“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

— Alan Kay

talk at Creative Think seminar, 20 July 1982 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Creative_Think.txt <br class="br">1980s

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Alan Kay25

computer scientist 1940

Larry Bossidy (1935) American businessman

Source: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Apple fans should be scared to death … Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought — and lost — in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are 'better,' but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers”

Henry Blodget (1966) American equity research analyst

Windows in the 1990s, Android now <br class="br"> Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM — iPhone Dead In Water http://www.businessinsider.com/android-iphone-market-share-2011-4 in Business Insider (2 April 2011)

“Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

[A Plea for Lean Software, http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/mags/co/&toc=comp/mags/co/1995/02/r2toc.xml&DOI=10.1109/2.348001, 2007-01-13, Computer, 1995, February, 28, 2, pp. 64-68]
Variation: Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating.
aka "Wirth's law"

“The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1970s, The Education of Mike McManus, TVOntario, December 28 1977

“It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

“Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

“When I was at Tek, I was frustrated that computer hardware was being improved faster than computer software. I wanted to invent some software that was completely different, that would grow and change as it was used. That’s how wiki came about.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

"Startup mines for riches in collaboration software" in The Portland Tribune (7 March 2008) http://www.portlandtribune.com/rethinking/story.php?story_id=120430910578805900

“Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

The Odyssey File (1984), also quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs, p. 128
1980s

“Government must provide the hardware - classrooms, desks, chairs, and the software - books, teacher retraining.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

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