For an interesting history of the tech sector or the digital revolution – the book the Innovators by Walter Isaacson published by Simon&Schuster, NY, 2014 is a wonderful read. The ideas which are society is using and developing had its start with Lord Byron. If you read poetry to your partner or lover you may have read some Byron. He had a daughter named Ada who has one of Britain’s few noted mathematicians and scientists. Ada worked with Charles Babbage on the Difference Machine – the machine the size of a room was designed to tabulate logarithms, sines, cosines and tangents. Ada was the world’s first computer programmer.

The history jumps 100 years to the 1880s when Herman Hollerith vowed to automate the US census because the last one took 8 years to put together. The IBM punch cards was developed. The next big development was in the war time – due to demands of the military digital revolution came into being. Punch cards were slow and cumbersome – how to make it easier and in 1947 the transistor was developed by 3 scientists from Bell Labs developed the transistor – they were all geniuses and they worked together. Bell Labs was a remarkable institution – it was great at inventing, but not so good at capitalizing on its inventions. Part of the reason was Bell was a regulated monopoly and did not want to risk antitrust suits and public criticisms, and its solution was to license its patents to other companies. The growth of Texas Instruments – once known for its calculator was an example. Another great example is Intel – which transformed the transistor to the microchip and had enough brains to make Intel chips the standard of the industry. The book discusses the names of the people who did the work and this makes the book a terrific read.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the first part of the digital creation is the science of doing. It took months and years to figure out how to conduct electricity through a transistor moving from vacuum tubes. It took another large leap to be able to figure how to conduct massive amounts of data through the microchips. If you are a little bit interested in the science of doing it, the book is a wonderful read. In terms of investing, the real stars of the digital age is in part two – the people who saw what the science meant and transformed it into companies the average company and then the average person would do. It often starts with companies because they have the ability to pay for what they need. Fill their need and the company is off to the races.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.