Quotes about hardware (93 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The hardware of a computer is useless without the right software. Similarly, in an organization the hardware (strategy and structure) is inert without the software (beliefs and behaviors).”

Larry Bossidy (1935) American businessman

Source: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Behavior

“Technology is an inherent democratizer. Because of the evolution of hardware and software, you’re able to scale up almost anything. It means that in our lifetime everyone may have tools of equal power.”

Sergey Brin (1973) President of Alphabet Inc.

Guest lecture, UC Berkeley http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7582902000166025817 Oct. 5, 2005 – 40 min.

“The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.”

Rick Cook (1944) American writer

The Wizardry Consulted (1995)

World , Idea

“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

Life , Problem , Science , Dependency

“And throughout this process, Michelle and I, we just have been your frontmen and women. We have been the face, sometimes the voice, out front on the TV screen or in front of the microphone, but this has never been about us. It has always been about you. And all the amazing things that happened over these last 10 years are really just a testament to you. In the same way that when we talk about our amazing military and our men and women in uniform, the military is not a thing. It's a group of committed patriots willing to sacrifice everything on our behalf. It works only because of the people in it. As cool as the hardware is, and we have cool hardware, as cool as the machines and weapons and satellites are, ultimately it comes down to remarkable people.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2017, Farewell to Staff Members (January 2017)

Women , Men , People , Way

“The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

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

“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

God , Beauty

“Lying down to sleep on the earthen riverbank, I thought, Vrindavan is attracting my heart like no other place. What is happening to me? Please reveal Your divine will. With this prayer, I drifted off to sleep.
Before dawn, I awoke to the ringing of temple bells, signaling that it was time to begin my journey to Hardwar. But my body lay there like a corpse. Gasping in pain, I couldn’t move. A blazing fever consumed me from within, and under the spell of unbearable nausea, my stomach churned. Like a hostage, I lay on that riverbank. As the sun rose, celebrating a new day, I felt my life force sinking. Death that morning would have been a welcome relief. Hours passed.
At noon, I still lay there. This fever will surely kill me, I thought.
Just when I felt it couldn’t get any worse, I saw in the overcast sky something that chilled my heart. Vultures circled above, their keen sights focused on me. It seemed the fever was cooking me for their lunch, and they were just waiting until I was well done. They hovered lower and lower. One swooped to the ground, a huge black and white bird with a long, curving neck and sloping beak. It stared, sizing up my condition, then jabbed its pointed beak into my ribcage. My body recoiled, my mind screamed, and my eyes stared back at my assailant, seeking pity. The vulture flapped its gigantic wings and rejoined its fellow predators circling above. On the damp soil, I gazed up at the birds as they soared in impatient circles. Suddenly, my vision blurred and I momentarily blacked out. When I came to, I felt I was burning alive from inside out. Perspiring, trembling, and gagging, I gave up all hope.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching. A local farmer herding his cows noticed me and took pity. Pressing the back of his hand to my forehead, he looked skyward toward the vultures and, understanding my predicament, lifted me onto a bullock cart. As we jostled along the muddy paths, the vultures followed overhead. The farmer entrusted me to a charitable hospital where the attendants placed me in the free ward. Eight beds lined each side of the room. The impoverished and sadhu patients alike occupied all sixteen beds. For hours, I lay unattended in a bed near the entrance. Finally that evening the doctor came and, after performing a series of tests, concluded that I was suffering from severe typhoid fever and dehydration. In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, “You will likely die, but we will try to save your life.””

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

Republished on The Journey Home website.
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life , Death , Pain , Hope

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

Behaviourables and Futuribles, manifesto, 1967; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Art

“Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 97

War , Change , Time

“Bill Cohen had a will-earned reputation as a thoughtful, decisive Secretary of Defense. When the staff lit up the plasma screens and ran the tapes of the Bright Star exercise, showing how the friendly coalition "Greenland" had defeated the aggressors of "Orangeland", Cohen asked all the right questions. He seemed especially impressed that we had assembled the system using commercially available hardware. Our staff officers and sergeants were on their toes. They answered all the secretary's questions, and he left with a smile on his face. I was proud of the command post- and of the young men and women who had made it such a success.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 185

