Technology Quotes

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The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.

I’ve noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS.

Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by ‘they’, I mean ‘computers’. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)

They've grown up with the computer, so they expect things to be faster, including cooking. They like baking by adding things to a mix. In recipes, they want fewer ingredients -- seven is ideal -- and they like step-by-step pictures that show them what to do.

The best accelerator available for a Mac is one that causes it to go at 9.81 m/s2.

I am sometimes something of a lazy person, so when I end up spending a lot of time using something myself — as I did with Google in the earliest of days, I knew it was a big deal.

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

The eleventh commandment was "Thou Shalt Compute" or "Thou Shalt Not Compute" - I forget which.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.

WWW? Nice toy, but what a waste of time.

Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing.

In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer’s shifting idea of what their problem is.

The computer reminds one of Lon Chaney -- it is the machine of a thousand faces.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

My computer must be broken: whenever I ask a wrong question, it gives a wrong answer.

If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check.

There is no programming language–no matter how structured–that will prevent programmers from making bad programs.

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.

Silos can't interoperate unless the technology does.

Paper returns done by hand have an 80 percent accuracy rate, or 20 percent error rate. E-file has more than a 99 percent accuracy rate, because the computer does all the work for you.

People say Microsoft paid $14M for using the Rolling Stones song 'Start me up' in their commercials. This is wrong. Microsoft payed $14M only for a part of the song. For instance, they didn't use the line 'You'll make a grown man cry'.

It’s ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.