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The Innovators
- How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
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Publisher's summary
2015 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens.
What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?
In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.
This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.
For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.
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A Mind at Play
- How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
- By: Rob Goodman, Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Claude Shannon was a tinkerer, a playful wunderkind, a groundbreaking polymath, and a digital pioneer whose insights made the Information Age possible. He constructed fire-breathing trumpets and customized unicycles, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots, but he also wrote the seminal text of the Digital Revolution. That work allowed scientists to measure and manipulate information as objectively as any physical object. His work gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.
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I wanted more information about Information Theory
- By Bonny on 05-08-18
By: Rob Goodman, and others
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Electronic Dreams
- How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer
- By: Tom Lean
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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In Electronic Dreams, Tom Lean tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time, as people set aside their worries of electronic brains and Big Brother and embraced the wonder technology of the 1980s. This book charts the history of the rise and fall of the home computer, the family of futuristic and quirky machines that took computing from the realm of science and science fiction to being a user-friendly domestic technology.
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Awesome outline of electronic history
- By Johnny on 09-28-17
By: Tom Lean
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Data-ism
- The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
- By: Steve Lohr
- Narrated by: Steve Lohr
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.
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More business case than serious analysis
- By Godfried Gubbels on 06-03-15
By: Steve Lohr
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Smarter Than You Think
- How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
- By: Clive Thompson
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation - from the printing press to the telegraph - has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old.
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Title should be Getting Smarter Through Technology
- By A. Yoshida on 03-10-17
By: Clive Thompson
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The Filter Bubble
- What the Internet Is Hiding from You
- By: Eli Pariser
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.
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Now in the top 3 best books I've ever read
- By Brian Esserlieu on 05-26-11
By: Eli Pariser
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Hood
- Trailblazer of the Genomics Age
- By: Luke Timmerman, David Baltimore
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Lee Hood did that rarest of things. He enabled scientists to see things they couldn't see before and do things they hadn't dreamed of doing. Scientists can now sequence complete human genomes in a day, setting in motion a revolution that is personalizing medicine. Hood, a son of the American West, was an unlikely candidate to transform biology. But with ferocious drive, he led a team at Caltech that developed the automated DNA sequencer, the tool that paved the way for the Human Genome Project.
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A Revealing Biography
- By Jean on 07-27-17
By: Luke Timmerman, and others
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Googled
- The End of the World as We Know It
- By: Ken Auletta
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In Googled, esteemed media writer and critic Ken Auletta uses the story of Google's rise to explore the inner workings of the company and the future of the media at large. Although Google has often been secretive, this book is based on the most extensive cooperation ever granted a journalist, including access to closed-door meetings and interviews with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt, and some 150 present and former employees.
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Audio production could have been better
- By David on 11-12-09
By: Ken Auletta
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The End of College
- Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
- By: Kevin Carey
- Narrated by: James Yaegashi
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Exploding college prices and a flagging global economy, combined with the derring-do of a few intrepid innovators, have created a dynamic climate for a total rethinking of an industry that has remained virtually unchanged for a hundred years. In The End of College, Kevin Carey, an education researcher and writer, draws on years of in-depth reporting and cutting-edge research to paint a vivid and surprising portrait of the future of education.
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40 pages of content inflated to 250 pages
- By Brian Dickinson on 04-28-15
By: Kevin Carey
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Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs
- By: Carmine Gallo
- Narrated by: Sean Mangan
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs, best-selling author Carmine Gallo reveals the qualities that make the Apple co-founder the most innovative leader in business today. Each principle is backed with research, quotes, and first-person interviews with experts and business leaders, as well as specific ideas for applying those principles to every business, large or small.
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awful
- By Thomas on 10-15-11
By: Carmine Gallo
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Automate This
- How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
- By: Christopher Steiner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.
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good start, book runs out of sustenace
- By RealTruth on 02-15-13
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Except for the author, this book is good!
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Wish the sample was not from the preface!
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Good Biography, Fine narrator
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Great book but better in writing
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megalomania on display
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The Innovators
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Did you know how bad it is to work for Amazon?