Women , Men , Smile , Exercises

“Not the consumer cloud. Not hardware-software innovation. We are not leaving any of that to Apple by itself. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Steve Ballmer says Microsoft plans to compete with Apple in every market http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/07/10/steve_ballmer_says_microsoft_plans_to_compete_with_apple_in_every_market in AppleInsider (10 July 2012)
2010s

“What we're saying to people is that every idea about ease-of-use, we can develop in software, for the PC, without asking them to buy new hardware, without asking them to throw away their old applications.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

Bill Gates Charlie Rose Interview http://youtube.com/watch?v=M1EsIusQJQM on Charlie Rose (25 November 1996)
1990s

People , Idea

“Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.”

Italo Calvino book Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) , "Lightness"
English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

World , Travel , Exercises , Light

“Unlike Rachel, Player One has a complete overview both of the world and of time. Player One’s life is more like a painting than it is a story. Player One can see everything with a glance and can change tenses at will. Player One has ultimate freedom, the ultimate software on the ultimate hardware. That realm is also the one place where Player One feels, for lack of a better word, normal.”

Douglas Coupland book Player One

Player One (2010)

Life , World , Feeling , Freedom

“Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. … If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything…. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 8

Way , Thinking , Learning , Help

“We humans replace the bulk of both our “hardware” (e. g., our cells) and our “software” (e. g., our memories) many times in our life span. Nonetheless, we perceive ourselves as stable and permanent. Likewise, we perceive objects other than ourselves as permanent. Or rather, what we perceive as objects are those aspects of the world that display a certain permanence. For instance, when observing the ocean, we perceive the moving waves as objects because they display a certain permanence, even though the water itself is only bobbing up and down. Similarly (…) we perceive only those aspects of the world that are fairly stable against quantum decoherence.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

Life , World , Water , Memory

“BlackBerry isn't getting out of the hardware business. It stands alone as the only smartphone company exclusively focused on business, security and traditional communication. Until someone else steps up to meet this need, there continues to be a market for its hardware …”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

BlackBerry Misinformation and the Smartphone Security Crisis http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/blackberry-misinformation-and-the-smartphone-security-crisis.html in IT Business Edge (8 July 2016)

Communication , Business

“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

Sex , Reading

“As much as possible, the government should purchase brand new military hardware if it really wants to modernize the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which is widely regarded as one of the weakest military forces in Southeast Asia. If we are going to pour in billions of pesos to improve the AFP, we might as well give our soldiers the best modern and sophisticated equipment we can get.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Sun Star Manila http://www.sunstar.com.ph/manila/local-news/2015/08/18/escudero-asks-govt-stop-buying-dilapidated-military-hardware-425294
2015

“We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s

Music

“V has come to be my last Metal Gear.
It has been an honor and a joy to have been given the opportunity to work on Metal Gear for nearly twenty amazing years.
Tоday's computer graphics, technology, and hardware—compared to those of twenty years ago—have evolved so significantly. As a result, the art that can be created has dramatically changed.
However, the process of conceptualizing and creating a character by understanding their personality, their habits, their backstory, and the role they play—this has fundamentally remained the same. Refining ideas and doing countless sketches over and over are tasks that at times feel formidable and complex. At the same time, they are very fun and gratifying.”

Yoji Shinkawa (1971) Japanese illustrator

Foreword to The Art of Metal Gear Solid V, Dark Horse Comics, 2016, p. 7 https://books.google.it/books?id=BerxDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA7.

Art , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“4th. Savings in labor: (a) By the lowness of the walls… (b) in the use of unskilled labor in building walls, by backing the face stones with concrete, and placing the face stones in the forms dry without the use of mortar, except for pointing… (c) in the simplification of woodwork, especially in the hanging of windows and doors, and in the setting of trim… (d) in the application of hardware, chiefly on account of the kind of hinges used… (e) in the standardization of parts and the use of similar members… (f) by cutting about one-half the labor in the installation of plumbing drainage… and (g) by the greater use of machine and shop work, which the exposed structural members permit of.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Introduction
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Parting

“So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come […] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible […] decades from now.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 329

Confidence , Knowledge

“I am glad that my hon. Friend has raised the problems of the Kurdish people in Iraq, and I am sure that they will be grateful for that. Although the Government may not allow the export of military hardware to Iraq, is it not just as beneficial to the Iraqi Government to be given banking facilities, credits and increased trade? They have exactly the same effect of propping up the Iraqi economy, which is used to finance the war machine that is practising genocide against the Kurdish people.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/jul/14/foreign-affairs in the House of Commons (14 July 1989).
1980s

War , People , Problem

“In 10 years, you'll see 99% of the hardware and software systems sold through what are fundamentally retail stores.”

