Walter Isaacson is best known as the author of the official Steve Jobs biography. His new book is called The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.
The Birth of Pong, an excerpt from the book, tells the story of Nolan Bushnell and the birth of the arcade game.
Here’s a taste:
He was fortunate as well in landing at the University of Utah. It had the best computer graphics program in the country, run by professors Ivan Sutherland and David Evans, and became one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. (Other students included Jim Clark, who founded Netscape; John Warnock, who co-founded Adobe; and Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar.)
That’s an amazingly rich talent pool.
As they were working on the first Computer Space consoles, Bushnell heard that he had competition. A Stanford grad named Bill Pitts and his buddy Hugh Tuck from California Polytechnic had become addicted to Spacewar, and they decided to use a PDP-11 minicomputer to turn it into an arcade game. When Bushnell heard this, he invited Pitts and Tuck to visit. They were appalled at the sacrifices—indeed sacrileges—Bushnell was perpetrating in stripping down Spacewar so that it could be produced inexpensively. “Nolan’s thing was a totally bastardized version,” Pitts fumed. For his part, Bushnell was contemptuous of their plan to spend $20,000 on equipment, including a PDP-11 that would be in another room and connected by yards of cable to the console, and then charge 10 cents a game. “I was surprised at how clueless they were about the business model,” he said. “Surprised and relieved. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I knew they’d be no competition.”
Galaxy Game by Pitts and Tuck debuted at Stanford’s Tresidder student union coffeehouse in the fall of 1971. Students gathered around each night like cultists in front of a shrine. But no matter how many lined up their dimes to play, there was no way the machine could pay for itself, and the venture eventually folded.
Definitely a fun read.
Considering the technical issues Isaacson got wrong in the Jobs biography, I’ll happily wait to hear if there are any similar ones for this book.
My thought precisely.
Yeah, he might be an excellent historical documentarian (I don’t know, I didn’t read his other books), but the SJ book didn’t come close to catching the flavor of the time. It feels like he has no real interest in technology other than the documentation of it.
Eh. I’m a vet software dev and the SJ book didn’t bother me. Sure he got some terms wrong, but hes a biographer, not an EE. I read it to learn more about jobs’ life, the human story. The book did this. I wasn’t expect a CEO how-to manual like so,e other high profile tech critics were.
Couldn’t agree more. Isaacson is not interested in portraying his subjects with precision and accuracy. He is interested in displaying his interpretation of his subjects.
If he didn’t care enough about technical details, how do we know he cared enough about historical details?
Yes, you got to read an interesting story. But was it real history?
My point wasn’t so much about the technical inaccuracies, but more the writing style. He has no real love for the subject at hand, and it showed in the SJ book. It read more like a laundry list than a good novel. The subject matter is insanely exciting (at least to me) and it didn’t come across as anything other than an afterthought, or a frame to hold the details of SJ’s life, rather than an important central character. Which might be fine, but even human aspect had no life breathed into it. The whole thing felt flat. I hope this new one goes further, as again, it’s a subject I’m really interested in reading about.