliban were kidnapping journalists so i didn't just drive into some taliban territory and show it. you be kidnapped and probably end up on a video somewhere. what i had done since i had connected to the leadership in the way i did that was very fortuitous because it turned out that there were people in the main prison in kabul and i used to sneak into the person posing as a relative. i would sneak in there once a week and hang out with these guys. it was was taliban all kinds of bigwigs in there. for months and months i would hang out with them and talk to them and win their trust to the point where they would be able

to connect me to people in the field. only after god -- i got that i wanted to the field. i spend a month living in the -- with the taliban in 2008 in interviewing people. today that's probably impossible. a lot of people that i met are dead now. most of them have been killed in targeted strikes and drones and a lot of things. that is contributed to the fragmentation of the taliban insurgency. today if i showed up like i did in 85 with the letter from some taliban leader saying i'm a journalist, i'm not a spy it probably wouldn't matter. they would probably still kidnapped me today. so it wouldn't do it today but for five years ago was easier to do. >> thank you again to anand and the audience here today. [applause] i will remind you that anand ropey signing books in the plaza for the next 30 minutes if you

would like to continue the conversation and if you are just in the veteran sections there's a flyer up here if you want one of those. so thanks so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> it is a glorious service, the service for the country. the call comes to every citizen. it is an unending struggle to make and keep government representative.

>> bob lafollett is probably the most important political figure in wisconsin history and one of the most important in the history of the 20th century in the united states. he was a reforming governor. he defined what progressivism is. he was one of the first to use the term progressive to self-identify. he was a united states senator who was recognized by his peers in the 1950s as one of the five greatest senators in american history. he was an opponent of world war i, stood his ground advocating for free speech. above all bob lafollett was about the people. in the era after the civil war america changed radically from a nation of small farmers and small producers and small manufacturers and by the late

1870s, 1880s, 1890s we had concentrations of wealth. we had growing inequality and we have concern about the influence of money in government. so we spent the later part of the 1890s giving speeches all over wisconsin. if you wanted a speaker for your club or your group bob lafollett would give a speech. he went to county fairs. he went to every kind of event that you could imagine and built a reputation for himself. by 1900 he was ready to run for governor advocating on behalf of the people. he had two issues. one, the direct primary. no more selecting candidates at the convention. two, stop the interests specifically the railroads.

>> walter isaacson's book "the innovators" tells the story of the people who created the personal computer and the internet. he has also written biographies of albert einstein, ben franklin and steve jobs. mr. is a isakson discusses book at the computer history museum in mountain view california. this is an hour, 15 minutes. >> and now for tonight's progr program. the history of computing is epic. it is the ongoing story of how one of the greatest periods of creativity in human history has been unleashed. it is populated with some of the most fascinating people of our time and now one of the most distinguished biographers of in our time has taken it on and produced an exceptional result. the biographer of courses walter isaacson. not content solely with his award-winning best-selling biographies of benjamin franklin, albert einstein and

steve jobs walter has returned once more to paint on a very large campus and the book is "the innovators" how a group of hackers, geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution. all of us have learned and are delighted to have learned in the process that walter isaacson has an inner geek and he is tapped into it directly. the epic stories are all here. allen turning steve jobs marc andreesen and more but he also leaves us go for story about the lesser-known icons of computing, the women who programmed the eniac for example, the hackers and rebels behind the first on line communities, the skier belgian engineer who helped 10 berners-lee give rise to the world wide web. he even sorts out the real story behind al gore and the internet. [laughter] walter will take us on an abbreviated journey through that story tonight starting with the distant figures but very

important figures of charles babbage and ada lovelace. please join me in welcoming walter isaacson. [applause] >> thank you john. >> welcome back. >> it's great to date back and this is an amazingly wonderful place. it's such an honor to be back here and you can even reveal my inner geek if you need to. >> i think you are about to do that yourself. >> i grew up soldering ham radios. my dad was an electrical engineer and i love circuit boarding so it was good to get back and write about them. >> is that how you originally got into this? did you develop a kind of fascination with that kind of technology before you know you wanted to do? >> one of the things you learn as a biographer is probably about pleasing dad. my dad was an electrical engineer and he made me understand how it transistor capacitor works and how you make a circuit. i was so fascinated by that i

wanted to convey that excitement. most people in this room probably remember opening things up, testing the tubes in your radio figuring out how to make a circuit but nowadays i fear that our devices are so close to that we don't get that hands-on field and excitement that i had growing up. and then i was in charge of digital media at the time incorporated in a one point my boss, and i won't say his name since we are on tv set who owns the internet? i thought to myself that's a clueless question. and then he said how did it come to be? who builds its? i thought that's clueless but i did not know the answer to that. and i thought it would be really interesting to figure out who are the people that did the internet and then when i interviewed bill gates about it, one of the lucky things about being at the "times" as you get to meet these people. so he said yes but the intersection of the internet with the personal computer,

that's like the steam engine in the mills intersecting during the industrial revolution. you want to do both of those stories. so i realize we have lots of books about the industrial revolution are the scientific revolution or even the revolution and the american revolution but we don't know who is the paul revere you know of the digital revolution even though we live in it everyday. >> what was your inspiration for beginning where you begin because you go back to the roots of computing which we love of course because we have that but you go back to babbage and lovelace. >> as long as i'm embarrassing every member of my family, my daughter were supposed to be writing her entrance essay to go to college and being the type of family that we are we thought parents are supposed to be involved in the process. she thought to the contrary so was not even talking to us about it. my wife was getting a little

jittery like why haven't you written its? family she said i've written it and i've done it and send it in. i said who was of honor what was the maam i said and she said ada lovelace. i actually did know who ate a lovelace was but i couldn't remember what was it that she did that really helped defined the digital and computer revolution? ..

