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Computer Quotes

“Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

“The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you're lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it's at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you're in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.”

“It seems like I always wrote, I just didn't think of it as a career choice. I just liked to tell stories ... to myself, to pen pals (I had a lot of them, all over the world). Of course this was in the days before computers were everywhere, and anyone could access the Web. You had to make an effort keeping up a correspondence, and the arrival of the mail once a day was a big deal. I think if modern technology had been around when I was a kid, I would never have left my bedroom except to take the dogs out for their run three times a day.”

“Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.”

“Suppose aliens invade the earth and threaten to obliterate it in a year's time unless human beings can find the Ramsey number for red five and blue five. We could marshal the world's best minds and fastest computers, and within a year we could probably calculate the value. If the aliens demanded the Ramsey number for red six and blue six, however, we would have no choice but to launch a preemptive attack.”

“Indeed, being a beginner is very difficult right now. Book publishers are in a crisis, sales are dwindling, and publishing houses are losing money, doing their best to survive. It's a sign of the times, the emergence of new kinds of entertainment -- there's nothing we can do about it. I don't think books will perish for good. They could become less widespread, though, falling even further behind movies and computer games. But we shouldn't be afraid of this, because books will always remain the entertainment of choice for intelligent people, of whom there are still many in this world.”

“[The Internet] ... is an amazing communications tool that's bringing the whole world together. I mean, you sit down to sign on to America Online in your hometown, and it's just staggering to think that at the same moment, halfway around the world, in China, someone you've never met is sitting at their computer, hearing the exact same busy signal that you're hearing.”

“In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure - error rather than terror.”

“I remain fearless of airplanes after 9/11. But during a trip to Los Angeles on a Boeing 767, I couldn't keep my mind from drifting: What's the largest piece of this airplane that could crash into the World Trade Center, explode out the other side, and survive intact? The landing gear? My computer battery? My belt buckle? My wedding ring?”

“The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers--and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works--should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative! All information should be free. Mistrust authority--promote decentralization. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better.”

“Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to.”

“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”

“The modern world has created airports and hospitals and put 10,000 songs in our pocket. It has built gleaming buildings and computers and advances and innovations that blow our minds. But we have soul, and spirit, and consciousness, and the modern world hasn't done so well at helping us name and understand what it means to be thriving and fully alive with a full heart.”

“I did a couple of writing seminars in Canada with high school kids. These were the bright kids; they all have computers, but they can't spell. Because spell-check won't [help] you if you don't know through from threw. I told them, "If you can read in the 21st century, you own the world." Because you learn to write from reading.”