Past
Featured Books
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on any book to order now at
The Qualcomm Equation
by David Mock, with Forward by George Gilder
Order Your Copy Today !
"The Qualcomm Equation by Dave Mock, is a probing account of the rise of the company and the development of its multifaceted strategies for dominance. Once a skeptic toward CDMA, Mock has become perhaps its ablest exponent. In this wide ranging and lucidly written book, he evokes the personalities, the interwoven innovations, the tumultuous history, the global strategy, and the intellectual property of what has become the exemplary Twenty-First Century Technology Company." George Gilder
Featuring a foreword by George Gilder The Qualcomm Equation provides readers with a fascinating inside look at how a small company stormed the burgeoning wireless industry and grew into a global multibillion-dollar powerhouse in less than a decade. This book examines how Qualcomm became so successful, chronicling the early history of the company, then provides an in-depth analysis of Qualcomm's business model. Through this eye-opening, real-life case study, readers will learn: how the company pioneered and commercialized a new technology in record time...and made it an industry standard; how Qualcomm's revolutionary business model relied on licensing this technology; key business strategies that enabled Qualcomm to leapfrog the competition; how companies can encourage and use innovation to dominate their markets. In addition to describing the development of the wireless industry over the last few decades, The Qualcomm Equation is a riveting look at a one-of-a-kind company.
![](/books/BookOfTheMonth/BottomlessWell.JPG) |
The
Bottomless Well:
The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run
Out of Energy
by Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills
Order
Your Copy Today !
A myth-shattering
book that explains why energy is not scarce, why the price of energy
doesn't matter very much, and why "waste" of energy is both
necessary and desirable.
The sheer volume of talk about energy, energy prices, and energy policy
on both sides of the political aisle suggests that we must know something
about these subjects. But according to Peter W. Huber and Mark P.
Mills, the things we think we know are mostly myths. In The Bottomless
Well, Huber and Mills show how a better understanding of energy will
radically change our views and policies on a number of very controversial
issues.
Writing in take-no-prisoners, urgently compelling prose, Huber and
Mills explain why demand for energy will never go down, why most of
what we think of as "energy waste" actually benefits us;
why more efficient cars, engines, and bulbs will never lower demand,
and why energy supply is infinite.
![](/books/SoftMachines.jpg) |
Soft Machines: nanotechnology & life
by Richard
A.L. Jones
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Your Copy Today !
Having spent much of my time since the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference
(October 19 20, 2004) deep in books about nanotech, I can report
that the field is real and that it has already yielded a definitive
text. Entitled Soft Machines: nanotechnology & life, elegantly
written by a UK physicist named Richard A.L. Jones, it arrives at
the essential destination that Gilder Technology Report Editor,
Nick Tredennick, defined three years ago at his Dynamic Silicon Conference.
Nanotech
is the result of the continuing advance of semiconductor technology
into the nanoscale, where it can form devices the size of molecules
and biological organelles. Thus semiconductors can drop below the
electro-mechanical domain into the domains of bio-mimesis where designers
take inspiration from biological structures. As Jones patiently shows,
the effort to reduce biology and chemistry to physical mechanics,
as Erik Drexler proposed, founders at the nanoscale. Here the environment
is dominated by Brownian motion at up to 10 gigahertz, by low Reynolds
numbers signifying extreme viscosity, and by surface effects such
as Van der Waals forces that dwarf the bulk effects of conventional
mechanics. Jones concludes that while nanotech has developed new materials
such as semiconducting polymers, new test gear such as gold and thiols
on silicon substrates, fabrication equipment such as atomic force
microscopes, new devices such as rotaxanes, nanotube nanistors, and
C60 fullerenes, it is far from creating integrated systems or transducers
that link to or from its laboratory concoctions. One of the best science
and technology texts I have ever read, this book is a tribute to the
fertility of disciplinary intercourse among solid-state physics, chemistry
and biology.