her mother being a mathematician she helped create the intersection where the true creativity happens in the the digital age. >> there's a thesis you begin with that i want everyone to understand this is the passa. you wrote: the key to inknown vacation, crete tea geniuses, practical engineers partnered closely to turn concepts concepo contraptions and turning the invention into a practical product. you refer to the ecosystem, the genius and then the practical engineer and then the process of collaboration. babich and love done lace had their own form. >> he called for my muse. he shouldn't overstate her. she was in some ways not as great of a mathematician as she

liked to believe but she could make a chart for them that become the first public program and when people -- that is ada lovelace day. so we should celebrate it. i say, okay, tell me the seventh and eighth and ninth in the sequence, or 10th, 11th, and 12th, and how to do a chart on a mechanical process like that one to generate them. and then people understand what partnership she had and how important she was to babich trying to create what he thought was a new -- new marry calculator but she has the great insight not just for numbers. he mom had taken to at the england in the 1830s to look at the mechanical weaving looms using punch carded.

you happen purpose card is in this museum. the punch cards, the mechanical looms of the industrial revolution that ada saw on the trip. her father, lord byron, was a luddite, and i mean that literally. the only speech he gives in the house of lord is defend followers of 0ed in ludd who were smashing the looms because they thought it put people out of work. this disruption of technology is not new. it goes back a long time. so ada, instead of thinking, yes, these people will put people -- she said, these punch cards -- go downstairs and look at them. these punch cards -- she has a line in her wonderful set of notes on the analytical engine. she said it will make the machine be able to weave patterns just like the loom can, and then she says, so the machine will be able to do

anything that can be know tated symbolically. not just numbers but words. it will make music, she said. it will do pictures do pattern. in other words, it will be a computer. not just a calculator. so she is pretty awesome. >> host: you point out she is simultaneously maybe one of the most overappreciated and underappreciated people in the hoyt of computing. why is that? >> guest: i think she sort of grabbed on to sometimes -- there are a lot of good books about her, betty tool has written two books, one has all of her wonderful letters and great analysis book, and she is very favorable to the world of ada. a couple other books, daren swain has done a book on charles babbitt. the most scientific book was doering the stein's book, ada,

and if i can find -- there's such a controversy. i like controversy. i'm an old journalist. you can like those things. but sort of explain -- there's some guy who did a ph.d at harvard and writes: ada was manic depresssive with the most amazing delusions about her talents, at as mad as hatter and distributed little more than trouble. so you have people -- >> host: that a footnote. >> guest: right. i do think that you don't have to overstate her accomplishments in order to just totally marvel at how wonderful it was that she saw the magic and he humanity that could be connected to the machine. and so i tried -- as i do null n all the book -- the think about -- the interesting thing about at the digital age is that it's very, very collaborative, and people work together, and then afterwards they fight over who deserves the most credit.

a.l. corp there who was the engineer for the first pong and the atari machines, and even now there's sort off all those things, did more, i did more. so i try very judiciously to say, here's some of the disputes. but by the way, this revolution is so amazing, there's enough credit to go around. we shouldn't be fighting over it. >> host: we have four stories on the stage tonight. we start with babich and lovelace, and the second is the enigma. >> guest: that's really cool. >> host: which we'll talk about in a minute. and then just to take everybody through it, the altarry pc and then then apple 1 and then we'll talk about the women. let's turn now to al -- allen and code-breaking. you do something interesting which is explore the magical year of 1937. you pick a point in hoyt when

everything seemed to be con verging all at once from many places. >> guest: yes. one of the things about history of technology or any history, is that it's not totally revolutionary. we build on things like babich's engine. every now and then it's a punctuated evolution and things happen. '37 is one of those years partly because there's a combination of analytic sciences, like claude shannon figuring out information theory, and people understanding how bully and algebra, which allows you to do logical sequences based simpleline -- simply on/love switches switchey have the vacuum tubes going they can make circuits. and bell labs and other places, they're making these advances, using bouillon algebra, and then you have touring -- temperaturing has many things he does but let's start with ada

lovelace. ada lovelace said a machine will be able to do everything. weave tapestries, music, whatever. but she says there's one thing a machine will never be able to do. and that is think. it will be humans that do the creativity. so, allen touring says that's lady lovelace's objection. 100 years later he is reading ada lovelace's notes and calling that lady lovelace's oxes that machines will never think. he comes up with a test of how do we know machines will never think? and you put a machine in a room and a person in a room and send questions in, and if you can't tell the difference after a while, there's no empirical reason to say the machine is not thinking. you can have a lot of people say that's not a very good test. but still the turing test is

