Technology Quotes

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.

Yesterday it worked Today it is not working Windows is like that

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind -- mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

It would take a lot of time and effort (to repair the computers). And they can't run (programs and games) kids are interested in today. They're not even on the Internet. We wouldn't be offering them much of a carrot.

Technology favors horrible people.

The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the down side is some of the things... for real fans to go on and see that 90 percent of the information isn't true or to see pictures that aren't really me, or for them to be able to sell these things, that's one of the down sides, I think.

Customers are still setting the technology agenda. Not just you, our customers, but your customers as well. What more and more are telling you is what kind of services they need, and how and when they want those services delivered to them. And in fact, that is just the beginning.

The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid. It’s up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them.

No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved.

I want people to understand the amazing, positive way our software can make leisure time more enjoyable, and work and businesses more successful.

Windows 95: It's like upgrading from Reagan to Bush.

That can be a good tax planning tool for small businesses - especially if you get a computer or something that you were planning to buy (in the coming year anyway).

Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things.

Every operating system out there is about equal… We all suck.

Not until a program has been in production for at least six months will its most harmful error be discovered.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.

AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive.

The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.

When music technology takes the place of musicianship, it's time to pull the plug.

The Internet? Is that thing still around?

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.