Also
worth reading is Nanocosm by William Ilsey Atkinson, a breezy
but useful journalistic tour of the nanotech scene, which contains
a cogent argument against the Drexlerian movement and presents intriguing
portraits of such nanotech leaders as Thomas Theis of IBM and an array
of fascinating Japanese scholars. The Scientific American book, Understanding
Nanotechnology, published in 2002, adapts a series of articles
from the magazine, including a notable foreword and early chapter
from exemplary Caltech teacher Michael Roukes.
George Gilder
Running
Money
by Andy Kessler
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Your Copy Today !
George Gilder's latest pick for "Book
of the Month" is Andy Kessler's memoir Running Money.
A brilliant investor, a born raconteur and an overall smart-ass,
Andy Kessler pulls back the curtain on the world of hedge funds
and shows how the guys who run big money think, talk and act.
Following on the success of Wall
Street Meat, his self-published book on the lives of Wall
Street stock analysts, Andy Kessler recounts his years as an extraordinarily
successful hedge fund manager. To run a successful hedge fund
you must have an investing edge -- that special insight that allows
you to reap greater returns for your clients and yourself.
A quick study, Kessler gets an education
in investing from some fascinating and quirky personalities. Eventually
he works out his own insight into the world economy, a powerful
lens that reveals to him hidden value in seemingly negative trends.
Focusing on margin surplus, Kessler comes to see that current
American economy, at the apex of the information revolution, is
not so different from the British economy at the height of the
industrial revolution. Drawing out the parallels he develops a
powerful investing tool which he shares with readers. Contrarian
and confident, Kessler made a fortune applying his ideas to his
hedge fund. Which only proves that they may not be as crazy as
they sound.
"(One of) the best books you'll
find on technology, opportunity and entrepreneurship [to] hit
bookstores."
-Rich Karlgaard, Publisher, Forbes magazine
Life
2.0 : How People Across America
Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding
the Where of Their Happiness
by Rich Karlgaard
Order
Your Copy Today !
Written with literary flair and analyzed with rare social and
financial insight, Life 2.0 combines a gifted novelist's sense
of personal drama and pace with a technology visionary's insight
into the future. Take an epochal ride in Rich Karlgaard's aerobatic
new book. Not only will it stretch your mind and wide the horizons
of your life, it also could renew your health and wealth.
George Gilder
Heavenly
Intrigue
by
Anne-Lee Gilder and Joshua Gilder
Order Your Copy Today !
AVENGING
MACHINES
Some ten years ago, after a hard run over a steep hill in my home
town, my cousin Joshua Gilder challenged me to explain the prevalence
of inverse square laws in science. Joining Newton's Law of Gravitation
with Coulomb's law of electromagnetic attraction, inverse square
laws inform the physics of attraction, whether of magnitudes or
magnetism. Grasping at straws, I mumbled something about the quadratic
expansion of areas and diminution of forces as any influence spreads
out from a point after a Big Bang blah blah blah. But my mumbling
did not satisfy Josh's raptorial mind.
Together with his wife Anne-Lee, an
investigative reporter and translator, Josh returns to the subject
in our book of the month, Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler,
Tycho Brahe, and the Murder behind one of History's Greatest Scientific
Discoveries. Behind Kepler's famous finding that planetary orbits
are ellipses, not perfect circles, is the implicit recognition of
inverse squares of attraction. Behind this epochal discovery, Josh
and his wife Anne-Lee have inferred from previously lost and untranslated
documents and from spectrographic analysis of poisoned strands of
Brahe's hair found in his tomb, was a murder. They conclude it was
probably committed by Kepler, determined to seize Brahe's huge trove
of astronomical observations, crucial to Kepler's own more astrological
researches.
