Robert X. Cringely Quotes

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

Computers double their performance every month.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Weird how fast technology changes.

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.

I saw the logarithmic growth of computer power.

The speed at which technology evolves affects everyone; we repeatedly hear that constant innovation is overwhelming for consumers, who struggle to keep pace.

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.

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

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.

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.

Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

The ordinary horseless carriage is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.

Technological innovation is so miserable in the Middle East that, if you exclude Israel, the number of patents filed is less than one fifth the number from sub-Saharan Africa.

If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.

Moore's law is really about economics.

In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.

The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.