The Innovators: How A Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution -- Walter Isaacson, 2014.
This is absolutely amazing.
As I go through the headings of these chapters, I realize I am an exact contemporary of the digital revolution. After each chapter, the year, my age, what I was doing when I see that heading. This is the first iteration. Will require significant editing, revision, updating.
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Early Notes
The book page: The innovators……
Chapters 1 - 3: early computers and programming; historical in nature; interesting.
All part of my own history in college, 1969 - 1973, when I was introduced to an IBM mainframe and learned to program in FORTRAN (formula translation). I know students in college are taught how to use FORTRAN or similar “languages” to write short programs to solve tedious math problems. That does not interest me much any more, at least not now, maybe some day.
1: Ada, Countess of Lovelace
2: The computer
3: Programming
But chapter 4 - 5: this is what I’m interested in now.
4: The transistorMy closest high school friend was amazed when he could listen to the local radio station using two thin wires and touching a naturally-occurring rock he had found somewhere. That rock was a crystal and it was well-known that some naturally occurring “crystals” could “receive” radio signals. There were two big problems: “tuning” — to get the right frequency to capture the radio signal; and “amplification” — make the reception loud enough one could actually hear the signal.
5: The microchip
That’s what the early research was all about — occurring during the war and immediately after the war — the period of “waves”:
- Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves;
- ocean waves: US Navy in the Pacific theater of operations, WWII; and the Royal Navy in the Atlantic theater of operations, WWII;
- invisible waves: radio waves; radar waves; sonar waves — all of which had to be sent/received in contraptions small enough to fit in airplanes. Ships could manage with larger receivers / transmitters (using vacuum tubes invested by Thomas Edison), but this would this method would not work in airplanes, and thus the race to find something that was smaller and would still work.
I imagine listening to a local radio station on a small rock/crystal in a physics lab was absolutely amazing.
My close friend in high school was aware of that and was really intrigued by that. He ended up becoming an engineer for the USAF and then eventually establishing his own company in that field.
Me? I thought it was easier just to go home and turn on the large radio in the living room and listen to the music on a "real" radio. Trying to get the signal on a little crystal did not intrigue me at all. LOL. Had it intrigued me who knows where I might be today.
ChatGPT and I have been having discussions back and forth all day on the history of discovering / investing the transistor.
So, back to Walter Isaacson and the Innovators.
Page 133: “… frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters.”
Page 134: important paragraph on teams and individuals; teams combined with theorists and engineers.
area of investigation: solid-state physics which studied how electrons flow through solid materials such as silicon; silicon: after oxyen, the most common element in the earth’s crust and a key component of sand —
Meanwhile, theorists were wrestling with the mind-bending discoveries of quantum mechanics
History of quantum mechanics begins at bottom of page 134.
Metallurgists: trial and error.
Doping:
n-type semiconductor; excess electrons
p-type semiconductor; a deficit of electrons; concept of “holes”;
Bell Labs,
1936: a solid-state study group formed; met once a week; of all the people in the group, one stood out: William Shockley.
Key paragraph, middle of page 137: Mervin Kelly, Bell Labs, interviewed and hired William Shockley: mandate: replace vacuum tubes with a device that was more stable, solids nd cheap.
Shockley felt that was possible using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible, in his lab notebook on December 29, 1939.
Shockley needs a partner who could transform Shockley’s ideas into physical contraptions.
Walter Brattain: built rectifiers; Cu and CuO2
Walter Brattain: the original MacGyver.
Shockley had the theory, but Brattain tried it and it didn’t work. Shockley said it would work.
But then WWII intervened.
Shockley: research director in the Navy’s antisubmarine group; where he developed analyses of bomb detonation depths to improve attacks on German U-boats; later to Europe and Asia to help B-29 bomber fleets use radar.
Brattain went to work on submarine-detection technologies for the Navy, focusing on airborne magnetic devices.
Bell Labs outgrew Manhattan headquarters and moved to Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly still in charge.
After the war, came back to Bell Labs; same mission: solid state replacement for vacuum tubes.
The solid-state research group may have been one of the greatest research teams ever put together.
Brought in an additional theorist: John Bardeen.
Expert in quantum theory.
During WWII was in the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, discussed torpedo design with Einstein.
No office space of John Bardeen, so he make up his own space in Brattain’s lab.
THE TRANSISTOR, p. 141.
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By Chapter
Chapter One: Ada, Countess of Lovelace.
Chapter Two: The Computer.
The mainframe. The huge IBM mainframe. 1969 - 1970. Perhaps one of the most incredible years of my life. I was a freshman at Augustana College and was fortunate to have had three or four of the best professors in the world, as far as I was concerned at the time. Perhaps more each of them later. My first year college chemistry professor, Dr Arlen Viste, had just acquired a state-of-the-art IBM mainframe computer. I had no clue that those IBM punch cards were just the beginning. I lacked the vision to see what that mainframe was capable of doing and where it might lead.
Chapter Three: Programming.
The mainframe. The huge IBM mainframe. 1969 - 1970. Freshman, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD. I taught myself to code in "Basic," but we then went on to learn to code in Fortran ("formula translator"). Again, I lacked the vision to see what that mainframe was capable of doing and where it might lead. But it was fascinating to be able to code.
Chapter Four: The Transistor.
Chapter Five: The Microchip.
Chapter Six: Video Games.
I don't recall ever enjoying electronic video games, except perhaps Pong.
Chapter Seven: The Internet.
1992: 41 years old; Icirlik AB, Turkey. I was the commander of the USAF hospital in eastern Turkey, the Air Force's largest hospital in that part of the world. One day, from the bowels of the basement a junior biomedical science officer officer rushed to my office telling me he had just "connected" with the Pentagon and was sharing files with his counterparts in Washington, DC, halfway around the world. He was probably using some "file transfer protocol." I've long forgotten. There was something called "FetchIt" and something called "Mosaic" which eventually morphed into Firefox, I believe. I was intrigued but had no idea how revolutionary this was and was yet to become.
Chapter Eight: The Personal Computer.
Where was I? Where could I say I bought my first personal computer. Probably Bitburg Air Base, Germany, 1984, or thereabouts. I would have been a captain or a major, age 33 years old. You can see chapters seven and eight to some respect were reversed for me. My first personal computer was an Apple computer. I believe my first Apple computer was an Apple IIc, but I owned, or used, almost every Apple computer that was released. Our two daughters were first exposed to the Apple IIc (?)when we were stationed in Bitburg Air Base, the second time, 1989- 1993, when they were six years old and two years old, or thereabouts.
Chapter Nine: Software.
For me, verything flowed from 1984. In 1999 - 2000, I was commander of USAF's Air Combat Command (ACC)'s flagship hospital at Langley AFB, Virginia. We beta-tested the first large scale electronic medical record system in the world. This would have been "phase II." I had also been commander of the hospital in Turkey when we tested Phase I of that same system: CHCS: comprehensive healthcare system. We -- our hospital -- was the most remote Air Force hospital to implement and test that groundbreaking EMR suite.
Chapter Ten: Online. 2000 to 2007.
My last years in the USAF were with the Air Intelligence Agency and it was all about the digital revolution. Too much to talk about here and now. Maybe later. All I will say now is that's where I learned html and developed my own webpage with ten minutes of USAF instruction. That's how good the Air Force was when it came to education and training. I was on at least three systems: unclassified; classified SECRET; and, then classified at a higher level.
Chapter Eleven: The Web.
I retired from the USAF in 2007 and took my programming skills with me to begin blogging about the Bakken.
Chapter Twelve: Ada Forever
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