The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History

Legendary sound bites that made sense, made history--or just made us laugh.

By  |  Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:53 pm

The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech HistoryIt’s not love, war, or baseball. But over the years some memorable things have been said about technology. Some have been memorably eloquent; others are unforgettably shortsighted, wrongheaded, or just plain weird. Let’s celebrate them, shall we?

A few ground rules for the list that follows: I considered only statements attributable to a specific individual, which ruled out most ad slogans (“Think Different”) and many durable Internet memes (“You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike”). I did, however, include individuals who happened to be fictional, or canine, or inanimate. I also let a couple of quotes slip in that are not strictly speaking about technology, though neither would exist without it–one from 1876, and one from earlier this decade. Sue me.

It’s hard to rank quotes by how notable they are. So I faked it by listing them using an imprecise, unscientific factor I call Googleosity: the number of results Google reports that reference (or riff upon) each quote. (You may quibble with the queries I performed to determine Googleosity, but I tried my best.) Googleosity tends to reward quotes that are not only famous but fun–they’re the ones that people like to allude to, to parody, and to generally weave into blog posts and other online conversation.

We’ll start with the quote with the lowest Googleosity factor, and work our way up from there.

25. Mike Doonesbury’s Newton-like PDA:

"Egg Freckles?" --Mike Doonesbury's Newton

Googleosity: 3,970

Quote type: Satire as product evaluation.

Circumstances of origin: In Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip for August 27th, 1993, as Mike tries out his new PDA’s handwriting recognition; it’s what the PDA thinks he meant when he scribbles “Catching on?”

Why it’s notable: Trudeau’s sequence tweaking Apple’s high-profile Newton attracted attention at the time–the PDA had debuted earlier that month–and it still comes up frequently in discussions of the product. Some Newton fans seemed to blame the strips for contributing to the product’s ultimate failure, although the platform hung on until 1998. The Newton engineers, however, took the jibe gracefully, tacking the strip up on the wall as inspiration and building a version of the “Egg Freckles?” panel into a later Newton model as an Easter Egg.

24. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple:

"Real artists ship" -- Steve Jobs

Googleosity: 5,710

Quote type: Terse goading.

Circumstances of origin: The statement was one of three ‘Sayings from Chairman Jobs” that Jobs shared at a January, 1983 Macintosh team retreat in Carmel, California. The groundbreaking computer was behind schedule and wouldn’t end up shipping for another year. (The other two sayings: “It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy” and “Mac in a book by 1986.”)

Why it’s notable: Jobs was right–the technological innovations that matter most are the ones that appear in products that consumers can actually buy. Here’s a good blog post on how the “Real artists ship” ethos impacts Apple to this day.

23. Linus Torvalds, father of Linux:

I'm doing a (free) operating system (won't be big and professional like gnu) --Linus TorvaldsGoogleosity: 12,500

Quote type: Momentous moment.

Circumstances of origin: Torvalds posted to the comp.os.minix newgroup to seek input on Linux, which he had just begun developing.

Why it’s notable: In an industry notorious for overhype–especially for new operating systems–this modest little message is one of the most hype-free major product announcements ever. Torvalds’ “hobby” went on to change the world, in part by inspiring such other worthy open-source projects as Mozilla’s Firefox.

22. Scott McNealy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems:

You have no privacy anyway. Get over it. --Scott McNealy

Googleosity: 35,700

Quote type: Inconvenient half-truth.

Circumstances of origin: Before the media at the launch of Sun’s Jini technology, January 26th 1999.

Why it’s notable: Former Sun CEO McNealy may be the most irritable man in technology. (He once told me I’d asked him the dumbest question he’d ever heard.) His dismissal of a question about the privacy implications of the company’s Jini platform for distributed services is shocking–in part because CEOs touting new technology usually don’t talk like that, and in part because his blanket statement is closer to being true than most of us would care to admit.

21. Ken Olsen, founder of legendary minicomputer company DEC:

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." --Ken Olsen

Googleosity: 49,200

Quote type: Boneheaded miscalculation.

Circumstances of origin: A talk to the World Future Society in Boston, presumably before an audience full of folks who disagreed with him.

Why it’s notable: Unlike the similarly shortsighted “I think there is a worldwide market for maybe five computers,” Olsen’s seemingly blithe dismissal of the home PC is definitively real. But Olsen and his defenders say he was quoted out of context–that he was talking about all-powerful computers that would control lights, temperature, entertainment, and meals. I admire the guy, so I’ll cut him some slack. Is it a coincidence, though, that when DEC attempted to enter the home computer market five years later, it was with a famously miserable machine?

