George Dyson Quotes

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

The form of computers has never been important, with speed and performance being the only things that mattered.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

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

That we plug in carts or CDs with megabytes of memory when only yesterday we were happy to have 64K or 128K in our Apple II and PC workhorses... that's nothing short of phenomenal.

Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices.

The power of the computer is starting to spread.

That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

Computers get better faster than anything else ever.

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.

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.

There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world.

We've seen the power of the PC, and we've seen that it's unstoppable.

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.

Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light.

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

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.

As long as we can make them smaller, we can make them faster.

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

The digital explosion has been so explosive.

In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city, or even the whole world.

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?

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

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web... Now even my cat has its own page.