Heavenly Intrigue stands as
a superb exploration of the contentious relations between science
and technology. A lifelong astrologer, Kepler emerges as a precursor
of the politically correct abstract scientist of today musing on
global warming in multiple parallel universes in the pages of Scientific
American and imposing his own predilections for form and fashion
on the intractable stuff of the world. Brahe is a creator of the
exquisitely accurate and advanced technology that measured the paths
of the stars to one part in 253 thousand and rescued astronomy from
the astrological pseudo science of the day. "With Brahe's measurements
as the standard," observe the Gilders, "the wheels of
astronomy would grind exceedingly fine."
Best known as the author of some of
Ronald Reagan's most memorable utterances, from his blunt veto threat
to a tax hiking Congress-"Go ahead, make my day"-to his
eloquent celebration of capitalism and technology at Moscow State
University, Josh has become an accomplished writer of fiction. Last
year his Ghost Image won laurels for a first mystery novel.
This book combines the punctilious lucidity of his expository style
with the narrative intrigue of a murder story.
As intricately layered as a microchip,
as compellingly plotted as a Columbo mystery, as scrupulously factual
as its hero Brahe himself, Heavenly Intrigue launches a new
form of literature: history of science and technology as philosophical
adventure and psychological thriller. In a beautiful consummation,
the seeds of Brahe's rigorous empirical science ultimately give
birth in the late twentieth century to new machines, such as atomic
absorption spectrometers and proton induced x-rays, that enable
current day sleuths to discover and solve his murder. In this book,
the Gilders illuminate this twisted path of science and technology,
avenge the crime, and redeem it. Now they should proceed with the
screenplay, perhaps to be directed by Anthony Mingella and titled
The Talented Mr. Kepler.
George Gilder
The Long Walk
by Slavomir Rawicz
Order Your Copy Today !
After spending much
of my holiday reading time with estimable critics of the Telecosm such
as Om Malik (Broadbandits) and David Denby (American Sucker), I innocently
picked up a book called The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz, defying the
most urgent warnings from historian Stephen Ambrose that I would not
be able to put it down. Sure enough, the darn book adhered to my hands
for the next two days-in the bathtub, under the Christmas tree, at lunch,
and in the car to cross-country ski races-and I emerged from my ordeal
with an inspiring new perspective on all the trials of this Millennium.
Incarcerated in a concentration camp in north eastern Siberia, Rawicz
and six colleagues escaped during a blizzard, and most of them managed
to elude dogs, KGB, apparently abominable snowmen, and marauding Chinese
soldiers, and make their way nearly 4000 miles in 18 months through
the Siberian snows and the Gobi desert and through Mongolia and Tibet
and over the Himalayas to India. Full of fascinating details of survival
against all odds both in the desert and the mountains, in sub zero and
trans-100 Farenheits. Perhaps there is still hope for the all optical
revelation.
George Gilder
The
Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
by
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
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Your Copy
Towering
over his colleagues in business analysis, Clayton Christensen has proven
that he is not just another tall white guy who hangs around the basket
and piles up the easy points.
After introducing a champion product at the top of
his game six years ago, garnering huge markets, magisterial prestige,
devoted students, and a double chair at the Harvard Business School,
Christensen triumphantly flouts his own chilling odds against renewing
a stalled franchise. Written with colleague Michael Raynor, his second
book is a whopper of a further innovation: The Innovator's Solution:
Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, even more gripping and
compelling than his first work. His famous core concept of disruptive
innovation, launched in his now classic prize winner The Innovator's
Dilemma, has begotten a scintillating sequel, full of powerful business
ideas that continue spinning in the mind long after you put down
the book.
Using an insight of my partner Nick Tredennick, I would
like to sum up Christensen's initial theory as a form of Tredennick's
law: "Seek performance first and you forgo volume. Seek volume
first and you get performance."
Catchy isn't it? The essence of it is the learning
curve. Creating a high performance product is only the first step.
If you make one brilliant prototype of a magical Silicon Wonderchip
XXX, and then embark on an agenda of costly performance improvements,
you will restrict yourself to a sparse population of elite users.
