Pastoral Resources

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

There were sometimes from forty to sixty English machines, but unfortunately the Germans were often in the minority. With them quality was more important than quantity.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new.

When ATM machines came out and people were prosecuted for robbing ATM machines, I don't think anybody thought the banks were against technology because they didn't want their ATM machines lifted.

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery.

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines.

By working hard we could make an average of about $5 a week. We would have made more but had to provide our own machines, which cost us $45, we paying for them on the installment plan. We paid $5 down and $1 a month after that.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines.

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

Beyond that, states had to also have electronic voting machines that made it possible for people who are physically handicapped to vote in private... and the computerized voting machine made it very easy for, particularly, the blind.

It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance.