Quotes About Technology

In 1829, when Boston's Tremont House opened its Greek Revival doors, the hotel world changed forever. Its innovations included individual patent locks on each of the 170 rooms, French cooking, gaslight in the public rooms and a substantial chunk

We live in an age of confusion and thirst in which the advantages of communication are greater than those of secrecy.

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

No matter how good a jockey, he can't turn a plow horse into a thoroughbred. It was the same with chips and software. Indeed, an operating system depended on a reliable chip.

Code writers and engineers often maintain the fiction that their own psychology has little bearing on their work. Reason rules.

There are invariably many ways to achieve roughly the same technical ends. Technical choices are often highly personal. While shaped by commercial considerations, technical decisions also reflect human values and psychology. Cutler

It was now the age of visualization, when abstract concepts as well as basic needs and wants were increasingly expressed in visual terms. From its origins as a number cruncher, the computer had gone Hollywood; it was now an image maker of vast power. Thus, graphics in many ways defined the look and feel of computing. Cutler

The great advantage of digital media is that it can be stored, retrieved and massaged by a computer—at lightning speed and with unerring accuracy.

Code writers, like engineers generally, tend to get sidetracked by interesting but irrelevant conundrums.

The harbinger of a revolution, the Altair was the first mass-marketed personal computer. For the first time a computer was dedicated not just to a single task but to one person. The old guard of computing entirely missed the significance of this.

NT is alarmingly complex. Consisting of six million lines of code, the program is among humanity's most intricate handiworks. "No one mind can comprehend it all," Cutler says. A

Compact code was inherently good since it consumed less internal memory. Consisting of slivers of silicon chips called DRAM ("dynamic-random-access-memories"), internal memory was like a gas tank. The larger the tank, the farther the car would go. The smaller the operating program, the more gas was left for all other programs. Because

It wasn't until five years after the first 360 hardware was introduced in 1964 that all of its software ran well. By then, IBM had spent nearly as much writing the software as designing the hardware. This astonished the company's managers and vividly highlighted "the greatest impediment to advances in computer technology," the problem of managing large software projects. At

Muglia insisted that a computer program, while certainly inspired and created by code writers, must reflect the currents of the market and the desires of customers. No great program was created by slavishly following the market or crudely regurgitating the requests of shoppers. But creators lived in a cocoon. The very demands of their craft made it hard to step outside the bounds of their imaginations. Muglia

Formed a decade earlier by a Whirlwind engineer, Digital was a rising star among minicomputer suppliers, who broke sharply with tradition. In the past, computer designers had promoted large mainframes that shared their power between many jobs. Minicomputers, often priced well below a hundred thousand dollars, made it practical for the first time to dedicate a computer to a single job, such as keeping track of parts, the data for an experiment or the operation of a machine tool. Though

The practice of writing code in C++ continually upset Cutler because it created so much confusion and inefficiency.

One team member, who had formerly worked at AT&T's Bell Labs, recalled only writing specifications for prototype products during his entire time with the company. Invariably after finishing the specs, the project was cancelled. Coming away empty handed so often made him feel sad. After

Poor performance was a common failing of most new programs. The annals of software amply showed this; nearly every landmark system, from IBM's 360 to the various flavors of Unix to Microsoft's Windows, was released in an immature state and evolved over time to win broader acceptance. Indeed, people expected the first commercial release of a new program to contain flaws of all sorts.

Better to release the first version sooner with less. His was a less-now, more-later ethic. Robert

The programmer seemed to be a throwback to an earlier age of handicrafts, when each maker put a distinctive stamp on what were functionally the same products. Well rewarded, the programmer's work was judged harshly.

A computer is a merciless critic," Joseph Weizenbaum, a pioneering computer scientist, has observed. Designers are ranked by peers, but code writers ultimately are measured by a machine. The

Even seasoned code writers could not dismiss the possibility of being trapped in something akin to an infinite loop, wherein fixes spawned their own bugs. It had happened to others. The history of software was littered with projects, large and small, that had been abandoned in disgust, destroying careers.

By the summer of 1988, Bill Gates was the leading representative of a new breed of tycoon: the software superrich. Just as oil created a kind of royalty in the last century, "wildcat" programmers had emerged among the wealthiest self-made men in America. Paul Allen, who had left Microsoft because of illness, was worth megamillions. So were the founders of other leading software companies. At the age of thirty-three, Gates was the youngest billionaire in the United States.

Gates had a notion that only solid code writers should manage and all managers of code writers should keep writing code.