Quotes
Quotes about Computer
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.
The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.
The NeXT Computer: The hardware makes it a PC, the software makes it a workstation, the unit sales makes it a mainframe.
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing.
All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Want to make your computer go really fast? Throw it out a window.
In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately, Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer, you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers [on the Net] by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history--with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none dare criticize it.
Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration.
FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I --'the fatal disease'-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
Globalization, as defined by rich people like us, is a very nice thing... you are talking about the Internet, you are talking about cell phones, you are talking about computers. This doesn't affect two-thirds of the people of the world.
People in the computer industry use the term 'user,' which to them means 'idiot.'.
The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
