Steve Jurvetson Quotes

I'm surprised at some technological development, and the realization that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think the CD-ROM is the best example of that. The idea of having a whole symphony, or opera, or novel in a little piece of plastic is pretty amazing.

There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.

Every day, three times per second, we produce the equivalent of the amount of data that the Library of Congress has in its entire print collection, right? But most of it is like cat videos on YouTube or 13-year-olds exchanging text messages about the next Twilight movie.

The best mobile phone had the best mathematician. They know how to fit a huge amount of data into a small amount of space. How to do things efficiently, how to do them cleverly.

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

Second, we're spending a huge amount of money on technology so that everyone can check out laptops and portable phones. We're spending more money to write our existing information into databases or onto CD-ROM.

People simply don't have room, physical room, to keep, for instance, 2-inch tape in the sort of quantities that are required to hold a full archive. It's not just a matter of having three or four boxes, it's 40, 90 boxes of 2-inch tape, and very few people have the resources that sort of stuff properly.

The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops.

Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

It would be better for everyone if we deleted everything by default and saved the things that are important to us.

With faster Internet and better computers, you'd better believe we're creating and consuming more digital data.

We're not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.

Anyone with a little computer experience knows that anything can be copied bit by bit with the right equipment.

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.

If there can be three certain things in life, instead of two, it might be death, taxes, and data.

I've often asked myself, how much information can the brain actually hold? There'll probably come a day when you're able to download it; that's what you have to do when the machine's full.

Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.

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.

I have seen a man charged with revolutionizing incredibly complex government information technology systems who did not know how to use a thumb drive.

Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.

The "paperless office" is a bad idea because paper is one of the most useful and valuable media ever invented. "On paper" is a good place for information you want to use; a bad place for information you want to store.

The content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they're so cheap, that pretty soon you'll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate.

It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books.