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The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition
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Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt wrote the first edition of this influential book in 1999 to help their clients create better software and rediscover the joy of coding. These lessons have helped a generation of programmers examine the very essence of software development. Now, 20 years later, this new edition re-examines what it means to be a modern programmer. Topics range from personal responsibility and career development to architectural techniques for keeping your code flexible and easy to adapt and reuse.
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An excellent and entertaining technical book
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The Code Breaker—Young Readers Edition
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When Jennifer Doudna was a sixth grader in Hilo, Hawaii, she came home from school one afternoon and found a book on her bed. It was The Double Helix, James Watson’s account of how he and Francis Crick had discovered the structure of DNA, the spiral-staircase molecule that carries the genetic instruction code for all forms of life. This book guided Jennifer Doudna to focus her studies not on DNA, but on what seemed to take a backseat in biochemistry: figuring out the structure of RNA, a closely related molecule that enables the genetic instructions coded in DNA to express themselves.
By: Walter Isaacson
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No Better Time
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No Better Time tells of a young, driven mathematical genius who wrote a set of algorithms that would create a faster, better Internet. It's the story of a beautiful friendship between a loud, irreverent student and his soft-spoken MIT professor, of a husband and father who spent years struggling to make ends meet only to become a billionaire almost overnight with the success of Akamai Technologies, the Internet content delivery network he cofounded with his mentor.
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An Overlooked Hero of 9-11
- By Jean on 05-27-16
What listeners say about The Innovators
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark
- 10-21-14
A History of the Ancient Geeks
I have a PC, a laptop, a smartphone, an Ipod and an electronic keyboard. I'm not boasting. Most people in the West who aren't embroiled in poverty probably own a similar range of digital devices. These digital machines have taken over the World and occupy large chunks of our time. And I'm not complaining. I get huge pleasure listening to talking books (a gift of the digital age) and browsing the internet. 25 years ago I got my first computer and it had a hard drive less than 500mb. I hadn't heard of internet or email, There was no Wiki, Google or Facebook. 25 years earlier, when I was a toddler, the only computers were massive creaking mechanical dinosaurs hidden away in military facilities or NASA.
I find this dramatic recent change in our way of life astounding. And I'm not a computer geek at all. I have no idea how they work, I just enjoy the way they present information, entertainment and interactions with my old friends whenever and wherever I want them.
So this book is the story of how that all came about. The visionaries and eccentrics who took the series of steps, starting with adding machines and progressing to the first personal computers, video games, the internet, search engines and social networking. The book presents the Goliaths such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Alan Turing, along with the many Davids with whom they collaborated so productively. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found it a fascinating listen.
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57 people found this helpful
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- W Perry Hall
- 10-06-15
With Atlantean Shoulders, Fit to Bear
This book is a grand and gratifying overview of the Innovators who have played a major role in forging today's dynamic technology and our high-tech society, with its main focus on the last 80 or so years.
Only Walter Isaacson, who has written bios of Jobs and Einstein, would have the brilliant ability to research (on the shoulders of a wealth of prior research), comprehend and assimilate all this intriguing and highly complex information and transform it all into an inquisitive and fascinating look at our technological Innovators, coherent and clear enough for the average reader to understand AND enjoy.
I took away a much more informed perspective of how we got here and a distinct reverence for the innovators in the text and generally for the human capacity for incredible intellect and curiosity as well as our enduring and limitless creativity.
The following quote gives the best overview, in my opinion, of the book to an average reader (such as I):
"Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”
Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake.... Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.”
Dennis Boutsikaris, an accomplished actor, is always a first-class narrator.
This book is due all exceptional acclaim.
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51 people found this helpful
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- K
- 10-10-14
Inspiring stories about technology & innovation
Isaacson's THE INNOVATORS is a series of inspiring stories about technologists and their innovations. The stories are woven together to give the book a cohesive flow and it reads like a novel. For technology fans, some of the stories won't be new... but the way the stories are told and juxtaposed with other innovators' achievements makes this book unique. These are geeks' stories told lovingly by someone who clearly respects them and what they've done. I listened to the audible.com version of this book and found the narration well-done. I highly recommend this book to those interested in technology or innovation.
