Computers

Quotes

1

The book is here to stay. What we’re doing is symbolic of the peaceful coexistence of the book and the computer.
— Vartan Gregorian, on computerization of the New York Public Library card catalog

2

The mind can store an estimated 100 trillion bits of information—compared with which a computer’s mere billions are virtually amnesiac.
— Sharon Begley

3

Men are going to have to learn to be managers in a world where the organization will come close to consisting of all chiefs and one Indian. The Indian, of course, is the computer.
— Thomas L. Whisler

4

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
— Pablo Picasso

5

Not even computers will replace committees, because committees buy computers.
— Edward Shepherd Mead

6

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it.
— Pierre Gallois

7

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except the things in the world that just don’t add up.
— James Magary

8

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would take many men many months to equal it.
— Merle L. Meacham

9

The new electronic independence recreates the world in the image of a global village.
— Marshall McLuhan

10

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
— Sydney J. Harris

11

The more data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
— Marshall McLuhan

12

. . . man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
— John F. Kennedy

13

The presence of humans, in a system containing high-speed electronic computers and high-speed accurate communications, is quite inhibiting.
— Stuart Luman Seaton

14

Immunity to boredom gives computers the edge.
— Alan Lakein

15

The computer is more than a tool, it is a medium. Just as the typeface standardized information—changing us from a society where information was at the mercy of monks busy with hand copying into a fact-loving society where nonfiction outsell fiction—so the computer will change the way we look at the world.
— John Sculley


Sayings

1

To err is human, but to really screw up requires a computer.

2

In the computer age, it is disturbing to realize that a machine has your number.

3

A company we know is encountering so many errors it’s thinking of buying a computer to blame them on.

4

The computer is only a fast idiot—it has no imagination; it cannot originate action. It is, and will remain, only a tool of man.

5

The computer is down.


Jokes

1

“I hate this darn machine,” complained an office worker about his newly automated work station. “It never does what I want it to do, only what I tell it.”

2

I don’t see why religion and science can’t cooperate. What’s wrong with using a computer to count our blessings?
— Robert Orben

3

Smith was a man of cold facts, a scientist, a computer jock, and a confirmed atheist. He became somewhat obsessed with the desire to prove the truth. So he mortaged his house and sold his car in order to put a down payment on the most powerful computer commercially available. Then Smith plugged it into every data bank in the world, accessed every library in the United States and Europe, and had the machine scan every book published since the invention of the printing press.
Finally Smith sat down at the console, took a deep breath, and typed, “Is there a God?”
The monitor flickered, the hard drives clicked, and up on the screen came the words “There is now.”

4

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
— Grace Murray Hopper, on the removal of a two-inch-long moth from an experimental computer at Harvard in 1945

5

How do they know computers existed in biblical times?
— Because Eve had an Apple, and Adam had a Wang.

6

How can you spot a secretary who’s a slow learner?
— He’s the one with Wite-Out all over his screen, and the one who Xeroxes floppies in order to copy files.