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Your Quotes for 12 August 2005 - Computers

It was on this day in 1981 that IBM introduced their Personal Computer and its operating system, PC-DOS 1.0. I didn't have a computer at the time, but I read every word of BYTE Magazine within a couple of days of its arrival in my mailbox. (Some years later I wrote for BYTE regularly, a few years later BYTE and most of the other magazines I wrote for went out of business.) I wouldn't want to try to count the computers I've had since then, it's hard enough counting the ones that are running here right now (16, I think, divided between home and the server farm up the road) or even the recently running ones that are sitting around in corners (probably 20), but it's safe to say that I've been involved with a computer at least ten hours a day since then. You could say it changed my life, these quotes speculate that it may not have been consistently for the better.

In former times it took dozens of clerks, secretaries, and administrators to create a bureaucratic milieu capable of diffusing responsibility for misinformation and disservices. Today thanks to desk-top information processors, small firms and agencies down to the neighborhood hardware store are finding it possible to emulate the bureaucratic style by blaming their disservices on their computer.
     - Marvin Harris

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
     - Nathaniel Borenstein

So far the main impact of the computer has been the creation of unlimited employment opportunities for clerks.
     - Peter Drucker

Computers are the tools of the devil. It is as simple as that. There is no monotheism strong enough that it cannot be shaken by Unix or any Microsoft product. The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.
     - Philip Greenspun

The most overlooked advantage of owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little.
     - Porterfield

If automobiles had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
     - Robert X. Cringeley

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