Computers

"Where a calculator like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1½ tons."

"Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend."

"This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right."

"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — theres the real danger."

"Starting when computer technology first emerged during World War II and continuing into the 1960s, women made up most of the computing workforce. By 1970, however, women only accounted for 13.6% of bachelors in computer science graduates. In 1984 that number rose to 37%, but it has since declined to 18% -- around the same time personal computers started showing up in homes. According to NPR, personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to men and families were more likely to buy computers for boys than girls."

"If you dont know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result."

"Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind."

"I have bought this wonderful machine- a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine- it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy."

"It makes sense to examine Plato and pottery together in order to understand the Greek world, Descartes and the mechanical clock together in order to understand Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same way, it makes sense to regard the computer as a technological paradigm for the science, the philosophy, even the art of the coming generation."

"So computers are tools of the devil?" thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasnt him."

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"...I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

"The computer was a fairly new thing in 1971, and most people were not well acquainted with it. There was only one five-week course in programming at Carleton. I had taken the class when I was a junior, and the next trimester, I was recruited to be a lab assistant to help other students who were taking the course. I was fascinated by the power of the computer to not only calculate, but also to interact with written language. I had been thinking about writing a program to interact with a human through language, but the content of such a program remained a mystery to me."