Quotes About Technology

When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn't care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.

At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The

Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.

It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But

Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.

Because if you're going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.

When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal system. Veres says that what he does at home is different enough from what he does at work to serve as recreation for him. At work he deals with hardware; when he's at home, he focuses on software—reading programming manuals and creating new software for his own computer.

Everything is quantified," he said. "Whether it's the technology or the way people use it, it has an insidious ability to reduce things to less than human dimensions.

Looking into the VAX, West had imagined he saw a diagram of DEC's corporate organization. He felt that VAX was too complicated. He did not like, for instance, the system by which various parts of the machine communicated with each other; for his taste, there was too much protocol involved. He decided that VAX embodied flaws in DEC's corporate organization.

West once said, "An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.

There were Colorgraphics and Summagraphics; Altergo and C. Itoh; and Ball. "Hey, wait a minute. What's Ball doing here? Aren't they the mason jar people?" "Yeah, but they also make disk drives.

Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed.

I've gotta keep life and computers separate, or else I'm gonna go mad.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.

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. Minicomputer companies split the differences more or less; they sold some machines and service to actual users, but spent most of their money on hardware and did a big business by selling machines in quantity to OEMs.

Certain of the engineers now entered what West called "the first off-the-wall period." A few quit. Others went on vacation immediately. Still others spent the next couple of weeks playing a game called Adventure, in which you travel by computer into an underground world, wandering through strange, awful labyrinths, searching for treasure that's guarded and sometimes snatched away by dragons, dwarfs, trolls and a rapacious pirate who mutters: "Har. Har.

Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize). Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes.

the younger generation's deficient self-management skills have little to do with things we can't change like the effects of growing up in the age of iPods and Facebook.

Turn off the computer at least two hours before bedtime. The light of a computer screen right in front of your face late at night is similar enough to sunlight that it tricks your brain, making it difficult to fall asleep and disruptive to the quality of your sleep.

Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time.

No matter how secret a particular satellite was, it had to obey the same laws of physics as the rest of the solar system.

Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they're in the form of spotting scopes, spyplanes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies.

Machines have no fear of the unfamiliar.

It's becoming increasingly clear that mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.