— With regard to the footnote intended for use in the text, we found that some content needed to be included in the manuscript, but was less important than the main copy. Therefore, it is necessary that the master copy has a higher level of hierarchy.

Many books have been written about Silicon Valley and the collection of geniuses, eccentrics, and mavericks who launched the "Digital Revolution"; Robert X. Cringely's Accidental Empires and Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning are just two excellent accounts of the unprecedented explosion of tech entrepreneurs and their game-changing success.

But Walter Isaacson goes them one better: The Innovators, his follow-up to the massive (in both sales and size) Steve Jobs, is probably the widest-ranging and most comprehensive narrative of them all. Don't let the scope or page-count deter you: while Isaacson builds the story from the 19th century—innovator by innovator, just as the players themselves stood atop the achievements of their predecessors—his discipline and era-based structure allows readers to dip in and out of digital history, from Charles Babbage's Difference Engine to Alan Turing.