Our Favorite Technology Quotations 

  • The telephone wire, as we know it, has become too slow and too small to handle Internet traffic. 
  • It took 75 years for telephones to be used by 50 million customers, but it took only four years for the Internet to reach that many users. – Lori Valigra 
  • 640K ought to be enough for anybody. – Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, 1981 
  • The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. – B. F. Skinner 
  • Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done. – Andy Rooney 
  • I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. – IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943 
  • If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done. – Scott Adams 
  • In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it. – Anonymous 
  • If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee. That will do them in. – Bradley’s Bromide 
  • There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence. – Jeremy S. Anderson 
  • One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. – Elbert Hubbard 
  •  Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer, deserves to be. – David Thornburg 
  • Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software. – Anonymous 
  • We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. – Carl Sagan 
  • If you tried to read every document on the web, then for each day’s effort you would be a year further behind in your goal. – Anonymous 
  • There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new – and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them. – Margaret Thatcher 
  • The last good thing written in C++ was the Pachelbel Canon. – Jerry Olson 
  • The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there’s no law against whacking them around a little. – Porterfield 
  • Everything that can be invented has been invented. – Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899 
  • Any science or technology which is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke 
  • Never let a computer know you’re in a hurry. – Anonymous 
  • A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. – Alan J. Perlis 

It continues

  • I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison
  • Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we’re not going to buy your product. – Joe Keenan, President of Atari, in 1976 responding to Steve Jobs’ offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak developed
  • The Internet is a great way to get on the net. – Senator Bob Dole 
  • Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons. – Popular Mechanics, 1949 
  • From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it. – Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, US Navy 
  • Technology is like fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes. – Andrew Heller, IBM 
  • AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive. – Jan Horsfall, VP of marketing for Lycos 
  •  How could this be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft? – Al Gore on Y2K 
  • The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent. – Sydney Brenner in 1927 
  • There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. – Ken Olson (President of Digital Equipment Corporation) at the Convention of the World Future Society in Boston in 1977 
  • During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. – Al Gore describing his 1986 legislation to interconnect five supercomputer centers (17 years after the first Internet servers hooked up) 
  • If Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell-check. – Former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle 
  • The day I made that statement, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder. – Al Gore attempting damage control.