Computer Scientists

"Philosophers get paid for posing interesting questions; scientists for answering them. Thus, one cannot live without the other..."

"Nothing is free of its own limits."

"The question is not whether something is wrong with subjectivity. We are embedded in it, so we can only deal with it, or be blind and attempt to ignore it."

"Once you know the rules of the game, you can change them."

"The only impossible thing is something to be impossible."

"All ideas are valid in the context they were created."

"Before being humans, we are animals."

"It is not that you cannot understand it, it is that you cannot compute it."

"Software engineering is the part of computer science which is too difficult for the computer scientist."

"[Software engineering is the] establishment and use of sound engineering principles to obtain economically software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently."

"In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge."

"Der Glaube an eine bestimmte Idee gibt dem Forscher den Rückhalt für seine Arbeit. Ohne diesen Glauben wäre er verloren in einem Meer von Zweifeln und halbgültigen Beweisen."

"After the war Zuse constructed the Z4 computer, which became the world’s first commercially used computer. Zuse is also credited with writing the first programming language for his computers: Plankalkül, meaning calculus for programs. As an engineer by trade, Zuse was mainly focused on building a working machine that could perform calculations. He was not at all concerned with the theory of computation, which at that time was explored by renowned mathematicians in the academic world like Schönfinkel, Church, Post, Kleene, and Turing. Because of this, Zuse was not an established name in the academic community as a theoretical computer scientist. It is known however, that Turing and Zuse were familiar with each other’s work (Zenil, 2012). Although Zuse has always been more characterized as an engineer than a theorist. This is perhaps one of the reasons why his main work on computation in physics has been relatively unnoticed in the academic community for so long."

"Undecided about whether to pursue art or engineering, he pursued engineering, but with a continued interest in design—for his senior school project, he had designed a city of the future (à la Fritz Lang's Metropolis) based on a hexagonal grid. Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion."

"Only too often the inventor is the idealist who, like Mephisto, tries to improve the world, only to be crushed by harsh realities. If he wants to carry through his ideas, he is forced to do business with the wielders of power, whose sense of reality is sharper and more developed."

"The rattling of the relays of the Z4 was the only interesting thing to be experienced in Zurich's night life!"

"Very belatedly in 1947, Darwin [Sir Charles Darwin, great-grandson of the famous Charles Darwin] agreed to set up a very small electronics group [...] It was not easy to have the imagination to foresee that computers were to become one of the most important developments of the century."

"In the early days of the computer revolution computer designers and numerical analysts worked closely together and indeed were often the same people. Now there is a regrettable tendency for numerical analysts to opt out of any responsibility for the design of the arithmetic facilities and a failure to influence the more basic features of software. It is often said that the use of computers for scientific work represents a small part of the market and numerical analysts have resigned themselves to accepting facilities "designed" for other purposes and making the best of them. [...] One of the main virtues of an electronic computer from the point of view of the numerical analyst is its ability to "do arithmetic fast." Need the arithmetic be so bad!"

"Of course everything in computerology is new; that is at once its attraction, and its weakness. Only recently I learned that computers are revolutionizing astrology. Horoscopes by computer!"

"Numerical analysis has begun to look a little square in the computer science setting, and numerical analysts are beginning to show signs of losing faith in themselves. Their sense of isolation is accentuated by the present trend towards abstraction in mathematics departments which makes for an uneasy relationship. How different things might have been if the computer revolution had taken place in the 19th century! [...] In any case "numerical analysts" may be likened to "The Establishment" in computer science and in all spheres it is fashionable to diagnose "rigor morris" in the Establishment."

"He [Turing] was particularly fond of little programming tricks (some people would say that he was too fond of them to be a "good" programmer) and would chuckle with boyish good humor at any little tricks I may have used."

"Turing had a strong predeliction for working things out from first principles, usually in the first instance without consulting any previous work on the subject, and no doubt it was this habit which gave his work that characteristically original flavor. I was reminded of a remark which Beethoven is reputed to have made when he was asked if he had heard a certain work of Mozart which was attracting much attention. He replied that he had not, and added "neither shall I do so, lest I forfeit some of my own originality.""

"The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style."

"You need to study other people's work. Their approaches to problem solving and the tools they use give you a fresh way to look at your own work."

"It's fun to sit at a terminal and let the code flow. It sounds strange, but it just comes out my brain; once I'm started, I don't have to think about it."

"He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry."

"I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language. It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds."

