The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

The recovered history is the draw. Ada Lovelace working out programmable computing in the 1840s, Vannevar Bush describing linked, searchable archives in 1945 ("He even predicted hypertext!" one reader exclaims), and above all the women who programmed the military's first machines. "I was especially glad that Isaacson gave the female programmers the attention they deserved," an admirer writes; another reader, years later and unprompted, walks away with the same fact, that "the earliest computer programmers for the military computers during WW2 were women." The chapters send people off the page: one reader stopped mid-chapter and "spent an entire Saturday online learning about the basic physics and chemistry involved in that process." And between the transistor and the microchip, the book gives Pong most of a chapter.

Traced backward from what won: "a history of innovation from the point of view of the winners," a detractor calls it. Jef Raskin, who originated the Macintosh concept, gets a single mention. Ted Nelson, barely there. "The Gopher protocol, which predates the web, was extremely important, and, arguably, would have been more useful for certain kinds of information browsing," but Gopher lost, so out it goes. Even among winners: "Atanasoff (who never got his machine to work) was given more than three times as much page time as Konrad Zuse, who built the world's first programmable computer." Then the teams thesis, hammered for 500 pages, splits into three kinds at the end: "Sorry, you can't have your lumping claim, and then at the end of the book break it down."