Walter Isaacson Quote
Disdainful of the Eckert-Mauchly mercenary approach. Eckert and Mauchly are a commercial group with a commercial patent policy, he complained to a friend. We cannot work with them directly or indirectly in the same open manner in which we would work with an academic group.80 But for all of his righteousness, von Neumann was not above making money off his ideas. In 1945 he negotiated a personal consulting contract with IBM, giving the company rights to any inventions he made. It was a perfectly valid arrangement. Nevertheless, it outraged Eckert and Mauchly. He sold all our ideas through the back door to IBM, Eckert complained. He spoke with a forked tongue. He said one thing and did something else. He was not to be trusted.81 After Mauchly and Eckert left, Penn rapidly lost its role as a center of innovation. Von Neumann also left, to return to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He took with him Herman and Adele Goldstine, along with key engineers such as Arthur Burks. Perhaps institutions as well as people can become fatigued, Herman Goldstine later reflected on the demise of Penn as the epicenter of computer development.82 Computers were considered a tool, not a subject for scholarly study.
Disdainful of the Eckert-Mauchly mercenary approach. Eckert and Mauchly are a commercial group with a commercial patent policy, he complained to a friend. We cannot work with them directly or indirectly in the same open manner in which we would work with an academic group.80 But for all of his righteousness, von Neumann was not above making money off his ideas. In 1945 he negotiated a personal consulting contract with IBM, giving the company rights to any inventions he made. It was a perfectly valid arrangement. Nevertheless, it outraged Eckert and Mauchly. He sold all our ideas through the back door to IBM, Eckert complained. He spoke with a forked tongue. He said one thing and did something else. He was not to be trusted.81 After Mauchly and Eckert left, Penn rapidly lost its role as a center of innovation. Von Neumann also left, to return to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He took with him Herman and Adele Goldstine, along with key engineers such as Arthur Burks. Perhaps institutions as well as people can become fatigued, Herman Goldstine later reflected on the demise of Penn as the epicenter of computer development.82 Computers were considered a tool, not a subject for scholarly study.
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About Walter Isaacson
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.