Quotes About Computers

There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write-words.

At the age of 5, when I was in kindergarten, I often used to pass by the computer labs and see students doing work on computers. I realized that calculation, which would take us a long time to do, can be done in less than a second with the help of computers. So that is how my interest in computers began.

It's a very special generation, because during our careers the computer entered chess. So we know how to play without computers, which is also important. We can analyse without computers. I am not saying that younger players cannot do this, but we are more in the habit of doing this. That's important to improve your chess understanding.

Computers are scary. Theyre nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

Every computer divides itself into its hardware and its software, the machine host to its algorithm, the human being to his mind. It is hardly surprising that men and women have done what computers now do long before computers could do anything at all. The dissociation between mind and matter in men and machines is very striking; it suggests that almost any stable and reliable organization of material objects can execute an algorithm and so come to command some form of intelligence.

Computers are only capable of a certain kind of randomness because computers are finite devices.

Back then, the entire Internet consisted of two slow, boxcar-sized UNIVAC computers about 50 feet apart, connected by a wire. It would take one of these computers an entire day to send an email to the other one, which would immediately delete it, because it was a Viagra ad.

One of the big challenges I've thought about in making record is that the role of computers has become so inescapable and computers offer so many possibilities for creativity, but they also make you lazy.

There has been a great proliferation of lawyers in the pat 20 years, just as there has been a proliferation of computers. But unlike computers, lawyers do not get twice as intelligent and half as expensive every two years.

Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.

What a lot of people don't know, because in a lot of TV and movies, they have a lot of men talking about computers - it was a woman who invented the first compiler!

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

I like computers. I like the Internet. It's a tool that can be used. But don't be misled into thinking that these technologies are anything other than aspects of a degenerate economic system.

Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.

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.

The security of computers and the Internet is a horrible and dangerous mess. Every week we hear about breaches of databases of Social Security numbers and financial information and health records, and about critical infrastructure being insecure.

We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often "crash" when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I'm sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for "productivity"

I'm not afraid of computers taking over the world. They're just sitting there. I can hit them with a two by four.

We're progressing on a lot of fronts, but on the aspect of your responsibility - just the very basics of how we treat each other - before we learn mathematics and computers and science in school, and languages and all of this, the basis of it: What is it to be a human? What responsibility do you have?

Look at what Silicon Valley has done - the advance of computers.

Kids absolutely not reading. I think it's because they're so screen-oriented [TVs, computers, smartphones]. They do read - girls in particular read a lot. They have a tendency to go toward the paranormal, romances, Twilight and stuff like that. And then it starts to taper off because other things take precedence, like the Kardashian sisters.

I'm not very technically minded. I mean, I don't know how to do e-mail on computers.

Learning how to code and program computers when I was a kid was one of the best choices I made growing up. By writing code, I learned how to bring my dreams to life, how to budget, and how to build stuff. Whatever path you choose in life - being an artist, an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher, or even a politician, you will give yourself a huge leg up if you learn how to code.

There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.

The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.

As we build systems that are more and more complex, we make more and more subtle but very high-impact mistakes. As we use computers for more things and as we build more complex systems, this problem of unreliability and insecurity is actually getting worse, with no real sign of abating anytime soon.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile.

As Walt Whitman correctly surmised, we are large and we harbor multitudes within us. And those multitudes are locked in chronic battle. There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior. As a result, you can accomplish the strange feats of arguing with yourself, cursing at yourself, and cajoling yourself to do something - feats that modern computers simply do not do.

It's a bug that cars were invented before computers.

You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

Without computers we will be stuck only proving theorems that have short proofs.

Technology evangelism has always been my passion since I learned how to use computers.

I have some rhythms on my computers, that are actually called "trance", they go from 1-30 or 40. They're grooves that come on the synth. If I could somehow use them, I would.

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning".

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

Editing can alter the original meaning and context, and computers can alter the image itself. The camera can also be manipulated. At the very least, it must be turned in one direction - only one direction at a time ... Who chooses what direction to point the camera, and why?

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.

I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It's like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping, where they would fill the memory with one task, do it and get it out.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

Go into the auto mechanic, youve got to know computers to be able to work on the cars.

Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science.

It used to be the program's purpose to instruct our computers; it became the computer's purpose to execute our programs.

You look at these past predictions like there's only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it's not a good idea to predict too far into the future.