"People keep asking me what I think of it now that it's done. Hence my protest: The Web is not done!"

"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."

"Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet."

"I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think…"

"WinNT: All the headaches of Unix, but in a pretty, windowed environment."

"What does it say about our culture that personality is now considered a technology, a tool of the trade, not only in politics but in business and the professions? Has everyone been forced to become an actor? In sixteenth century…"

"One does not learn computing by using a hand calculator, but one can forget arithmetic."

"Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response."

"Apple really hasn't weighed in on the sub-$1,000 computer category. Their next step could be refreshing their current products and making pricing changes."

"Users truly don’t know what they want in a program until they use it."

"Worth noting: running 'reboot -h' does NOT produce a helpful usage message."

"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork."

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

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

"The lifeblood of our business is that R&D spend. There's nothing that flows through a pipe or down a wire or anything else. We have to continuously create new innovation that lets people do something they didn't think they could…"

"Think of all the psychic energy expended in seeking a fundamental distinction between "algorithm" and "program"."

"The Star Trek computer doesn't seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that."

"Back up my hard disk ? I can't find the reverse switch !"

"The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier."

"I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next."

"We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."

"I am a hard-core believer that the clean desktop is the way to go... At the same time, we told OEMs that if they were going to put a bunch of icons on the desktop, then so were we."

"If you automate a mess, you get an automated mess."

"Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more ‘user-friendly’… Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words ‘user-friendly’ on the cover."

"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…"

"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology."

"Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things."

"Microsoft has had its success by doing low-cost products and constantly improving those products and we've really redefined the IT industry to be something that's about a tool for individuals."

"It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are."

"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."

"Technology favors horrible people."

"The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord."

"It is not the computer's fault that Maxwell's equations are not adequate to design the electric motor."

"I find sitting at a specially equipped desk in front of some pretty ugly plastics and staring at a little window is a very unnatural event."

"Why do we want intelligent terminals when there are so many stupid users ?"

"I'm not anti-social; I'm just not user friendly."

"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!"

"Some people think technology has the answers."

"Make no mistake about it: Computers process numbers - not symbols. We measure our understanding (and control) by the extent to which we can arithmetize an activity."

"We're only at the beginning of what we have to do here."

"I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn’t show up in a Unix directory listing."

"Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?"

"All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness."

"Many people see technology as the problem behind the so-called digital divide. Others see it as the solution. Technology is neither. It must operate in conjunction with business, economic, political and social system."

"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."

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

"Often it is the means that justify the ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble."

"A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."