“The world contains entities, processes, locations, people, times, and purposes. Computer systems are filled with bits, bytes, numbers, and the programs that manipulate them. If the computer is to do anything useful, the concrete things in the world must be related to the abstract bits in the computer. Zachman’s framework for information systems architecture (ISA) makes that link. It provides a systematic taxonomy of concepts for relating things in the world to the representations in the computer.”

— John Zachman

Source: Extending and Formalizing the Framework for Information Systems Architecture, 1992, p. 590

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John Zachman 23

American computer scientist 1934

George Forsythe (1917–1972) Stanford University computer scientist

As cited in Donald Knuth (1972). "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science" http://www.stanford.edu/dept/ICME/docs/history/forsythe_knuth.pdf. Comms. ACM.
"Educational implications of the computer revolution," 1963

“When I use a direct manipulation system—whether for text editing, drawing pictures, or creating and playing games—I do think of myself not as using a computer but as doing the particular task. The computer is, in effect, invisible. The point cannot be overstressed: make the computer system invisible.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 185.

“We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several. illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1980s and later, "Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words," (1987), p. 65

“If you think about things that happen, as being computations... a computation in the sense that it has definite rules... You follow them many steps and you get some result. ...If you look at all these different computations that can happen, whether... in the natural world... in our brains... in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is how do these computations compare. ...Are there dumb ...and smart computations, or are they somehow all equivalent? ...[T]he thing that I ...was ...surprised to realize from ...experiments ...in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for ...[is] this ...principle of computational equivalence, which basically says that when one of these computations ...doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached this ...equivalent layer of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? ...You might say that ...I'm studying this tiny little program ...and my brain is surely much smarter ...I'm going to be able to systematically outrun [it] because I have a more sophisticated computation ...but ...the principle ...says ...that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. ...It means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no ...shortcut ...that jumps to the answer.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

“When we view nature stripped to essentials, so to speak, in this Unification Table, what we see is… a five bit register. …It is in just this form that data is stored and manipulated within a digital computer. …Every particle, then, can be specified by a five-bit word and stored in a five-bit register. It's eerie that even the odd restriction on how many minus signs are allowed is reminiscent of a trick used in computers, to detect errors in transmission. You see, if allowed words must have an odd number of minus signs, any single error in transmission of a word can be detected. …our world might be an intricate program working itself out on a gigantic computing machine.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“The critical act in formulating computational theories turns out to be the discovery of valid constraints on the way the world is structured -- constraints that provide sufficient information to allow the processing to succeed.”

David Marr (1945–1980) British neuroscientist and psychologist

Representation and recognition of the spatial organization of three-dimensional shapes, 1978

“In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. […] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/towards.html", Information Processing 1962: Proceedings of IFIP Congress 62, ed. Cicely M. Popplewell (Amsterdam, 1963), pp. 21–28
1960s

“The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers (1962) Preface

“To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Interview in Revolution OS http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/, documentary, 2001.
2000s, 2000-04

“Should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?”

Seymour Papert (1928–2016) MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator

Spacewar http://wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html ROLLING STONE · 7 DECEMBER 1972

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