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The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History
It’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 onlne conversation.
We’ll start with the quote with the lowest Googleosity factor, and work our way up from there.
The 20 Greatest Tech Underdogs of All Time
5. November 2009
Rocky. The Chicago Cubs. Charlie Brown. Avis, back when its whole schtick centered on being America’s #2 rental car company. America loves its underdogs–and the technology business has always been home to a disproportionate number of exceptionally lovable underdogs. They may never achieve market leadership, but without them, the tech in our lives would be less interesting, innovative, and inspiring.
So what is an underdog? Merriam-Webster says it’s a “loser or predicted loser in a struggle or contest” or a “a victim of injustice or persecution.” For this list, I’m using a somewhat different, tighter definition. Continue reading this story…
Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost
25. October 2009
You’re familiar with Moore’s law. You know all about the accelerating pace of information technology. Regardless, you’re still amazed at how many gigabytes you can fit in your pocket these days. Remember how your first computer’s entire hard disk only held 20 megabytes? You could accidentally swallow a thousand times as much data now if you weren’t careful.
But how much did that old hard drive cost? I mean really cost? Our memories get fuzzy on this point, because the buying power of the U.S. dollar has not remained constant over the years. Inflation has decreased the value of the dollar, per dollar, continuously for over a century. That means if you bought an IBM PC for $3,000 in 1981, you were actually spending the equivalent of $7,127.69 in today’s dollars.
Wait..what? $7,000 for a PC? Does anybody buy a $7,000 PC these days? Does anybody even sell a $7,000 desktop PC now? In our present climate of plentiful sub-$1,000 computers, surely a $7,000 PC must be the most incredible machine ever invented. But for a business-oriented machine in 1981, that sounded cheap.
To examine this trend, let’s take six classic personal computers from yesteryear–some cheap, some expensive–and see what you could buy today for the same price. And we’re not talking original retail price here; we’re going to take inflation into account. For example, the Commodore 64–once considered a low-cost home computer–originally sold for $1,331.62 in 2009 dollars. Today you can get quite a bit for that much money. How much? That’s what we’re going to find out.
Apple Rumors: The Early Years
28. September 2009
We live in an, um, golden age of Apple gossip. Thanks to the blogosphere, a surging sea of sites cover an endless array of rumors about the company, from ones that are right on the money to ones that are partially right to ones that aren’t right at all. The conversation spawned by the scuttlebutt has helped many a site fill time during slow news days: No other company can set off a frenzy of speculation about matters as mundane as the quantity of USB ports a new machine might sport.
The sheer quantity of Apple scuttlebutt has never been higher. But the company has been a powerful engine for the rumor mill for as long as there’s been an Apple and tech journalists to cover it. And Google Books’ recent addition of the entire run of InfoWorld provides us with the opportunity to revisit the first golden age of Apple rumors–which, uncoincidentally, ended when Steve Jobs was forced out of the company he cofounded in mid-1985.
Today’s InfoWorld may be a Web site for IT professionals, but in the early 1980s it was a weekly publication for microcomputer users, and its pages are as good a record as you’ll find of the era’s industry chatter–including lots and lots of stuff about Apple. So in this second installment in our once-in-awhile series on Apple rumors and predictions, we’ll check out tidbits from InfoWorld stories (1980-1985). My goal is not to mock, but simply to see what folks thought Apple would do, what they thought it meant…and whether any of it came to pass.
Shouldn’t Every Day Be Google Doodle Day?
27. September 2009
If you visited Google on Sunday–and odds are pretty good that you did–you may have noticed that its logo sports what seems to be a typo but is really a celebration of the company’s eleventh anniversary…
The special logo is known as a Google Doodle, and it’s a tradition almost exactly as old as Google itself (the first one appeared in September of 1998 to celebrate the Burning Man festival). And if Google Doodles were ever a scarce resource, that day is long past. Shall we recap September–so far?
Fifteen Classic Game Console Design Mistakes
10. August 2009
Video game systems may be toys of a sort, but they’re also complicated machines. They require precision engineering, specialized hardware design, and careful industrial design to successfully achieve what seems like a simple goal: to play games on a television set. Throughout the history of home game consoles, each generation of machines has brought new opportunities to innovate. Along the way, companies have often slipped up and made mistakes that came back to haunt them later–some of which were so serious that they helped to destroy platforms and even entire corporations.
