Computers

• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943.

• "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

• "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra

• "Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Computers are from hell."

• "It's not just a computer - it's your ass." - Cal Keegan

• "It reminds me of the claim that Americans built the first computer... It depends on what properties are necessary for a device to be classed as a computer: That it's electronic? That it has Randomly Accessible Memory? That it operates on a stored program? I am tempted to suggest that one of the requirements implicit in some people's lists is that it was built in America."

• "A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy" - Joseph Campbell

• "Distributed file systems are a cruel hoax." - Zalman Stern

• "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." - Mitch Ratcliffe

• "A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light"

• "Anti-glare screens to prevent eye strain ??? In my day, you didn't need an anti-glare screen. With the power they consumed, when you turned your computer on, the whole building darkened!" - Simon Travaglia (the B.O.F.H.).

• "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." - Arthur C. Clarke

• "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done." - Andy Rooney

• "Computers do not solve problems, they execute solutions" - Laurent Gasser

• "Large increases in cost with questionable increases in performance can be tolerated only in race horses and women." - Lord Kelvin

• "Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error."

• "Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it." - Seymore Cray (on virtual memory)

• "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." - Douglas Adams

• "Software Engineering is that part of Computer Science which is too difficult for the Computer Scientist." - F. L. Bauer

• "Counting in binary is just like counting in decimal if you are all thumbs." - Glaser and Way

• "Base eight is just like base ten really, if you're missing two fingers" - Tom Lehrer

• "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't."

• "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand trinary, those that don't, and those that confuse it with binary."

• "If you torture the data enough, it will confess" - Ronald Coase

• "A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do" - Dennis M. Ritchie

• "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" - F. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month

• "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error" - Weisert

• "If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime."

• "Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing." - Dick Brandon

• "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life." - Michael Sinz

• "Perfection is achieved not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

• "Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." - Fred Brooks

• "I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck." - Rob Pike (commenting on the X Window System)

• "Managing senior programmers is like herding cats." - Dave Platt

• "Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies." - Bill Bulko

• "If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong." - Norm Schryer

• "If your computer speaks English, it was probably made in Japan." - Alan J. Perlis

• "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rich Cook

• "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth

• "/* You are not expected to understand this */" - comment in the context-switching code of the V6 Unix kernel

• "The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance" - Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

• "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." - John von Neumann (1951)

• "Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases." - Norman R. Augustine

• "I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me." - Edsger Dijkstra

• "Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable." - Ralph Johnson

• "They don't make bugs like Bunny anymore." - Olav Mjelde

• "To err is human, but for a real disaster you need a computer."

• "Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code."

• "Error, keyboard not found - press F1 to continue." - BIOS system message

• "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." - Donald Knuth

• "When all else fails, read the instructions." - L. Iasellio

• "The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children." - Linus Torvalds

• "When I was a teenager, Mom said I'd go blind if I didn't quit doing *that*. Maybe she was right - since the invention of internet porn, computer monitors keep getting bigger and bigger." !" - Bill Ervin

• "You can create art and beauty with a computer" - Steven Levy

• "You know you're a geek when... You try to shoo a fly away from the monitor with your cursor. That just happened to me. It was scary." - Juuso Heimonen

• "I don't understand why cheerleaders won't talk to me. Maybe I don't throw five touchdowns against Newport High, but let's see one of those football morons program in assembly language.!" - Chris Lipe

• "Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly... Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, 'user-friendly' on the cover" - Bill Gates

• "The ultimate metric that I would like to propose for user friendliness is quite simple: if this system was a person, how long would it take before you punched it in the nose ?" - Tom Carey

• "NEVER EVER mess with a PCB jumper you don't understand, even if it's labelled 'SEX AND FREE BEER'." Dave Haynie

• "You have a hardware or a software problem" - service manual for Gestetner 3240

• "Mr McKitrick, After a careful consideration I have came to the conclution that your defencesystem SUCKS!" - from Wargames

• "Heuristics are bug ridden by definition - if they didn't have bugs, then they'd be algorithms."

• "Don't get suckered in by the comments - they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code." - Dave Storer

• "Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." - Bruce Brown

• "Humans are the best value in computers - where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160lbs, having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour?"

• "Any significant boost in technology could just as easily be a rigged demo."

• "Computers don't make mistakes. People do."

• "Software is the soul to the lifeless body of the hardware." - Ong Lee Shyh

• "I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them." - Isaac Asimov

• "Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest." - Isaac Asimov

• "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." - Steve Wozniak

• "The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." - Nathaniel Borenstein

• "Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network." - Tim Berners-Lee (in Technology Review, July 1996)

• "It is ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the eighties, we should by now have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music." - Anonymous

• "The disadvantage of working over networks is that you can't so easily go into someone else's office and rip their bloody heart out" - Jim McDonald

• "Trust The Computer. The Computer is your friend." - Paranoia RPG

• "I invented it, Bill made it famous" - David Bradley (wrote the code for Ctrl-Alt-Delete on the IBM PC)

• "Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?" - Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982

• .HELP SEX: This system is a computer and as such is not able to help with enquiries of this nature. For details on reproduction see the Xerox documentation.
  • Famous Help text from Essex Dec10

Table of contents

1 Unix 2 Internet 3 Microsoft

Unix

• "UNIX is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, Windows is a shell, and DOS is a boot partition virus." - Peter H. Coffin

• "Linux is only free if your time is worthless."

