The 25 Most Notable Quotes in Tech History
Legendary sound bites that made sense, made history--or just made us laugh.By Harry McCracken | Monday, November 9, 2009 at 11:53 pm
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 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:
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:
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:
Googleosity: 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:
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:
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?
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November 9th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
How about Bill Gates' "That must be why we're not shipping Windows 98 yet"?
November 10th, 2009 at 1:31 am
Steve Ballmer: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
November 10th, 2009 at 2:44 am
"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.
November 20th, 2011 at 3:48 am
Exactly!
November 10th, 2009 at 5:48 am
You have no chance to survive make your time.
… sorry I can never resist. Move zig.
November 10th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Thank you for posting more than one quote per page! Nice post overall.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
And there’s always the classic, “What do you mean this computer is late? It’s five years ahead of its time!”
November 10th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
“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.
November 10th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
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. “
November 11th, 2009 at 8:16 am
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
November 11th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
@Thomas
That quote is often attributed to Bill Gates, but I’ve heard that he never really said it.
Could be wrong though.
November 12th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
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
November 16th, 2009 at 12:34 am
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.
March 25th, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Ah ah, it's not "grammer", it's "grammAr" 😉 !
November 16th, 2009 at 11:19 am
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
November 18th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I really, really like this article. Excellent work, Harry. One of your best, freshest Technologizer pieces yet!
November 20th, 2009 at 7:58 am
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.
July 21st, 2010 at 9:04 am
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…
November 24th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
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”.
November 25th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
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”!
November 27th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
@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.
April 4th, 2010 at 9:24 am
@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”?
June 1st, 2010 at 3:55 pm
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.
June 2nd, 2010 at 10:26 pm
It was Jobs who said 64K was enough and he said it about the Macintosh.
July 25th, 2010 at 6:44 am
“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.
September 2nd, 2010 at 4:12 am
Columbo: Oh, just one more thing…
August 2nd, 2010 at 4:10 pm
“Linux is a cancer” – Steve Balmer 2001
September 6th, 2010 at 10:48 am
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.
September 8th, 2010 at 9:43 am
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".
December 21st, 2010 at 12:31 pm
“PC Load Letter”
March 22nd, 2011 at 12:17 am
“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!
March 22nd, 2011 at 12:22 am
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!
March 25th, 2011 at 5:29 pm
What about the Little Britain meme "The computer says 'No'!" ?
May 21st, 2011 at 8:01 am
I find that everything has its variety and everything goes according to consumer taste
June 2nd, 2011 at 5:53 pm
What about "My Name Is Macintosh?"
June 15th, 2011 at 1:06 pm
Interesting quotes.
July 21st, 2011 at 8:14 am
"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
July 29th, 2011 at 12:29 am
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons"; popular mechanics, 1949
August 19th, 2011 at 10:43 am
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.
August 26th, 2011 at 8:29 am
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Rob Malda, on the iPod at its release in 2001.
August 26th, 2011 at 12:46 pm
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
September 12th, 2011 at 11:46 am
"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.
October 20th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
This is an affecting point of view on this topic. I am happy you shared your ideas and I find myself agreeing.
November 8th, 2011 at 6:55 am
If you make a technology statement today, you should expect that ten years from now, people will be laughing at you.
November 8th, 2011 at 6:57 am
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.
November 11th, 2011 at 11:18 pm
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November 13th, 2011 at 10:26 pm
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November 14th, 2011 at 10:45 pm
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.
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November 15th, 2011 at 2:27 am
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.
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November 17th, 2011 at 4:24 am
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November 17th, 2011 at 8:07 am
Some great and funny quotes there, many things we say come back to haunt us eventually
December 1st, 2011 at 10:51 am
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December 9th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
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.
December 14th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
Haha! Funny quotes here! Nice article. Thanks! 3dcad
December 14th, 2011 at 2:18 pm
An then there is this Quote: "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons"
Popular mechanics 1949
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December 16th, 2011 at 1:31 am
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December 19th, 2011 at 1:23 pm
"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 Optimierung – Flirt – Facebook Fans
December 19th, 2011 at 8:15 pm
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
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January 4th, 2012 at 12:18 am
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.
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January 11th, 2012 at 7:36 am
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!
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