Quotes About Computing

The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers' needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people.6 How the computer people satisfy the needs of the manager is their business. What the needs are is the manager's business. To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.

This was, keep in mind, the tail end of the era of the mainframe computers, tape- and card-based data storage, & c., which now seems almost Flinstonianly remote.

The early years of statistical development were dominated by men. Many women were working in the field, but they were almost all employed in doing the detailed calculations needed for statistical analysis, and were indeed called computers.

Women tended to be more docile and patient, so went the belief, and could be depended upon more than men to check and recheck the accuracy of their calculations. A typical picture of the Galton Biometrical Laboratory under Karl Pearson would have Pearson and several men walking around, looking at output from the computers or discussing deep mathematical ideas, while all about them rows of women were computing.

My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.

There is no all-?purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty pounds. You do.

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow.

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

Loads of computer graphics equals a terrible video in my book.

It's hard to build large-scale, general-purpose quantum computers. I hope that we can cross that hurdle soon and build general-purpose quantum computers with hundreds or thousands of quantum bits. But the most important hurdle is in our own understanding. Unless we can understand how the world processes information at a quantum level, we will remain in the dark.

Right now, we have small, general-purpose quantum computers that can basically do anything you ask them to, if you ask nicely. Then we have large, special-purpose quantum computers that can solve specific problems better than classical computers can. What we don't have is a large, general-purpose quantum computer of the sort that would be needed to break codes, strike fear in the heart of the National Security Agency and other three-letter agencies. Which is probably a good thing.

We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.

It's not a fantasy to explore this question about making computers that are much, much, more powerful than the kind that we have sitting around now -- in which a grain of salt has all the computational powers of all the computers in the world.

[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.

Resetting the password only further frustrated her because the password had to include an uppercase letter, a number, a haiku, a gang sign, and the blood of a virgin.

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.

A computer is like air conditioning - it becomes useless when you open Windows

Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.

I started on an Apple II, which I had bought at the very end of 1978 for half of my annual income. I made $4,500 a year, and I spent half of it on the computer.

Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.