“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”

— Douglas Adams

Last update Nov. 18, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we though…" by Douglas Adams?

Douglas Adams 317

English writer and humorist 1952–2001

Related quotes

“Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.”

Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943) British scientist

Beautiful Minds (2010)
Context: Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right. You build up this picture of what there is and you believe it to be true and you work with this picture and you refine it but sometimes you have to abandon the picture. Sometimes you discover the picture you thought you had, that everybody thought we had, actually turns out to be wrong.

“We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

As rendered by T. Byrom (1993), Shambhala Publications.
There is no quote from the Pali Canon that matches up with any of these. The closest quote to this is in the Majjhima Nikaya 19:
"Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking & pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with sensuality, abandoning thinking imbued with renunciation, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with sensuality. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with ill will, abandoning thinking imbued with non-ill will, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with ill will. If a monk keeps pursuing thinking imbued with harmfulness, abandoning thinking imbued with harmlessness, his mind is bent by that thinking imbued with harmfulness." Sources: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.019.than.html
Misattributed

“The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought.”

Pema Chödron (1936) American philosopher

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)

“O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

I, st. 2
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

“We had thought Mike the greatest; now we began to discover he was only human and, worse, we had our first dismaying confrontation with the fact that he would not back up his ministers.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 4, Sixty days of decision, p. 63

“In the history of physics, every time we've looked beyond the scales and energies we were familiar with, we've found things that we wouldn't have thought were there. You look inside the atom and eventually you discover quarks. Who would have thought that? It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.”

Lisa Randall (1962) American theoretical physicist and an expert on particle physics and cosmology

The Discover Interview: Lisa Randall (July 2006)

“I thought we’d turned a corner. Maybe we did, but we hit a brick wall anyway.”

Sylvia Day book Bared to You

Source: Bared to You

“A central thesis of this book is that the connection between thought and practice is most intimately and fully realized only when our minds are addressed to our own affairs—the concerns of humanity. When we direct our thoughts to nature, even if to see ourselves as fixtures of nature, we loosen the connection between thought and practice. When we loosen it, we are tempted to assume the posture I earlier called naturalism. We survey both the human and the nonhuman worlds from a supposedly godlike distance. We treat the achievement of such distance as the realization of our longing for transcendence.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 32

“We have a Gujarat State Wide Area Network. The optical fibre network. We are [the] largest in Asia, number one. We are number one in Asia. And we are second largest in the world. Can you image how we are using the technology?”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2008, Speech, 14 January 2008

“What we find in life is based on where we put our attention. When we focus on the small worlds our thoughts create, we miss out on the beauty and possibilities we are meant to enjoy.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

The Intimate Enemy

“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Douglas Adams 317

Related quotes

Related topics