Quotations and fatal mistakes

Quotations and fatal mistakes

Perhaps the most truthful on Microsoft marketing: "There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go."

Not on his mind while developing Win9X..circa 1981... "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

"But what... is it good for?" Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

On the solid code base of Win9X... thanks WPW!

"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates): "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."

Bill Gates, Free Market and the LA Times Thanks GC!

"There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft"

From the back of an old Digitalk Smalltalk/V PM manual, 1990: "This is the right way to develop applications for OS/2 PM. OS/2 PM is a tremendously rich environment, which makes it inherently complex. Smalltalk/V PM removes that complexity and lets you concentrate on writing great programs. Smalltalk/V PM is the kind of tool that will make OS/2 the successor to MS/DOS."

from "OS/2 Notebook", Microsoft Press, (c) 1990--an excerpt from an interview with Bill Gates and Jim Cannavino, p. 614:

Developer: "Does the announcement [of the OS/2 joint development agreement between IBM and Microsoft] mean that Microsoft is curtailing any plans for future development of Windows?"

Gates:"Microsoft has not changed any of its plans for Windows. It is obvious that we will not include things like threads and preemptive multitasking in Windows. By the time we added that, you would have OS/2."

"There's a reason they threw it away..." from "Programmers at Work" by Microsoft Press, interview with Bill (found on comp.os.os2.advocacy)

Interviewer: "Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?"
Gates: "No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."

Only the finest Microsoft marketing! (submitted by BarryB): "If you don't know what you need Windows NT for, you don't need it."

On the Box of Windows 2.11 for 286 (submitted by GLDM): "New interface closely resembles Presentation Manager, preparing you for the wonders of OS/2!"

On code stability, from Focus Magazine (submitted by Benedikt Heinen): "Microsoft programs are generally bug-free. If you visit the Microsoft hotline, you'll literally have to wait weeks if not months until someone calls in with a bug in one of our programs. 99.99% of calls turn out to be user mistakes. [...] I know not a single less irrelevant reason for an update than bugfixes. The reasons for updates are to present more new features.

Microsoft's GUI innovations... 1983: "Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under it's own name... without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art."

Even more 1984 predictions: "The next generation of interesting software will be made on a Macintosh, not an IBM PC." <!-- Collected by Steen Hansen Hviid, Columbus, Ohio, USA-->

"Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things." Doug Gwyn

"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." Edward V. Berard, "Life-Cycle Approaches"

"An idiot with a computer is a faster, better idiot" Rich Julius

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." Rich Cook

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.", Bjarne Stroustrup

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Donald Knuth

"I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages of documentation, and if there was, I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool." Joseph Costello, President of Cadence

"The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable pi can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change." FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." E. W. Dijkstra

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that [sic] have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." Dijkstra

"Usenet is like Tetris for people who still remember how to read." Joshua Heller

"I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold. I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case. Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to the point where it would not run at all." George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars"

"A system admin's life is a sorry one. The only advantage he has over Emergency Room doctors is that malpractice suits are rare. On the other hand, ER doctors never have to deal with patients installing new versions of their own innards!" Michael O'Brien

<!--

<td valign=top>"The C Programming Language - A language which combines the

flexibility of assembly language with the power of assembly language."

Pascal - A programming language named after a man who would

turn over in his grave if he knew about it.

I haven't lost my mind, I have it backed up on tape somewhere.

CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh!!

PROGRAM - n. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn

one's input into error messages. v. tr.- To engage in a pastime

similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. - cartoon in the New Yorker

Beware of programmers with screwdrivers.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it.

PCMCIA - People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

Windows, another fine product from the folks who gave us EDLIN.

Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.

The Internet is mightier than the pen.

-->