Gordon Bell (1934) American computer engineer

Computer World "VAX Man" interview

“Two views on the scope of technology have pervaded (and shaped) studies of technology, reflecting the different claims to generalizability that researchers have intended with their work. The one set of studies has focused on technology as "hardware," that is, the equipment, machines, and instruments that humans use in productive activities, whether industrial or informational devices.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 399

Study

“[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum. … If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Worth Watching: Steve Ballmer in the heart of Silicon Valley http://blogs.zdnet.com/Foremski/?p=308&tag=rbxccnbzd1 in ZDNet (26 September 2008)
2000s

People , Sense

“People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.”

Donald Ervin Knuth book The Art of Computer Programming

Vol. I Fasc. 1, "MMIX, a RISC computer for the new millennium"
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

People , Idea

“Chen is not only ahead of Steve Jobs in terms of turnaround speed, he has done something that both HP and Sun failed at: turned a hardware company into a software and services company, arguably something Jobs couldn't have done. … Jobs smartly decided to kill the process at Apple to transition that company to software and services. Jobs didn't understand how to do that and would have likely failed because he was just a hardware guy.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

BlackBerry's John Chen: Beating Jobs by Doing the Impossible in Three Years http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/blackberrys-john-chen-beating-jobs-by-doing-the-impossible-in-three-years.html in IT Business Edge (26 January 2017)

Guy , Understanding , Sun , Speed

“In the minds of many writers systems engineering is synonomous with component selection and interface design; that is, the systems engineer does not design hardware but decides what types of existing hardware shall be coupled and how they shall be coupled. Complete agreement that this function is the essence of systems engineering will not be found here, for, besides the very important function of systems engineering in systems analysis, there is the role played by systems engineering in providing boundary conditions for hardware design.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering (1967), p. 193.

“All of them (temples at Hardwar and Ayodhya) are thronged with worshippers, even those that are destroyed are still venerated by the Hindus and visited by the offering of alms.”

Niccolao Manucci (1638–1717) Italian writer and historian

Manucci, vol,. III. Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3
Storia do Mogor

“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

Books , Teachers

“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"

“This book is not for the engineer content with hardware, nor for the biologist uneasy outside his specialty; for it depicts that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems. They regulate themselves and survive: They adapt and they compute: They invent. They co-operate and they compete. Naturally they evolve rapidly.
Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines to run must have energy available as work : and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to Thermodynamics and to its brother Σp log p, called Information Theory, that we look for the distinctions between work and energy and between signal and noise.
For like cause we look to reflexology and its brother feedback, christened Multiple Closed Loop Servo Theory, for mechanical explanation of Entelechy in Homeostasis and in appetition. This is that governance, whether in living creatures and their societies or in our living artefacts, that is now called Cybernetics.”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

McCulloch (1961) in: Pask An approach to Cybernetics http://www.pangaro.com/pask/pask%20approach%20to%20cybernetics.pdf. Preface. p. 7

Books , Art , Mathematics , Nature

“In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Life , Law , Success

“2006, at least after August['s Vista release], will be great time for buyers and sellers of PC hardware and that has to be a good thing for everyone — except Apple.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Windows Vista: The Final Countdown Begins http://technewsworld.com/story/46149.html in Tech News World (19 September 2005)