"The first commercial licensing of took place in 1975 with contracts between Digital Systems and for use in their intelligent terminal, and with where CP/M was used to monitor programs in the Octopus network. Little attention was paid to CP/M for about a year. In my spare time, I worked to improve overall facilities... By this time, CP/M had been adapted for four different controllers.... In 1976, approached me with a problem: Imsai, Incorporated, for whom Glenn consulted, had shipped a large number of disk subsystems with a promise that an operating system would follow. I was somewhat reluctant to adapt CP/M to yet another controller, and thus the notion of a separated Basic I/O System (BIOS) evolved. In principle, the hardware dependent portions of CP/M were concentrated in the BIOS, thus allowing Glenn, or anyone else, to adapt CP/M to the Imsai equipment. Imsai was subsequently licensed to distribute CP/M version 1.3 which eventually evolved into an operating system called"

"Ask Bill [Gates] why the string in [MS-DOS] function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that."

"Intel had hired him a few months earlier to write a control program monitor to run on their little demo system for 8008 and now 8080.... Glenn knew this and he would be talking with Gary, and he started twisting Gary's arm. He said, "Hey Gary, why can't we run this in this IMSAI?" "The I/O's all different, won't run." But Glenn persists and finally makes a deal with Gary. He says, "Okay Gary, if you split out the I/O, I'll write the BIOS, basic I/O's system," and Glenn named it then. "We'll split it out separately. I'll write that part, as long as you can make a division in the program there." And he got Gary to do that and Glenn put those two pieces together and was running Gary's CP/M on an IMSAI. Glenn let us know that, and it wasn't too much later than Bill was down there making arrangements with Gary Kildall to license CP/M.... Now that the BIOS is separated out, anybody could write a BIOS for their machine, if it was 8080-based, and run this, so he started selling that separately under the company Digital Research that he formed and did quite well."

"When we failed to produce an operating system in a timely manner, Glenn started talking with Gary about CPM, which Gary had written for Intel under contract. It took several months of twisting Gary's arm to get Gary to port it to the 8080. The final success came when Glenn talked Gary into just separating the I/O from the rest of it, with Glenn promising to re-write the I/O module for the IMSAI 8080 (which he did). So CPM on the IMSAI was a joint effort between Glenn and Gary."

"I've told this story to lots of people and they just won't get it. All they want to get is that IBM showed up and Gary was off flying his aeroplane. The problem is that this is very wrong.… The real issue wasn't that Gary refused to talk to IBM. The real issue was that Microsoft had a much better vision for the business. Gary was very laid-back. He did not care that much."

"It was Gary's bad luck that put him up against the most skilled businessman of all time. Anyone looks like a failure standing next to Bill Gates."

"Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed."

"A man spends the first year of his life learning that he ends at his own skin, and the rest of his life learning that he doesn't."

"The term "informatics" was first defined by Saul Gorn of University of Pennsylvania in 1983 (Gorn, 1983) as computer science plus information science used in conjunction with the name of a discipline such as business administration or biology. It denotes an application of computer science and information science to the management and processing of data, information and knowledge in the named discipline."

"Saul Gorn, an authority on machine oi automated language who has expanded his interests from the use of the computer foi information storage and retrieval to the broader topic of the "'information pollution" and an examination of the forces which contribute to it..."

"Science vs. Technology: We should know why things must act as they do, to make them act as we want them to."

"If you expect to sell what you make, you must also fabricate information about it."

"This fact is clear to those who know it."

"It's amazing how we can do things simultaneously, like talking and not listening."

"If you think about it long enough, you'll see that it's obvious."

"Only unsolvable problems are worthy of artificial intelligence."

"Before I begin speaking, there is something I would like to say"

"Teaching is a personal matter of the nursery of the mind and should not be on public display."

"Universal coding for computers is sought that uses relative addresses and a pseudocode and that assembles and translates, printing out a directory of final addresses of key commands, variables, and constants."

"How the hell did they think this was going to be something else than EPIC FAIL for the prosecution? We’re winning so hard."

"It is not legally more complex to prove the copyright on the Internet than other crimes committed online, such as illegal threats or defamation. We know just where to start with that comment. No, it may not be legally more complex. However, it is impossible in most cases to prove illegal threats and defamation on the net - except when there is a related person who becomes a suspect in the case."

"Hey wait a minute, this isn't a Copyright claim now is it? This looks more like a personal ad! How about checking out some of the local press instead of trying to pick up people in other continents? Actually, being in different countries (even on different continents) means that we don't have the same laws here. You know, in Sweden, it's still legal to do a lot of things. Elks can have sex with each other without being prosecuted for instance. And people are allowed to copy. It's quite natural, both of them, don't you think?"

"The crazy people behind IFPI should be stopped."