Jef Raskin Quotes

The globe is shrinking, the information age is bringing a lot of changes. People are anxious about their future and their children's futures.

The notion of the Internet as a force of political and social revolution is not a new one. As far back as the early 1990s, in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were technologists and writers arguing forcefully that the Internet was destined to become the most important tool for cultural change in human history.

We changed the world many ways with the Internet.

The Internet is a clear example of how our lives have changed in ways we couldn't have imagined: a distributed information source, which is invisible to everyone, where you can access anything, and it's distributed throughout the whole world. Basically, communication is instantaneous.

Ever since I first used a computer in the early '80s, I've thought of it as a fundamentally new medium for the dissemination of ideas which can transform people's lives and the society we live in.

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

This whole thing called the internet and all this other kind of stuff is about to go crazy. It's all going to change. But, you know what's not going to change? The talented people.

The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, "It's the biggest thing since Gutenberg," and then someone else said "No, it's the biggest thing since the invention of writing."

Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we've gotten a third of the world's population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.

The question I want to put forward is, 'Does the technology we are developing ultimately benefit mankind?'

The World Wide Web went from zero to millions of web pages in a few years. Many revolutions look irrelevant just before they change everything swiftly.

So much of the world is digital.

The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential - small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

It's pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and very complex to where they're a tool of everyday life.

You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more.

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?

Never before in the history of the planet have so many people, on their own, had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people.

I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn't a strict vision between sort of science and art.

Here, all of a sudden, we have a revolution in - in communication, and it is - it is really, truly big. Internet is as big as the introduction of fire to the human race, or the introduction of electricity into our lives.

I grew up in a generation that had exponential technological advances.