ingrained how we look at artificial intelligence. a movies coming out called "the imitation game" about that test. now, think the two strands of computer history, what i actual the ada lovelace strapped, which is the combination of humans and machines will always be more powerful than just machines doing artificial intelligence alone. and that is one of the themes i try to explore in the book. it ended with jenny, who i know you're having, talking about how watson and deep blue, the two machines ibm built, in the end become more powerful when combined with the imagination of humans. so that's the ada lovelace strand. then we get to leslie park. so, he goes to leslie park, this secret facility in england to break the german wartime codes. that machine is an inning ma

machine which colds the german messages, and they're able to slowly break how the code is done. but one of the amazing things that turing does is figure out, along with tommy flowers, who knew how to use vacuum tubes and work for the phone company -- how to make something called colossus, the first real electronic operable computer and they use it to break the german code. so, when we argue about what is the first computer, one contender, if you think it has to be electronic, has to work harks to do logical generals, probably ought to be digital. colossus breaking the code done on that machine by turing and the whole team there at belchly park, and tommy flowers and others. >> a few other players in 1937 which you cover and i want to bring into the drama now. there's john vincent.

>> you have someone who recrated -- >> we do. there's john over there. >> cool. >> he has read part 0 the book. i don't actually give credit for truly building the first machine. i was worried about what they would say, but john told me it was all right. i got it right in the book. and here's the argument. john vincent doesn't fit into the notion of somebody who has a collaborative team. he is a bit of a loner. works on the machine on an old mobile and drives to missouri to get a drink to go by the glass bus iowa was a dry state, and he comes up with this notion of using circuits, electronic circuits to do processing and he builds with with a graduate

student named cliff perry and they have to team. and they get it pretty good. it's a pretty nice little machine but they can never fully get it working, because they don't have mechanics and engineerings. the punch card burner didn't quite work, and he join this navy. the middle of the war. in the end the people at iowa state have no idea what the contraption is and throw it away. which is why you have too recreate it her to be part of this museum. so in some ways, vision without execution is just hallucination. he never really executed on it. so i don't really think he could be called the first computer. >> host: so let's concern to the one that you do talk about, and you prefer in this pecking order of first computers can the one that john macly work on at the moore school at the university of pennsylvania. >> guest: john mockly is typical of the great innovators of the

digital age. he was somebody who loved to go around and pick up ideas wherever he went. so, he was from washington. his father was at the carnegie institution. he was one of those people who loved comes to places like this, hearing lectures, being at explorer's clubs, going to dinners. so, he flits around in the late 1930s to places like the 1939 worlds fair to bell labs to harvard, where mark one is being built, a nonelectronic electromechanical computer, and he even runs into, at lecture, this guy. adanasof who says i'm building one in hi base independent iowa state. mockley gets in the car with his kid and drives to iowa state and looking at the machine and learns, takes notes, and goes back, and when he gets back to the university of pennsylvania,

he gets press breck, a really good evening near, six women who will talk about and become the mathematical programmers, people who know how to have grease under their fingernails and build this huge room-sized machine. you have pa or the it on lone from the smithsonian. it's the first working machine, and almost reprogrammable thanks to the women. it's fully electronic and actually works. so, i tend to say, if you are looking for the one that really worked, that's programmable. india the first computer. the one in belchy park. this one you can have the cables replugged and do other things. typically we all collaborate, take ideas from -- steve jones

goes to xerox park. bill gates looks at the first macintosh. everybody is taking each other's ideas spend apple suze microsoft. not surprisingly there was 15 years of a lawsuit because after iniac is built it becomes univac in its commercial form, barry rand, stat enforcing patents and honeywell wants to break the patents and finds nasauf who is retired, and he says he took my ideas. so for 15 years you have a lawsuit over who deserves the pant patents. in the end the court squaredded against the enyack people and didn't award the patent to anybody because it was collaborative thing. >> host: we have a trustee bell who call the lawsuit the disinvention of the computer. >> guest: exactly. with all due respect to the lawyers in the room, it's best

not to leave the whole notion of historical invention to copyright lawsuits. there's a one one where jack kilby at texas instruments and bob noyce and gordon moore, they almost simultaneously do the microchip, and that is a huge lawsuit for many years, but noyce and kilby were both such decent people, they always gave each other the credit, and before the lawyers could settle -- that suit went on and on and on. finally noyce and the texas instruments people got together and said, shook hands hands and, let's get the lawyers out of this. >> host: so let's go back to the iniac women, balls it's another unknown story where mockley and eckhart recute young women, mostly math majors from small midwestern colleges, bring them

to washington, and decide they're going to be assigned the task of programming this computer. why are they simultaneously so obscure and yet played such an important role at that key moment. >> guest: partly hair obscure because this was happening during wash, and iniac was originally done mainly to calculate missile trajectories for artillery tables, and as the war is ending in '46 -- the war is ending, and by 1946 they realize it has to do other things, such as john van neuman arrives and says i want to know if this hydrogen bomb concept will work. so they did the explosion and the implosion and women are the ones who understand how to program it by unplugging and replugging cabled and turning off switches. they get written out too because, you know, the boys with

their toys thought they were in charge, and the night that -- the day they unveil iniac finalfully 1946, it's february, it's valentine's day. "the new york times" there is, dignitaries and they're going to show off they have this new machine. jean jennings, i think frances and others, they do the program. they have to stay up all newt because they got one thing wrong and couldn't figure it out. they figure it out and it works perfectly for the demonstration. then everybody goes to this wonderful candle lit dinner, black tie next pages of never "new york times" but the women are not invited. it's valentine's day and the take the bus back to their apartments, feeling bad they didn't even get invited to the dinner. so, when you wonder about women and technology, you have to say we all have to have role models.

