Computers and Computing
-----------------------


THE PAST:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment, 1977

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"But what ... is it good for?"
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM,
1968, commenting on the microchip.

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked
with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a
fad that won't last out the year."
The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible
to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with
such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."
John von Neumann (ca. 1949)

"Contrasting this modest effort [of Seymour Cray in his laboratory to build
the CDC 6600] with 34 people including the janitor with our vast development
activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership
position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer."
Thomas J. Watson, IBM President, 1965

"It seems Mr. Watson has answered his own question."
Seymour Cray

"This is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's
[IBM's] Galaxy-wide success is founded... their fundamental design flaws are
completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
TH Nelson, Computer Lib., 1988, London: Penguin.


GENERAL QUOTATIONS:

"Computer viruses are an urban myth... "
Peter Norton

"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
Isaac Asimov

"Our computer has never had an undetected error."
Weisert

"The computing field is always in need of new cliches."
Alan Perlis


"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
Pablo Picasso

"Want to make your computer go really fast? Throw it out the window."
Unknown

"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer."
Farmers' Almanac, 1978

"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature."
Kulawiec

"Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."
G. Hopper

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes."
Professor Edsger Dijkstra

"If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee --
that will do them in."
Bradley's Bromide

"Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the
ones in movies"
Bill Bulko

"No matter how fast your computer system runs, you will eventually come to
think of it as slow."
Unknown

"As the people here grow colder, I turn to my computer, and spend my
evenings with it, like a friend... "
Kate Bush, "Deeper Understanding"

"I just found out that the brain is like a computer. If that's true, then
there really aren't any stupid people. Just people running DOS."

"There are two major products to come out of Berekley: LSD and UNIX.
We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
Unknown

"Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things
in the world that just don't add up."
James Magary

"In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would
have taken many men many months to equal it."
Unknown

"Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they
make it easier to do don't need to be done."
Andy Rooney

"The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as
smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway."
Bernard Avishai

"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that
men will begin to think like machines."
Sydney G. Harris

"In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse.
It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late."
Bruce Sterling

"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they
foul up there's no law against wacking them around a little."
Porterfield

"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way.
This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining."
Jeff Raskin

"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."
Nathaniel Borenstein

"At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the
computer."
Unknown

"If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But this
garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow
enobled and none dare criticize it."
Unknown

"Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana."
Example of why it is difficult to get computers to understand human speech.

"Where did you put it?"
"Put what?"
"You know?"
"Where do you think?"
"Oh."
Nicholas Negroponte Director of the MIT Media Lab stating his ideal model
of human-computer interaction

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
C.A.R. Hoare

"I have a friend who told me that the greatest computer system ever built
by mankind was by the Druids at Stonehenge. Well, that's an old story.
But what I like was that he felt that the Druids didn't die out, they
just went bankrupt trying to debug the software."
James Finkle

"It's a well known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were
invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use
of a common computer protocol occured in the Old Testament. This, of course,
was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea... "
Tom Galloway

"I have a cat named Trash. In the current political climate it would seem
that if I were trying to sell him (at least to a Computer Scientist), I
would not stress that he is gentle to humans and is self-sufficient, living
mostly on field mice. Rather, I would argue that he is object-oriented."
Roger King

"pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays.
The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the
sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the
trolls in the marketing department."
Jeff Meyer

"If EasyFlow doesn't work: tough. If you lose millions because
EasyFlow messes up, it's you that's out the millions, not us. If
you don't like this disclaimer: tough. We reserve the right to do
the absolute minimum provided by law, up to and including nothing.
This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software
packages, but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese.
We didn't want to include any disclaimer at all, but our lawyers insisted."
Disclaimer from Haventree Softwares's Easy Flow package

"An old puzzle asks how a barometer can be used to measure the height of a
building. Answers range from dropping the instrument from the top and
measuring the time of its fall to giving it to the building's superintendent
in return for a look at the plans. A modern version of the puzzle asks how
a personal computer can balance a checkbook. An elegant solution is to sell
the machine and deposit the money."
Jon Bentley

"The modern computer is capable of answering, in a matter of seconds,
mathematical questions that would take millions of years for a human being
to answer (even longer if he stopped for lunch). How does the computer do
this? Simple. It makes everything up. It knows full well you're not going
to waste millions of years checking up on it. So you should never use
computers for anything really important, such as balancing your personal
checkbook. But they're fine for corporate use."
Unknown


THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY:

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
John Gilmore

"Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read."
Button from the Computer Museum, Boston, MA

"Usenet isn't a right. It's a right, a left, and a swift uppercut
to the jaw."
Button from the Computer Museum, Boston, MA

"EMAIL - when it absolutely positively has to get lost at the speed
of light."
Unknown

"While modern technology has given people powerful new communication
tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many
people have nothing useful to say."
Lee Gomes, San Jose Mercury News

"The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people
it is a complete substitute for life."
Andrew Brown

"There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's
brain death, and there's being off the network."
Guy Almes

"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."
Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update

"The world communications net, the all-involving linkage of electric
circuitry, will grow and become more sensitive. It will also develop new
modes of feedback so that communication can become dialogue instead of
monologue. It will breach the wall between "in" and "out" of school. It
will join all people everywhere."
Marshall McLuhan, Learning in the Global Village, 1969

"The skeptic may be pardoned for thinking that hypertext encourages
irrelevance. What the user can end up with is little more than a series
of footnotes, marginalia, and "see also" references -- items that have
historically been relegated to second-class citizenship in the good old
book format, with the added benefit of not having to stare at a lousy
screen display to read them... Indeed, when you boil it down to its
rudiments, hypertext seems to make one major claim: it makes computers work
almost as well as books."
Stephen Manes


