Charles Petzold Quotes

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday

I started out with machine code and assembly language.

Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven

In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.

I felt more like a scientist exploring nature, and Windows was my environment. You dont pass judgment on nature; you just explain how it works.

You probably don't have much of a choice.

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

Free lunches don't come cheap.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick

Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always.

NOP stands for (and is pronounced) no op, as in no operation. The NOP causes the processor to do absolutely nothing. What's it good for? Filling space. The 8080 can usually execute a bunch of NOP instructions without anything bad happening