Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
Steve WozniakRead
Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the altruistic origins of computers, emphasizing their role in empowering individuals against powerful entities.
Steve Wozniak reflects on the true purpose behind the creation of the first computers, arguing that they were designed to serve the common good rather than for selfish motives. This revolutionary spirit was aimed at enabling everyday people to overcome the dominance of established institutions, suggesting that technology can be a force for democratization and empowerment.
In practice
During a tech conference, while discussing the history of computing.
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.
If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny
Every dream I've ever had in life has come true ten times over.
My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.
Safety is not just about trying really hard and being really careful. You have to design technology that makes it possible for a computer to be safe.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.
If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.
The whole notion of passwords is based on an oxymoron. The idea is to have a random string that is easy to remember. Unfortunately, if it's easy to remember, it's something nonrandom like 'Susan.' And if it's random, like 'r7U2*Qnp,' then it's not easy to remember.
Run for your lives-the computers are invading. Awesomely powerful computers tackling ever more important tasks with awkward, old-fashioned interfaces. As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us. In turn, we will be tempted to kill our computers, but we won't dare because we are already utterly, irreversibly dependent on these hopeful monsters that make modern life possible.
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