These first chapters, about figures largely unknown outside Silicon Valley, are fascinating. Later chapters deal with better-known figures. Steve Jobs, about whom Isaacson probably knows more than any other observer, makes an extended appearance, and Isaacson has drawn a vivid portrait of Bill Gates. I imagine that most readers will find these later chapters more interesting than the front-half profiles, but it is the men and women who did their work before the rise of the celebrity innovator that I found so exceptionally interesting.

Below are portions of an interview I conducted with Isaacson about this book. Read it; his answers are illuminating.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You had already set out on this book when you were diverted by an offer you couldn’t refuse, to write the biography of Steve Jobs. Did the act of spending so much time with Jobs, and immersing yourself in his thinking, change the focus or idea behind The Innovators?

Walter Isaacson: The main thing I learned from Jobs was the importance of the connection between the humanities to technology. And that became a theme in this history of the digital age. Ada Lovelace represented this, all the great innovators—Alan Kay at Xerox Parc—all of them realized that beauty mattered and that our technology should have a streak of humanity in it.

Goldberg: Literally a streak of humanity, by which I mean, you are quite skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence, and everyone has worries about this dystopian artificial intelligence future when machines run away from us.

Isaacson: The intimate connection between humans and machines is something that Steve Jobs really believed in, and it was a great counter to the notion that the machines would take over. The other thing that was important from Steve, something that I had to wrestle with when understanding him, was that he had this quality of loner individualism that made him a difficult person to work with and yet he was also a builder of really strong teams, and it helped me appreciate the importance of collaboration and teamwork but also the importance of having a strong visionary as part of the team. Steve seemed on the purpose to be a prickly, difficult teammate but in fact he brought together the strongest and most loyal team of any company in the digital age. So I had to get beyond looking at him as a kind of headstrong loner.

Goldberg: So he wasn’t a radical individualist in the classic American model?

Isaacson: The American mythology is of the person with the radical individual streak, but what Tocqueville missed is that individualism is not antithetical to forming associations. Americans have been great at barn raisings and quilting bees and all sorts of common endeavors that were undertaken by very individualistic and pioneering people.

Goldberg: Stay on this idea of pioneering for a moment. The West Coast, East Coast, divide. As a Penn guy, this nags at me. By rights, the University of Pennsylvania should be to digital innovation what Stanford actually is today, because of the work done there on ENIAC, just as Bell Labs should be Xerox Park. But they aren’t. What causes incubators to go stale?