In the end, this small market of demanding buyers-whether of high-end
cameras or high-end routers or specialized business communications-will
not be able to pay for the early rate of improvement. Meanwhile your
rival-Intel, perhaps-incorporates an inferior ripoff on some underused
corner of a Pentium and makes billions of units. Moving down the
learning curve of the semiconductor industry with Moore's law, the
Pentium will soon be doing the job more cheaply and better than your
Silicon WonderchipXXX."
Now in The Innovator's Solution, Christensen offers
a broader, more far reaching, but less quantitative, discourse on
business strategy. He tells executives why "core competence" shouldn't
necessarily be your core business; when to outsource and when not;
how to avoid the grim reaper of business-"commoditization";
how to develop products by asking the question "What job needs
to get done?"; why large mergers almost never work; and how
to counter disruptive threats-and even become the disrupter yourself-by
forming autonomous organizations.
Christensen is full of sagely contrarian advice: he
argues that it is usually better to give a new project to an executive
who has previously failed at a similar undertaking, rather than one
who has been highly successful in an unrelated field. The learning
curve, in other words, applies to management not just manufacturing.
He also shows how, depending on the circumstances, technologies can
be disruptive for some firms but sustaining for others. The Internet,
for example, sustained Dell's low-cost direct-to-customer marketing
and distribution model but disrupted the retail models of Compaq,
HP, IBM, and others.
Perhaps most
importantly, Christensen and Raynor demolish the myth that young companies
should be impatient for growth and patient for profits. Just the opposite,
they argue. Demands for early profitability are good because they
force new companies to adjust their business models based on feedback,
rather than assuming the model is perfect from the outset, only to
find out years later that the initial business plan was fatally flawed.
Christensen and
Raynor's chapter endnotes-substantial, pithy, provocative-add further
relish to a feast of business ideas.
George
Gilder & Bret Swanson
Wall
Street Meat
by Andy Kessler
Order
Your Copy
Our old friend and Telecosm
star Andy Kessler has minced and marketed WALL STREET MEAT, the most
riotous, insightful, poignant, gossipy, and gallivanting book on Wall
Street ever written. Unlike the telepathic Michael Lewis, whose Liar's
Poker was mostly written at three removes from the major players of the
1980s, Kessler was embedded big time, for both the eighties and nineties
and he is still prescient in the new era. No fly or flower on the wall,
Kessler was a major player on the field, a double-E from Bell Labs who
actually grasped the intricacies of the technologies that he analyzed
and they touted. He often told these Wall Street stars the score, or
bit a bruised tongue dumbstruck when they did their daffy dunderheaded
thing anyway. Then he went off and formed a hedge fund with Fred Kittler
and scored on his own.
He was there as Bill Gates cackled
at the credulity of analysts rushing to the phones to report a calculated
putdown of his own stock; Kessler was at Jack Grubman's side as he honed
his ax, his "A," his Ebbers and his AWE-strike, boasting three
fictitious women per night, ten beers and four uncanny earning calls.
Kessler was there, carrying true believer Mary Meeker's sachel as she
rushed to her limo to tout her famous "feelings" about clueless.com
to clueless dotty investors; he had frank conversations with Quattrone
about the "monkeys in suits" that end up as brokers, and he
did analytical hanky panky side by side with Blodget.
But unlike most of the inebriated cast
of this rollicking tale, Kessler never lost his head or sense of
proportion. He got out on top, with his humor, writing flair, integrity,
and portfolio intact. And he is about to get even richer on this
self-published book, which has already leapt high at Amazon, where
it tops the list at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Bros, is number 19
in New York and is moving up everywhere else.
This
book may have begun in the boutique insider cult trade but it will
be a bulge bracket paperback soon and then--I have a heart-felt feeling
here, a Meeker moment--it will be a major motion picture. Read it
before Kessler goes Hollywood and becomes too famous to talk to you
anymore.