• "Fixing Unix is easier than living with NT." - Jonathan Gilpin

• "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence" - Jeremy S. Anderson

• "Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are."

• "VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix." - W. Davidson

• "Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix." - Linus Torvalds to Tanenbaum (author of Minix)

• "Brian Kernighan has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant '?' lights up in the center of the dashboard. 'The experienced driver'", he says, 'will usually know what's wrong.'"

• "The most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many times you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage to lose consciousness. It just goes on and on" - Patrick Sobalvarro

• "Will journalling become prevalent in the Unix world at large? Probably not. After all, it's nonstandard." - The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994)

Internet

• "Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton

• "It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an exercise for your kill-file." - Bertil Jonell

• "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore

• "Of course, the best way to get accurate information on Usenet is to post something wrong and wait for corrections" - Matthew Austern

• "In headlines today, the dreaded killfile virus spread across the country adding 'aol.com' to people's Usenet kill files everywhere. The programmer of the virus still remains anonymous, but has been nominated several times for a Nobel peace prize" - Mark Atkinson

• "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea; massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." - Eugene Spafford

• "The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent" - Jim Showalter

• "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup full of magnetic tapes."

• "First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure" - Douglas Adams

"Designing for 90% of browsers is our policy? Here's a question. If I answered 10% of the sales calls with "hello [companyname], could you please f*** off", how would that affect our sales?" - Seen in Argument over web standards.

• "Welcome to DALNet! Where the men are men, the women are men, and the teenage girls are undercover FBI Agents!" - DALNet IRC Welcome Message

Microsoft

• "I wonder what Jesus would do if He had to reload Windows 95 for the eighth time today ?" - Mirabour Gilbride

• "MS-DOS isn't dead, it just smells that way." - Henry Spencer

• "In a world without walls and fences, who needs Windows and Gates?" - Dino Esposito

• "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." - Bill Gates

• "...the best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system." - Bill Gates

• "People say Microsoft payed 14M$for using the Rolling Stones song 'Start me up' in their commercials. This is wrong. Microsoft payed 14M$ only for a part of the song. For instance, they didn't use the line 'You'll make a grown man cry'."

• "Our products just aren't engineered for security," - Brian Valentine (VP in charge of MS Windows Development)

• "HighContrast mode is turned on. This totally fucks our style sheet as most of it will" - Windows 2000 source code (private/shell/applets/welcome/html/webapp.cpp)

• "The user fucked up" - Windows 2000 source code (private/windbg64/debugger/tl/remote/shell/windbgrm .c)

*       !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*       !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* !!!!!!!IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!!!!!!!
*       !!!!!!!!!!!!!!DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*       !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*       !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

- Windows 2000 source code (private/windows/media/avi/verinfo.16/verinfo.h)

• "!!!this is fucked if a map goes to multiple physical devices" - Windows 2000 source code (private/windows/shell/control/midi/map.c)

• "BUGBUG - DON'T DO THIS SHIT." - Windows 2000 source code (private/inet/wininet/urlcache/conman.cxx)

• "this shit's read only" - Windows 2000 source code (private/shell/ext/netplwiz/mnddlg.cpp)

• "Some ugly shit goin' on here!" - Windows 2000 source code (private/shell/win16/commctrl/ctl3d.c)

• "Holy shit, couldn't change formats, time to punt!" - Windows 2000 source code (several places)

• "lets do some majic shit so the compiler generates "good" code." - Windows 2000 source code (private/windows/media/avi/msrle/rle.c)

• "!!!!!!!IF YOU CHANGE TABS TO SPACES, YOU WILL BE KILLED!!!!!!!" - Windows 2000 source code

• "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!DOING SO FUCKS THE BUILD PROCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" - Windows 2000 source code

• "We have to do this only because Exchange is a moron." - Windows 2000 source code (private\\shell\\ext\\ftp\\ftpdrop.cpp)

• "God, I hate this hack ..." - Windows 2000 source code (private\\inet\\mshtml\\src\\site\\layout\\flowlyt.cxx)

• "CallProc32W is insane. It's a variadic function that uses the pascal calling convention. (It probably makes more sense when you're stoned.)" - Windows 2000 source code (private\\shell\\ext\\tweakui\\genthunk.c)

• "These undocumented messages are used by Excel 5.0" - Windows 2000 source code (private\\mvdm\\wow32\\wcntl32.c)

• "Probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age" - Scott McNealy (about Bill Gates)

• "A giant hairball" - Scott McNealy (about Windows NT)

• "The beast from Redmond" - Scott McNealy (about Microsoft)

• "the evil empire" - Scott McNealy (about Microsoft)

See also Bastard Operator From Hell excuses, Linux, Programming.