The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

What we now call the browser is whatever defines the web. What fits in the browser is the World Wide Web and a number of trivial standards to handle that so that the content comes.

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

So, what you can do in Microsoft Word is what Bill Gates has decided. What you can do in Oracle Database is what Larry Ellison and his crew have decided.

I was very intensely concerned with all kinds of new media.

I thought I was going to be a filmmaker but at the same time I was an intellectual and I felt that I could make a contribution to some field, as yet, not invented.

But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.

Project Xanadu is essentially my trademark. It was originally, and has returned to my arms as that.

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

I am looking at it from the point of view of a harried user, which I am, and I believe that I am much more like the typical non-technical harried user than I am like the people who smoothly operate everything.

The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there's a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.

The point is that these decisions they've made are partly for your convenience and partly for theirs and partly out of stereotypes that they carry with them from the conventions of the computer field.

So, that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms.

The four walls of paper are like a prison because every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else, sometimes more than others.

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.