Perceiving Desires

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  Steve Jobs.

GIGO

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. - Bill Gates 

  Know your process before you automate it. Make sure your computer guys know your process as well as they do their computers.

Easy Computing

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. - Andy Rooney


  Before starting any computer project answer "Is there a better (non-computer) way to do this?"

Smart Questions

Man has made some machines that can answer questions provided the facts are profusely stored in them, but we will never be able to make a machine that will ask questions. The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding the answer. - Thomas J. Watson


  Machines are always inside the box. People can think outside the box.

Seeing Future Potential

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people––as remarkable as the telephone.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985] - Steve Jobs


1985! That is being insightful and connecting the dots. Most of us were sitting around asking each other "What are they going to do with this Internet thing?"

Big Ding

I want to put a ding in the universe. - Steve Jobs

He has.

Augmented Post

Sometimes I have more to say. From a previous post:


We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. - Maria Montessori 

Remember Computer Science is indeed a science.


I started at the university in 1967. In my General Engineering class we were privileged to have a class or two using the spiffy new analog computer. It had a bunch of op-amps, capacitors, resisters, voltmeters (analog dials of course), an osciiiscope and a patch panel not unlike the first telephone operators had with wires you could strech from device to device. It was by way of these wires that you "programmed" this computer. This machine had no memory as such - if you don't define a voltage across a capacitor as memory.


About this same time a lab partner had access to the IBM 1600 which was in the basement of the engineering bluilding. It consisted of three upright piano sized units; card punch, card line printer, card eader/cpu. Output  of the cpu was by way of punched cards. It , if I remember correctly, had 1,400 bits of core, was programmable only in asembly language via punch-cards.


There was a debate going on at the time: digital or analog? Analog computers were pretty good at solving differential equations. While they were a little short on accuracy they at least provided an answer; digital machines like the 1600 just didn't have the RAM needed to provide any answer at all. (Even in 1972 I took a grad course on Numerical Methods where the text book was "Numerical Methods that (usually) Work". No kidding!). Four years later (1971) the CDC 3300 and the computer department had its own building and there was a terminal in every building on campus. Needless to say the CDC 3300 was digital. The argument had been settled. The 3300 had something like 56k of RAM and was as slow as bejesus if there was more than a few dozen users on at any one time. If your program used many resources you would have to submit it to run overnight.


By that time I was working for EPA and we were also using the IBM 360 in Bethesda Maryland (at NIH). We used our card reader and 300 bit/second modem to submit jobs using JCL (Job Control Language) the most arcane, frustrating, evil, operating system ever devised by demons - I mean humans. If the card reader didn't fail then your JCL probably would and it would take a day to find out. I firmly believe the reason there are so many religious people in the world is because of JCL and card readers. Talk about the power of prayer! One got to where anything was worth a try! 


But I digress. My point here is we didn't have a clue what was going to become of the computer industry. We could not conceive of the utility of a personal computer. Gigabyte was beyond our imagination (I don't even know if the word existed at the time). There were very, very few who had the imagination to even hazard a guess at the future of computing. Most were science fiction writers and they were dismissed as crackpots out to make a buck writing fiction.


Pay attention to the crackpots. Don't swallow everything they say but somewhere within all that noise may be a fragment of an idea that may change the future.

Discovering What Is Teachable

For me, the first challenge for computing science is to discover how to maintain order in a finite, but very large, discrete universe that is intricately intertwined. And a second, but not less important challenge is how to mould what you have achieved in solving the first problem, into a teachable discipline: it does not suffice to hone your own intellect (that will join you in your grave), you must teach others how to hone theirs. The more you concentrate on these two challenges, the clearer you will see that they are only two sides of the same coin: teaching yourself is discovering what is teachable. - Edsger W. Dijkstra 


You don't have to be involved in computer science to learn from what he says here.


(Other posts on Learning) 

Computer Thought

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. - E. W. Dijkstra


An elegant example showing that words do mean something.


(Other posts on Words) 

Programmers

Computer programmers tend to write programs for programmers. They should first get a job managing people where they can learn to deal with people who are dyslexic, or color blind, or dogmatic, or contrary, or resistant to change, or any of the other variations of the human personality. People use computers; not the other way around. - Lyle


(Other posts on Computers)

Tequila Trepidation

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. - Mitch Ratliffe

Just because it came out of a computer be wary - just like you would with a guy tanked up on tequila packing a handgun.

Finding Giants

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. - Isaac Newton

First you have to find the giant; the Internet makes this a lot easier.

Programmer

Programmer: An organism which converts caffeine into software. – Anonymous



Sometimes it takes one thing to create another.

Novelty

Of all the passions that possess mankind, the love of novelty rules most the mind; in search of this from realm to realm we roam, our fleets come fraught with every folly home. – Samuel Foote

Isn't using this what Apple has been best at? Novel products can become fads but to become indispensable they must have value beyond their cost. Microsoft has been good at he latter, Apple the former. So the lessen to be learned is to imbue your product with both.