i talked to you about my dad. you have to put these people back in the history so that everybody feels included in this revolution, and they rove models. >> host: as you to the -- [applause] >> guest: yes. absolutely. >> host: we inducted jean as a fellow here. >> guest: jane jennings and buy her autobiography, published hoes human mousily, and it's online -- posthumously, and it's online now, and it's pioneer programs. here's a little thing about it to think about. she is program alancis grove, missouri, town of 127 people. a tiny town. one of seven or eight children, poor farm family. and she decides she wants to go to college because her family cares about education. so for $78 a year she goes to missouri state teachers college,

and decided she doesn't want to be a teacher. she wants to be a mathematician, back then that was fine. so for that $78 for four years she becomes a math may television and sees the sign, come to philadelphia and work on iniac. we need mathematicians and she goes and become as a pioneer. that program costs $19,000 a year now. we should not cut off the ability for everybody to get a good education. anyway, read the book. >> host: some was so accomplished she went with them to university and continued her career -- >> guest: and grace popper, the other programmer, chev is up at harvard, and the good think that mockley and eckardt they hey not

have invited the women to the dinner but they made up for it by hiring a lot of these women, and john markley actually married one of them, who became kay markley, and then also hired her and married her. i guess that was done back then. and she became one of the great pioneer programmers, too. and it is interesting that fewer women go into computer science now than did 20 years ago. we got -- that's why it's good to have sheryl sandberg and melissa and others here. >> host: there's a terrific film, if you haven't seen it, called "top secret rosies" about the history of these women programmers. >> guest: there's another one on -- well, you should go online and google them because there's a couple of documentaries that have been made, too. >> so let's move on. you mentioned the semi conductor earlier, and i want to talk

about now about the transtransistor and the integrated circuit. i want to talk about it to draw a contrast the way you explain teams and collaboration happen, and by contrasting two very different approaches. one is the shockley approach, and his team, working on the transistor on the one hand and then noyce and money on the other one. talk about shockley, the genius invent 'er but -- >> guest: shockley you know about. a genius but also paranoid and eventually racist. so, he is at bell labs, which is by far the coolest place for collaboration and the 1930s and '40s, and throughout the mid-to late '40s they have to figure out how to do many things, one of which is amplify a phone signal so you can make a call from san francisco to new york, and they need a solid state amply -- amplifier.

and yaw daytona do it with -- i love bell labs because it's the ultimate of -- a collaboration where in the hallways there -- you have this guy claude shannon, john bareen, and they're sharing a washing space, and a bench, with walter bratton, an experimentalist. he knows how to take a piece of silicon chase semi conductor you can dump with impurities and make it conduct better or worse, and therefore be an 0 on-off situation and they understand the state which means understanding both quantum theory and also material science, like what is happening to those electrons dancing in the surface of a piece of silicon. and so they're doing all these

things. bardine and bratton almost do a call and response, there's a composer at a bench doing a song, as they figure out ways to make the various materials they're using, into better semi conductors and using a paper clip. they're working under shockley. they finally do it. shockley has contributed many of the theories about has been a bit hands off, but unlike the heros of this book, he doesn't like giving credit as much as he likes taking credit. so, even -- i mean, he is furious when they are put on the application for the patent for it, and he ensies he be in all -- he insists he be in all the press releases and he even insists that in the publicity

photos he be in it. he gets to be in it. and just as they were taking this photo, at bell labs for the publicity shot, they were all standing up, he sits down and grabs bratton's microscope as if it's his and makes himself the center, and bardine and bratton said they hated this photograph from then on. they don't speak to each other for a while. shockley gets eades out of bell lab because he is such a pain to work with. the only time they speak is when they win the nobel prize and meet in the hotel and they're both in the same restaurant and they forgive each other, but shockley comps out here, very nearby, starts shockley semi conductors and just as paranoid and hard of building teams. he calls noyce and moore, and gathers them to work at shockley semi conductor.

but after a while, they just can't stand working for shockley, and the pictures you have downstairs in the lobby of noyce, moore, and others, and those notebooks or fairchild are because bob noyce and gordon moore decided the way to run a company is not this authoritarian, bossy, glory-hogging way that shockley has been doing it, and they start intel, and they have a room almost like this, not too far from here, big room, nobody what corner office, and noyce puts a beat-up desk in the center of the room, along with moore and others, and there's no hierarchy in it, and invents not only the microchip but what they invent is the silicon valley culture of that sort of open, nonauthoritarian.

