Claude Shannon

“So he rigs up a barbed wire telegraph between his house and a friend's house.”

“Shannon's paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, is something like a founding document. It laid out the principles that make the digital transmission of information possible, and Shannon in this paper does things like introduce the concept of the bit, …”

“What we take from the paper only starts to matter in the eighties. And so at the time, this was still a discussion very much in theory, but the power and force of his theory was immediately seen.”

“He had no collaborators of any kind and that it was published in two, two sections within the Bell Technical Journal, the Bell Systems Technical Journal.”

“Vannevar Bush, who was one of the great sort of scientific networkers and organizers in 20th century America, he had a real eye for talent. He was the first person really well up in the scientific hierarchy to spot Claude Shannon's talent and to sort of invite…”

“A lot of his earliest papers are in her handwriting and she would do the math, do the intervening math, she would challenge him, she would include historical references, literary references in papers, and she never got any credit for this,”

“Steve Jobs actually sends the Shannons he assembles an Apple II and sends it to Claude. So they have one of the only Apple IIs, I guess, that was assembled by Steve Jobs himself.”

“He actually wrote a note to Vannevar Bush first Suggesting that he was working on this, that the theory that all messages or all communications were essentially the same. This is 10 years before he ever publishes the paper.”

“Those mentors get him a wartime contract working at Bell Laboratories that spares him from the draft.”

“What Shannon does in introducing the bit which he starts off calling the binary digit Before one of his colleagues comes up with BIT as a good abbreviation.”

“I believe it's called a mathematical theory of cryptography. And he proves the existence of a one-time pad the existence of an unbreakable code.”