So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

I've been out on the periphery.

It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.

From a technical point of view, there seemed to me to be absolutely no reason why - with the existing technology - we couldn't do very high quality audio, because whereas the boom in digital graphics is ongoing, the boom in digital audio has already happened.

I was very pleased to find that once I had records out music videos were starting to happen, so I directed some of my own music videos and got to experiment in other areas of expression.

It's been over 15 years since I toured... over 12 years since I did any recording under my own name. I never really intended to take that long of a hiatus.

Well, you know, I mean, I first did my live shows in the late 70's and in those days I had a boatload of equipment that always seemed to be going wrong.

The games industry is already bigger than the music industry, and it's mainly directed at teenage boys.

At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.

So a more sensible thing it seemed to me was to go to Silicon Valley and be pushing on the technology companies to accelerate the use of audio and music in computers.

The other thing I felt was that the philosophical concept behind the experiences also looked like it had been designed by technicians and not by entertainers. I felt I needed to grab hold of it and try and push the envelope as much as I possibly could right now.

I was desperate really for people not to accuse me of coldness. It was taboo.

The hardware manufacturers, game designers, cable companies and computer companies and, in fact, film studios are going to ensure that this thing marches on. They know that they are going to make an enormous amount of money from it.

Then I have a head mounted display which actually was designed for the military to do synchronized building entries and that's looking down at my hands, so projected on the big screen behind me, you can see my hands as I'm putting the tracks together.

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.

So evidently music was a killer app and is a killer app for computer and the Internet; it just took the tech industry a long time to hear that message.

I started looking at small companies that were running a sort of virtual reality cottage industry: I had imagined that I would just put on a helmet and be somewhere else - that's your dream of what it's going to be.

The man who never dreams, goes slowly mad.

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.