nonhierarchical company. >> host: he had gophered here for the -- >> guest: i love driving up and just sitting there and listening. >> host: someone asked him what was it was like to work for shockley. he said he was a difficult guy to work for but a pretty good judge of talent. that's. >> guest: that's pron through only egotistical thing he would say. >> host: it got the same laugh as everybody gave us tonight. so, shockley is the anomaly in the ecosystem narrative you talk about. i want to ask you, why some teams that seemingly have those ingredients. the genius innovate for and the practical engineer and the ecosystem builder, why do some citied and some not succeed? >> well, partly -- you have to get it right. shockley's big failure was not just being a jerk but came up if

a a tran -- transistor which he kept insisting would work but didn't. but if you get the right system, the vision north carolina, people can execute, people can opportunity it into products -- that's not thing, too sometimes you forget you need the business person who can turn it into a real product. and that's what you see with pat hagarty and others at texas instruments. they real yes the transcyst store is cool but need products. >> host: the transistor radio was not only the perfect implementation of the technology but revolutionized american culture. >> guest: i love the transistor radio. it is making our devices personal, the way steve jobs liked to do it. not doing the, let's create artificial intelligence and what -- the people at texas instrument, especially hagarty and others, figured out you had this transcyst stores but

you need -- transsis stores but you need a mark for them. they're putting enemy hearing aids, that's an important but limited market. people won't buy a hearing aid unless they need a hearing aid. radios were then a shared appliance, just like many things, you have something that is shared, like a computer, that suddenly somebody makes personal. so what they do -- they can't get rca or any big company to and it. they make the radio around 1957. ...

mine has six and you could listen to any music you wanted especially the ones your parents didn't like. and so you have that symbiosis just like an automobile industry and the oil industry grow up symbiotically. but i think more importantly if you want to look at the trajectory of digital revoluti revolution, it's making our machines more personal, taking a computer which is a big hulking thing and finally you can put it on your lap. taking radios, taking in the

ipod. nobody knew we needed 1000 songs in our pocket until steve jobs said yeah music is personal. >> that's the perfect segue to her for story which is the pc and we are going to talk about the alt-a are now and to curse the alt-a her story is bound up in the story of bill gates and paul allen. >> and steve wozniak. >> and steve wozniak and steve jobs because i want to talk about that. let's focus on gates and allen now. you write about their relationship in very detailed and personal terms and i wonder when you started this book did you intend to examine the personal relationship between bill gates and paul allen is part of the story? >> when we talk about visionaries and engineers often teams have their colonel up here babich and lovelace, whatever it was and steve jobs, gates and

allen and john mockley all the way down the list to people who work together to form the colonel and that's almost in a computer since the colonel of the operating system. and so i talked to bill gates from the very beginning. i think i mentioned he was the one he said no make it about the pc and the internet so i interviewed him many times and very informally for the book and i had a nice long interview with him in seattle. but the really important thing is when the altaire comes along it does exactly what we said. it takes something that is a big old impersonal thing i.e. a computer that up until then we kind of feared would be orwellian. they are going to be controlled by the government and the pentagon in big corporations. this guy makes a something that a hobbyist can do.

>> with all due respect to this altaire is a pretty rinky-dink thing. it has a a few lights and if you toggle switches that people went nuts because you could own it and you could make it do things. it didn't have any basic or didn't have any programming so that is what bill and paul come and. one of the things we covering journalists like to believe is that if you have a great product and it's like bishop berkeley's the tree falls in the forest and you don't hear it you're not sure if it makes not sure of remixes founded by the cool things that ed roberts did was give it on the cover of popular electronics. paul, allen in december of that year is going to the harvard square newsstand right in the middle of harvard square because his friend bill gates is at harvard and is convince paul to drop out into even to come to cambridge.

so he's there and he sees this thing and he says it's happening without us. he grabbed a copy of the magazine and its snowing and he trudges through the slush to the carrier house which is bill gates house at the harbor. he said this is happening without us. bill as you know starts rocking as he's reading and these rocking. he blows off all the exams and they sit there using the computer right next to the mar mark i but a pdp one and a later version of the pdp at the harbor computation lab and they write basic for the altaire. bill gates basically doesn't shave at this point by paul allen can agree -- at least grow sideburns. they want to figure out what to do when they realize that paul allen is going to have to be the one to bring it to albuquerque when they make this altaire but bill is sort of in charge.

so they decide that bill should call ed robertson say we have a version of basic but as you said he is paul allen. he makes his voice deeper says he is paul allen and robert says if you walk through the door with it you've got the contract. so then paul allen flies to albuquerque and they make the first of the two really good deals. you have to be a good businessman. they say fine you can have basic for can have basic for the altaire did we keep the rights to it and we get to license it to anybody else. sound familiar? is what they do at ibm with the operating system. so that's why basic becomes the standard, i mean that microsoft basic becomes the standard. >> anecdote about you pretend you are me and talk to this guy on the phone is very telling because you talk about it. there's another anecdote earlier when they are young boys really working in seattle. the lakeside, high school lab

and there are four of them. they get a contract actually that paul allen becomes convinced that he can work on with another member of the lakeside group. not bill gates and they take it on and they try to do this job for a company in portland. they get halfway through and they discover they can't do it. allen calls gates and says man we are in trouble. at that heavy combat and then you have this quote and i want to read it because it's so interesting. gates says to allen okay but i'm going to be in charge and i will get used to being in charge and it will be hard to deal with me from now on unless i am in charge. if you put me in charge i'm in charge of this and anything else we do. that is a really interesting story. >> and has the added virtue of being true. bill gates, but it was an interesting partnership and you see that with steve jobs without

