Here is the fascinating story of the making of the high-tech business revolution and the birth of the Digital Age. Packed with all the excitement of scientific discovery and nail-biting suspense of entrepreneurial brinksmanship, journalist Jeffrey Young recounts the exploits of a captivating array of innovative individuals, including: Millionaire-playboy turned visionary-CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr.—how he helped pioneer the business computing industry in the early 1950s and made IBM its undisputed master for the next three decades The ever-controversial William Shockley—the complete story of his development of the transistor at Bell Labs and his misbegotten efforts to capitalize on his discovery Ed Roberts—the innovative naval engineer turned mail-order entrepreneur who pioneered the
… read more...microcomputer revolution in his Albuquerque garage, and then missed his chance to dominate the industry Fast-talking hippie-entrepreneur Steve Jobs and engineering genius Steve Wozniak—how they went from penniless "wireheads" to high-tech multimillionaires overnight Bill Gates—whose talent for turning other people's creative innovations into his own marketplace success was at the heart of Microsoft's brilliant strategy—a tactic Gates perfected at a very tender age How a handful of visionaries turned a Cold War communications system into the global phenomenon called the Internet. In the tradition of the international bestseller Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, this new, authoritative book from Forbes tells a compelling series of business tales—this time focusing on the rapid-fire technology frontier. In stories filled with human drama and high-tech excitement, Forbes Greatest Technology Stories takes you inside today's Digital Age business empires and introduces you to the dreamers and schemers, visionaries and moguls, and entrepreneurs and inventors who built them. The past half century has been a time of unparalleled technological innovation. The sheer power and mobility that technology has made available to millions of people around the world today surpasses anything we could have dreamed of even fifty years ago. Most historians of the high-tech revolution tend to focus on the exploits of men and women of scientific genius, invoking names such as Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, von Neuman, and Cray. But, as Forbes contributing editor Jeffrey Young shows in this fascinating account, while science may have provided the fuel, business was the engine that drove the epic shift from the Machine Age to the Digital Age. Beginning in 1937, with the invention of the first crude electronic calculator by a renegade physics professor at the University of Iowa, and culminating with the Internet Wars of 1998, Jeffrey Young chronicles six decades of unbridled technological innovation and business genius. Writing in a crisp, fast-paced journalistic style, he whisks readers from the Truman-era engineering labs of MIT to the virtual reaches of cyberspace, from the "wirehead" garages of Silicon Valley to the boardrooms of Microsoft, pausing along the way to demystify the technological innovations involved and the roles they played in the high-tech revolution. And he provides compelling portraits of entrepreneurs and inventors such as John Vincent Atanasoff, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Craig McCaw, as well as the little-known inventors, audacious also-rans, and magnificent failures whose pioneering efforts gave birth to the Digital Age. An enthralling account of the high-tech revolution as seen from a business perspective, Forbes Greatest Technology Stories is must reading for every business professional.Read More read less...