Time

“Here’s the problem with the web — this is so cool, it’s worth it. The internet is decentralized in the sense that you can kind of nuke any part of it and it still works. That was its original design. The World Wide Web isn’t that way. You go and knock out any particular piece of hardware, it goes away. Can we make a reliable web that’s served from many different places, kind of like how the Amazon cloud works, but for everybody? The answer is yes, you can. You can make kind of a pure to pure distribution structure, such that the web becomes reliable. Another is that we can make it private so that there’s reader privacy. Edward Snowden has brought to light some really difficult architectural problems of the current World Wide Web. The GCHQ, the secret service of the British, watched everybody using WikiLeaks, and then offered all of those IP addresses, which are personally identifiable in the large part, to the NSA. The NSA had conversations about using that as a means to go and… monitor people at an enhanced level that those are now suspects. Libraries have long had history with people being rounded up for what they’ve read and bad things happening to them. We have an interest in trying to make it so that there’s reader privacy”

Brewster Kahle (1960) American computer engineer, founder of the Internet Archive

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode https://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14843408/transcript-internet-archive-founder-brewster-kahle-wayback-machine-recode-decode (March 8, 2017)

People , Secret , World , Way

“In all this, I have made no mention of punched cards and all the other hardware. The CRG would have been hard put to it to ignore this, even if it had wanted to, which it does not. We believe, however, that there will, in the foreseeable future, remain a need for classification to provide research workers with the opportunity for browsing and for imposing some discipline on a literature that tends always towards greater disorder. We believe that, since hundreds of millions of dollars and rubles are being spent on hardware, and fat volumes roll off the presses almost day and night, that ten shillings a year that the CRG collects from its members will not be missed.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 137

Literature , Future , Night

“I don't ask for money. I don't ask for sexual favors. I don't ask for access to the hardware you design and sell. I just ask for the thing I gave you: source code that I can use myself.”

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

Message to Linux kernel mailing list, 2007-06-14, Torvalds, Linus, 2010-02-01 http://groups.google.com/group/linux.kernel/msg/29b45885cc7b11b3,
2000s, 2007

Money

“Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware”, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.”

Patricia Churchland (1943) philosopher

Introductory message at her homepage at the University of California, San Diego http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/presentation.html, 2013

Understanding

“id is both a technology and an art company, so we try to push the art and the technology to its edge on each game, and when you're into high-tech you want to make sure your game can run on several platforms, and you have some room to experiment with several architectures. We don't want to have a basic product, get it out the door, sell as many copies as we can, and then just do the next one. Everyone's putting a lot of soul into the games, and id has got enough money overhead to decide that they can afford to have game ports to show that technology is good on Linux and on Apple hardware.”

Timothee Besset French software programmer

Quoted in Dustin Reyes, "Interview with id Software's Timothee Besset" http://web.archive.org/web/20040924113843/http://www.linuxgames.com/?dataloc=articles/ttimo/ LinuxGames (2004-08-22).

Money , Art , Soul , Game

“Objects are the real and conceptual things we find in the world around us. An object may be hardware, software, a concept (e. g., velocity), or even "flesh and blood." Objects are complete entities, i. e., they are not "simply information" or "simply information and actions." Software objects strive to capture as completely as possible the characteristics of the "real world" objects which they represent. Finally, objects are "black boxes," i. e., their internal implementations are hidden from the outside world, and all interactions with an object take place via a well-defined interface.”

Edward V. Berard

Source: Essays on object-oriented software engineering (1993), p. 335; as cited in Edward V. Berard (1995) " A Comparison of Object-Oriented Development Methodologies http://www.ipipan.gda.pl/~marek/objects/TOA/OOMethod/mcr.html". The Object Agency, Inc.

World , Box

“As a design-scientist the artist discovers and perfects language that corresponds more directly to experience; he develops hardware that embodies its own software as a conceptual tool for coping with reality.”

Gene Youngblood book Expanded Cinema

Source: Expanded Cinema, 1970, p. 72

Reality , Perfection

“I am afraid that this chapter will amply demonstrate the truth of Clarke's 69th Law, viz., "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.”