leaping ahead too far as well. you have to have somebody who is really the driven visionary and you know wozniak had been on the stage when i spoke about the steve jobs book you had in the clips real. wasswa sitting right there and we talked about it and in the end he realizes you know will pay steve jobs really did start driving the show. and likewise bill gates really did start driving microsoft and he becomes you know more and more in charge. i tried to be not judgment all about that and you know you should read paul allen's book and paul allen's memoir is very good. i think he has some resentment but bill gates was pretty awesome and he knew how to code and how to run a company. >> there were several other passages that you referred to in the section where it seems clear

allen doesn't really capitulate as much as he just says i just understood this was the way we could best work together and this is the way that we could actually get things done. they seemed to take their roles on and carry them out. >> sometimes we think these partnerships and collaborations are mysterious but then you should step back and realize we have all been through things like that. "cnn" end times and other things and you know you have to think sometimes this is the way life is and sometimes partnership have a lot of tension in it, but these partnerships are very productive. i will tell you the last product launch i went to for apple very near the end for steve, i was in the green room and there was was. we shouldn't be too judgmental about partnerships that have contention and especially when they create microsoft and apple. >> that's the final relationship

i want to turn to an. >> one of those is going up for auction for $600,000. >> do. >> d.c. that armed that armed guard we have over there? that is not going up. >> oh darn i was hoping that was my gift. [laughter] and it has woz' signature on it. >> it does. you told such a complete story in your biography of steve jobs. i'm wondering in this book did you want to eliminate anything or did you even discover it? >> first i tell it through woz' contributions of people don't fill gypped if they already read that chapter. but here is what i discovered. i discovered it when writing about steve jobs. we think he's the great visionary and that you know out of his head comes apple and all of these things. he is a great visionary but what

he did extraordinarily well is even though he was tough to deal with, even though he was a strong cup of tea at times and could be tough on people at times, he developed an incredible set of teams and those teams were very collaborative. one of the last things i asked steve jobs was what was the thing that you created that you are most proud of. i thought he would say the ipod or the iphone or whatever. he said no creating a product is very hard at creating a company that can continue to create products is even harder. the thing i'm proudest of is creating the team that became apple. so look at the m -- original team from 1980 to 1984. half of them have been in this room from andy herzfeld to joanna hoffman and others. all of them would say how hard it was to work with steve but every one of them would say, and i think i was a quote i had in the highlights reel.

i would not give it up for anything in the world. he made me do things i need to know i could do and you look at all these nicer bosses in the valley over the years if they don't have teams that stay loyal. people quit all those other companies but whether it was the original mcintosh team or the team that steve headed at apple for the past decade, that's an incredibly good team of people like tim cook who knew how to execute and people like johnny ives to have a great feel for beauty and art and people like shellen who did software. i discovered that steve besides being a visionary, he was also a team builder and he probably doesn't get enough credit for being a collaborative team builder because if you look up collaboration on wikipedia you probably wouldn't see his picture. but in the end he deserves credit for building the most loyal team of any computer

company i know. >> lest we think we give people the impression we are on a journey that stops about 1986, you do a wonderful job bringing the story currents talking about the on line world. this is long before the internet and the world wide web and in the rice of the internet and the rise of the world web -- world wide web on top of the internet. which in that hole next to you did you really fast nonis the story you thought was really emblematic of that? >> emblematic in of the digital revolution was the creation of arpanet and starting starting with jc ehrlich later. if you have to have one or two unsung or little song heroes like leiter is this once again missouri person, likes giving credit more than taking it. when he is doing the defense system and these at m.i.t. and other places he creates a notion

of the interactive computer display that's easy to read. if you are doing an air defense system enough to know quickly what's happening. it has to be fast and interactive batch processing disorder. he's also realizing you have a downstairs, you have to have 23 of these things all over the country and they have to instantly connect. he comes up with a humorous phrase the intergalactic -- intergalactic computer network. he finally gets to the pentagon in the fund's arpanet and then you have these cool people doing the nfc is on the arpanet working collaboratively to create the protocols for the host to host communications and then then eventually been served on bob cone who had been a graduate student so arpanet a few years later saying we now have a few packets of networks and they need to enter network hence the phrase internet protocol and they did tc pict

together. that's cool that one of the things i noticed because i grew up in this sort of thing and running digital media for a time incorporated was back in 1990 or so the internet is really big and it's wonderful that you can't get on it if you're just a normal person. you have to be at the university and have to be in a research lab. you can't just from home dial-up. likewise a personal computer most of the people who invented it from allen k to steve jobs or whatever they wanted it as a personal creativity tool and it was not seen as a networking tool. in 1992 to 1994 something amazing happened which as we get to interconnect their computers, our personal computers. it starts with the on line services and then connecting to the internet meaning the well and eventually steve case helps takeover america on line which was a sort of flailing company

started by bill von meister back once again you needed a visionary like von meister and steve case who could implement it and then i think, can't remember exactly maybe 93. it's called endless september because all of you net denizens who didn't like the unwatched coming on every september they would be a new wave of people that got to come onto the internet because they went to college and all of a sudden i get on the internet and that was called the september problem because they would all come on in posts on the bulletin boards in use those stupid things. eventually they would be okay. because of al gore. al gore in the 19 into gore ads and 93 allows the internet to be opened up to on line services. aol and delphi are the first to did do it. i remember vividly because suddenly you know we could go on

to aol and have an open gate to go on to the internet. it was called the endless september because from then on all these people start flooding onto the internet. but it is a really good thing. allows the internet to get back to the theme of the book to become personal. to become something the rest of us can use. >> you match that up to the cultural transition that holocaust almost where we are going through with everybody all the turmoil in the united states and the complete of people of social norms and campus unrest and the idea that information was really going to be free and everyone needed to be a part of that and this marriage of on line and computing played art into that. >> it happened right here. this is the epicenter. i guess i shouldn't use earthquake. this is the g. spot.

