“I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.”

— Douglas Adams

Last update Feb. 12, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of …" by Douglas Adams?

Douglas Adams 317

English writer and humorist 1952–2001

James H. Wilkinson (1919–1986) English mathematician

Oral history interview http://history.siam.org/wilkinson.htm by John C. Nash, SIAM History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Project http://history.siam.org/,13 July 1984
Context: Very belatedly in 1947, Darwin [Sir Charles Darwin, great-grandson of the famous Charles Darwin] agreed to set up a very small electronics group [... ] It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century.

“Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees. Hence industry rejects any methodological proposal that can be viewed as making intellectual demands on its work force. Since in the US the influence of industry is more pervasive than elsewhere, the above dogma hurts American computing science most. The moral of this sad part of the story is that as long as computing science is not allowed to save the computer industry, we had better see to it that the computer industry does not kill computing science.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra Computing Science

Dijkstra (1999) "Computing Science: Achievements and Challenges" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html (EWD 1284).
1990s

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.”

Larry Ellison (1944) American internet entrepreneur, businessman and philanthropist

Referring to the term "cloud computing" in his Oracle OpenWorld 2008 speech, as quoted in "Oracle's Ellison nails cloud computing" at cnet (26 September 2008) http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5.
Context: The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

Leslie Lamport (1941) American computer scientist

Email of 28 May 1987 https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt
As quoted in [Teresa K. Attwood, Stephen R. Pettifer, David Thorne, Bioinformatics Challenges at the Interface of Biology and Computer Science: Mind the Gap, https://books.google.com/books?id=_i-8DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA266, 26 September 2016, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-03548-1, 266–]