Technological History Quotes

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

My father had a big brick cell phone, before anyone had a cell phone, because he was really just into that kind of thing - communication devices. I grew up between my father's laboratory and my mother's library.

If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.

Manchester has always been a massively innovative city, loads of great scientific findings have come from Manchester. The first computer in the world was there and took up a whole building. So Manchester has always been very innovative.

The Cube is approximately - it's around the same age as the Internet, and in that time, we had no personal computers yet.

The government invented the Internet.

This is the moment when I should also admit that when the Internet first arrived I kept telling people it was a fad.

After all, the internet originated around 1960 and wasn't privatized until 1995. That's thirty five years in the public domain during the hard, creative development period.

The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.