“Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was commonly expressed that universities had played their part in computer design, and that the matter could now safely be left to industry. […] Apart from the obvious functions of keeping in the public domain material that might otherwise be hidden, universities can make a special contribution by reason of their freedom from commercial considerations, including freedom from the need to follow the fashion.”

—  Maurice Wilkes

Sect. 1: Pioneering Days
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was …" by Maurice Wilkes?
Maurice Wilkes photo
Maurice Wilkes 7
British computer scientist 1913–2010

Related quotes

Stephen Wolfram photo

“Could it be that some place out there in the computational universe, we might find our physical universe?”

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

"Computing a Theory of Everything" (2010)

Stephen Wolfram photo

“I had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica. I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope four hundred years ago. But I wanted to look, not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe.”

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

"Computing a Theory of Everything" (2010)

Richard Stallman photo

“Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

Steve Jobs

“Whether computers are used for engineering design, medical data processing, composing music, or other purposes, the structure of computing is much the same. We are extremely short of talented people in this field, and so we need departments, curricula, and research and degree programs in computer science… I think of the Computer Science Department as eventually including experts in Programming, Numerical Analysis, Automata Theory, Data Processing, Business Games, Adaptive Systems, Information Theory, Information Retrieval, Recursive Function Theory, Computer Linguistics, etc., as these fields emerge in structure… Universities must respond [to the computer revolution] with far reaching changes in the educational structure.”

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

Willem de Sitter photo

“In the "static" universe expansion is impossible, the "empty" universe does expand. Therefore we may be tempted to consider the empty universe as the most likely approximation; and we can proceed to compute the radius of curvature of the universe, supposing it to be of the empty type, from the observed rate of expansion.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Nicolaus Copernicus photo

“Nor could they elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe and the true symmetry of its parts.”

Nicolaus Copernicus book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

Preface Letter to Pope Paul III, Tr. E. Rosen, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1978) pp. 4-7.
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543)
Context: Those who devised the eccentrics seen thereby in large measure to have solved the problem of apparent motions with approximate calculations. But meanwhile they introduced a good many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of uniform motion. Nor could they elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe and the true symmetry of its parts. On the contrary, their experience was just like someone taking from various places hands, feet, a head, and other pieces, very well depicted it may be, but for the representation of a single person; since these fragments would not belong to one another at all, a monster rather than a man would be put together from them.

Edsger W. Dijkstra photo

“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

Clifford D. Simak photo

“A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river — but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself — a thing that went on caring.”

Clifford D. Simak book Way Station

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 35

“From the computer application point of view the primary problem [of Computer-Aided Design] is not how to solve problems, but how to state them.”

Douglas T. Ross (1929–2007) American computer scientist

Source: Computer-Aided Design: A Statement of Objectives (1960), p. iii; Abstract.

“If we make this readjustment to view Homo sapiens as an ultimate in oddball rarity, and life at bacterial grade as the common expression of a universal phenomenon, then we could finally ask the truly fundamental question raised by the prospect of Martian fossils. If life originates as a general property of the material universe under certain conditions (probably often realized), then how much can the basic structure and constitution of life vary from place to independent place?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 352
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Related topics