Quotes About Computing

To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.

If you believe that the mobile phone is the next supercomputer, which I do, you can imagine a datacenter that is modeled after, literally, hundreds or thousands or millions of mobile phones. They won't have screens on them, but there'll be millions of lightweight mobile-phone processors in the datacenter.

I wanted to separate data from programs, because data and instructions are very different.

There is a chasm of carbon and silicon the software can't bridge

Lighter computers and lighter sensors would let you have more function in a given weight, which is very important if you are launching things into space, and you have to pay by the pound to put things there.

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020.

A thousand-bit quantum computer would vastly outperform any conceivable DNA computer, or for that matter any conceivable nonquantum computer.

perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (assumed at ten billion human brains for ten thousand years) in ten microseconds.64 If we examine the "Exponential Growth of Computing" chart (p. 70), we see that this amount of computing is estimated to be available for one thousand dollars by 2080.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. —POPULAR MECHANICS

Computers are about one hundred million times more powerful for the same unit cost than they were a half century ago. If the automobile industry had made as much progress in the past fifty years, a car today would cost a hundredth of a cent and go faster than the speed of light. As

A universe saturated with intelligence at 1090 cps would be one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than all biological human brains on Earth today.3 Even a one-kilogram "cold" computer has a peak potential of 1042 cps, as I reviewed in chapter 3, which is ten thousand trillion (1016) times more powerful than all biological human brains.

it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours.

Computers doubled in speed every three years at the beginning of the twentieth century, every two years in the 1950s and 1960s, and are now doubling in speed every twelve months.

Furthermore, neurons are extremely slow; electronic circuits are at least a million times faster. Once a computer achieves a human level of ability in understanding abstract concepts, recognizing patterns, and other attributes of human intelligence, it will be able to apply this ability to a knowledge base of all human-acquired—and machine-acquired—knowledge.

One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.9

Those who rule chips will rule the entire world.

We run the programs, and we support them through all of our folks, but usually the hardware is somewhere else.

One would expect that a surge of new automation opportunities in highly paid work would catalyze a surge of corporate investment in computer hardware and software. Instead, the opposite occurred.

We should get you Linux, too. Nobody uses Windows anymore.

Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.

Make it just like a Mac.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning".

Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.