He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace, Vasari said of him. He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.
He never trusted Jobs with a key to the stockroom.
He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of trends that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go direct...
He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those w...
Having outgrown its Manhattan headquarters, most of Bell Labs moved to two hundred rolling acres in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Mervin Kelly and his colleagues wanted their new home to feel like an acade...
Grove’s mantra was Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent.
Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his...
Falling in love is not the most stupid thing that people do, Einstein scribbled on the letter, but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.
Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit, Jobs said, so why don’t you come work for me?
Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thi...
Engelbart showed, back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today.
Einstein’s developmental problems have probably been exaggerated, perhaps even by himself, for we have some letters from his adoring grandparents saying that he was just as clever and endearing as eve...
Einstein wrote to Bohr, using his real name, in care of Denmark’s embassy in Washington, and somehow the letter got to him. In it Einstein described his worrisome talk with Stern about the dearth of t...
Einstein was filled with good humor and sagacity, both qualities lacking in Gödel, whose intense logic sometimes overwhelmed common sense. This was on glorious display when Gödel decided to become a U...
Einstein never asked Freud to meet or treat his son, nor did he seem impressed by the idea of psychoanalysis. It may not always be helpful to delve into the subconscious, he once said. Our legs are co...
Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyon...
During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: The best way to predict the futu...
DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closes...
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,
DEBORAH DEBI COLEMAN. Early Mac team manager who took over Apple manufacturing. TIM COOK. Steady, calm, chief operating officer hired by Jobs in 1998; replaced Jobs as Apple CEO in August 2011. EDDY C...