Quotable Quotes

"On Technology" (Category #1)

"The information superhighway is a dirt road that won't be paved over until 2025." -- Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom/Blockbuster.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"  --H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

"This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."  -- An internal Western Union memo, 1876

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

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, founder, chairman & president of DEC, 1977

"640k ought to be enough for anybody."  -- Bill Gates, 1981 (Did he mean $640K?)

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
--Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

"Everything that can be invented has already been invented."
-- Charles H. Duell, director of the U.S. Patent Office, 1899

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music." 
- Kristin Wilson, Nintendo, Inc., 1989.

"A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's atmosphere."  --The New York Times, 1936

"The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T."  --Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." 
--The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
"But what ... is it good for?"
--Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"  --David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"The world is coming to an end in 1950." --Historian Henry Adams, 1903

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." 
--Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken, 1923
"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this."  --Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.
"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'"
--Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.