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About Telcontar.net

Formerly a resource for Mac OS 9 cling-ons, and now somewhere to delve into the history of the computer keyboard technology industry.

You would not keep a dog and bark yourself. Why then with computers must we perform all the thinking for them?

The objective of a data-driven system is not to put the data in, but to get the data out.

On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage: Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Babbage’s Engine], on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858)

There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.

Robert Sewell