1 2 3 4 5 NEXT PAGE»


74 Comments


Read more: 

66 Comments For This Post

  1. OHaleck Says:

    How about Bill Gates' "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet"?

  2. Chip Says:

    Steve Ballmer: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."

  3. Brian Says:

    "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth — and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

    Steve Jobs, As quoted in Fortune (1996-02-19)
    http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

    And, what nobody's noticed is that he's doing exactly this.

  4. Mark Says:

    Exactly!

  5. Jared Says:

    You have no chance to survive make your time.

    … sorry I can never resist. Move zig.

  6. Z Says:

    Thank you for posting more than one quote per page! Nice post overall.

  7. Backlin Says:

    And there’s always the classic, “What do you mean this computer is late? It’s five years ahead of its time!”

  8. Tech Says:

    “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer at home” LOL Ken Olsen is really eating his words. Forget the home, people have computers in their pockets.

  9. tom b Says:

    October 6, 1997: “And at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.

    “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives. “

  10. Thomas Says:

    Bill Gates: “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer.” it may have been said in the early 1970s

  11. NanoGeek Says:

    @Thomas

    That quote is often attributed to Bill Gates, but I’ve heard that he never really said it.
    Could be wrong though.

  12. Dan Palacios Says:

    And I, for one, welcome our new insect [or insert technology here] overlords

    as quoted from the Simpsons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Homer

  13. Robert Says:

    Re: "You've got mail." In documenting this clearly memorable tech phrase, you really should have noted it's poor grammer. It has trained a generation in bad English. If you expand the contraction "You've" you get "You have got mail." There's no need for the "got" — it's redundant. The simple statement "You have mail." is all that's needed — and could have been delivered with the same excited intonation for the same effect.

  14. jpaul Says:

    Ah ah, it's not "grammer", it's "grammAr" 😉 !

  15. Andrew Says:

    The infamous John C. Dvorak quote: “The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dvorak#Quotes

  16. Bertolomie Says:

    I really, really like this article. Excellent work, Harry. One of your best, freshest Technologizer pieces yet!

  17. Michael Peck Says:

    Of course, lost in all this idiotic “Jobs was right!” hurrah-nonsense is the fact that at the time, Jobs pooh-poohed the Macintosh efforts in favor of his own Lisa.

    Which did not ship.

  18. Rolf.Breuer Says:

    Did not ship? Check the facts. I still say I had a "mouse interface" 2 years before everybody else. Yes – it did cost me 32,000 Deutsch Marks in 1983 but I loved it. (Some would say I had to.)
    The software was amazing and BTW – when I sold it in 1986 I had made all my money back. A week later and now in California, I bought a Mac Plus for $2,500…

  19. Clive Says:

    I think the best Bill Gates quote is “I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.”

    It is the opening sentence of the foreword to the “OS/2 Programmers Guide”.

  20. Daryl Says:

    I can’t believe you missed Charles Wright’s summing-up of the Amiga computer in some computer magazine review many, many years ago: “Adults don’t need colour.”

    This at a time when the world was filled with 8-bit, monochrome “IBM-compatibles”!

  21. Walter M. Clark Says:

    @Michael Peck, while the Apple Lisa was a commercial failure it most assuredly did ship. I passed on taking a job at a school district in 1984 with one of the jewels dangled in front of me the fact that they’d recently bought a Lisa to use for attendance projections.

  22. Irreverent Says:

    @Michael Peck: you’re wrong on every count. Not only did the Apple Lisa most certainly ship, but you are also way off the mark regarding Jobs’ attitude toward the Mac. He was the biggest Mac proponent at Apple from pretty much day 1 (read something like Andy Hertzfeld’s “Revolution in the Valley” to uncross your wires on this issue). To be honest I don’t know how you managed to cram so much misinformation into such a small post. Can I say “You’ve got fail”?

  23. John Richardson Says:

    For me, the best tech comment ever was by Walter Cronkite. In his TV series “The Twentieth Century” he visited the Jet Propulsion Labs in California. There the programmers, as a technology demonstration, had programmed an early computer- probably a PDP 8, to play a video game that resembled “Asteroids”. This was at a time when most people interfaced with their computer through a deck of punched cards. Cronkite looked at the row of refrigerator-sized computers running the game and speculated “Who knows, maybe some day we’ll have games like this in our own homes.”