a better locus term for it. and it really begins in the 70s and all the way through. this is a long section in my book that i crowdsourced. i put these passages on line and people like stewart brand and many others liza loop that i had never met before but was a community organizer put it on this site medium and other sites where you could put a note to napping sun. these chapters became crowdsourced by the people who were involved and there was a whole melding. that would go back to the 70s for that happening. you have it right here the electronic geeks and the people from the defense industry and the people who wore pocket protectors from hewlett-packard but you also have the whole nerve crowd that believes in access to tools, stewart brand like every few years as doing something really cool. he on line helped edit this

chapter and then you have the antiwar activists who bend folder -- ben fold and mutilate became an ironic antiwar statement that we don't want the corporation to own our machines. you actually have the hippies and the acid test him out of that comes stewart brand and dave engelbert so there's a cauldron that has this one, and flavor, antiauthoritarian lets take the tools back, let's make the tools personal. that's when the personal computer rises and then the notion of switchboards, bulletin boards, on line services, the well and eventually the world wide web. >> you set this project aside to

work on the steve jobs biography. first biography. first of all you have been working on it for a long time. how difficult was it for you and secondly how well-informed do you feel you were to enter into the steve jobs project because of all the work you have been doing? >> well i have been gathering strength for 15 years on this book ever since the early 90s when i was doing digital media. my bosses were saying launch this internet. as i said i'm probably not the best historical researcher in america. you have berlin who didn't wonderful book on bob noyes who knows the archives of standford left-right and center, just great. i may not be the best journalists. you have bob woodward but i know how to mesh the two. i know how to call and say want to come to your house and i have the really good fortune in my life of having been out of place like "cnn" or "time" are writing

books where if i call larry page and say look i really want to sit down and go through it to he says fine and i show up and spend time doing it. so i have that little advantage that comes from being a journalist so i try to put those two things together and doing this book which meant it took throughout the 90s. every time i knit interviewing, i mean we made andy grove man of the year at "time" but i spent a lot of time with him instead of saying how did intel come about and that all went into this folder here. i was in no rush to write this book and certainly when i had the chance do the steve jobs what it was not painful to put it aside to do that. the "time," and i really wanted to put it together. >> let's take questions from the audience. here is one about bell labs

being such an incredibly innovative place in the 30s and 40s. what do you think about the bell labs of today? >> you know it's a shame that whether it be xerox parc, bell labs, many others of these great corporate institutions we had a lot of corporate basic research that was being done. i think you see that summit google now with google apps. they are really cool about it. you also have one of the unsung heroes in the book who wrote not only as we may think which is really the recipe in 1945 for the personal computer and the internet in wikipedia and a lot of other things but he also he was besides founding raytheon and running the war research the manhattan project for the u.s. government he puts together this triangle of corporate research centers, universities like

stanford harvard and m.i.t. and private corporations. you have things like brand that almost fall in between. those were the days bell labs was in the highlight of that in which we did basically search in this country. as i say in this book you have got to read every congressman should be made to read science the next frontier which is his memo to eisenhower who becomes great. eisenhower is the perfect president to bring together the academy the military and corporations. but he says in the memo is the basic research is the seed corn from which we will get future inventions. he turns out to be right. the internet, the laser,

microchip whatever it may be. boy we are decimating that. stanford is a great job and combined academic and corporate and stuff. but the cutbacks of our basic research funding both by corporations and the federal government is one of the things i worry about. which is a nice way of saying i think bell labs is -- [laughter] >> a number of people they already have read the book since a one-out, a whole week. if you have read the book and if your name appears in the index please raise your hands. charlie fine, stand up for a second. i'll go you are standing up. bad joke. charlie, unknowing that he was going to be in history is sitting there at the lab and

ucla when they are connecting the arpanet nodes, right and the arpanet which is a precursor to the internet to routers. >> they were called basically just packet switches. >> interface message being a government acronym they had to use. i think one was at stanford. >> built the ball was monitoring his computer at stanford. i was trying to login which in those days you type the word login. >> sri not stanford. >> i'm sorry. >> we know the difference between sra and stamper. by the way it fits into what i was saying. anyway, go ahead. >> anyway i typed in al and i typed in o and he got the o that type to g and he said my system crashed. i will call you back.

