 - These are some of our favorite quotations aboutcomputers, the Internet, and technology in general.We find it very useful to have a selection of quotations to use whenwe're preparing presentationsand handouts. Do you know of a quote we should include in ourlist? Please let us know!I heard there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft.
—President George W. Bush, during the second presidential debate The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
- Andrew S. Tannenbaum Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
- T.S. Elliot The telephone wire, as we know it, has become too slow and too smallto handle Internet traffic. It took 75 years for telephones to be usedby 50 million customers, but it took only four years for the Internet toreach that many users.
- Lori Valigra 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates,1981 The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
- B. F. Skinner There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.
- George Pompidou Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
- Archibald Putt For years there has been a theory that millions of monkeys typing at random on millions of typewriters would reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. The Internet has proven this theory to be untrue.
- Anonymous Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the thingsthey make it easier to do don't need to be done.
- Andy Rooney In the old days, people robbed stagecoaches and knocked off armored trucks. Now they're knocking off servers.
- Richard Power I think there is a world market for maybe fivecomputers.
- IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943 If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user toshow you how it's done.
- ScottAdams In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it wouldhave taken many men many months to equal it.
- Anonymous If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee. Thatwill do them in.
- Bradley'sBromide The Internet is the Viagra of big business.
- Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO, General Electric At some point...we must have faith in the intelligence of the end user.
- Anonymous There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.We don't believe this to be a coincidence.
- Jeremy S. Anderson One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can dothe work of one extraordinary man.
- Elbert Hubbard Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be.
- David Thornburg Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are calledhardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are calledsoftware.
- Anonymous Save early, save often.
- Alwin Lee and everyone else who uses Microsoft Word We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
- Carl Sagan If you tried to read every document on the web, thenforeach day's effort you would be a year further behind in your goal.
- Anonymous There might be new technology, but technological progress itself wasnothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.
- Margaret Thatcher The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon.
- Jerry Olson The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if theyfoul up there's no law against whacking them around a little.
- Porterfield Build early and build often.
- Proprietary developer adage Release early and release often.
- Open source developer adage Everything that can be invented has been invented.
- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents,1899 Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but nomachine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, andunderstanding.
- Louis Gerstner, CEO, IBM GARBAGE IN---GOSPEL OUT
- Fairchild Research and Development, 1969 Any science or technology which is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishablefrom magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficientlyadvanced.
- Gregory Benford Never let a computer know you're in a hurry.
- Anonymous A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believein God.
- Alan J. Perlis I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
- Thomas Edison Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we're notgoing to buy your product.
- Joe Keenan, President of Atari, in 1976 respondingto Steve Jobs' offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer heand Steve Wozniak developed The Internet is a great way to get on the net.
- Senator Bob Dole Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhapsonly weigh 1 1/2 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, 1949 From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said ithad bugs in it.
- Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, US Navy Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the lessdesirable it becomes.
- Andrew Heller, IBM AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They knowhow to survive.
- Jan Horsfall, VP of marketing for Lycos How could this be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?
- Al Gore on Y2K The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent.
- Sydney Brenner in 1927 The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.
- Linus Torvalds To be a nemesis, you have toactively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'mnot out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be acompletely unintentional side effect.
- Linus Torvalds Windows is just DOS in drag.
- Anonymous There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation)at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977 A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Doug Linder During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiativein creating theInternet.
- Al Gore describing his 1986legislation to interconnect five supercomputer centers (17 years after thefirst Internet servers hooked up) If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check.
- Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle The day I made that statement, I was tired because I'd been up allnight inventing the Camcorder.
- Al Gore attempting damage control Interested in finding more quotations for your presentation? We recommend you visit About Quotations. Ray Gallagher has put together a large collection of quotations for just about any subject you can think of!
| CONTRIBUTORS: |
Andrew Diliddo, Steve Miller, Jon Mayer, Ramond Moy, Daniel Wallance, Earl Hallen, Tony Monge, Catherine Faduska |
| LAST UPDATED: |
17 Aug 2007
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