Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

If you've got good systemising skills you can apply them to systems you aren't familiar with, and look for patterns.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

There's a certain logic to systems, and that logic is fairly self-evident. It's very straightforward, usually. It might take a little research, it might take a little bit of industry to prize it out, but it's there to be seen.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

Technologists come at a problem from the point of view that the system is working a certain way, and if I engage in that system and actually change the rules of the system, I can make it work a different way.

We think of enterprise architecture as the process we use for fully describing and mapping business functionality and business requirements and relating them to information systems requirements.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

The designer of a new kind of system must participate fully in the implementation.

If you write your own tools, you can sort of see new things, design new things.

I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.

To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Caltech is a very adventurous place. Part of the culture is that we tolerate people doing things that seem impossible, and also synthesizing and borrowing ideas across very kooky and unusual boundaries.

One of the core reasons for creating 'Station to Station' was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process.

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

Program construction consists of a sequence of refinement steps.

I think with modelling and acting these days, the lines are blurred. Everyone can do all sorts of things, so why do just one?

In any software work, you have IT consultancy competence required to build the systems.

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.

People crave predictability, and when you design and use systems, you give people predictability. More importantly, when you build systems, they can help you orchestrate, and orchestration helps you create the habits that continuously improve the systems!

Just as a fan and a consumer, I think less of actors as one thing and belonging to one genre or medium. People do all kinds of things.

We try to continually push ourselves to do more and more, not just on the hardware side but also in terms of developers' tools so they can take advantage of the hardware that's there, in the best way.