Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
Computers Quotes
All a computer does is tell a consistent story: a consistent truth or, if the programmer’s guesses are unlikely, a consistent fiction.
We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
The Christian notion of the possibility of redemption is incomprehensible to the computer.
The computer is more than a tool, it is a medium. Just as the typeface standardised information -changing us from a society where information was at the mercy of monks busy with hand-copying into a fact-loving society where non-fiction outsells fiction -so the computer will change the way we look at the world.
It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values – the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there’s something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an […]
There won’t be schools in the future. I think that the computer will blow up the school.
Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
It’s easy to cry ‘bug’ when the truth is that you’ve got a complex system and sometimes it takes a while to get all the components to co-exist peacefully.
As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
