Engineers, scientists, and artists create value. Everyone else just moves it around.
—Robert Noyce, co-founder Intel

Thus begins Steve Hamm's light and fun read, "The Race for perfect: Inside the quest to design the ultimate portable computer." The story starts with Alan Kay's vision of the Dynabook (incidentally inspired by a visit to our very own Seymour Papert here in Lexington) and traces first the development of the clamshell laptop and then the pda-turned-smartphone. Throughout it all we get to know a bunch of cowboy-entrepreneur engineers that spend many cycles cramming ever more powerful components into ever shrinking cases trying desperately the whole time to catch up with the hype that the vision of truly mobile computing had unleashed.

I loved this story. And to boot, I can't think of a better time to have read it.

It's been over a week, so I figure the presidential inauguration hype has died down enough for me to quote my absolute favorite part of the speech:

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labour, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

I was surprised that this one line was not picked up by more of the media, especially because $850 billion stimulus package or not, it is these kinds of folks that we are in desperate need of to pull us out of this financial bubble hangover we're suffering from.

We need more of those crazy entrepreneur-engineers that Hamm chronicles in The Race for Perfect. Folks like Edwin Land who invented instant photography by rolling up his shirtsleeves and getting to work. Or more importantly, as the man in the big white house says, all of those folks "obscure in their labour" but chronicled by Hamm in his book that spend countless years building real value.