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

"Appendix II: MITE for Morons," The Odyssey File (1984), p. 123
On Clarke's Laws

Truth , Law , Sex , Reading

“Aurangzeb’s religious policy had created a division in the Indian society. Communal antagonisms resulted in communal riots at Banaras, Narnaul (1672) and Gujarat (1681) where Hindus, in retaliation, destroyed mosques. Temples were destroyed in Marwar after 1678 and in 1680-81, 235 temples were destroyed in Udaipur. Prince Bhim of Udaipur retaliated by attacking Ahmadnagar and demolishing many mosques, big and small, there. Similarly, there was opposition to destruction of temples in the Amber territory, which was friendly to the Mughals. Here religious fairs continued to be held and idols publicly worshipped even after the temples had been demolished.64 In the Deccan the same policy was pursued with the same reaction. In April 1694, the imperial censor had tried to prevent public idol worship in Jaisinghpura near Aurangabad. The Vairagi priests of the temple were arrested but were soon rescued by the Rajputs.65 Aurangzeb destroyed temples throughout the country. He destroyed the temples at Mayapur (Hardwar) and Ayodhya, but “all of them are thronged with worshippers, even those that are destroyed are still venerated by the Hindus and visited by the offering of alms.” Sometimes he was content with only closing down those temples that were built in the midst of entirely Hindu population, and his officers allowed the Hindus to take back their temples on payment of large sums of money. “In the South, where he spent the last twenty-seven years of his reign, Aurangzeb was usually content with leaving many Hindu temples standing… in the Deccan where the suppression of rebellion was not an easy matter… But the discontent occasioned by his orders could not be thus brought to an end.””

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Hindu resistance to such vandalism year after year and decade after decade throughout the length and breadth of the country can rather be imagined than described.
Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

Money , Imagination , Communication , Country

“When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.”

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

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 180

“The field of 'information theory' began by using the old hardware paradigm of transportation of data from point to point.”

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

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 111

“Jobs took over. He simply came in and said, "I'm taking over Macintosh hardware; you can have software and publications." … And then a few months later Jobs said, "I'm taking over software; you can have publications." So I said, "You can have publications too," and left. That was in May of 1982. He and Markkula said, "Please don't leave. Give us another month and we'll make you an offer you can't refuse."”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

So I gave Apple a month; they made me an offer, and I refused.
Programmers At Work (1986)

“You know, I understand how you feel. This is a really contentious issue. Probably as contentious, and potentially as troubling as the abortion issue in this country. All I can tell you is, rushes to pass legislation at a time of national crisis or mourning, I don't really think are proper. And more importantly, nothing in any of this legislation would have done anything to prevent that awful tragedy in Littleton.What I see in the work I've done with kids is, is troubling direction in our culture. And where I see consensus, which is I think we ought to concentrate on in our culture is… look… nobody argues anymore whether they're Conservatives or Liberal whether our society is going in the wrong direction. They may argue trying to quantify how far it's gone wrong or why it's gone that far wrong, whether it's guns, or television, or the Internet, or whatever. But there's consensus saying that something's happened. Guns were much more accessible 40 years ago. A kid could walk into a pawn shop or a hardware store and buy a high-capacity magazine weapon that could kill a lot of people and they didn't do it.The question we should be asking is… look… suicide is a tragedy. And it's a horrible thing. But 30 or 40 years ago, particularly men, and even young men, when they were suicidal, they went, and unfortunately, blew their brains out. In today's world, someone who is suicidal sits home, nurses their grievance, develops a rage, and is just a suicidal but they take 20 people with them. There's something changed in our culture.</p”

Tom Selleck (1945) American actor

On <i>The Rosie O'Donnell Show</i> on May 19th, 1999.

Men , People , World , Feeling

“People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.
Make no mistake: all politicians — even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership — hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician — or political philosophy — can be put.
If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.
"Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?" (3 August 1999) http://www.lneilsmith.org/.

Hate , People , World , Idea

“Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Quoted in Staying on the cutting edge, Varghese, Sam, 2004-10-08, 2007-01-10, The Age http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/07/1097089476287.html,

Parting

“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)

World

“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
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)

Death , War , Fight

“I'm in great shape considering I have hardware in my back. I work out constantly to keep my muscles limber and my abs strong so they can take the burnt of everything.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Latina Magazine (September, 2007)
2007, 2008

Strong

“The physical mechanisms (hardware) in which the structure is embodied.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959), p. 1275.

“All of man's artefacts, whether hardware or software, whether bulldozers or laws of chemistry, are alike linguistic in structure and intent.”

