Pastoral Resources

I said, 'Okay, it's the year 2000, I'm getting a computer and a Palm Pilot.' I know how to check my e-mail, and I've listed some phone numbers on it. Half the time the battery has gone out so I can't use it.

I wouldn't know how to find eBay on the computer if my life depended on it.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

Kids are all computer-savvy. Sit down and write to your parents on the computer. And just say, I have some questions and I'm scared. There's some stuff I don't know and I really need to talk to you about sex. Tear it off and put it on their pillow. They'll read it.

I'm fortunate in that I'm a lecturer too and this gets me out and about and away from the computer. I also have loads of friends all around the world, plus a core group of special people in my life that I can lean on, chat to, or just hang with.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.

I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.

Well, I had a lot of help from my father with the soldering and so on, and he was very good at math and was fascinated with computers, and so I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of exposure going all the way back to high school - this was in the 1960s.

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man - the airplane, the automobile, the computer - says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

Well, the thought that everybody might have a personal computer at their desk or their home was certainly not on the mainstream of anybody's activity at that time.

Well, the big products in electronics in the '50s were radio and television. The first big computers were just beginning to come in and represented the most logical market for us to work in.

I think I thought it would be important for electronics as we knew it then, but that was a much simpler business and electronics was mostly radio and television and the first computers.