The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson, read by Dennis Boutsikaris.

I haven't finished this one yet - not walking as much as I'm used to, as I am preparing to leave on a long trip. I am up through the PC boom that made Microsoft the dominant force in the industry. So far I like his coverage of the developments leading to the computer (he starts with Babbage and Lovelace, sidetracking to Byron) and the Internet. The territory from the PC to the smartphone is more controversial, but I expect I'll enjoy it even if I don't agree with his conclusions.

While we love stories of the lone inventor creating something new in his garage or basement, the reality is that most successful innovations come from teams, collegial environments and other places where people share ideas. They cross-pollinate, assist, and sometimes steal outright from each other. Isaacson does a good job of tracking the personalities and players of those less known in the history of the industry and debunking the few cases where we've assigned lone glory to a single figure. (I am looking at you, William Shockley.)

Boutsikaris is good with non-fiction narration, though he's not great with technical terms. I have a lot of annoyances with his pronunciation - when we speak of a computer doing "arithmetic operations" the emphasis shifts forward a syllable from the way we say "arithmetic" by itself. He keeps spelling out DEC (vendor of the computers that enabled much of the early hacker culture, and my one-time employer) the same as we spell out IBM, but anyone in the industry would say "deck" instead. Lots of annoyances like that. But non-fiction narration is not an easy job, and he keeps in interesting. Still recommended.