Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.
I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
I do think that deciding between a particular discovery and a technological breakthrough - I would always think the impact is probably much larger for the technological breakthrough.
We are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet.
I started out with a dream to make a star in a jar, and I ended up ... making things that I think can change the world.
The Internet, like the steam engine, is a technological breakthrough that changed the world.
A basic truth that the history of the creation of the transistor reveals is that the foundations of transistor electronics were created by making errors and following hunches that failed to give what was expected.
I think AMD is at our best when we're working with a customer and allowing them to do something they couldn't do before.
The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I'd been up all night inventing the Camcorder.
In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design.
There was a magical breakthrough when the computer became cheap and we could see that everyone could afford a computer.
There is a material advancement; we desire it. There is, also, a moral grandeur; we hold fast to it.
One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage.
Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction.
The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.
We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.
An invention that is quickly accepted will turn out to be a rather trivial alteration of something that has already existed.
It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.
Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.
If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.
Coolidge and his treasury secretary Mellon loved new technology. Like JFK, C.C. divined that a new technology could lift the nation out of its doldrums; the only difference was that JFK's new technology was space travel, and Coolidge's travel by airplane.
The technological breakthrough of the World Wide Web has been enormously beneficial to society.
If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers.
The tech genie is out of the bottle; you can't put it back in.
