Computer History Quotes

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, 'Thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.' Thousands of people.

One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.

I used to collect computer punch cards from the data centers.

With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs.

You have to think back to the '90s. The computer was this terrible-looking thing that was trying to compete with the television. And it was this idea of email and chat rooms and this kind of stuff that first people - got people there.

Windows 95 is what Rube Goldberg would have designed if he'd studied cartooning at M.I.T.

I'm a computer guy, and one of the things I did with the good fortune that 'Presumed Innocent' brought me was to buy one of the very first laptop computers. It weighed about eight and a half pounds, by the way.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

The reason I'm an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn't wait for the Powerbook.

Windows 95 had its 20th anniversary last year, so we got our hands on an old system and showed it to teenagers who were not even alive in 1995. The results were pretty great and also makes you feel quite old.

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

I started with CB radio, ham radio, and eventually went into computers. And I was just fascinated with it. And back then, when I was in school, computer hacking was encouraged. It was an encouraged activity. In fact, I remember one of the projects my teacher gave me was writing a log-in simulator.

Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.

Right at the start, when I was about 13 or 14, I only had an Amiga 500 Plus running a bit of tracker software called OctaMED. My brother was big into his computers, and when he moved up to a proper PC, I took charge of the Amiga.

The whole thought of a career with computers - given that hardly anybody even knew what they were - it wasn't even a concept.

Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon.

Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.

Manchester has always been a massively innovative city, loads of great scientific findings have come from Manchester. The first computer in the world was there and took up a whole building. So Manchester has always been very innovative.

Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.

I'm really interested in the current tech world because of my brother Michael. Since we were little kids, in the 1970s, he was dealing with the first computers. He works for the government.