history of computing

• Now I assign the Internet the highest level of importance.

  — Bill Gates

• The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.

  — Howard H. Aiken

• The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.

  — Larry Wall

• What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

  — Bill Gates

• The whole of arithmetic now appeared within the grasp of mechanism.

  — Charles Babbage

• The clock has been the center of Western technology since its invention in the Middle Ages. Computer technology too finds it indispensable, although it has changed the clock from a mechanical device to a wholly electronic one.

  — Jay David Bolter

• We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.

  — Raymond Kurzweil

• Most of us have grown so blase about computer developments and capabilities — even some that are spectacular — that it is difficult to believe or imagine there was a time when we suffered the noisy, painstakingly slow, electromechanical devices that chomped away on punched cards.

  — Nicholas Metropolis

• Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy.

  — Vannevar Bush

• [A]n order of magnitude quantitative change in technology can make a qualitative change in the lifestyle we enjoy.

  — Isaac L. Auerbach

• Even though we started in the days when the equipment itself wasn't able to do very exciting visual things, we were always concentrating on this matter of communication and meaning.

  — Douglas T. Ross

• Algorithms existed for at least five thousand years, but people did not know that they were algorithmizing. Then came Turing (and Post and Church and Markov and others) and formalized the notion.

  — Doron Zeilberger

• When Commodore acquired Amiga in 1984, the legion of Amiga loyalists thought the world would beat a path to the better-mousetrap door. It didn't happen. The Amiga languished.

  — Jay Miner

• The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.

  — Vannevar Bush

• In 1971 when I joined the staff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab, all of us who helped develop the operating system software, we called ourselves hackers.

  — Richard Stallman

• In looking back at this turn-of-the-century period, the rise of a worldwide network will be seen as the most significant part of the computer revolution.

  — Jef Raskin

• A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

  — Vannevar Bush

• The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century.

  — Vernor Vinge

• Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

  — Vannevar Bush