I’ve been reading ‘iWoz’ which is the autobiography of Steve Wozniak, who invented the personal computer in the form of a computer with a keyboard for input and a TV as a display. It seems so obvious now, but it was a revolutionary advance over the existing computers of the time which only had a panel of lights as a display and punch cards as input. The spark which gave him the idea seems to have been playing the archetypal arcade game of Pong. He then formed Apple computer with Steve Jobs … and the rest is history.
It is quite an inspiring and very readable story, which isn’t burdened down by a lot of technical details, but just enough so you can appreciate how really smart this guy is — he built an electronic adder/ subtractor as a science project in high school, when everybody was still using slide rules!