Computer Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I can envision no device more capable of spreading ignorance and illiteracy than the computer. It is, I think, like the atom bomb, a naturally evolved engine of destruction, a sign, like the Tower of Babel, that civilization has run its course.

Anything unusual that you can produce has quadruple, quintuple the value, precisely because your opponent is likely to do the predictable stuff, which is on a computer.

Viswanathan Anand

Data is raw. It simply exists and has no significance beyond its existence (in and of itself). It can exist in any form, usable or not. It does not have meaning of itself. In computer parlance, a spreadsheet generally starts out by holding data.

Russell L. Ackoff

You, HP, promised me a toxic-free COMPUTER by 2009. Now my friends at Greenpeace tell me that I'll have to wait till 2011. What's up with that?

William Shatner

Today's toys contain computer chips, so they can move and talk; this stimulates the mind of your child. Notice I say "your child." MY child just wants to eat the toys.

We tend to think that the phenomenon of engineers and scientists being at the top of a company is something that started with Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak or Gary Kildal. But this just isn't the case. Even back in the days when IBM was the single most important computer company, it was possible for one of its engineers to escape and make an impact that disturbed even Big Blue.

Trees sprout up just about everywhere in computer science...

This new knowledge economy will rely heavily on knowledge workers.... the most striking growth will be in knowledge technologists: computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, manufacturing technologists, paralegals.... They are not, as a rule, much better paid than traditional skilled workers, but they see themselves as professionals. Just as unskilled manual workers in manufacturing were the dominant social and political force in the 20th century, knowledge technologists are likely to become the dominant social—-and perhaps also political—-force over the next decades.

Had there been a computer in 1872... it would probably have predicted that there would be so many horse-drawn vehicles that it would be impossible to clear up all the manure.

Karl William Kapp

Plainly it isn't an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn't always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on infinite loop, so that if at first you don't meet, you are drawn back together for another try.

In short, I suggest that the programmer should continue to understand what he is doing, that his growing product remains firmly within his intellectual grip. It is my sad experience that this suggestion is repulsive to the average experienced programmer, who clearly derives a major part of his professional excitement from not quite understanding what he is doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most undernourished psychological needs is the craving for Black Magic and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this need for the professional software engineer, who is secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks he takes in his daring irresponsibility. For his frustrations I have no remedy......

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.

There are several distinctive features of the way texts are written that combine to give the impression of novelty, but none of them is, in fact, linguistically novel. Many of them were being used in chatroom interactions that predated the arrival of mobile phones. Some can be found in pre-computer informal writing, dating back a hundred years or more.

If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

It is naïve to think that a [computer] model can predict future events on the Earth. To try to predict the future based on just one variable (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly.

On the properties of God: "Such a bandwidth! God, who may not have a brain made of neurons, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know."

Richard Dawkins

I don't own a computer, or a modem, or anything like that; I still work on a manual typewriter, by choice, and to those who consider me a Luddite I say: Fuck you and yo mama. I operate at the level of technology that best suits my needs. And I type at 120 words per minute — two fingers — I make no mistakes, and my manuscripts are real. You can pick them up and hold them. My typewriter doesn't dump its memory — I don't lose a book.

The Mandelbrot set is the modern development of a theory developed independently in 1918 by Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou. Julia wrote an enormous book — several hundred pages long — and was very hostile to his rival Fatou. That killed the subject for 60 years because nobody had a clue how to go beyond them. My uncle didn't know either, but he said it was the most beautiful problem imaginable and that it was a shame to neglect it. He insisted that it was important to learn Julia's work and he pushed me hard to understand how equations behave when you iterate them rather than solve them. At first, I couldn't find anything to say. But later, I decided a computer could take over where Julia had stopped 60 years previously.

Benoît Mandelbrot

Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer.

Leah Hager Cohen

Fighting wars is not so much about killing people as it is about finding things out. The more you know, the more likely you are to win a battle. Take the AEGIS system in the navy. It's a radar computer system for air-battle management. What it does is give the commander an extra 15 minutes to decide what he's going to do to fight a battle, and those 15 minutes are decisively important.

I want to be sitting in front of my computer, where you can press a button to block out your junk mail. These two are my junk mail.

Melina Marchetta

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too.

Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa.

When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.