George
Gilder
Valuing
Technology
The New
Science of Wealth in the Knowledge Economy
by Chris Westland
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Your Copy
In
this ambitious and original text, Chris Westland follows in the path
of Aswath Damodaran, casting light on "The Dark Side of Valuation"
of technology stocks. But where Damodaran stops short of addressing
the fundamental issues of technology itself, the polymathic Westlanda
scientist and
consultantcruises in with observations on Moore's and Metcalfe's
laws, nanotechnology and optics, biotech and materials science. He
attempts to formalize in crisp mathematics some of the "laws"
of the microcosm and telecosm.
A fascinating read that does not pretend there are any simple answers
or panaceas.
George Gilder
The
Advent of the Algorithm
by David
Berlinski
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Your Copy
Don't be
put off by the author's vagaries and discursions. They are sometimes
poetic and funny, sometimes distracting, but if you press on, you
will encounter a unique tale of the real meaning of the science and
technology of the twentieth century-the overthrow of the materialist
superstition in the heart of mathematics physics, biology, and computer
science. Berlinski was a student of Alonzo Church, who was the most
fruitful protégé of Kurt Godel, who defined the limits
of mathematics and tutored Einstein. This contrarian tour de force
is a gripping adventure in the ideas that matter in the 21st century
as it transcends and surpasses the 20th.
George Gilder
Mind
at Light Speed
by
David D. Nolte
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Your Copy
A
leading physicist, solid state theorist, and inventor of dynamic
holography, Nolte has reshaped telecosmic theory for the 21st
century. Describing the promise of an all optical Internet
and the limitations of human vision, he envisages a new computing
and networking architecture based on the massive parallelism
of holograms. With Avanex and Terabeam both gaining competitive
advantage through holographic techniques, with Essex pursuing
the huge advantages of analog optical processing, and with
Carver Mead transforming the camera in the image of the human
retina, Noltešs book is a paradigm tour. Lucidly written for
the layman, it explores the parallel advantages of light and
image in the new era of optics. He ends with an intriguing
discussion of quantum computing.
In
the Beginning Was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson
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Your Copy
In the Beginning Was the Command Line-is
a fast, funny, and uncannily perceptive history of computer
operating systems by the incomparable Neal Stephenson,
author of Cryptonomicon, a panoramic historical novel which
was one of the first and best of our books of the month.
A former programmer, Stephenson explains in savvy and acrobatic
prose the contribution of Microsoft and its obsolescence
today, and explains why Linux is realwhy operating
systems will all be essentially free and open sourced.
Machine
Beauty
by David Gelernter
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Your Copy
Machine
Beauty by
David Gelernter explains and expounds the assumptions behind
his transfiguration of the user interface through his company Mirror
Worlds, named after his prophetic book by the same title,
which essentially outlined the key features of the ultimate
World Wide Web (still under construction today). Gelernter
is an essential guide to the future of computer interfaces
and databases.
The
Quantum Brain
by
Jeffrey Satinover
The
Search for Freedom and the Next Generation of Man
Order
Your Copy
The
Quantum Brain is an adventure in the science of ideas. It
is the first book on the brain that combines a grasp of the
physics of the microcosm and the technologies of artificial
intelligence, neural networks, and self-organizing systems,
with a recognition of the transcendant properties that define
the mind and differentiate it from matter. Although the subject
is inherently difficult and novel, Jeffrey Satinover is an
inspired guide through the fertile areas of convergence among
the pivotal sciences of the age. From such insights will
emerge both new technologies and new philosophies and theologies
for the Twenty First Century.
Basic
Economics
A
Citizen's Guide to the Economy
by Thomas Sowell
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Your Copy
Thomas
Sowell is widely known as a masterly writer on the intricacies
of race and culture around the globe. His recent autobiography
offers a fascinating vista into his amazing life battling
the forces of political correctness on issues of race.