SHORT THOUGHTS:

A Big Mac, french fries and a large Coke!
A Macintosh a day keeps Apple Happy and Rich!
A supercomputer is a machine, that runs an endless loop in just 2 seconds.
Any given program will expand to fill available memory.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.
"Bother," said Pooh, as he deleted UNIX from his machine.
But honey, I wouldn't be up so late on a faster machine!
Buy a Mac. It can do SOMETHING right.
Chernobyl used MACs.
Compassion -- that's the one thing no machine ever had.
Complexity of a Mac user:- The number of buttons on the mouse.
Computers aren't intelligent, they only think they are.
Data convinces the Coke machine that Pepsi is better.
Data convinces the Pepsi machine that Coke is better!
DOS is to OS/2 as a bicycle is to a Mack Truck.
EMACS: "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping"
Go not to the machines for counsel, for they will say both 0 and 1.
God is real, unless declared integer.
God made machine language; all the rest is the work of man.
Help Me Macro Through the Night.
How can you respect a machine controlled by a mouse?
IBM: Its Better Manually
IBM: Its Being Mended
IBM: Intercourse Beats Masturbation
IBM: Intimidation By Marketing
IBM: Itty Bitty Machines
IBM: Ishoulda Boughta Mac
IBM: It's Broken Man
IBM: Industry's Biggest Menace
IBM: Intellectually Benign Machine
IBM: Inferiorly Built Machine
IBM: I befriended Microsoft (remember 1980?)
IBM: I'd Buy Macintosh
BMI: Business Machines International (computers for dyslexics)
I didn't write this; a very complex macro did.
I want my data back, machine, and I want it now!
If a train station is where the train stops, what's a work station?
Intel: Putting the "backward" in "backward compatible".
Its only a macro, only a macro, only a macro...
Just a 2 bit programmer on a 32 bit machine.
Let the machine do the dirty work (Elements of Programming Style).
Linux* IS user friendly, it's just not very promiscuous about whom it's
user friendly WITH.
Lord, give me strength to turn this machine off.
Macintosh: Machine Always Crashes If Not OS Hangs
Macintosh error message: "Like, dude, something went wrong."
Macintosh, adj. The excuse for not wanting to learn computing.
Macintosh: The etch-a-sketch you don't have to shake to clear the screen!
Macintosh: Computer With Training Wheels You Can't Remove
Machine Coders do it in bytes.
Machine independent code isn't.
Machine language programmers do it very fast.
Machine-independent: Does not run on any existing machine.
Macho Programmers Use Edlin.
Macro? Is that short for Macaroni?
"Macros will do that to you deary....."
Modem - Monumentally Overpriced Data Eating Machine
"Newton: A pocket-sized Machine That Goes Ping!"
Real programs don't eat cache.
The nice thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from.
The only good Mac is a big Mac!
"To err is human, to really screw up requires a Mac."
Unix: When you can't afford the very best.
"What a depressingly stupid machine," said Marvin and trudged away.
Windows 3 - the MAC for the rest of us!


PROGRAMMING:

"Fast, fat computers breed slow, lazy programmers."
Robert Hummel

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it."
Donald Knuth

"Programming just with goto's is like swatting flies with a sledgehammer."
Unknown

"There are two ways to write error-free programs. Only the third one works."
Unknown

"A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in
God."
Unknown

"It's hard to make a program foolproof because fools are so ingenious."
Unknown

"There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least
bit difficult to write bad programs."
Unknown

"If debugging is the art of removing bugs, then programming must be the art
of inserting them."
Unknown

"You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on
the continuing viability of Fortran."
Alan Perlis

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to
build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying
to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
Rich Cook

"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language
will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good
name and now I am looking for a suitable language."
D. E. Knuth

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offense."
Professor Edsger Dijkstra

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that
have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally
mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
Professor Edsger Dijkstra

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it
wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to
be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a
large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding
mistakes in my own programs."
Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

Real Programmers don't write in COBOL. COBOL is for wimpy applications
programmers.

Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and
crystallography weenies.

Real Programmers don't write in PASCAL, or BLISS, or ADA, or any of
those pinko computer science languages. Strong typing is for people with
weak memories.

Real Programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should
be hard to understand.

Real Programmers don't write specs -- users should consider themselves
lucky to get any programs at all and take what they get.

Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires you to
change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers wear their
climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the
middle of the machine room.


THE MANUALS:

"Do not expose your LaserWriter to fire or intense heat."
Apple LaserWriter manual

"Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and
when it is bad, it is better than nothing."
Dick Brandon


"This document describes the usage and input syntax of the Unix Vax-11
assembler As. As is designed for assembling code produced by the "C"
compiler; certain concessions have been made to handle code written
directly by people, but in general little sympathy has been extended."
Berkeley Vax/Unix Assembler Reference Manual (1983)

"Now that we have all this useful information, it would be nice to do
something with it. (Actually, it can be emotionally fulfilling just to
get the information. This is usually only true, however, if you have
the social life of a kumquat.)"
Unix Programmer's Manual

"All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that
the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if
you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means,
do not use a hammer."
IBM maintenance manual, 1925

"Program -- A set of instructions, given to the computer, describing
the sequence of steps the computer performs in order to accomplish a
specific task. The task must be specific, such as balancing your
checkbook or editing your text. A general task, such as working for
world peace, is something we can all do, but not something we can
currently write programs to do."
From Unix User's Manual Manual, Supplementary Documents, p. 14-3:


Copyright: Kevin Harris 1995 (may be freely distributed with this
acknowledgement)