The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.