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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 227

Law

“For some time now, Apple has faced questions about its growth and what rabbits it can pull out of its hat next … Apple's immediate future looks sunny, but its long-term outlook has begun to look partly cloudy. In a world that seems to care less and less about beautiful hardware and more about services that help you from afar, over the air, without your ever having to touch a machine, Apple risks becoming an anachronism.”

Farhad Manjoo (1978) American journalist

Apple Needs to Reinvent Itself. It Just Might Be Doing So. http://nytimes.com/2017/06/06/technology/apple-reinvent-itself.html in The New York Times (6 June 2017)

World , Beauty , Question , Time

“There is a rigorous science, just waiting to be recognized and developed, which encompasses the whole of 'the software problem,' as defined, including the hardware, software, languages, devices, logic, data, knowledge, users, users, and effectiveness, etc. for end-users, providers, enablers, commissioners, and sponsors, alike.”

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

D.T. Ross (1989) "Appendix B: Understanding: The Key to Software" in: Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council Scaling Up: A Research Agenda for Software Engineering. p. 66 (cited on p. 3).

Knowledge , Problem , Science , Waiting

“Advances in hardware and network technologies have paved the way for the development of increasingly pervasive software-based systems of systems that collaborate to provide essential services to society. Software in these systems is often required to (1) operate in distributed and embedded computing environments consisting of diverse devices (personal computers, specialized sensors and actuators), (2) communicate using a variety of interaction paradigms (e. g., SOAP messaging, media streaming), (3) dynamically adapt to changes in operating environments, and (4) behave in a dependable manner. Despite signiﬁcant advances in programming languages and supporting integrated development environments (IDEs), developing these complex software systems using current code-centric technologies requires herculean effort.”

Bernhard Rumpe (1967) German computer scientist

Source: Model-driven development of complex software: A research roadmap (2007), p. 37: Introduction

Way , Communication , Support , Effort

“Apple Watch is superfluous, an unnecessary accessory that literally no one needs. … it just seems so pointless. … I understand, even accept, that Apple hardware purchases involve most of the points made above and that most fans of the company simply don’t care or are essentially pushing their fingers into their ears and going "na-na-na-na" so they can’t hear the logic of the argument against their buying decisions. I am at peace with this.”

Paul Thurrott (1966) American podcaster, author, and blogger

The Problem with Apple Watch in a Nutshell http://thurrott.com/mobile/ios/3137/the-problem-with-apple-watch-in-a-nutshell in Thurrott - News & Analysis for Tech Enthusiasts (27 April 2015)

Peace , Understanding , Decision

“Simulation is the use of models and/or the actual conditions of either the thing being modeled or the environment in which it operates, with the models or conditions in physical, mathematical, or some other form. The purpose of simulation is to explore the various results which might be obtained from the real system by subjecting the model to representative environments which are equivalent to, or in some way representative of, the situations it is desired to understand or investigate. Simulation may involve system hardware and the actual physical environment, or it may involve mathematical models subjected to mathematical forcing or disturbance functions representative of the systems conditions to be studied.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 111 as cited in

Way , Mathematics , Understanding , Study

“The information age is an age of permanently getting stuck. Greater and greater speed is demanded. New software, new hardware, new structures, new cultural techniques. Life-long learning? Yes. But the company can't fire the secretary every six months, just because she can't cope with the new version of Excel. They can count their keystrokes, measure their productivity … but! They will never be able to sanction their inability! Because that is immanent.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Minus 24x http://www.monochrom.at/minus24x/index-eng.htm, 2001

Life , Age , Learning , Speed

“The APT and CAD Projects had one Air Force sponsorship, but it was actually a combination of about five or six projects, all going in parallel on both hardware and software matters, and I couldn't keep track of things, so I would take Polaroid pictures of the blackboard and then say what we had talked about into my dictating machine and my secretary would type it up.”

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

Source: Retrospectives : The Early Years in Computer Graphics at at MIT, Lincoln Lab and Harvard (1989), p. 26.