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44 people found this helpful
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- LMB
- 07-24-17
Who is this for?
The research behind this book is impressive and useful for those teaching a history of the industry. But it is dry and dull. It is like listening to the required standard textbooks in Uni. It was nearly impossible to fight my mind from drifting. I hardly made it through 3 chapters, and I wanted to learn the content. Maybe this is easier to learn from in print. But in audio form, it can only compete with the audio version of a Drivers manual.
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28 people found this helpful
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- Jean
- 10-26-14
Fascinating
“The Innovators” is a serial biography of the large number of ingenious scientist, and engineers who led up to Jobs and Wozniak. Isaacson covers the transistor, the microchip, microprocessor, the programmable computer and software. He also covers videogames, the internet and web, search engines, touch screens taken together it is called the digital revolution.
The digital revolution has changed many things for all people. Some people call this the third industrial revolution. The first based on coal, steam and iron, the second on steel, electricity and mass production.
The author tells the story of how the digital revolution happened, through the accomplishment of many individuals. Isaacson draws attention to organizations that, for a time hosted groups that were more than the sum of their individual parts. At the “idea factory” that was AT&T’s Bell Labs the physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley created the transistor, the fundamental building block for the microprocessor. It has been called the most important invention of the 20th century. The creative teams at Intel, the key company in development of the microprocessor industry and Xerox-PARC probably the single most fertile source of electronic innovation in the 1970s, they created the Ethernet, the graphic user interface, and the famous mouse. Texas Instruments created the personal calculator. The creation of demand for personal devices has blossomed.
It was Robert Oppenheimer, who at wartime Los Alamos so effectively found ways of getting scientists with radically different fields, skills and personalities to work together in designing the atomic bomb. Bell Labs, Intel, Xerox-PARC continued this team approach with great success. Silicon Valley took team innovation, venture capital, Stanford and University of California Berkeley Universities put them together to create what is called the “Ecosystem”. The authors shows how Silicon Valley took this “Ecosystem” of innovation and turned it into a powerful pool of creative revolution
The author tells of Gordon "Moore’s Law” predicting the doubling of a microprocessor’s power every year and half focused energies on a goal that was authoritatively said to be attainable. Bill Gates foresaw that hardware could be commoditized.
Isaacson tells of mathematician Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron, as she set out to create analytical engines. Isaacson weaves his enormous amount of research into deftly crafted anecdotes into gripping narrative about these imaginative scientists who transformed our lives. The book is a fun and informative read. Dennis Boutsikaris did a good job narrating the book.
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25 people found this helpful
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- Luis De Leon
- 10-08-14
A short history of digital technology.
This book is great, the way each biography and technical development interlaces and the insightful narrative made me feel like a witness to history.
Isaacson is a master distilling the essence of each person and the relevance of each technological achievement, putting it all in perspective in a neat well-narrated package.
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- Gary
- 10-16-14
Much breadth with little depth
This book is biography for how we got to the current internet age and all the major steps that took to get there. The author starts the story with Lady Ada Loveless and Charles Babbage's analytical machine up to the development of the internet. That's the problem. There's just too many good stories to tell and the author seldom gets into the nuts and bolts of the story leading the listener wanting more.
As in any good narrative of a biography there needs to be some themes that tie the stories together. The author pretty much tries to tie his story together with a couple of themes, "execution trumps creativity" and "cooperation leads to creation".
In general, biographies don't excite me. They deal with personalities and superficiality. The author's biography on Einstein is the one exception. The author not only taught me about Einstein the man, but what his work was all about. He explained the physics (in that biography) even better than Brian Greene does when he was talking about how Brian Greene explained the physics. Unfortunately, in this book the author seldom gets into details. A couple times he did get into the weeds. His section on Lady Loveless was marvelous and she becomes a recurring character in the book. I only wish he had explained what all the other characters were creating instead of what they did.
