Technology Quotes

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

Calculations which required a $20 million machine eight years ago can be done on a Mac cluster costing about $11,000.

A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages.

Documentation is like term insurance: It satisfies because almost no one who subscribes to it depends on its benefits.

We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.

Over the centuries the Indians developed sign language for communicating phenomena of interest. Programmers from different tribes (FORTRAN, LISP, ALGOL, SNOBOL, etc.) could use one that doesn't require them to carry a blackboard on their ponies.

The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again.

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.

That’s what’s cool about working with computers. They don’t argue, they remember everything, and they don’t drink all your beer.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

You know you're a geek when... You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.

Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.

Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches: Banality soothes our nerves.

The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

We are very much believers that the web is an open environment, and we need to make sure that people can find all kinds of different stuff through Yahoo!, and not necessarily keeping people within Yahoo!

The issues involved are sufficiently important that courses are now moving out of the philosophy departments and into mainstream computer science. And they affect everyone. Many of the students attracted to these courses are not technology majors, and many of the topics we discuss relate to ethical challenges that transcend the computer world.

Anyone who spends their life on a computer is pretty unusual.

Every program is a part of some other program and rarely fits.

The Internet? Is that thing still around?

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.