The Dream Machine Quotes

“a new open-interface standard that would allow hardware and software to evolve independently.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“MS-DOS—that was just barely different enough from CP/M to avoid legal action.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“collect all the code that had to be customized for each new computer or disk drive and put it into a small Unix-like kernel that he called the Basic Input/Output System, or BIOS.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“CP/M—for Control Program for Microcomputers—it had been created by thirty-three-year-old Gary Kildall, a computer-science teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“the Apple Computer Company, founded in 1976 by Homebrew Computer Club members Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, longtime buddies from the Silicon Valley town of Cupertino.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“MITS and the Altair had vanished by 1979. If Roberts and his computer were gone, however, the movement they had done so much to create was already self-sustaining. Not only were new brands of machines flooding the market by the dozens, if not by the hundreds, there were also users’ groups for every microcomputer imaginable, as well as pan-micro groups such as the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, which held its first meeting in a Palo Alto garage in March 1975. There were magazines such as Byte, which debuted in August 1975, and the software periodical Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (motto: “Running Light without Overbyte”), which published its first issue in 1976. There were specialty stores like the Byte Shop and ComputerLand, the latter soon to be a nationwide chain.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“(The language also owed its existence to the Harvard PDP-10, interestingly enough. Since Gates and Allen didn’t have access to an Intel 8080 at the time, they used Gates’s student account on the big machine to create a simulation of the microprocessor”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“official programming language was reminiscent of the minis. Created in the spring of 1975 by two young men who had been inspired by the Popular Electronics article—Bill Gates, now a Harvard undergrad, and his high school buddy Paul Allen, a programmer working outside Boston—Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC’s BASIC for the PDP-11.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The father of the Altair was H. Edward Roberts of Albuquerque, New Mexico,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Mark-8, another 8008-based machine, designed in the fall of 1973 by Jonathan Titus,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Altair was not the first commercial microcomputer; that honor goes to the Micral, an Intel 8008—based machine that was sold in France starting in May 1973.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Intel’s mental model of its product,” according to Ceruzzi, “was this: an industrial customer bought an 8080 and wrote specialized software for it, which was then burned into a read-only memory to give a system with the desired functions. The resulting inexpensive product (no longer programmable) was then put on the market as an embedded controller in an industrial system.”13 (Ceruzzi adds that Intel did build several microcomputers during this period; however, it marketed the ten-thousand-dollar Intellec “Development Systems” not as general-purpose computers but as tools to help customers write and debug software for embedded processors.)”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“In April 1974, for example, Intel introduced its 8-bit 8080 chip, the first microprocessor to come within shouting distance of, say, a 12-bit mini such as the PDP-8.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Paul Ceruzzi has noted: “Pocket calculators, especially those that were programmable, unleashed the force of personal creativity and energy of masses of individuals.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Since he’d based it on an earlier, experimental language by Thompson, code-named “B,” Ritchie code-named his language “C.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“PARC had given them something magical: an Alto-Ethernet—laser printer—GUI system that was like nothing else on the planet.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Simonyi would later take it to a young software house known as Microsoft, where it would become the foundation for Microsoft Word.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Bravo text editor, probably the most popular single application ever written for the Alto. Designed by Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi, and then developed further by Simonyi and others, Bravo introduced What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processing: WYSIWYG.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“nearly a decade would pass before TCP/IP was stable enough for ARPA to shift the whole Arpanet over to it.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“published in 1974 as “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,”16 gave the first architectural description of how the Internet would function as a network of networks, with TCP/IP as the glue holding it all together. Indeed, “the paper” is why Kahn and Cerf are so often hailed today as the inventors of the Internet, to the extent that any two people can be singled out for that honor: this was pretty much where the Internet began.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Kahn and Cerf had already started planning it out: a completely rewritten version of the existing Arpanet protocol that they called TCP, the Transmission Control Protocol.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“dropped the old name, Alto Aloha Network, in favor of a new phrase: the “ETHER Network.” “If Ethernet was invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day,” says Metcalfe, “this was it.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The Aloha system, he learned, was an experimental, ARPA-funded network that transmitted computer data via radio waves, instead of via the telephone lines used in the Arpanet.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The Alto was certainly not the first personal computer; that honor has to go to Wes Clark’s LINC, if not to Clark’s TX-0, or even to Jay Forrester’s Whirlwind. But it was the first machine that most of us would recognize as a personal computer.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Thacker wondered. Given the way prices were falling and processor speeds were rising, why not just build a bunch of very simple controllers and then let the computer’s central processor use software to do all the really hard work of input and output? The result would be a kind of internal time-sharing, Thacker realized. The processor would still cycle very, very quickly among all its users, but now only one of those users would be human; the rest would be input/output devices. “The payoff,” he explains, “would be an enormous simplification of the machine.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“By the summer of 1972, says Thacker, “it was personal-computer time, just like it was railroad time in the eighteen-fifties.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“the electronic office should consist of small personal computers, running high-resolution graphics and linked together with high-bandwidth network connections”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“windows”—a brainstorm that had hit Kay one day while he was in the shower, his favorite place to think.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“first personal computer—that was the LINC of Wes Clark”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The real significance of computing was to be found not in this gadget or that gadget, but in how the technology was woven into the fabric of human life—how computers could change the way people thought, the way they created, the way they communicated, the way they worked together, the way they organized themselves, even the way they apportioned power and responsibility.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine