Walter Isaacson’s last book was the best-selling biography of Steve Jobs —the charismatic business genius of Apple Computer and one of the beatified icons of modern technology and entrepreneurship. Mr. Isaacson’s fine new book, “The Innovators,” is a serial biography of the large number of ingenious scientists and engineers who, you might say, led up to Jobs and his Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak —“forerunners” who, over the past century or so, produced the transistor, the microchip and microprocessor, the programmable computer and its software, the personal computer, and the graphic interface. These in turn were among the technological conditions for the videogame, the Internet and Web, the search engine, the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia and the ability to use a touchscreen to hurl spherical birds into buildings and make them explode.
Image: Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’s parents’ garage in 1976. © DB APPLE/DPA/CORBIS
