Technology is ruled by two types of people: those who manage what they do not understand, and those who understand what they do not manage.
Computers Quotes
Computers make it easy to do a lot of things, but most of the things that make it easier to do don’t need to be done.
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null,and darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM was moving over the face of the market. And DEC said, “Let there be registers”; and there were registers. And DEC saw that they carried; and DEC separated the […]
Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debuging Monday’s code.
Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
All a computer does is tell a consistent story: a consistent truth or, if the programmer’s guesses are unlikely, a consistent fiction.
We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer.
The computer is more than a tool, it is a medium. Just as the typeface standardised information -changing us from a society where information was at the mercy of monks busy with hand-copying into a fact-loving society where non-fiction outsells fiction -so the computer will change the way we look at the world.
It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values – the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there’s something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an […]
