[TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution". It devotes ten pages to Stallman and Gnu, Torvalds and Linux, even Tannebaum and Minix, but never mentions Thompson and Ritchie. Unix is identified only as a product from Bell Labs from which the others learned something--he doesn't say what. I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory" (about Bell Labs) barely mentions Unix. Is Isaacson blind, biased, or merely brainwashed? In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson, Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs, but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to marketing, he seems to be more impressed by the later stages. Or maybe he just likes to tell stories, and didn't pick up all the good ones about Ken. Isaacson describes spacewar, arguably the first stage of computer-game innovation, at great length. At the same time, all he has to say about early-stage operating systems is a single sentence that credits John McCarthy with leading a time-sharing effort at MIT. (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.) He tells how ARPANET, which he says was mainly developed by BB&N, connected time-shared computers, but breathes not a word about Berkeley's work, without which ARPANET would have been an open circuit. "Innovators" won general critical praise. A couple of reviews predicted it would become the standard of the field. However, an evidently knowledgeable review in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing faulted it for peddling familiar potted legends without really digging for deeper insight. Regarding Thompson and Ritchie, it looks more like overt suppression. Doug