Quotes About Innovation

It is the ultimate expressive medium, Lick later wrote—"the moldable, retentive, yet dynamic medium—the medium within which one can create and preserve the most complex and subtle patterns and through which [one] can make those patterns operate (as programs) upon other patterns (data).

nearly a decade would pass before TCP/IP was stable enough for ARPA to shift the whole Arpanet over to it.

Jobs and his top engineers finally showed up for an afternoon visit in December 1979, the presentation was as minimal as Goldberg could make it.

the IBM 650, as it came to be called, would eventually become known as the Model T of the computer industry, the first mass-market computer.

The Alto was certainly not the first personal computer; that honor has to go to Wes Clark's LINC, if not to Clark's TX-0, or even to Jay Forrester's Whirlwind. But it was the first machine that most of us would recognize as a personal computer.

PARC had given them something magical: an Alto-Ethernet—laser printer—GUI system that was like nothing else on the planet.

two young Multicians, named Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who would go on to galvanize the emerging microcomputer industry with a little program called VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.

By mid-1970, they had a preliminary version up and running. Somewhere along the way, moreover, their homebrew operating system had acquired a name. According to one version of the story, the name signified "one of whatever Multics was many of." According to another, it stood for "Multics without balls." But either way it came out the same: Unix.

On the frontier," he had written in 1965, "man must often chart his course by stars he has never seen. Rarely does one recognize or discover a complex problem, formulate it, and lay out a procedure that will solve it—all in one great flash of insight.

The Computer as a Communication Device.

The Aloha system, he learned, was an experimental, ARPA-funded network that transmitted computer data via radio waves, instead of via the telephone lines used in the Arpanet.

The Q-32 would go on to support a lot of good research in education, psychology, and display technology.

By 1990 the Arpanet was history.

The Arpanet was up and running for real

RAND Tablet, a kind of high-tech sketch pad that a user could write or draw on with a stylus, with the results then appearing on a CRT display.

had found a decent name for the thing—a process that had proved to be surprisingly tricky.

After Sutherland left ARPA for Harvard, moreover, Roberts would start a collaboration with him on what would now be called virtual reality, complete with the world's first 3-D virtual headset.)

Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1830s through ENIAC in the 1940s,

directors of IPTO itself: J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Larry Roberts.

Project Lincoln—or Lincoln Laboratory, as it was renamed in 1952—they sound a lot like veterans of the Manhattan Project, or the Radiation Lab, or even the Apollo moon program of the 1960s.

There had never before been a machine that was this much in front of the competition. And never since. It was a singular event.

Since he'd based it on an earlier, experimental language by Thompson, code-named "B," Ritchie code-named his language "C.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

the creator of Lisp,