This list is by no means exhaustive, nor are all of these consoles bad overall (see The Worst Video Game Systems of All Time for that list). And though some of these problems keep popping up in one form or another–like the bad call of feeding power to the console via the RF switch shared by RCA’s Studio II and Atari’s 5200–other errors in judgments were unique to one console. Thank heavens for that.
Brilliant But Doomed: Technology’s Most Magnificent Failures
27. July 2009
Life, as John F. Kennedy once helpfully pointed out, isn’t fair. Neither is the market for technology products. There’s no law that says that the best products win: The history of tech is pockmarked with breakthrough hardware, software, and services that were dismal failures in the marketplace. (It’s also rife with mediocre products that became massive bestsellers–insert your own example here.)
Of course, not every innovative tech product deserves to be a hit. Some flop because they’re ahead of their time, which is kind of admirable; others bomb because they take too long to emerge from the lab and are obsolete by the time they do, which is simply embarrassing. And some products that are enticing on paper turn out to have fatal cases of Achilles’ heel in the real world. But they’re all valuable case studies in how good intentions can go awry.
For this article, I intentionally skipped some of the most legendary magnificent failures, such as the Apple Newton, Commodore Amiga, and Sony Betamax–they’ve been celebrated more or less continuously since their untimely passings, and I wanted to devote more space to lesser-known contenders. I figure you’re going to reminisce about your own favorites in the comments anyhow.
Thanks to my pals on Twitter (where I’m @harrymccracken) for nominating scads of products for this story. And yes, the title of this article is a homage to Brilliant But Cancelled, a retrospective of short-lived TV shows that appeared on the Trio cable channel…a channel which was itself both excellent and unsuccessful.
Forty Years of Lunar Lander
19. July 2009
Lunar Lander games abound on every platform. Along with Tetris and Pac-Man, the game–in which your mission is to safely maneuver your lunar module onto the moon’s surface–is one of the most widely cloned computer games of all time. But did you know that game players began touching down on the moon in Lunar Lander just months after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did so on July 20th, 1969?
Today’s versions of Lunar Lander are easily taken for granted; they’re generally regarded as dinky games you can get for free–”Who would pay for that?”
But the mother of all realistic space simulations wasn’t always perceived that way. In 1969, it was, in its own way, a sophisticated, ambitious piece of digital entertainment. And during the BASIC era of the 1970s and 80s, many programmers cut their teeth by attempting to program their own version of Lunar Lander. David Ahl, founder of Creative Computing magazine, called it “by far and away the single most popular computer game” in 1978 (and he was only talking about the text version!). Indeed, Lunar Lander was one of the early computer games that helped define computer games.
The Amazing World of Version Numbers
14. July 2009
In theory, software version numbers should be about as scintillating as as serial numbers, house numbers, channel numbers, or Vehicle Identification Numbers. You don’t much more mundane than the practice of keeping track of a software package’s major and minor editions by assigning decimal numbers to them.
Except…version numbers long ago stopped being version numbers. Software companies started using them as marketing weapons. They tried varying methods of assigning identities to applications, such as naming them after years. They decided that numbers were too dry and substituted letters and words that were meant to be more evocative. I’m not embarrassed to admit I find ‘em interesting enough to write this article.
I cheerfully admit to using the broadest possible definition of version number in this story–hey, I’m going to discuss names that don’t involve numbers at all. I know that developers still use more formal, traditional software versioning naming conventions behind the scenes. (Windows Vista, for instance, is officially version 6.0 of Windows; Technologizer is on version 20593, but don’t ask me to explain why.)
For no particular reason, I’m going to write this as a FAQ. Even though there’s an awful lot about this topic which I just don’t know…
Your Questions, AMD’s Answers
7. July 2009
[A NOTE FROM HARRY: Here's the inaugural edition of a new feature: Technologizer Q&A. We'll give you the opportunity to pose questions to interesting technology companies. First up is chipmaker AMD--many thanks to VP of Advanced Marketing Pat Moorhead for answering these queries.
