Personal Computer Quotes

I often think about the many remarkable things that my personal computer can do which I never ask it to do. I probably use a small fraction of its capabilities. I often wonder if the same dynamic occurs with our capacity for creativity.

I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.

I've been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year - almost 20 years ago - I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

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.

The term, information at your fingertips, is to remind people what a broad role the personal computer will be playing. It's not a computation device, it's not a word processing or a spreadsheet device. It's a window onto the world of information.

I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer.

The most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer... I even knew not to get married until later because I was so obsessed with it. That's my life's work.

I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.

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

The PC is the LSD of the '90s.

This is a very exciting time in the world of information. It's not just that the personal computer has come along as a great tool. The whole pace of business is moving faster. Globalization is forcing companies to do things in new ways.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

I left Apple in April of 1984, pretty soon after the introduction of the Mac.

I think that the health care industry is so complex that it doesn't necessarily start with a single killer app. You go back to the early days of the personal computer - when I joined the industry, we really didn't know what the killer app was going to be.

E-mail is the most influential application ever to appear on a personal computer, and it remains sadly deficient.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.

When I was finishing grad school, the hot new PC was the IBM 286. Bulky. Immobile. Expensive. I touched-typed easily and quickly, but nevertheless, I realized that the machine was a chain.

If I were a 13-year-old and I wanted to create subversive art, I wouldn't go out and buy an electric guitar. I'd get myself a personal computer.

Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you - and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.

A smartphone is a mobile computer in your pocket.

I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.