“You can and must understand computers now!”

—  Ted Nelson

Slogan. (The insistence that ordinary people need to understand computers is remarkable for its era: the first personal computers were not available until 1975.)
Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974, rev. 1987)

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 "You can and must understand computers now!" by Ted Nelson?
Ted Nelson photo
Ted Nelson 17
American information technologist, philosopher, and sociolo… 1937

Related quotes

Seth Lloyd photo

“It is not that you cannot understand it, it is that you cannot compute it.”

Carlos Gershenson (1978) Mexican researcher

Source: Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents (2001), p. 25

Kent Beck photo

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Kent Beck (1961) software engineer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

Martin Fowler photo

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, 1999, p. 15

Yukihiro Matsumoto photo

“Computers are not very smart. They don't understand human language, so we have to tell them what to do in a language that both humans and computers can understand.”

Yukihiro Matsumoto (1965) Japanese computer scientist

Yukihiro Matsumoto " I'm a Mormon, Ruby Author and a World-changer https://youtube.com/watch?v=bkh0gPf4Noc" by ComeUntoChrist.org on 2013-08-12.

Robin Williams photo
Donald Ervin Knuth photo

“Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974), p. 668

Frank Wilczek photo

“Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 10, p. 128.

Hal Abelson photo
E.E. Cummings photo

Related topics