Computer Quotes - Page 4

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

  Robert X. Cringely

  Funny, Humor, Technology

  "Noted from the field". "InfoWorld Magazine", Volume 11, Number 10, March 6, 1989.

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• Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

  Steve Jobs

  Creativity, Men, Color

  Steve Jobs (0101). “Motivating Thoughts of Steve Jobs”, p.48, Prabhat Prakashan

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• The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people - as remarkable as the telephone.

  Steve Jobs

  Communication, Home, Compelling Reason

  "Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs". Interview With David Sheff, reprints.longform.org. February 1985.

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• Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

  Donald Knuth

  Change, Attitude, Learning

  "The Art of Computer Programming. Volume 3". Book by Donald Knuth, www.wired.com. 1973.

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• It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

  Alan Perlis

  Change, Vices, Fit

  "Epigrams on Programming". ACM SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9), pp. 7-13, pu.inf.uni-tuebingen.de. September 1982.

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• It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

  Mike Royko

  Views, Bipolar, Lunatic Asylums

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• I was afraid of the internet... because I couldn't type.

  Jack Welch

  Inspirational, Internet, Type

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• If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Technology, Men, Buttons

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

  Steve Jobs

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Commencement Address at Stanford University, delivered 12 June 2005, Palo Alto, CA

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• 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...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

  John Searle

  Science, Technology, Childhood

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• Computer dating is fine, if you're a computer.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Fundraising, Dating, Fine

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• There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write-words.

  Richard Dawkins

  Teacher, Truth, Writing

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• It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.

  Nicholas Negroponte

  Technology, Computer Literacy, Should

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• Any fool can use a computer. Many do.

  Ted Nelson

  Technology, Use, Fool

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• Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

  Dave Barry

  Science, Technology, Teeth

  Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry in Cyberspace”, p.39, Ballantine Books

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• Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

  Martin Fowler

  Inspirational, Funny, Humorous

  Jay Fields, Shane Harvie, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck (2009). “Refactoring: Ruby Edition”, p.36, Pearson Education

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• A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

  Dennis Ritchie

  Simplicity, Language, Program

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• C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

  Dennis Ritchie

  Quirky, Programming, Enormous

  "Inventing Unix". Interview with Samuel K. Moore, Steven Cherry, spectrum.ieee.org. May 27, 2011.

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• On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

  Charles Babbage

  Ideas, Two, Confusion

  Passages from the Life of a Philosopher ch. 5 (1864) See Countess of Lovelace 1; Modern Proverbs 35

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• Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

  Hal Abelson

  Trust, Technology, People

  "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson, (Preface to the first edition), 1979.

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• If you don't want to be replaced by a computer, don't act like one.

  Arno Allan Penzias

  Technology, Want, Ifs

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• At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, one of which is the error of blaming it on the computer.

  Tom Gilb

  Learning, Errors, Two

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• The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

  Frank Zappa

  Missing You, Emotional, Eyebrows

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• Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.

  Lou Gerstner

  Inspirational, Dream, Compassion

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• The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.

  Tim Wu

  Breakup, Communication, Knowing

  Tim Wu (2010). “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires”, p.119, Atlantic Books Ltd

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