Technology Quotes

The computer is a moron.

In headlines today, the dreaded killfile virus spread across the country adding 'aol.com' to people's Usenet kill files everywhere. The programmer of the virus still remains anonymous, but has been nominated several times for a Nobel peace prize.

Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?

Every operating system out there is about equal… We all suck.

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.

Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capabilities of the programmer who must maintain it.

This is a highly reliable power source. Being a large credit card processor, doing $6 million an hour in transactions, our computers have to work.

The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell but it goes like mad!

Live TV died in the late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-1980s, meaning there was about a 25-year gap when it was difficult to put your foot in your mouth and have people all across the country know about it.

There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives.

Good code is its own best documentation.

If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer.

MS-DOS, an OS originally designed for a microprocessor that modern kitchen appliances would sneer at.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to see it as a soap bubble?

Kids today have so many advantages I never had. There's no telling what I could've accomplished with a home computer and a handgun.

First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.

Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

They say if you play a Microsoft CD backwards, you hear satanic messages. Thats nothing, cause if you play it forwards, it installs Windows.

If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!

Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them.

It's a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.