[laughter] i could explain the bug but it's not relevant to this conversation. >> that's an even better answer since we are getting live testimony. >> is like a quakertown meeting. >> it's a lot longer than a tweet which is even better. this is a wonderful question actually. now you overcome some of the epic figures in american history. as reading and researching these famous figures, has it changed you? is a changed her outlook, the way that you think about yourself in the context? >> it was really this book that changed me because albert einstein is the only exception to the rule. he is a loner and he is padding around especially in the 1915 to

the depression academy. he is jewish and not a part of a collegial group and he comes up with the most elegant theory in the history of science in my mind which is the general theory of relativity. otherwise there are very few people who are loners. collaboration is a team sport and innovation and creativity involve collaboration. i realized that i was never going to be mentally not einstein and not build jobs -- bill gates or steve jobs. you all are isolated but i live in washington d.c. and this notion that we can find carman carmans -- common ground to collaborators disappeared. i like being at the aspen institute which is part of the mission to say all right how do we put together teams of people to solve problems? so i became more fixated on what

steve case would call the rise of the rest. he's going around the country saying innovation can happen anywhere. i go back to new orleans by hometown and see what is called the intellectual property. the building with a diligent with people working together collaboratively. you go to austin and you go anywhere. you see these things so i became more interested in this notion of innovation being a collaborative sport and being a team sport. >> and he wouldn't confine matches to silicon valley although we are very happy with the way we do it. >> i think the digital revolution and this is a little bit too hard to get into here but i try to in the book. it's almost ingrained in the genetic code about the internet and the whole digital revolution that there is a distributed peer-to-peer networked way of creativity.

it's how the arpanet and internet were built built. it's how bob noyes and gordon moore formed companies and that peer-to-peer, just like every single node on the internet is in some ways powerful and can switch and store and distribute information. that notion that peer-to-peer networking i think is very integral to the digital revolution and thus makes creativity of the central. but that will be true of the next biotech the next biotech revolution and others as well i suspect. >> you mentioned that you put sections of your book up to get crowdsourced and looked at them this is a question about that. how satisfied were you at that process? >> i was blown away. this is not new. benjamin franklin creates the colonial postal service partly so people can share ideas, documents. he was assigned to tissue no.

all these papers get exchanged. we have been doing that forever. when i was at "time magazine" he wrote a story that was sent to all bureaus for comments and corrupt -- corrections. when i wrote a book i would send it to 20 or 40 friends and say comment, correct. now in one day when i put it up on media of this chapter in silicon valley of the different tribes that form is anti-authoritarian ferment and got 17,800 comments and corrections which is really co cool. [laughter] a lot of them are in there. and i think, hear something, i will float this idea. this book should not be just a book handed down by an author.

you and i are going to work together in turning this into a multimedia book. i book. i'm out there ready to announce it but i want this stuff to be here. >> we just did. >> the next thing i want to do is a book like this should be somewhat like a wikipedia document where everybody can add things but also multimedia eight so charlie kline can take his logs from that very first day that the arpanet is done and upload them and it becomes part of the book. now alcorn can do the scheme in the book. and by the way i've got pictures that video and i want all that uploaded. thousands of people can do a collaborative book. as an author i think it probably should be curated put an author should be as curators as the crowdsourced living multimedia book that in the next phase of

that i hope in the revolution will be one when bitcoins or other easy current seas allowed to sue if you put this book, and it is collaboratively created and crowdsourced, that the money and i do still believe the content shouldn't always be free, that people pay 10 bucks for the digital version of the book that money can be allocated based on all the people contributed just like the loyalties from songs or whatever allocated. i envision five or 10 years from now collaborated crowdsourced curated royalty shared multimedia forms of narrative history. >> that's amazing. >> we will do it here. >> let's do it here, absolutely. [applause] there is one additional story before we leave this whole area that i would love for you to tell which is your own

experience trying to change the wikipedia entry about albert einstein. >> will you know when wikipedia came up and i think it's 9495 this wonderful miracle year when all these things are happening like a lot of people i was fascinated about the power of collaborative crowdsourcing. and so i was then finishing are doing, can't remember this biography i was writing on albert einstein. i look around in wikipedia is not reliable and i'm stunned by how reliable it is. of course idiots can put things in that they have the reversion button and the crowd reverts things that are bad. actually reversion wars have been fought on wikipedia with more intensity than i think real wars that we are fighting now.

somehow it turns out right. so the wikipedia entries on albert einstein says that in 1937 he secretly traveled to albania because king zeid god gave him a visa to escape the nazis. not one word of that sentence is true but is there on wikipedia so i take it out. boom, comes back. it always has the citations because they are very passionate albanian ex-patriots who have web sites in which somebody says my uncle once told me he was walking down the street and the matt albert einstein. so you know it has references to weird web sites in which somebody's cousin said his uncle new kings dog and they kept getting put back in. meander but my real name and a wikipedia handle handle and try to figure how to do this says is not true. and by the way he was at princeton and here's the passport he was using, you know

swiss. he was not an albania. finally it just disappears. it comes out and the entry turns out to be correct. at first i did not attribute this to the wisdom of crowds because i said the wisdom of crowds got it wrong. i was the one who fixed it. i fixed it and then i realized i'm just a part of the crowd. every now now and then i added a tiny bit of wisdom to the wisdom of the crowd but that's what the crowd was. it included me and you and everybody else. that's when i became a fan of crowdsourcing and collaboration in the wisdom. >> i love that story and i love your vision of the future telling of history. i would love to collaborate with you on that. so that's it on the audience questions and i want to close with a return to the theme that you sounded