Got nominations for other companies you'd like answers from? Let me know--I'm lining up subjects for future installments.]
Fernando Garcia asks:
I have always asked the following question. Why is it that AMD will not step up advertising? A good 70% of the consumer public,still does not know what AMD is. I used to work for Best Buy and on the average day, one out of eight persons I would speak to knew what AMD was. Whenever I asked a customer about processors automatically they would say Intel.
Pat answers:
Simply taking out more advertising does not guarantee a product’s success. I think the best way to answer that is AMD chooses to focus differently. We first focus on making our customers and their channel partners successful by investing in them, not leveraging off their brandsby sandwiching them between AMD logos. We want to invest in our customers’ success. For those people who are specifically focused on the “processor,” we have very high awareness and market directly to end user groups. These include but are not limited to enthusiasts, gamers, DIYers, Fortune 1000 and government decision makers, etc.
The Race for Unplanned Obsolescence
26. June 2009
[NOTE: Here's a post that first appeared in our free T-Week newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.]
I’ve been thinking a lot about PC components lately–the obligatory, the optional, and even the controversial. That’s because I’ve been doing a series of comparisons of Windows PCs and Macs, and most of my comparing involves running down a lengthy list of components to see who offers what, and at what price. Much of the avalanche of feedback I’ve been getting involves varying opinions on just how essential particular components are–such as whether Macs’ lack of memory-card slots is a catastrophe, or whether the fact that Macs do have FireWire ports is a major point in their favor.
“Essential component” is, by its very nature, a moving target of a concept. There was a time when I wouldn’t buy a computer without a serial port, a parallel port, and a floppy drive; today, I have no need for any of them, and neither do you. I recently bought my first laptop in many years that lacks an optical drive (an Asus EeePC 1000HE), and while it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, I quickly plunked down some money for an external DVD writer. I still wish I could buy a notebook with a trackball, even though it’s one component that the industry declared obsolete about fifteen years ago.
So how about the major components that make up a circa-2009 personal computer? After the jump, my completely unscientific musings on their future, or lack thereof.
When Tech Products Go Pro, It’s…Utterly Meaningless!
25. June 2009
You may think you’re a pretty adept user of technology, but are you ready for the next level? Do you have the guts, the determination, and the penchant for arbitrary naming conventions to go pro?
At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this month, keynote presenter Phil Schiller explained that what had formerly been the 13″ aluminum MacBook now had what it took–FireWire 800, higher RAM capacities, and longer battery life–to be considered a MacBook Pro alongside larger-screened siblings. (The 13″ MacBook Pro also has a slot for Secure Digital cards which, unlike their Memory Stick rivals, never turned “Pro”) That leaves the entry-level white Macbook and the svelte MacBook Air as Apple’s “non-Pro” notebooks, although the MacBook Air is clearly targeted toward that user group often called “mobile professionals.” The lines are more clearly drawn between the pros and the no’s in Apple’s desktop line, where the pricey Mac Pro maintains high configurability and a high price, and the consumer line includes the LCD-based iMac and the hanger-on Mac mini.
But long before Apple renamed the PowerMacs and PowerBooks with the Pro label, the company used it on the software side. Back in 1993, Apple followed up its System 7 operating system with System 7 Pro. Quaintly touted in its press release as “the on ramp to the information superhighway,” it marked the debut of the PowerTalk messaging system, one of the company’s failed system software initiatives of the era along with OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX. On the other hand, System 7 Pro also featured two smash software hits that thrive in Mac OS toda, AppleScript and QuickTime.
Some of the Mac’s earliest applications also eventually went pro, as Apple’s Claris subsidiary churned out products such as MacDraw Pro and MacWrite Pro. But Claris was never spun out as had once been the plan, leaving its pro developers back at Apple. Even today, Apple continues to own FileMaker, Inc., the eponymous product of which is still called FileMaker Pro. (FileMaker Pro is the most basic version of the product–the more advanced one is known as FileMaker Pro Advanced.)
Microsoft has also associated databases with pros, making Access one of the applications included in Office Professional 2007, but its best-known pro product has been Windows XP Professional. XP Pro had a number of security and management enhancements beyond Windows XP Home, as well as multprocessor support, dynamic disk support, a personal Web server, and fax capabilities.