    At the time, I thought he was crazy. Nothing that cool could ever happen.

  24. Idrankthekoolaid Says:

    It was Jobs who said 64K was enough and he said it about the Macintosh.

  25. Dave Says:

    “One more thing” isn’t Jobs’ own phrase; he’s just quoting (perhaps mis-quoting) Columbo, who always used to pull that trick on suspects.

  26. SofaKing Says:

    Columbo: Oh, just one more thing…

  27. Pat Says:

    “Linux is a cancer” – Steve Balmer 2001

  28. Arby Says:

    Proof of Bill Gates "640k" comment is in the recordings of a speech he gave at Waterloo University (Ontario Canada) in the late 80's or early 90's. These recordings are available out there.

  29. Michael McDonald Says:

    Speaking of Ken Olsen's forthrightness, I remember a front-page story in a trade weekly, maybe ten years ago, which quoted him to the effect that DEC's financial difficulties were a good thing, becouse they provided an opportunity to "get rid of the riff-raff".

  30. JP Says:

    “PC Load Letter”

  31. wizarddrummer Says:

    “nothing would please me more than to be able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.”

    Well Gates got it half right … hired more than ten programmers and then deluged the market with bug ridden crappy software!

  32. wizarddrummer Says:

    Gates is usually said to have made the claim that the IBM PC’s 640K of RAM was sufficient at a 1981 microcomputer trade show,
    What was completely retarded about how they implemented this was that the USER portion was BEFORE the Operating system instead of the other way around.

    Because of this massive stupidity we had to have memory “go arounds” for years with expanded memory and extended memory in the mix.

    It was horrible. I hated programming in the early DOS days. Unix was so far superior that there wasn’t even a notable chart worthy comparison; but the “best” does not always win!

  33. jpaul Says:

    What about the Little Britain meme "The computer says 'No'!" ?

  34. marko Says:

    I find that everything has its variety and everything goes according to consumer taste

  35. Nick Says:

    What about "My Name Is Macintosh?"

  36. GADEL Says:

    Interesting quotes.

  37. Tube Worm Says:

    "I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." Jobs on Gates / MS

  38. Michael Says:

    "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons"; popular mechanics, 1949

  39. DaveA Says:

    Many moons ago, I was using a beta for AppleLink Personal Edition, which I think eventually became AOL. The You've got mail sound was in a very young child's voice. Very cute. I know I looked thru old floppies once, trying to find that sound, but couldn't. Maybe I can use The Google to try to find it on the interwebs.

  40. Dave Says:

    "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda, on the iPod at its release in 2001.

  41. LauRoman Says:

    Actually the "One more thing…" quote is another thing Steve stole or (innovated) as his followers would put it. There was a famous glass-eyed italian-american police detective that was using the phrase a long time before mr Jobs. The actor playing that detective died a little over 2 months ago. http://youtu.be/biW9BbWJtQU?t=17s http://youtu.be/pZiv8vkxMac?t=2m18s http://youtu.be/qRHy3RL54sI

  42. Cactus Wren Says:

    "Have you got a prediction for us, UNIVAC?"

    — Walter Cronkite, November 4th, 1952. UNIVAC most assuredly did: it predicted that Dwight D. Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes and Adlai Stevenson would get only 93. CBS found this so implausible that UNIVAC's prediction did not air live. Hours later the numbers were reported — but not until after what pollsters had forecast as a very tight race turned into an Eisenhower landslide, with the official count being 442 electoral votes for Ike, 92 for Stevenson.

  43. tool steel Says:

    This is an affecting point of view on this topic. I am happy you shared your ideas and I find myself agreeing.

  44. James W Says:

    If you make a technology statement today, you should expect that ten years from now, people will be laughing at you.

  45. James W Says:

    Funny how we had computers with slots that were the size of refrigerators and had graphics that were so pathetic that it required a vivid imagination to play them.

