Quotations: Computers

If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.
Harold Abelson

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
Anon

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.
Anon

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.
Anon

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Isaac Asimov

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is completely programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Isaac Asimov

We are reaching the stage where the problems we must solve are going to become insoluble without computers. I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them.
Isaac Asimov

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.
Bernard Avishai

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
J. G. Ballard

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.
Dave Barry

And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople Get Ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report.
Dave Barry

If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee -- that will do them in.
Bradley's Bromide

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
Joseph Campbell

If True computer music were ever written, it would only be listened to by other computers.
Michael Crichton

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.
Quentin Crisp

Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Professor Edsger Dijkstra

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
Sydney J. Harris

If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but . . .to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel.
Grace Murray Hopper

If I had to sum up in one word what makes a good manager, I'd say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act.
Lee Iacocca

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don't add up.
James Magary

Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers.
Edward Shepherd Mead

What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around Japanese computers?
Walter F. Mondale

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso

Steve Wozniak couldn't get Hewlett-Packard to take an interest in small computers. He very reluctantly left to join Steve Jobs, who couldn't sell a similar idea to Atari. They formed Apple Computers.
Gifford Pinchot III

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
Jeff Raskin

They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.
Janet Reno,

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.
Andy Rooney

Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
Martin Schulze

Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
Bruce Sterling

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.
Alvin Toffler

You have riches and freedom here but I feel no sense of faith or direction. You have so many computers, why don't you use them in the search for love?
Lech Walesa

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson (former chairman of IBM)

The trouble with computers, of course, is that they're very sophisticated idiots.
Doctor Who