At its debut, Windows XP Professional boldly advertised its presence as a PC was starting up, but Service Pack 2 did away with that bit of vanity and all XP startup screens simply said “Windows XP”. With Windows Vista, Microsoft stopped focusing on “professional”-ism and instead gave users the business, Windows Vista Business, that is. And Windows 7 Business will arrive in the fall, where it will compete with a Mac OS X Leopard update that has added not “pro” but “snow”.
Microsoft has also developed a pro version of Windows Mobile optimized for touch-screen devices as opposed to the Windows Mobile Standard offering aimed at products such as the Motorola Q and Samsung BlackJack. But in what could be interpreted as a part of the image problem of Windows Mobile, AT&T has latched on to the “Pro” suffix to designate handsets that run Windows Mobile, period. The first example of this was with the Pantech Matrix Pro. a dual slider differentiated from the vanilla Pantech Matrix dual slider feature phone by running Windows Mobile. But the Matrix itself came after the Pantech Duo, which also ran Windows Mobile but lacked the “Pro” designation. More recently, AT&T followed up its successful Samsung Propel QWERTY vertical slider with the Propel Pro, the most “pro” phone on the market by dint of it having “pro” twice in its name. And yet, like the Matrix Pro, it doesn’t use the “pro” version of Windows Mobile.
Over at Sprint, HTC followed up on its launch with the HTC Touch, Sprint’s first touchscreen smartphone answering the iPhone, with the Touch Pro, which included a horizontal QWERTY keyboard; both phones ran Windows Mobile Professional. But how do you do the Touch Pro better? HTC added a larger screen and some spiffy call management and user interface features. The result is the Touch Pro2. Pro-”Pro” AT&T also carried the Touch Pro, but it called it the Fuze (which may be short for “con-Fuze-ing”). Now, of course, Sprint is answering the iPhone with the Pre, which we can only hope will never be followed by a Pre Pro.
In the end, “Pro” has become a tech product modifier so dependent on context that it has become meaningless. The flames aimed at it can be fueled by only one thing: “pro”-pain.
Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research firm The NPD Group. He maintains his own blog at Out of the Box and you can follow him on Twitter at @rossrubin. Views expressed in Technoloizer are his own.
The Commodore 64 vs. the iPhone 3G S: The Ultimate Showdown
21. June 2009
Sad news: Apple has rejected a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. It’s not surprising, and arguably not an utter outrage given that the iPhone developer agreement expressly forbids emulators, and the C64 app’s creator knew that when he began work on his brainchild. I’m still unclear on how a Commodore 64 emulator–one fully licensed by the relevant copyright holders–hurts the iPhone, iPhone owners, or Apple, though. Especially since other iPhone apps that use emulation techniques and which sound less delightful have apparently snuck their way into the App Store. Thinking about all this got me to thinking about the fact that the Commodore 64 was considered to have a lot of RAM (64KB) at a surprisingly low price ($595) back in 1982. The iPhone 3G S has 4,000 times the RAM (256MB) for one-third the price (with an AT&T contract), and that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that it also has an additional 250,000 times as much memory (or 500,000, if you spring for the 32GB model) as the C64 in the form of its flash storage. Or that the starting price of $199 for an iPhone 3G S is really more like $90 in 1982 dollars. Did I mention that that the 3G S fits in your pocket? After the jump, what is almost certainly the most comprehensive comparison of the Commodore 64 and the iPhone 3G S that anyone has done to date. I’ll let you decide which one comes out on top. Continue reading this story…
Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes
14. June 2009
There’s no such thing as the perfect computer, and never has been. But in the personal computer’s long and varied history, some computers have been decidedly less perfect than others. Many early PCs shipped with major design flaws that either sunk platforms outright or considerably slowed down their adoption by the public. Decades later, we can still learn from these multi-million dollar mistakes. By no means is the following list exhaustive; one could probably write about the flaws of every PC ever released. But when considering past design mistakes, these examples spring to my mind.
Special thanks to Steven Stengel of the Obsolete Technology Homepage for providing many of the photos in this article.
