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" Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination? "

Ellen Ullman

Thought

Imagination

Design

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" UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system. "

" I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail. "

Ellen Ullman

Detail

Knowledge

" What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up. "

" Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization. "

" You can only get a beginner's mind once. "

" So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values. "

" Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. "

" If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not. "

" Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it. "

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" Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces. "

" It will not work to keep asking men to change. Many have no real objective to do so. There's no reward for them. Why should they change? They're doing well inside the halls of coding. "

" I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens. "

Ellen Ullman

I Am

Intimidated

" I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old. "