Brian Kernighan Quotes

The future lies in designing and selling computers that people don't realize are computers at all.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

The only thing I do on a computer is play Texas Hold 'Em, really. Obviously my cell phone is a computer. My car is a computer. I'm on computers every day without actively seeking them out.

Something else has happened with computers.

The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.

The world got enamored with smartphones and tablets, but what's interesting is those devices don't do everything that needs to be done. Three-D printing, virtual-reality computing, robotics are all controlled by PCs.

Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

Computing is evolving beyond phones, and people are using it in context across many scenarios, be it in their television, be it in their car, be it something they wear on their wrist or even something much more immersive.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.

Computers will be able to do all the mundane tasks in our daily lives.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

I've always been at the intersection of computers and whatever they can revolutionize.

Technology is fascinating.

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

The two inventions of the century, the car and the computer, are gradually coming closer together.

The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more., Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

The computer of today is really in its infancy.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

There’s not a single aspect of human life that doesn’t have the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies in the future.