I mean, when I wrote this block, I

thought, who are the great heroes of it,

and Dr. Khan and Vint Cerf are among them,

and I hope you appreciate how cool it is, especially

for somebody like me who loves history,

to be able to talk the internet with you all.

VINT CERF: Well, it's a real pleasure to have you here

and to have the rest of you here in our new offices.

For those of you who came in more on time,

we kind of started just informally.

This man sitting next to me has had

quite an interesting history, so I'll

repeat a little bit of that.

He's currently the chairman of the Aspen Institute

and was formerly the chairman of CNN.

He was also managing editor of Time Magazine

and has written a whole bunch of books, the most recent of which

you have before you, "The Innovators."

The most recent before that was Steve Jobs's biography

and many others before that, all of which

are well worth reading, so we welcome you to our presence

and to an opportunity to ask you some questions about this book.

Sitting over on my right is Bob Kahn.

I was going to say the late Bob Kahn, that would be bad taste,

so I won't do that.

BOB KAHN: Wasn't that late.

Your problem is your garage says it closes at 7 o'clock,

so we were about to go find some other garage to park in.

VINT CERF: Well, since we're all here,

I can make the door open for you.

How's that?

WALTER ISAACSON: All you have to do is say, OK, glass,

open the door.

VINT CERF: That's it.

I'm wearing one right there.

BOB KAHN: Is the audience all from Google?

VINT CERF: No, no, no.

These are people from all over the place.

WALTER ISAACSON: Who's from Google?

VINT CERF: Fair number but not everybody.

So what I thought we would do, Bob,

is start out with a couple of questions about the book itself

and what Walter has discovered.

This thing covers quite a broad range

of topics about things that were highly innovative

and made huge changes in our history.

So what is it that you would distill

from what you've already discovered

in writing the book that you would like us to take away?

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, and let

me say that when we get further along

and we're discussing the internet,

I'm going to turn the tables because to be

able to ask questions of the two of you

about both the ARPANET, the RFCs, and then

the internet protocols.

So watch out because that's going to be a two way street.

VINT CERF: Fair deal.

WALTER ISAACSON: The main thing I discovered.

I've written biographies a lot-- Steve Jobs,

Einstein, Franklin-- and those of us

who write biographies kind of know in the back of our minds

that we distort history with the great man theory of history.

We make it sound like there's a guy or a gal in a garage

or a garret who has a light bulb moment and innovation happens.

True innovation, and there's no better example of it

then the ARPANET RFC process and then the TCP/IP process,

really comes from pairs of people, teams of people,

and from collaboration, bouncing ideas off against each other,

finishing each other's sentences,

and the internet age in particular

allows such teamwork and collaboration.

The other thing was I started this book when I said,

way earlier before we started, we

were talking about when I ran digital media for Time Inc

in the early 1990s, and I first met Vint when he was at MCI,

and I was trying to convince Time Inc to do things

with the internet.

And so the president of Time Inc says to me, well,

who owns the internet?

So first of all, I think to myself

because I don't want to get fired,

that's a clueless question.

I say, nobody owns it.

He says, well, who built it?

Who created it?

And I realized after thinking how

clueless that question was that I did not really now.

And if you feel detached from the history of the things you

use, there's sort of a detachment that leads to you

not feeling comfortable with it.

So I wanted to know, how did computers happen?

How did the PC happen?

How did the transistor become the microchip,

and then how did the internet or digital packet switch networks

come into being?

So that's why I did this book, and in doing so, as I said,

you learn about the importance of collaboration,

but you also learn that there wasn't

one person who invented the computer.

And certainly, even after doing this book,

you and I have been discussing some of the,

no, I should get more credit type feelings,

but it was done creatively and collaboratively.

VINT CERF: This notion of collaboration

resonates very well with all of us

at Google because a lot of the tools that we make and use

are exactly collaborative elements,

things like Shared Documents, things like the Google

Hangouts, things like that where multiple parties can

communicate all at the same time.

WALTER ISAACSON: That was the original intention

of the internet or ARPANET was time

sharing research computers, and then collaborating.

I even did that with this book.

When I was writing that, I said, wait,

this is how we collaborate, and I put parts of this book

online, like on a medium with Google Docs, whatever,

and said, everybody share.

Help me collaborate.

Help put stuff in.

And people like Stewart Brand, who I knew,

started rewriting the demise of the Whole Earth Catalog,

and exactly what drugs were being served at the demise

partly because I got the drugs wrong.