Apple III (1980)
The Apple III was Apple’s first computer not devised by Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder. Instead, a committee of engineers designed it to be the “perfect” business system. With an absurdly high price (options ranged between $4,340 to $7,800–about $11,231 to $20,185 in 2009 dollars) and numerous bugs at launch, the Apple III was doomed to failure.
Problem #1: No Power Supply Fan
The Apple III’s lack of power supply fan caused system to heat up, warping the motherboard and unseating certain socketed chips.
What Were They Thinking?
According to Apple insiders, Steve Jobs’ zeal for a simple and silent computer design forced the Apple III team to exclude a cooling fan for the power supply. Apple later suggested a simple fix for the heat-warping problem: raise the Apple III a few inches off a hard surface and drop it, hopefully re-seating the chips in the process. Fortunately, that advice wasn’t required for later Apple computers that lacked fans.
Problem #2: Limited Apple II Compatibility
To run an Apple III in Apple II mode, one had to first boot from a special floppy disk. Once in Apple II emulator mode, the user could not use any of the Apple III’s enhanced hardware, including 80 column text mode or the real-time clock. Compatibility with Apple II software was not perfect, as many software packages used direct memory writes in the form of PEEKs and POKEs that didn’t line up with the Apple III’s memory structure.
What Were They Thinking?
Like IBM and the PC/PCjr, Apple wanted a clear product delineation between their “home” machine (the Apple II) and their “professional” machine (the Apple III). As a result, Apple II compatibility on the Apple III was intentionally crippled.
Continue reading this story…
The Patents of Steve Jobs
28. May 2009
Among the many uncanny parallels between Stephen Paul Jobs and Walter Elias Disney is this one: Very early on, both abandoned the work that in some respects might seem to define their careers. Walt Disney began as a cartoonist, but by the late 1920s he had nothing to do with the drawing of Disney cartoons and is said to have told folks that he couldn’t have held down an animator’s job in his own studio. And Steve Jobs held technical positions at HP and Atari at the dawn of his time in Silicon Valley, but his contributions to Apple have never been those of an engineer.
And yet, as I browsed Apple patents in recent months for stories like this one, I wasn’t surprised to discover that Jobs’ name is among the inventors listed on dozens of Apple filings over the past thirty years (with a thirteen-year gap in the middle during his absence). It doesn’t feel like glory-hogging, either: Anyone want to make the case that major Apple products would be pretty much the same if Jobs hadn’t contributed ideas and refinements? And Jobs’ name is typically one of several or many on a patent, usually along with that of Apple design honcho Jonathan Ive and other, lesser-known colleagues. (Most Jobs patents relate to industrial design; some are for software; none are for circuitry or other under-the-hood technologies.)
Rummaging through Google Patent Search’s records of patents credited in part to Steve Jobs is an absorbing way to reflect on some of his accomplishments and failures–and maybe even to learn some new things about what makes the man tick.Yes, his name is on the patents for most of the iconic computers, MP3 players, and other gizmos sold by Apple from 1998 to the present. (I’ve written about some of them before.) But you know what? It’s not the famous, obvious stuff that I find most interesting–it’s the sidelights, loose ends, and mysteries. I’ll look at ten of those in a moment.
A Brief History of Google Killers
19. May 2009
It’s the Web’s biggest straw man, and it keeps getting built up, torn down, then built up again. I speak of the idea that a startup is a potential Google killer–a notion that once meant that it promised to be a better search engine than Google, but has lately morphed into suggesting that a Web company of almost any sort could end up dominating the Web the way Google does today.
The phrase dates to at least 2001, and its usage consistently follows the same cycle: At first, pundits thoughtfully wonder if a promising new service might be a Google killer…and then, once it’s clear it’s an unlikely scenario, they cockily explain why it won’t come to pass. The latest example is going on right now, as the Web judges the new Wolfram|Alpha service. With the term ringing in my ears once again, I was moved to review fourteen examples of alleged Google killers, and to consider whether any of them are, in fact, likely to crush Google to death. My overall conclusion? If anyone compares your Internet startup to Google, it’s time to panic–it’s more of a curse than a compliment.
9. November 2009
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