30 Tech Quotes

The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.

A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

'Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going on while IP was being designed.' (2000)

'personally i prefer the MX RR and a stylized name, but i was trying to solve the problem rather than create an industry.' (2004)

'Being obscure in acronyms is great. I think I'll start making up my own... INYM - I'm Not Your Momma.' (2005)

The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice.

All this is conventional, except for the projection forward of present-day mechanisms and gadgetry. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement

Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities - a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at - plain to the sight but sealed like an egg - is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.

He worked quietly for years as keeper of the RFCs and final arbiter in technical matters when consensus couldn't be reached. Postel believed that decisions he had made in the course of his work over the years had been for the good of the community and that starting a company to profit from those activities would have amounted to a violation of public trust.

I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.

At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.

Like most artists who have made an invention of some kind, he tends to overplay the significance of his own and goes on about it as though it were a Rosetta Stone, with whose help all representation can be rescued from one-eyed falsehood.

(from the CD of the tour) Because your appliances are now talking to each other...about you. You don't wanna be three o'clock in the morning going, 'Yes, refrigerator, open please.' (as the refrigerator) 'No, Robin, I've talked to the scale and your ass is huge.' (as himself) 'Refrigerator, Haagen-Dazs, override, code 3.0?' (as the refrigerator) 'No, Robin, 'til you've logged 2.2 hours on the treadmoil.' The 'treadmoil,' which is a really hard thing - That's where you can actually run and be circumcised!! Wow! There's a product for the Jewish man on the go! A treadmoil! Can you believe it?! I'm losing weight and losing my foreskin at the same time!! Call now for Peal's Pocket Treadmoil!

Dale Luck looked like your average off the street homeless hippy with long hair and was pretty laid back.

I spent this time polishing up the software/hardware documentation, renaming registers to be more meaningful. This was actually time well spent in my life.

For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier...I put them in the same room and let them fight it out...then I put wax in the humidifier...now my room's all shiny.

I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within-oh five or six years people were complaining.

Microsoft has had clear competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to document that.

Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so irritating.

The new human networks' emergence represents the natural evolutionary expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its-buildings world-embracing, physical communications network. The new reorienting of human networking constitutes the heart-and-mind-pumped flow of life and intellect into the world arteries.

Russia must realise its full potential in high-tech sectors such as modern energy technology, transport and communications, space and aircraft building.