But Sowell began as a superb economic theorist, bringing
to light the foundational principles of supply side economics
in Says Law ("Supply creates its own demand") and Knowledge
and Decisions. Now he has summed up a lifetime of economic
wisdom in this definitive text, Basic Economics: A Citizen's
Guide to the Economy. He offers pithy and trenchant
accounts of a wide range of issues, from the perversity
of rent controls and the wastefulness of recycling to the
irrelevance of sex and race in income data and the true
role of government in economy.
Collective
Electrodynamics
Quantum
Foundations of Electromagnetism
by
Carver A. Mead
Order
Your Copy
The
book of the month (and perhaps of the decade; time will tell)
is Collective Electrodynamics by Carver Mead, written
is his copious free time while launching a revolution in
the camera business with the Foveon imager. Mead's climactic
speech at Telecosm, ending with a prolonged standing ovation,
focused less on Foveon's amazing new chip and its impact
on cameras than on his new book and its promise of a revolution
in the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some mathematics
afflicts about two-thirds of the chapters, but the rest are
readable and riveting.
The
Holy Grail of Data Storage Management
What
Every Enterprise Needs to Know to Solve Its Data
Deluge
by
Jon William Toigo
Order
Your Copy
An
excellent primer on network storage-perhaps the only in depth,
book length treatment of the subject. The book does, however,
suffer from conventional thinking. In particular, Toigo buys
into the flawed notion that the number one reason for SAN
architectures is to save network bandwidth. Recommended
as good background reading on enterprise storage.
Click on a cover for more information
and to order the following books, pulled from George's own
library:
The
New Era of Wealth
How
Investors Can Profit from the 5 Economic Trends Shaping the Future
by
Brian S. Wesbury
The
first book with a Telecosm List, a supply-side tilt, and a Greenspan
critique, Brian Wesbury's pithy tome castigates the prevailing
medianomics and offers a felicitous guide for investing in the
new economy.
GG
|
The
Innovator's Dilemma
When New Technologies Cause Great
Firms to Fail
By Clayton M. Christensen
"The
most profound and useful business book ever written about innovation,
it catapults its softspoken author abruptly into the class
of Burnham and Drucker."
George Gilder, October 1998 GTR |
Only
the Paranoid Survive
The Threat & Promise of Strategic
Inflection Points
By Andrew S. Grove
"As
a strategic fact, defining the conditions of the business
and the opportunities of the era, broadband is now. This
is a fundamental
paradigm shift-an inflection point like those described
in Andy Grove's riveting new book, Only the Paranoid Survive."
George Gilder, August 1996 GTR |
Adventures
of a Bystander (Trailblazers, Rediscovering the Pioneers
of Business)
By Peter F. Drucker |
The
Effective Executive
By Peter F. Drucker
|
Being
Digital
By Nicholas Negroponte
|
The
Twilight of Sovereignty
How the Information Revolution
is Transforming Our World
by Walter B. Wriston
|
The
End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy
by Richard W. Rahn
Former
Chief Economist of the National Chamber of Commerce, Richard Rahn has peered
deeply into the heated caldron of money, encryption, privacy, bandwith
and bureaucracy and emerged with a stark and stormy vision of the future.
This crisply written text foresees a concussive collision of new technologies
and old institutions, such as banks and nations, debts and taxes, and a
new world of web commerce on the other side. |
Optical
Networks
by Rajiv Ramaswami and Kumar N. Sivarajan
This
book is a lucid and practical exposition of the optics state
of the art by two protege's of Paul Green. Skip the denser
math if you want and you still can deepen your knowledge of
this incandescent field. You can also expose yourself to the
thinking of Rajiv Ramaswami, who is moving to Silicon Valley
to guide an exciting startup in optical switching, called XRos,
into the frontiers of the telecosm.
|
Feynman
and Computation
Exploring the Limits of Computers
Edited by Anthony J.G. Hey
(not to be confused with Feynman Lectures on Computation)
This book
contains three seminal lectures by Carver Mead, who co-taught
the course with Feynman, and includes many vivid recollections
of and by the world's greatest physicist in interplay with
the world's leading computer scientists.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Feynman on the Challenger disaster
|
Computer
Architecture
A Quantitative Approach
By David A. Patterson & John L. Hennessy
A leader in the debate
over the structure of tomorrow's computers, "David Patterson explained
how many of the problems with current computer architecture could give
way to an intelligent RAM architecture. He favors use of parallel vector
processors programmable through the means familiar in vector Cray supercomputers."
