Quotes About Progress

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.

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

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

By 1990 the Arpanet was history.

The Arpanet was up and running for real

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

directors of IPTO itself: J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Larry Roberts.

Project Lincoln—or Lincoln Laboratory, as it was renamed in 1952—they sound a lot like veterans of the Manhattan Project, or the Radiation Lab, or even the Apollo moon program of the 1960s.

There had never before been a machine that was this much in front of the competition. And never since. It was a singular event.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

the inventor of general-purpose computer "time-sharing," a technique that let individual users interact with batch-processing behemoths in a way that looked very much like present-day personal computing.

My normal cycle for movies is eighteen months and each part is separate.

Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial antidepressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac to prevent mental caries.

To innovate does not necessarily mean to expand; very often it means to simplify.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain, forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.

Stories abound of Waters confirming black and white children together in the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Raleigh, of his insisting on having white and black acolytes at masses at which he presided, and of his requiring the diocesan newspaper to cover the activities of black Catholics and their parishes with as much interest as they covered those of white Catholics in the diocese.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." —Søren Kierkegaard

Reward does more than make us work more effectively together—it stimulates creativity too. Reward, not necessity, is the true mother of invention.

She only sends us challenges when we're not growing fast enough," Vasiht'h said. "So let's just say that we're making up for centuries of stagnation.