People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

I liken myself to Henry Ford and the auto industry, I give you 90 percent of what most people need.

There'll be a special place in hell for the tape back-up people.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

With bundled machines you can throw away the hardware and keep the software, and it's still a good buy.

The small businessman is smart; he realizes there's no free lunch. On the other hand, he knows where to go to get a good inexpensive sandwich.

The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake - you can't learn anything from being perfect.

I take what I see work. I'm a strict believer in the scientific principle of believing nothing, only taking the best evidence available at the present time, interpreting it as best you can, and leaving your mind open to the fact that new evidence will appear tomorrow.

The future lies in designing and selling computers that people don't realize are computers at all.

This is the ultimate con game - I'm having fun and people pay me to do it.

People think computers will keep them from making mistakes. They're wrong. With computers you make mistakes faster.

Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.

Money coming in says I've made the right marketing decisions.

Adequacy is sufficient.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

And my real enemy is not to hold the specimen sterile, but it's the lighting. The light is our real enemy. So we have to work with very very poor lighting. But we can increase the light with computers.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Well, we didn't have our original drummer on our last record. And most of that album was not played as a band in the studio. It was mostly the world of computers and overdubs. There was very few things played live or worked out as a band.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

Why does everyone think the future is space helmets, silver foil, and talking like computers, like a bad episode of Star Trek?

Yeah, computers are going to take over the programming business because they have become so fast recently that they can solve the Halting Problem in five seconds flat.

You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles... there's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in the computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.

The trick with computers I think, is to approach old and new things with the same reverence as you would like your favourite chair and not be seduced by the constant innovation otherwise you never do anything.

I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.

We're just into toys, whether it's motorcycles or race cars or computers. I've got the Palm Pilot right here with me, I've got the world's smallest phone. Maybe it's just because I'm still a big little kid and I just love toys, you know?

I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers.

We could say we want the Web to reflect a vision of the world where everything is done democratically. To do that, we get computers to talk with each other in such a way as to promote that ideal.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

It was used for decades to describe talented computer enthusiasts, people whose skill at using computers to solve technical problems and puzzles was - and is - respected and admired by others possessing similar technical skills.