Early Computing Quotes

IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.

One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

I went and I started teaching computers to young kids, to fifth graders at first, later to sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth graders. I also started teaching teachers. And that was back in the days when we'd wire up the labs ourselves and crimp on the Ethernet connectors and then we would.

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

In 1978, I entered the Tokyo Institute of Technology. I would have loved to study videogame programming, but nobody was teaching it then. So I went to classes on engineering and early computer science.

When I got started, I was a sideshow. At my first Consumer Electronics Show, in 1977 in Chicago, people came from all over the floor to see the 'lady programmer.' They had me dressed in a turquoise lab coat with my name embroidered on the pocket.

After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

I started with CB radio, ham radio, and eventually went into computers. And I was just fascinated with it. And back then, when I was in school, computer hacking was encouraged. It was an encouraged activity. In fact, I remember one of the projects my teacher gave me was writing a log-in simulator.

While my friends were busy listening to the Talking Heads, Police, and B-52s, I was busy teaching myself to program on the Atari.

I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type.

I remember watching my dad work on PCs, and I remember using Texas Instrument calculators in school. It was a bit nostalgic.

The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.

I remember well my first 300 baud modem, which dialed up and scrolled text at an agonizingly slow speed.

I think when I graduated from my high school in '84, they were just bringing computers in. I don't even know if they were for classes. They might have just been for the administration. It was nowhere on the radar for anybody that I know.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play 'Pong,' a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that.

I was lucky to get into computers when it was a very young and idealistic industry. There weren't many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were brilliant people from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. They loved it, and no one was really in it for the money.

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

In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.

Before 'Dilbert,' I tried to become a computer programmer. In the early days of computing, I bought this big, heavy, portable computer for my house. I spent two years nights and weekends trying to write games that I thought I would sell. Turns out I'm not that good a programmer, so that was two years that didn't work out.

My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.

The Apple IIc, with its 128KB of RAM, 125KB floppy drive, word processor, and spreadsheet application, did everything I could imagine a computer doing at the time.

Doing a movie about computers between 1978 and 1982? You can't get much less sexy, less active than that.

It was a black and white only computer at the time, but it kept me fascinated.