Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors – is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.
Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when and for what.
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don’t like the idea of having different points of view,...
The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.