The Innovators

The Innovators

How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson

Name Game

The hunt for words that stick

Partly because of the huge number of pages and links involved, Page and Brin named their search engine Google, playing off googol, the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros. It was a suggestion made by one of their Stanford officemates, Sean Anderson, and when they typed in Google to see if the domain name was available, it was. ... “I’m not sure that we realized that we had made a spelling error,” Brin later said. ... It was a playful word, easy to remember, type, and turn into a verb.
Ideas Mate

Weak IP accelerates innovation through collaborative copying.

Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.”