The subject matter of this book is creativity in the realm of invention and design. More specifically, it addresses the issues of how significantly original technological ideas or concepts may be produced by individuals. Questions such as this about the nature of the creative process are, of course, far from new. As Brewster Ghiselin pointed out in his introduction to The Creative Process, an anthology of writings on the topic, interest in creativity can certainly be traced back to the Greeks. It has continued to be thought about and written on ever since.

The premise of this book, however, is a relatively modern idea. It is the belief that it is possible to construct plausible, detailed, testable explanatory accounts of the cognitive processes underlying specific past acts of creation – acts such as the discovery of physical laws, the elucidation of biochemical pathways, or the invention of artifactual forms. The basic intellectual tool to be used in such explanations originates in the modern disciplines of cognitive science and artificial intelligence: It is the idea that computation-like processes of a certain, rather abstract kind can serve as a powerful metaphor with which to probe creativity and that, consequently, it is possible to obtain insight into the nature of specific acts of creation in a way and at a level of detail that has hitherto proved infeasible.

The means by which technological creativity is examined in this book is, in fact, a confluence of three distinct strands. One is the case study approach in which a specific episode from the history of computer technology, widely recognized as a highly original landmark, is singled out for study.