IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.
You could say I was too lazy to calculate, so I invented the computer.
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.
It's pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and very complex to where they're a tool of everyday life.
I used to collect computer punch cards from the data centers.
Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.
Computing technology started out as number-crunching.
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.
I was born in Tamil Nadu. I built HCL in UP. The first computers of the world were built in UP, and the UP government has supported us all through.
When I started at Microsoft, I was lucky enough to be part of the rise of the client-server paradigm.
There were no PCs when I started programming on computers.
I think Apple's revenge is just the fact that Windows, you know, PCs all became Macintoshes in a way.
There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer.
The whole thought of a career with computers - given that hardly anybody even knew what they were - it wasn't even a concept.
First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
UNIVAC: a device, which contained 20,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,500 square feet and weighed 40 tons; there was also a laptop version weighing 27 tons.
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.
In 1966 I became president of the British Computer Society.
Then after that came word processors and it's hard to make those laugh.
Even before the world had any cognizance of India as an economy, HCL had made a mark with its microprocessor in the '80s. HCL pioneered modern computing.
There's been a big evolution since the days of personal computing. People had a concept of one computing device per family or maybe per person. We've clearly evolved to computing devices becoming more personal.
Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.
One of the things that's interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.
Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.
We didn't know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there.
