“The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.”

Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.

The greatest single programming language ever designed

In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.

People are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.

If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.

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.

I’m a very simple man. You’ve got to have, like, a computer nowadays to turn the TV on and off… and the nightmare continues.

Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas.

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

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go.

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed – it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer.

Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan.

I don’t even know which end of a computer one is supposed to gaze into. I’ve never used a computer.