Agent Palmer

The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”

Are there really 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet? Yes, there are. And not only has Pamela Paul listed them for us in her book but she’s defined how some of these things were not only formative but even perhaps aspirational to previous generations!

This book is a list book, a gigantic listicle if you will. It is also a history book, a philosophy book, a book full of questions and theories, and a definitive generation divider.

From the early coders of the most primitive computers to today’s venture capital wet dreams, Clive Thompson’s book “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World” peels back the layers on just who is behind the keyboard of the code that is impacting our lives.

How coders work, why they think the way they do, what it is they actually do, and even their reflections on what they’ve done.

There is a moment that changed the path of CD technology into the format we once loved. It occurred 18 years after the technology for compact disks was created and it was as much about politics as it was about standards. It also turned out to be more of a guideline than a rule.

Invented in the 1960s by James Russell the technology for the CD wasn’t new when it took the music landscape by storm in the ’90s.

I always take notes when I read a book. Part of it comes from wanting the ability to add quotes to the reviews I write, but the bigger picture reason is because sometimes I like to go back to those notes and see them at a later date. By actually being able to read through a small document with all the quotes I pulled, I’ll find the one I remember, and it’s easier than paging through and rereading a whole page.

I bring this up because the notes I collected from reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson are more than a lot of the other books I have recently read, even some on the same subject.