Quotes About Technology

Members of Congress would no doubt have been furious had they learned that DARPA—ostensibly a defense agency—was wining and dining professors of computer science as they theorized about chip design. But it was efforts like these that shrank transistors, discovered new uses for semiconductors, drove new customers to buy them, and funded the subsequent generation of smaller transistors. When it came to semiconductor design, no country in the world had a better innovation ecosystem.

By the end of the 1980s, a chip with a million transistors—unthinkable in the early 1970s, when Lynn Conway had arrived in Silicon Valley—had become a reality, when Intel announced its 486 microprocessor, a small piece of silicon packed with 1.2 million microscopic switches.

Haggerty and Kilby realized that light rays and photoresists could solve the mass-production problem, mechanizing and miniaturizing chipmaking in

The greatest beneficiary of the rise of foundries like TSMC was a company that most people don't even realize designs chips: Apple. The company Steve Jobs built has always specialized in hardware, however, so it's no surprise that Apple's desire to perfect its devices includes controlling the silicon inside.

A computer cannot manufacture new information. That's the difference between our brain and a computer.

You already have zero privacy. Get over it! --Scott McNealy CEO Sun Microsystems 1999

I'm sorry. I never think to check my messages and I don't have a clue where that cell phone is.' She looked around as if she might find it in the flower bed.

Computers are idiots whose only virtue is that they can count up to two extremely fast.

There are no shared memories anymore. Now, now there's twitter and email and Facebook and cable and satellite

That, I know now, is why social media remains so popular; it is the home of the powerless.

It was a man taking a machine and a machine taking a man into secret places, into the subliminal.

He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic; the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma - we cannot make a mistake.

He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic: the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma, We cannot make a mistake. Their magic consists in this: that whenever they do make a mistake, which is quite often, it is perpetuated and thereby becomes a non-mistake.…

Theophilus Crowe's mobile phone played eight bars of Tangled Up in Blue in an irritating electronic voice that sounded like a choir of suffering houseflies, or Jiminy Cricket huffing helium, or, well, you know, Bob Dylan.

The medium obscured the message.

That was supposed to be the whole purpose of the Internet, you know. To share scientific information. Not a Viagra- and porn-delivery system?

What's a Mennonite?" Vance asked. "Amish with blenders.

Who goes out without a phone? This guy was a complete loser.

Out came an extraordinarily complex network of plastic, brass, and stainless-steel tubing, which in seconds Kona had assembled into what Quinn thought was either a very small and elegant linear particle accelerator or, more likely, the most complex bong ever constructed.

Smartphones, devastating the world one instantly delivered tragedy at a time.

Because parents tend to allow more TV-watching and computer games in the third year, it's not surprising that nightmares go with the territory.

One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, "Computers are irrelevant." Building

In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.