Personal Computers Quotes & Sayings

In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music - combined. — Eric Schlosser

The diverse threats we face are increasingly cyber-based. Much of America's most sensitive data is stored on computers. We are losing data, money, and ideas through cyber intrusions. This threatens innovation and, as citizens, we are also increasingly vulnerable to losing our personal information. — James Comey

I am concerned about the failure of our moral computers of honesty, integrity, decency, civility, and sexual purity. How many people today are truly incorruptible? So many get caught up in waves of popular issues and tides of rhetoric. This breakdown of moral values is happening because we are separating the teachings of God from personal conduct. An honorable man or woman will personally commit to live up to certain self-imposed expectations, with no need of an outside check or control. I would hope that we can load our moral computers with three elements of integrity: dealing justly with oneself, dealing justly with others, and recognizing the law of the harvest. — James E. Faust

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build. — Larry Ellison

Computer users soon learn that the miraculous powers of personal computers are based on avoidance of error. — Robert Burchfield

Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020. — Ray Kurzweil

One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them. — Steve Case

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. — Neal Stephenson

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers. — Alan Kay

Intel's Pentium III processor operating at 1 GHz is the highest performance microprocessor for PCs, enabling Intel's customers to ship the fastest personal computers in the world, — Paul Otellini

Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel. — Mitch Kapor

Isaacson's biography can be read in several ways. It is on the one hand a history of the most exciting time in the age of computers, when the machines first became personal and later, fashionable accessories. It is also a textbook study of the rise and fall and rise of Apple and the brutal clashes that destroyed friendships and careers. And it is a gadget lover's dream, with fabulous, inside accounts of how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad came into being. But more than anything, Isaacson has crafted a biography of a complicated, peculiar personality - Jobs was charming, loathsome, lovable, obsessive, maddening - and the author shows how Jobs's character was instrumental in shaping some of the greatest technological innovations — Walter Isaacson

When I left Apple, it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world - not just personal computers - and Apple was the number one selling computer. — John Sculley

The early personal computers were not very powerful so the idea of feeding their program into a small amount of memory requires immense skill. — Bill Gates

Today, in the Twenty-First Century, an age of jet aircraft, personal computers, wireless telecommunications, laser surgery, and incipient space travel, the mentality with which many presumably educated, intelligent people approach matters of economics and business is, however astonishing it may seem, still that of the Dark Ages. — George Reisman

Everybody is becoming [a superhero]. In the past I've tried to say, 'Look, we are all crappy superheroes,' because personal computers and mobile phone devices are things that only Bat Man and Mr Fantastic would have owned back in the sixties. We've all got this immense power and we're still sat at home watching pornography and buying scratch cards. We're rubbish, even though we are as gods. — Alan Moore

The digital age could not become truly transformational until computers became truly personal. — Walter Isaacson

People often try to distinguish between personal and professional life, but they end failing - Cord 8 : Are we Computers? — Santosh Avvannavar

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece. — Dave Barry

Jiu Jitsu has given me something to pursue. We all need something to work towards. For people, as well as every piece of matter in the universe, there is no such thing as maintenance. If you are not growing you are decaying. The insidious nature of modern times is that it is so easy not to pursue anything. Societal norms pressure us into jobs we do not like, and the daily comforts of televisions and computers offer much in the way of distraction. If that isn't enough, there is always the numbing effects of alcohol coupled with attention-grabbing sporting events which conveniently run year round so one is never short of stimulus. — Chris Matakas

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history. — Douglas Rushkoff

Why is it that I notice so many brilliant scientists using Macs for their personal computers; why does the Lawrence Livermore & Berkeley Labs buy millions of dollars worth of Macs? — Lene Hau

PAUL REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple's stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs's Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs's closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN'L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, — Walter Isaacson

I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user. — Bill Gates

The biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm. — Steve Jobs

I think that having been around computers all my life - my father had brought home personal computers at a very early age in the '70s - so being around computers from a very early age perhaps I had even subconsciously seen the exponential progression of what was happening with computers. — Barry Ptolemy

The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn't use them, because they didn't know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games. — Robert Cailliau

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it. — Kevin Kelly

A wide variety of devices beyond personal computers are arriving, many of which will be used to browse the Web ... The Flash engineering team has taken this on with a major overhaul of the mainstream Flash Player for a variety of devices. — Kevin Lynch

Over my career, I'd say the last 25 years; we've gone from music and computer being for 10 people in the world to having personal computers, to now being able to do amazing things on your iPhone, or with Rock Band. So, right now there's enormous capability with technology in our devices that everybody has access to. — Tod Machover

The world was opening up to Apple bit by bit, and vice versa. The iPod was Apple's first mass-market consumer device, but it had come about because Steve and his team had taken one logical step after another: first iMovie, then a correction leading to iTunes, then the iPod. Steve's patience, discipline, and vision had set Apple on a new course, one that was more complicated than its old path, which had simply involved the regular improvement of personal computers. — Brent Schlender

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. — Walt Mossberg

Financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs. — Felix Rohatyn

On a scale ranging from very little to too much, Merkin could just about categorize the amount of personal data stored in Master Loo's computer as a shitload. — Sorin Suciu

Use a personal firewall. Configure it to prevent other computers, networks and sites from connecting to you, and specify which programs are allowed to connect to the net automatically. — Kevin Mitnick

In the summer of 1988, I received an interesting call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. He asked whether I'd like to come over and talk about building a new operating system at Microsoft for personal computers. [ ... ] What Bill had to offer was the opportunity to build another operating system, one that was portable [ ... ]. — Dave Cutler

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. — Steve Jobs

Since 2000, no important technology innovation in the United States has been scaled up to create millions of manufacturing, marketing, and engineering jobs here, as personal computers and related industries did. While selling online and social networking are clearly transformational movements that have created entrepreneurial opportunities, fewer than fifty thousand traditional jobs - those with full-time hours, benefits, and health insurance - have been created. — Doug Menuez

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, Turn on, boot up, jack in. — Walter Isaacson

If Jobs and Wozniak had believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no personal computers. — Jimmy Maher

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents' garage became the world's most valuable company. — Walter Isaacson

Brain-like in function and speed, the internet connected over one-third of the global population. Three million searches every minute; one-hundred-trillion emails every year; more Facebook users than people in North America, all with with personal photos, videos, apps, and chats. There were dozens of dating sites, an immersive universe called 2nd Life that boasted a country-sized GDP, a slew of viruses, obnoxious advertising, more than a billion photos of naked women, and seventy-two hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. This was the environment where the friendship flourished. — Jake Vander Ark

And there was a wonderful thing that tended to happen, something that felt like poetic justice: every time someone started shouting about the supposed monopoly of the Circle, or the Circle's unfair monetization of the personal data of its users, or some other paranoid and demonstrably false claim, soon enough it was revealed that that person was a criminal or deviant of the highest order. One was connected to a terror network in Iran. One was a buyer of child porn. Every time, it seemed, they would end up on the news, footage of investigators leaving their homes with computers, on which any number of unspeakable searches had been executed and where reams of illegal and inappropriate materials were stored. And it made sense. Who but a fringe character would try to impede the unimpeachable improvement of the world? — Dave Eggers

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk. — Howard Rheingold

What wasn't made clear, and what Bill didn't even come close to revealing, was how his deep understanding of the computing needs of businesses would transform the computer business itself over the next several years, further sidelining anyone who, like Steve, chose to focus on the aesthetics and thrills of personal computers. Even though nobody recognized it at the time, Bill was about to take the personal right out of personal computing. Ironically, in so doing, he would leave an opening for Steve to fill - eventually. — Brent Schlender