It was an IBM machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine’s professional caretakers could enter during the day. But Alsi...
It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation. Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensu...
In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls the compulsion to program. He describes the afflicted as br...
How does one person with great talents come to exert a force on the world? I think in Farmer’s case the answer lies somewhere in the apparent craziness, the sheer impracticality, of half of everything...
Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, What they call tough auditing,...
Among engineers generally, the most common form of ambition—the one made most socially acceptable—has been the desire to become a manager. If you don’t become one by a certain age, then in the eyes of...
You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.
Fraternité
When you burn out, you lose enthusiasm. I always loved computers. All of a sudden I just didn’t care. It was, all of a sudden, a job.
When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal sy...
When others write about people who live on the edge, who challenge their comfortable lives—and it has happened to me—they usually do it in a way that allows a reader a way out. You could render genero...
The mind that relies on cliché does not really know what it is saying.
One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given moment.
Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West
Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.
In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer’s power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though su...
He liked the casual look of the basement of Westborough. The jeans and so on. Several talked about their flexible hours. No one keeps track of the hours we work, said Ken Holberger. He grinned. That’s...
Because if you’re going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.
Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV.