The Fourth Major Area Of Computing Kicks In

[vt]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/andy-...59097327664495

[don]

Re: The Fourth Major Area Of Computing Kicks In

Have to subscribe to the Journal to read it.

[seobook]

Re: The Fourth Major Area Of Computing Kicks In

Many mainstream news sites do "first click free" with major search engines, so if you search for the URL in a search engine you are often able to click through and read it.

[lektrode]

Re: The Fourth Major Area Of Computing Kicks In

unless of course they've embedded something to prevent this - news.google hasnt worked for me in months
which seems to have occurred hand-in-glove with the 'somewhat sudden' mushrooming number of j-scripts eye note at ruperts place these daze (am a fan of 'no-scripts' by default and only turn on the ones necessary and ONLY the ones necessary to see what EYE want to see - vs what 'they' want ya to see...)

[Milton Kuo]

Re: The Fourth Major Area Of Computing Kicks In

unless of course they've embedded something to prevent this - news.google hasnt worked for me in months
which seems to have occurred hand-in-glove with the 'somewhat sudden' mushrooming number of j-scripts eye note at ruperts place these daze (am a fan of 'no-scripts' by default and only turn on the ones necessary and ONLY the ones necessary to see what EYE want to see - vs what 'they' want ya to see...)

Try using news.google.com in a private browsing session (most browsers have this feature nowadays.) I suspect that what is preventing you from reading the content is that there is a cookie on your computer that the WSJ uses to track how many free articles you've read. I'm still able to read all of the articles on Barron's, WSJ, etc. for free.

Also, if you're using Firefox, you should be able to use the RefControl extension to set the Referer header to tell WSJ.com that you were referred to them through Google. Using RefControl, you ought to be able to directly access the WSJ stories without having to go through Google News.

[lektrode]

Re: The Fourth Major Area Of Computing Kicks In

hey THANKS Mr K - i'm pretty sure you're right on the money with that obs/suggestion - i'm just getting less n less inclined to deal with all this crap anymore...

never mind even the slightest bit inclined to read any of it on a 4" screen...

am about ready to just cave and go back to old fashioned phreakin NEWSPRINT
(since its more functional when 'seated in the library' ;)

[don]

The First Major Area Of Computing Kicks Into Existance

Heralds of the Digital Tomorrow

Walter Isaacson’s ‘The Innovators’ Studies Computer Wizards

OCT. 8, 2014

Walter Isaacson, a versatile and workmanlike author, has never sounded as excited by his material as he does in “The Innovators.” It may be that he has the same basic qualifications as many of the people he writes about here: “My father and uncles were electrical engineers, and like many of the characters in this book, I grew up with a basement workshop that had circuit boards to be soldered, radios to be opened, tubes to be tested, and boxes of transistors and resistors to be sorted and deployed.”

Mr. Isaacson, who is 62, sounds as if he required no hindsight to know what thrilling times he grew up in. With the strain of romanticism that unites so many of the scientists that this book celebrates, he equates the postwar era with Wordsworth’s description of those who witnessed the start of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

He also grew up just as the Computer Age began to explode. So he has aural, tactile experience of computer kits that had to be assembled at home, the punch cards needed to run room-size computers at college and the screeches of the first modems via telephone line. By the 1990s, he was helping to run a digital division at Time. A decade later, he was writing books, and his best work as a biographer reveals where his heart lies. “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” from 2007, is the most supercharged of his biographies, although he admitted to having difficulty explaining the physics. (“O.K., it’s not easy,” he wrote, “but that’s why we’re no Einstein, and he is.”) His 2011 “Steve Jobs” was an instant classic, despite the obvious problem of dealing with a defensive yet worship-inducing subject.

But Mr. Isaacson’s goal this time is encyclopedic. He means to trace two parallel developments: the very different histories of the computing machine and the much more recent Internet. And he takes the computer back to when it was a gleam in the eye of Lord Byron, the poet. Byron is in here for two reasons. He was famously present when Mary Shelley conceived of “Frankenstein,” with its prospect of a man-made machine that might develop its own thoughts. But Byron’s real gleam was his only legitimate child, the daughter who would become known as Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815.

Ada Lovelace’s mid-19th-century writings were so brilliantly visionary about the potential of a general-purpose computer that she is acknowledged as a major tech-world hero. The United States Defense Department named a computer language after her; there is an Ada Lovelace Day in October (this year it falls on the 14th), a nifty Ada Lovelace Google Doodle and many books about her, including “Ada’s Algorithm,” a new biography by James Essinger, to be published on Ada Day his month. Most of this information can be found on Wikipedia, which was jump-started by Jimmy Wales, who named a daughter Ada in 2011.

If there is one vital point to which Mr. Isaacson keeps returning throughout this linear and elegantly streamlined book, it is that no one individual, not even Mr. Wales, has truly achieved anything alone. All advances require genius, practicality and entrepreneurial ability, skills that don’t necessarily come in the same package. Time after time, Mr. Isaacson reports stories in which the most advanced work is outrun by cannier innovators who pay attention to things like patents, or who think about the practical applications of the things they have devised.

This book is slightly slow going at first, when its emphasis is on incremental advances through dated (although amazing) devices like the programmable weaving loom. Still, Mr. Isaacson’s gifts as an enthusiast and explicator remain impressive. Treat Boolean algebra as a matter of either/or choices that can be executed by electrical circuits, and you move less dauntingly into the pioneering work being done at Bell Labs, Harvard and, most notably, Iowa State University, where a lone academic named John Vincent Atanasoff had by 1942 built a nearly functional prototype of a computer.

But Atanasoff, in a mistake oft repeated here, didn’t do much to protect his creation’s future. He tried to patent it, but only casually. He allowed himself to be visited by John Mauchly, a more gregarious scientist who later appropriated parts of what he saw in Iowa and would go down in history as one of the computer’s first inventors. Meanwhile, Atanasoff was drafted into the Navy in 1942 and left behind his machine, which was dismantled when storage space was needed. “His tale is evidence that we shouldn’t in fact romanticize such loners,” Mr. Isaacson says firmly.

So this book leans far more heavily toward success stories. Some of the best of these feature women, including early programmers working frantically during World War II, like Grace Hopper, whose team achieved many great accomplishments and one unforgettable small one. The moth that got caught in one of its electromechanical relays associated computers with the term “bug” forevermore.

As the book gallops forward, Mr. Isaacson must combine the good, the great and the ugly. They all figure in the story of the transistor, which featured William Shockley, the scientist who first saw the potential in silicon and became a Silicon Valley pioneer — but is now remembered for the racist theories that clouded his legacy. His work on the semiconductor, with two powerful collaborators, would never have led to such household popularity had there not been a Steve Jobs-like figure (Pat Haggerty at Texas Instruments, who shared Jobs’s ability to sell products people had no idea they wanted) to put these brand-new devices, now called transistors, into radios, and truly rock the American teenager’s world.

The further “The Innovators” goes, the more familiar its material is to the present-day reader. And the more interesting its exclusions become. When Mr. Isaacson gets to the Microsoft, Apple and Google eras, he mentions venture capitalists only when necessary and does not dwell on the huge amounts of money that came to complicate the joys of invention. And whether for aesthetic or moral reasons, social media are entirely absent from this book’s timeline. Among possible future biographical subjects, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google are clearly the characters whom he finds most simpatico, and they could do worse than to have Mr. Isaacson tell their story. As this book so clearly demonstrates, he is a kindred spirit to the visionaries and enthusiasts who speed us so thrillingly into the technological future.

THE INNOVATORS
How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
By Walter Isaacson
Illustrated. 542 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.