“I used to [look at the Linux source code], for Plan 9. They were always ahead of us—they just had massively more resources to deal with hardware. So when we'd run across a piece of hardware, I'd look at the Linux drivers for it and write Plan 9 drivers for it. Now I have no reason to look at it. I run Linux. And I occasionally look at code, but rarely, so I can't really tell whether the quality has gotten better or not [since 1999]. But certainly the reliability has gotten better.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

Ken Thompson; cited in [Seibel, Peter, Coders At Work, 2009, 479]
"Coders At Work", 2009

“While it is becoming increasingly obvious that the fundamental architecture of a system has a profound Influence on the quality of its human factors, the vast majority of human factors studies concern the surface of hardware (keyboards, screens) or the very surface of the software”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

command names, menu formats
L.M. Branscomb, J.C. Thomas (1984) "Ease of use: a system design challenge". in: IBM Systems Journal. Vol 23.3, Sept 1984. Pages 224-235

Study

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

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

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

People

“Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 39, Popcorn, Lord Jim, Extinction

Love , Life

“There was nothing under her clothes but girl and assorted items of lethal hardware.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Puppet Masters

Source: The Puppet Masters (1951), Chapter 4 (p. 28)

Girl , Clothes

“The speed and density of computation have been doubling every three years (at the beginning of the twentieth century) to one year (at the end of the twentieth century), regardless of the type of hardware used. …Despite many decades of progress since the first calculating equipment was used in the 1890 census, it was not until the mid-1960s that this phenomenon was even noticed”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

although Alan Turing had an inkling of it in 1950
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

Speed

“You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness. And it’s all catching up with you. You live and die by the development cycle. You’re glamorized drosophila flies, with the company regulating your life cycles at whim. If it isn’t a budget-driven eighteen-month game production schedule, it’s a five-year hardware obsolescence schedule. Every five years you have to throw away everything you know and learn a whole new set of hardware and software specs, relegating what was once critical to our lives to the cosmic slag heap.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life , Feeling , Game , Learning

“SHALMANESER That real cool piece of hardware up at the GT tower. They say he's apt to evolve to true consciousness one day. Also they say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

tracking with closeups (17) "Brighter Than A Thousand Men"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

Intelligence

“Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.”

Max Tegmark (1967) Swedish-American cosmologist

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)

Life , Behavior , Thinking

“Cybernetics is concerned primarily with the construction of theories and models in science, without making a hard and fast distinction between the physical and the biological sciences. The theories and models occur both in symbols and in hardware, and by 'hardware* we shall mean a machine or computer built in terms of physical or chemical, or indeed any handleable parts. Most usually we shall think of hardware as meaning electronic parts such as valves and relays. Cybernetics insists, also, on a further and rather special condition that distinguishes it from ordinary scientific theorizing: it demands a certain standard of effectiveness. In this respect it has acquired some of the same motive power that has driven research on modern logic, and this is especially true in the construction and application of artificial languages and the use of operational definitions. Always the search is for precision and effectiveness, and we must now discuss the question of effectiveness in some detail. It should be noted that when we talk in these terms we are giving pride of place to the theory of automata at the expense, at least to some extent, of feedback and information theory.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.2

Search , Motivation , Question , Thinking

“You know what you can buy at the supermarket?” Laws inquired acidly. “I’ll tell you. Canned burnt offerings.”
“You know what you can buy at the hardware store?” Hamilton answered. “Scales to weigh your soul on.”
“That’s silly,” the blond said petulantly. “A soul doesn’t have any weight.”
“Then,” Hamilton reflected, “you could put one through the U. S. mail for nothing.”
“How many souls,” Laws conjectured ironically, “can be fitted into one stamped envelope? New religious question. Split mankind in half. Warring factions. Blood running in the gutters.”
“Ten,” Hamilton guessed.
“Fourteen,” Laws contradicted.
“Heretic. Baby-murdering monster.”
“Bestial drinker of unpurified blood.”

Philip K. Dick book Eye in the Sky

“Accursed spawn of filth-devouring evil.”
Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 6 (p. 75)

War , Law , Soul , Question

“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called 'Pharmacy' after assign two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store an snow shovel on which I wrote 'In advance of the broken arm'. It was around that time that the word 'Readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, Apropos of Ready Mades', 1961

Idea , Winter , Time , Happiness

“Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: Orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience, towards the psychedelic phenomenon, as a source of information. A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks. Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society, where, in hardware, the unconscious is actually being created. It's as though we took the Platonic bon mot about how "if God did not exist, Man would invent him", and say "if the unconscious does not exist, humanity will invent it" — in the form of these vast networks able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in, is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years; the human type was established at the end of the last glaciation. But change, which was previously operable in the biological realm, is now operable in the realm of culture.

