History is so much bunk

So saith Henry Ford, multiple times.  Reports from 1916 onward, when he began his diatribes against knowing or worrying about or learning from history, indicate that he was quite the character.  Donald Trump would find him a great fellow-traveler on his current quest to be certified.  

Is history 'so much bunk?'  Well, it certainly has some interesting sidebars if you study it just a bit.  I'm intrigued these days as much by what doesn't get said, as what does.  Take, for example, Walt Isaacson's two most recent books--the wildly popular best-seller Steve Jobs, and the much more nuanced Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.


The Jobs book was commissioned, almost as Jobs was dying, rushed to market to capitalize on Apple's strong brand and Jobs' near mythical status as its innovator/leader.  It was not well researched, it lacked important elements of 'the story,' but it 'caught the mood' and sold A LOT.

Fortunately, along comes Becoming Steve Jobs, so we have a better, more nuanced account.

Isaacson's Innovators, on the other hand, is a gem of his own desire, with years spent on it.  It shows. Isaacson is a gifted writer, no question about it, and he creates readable, page-turning prose.  And it is a great contribution, even though a few historians of science quibbled about some factoids.

What I found interesting, though, is the premise that "the Digital Revolution" is mostly about small computers and mobile phones, never mind the infrastructure that runs them.  So I did a check on words.  Internet, or WWW, appears on 98 of the 490 text pages--he must think the Internet is part of the Digital Revolution.  And the title is about the "hackers, geniuses, and geeks" who did it.  So who is listed, from the network side?  Bob Metcalfe, once.  His Ethernet idea, once.  Cisco as a name, once.  And no one else, and no other company, of the eighteen prominent and perhaps fifty also-rans who built the backbone for all of our mobile and connected world.  

So, it is not an indictment so much as an observation about POINT OF VIEW.  Point of view of the author is always the give-away.

And my guess is that Henry Ford understood at least a bit of that perspective when he blurted out his famous words 'for history.'