“In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.”

The result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.

Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet

A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.

Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.

Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation.

This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

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.

I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

My computer’s memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.

Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me.

Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true.

Run for your lives-the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces.

Computers no longer interface with humans–they interact, and the interaction will become steadily deeper, more subtle, and more crucial to our collective sanity and ultimate survival.