“Often designers do complicated things that improve the capacity on a particular hardware platform when it might actually be cheaper to buy more hardware.”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Martin Fowler (2012) Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

“A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (1972) The Humble Programmer http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html (EWD340).
1970s
Context: After having programmed for some three years, I had a discussion with A. van Wijngaarden, who was then my boss at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, a discussion for which I shall remain grateful to him as long as I live. The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become....., yes what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. Full of misgivings I knocked on van Wijngaarden’s office door, asking him whether I could “speak to him for a moment”; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could. One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it!

Question , Support , Knowledge , Envy

“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

World , Light , Speed

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

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

“Military men! Damn it, they always thought in terms of hardware, black or white, our side or the other side. It was damned hard to get them to see gray at all, and getting them to tell dark gray from medium gray was impossible!”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Fresco (2000), Chapter 12, p. 125

Men

“Warfare with the use of aviation and military hardware and so on, a huge number of militant groups on the territory of this country, with militants coming mostly from terrorist organisations based abroad, including Al-Qaeda who were active in this country. Thank God, we got rid of this but we have not eradicated terrorism per se. Of course, terrorism still poses a great threat to our country as well, which was why we launched these operations in Syria…”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Cooperation, Terrorism, UK & USA, President Trump, Resolving Conflict, Defense, Crimea, The Media, Nuclear Weapons Policy: 15th Plenary Session (18 October 2018)

God , Country

“The United States has enough military hardware and technology to… bully, bribe and blackmail people into going along with their wars is something you mustn’t underestimate. …The multinationals have no loyalty to the United States any more than they have any loyalty to Britain, but the way they express their interest is by buying both political parties in America and expecting a pay-off whichever one wins — and that is totally anti-democratic.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Tony Benn interview: Hope is the key, Share International Foundation http://www.share-international.org/magazine/old_issues/2003/jan_03.htm#benn (January 2003).
2000s

Way , War , Loyalty , People

“It is possible to debate how strong America should be militarily in relation to the rest of the world. But that is not a debate that needs to be entered into to reduce the military budget by a large amount. If, beginning one year from now, we were to cut military spending by 25 percent from its projected levels, we would still be immeasurably stronger than any combination of nations with whom we might be engaged… Spending on military hardware does produce some jobs, but it is one of the most inefficient ways to deploy public funds to stimulate the economy. When I asked him years ago what he thought about military spending as stimulus, Alan Greenspan, to his credit, noted that... it was not good for the economy; and to the extent that it could be reduced, the economy would benefit…The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush’s tax cuts for the very wealthy.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Barney Frank: ‘Cut the Military Budget’, The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/cut-military-budget/ (2 March 2009)

Strong , Way , Relation ships , World

“Tulsidasa alone, though the most famous of them all, has no disciples that are called after his name. There are Vallabhachars and Radha Vallabhs and Maluk Dasis, Pran Nathis and so on in interminable succession, but there are no Tulsidasis. Virtually, however, the whole of Vaishnava Hinduism has fallen under his sway; for the principles that he expounded have permeated every sect and explicitly or implicitly now form the nucleus of the popular faith as it prevails throughout the whole of the Bengal Presidency from Hardwar to Calcutta.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

F.S.Growse, in According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India http://books.google.co.in/books?id=GrMwdEqHLzEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=Tulsidas&f=false, p. 80

Faith , Success

“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference—the only difference in their eyes—between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 15 (pp. 184-185, quoting the fictional work Things I Should Have Learned by Now, Volume II, written by story character Quellcrist Falconer)

Chance , Time , Justice , Business

“I am afraid that this chapter will amply demonstrate the truth of Clarke's 69th Law, viz., "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

In both cases the cure is simple though usually very expensive.
"Appendix II: MITE for Morons," The Odyssey File (1984), p. 123
1960s, Clarke's Three Laws, et al (1962; 1973…)

Truth , Sex , Law , Reading

“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

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