  46. jones123peter Says:

    I am happy to find your distinguished way of writing the post. Now you make it easy for me to understand and implement the concept. Thank you for the post Saccharomyces Boulardii

  47. jones123peter Says:

    Let me start by saying nice post. Im not sure if it has been talked about, but when using Chrome I can never get the entire site to load without refreshing many times. Could just be my computer. Thanks. fal

  48. jones123peter Says:

    My favorite “oops, I wish I never said that” quote is Michael Dell’s “shut it down and give the money back to shareholders” advice to Apple. Of course, this was circa 1997 when Apple was in quite dire straits.
    Security Jobs

  49. jones123peter Says:

    Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
    driving lessons birmingham

  50. sihirlaz Says:

    nice site Burçlar

  51. kelly grundy Says:

    Some great and funny quotes there, many things we say come back to haunt us eventually

  52. SUN Says:

    Thanks for sharing this great article! This is exactly what I was looking for. That is very interesting Smile I love reading and I am always searching for informative information like: yeast infection treatment Squidoo Lens creation

  53. dss Says:

    I am in closer agreement with you than Robert

    "You have mail" would be true if you haven't deleted all the mail you have ever received. You still have some.

    "You've got mail" means mail has arrived – informing you that you have received mail since the last time you looked.

  54. Freddy Says:

    Haha! Funny quotes here! Nice article. Thanks! 3dcad

  55. Marky Says:

    An then there is this Quote: "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons"
    Popular mechanics 1949
    Ps3 Reparatur

  56. mediahuset123 Says:

    coffee machines
    The depth and quality of this post is really awesome. It is very knowledgeable information that could be very much helpful in IT as well as e-business industry.

  57. Wendy Miller Says:

    "I think there is a worldwide market for only five computers" is a funny one. Ok, there´s a discussion that Watson ever made such a comment, but still. If someone ever thought this to be true, they couldn´t have been more wrong!! Website OptimierungFlirtFacebook Fans

  58. Stanley Says:

    I actually miss "Clippy"! It was a nice feeling that there was something livving in my computer and was always there to help….euhm…annoy me 😉 Winther Kinderbus

  59. Roey Says:

    Thanks for the great info, love your post, and hope your site continues to grow! Laundry Renovations Sydney

  60. Xyzzy Says:

    1. Here's another notable quote: "Do you want to play a game?" – Wargames

    2. "Originally known as ARPANET, the Internet went online in October 1969 …"

    No: ARPANET was the 1st WAN, connecting California & Utah. The word "internet" was defined in the mid-70s as a theoretical global TCP/IP network — and the final links were connected to form *the* Internet around the very late 80s.

  61. Leesa Kennedy Says:

    My name is Michel Ruurda. I am Australian, born and raised, a natural citizen and current resident of the Sunshine Coast ( above Brisbane) in attractive Queensland. Thanks for the great info, love your post, and hope your site continues to grow!
    Michel Ruurda

  62. Edwin Says:

    great information men florida sales tax

  63. nice Says:

    what an interesting take on the history of the Apple Company! Clearly I haven't been paying attention as all of this had completely escaped my notice!

  64. Edwin Says:

    You know, I’ve been googling Improve Your Speedall day to find this Truth About Quicknesskind information. Glad you wrote Truth About Quickness Reviewabout it. Thanks!

  65. jones123peter Says:

    Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand. – Archibald Putt
    Bali Hotel And Tour

  66. jenni158 Says:

    webdesign
    Every sentence has a lot of importance. It is always informative,exclusive,impressive and unique one. I expect more from you. Your post are best.

8 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History « Chicago Mac/PC Support Says:

    […] The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History Fun list.  Good thing to read just to get perspective on the history of computing.  Click here. […]

  2. Windows? Laptops? They’ll Never Catch On! | Technologizer Says:

    […] The 25 most notable tech quotes […]

  3. Mr. Edison’s Kindle Says:

    […] all: Features “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” So said the legendary tech visionary Alan Kay. He was absolutely correct. But he might have added that it’s not a very reliable […]

  4. Mr. Edison’s Kindle Says:

    […] all: Features “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” So said legendary tech visionary Alan Kay. He was absolutely correct. But he might have added that inventing the future is anything but a […]

  5. Jobs Calls Out Android Over Porn — Think Geek Australia Says:

    […] The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History […]

  6. Las 25 frases más notables en la historia de la tecnología [ENG] Says:

    […] Las 25 frases más notables en la historia de la tecnología [ENG] technologizer.com/2009/11/09/great-tech-quotes/  por superplinio hace 2 segundos […]

  7. The 15 Greatest Computer Books of All Time | Fixpcexpress Says:

    […] works that follow are listed in chronological order. As in “The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History,” I’ve also listed each book’s Googleosity-the number of references to it on the […]

  8. The 25 Best Technology Quotes | Wire Turf Says:

    […] Recently came across this ranked listed of the 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History. […]