Ken Olsen Quotes

I'm a computer guy, and one of the things I did with the good fortune that 'Presumed Innocent' brought me was to buy one of the very first laptop computers. It weighed about eight and a half pounds, by the way.

Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone.

A society without civil, political, and property rights may indeed find it difficult to innovate innovation outside the military sector, but it often has a relatively easy time adopting technologies that have already been developed elsewhere.

We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don't see any argument to go back to 1600.

We are not concerned about innovation shifting from the U.S. I still believe that the U.S. still has capabilities for innovation.

'The Victorian Internet' is a must read for anyone interested in the history of technology and in the cycles of hype, boom, and bust that seem to only quicken with each new wave of innovation. Highly recommended.

I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

I did some research once on the way people in the past imagined the year 2000. They tended to picture the things they already had getting more sophisticated - flying cars, self-cleaning windows. And the folks in the early 1900s had a wildly optimistic estimate of the future of pneumatic tubes.

Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.

Don't be the best. Be the only.

Faced with the profound changes that AI technologies can produce, pressure for "more" and "tougher" regulation is inevitable. Misunderstanding about what AI is and is not, especially against a background of scare-mongering, could fuel opposition to technologies that could benefit everyone. This would be a tragic mistake. Regulation that stifles innovation, or relocates it to other jurisdictions, would be similarly counterproductive.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.

After World War II, the U. S. Government made massive investments in the nascent field of computer science, both in research and in industry. In the 1950s it bought almost 50 percent of all semiconductors that were produced, thus driving down their costs until the private sector could afford to buy them.

The spending in science and technology need to be to increased.

Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.

From the first time that I went over to China, I think I was around the age of 17, 18, and just going there and seeing that their technology being years ahead of ours in America, it sparked something with me back then.

In some ways, technology keeps on enhancing us, and we embrace it.

As one of the leaders in the world for AI, I feel tremendous excitement and responsibility to create the most awesome and benevolent technology for society and to educate the most awesome and benevolent technologists - that's my calling.

I believe in the potential of all things possibly imagined that can be made into a reality. My uncle was a Swedish scientist, and in the 1970s, he would speak of computers controlling most things in the future and self-driving cars and wireless communication. All the things that we are living with now.

We will always work on technologies that are required in our market, which is India.

Nothing I'm doing is without its predecessors.

The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.

Often, I'm sitting opposite a client, and I'm thinking, 'How do I convince him to not copy the best-selling product out there?' And sometimes I don't know. Really, it's smarter to be a thief.