Quotes About Progress

History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.

A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.

When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history's basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of "trends" that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC's creed: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."60

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.

People don't invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.

Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.

freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!' " he japed in 1951.

There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution

He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history.

Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together

Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought," Wiener wrote. "This is not the case."14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

Public awareness is an important component of innovation.

In other words, the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers.

A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground. Instead of having a single cause, the great advances of 1937 came from a combination of capabilities, ideas, and needs that coincided in multiple places.

By 2001 Apple had revived its personal computer offerings. It was now time to think different. A set of new possibilities topped the what-next list on his whiteboard that year.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year