Annalee Newitz Quotes

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

One of the coolest days of my life was when I bought a 16K memory card upgrade and stuck it in my Apple II. I was kind of a geek.

I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem.

I just really love building chips.

My colleagues and I were engineers who worked for DCM's calculator division. These electronic calculators used digital integrated circuits, and then they started using chips. The advanced versions of those chips were used for programmable calculators, which were the forerunners of PCs.

The only thing that was in my mind when we made that first phone call was, 'Is it going to work?' We had all these parts hand soldered together, engineers standing by with the soldering iron - just in case.

I don't have a computer. I never have had one.

Electronics are getting more and more accessible now - you don't have to be an engineer to start building things.

I decided to design and build my own stereo amplifier system at age 13.

The PC is going to become one key product in an ever-expanding array of products.

I built computers and stuff when I was a teenager and whatever.

I got my first computer at the age of 6. To me, it was magic. By the time I was 12, I wanted to know the secrets behind the wizardry, and that started my journey toward computer programming. This was the early 1990s, when computers weren't built for the mass market.

I am amused when somebody tries to illustrate the first email using a modern keyboard and a finger reaching for the '2' key. Wrong key! The @ was on the 'P' key.

The PC is an important part of our business and will continue to be for a long, long time.

When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because I knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family's Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.

The IIc was Apple's first crack at a 'portable' computer, which it sort of was if you didn't mind a 7.5 pound weight, plus monitor, external floppy drive, and all the cables.

We have Windows 8 machines for our office. All of our staff have Windows phones. Some have desktops. We have a couple of folks who are using a Surface. I use a Surface.

The job was to put into a, a computer with only 4K of memory an entire basic full blown, floating point Basic and that's one of the greatest programming feats I've ever had a chance to work on.

My programming language was solder.

There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.

I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.

You hear these stories about people who take apart their radio and put it back. Or just learn a lot from taking it apart. But I wasn't as into that stuff as I was just into how computer programs work.

Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.

It was not so very long ago that people thought that semiconductors were part-time orchestra leaders and microchips were very small snack foods.