John Carmack Quotes

I'm a physicist, and we have something called Moore's Law, which says computer power doubles every 18 months. So every Christmas, we more or less assume that our toys and appliances are more or less twice as powerful as the previous Christmas.

A big part of the success of Microsoft was that every year, the chips our software ran on got faster and cheaper. They doubled in capability every 18 months under Moore's law.

It's Moore's Law, everything will be obsolete in 10 years - I'll be obsolete in 10 years!

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

Computers double their performance every month.

Every two years, to keep Moore's Law happening, you have to invent... That's where I grew up.

The accumulated knowledge of materials, computing, electromagnetism, product design, and all the rest that we've learned over the last several centuries converts a few ounces of raw materials worth mere pennies into a device with more computing power than the entire planet possessed fifty years ago.

When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer and it took up a whole building. The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. What now fits in your pocket 25 years from now will fit into a blood cell and will again be millions of times more cost effective.

The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience.

The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.

The pace of innovation may slow down or speed up depending on the appetite in the public markets, but the constant progress of technology doesn't really ever stop. There's always opportunities for new ideas and creative people to go build great things. I'm always interested in learning about those kinds of opportunities.

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

At some point, Moore's law will break down.

When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, 'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

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.

In almost every technology area that we're ahead in, we're ahead in because the United States leads the world in computers.

You always need to be on the lookout for the next kind of great technology.

A typical smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 when it landed a man on the moon.

No consumer product improves more drastically, year after year, than the computer.

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

I think about the Internet and cell phones and jets and spaceships, and I wonder, 'What's going to make that look ancient?'

There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.

The speed at which modern CPUs perform computations still blows my mind daily.