Quotes About Technology

Nonetheless, his vision of high technology's enhancing and empowering the individual, as opposed to serving some large institution, was quite radical for 1939—so radical, in fact, that it wouldn't really take hold of the public's imagination for another forty years, at which point it would reemerge as the central message of the personal-computer revolution.

Another TX-0 hacker devised what was essentially the first word processor, a program that allowed you to type in your class reports and then format the text for output on the Flexowriter. Since it made the three-million-dollar TX-0 behave like a three-hundred-dollar typewriter—much to the outrage of traditionalists who saw this, too, as a ludicrous waste of computer power—the program became known as Expensive Typewriter.

the modern relationship between software and hardware is essentially the same as that between music and the instrument or voice that brings it to life. A single computer can transform itself into the cockpit of a fighter jet, a budget projection, a chapter of a novel, or whatever else you want, just as a single piano can be used to play Bach or funky blues.

Ultimately, in fact, they would enter into a kind of symbiosis with humans, forming a cohesive whole that would think more powerfully than any human being had ever thought and process data in ways that no machine could ever do by itself.

Hopper would later gain fame both as a teacher and as a pioneer in the development of high-level programming languages. Yet perhaps her best-known contribution came in the summer of 1945, when she and her colleagues were tracking down a glitch in the Mark II and discovered a large moth that had gotten crushed by one of the relay switches and shorted it out. She taped the dead moth into the logbook with the notation "First case of an actual bug being found.

To Wiener, there seemed every possibility that computers and other such technologies of the cybernetic age—he would later coin the phrase "the Second Industrial Revolution"—would have consequences just as dire. Inevitably, he felt, the rich and the powerful would seek to use these new technologies of communication and control to cement their power even further.

Unlike Davies, he didn't have to work through the British Postal Service. And unlike Baran, he didn't have to work through the Defense Communications Agency. Roberts was backed by ARPA, whose whole reason for existing was to cut through the bureaucracy. His bosses were giving him a free hand. And he meant to exercise that freedom. He meant to get this network ready to

Technology isn't destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.

However fierce the controversy surrounding its birth, the stored-program concept now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age—arguably the great idea.

computer science is the study of "the phenomena surrounding computers"—all the phenomena,

Clark, that was the idea: small, independent routing computers.

In April 1974, for example, Intel introduced its 8-bit 8080 chip, the first microprocessor to come within shouting distance of, say, a 12-bit mini such as the PDP-8.

AT&T engineers, most of whom had spent a lifetime perfecting their circuit-switching network, found Baran's packet-switching concept ludicrous

The Truly SAGE System, or Toward a Man-Machine System for Thinking

Altair was not the first commercial microcomputer; that honor goes to the Micral, an Intel 8008—based machine that was sold in France starting in May 1973.

The father of the Altair was H. Edward Roberts of Albuquerque, New Mexico,

William B. Shockley, coinventor of the transistor,

M. Mitchell Waldrop

first personal computer—that was the LINC of Wes Clark

the integrated circuit itself; that honor goes to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who demonstrated his first device in Dallas on September 19, 1958.

1959, Fairchild cofounder Robert Noyce did devise a way to mass-produce integrated circuits by etching thousands of transistors simultaneously onto the surface of a single silicon wafer.

we divided the scope into four quadrants and let each person have a quadrant of the scope." That was one each for Fredkin, Lick, Minsky, and McCarthy—a format that quite possibly represented the first "windows" ever to appear on a computer screen.

Computers and the World of the Future,

collect all the code that had to be customized for each new computer or disk drive and put it into a small Unix-like kernel that he called the Basic Input/Output System, or BIOS.