Clive Thompson Quotes

I think the Macintosh proves that everyone can have a bitmapped display.

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.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Inc, which set the computing world on its ear with the Macintosh in 1984.

Personal computers were created by some teenagers in garages because the, the wisdom of the computer industry was that people didn't want these little toys on their desk.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

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

I got my first computer at the age of 6. To me, it was magic. By the time I was 12, I wanted to know the secrets behind the wizardry, and that started my journey toward computer programming. This was the early 1990s, when computers weren't built for the mass market.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.

I started on an Apple II, which I had bought at the very end of 1978 for half of my annual income. I made $4,500 a year, and I spent half of it on the computer.

I became convinced that the whole essence of the computer revolution is interactivity. That was very early in my career. At the time I did that it was heresy.

I taught myself computer. Then Macintosh came along, and it became a really bad addiction. If I wasn't in show business, I'd have pocket protectors growing out of my chest. I do everything on it. It's kinda sick.

The reason I'm an I.B.M.-type guy today is that I really needed a laptop back in 1986, and I just couldn't wait for the Powerbook.

I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad. That shows you how ancient it was. And it said, 'Thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer.' Thousands of people.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple computer in a garage in Palo Alto, it heralded the beginning of the PC revolution that ultimately dealt a death-blow to dozens of older companies.

When Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and saw computers running the first operating system that used Windows and a mouse, he assumed he was looking at a new way to work a personal computer. He brought the concept back to Cupertino and created the Mac, then Bill Gates followed suit, and the rest is history.

There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II - the first computer it produced for the mass market - many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen.

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.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.

My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.

The whole thought of a career with computers - given that hardly anybody even knew what they were - it wasn't even a concept.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs.

Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.