History of Innovation in Computing

"Innovation is the process of creating value by applying novel solutions to meaningful problems" -- Digintent        

Innovation is hard and there is a long list of companies and organizations that have either never innovated or innovated once and eventually withered away. A lot has been written by one of the giants in this space Clayton Christensen in his innovation trilogy. His last book on innovation looks at innovative organizations/teams' DNA and is a great framework to understand innovation.

To understand the future of innovation, especially in computing (because of the outsize impact it has on humanity) it is important to understand the history of computing and how we got here. Thankfully there are many books in this category and wanted to highlight a few that I enjoyed.

The Top Row: These two books have a broad focus and can be easily read by all.

• The Innovators - Walter Issacson is one of my favorite authors and this is one of his best books. Very broad overview from Chips to Hardware to Software to the Internet and to Games. Honestly, a must-read for all. The book's Wikipedia page is my son's first Wikipedia contribution!
• The Idea Factory - Focuses on Bell Labs, a place I love because I worked there, and has been a fountain of innovation in so many fields including Information Theory, Lasers, Transistor, and UNIX. Best few years of my early professional life.

The Second Row: These are a bit deeper and/or focus on a specific subculture of innovation.

• The Dream Machine - This book is probably one of the best books I read on this topic. It is primarily a biography of J.C.R Licklider who without a doubt is the pied piper of innovation - he envisioned interactive computing (and eventually the PC), networked computing (and eventually the Internet) by doling out money to researchers at universities and corporations from his seat at DARPA. The woven narrative is compelling and truly shows how innovation can be funded successfully by a curious mind.
• The Man from the Future - There is no computing without Von Neumann and his architecture still rules all of computing. This is an amazing book that peers into his fascinating mind which wandered into Math, Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Game Theory, and of course Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
• Unix - A Memoir - Brian Kernighan is a national treasure in computing. A humble and brilliant programmer whose programming skill is matched by his skill to make hard things seems easy to understand. Anything he has written has that unmistakable fingerprint. If you love Unix (which dominates computing today) then read how Unix evolved - all the way from Research Unix to Linux and Mac/IOS/Android of today.
• Where Wizards Stayed up Late - Incredible read of the very early Internet (Arpanet) all the way from the RFQ for first IMP to the creation of IP and then TCP. If you love networking you will love this book even more.
• Steve Jobs - Walter's book on an incredible person that took the best of Interactive Computing (via the original Macintosh) then later infused Unix into it via MacOS (that's when I really started to use it) then of course the iPod to change the Music industry, iPhone to change the course of mobile computing. Even if you are not an Apple fan you will love the book at least for Walter's writing.
• Genius Makers - Cade Metz is a great writer (Wired and now with NYTimes) and his first book on the evolution of Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence is simply outstanding. It covers the early days of the Perceptron to McCarthy's initial work to Geoff Hinton and his team's pioneering work to IBM's DeepBlue and then the DeepMind team with AlpaGo. It's a great read.

The Third row digs into the Physics and Hardware of Computing

• Crystal Fire - This one needs some Physics to understand but it is very rewarding as it digs into how learning the physics of dirt (Silicon) resulted in the creation of semiconductors and eventually the transistor, a foundational building block for computing. The personalities of the three inventors could not be different but it's not surprising what can happen in a cauldron of innovation like Bell-Labs.
• The Chip - Great book on Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce and how they independently invented ICs, Kilby did it via the Hybrid approach and Noyce used the Monolithic approach both of which became influential in the design of all future hardware and integrated circuits.

Of course, there are many books I did not include in the list above like Computing, The Soul of a New Machine, Showstopper, Masters of Doom, Dealers of Lightning, etc some of which I have not read as well as some that are repetitive to the books above.

Here is what I learned about what is actually needed to create an innovative culture.

1. Steady access to (hard) problems - The teams need to be in an environment that is feeding them hard problems to solve. For example with ATT running at a massive scale, for the folks at Bell-Labs there was never a shortage of problems to solve that needed innovative ideas.
2. Thinking Long Term - By allowing teams to not worry all the time about what happens in the next 3-6 months gives them the luxury to think long-term. It can be done in two ways: long-term thinking is baked in the culture and the company/organization is flush with resources so they are not waking up to a short-term cycle every day.
3. Making it OK to Fail - Long-term thinking and innovation means failure will happen and the culture needs to be ok with that and the company should be able to survive that as well. Psychological safety, learning from failure vs finger-pointing are key building blocks.
4. Curious/Learning Culture - Make sure everyone hired on the team is being hired for being curious vs just what they actually know. When you hire curious and passionate people, give them access to problems, let them think long term, and show it's okay to fail magic happens.
5. Technical Leadership - Have leaders who have depth in technology. Flashy leaders with great rhetoric but no substance rarely drive innovation unless they can attract and retain great technologists around them.

In the 50s and 60s the US Government had hard problems: missile tracking threats in the cold war, had access to lots of resources with the US being a dominant country post WW2, lucky to have great leadership that spawned the DARPA/IPTO (which of course worked with the private enterprise like BBN, etc), etc and that changed the game totally. Most modern computing owes its thanks to the above confluence of factors.

But things changed post the cold war when the enterprise could take over from the government in the field of innovation. You look at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Linkedin, etc - it's unmistakeable that the above confluence of factors Access to Problems, Long Term Thinking, OK to Fail, Curious Cultures, and Technical Leadership have all resulted in incredible innovations. Of course with great power comes great responsibility and hope they all wield that well.

Hope you enjoyed the write-up. Please add comments with any feedback or additional resources.