Quotes About Technology

The real significance of computing was to be found not in this gadget or that gadget, but in how the technology was woven into the fabric of human life—how computers could change the way people thought, the way they created, the way they communicated, the way they worked together, the way they organized themselves, even the way they apportioned power and responsibility.

the electronic office should consist of small personal computers, running high-resolution graphics and linked together with high-bandwidth network connections

a new open-interface standard that would allow hardware and software to evolve independently.

There was this thread of ideas that led from Vannevar Bush through J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay

By the summer of 1972, says Thacker, "it was personal-computer time, just like it was railroad time in the eighteen-fifties.

It is the ultimate expressive medium, Lick later wrote—"the moldable, retentive, yet dynamic medium—the medium within which one can create and preserve the most complex and subtle patterns and through which [one] can make those patterns operate (as programs) upon other patterns (data).

nearly a decade would pass before TCP/IP was stable enough for ARPA to shift the whole Arpanet over to it.

Jobs and his top engineers finally showed up for an afternoon visit in December 1979, the presentation was as minimal as Goldberg could make it.

the IBM 650, as it came to be called, would eventually become known as the Model T of the computer industry, the first mass-market computer.

The Alto was certainly not the first personal computer; that honor has to go to Wes Clark's LINC, if not to Clark's TX-0, or even to Jay Forrester's Whirlwind. But it was the first machine that most of us would recognize as a personal computer.

PARC had given them something magical: an Alto-Ethernet—laser printer—GUI system that was like nothing else on the planet.

two young Multicians, named Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who would go on to galvanize the emerging microcomputer industry with a little program called VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.

By mid-1970, they had a preliminary version up and running. Somewhere along the way, moreover, their homebrew operating system had acquired a name. According to one version of the story, the name signified "one of whatever Multics was many of." According to another, it stood for "Multics without balls." But either way it came out the same: Unix.

graphics-rich personal workstations and the notion of human-computer symbiosis; time-sharing and the notion of computer-aided collaborative work; networks and the notion of an on-line community; on-line libraries and the notion of instant, universal access to knowledge; and computer languages and the notion of a new, digital medium of expression.

The Computer as a Communication Device.

The Aloha system, he learned, was an experimental, ARPA-funded network that transmitted computer data via radio waves, instead of via the telephone lines used in the Arpanet.

The Q-32 would go on to support a lot of good research in education, psychology, and display technology.

The Q-32 would go on to support a lot of good research in education, psychology, and display technology. It would even support dial-in connections from Stanford, Berkeley, and several other sites around the state—thus serving as a kind of prototype for the far more ambitious long-distance networks to come.

By 1990 the Arpanet was history.

The Arpanet was up and running for real

RAND Tablet, a kind of high-tech sketch pad that a user could write or draw on with a stylus, with the results then appearing on a CRT display.

Berners-Lee's hypertext browsing, users would finally begin to get it about the Internet.

After Sutherland left ARPA for Harvard, moreover, Roberts would start a collaboration with him on what would now be called virtual reality, complete with the world's first 3-D virtual headset.)

Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1830s through ENIAC in the 1940s,