Quotes About Progress

Fred Terman, un antiguo estudiante de doctorado de Vannevar Bush en el MIT que después sería decano de ingeniería de la Universidad de Stanford

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything

Taylor recalled that he ran into a brick wall every time he tried to deal with the suits back east. As the head of a Xerox research facility in Webster, New York, explained to him, "The computer will never be as important to society as the copier."73

The people who were comfortable at this humanities-technology intersection helped to create the human-machine symbiosis that is at the core of this story.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MACS Setting Apple Apart

The idea of a personal computer, one that ordinary individuals could get their hands on and take home, was envisioned in 1945 by Vannevar Bush.

La conciencia pública es un componente importante de la innovación.

I can't see any reason that anyone would want a computer of his own," DEC president Ken Olsen declared at a May 1974 meeting

The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever.

Advances in science when put to practical use mean more jobs, higher wages, shorter hours, more abundant crops, more leisure for recreation, for study, for learning how to live without the deadening drudgery which has been the burden of the common man for past ages."9

Engelbart showed, back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.

inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology

Computer innovators, like other pioneers, can find themselves left behind if they get stuck in their ways.

create a new standard takes not just making something that's a little bit different, it takes something that's really new and captures people's imagination.

rock—Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era.

As he approached his thirtieth birthday, Leonardo had established his genius but had remarkably little to show for it publicly. His only known artistic accomplishments were some brilliant but peripheral contributions to two Verrocchio paintings, a couple of devotional Madonnas that were hard to distinguish from others being produced in the workshop, a portrait of a young woman that he had not delivered, and two unfinished would-be masterpieces.

He didn't invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future. He

The little device that finally created a connection between home computers and global networks was called a modem.

In the seventy years since von Neumann effectively placed his "Draft Report" on the EDVAC into the public domain, the trend for computers has been, with a few notable exceptions, toward a more proprietary approach. In 2011 a milestone was reached: Apple and Google spent more on lawsuits and payments involving patents than they did on research and development of new products.64

The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.

Embrace uncertainty," the ads read.

Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn't want to. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year," he noted. "There is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least ten years.