But people like Dan Bricklin were explaining,

no, VisiCalc was done this way.

And so they're in the book from having been crowd sourced.

BOB KAHN: Walter, I'd like to ask you a question.

Vint and I were both on a panel at the National Academy

about a week ago, and one of the questions that came up was,

what is the internet?

One of the panelists took the position

that the internet is what people think it is.

So if you think the web is the internet,

then that's the internet.

If you think the web is this.

I just wondered, do you care much

in writing a book like that of clarifying that example.

Because a lot of places in the book, you say,

the ARPANET morphed into internet, and not

exactly clear what the internet is from reading your book.

Are you comfortable with that definition?

WALTER ISAACSON: I see the internet,

and I'm going to turn it to you, because you should answer

it better, but I see it as the TCP/IP protocols.

Now, the question is when Tim Berners-Lee

puts a layer of that [INAUDIBLE] that have hypertext protocols

and markup languages, to me, that's still the internet.

Now, the question then becomes, if I'm using Twitter,

is that the internet?

And the answer technically is no.

I mean, that's not--

VINT CERF: Well, actually, we could argue that because--

WALTER ISAACSON: Oh, we could argue it,

so let me turn it back to you all.

VINT CERF: Wait, wait, wait.

You're right in the middle of chapter six,

and I wanted to at least point out to you--

WALTER ISAACSON: Start at chapter one?

VINT CERF: Well, we don't have to go through every chapter

but this starts out with Ada Lovelace, who

was Lord Byron's daughter.

And I wanted to start out by just asking, what

was it that drew you to that story first,

because it's in the 1850s in England,

and it's the earliest manifestations

of mechanical computing?

What made you decide to start there?

WALTER ISAACSON: To be honest, what

drew it to me first was my daughter had not written

her college entrance essay, and my wife, who we've talked

about, was going nuts the way Yuppie wives do, and saying,

get it done.

And one day, Betsy said, I did it.

I said, what was it on?

She said, Ada Lovelace because she's

a computer geek and stuff.

And I paused.

I kind of knew the name Ada Lovelace,

but I didn't know exactly what she did.

VINT CERF: You didn't mix it up with Linda Lovelace?

WALTER ISAACSON: No, I did not.

I'm surprised that people all remember who she is.

So I became much more interested in Ada Lovelace.

Now, Ada Lovelace is partly a symbol in this book,

because as a person, she's kind of controversial,

but what she does as Lord Byron's daughter is

her mother, Lady Byron, was optically fond of Lord Byron

by the time Ada was growing up, for reasons that Byron

fans will understand, and so had her tutored mainly

in mathematics as if that were an antidote for her becoming

a romantic poet, which Lady Byron did not want her to be.

So she embraces what she calls poetical science.

It's the ability to link the poetic and the beauty

of humanities with the technology of science.

She loves, for example, traveling the Midlands

and looking at the punch cards that

are being used in the mechanical looms of the Industrial

Revolution in the 1830s.

VINT CERF: The Jacquard looms, yes.

WALTER ISAACSON: The Jacquard loom,

and showing how they weave patterns.

Her father, Lord Byron, was a Luddite,

and I don't mean that figuratively.

His only speech in the House of Lords

was defending the followers of Ned Ludd, who

were smashing these looms because they

were putting people out of work.

And he also is there with Mary Shelley

when they do Frankenstein's monster.

This notion that technology can destroy us

was ingrained in Lord Byron.

Ada felt the opposite.

She had this friend, Charles Babbage,

who had made a pretty good calculator called

the difference engine, was trying

to conceive one which he never got

built called the analytical engine, which

uses punch cards to do the processing of the numbers.

Ada writes a set of notes that are totally fascinating.

You've got to read them.

And among the notes to this thing

is how if you use punch cards, the machine

will be able to weave patterns like Jacquard's loom,

as she puts it.

In other words, the machine will not only do numbers, she says.

You can make it do words, or even music.

I can feel her father rolling over in the grave.

Patterns, anything that can be notated in symbols, she said.

So to me, that is the core notion

of what a computer is, anything that can be notated in symbols.

She has many other things, but I'll

only mention one, which is her final note is

that they'll do anything but think.

Machines will never be creative.

Machines will never think.

And 100 years later, assuming you're

going to jump there, Alan Turing, who really comes up

with the concept of the universal computing machine,

and then works at Bletchley Park to break the German ENIGMA

code with some people.

They build the Bombe and then Colossus.