George Gilder, October 1997 GTR
|
Introduction
to VLSI Systems
By Carver Mead & Lynn Conway
|
Feynman
Lectures on Physics
By Richard P. Feynman
|
Analog
VLSI and Neural Systems
By Carver Mead
|
Computer
Organization and Design
The Hardware/Software Interface
By David A. Patterson & John L. Hennessy
|
Packet
Communication
By Robert M. Metcalfe
Bob Metcalfe invented ethernet
and was a founder of 3Com. His 1973 doctoral dissertation, Packet Communication,
is a classic text in the development of the communications protocols at
the core of the Telecosm.
"In the new paradigm, the Moore's Law advance of MIPS and
bits gives way to the Metcalfe's Law explosion of bandwidth." George
Gilder, August 1996 GTR |
An
Introduction to Information Theory
Symbols, Signals and Noise
By John R. Pierce
"Shannon's
work is shrouded in hardcore math and the explanation can be
skipped if you want. But
it is worth getting a glimpse of his vision. It is most clearly expounded
by his leading apostle, John R. Pierce of Bell Laboratories, in a
book called An Introduction to Information Theory."
George
Gilder, June 1998 GTR
|
Fiber
Optic Networks
By Paul E. Green
"the leading text on fiber
networks"
George Gilder, February 1997 GTR
|
The
Age of Spiritual Machines
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
By
Ray Kurzweil
|
CDMA
Principles of Spread Spectrum Communication
By Andrew J. Viterbi
Viterbi presents the mathematical
bridge between Shannon's theories and today's most advanced wireless technology.
"For many years, few noticed the full significance of [Shannon's]
baffling message. Andrew Viterbi, the famed author of the Viterbi
algorithm, now at Qualcomm, was one of the few. With Jacobs
and Gilhousen, they set out to fulfill the Shannon mandate.
In the Telecosm today, physics, optics, engineering, signals,
and noise all are now beginning to whirl centrifugally in Shannon's
hyperspace. Just as Wavelength Division Multiplexing is the
wireline expression of Shannon's vision, CDMA is the wireless
form of "wide and weak."
George Gilder, June 1998 GTR |
Claude
Elwood Shannon
Collected Papers
By Claude E. Shannon
"As early as 1949, Claude
Shannon, the inventor of information theory, defined the crucial tradeoffs
of a regime of bandwidth abundance. Bandwidth, he showed, can substitute
both for switching and for power. The new paradigm requires that successful
companies of the new era pursue this crucial trade off among the emerging
technologies of sand and glass and air."
George Gilder,
July 1996 GTR
"The great astronomer and physicist Kepler wrote: "I
cherish more than anything else the Analogies.They know
all the secrets of nature." For the Microcosm, the model
was to move to the center of the sphere, at the atomic
level, where power was concentrated. With an uncanny analogy
of communications to multi-dimensional geometry, however,
Claude Shannon in 1948 supplied a new spherical analogy
for the Telecosm. An MIT professor with close ties to Bell
Laboratories, he developed information theory to gauge
the potential capacity of any communications channel in
the presence of noise. This work took the theory of the
Telecosm from the center of the sphere, where power was
unlimited and bandwidth scarce, to the surface of the sphere,
where the results were weirdly wide and weak and counterintuitive."
George Gilder, June 1998 GTR
|
Click
on any book to order now at