I think there are much better books out there that cover the same kind of material better and I would recommend them instead. I would start off with the wonderful book "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu. It delves into why Google is so important and how it got that way much better than this book does.
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- Shane
- 11-14-14
History of Computing 101
Would you listen to The Innovators again? Why?
If you know little about the history of computing this is a great listen. It covers a lot of ground, and the narration is superb.
My only gripe is that if is very superficial in many areas. Many innovations outside the USA get little or no credit (like those my the Japanese, Germans, Australians, Koreans, or Taiwanese), and if you are already familiar with computing history then you may already know much of the content, in which case it may bore and frustrate you.
Recommended for those not so hardcore into computer science, or looking to stoke a passion in that field.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Innovators?
The tales of Lady Loveless and Babbage.
What does Dennis Boutsikaris bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Timing. He gives the words a chance to sink in, especially at key moments.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
It inspired me to continue deeper into the field of robotics. Thank you!
Any additional comments?
Audiobooks are awesome.
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- Elaine D. Kirchen
- 10-20-14
Wonderful Biographer Writes Boring Book
What disappointed you about The Innovators?
Mr. Issacson's talent is wasted on a rambling historical account of computers, software, etc. He drones on about early innovators when he could have focused on the interesting people in the business today. He wasted his time.
What do you think your next listen will be?
Biography of Nelson Rockefeller.
Have you listened to any of Dennis Boutsikaris’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
Dennis Boutsikaris performed miracles with nothing to work with. I would absolutely listen to him again.
What character would you cut from The Innovators?
The entire book.
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- Rodney
- 02-12-18
Mostly good, at times annoying
I really enjoyed the Isaacson bio of Jobs and Franklin, and while this book was different, I still looked forward to listening to it.
First let me say if I was scoring it, it'd be more like 3.5 stars - but that's not an option and based on the hyperbole of the other scores I rounded down. I don't by any means dislike the book, it's just written in an obnoxious annoying style where the author continually shoe horns in his politics all while trying to impress his fellow writers with long passages that attempt to sound poetic, but instead come off as pompous and a waste of time. Also the author is completely obsessed with gays, everytime someone who is gay comes up in the story the author feels the need to stop the story to tell you about how gay they are - completely unnecessary and it slows the pace of everything to a crawl all so he can show everyone how progressive he is. However if he was truly progressive he wouldn't be hung up on people's sexuality.
Also the book misses one HUGE part of the story that got us to where we are today. Obviously in a book of this scope you can't touch on everything, but to completely leave out Jack Tramiel, the head of Commodore, it's pretty remarkable. Tramiel and Commodore did more than anyone else (including Apple) to bring the personal computer into peoples home by waging a huge price cutting war with everyone. It's a massive oversight and would be slightly more forgivable if he didn't spend the first hour of the book on a completely worthless, pompous and boring subject.
With that said I know it sounds like I hated the book, but I really didn't. When the author stuck to telling the story instead of preaching his leftist politics, the book is very interesting and well written. It covers a lot of content, some of which is new to me, and that's a big to me since I'm extremely well read in the subject of computer history and the origins of the internet and I've been working in the field for 25 years so I've seen the rise of the internet and how it came to be. Even knowing most of the content already when the author sticks to the narrative it's still interesting in how he brings things together.
The authors politics however definitely bring the book down a notch for the reason above, it's not so much that it's unlistenable, it's just obnoxious he feels the need to stop the flow to lecture to you on things that are his opinion and not part of the story. The best analogy I can give you is that he comes off like Bob Costas, so take that as you wish.
Overall I'd give it 3.5 stars as stated above. If you're a left winger you'll love it even more.
The reader does a very good professional job - and as a heads up you can easily listen to this book at 1.25x speed and it sounds greats, just a little tidbit if you want to shave a few hours off the total listening time (I like long books, but have found listening a bit faster than normal helps hold my interest as my mind doesn't wander as often).
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