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Quotes of the Day for 28 September 2006 – Computers
Seymour Roger Cray was born at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin on this day in 1925. After high school he was drafted as a radio operator, first in Europe and later in the Pacific where he was involved in cracking Japanese codes. After getting his Masters from the University of Minnesota he joined a consulting group and quickly emerged as their expert on computers. Over the next several decades, through a number of companies including CDC and Cray Research, he was responsible for the design of the worlds fastest computer at least four times, and a couple of expensive flops. When I asked for quotes suggestions last month, several of you asked for quotes on Computers, and Cray's birthday seems the ideal times to deliver.
The quotes:
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
- Bill Bryson, Notes from a Big Country
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
- Edsger Dijkstra
I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go into overload and blow up.
- Erma Louise Bombeck, 1927 - 1996
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
- Joseph Campbell
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
- Mitch Ratliffe
The computer is a moron.
- Peter F. Drucker
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