The Dream Machine Quotes

“Noyce himself, who teamed up in 1968 with another Fairchild cofounder, Gordon Moore of Moore’s law, to found a company they called Intel, short for “integrated electronics”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“1959, Fairchild cofounder Robert Noyce did devise a way to mass-produce integrated circuits by etching thousands of transistors simultaneously onto the surface of a single silicon wafer.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“the integrated circuit itself; that honor goes to Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who demonstrated his first device in Dallas on September 19, 1958.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“William B. Shockley, coinventor of the transistor,”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“sndmsg, for “send message.” Invoke it, and the thing would ask you for a To: field, a From: field, and a Copy: field, plus a few other options. Then you would type your message and hit Control-Z, and off it would go. At the other end, the recipient could see what you’d sent by invoking a companion utility that Tomlinson called readmail. In writing these utilities, moreover, Tomlinson had come up with an elegant way to define E-mail addresses: take the “user name” that the person typed when logging in to his or her host computer, and simply link it to that computer’s “host name” on the network with an “at” sign: username @ hostname.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Tomlinson had already written an E-mail utility for Tenex, BBN’s new time-shared operating system for the PDP-10, and had also begun to experiment with a new version of the Arpanet’s file-transfer protocol. So putting the two together seemed a natural step.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“BBN engineer named Ray Tomlinson had sent a message between the company’s two PDP-10s—the same ones that BBN was using to run the Arpanet itself, as it happened.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Every time-sharing system in the country had E-mail, starting with Project MAC in 1965;”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The Arpanet was up and running for real”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“When the systems are truly complex, in short, programming has to be a process of exploration and discovery. That had been the whole point of interactive languages such as Lisp, as well as interactive-design tools such as Sketchpad: they made it easy to explore new solutions by making it easy to formulate and then reformulate ideas on the fly. And that was the whole point of Lick’s Dynamic Modeling project: he wanted to push exploratory programming as far as he could in every direction.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“On the frontier,” he had written in 1965, “man must often chart his course by stars he has never seen. Rarely does one recognize or discover a complex problem, formulate it, and lay out a procedure that will solve it—all in one great flash of insight.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“By mid-1970, they had a preliminary version up and running. Somewhere along the way, moreover, their homebrew operating system had acquired a name. According to one version of the story, the name signified “one of whatever Multics was many of.” According to another, it stood for “Multics without balls.” But either way it came out the same: Unix.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“two young Multicians, named Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who would go on to galvanize the emerging microcomputer industry with a little program called VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Multics gave living proof that a grown-up operating system was possible—that sophisticated memory management, a hierarchical file system, careful attention to security, and all the rest could be integrated into a single, coherent whole.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“just an ASR-33 Teletype terminal that could dial in to a nearby GE Mark II time-sharing system, which offered little more than GE’s version of BASIC.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Before 1965 was out, GE was offering just such a commercial time-sharing service based on the Dartmouth College system, which included the new interactive programming language BASIC.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Stanford was out; John McCarthy was as unenthusiastic about the network as ever.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“AT&T engineers, most of whom had spent a lifetime perfecting their circuit-switching network, found Baran’s packet-switching concept ludicrous”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Clark, that was the idea: small, independent routing computers.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“(After Sutherland left ARPA for Harvard, moreover, Roberts would start a collaboration with him on what would now be called virtual reality, complete with the world’s first 3-D virtual headset.)”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The Computer as a Communication Device.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Vannevar Bush’s article about the Memex, and Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“RAND Tablet, a kind of high-tech sketch pad that a user could write or draw on with a stylus, with the results then appearing on a CRT display.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“The Q-32 would go on to support a lot of good research in education, psychology, and display technology. It would even support dial-in connections from Stanford, Berkeley, and several other sites around the state—thus serving as a kind of prototype for the far more ambitious long-distance networks to come.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Pentagon’s space research under a new civilian agency reporting directly to the secretary of defense. It would be called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“October 5, 1957, local time, an R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile lifted off from the Soviet Union’s top-secret launch complex at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, and arced eastward into the predawn darkness over central Asia.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“few prior forays into artificial intelligence, McCarthy had spent the summer of 1952 working with Shannon at Bell Labs.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future,” he said, “then computation may someday be organized as a public utility, just as the telephone system is a public utility. We can envisage computer service companies whose subscribers are connected to them by telephone lines. Each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity that he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic of a very large system.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny were starting to plan a campus-wide time-sharing system for much the same reason; the effort would eventually lead them to create an interactive programming language that they would call BASIC.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine

“graphics-rich personal workstations and the notion of human-computer symbiosis; time-sharing and the notion of computer-aided collaborative work; networks and the notion of an on-line community; on-line libraries and the notion of instant, universal access to knowledge; and computer languages and the notion of a new, digital medium of expression.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine