A century after his great triumphs, we are still living in Einstein’s universe, one defined on the macro scale by his theory of relativity and on the micro scale by a quantum mechanics that has proven durable even as it remains disconcerting.
NeXT, 1988: Freed from the constraints at Apple, he indulged his own best and worst instincts.
Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking the required classes.
I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time,” he deadpanned.
I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
Einstein offered her a deal. He would win the Nobel Prize someday, he said; if she gave him a divorce, he would give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted.
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?
He was working himself up into a fervor of delight while I was shrinking into a rage and thinking, How could you.
Leibniz had little engineering skill and did not surround himself with those who did. So, like many great theorists who lacked practical collaborators, he was unable to produce reliably working versions of his device.
I liked the film because it was about taking risks and learning to let those you love take risks,” Jobs said.
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science.
Indeed, most of their letters mixed romantic effusions with scientific enthusiasms, often with an emphasis on the latter.
Kilby displayed his awshucks humility. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he responded, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.
Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.
Leonardo’s optics experiments produced discoveries that would not be rediscovered for another century.23 In addition, they were important in honing his ability to match theory with experiment, and they became an underpinning of his studies on perspective.
Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin.
In his competition with Bradford, Franklin had one big disadvantage. Bradford was the postmaster of Philadelphia, and he used that position to deny Franklin the right, at least officially, to send his Gazette through the mail. Their ensuing struggle over the issue of open carriage was an early example of the tension that often still exists between those who create content and those who control distribution systems.
A break came when Polish intelligence officers created a machine based on a captured German coder that was able to crack some of the Enigma codes. By the time the Poles showed the British their machine, however, it had been rendered ineffective because the Germans had added two more rotors and two more plugboard connections to their Enigma machines.
I can’t see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own,” DEC president Ken Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting where his operations committee was debating whether to create a smaller version of its PDP-8 for personal consumers.