Quotes About Technology

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

The wonderful thing about Apple technology is just how intuitive it is.

Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.

In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.

So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.

I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.

This, I fundamentally believe, is why scientists and engineers will do more than politicians and activists to solve today's environmental problems. They have more than words. They have solutions.

The idea I am trying to launch here is: the appearance of new species naturally and the appearance of new inventions by artifice are both responses to need.

Hollerith was at heart an academic inventor whose commercial success, though not his technological achievement, had in a sense been something of an accident. Watson believed that in business, as in life, things did not happen by accident but because you willed them to happen and took the practical steps to turn your wishes into reality. For Watson, making customers happy was the most serious thing in the world. Hollerith, though, was much more interested in technical issues.

Their reliability was such that they were used by the French Army as late as 1940

Hollerith regarded engineers as backroom boys who worked best when they were left alone. Watson, on the other hand, was quick to chase engineers out of the laboratory and into customers' offices to find out precisely what functions and features customers needed from their machines.

The clash of Watson's and Hollerith's personalities was a classical example of a brash, energetic, visionary newcomer confronting a staid traditionalist.

IBM had its origins in Jacquard's endeavours in Revolutionary France. And indeed IBM is, indeed, a direct descendant of the work that went on in Jacquard's workshop during the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth.

Peel finally decided to interrupt the endless stream of complaints and grievances and call Babbage to order with a hard fact: 'Mr Babbage, by your own admission you have rendered the Difference Engine useless by inventing a better machine.' Babbage took the bait and glared at Peel. 'But if I finish the Difference Engine it will do even more than I promised. It is true that it has been superseded by better machinery, but it is very far from being "useless.

Computer engineers of today are likely to find that if they have a two-week holiday they may miss a crucial new development in computing. Similarly, those wishing to keep abreast of mechanical engineering in the late nineteenth century had little choice but to keep working at the coalface where knowledge was being sledge-hammered out of the rock of ignorance.

Let us reflect on the brief life of a bit

Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to 'simplify' and 'bring order to' my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS computers, and Actioneer for the early Palm.

The demise of Google Reader, if logical, is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days, in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

The American axe! It has made more real and lasting conquests than the sword of any warlike people that ever lived; but they have been conquests that have left civilization in their train instead of havoc and destruction…. A brief quarter of a century has seen these wonderful changes wrought; and at the bottom of them all lies this beautiful, well-prized, ready, and efficient implement, the American axe!

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?

Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.