#computers

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation. Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#humor #programming #humor

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#accounts #actually #computers #email #few

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#eventually #get #journalists #kill #middle-class

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago. ↗

— Kevin Mitnick

#ago #computers #easier #get #hack

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface. ↗

— David Mamet

#altogether #appear #bad #bad thing #believed

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do. ↗

— Ted Nelson

#about #bad #bad news #good #good news

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. ↗

— Tim O'Reilly

#data #entering #important #may #more

When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment. ↗

— Frank Press

#computers #equipment #first #started #tried

Interactive computers and software will, I think, provide a less costly method of doing some kinds of inquiry, in knowledge acquisition and even reasoning and interaction. ↗

— Roy Romer

#computers #costly #doing #even #i

Our lives sometimes depend on computers performing as predicted. ↗

— Philip Emeagwali

#depend #lives #our #our lives #performing