Here are just a few tid bits to bring a little history to the computer world, and a smile to your weekend...enjoy!
Interviewer: Thank-you all for your insightful comments. By the way, do they have the Internet where you are?
Interviewer: How would you define the Internet?
Charles Dickens: Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
(Great Expectations. 1860-1861)
Interviewer: Why does the Internet work?
Jane Austen: One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
(Mansfield Park. 1812-1814)
Interviewer: Would you care to comment on the ability to read anything and everything on the internet?
Benjamin Franklin: He that would live in peace and at ease, must not speak all he knows nor judge all he sees.
(Poor Richard's Almanack. 1736)
Interviewer: What's your take on spam?
Abraham Lincoln: I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
(The collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, volume vii, "Letter to Albert G. Hodges" . April 4, 1864)
Interviewer: Internet start-ups?
Mark Twain: Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.
(Speech to Eastman College (1901))
Interviewer: On the wisdom of reading a book instead of checking out one's home page:
William Thackery: I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses
(The Virginians. 1857-1859)
Interviewer: Hyperlinks?
Christopher Columbus: I should not proceed by land to the east, as is customary, but by a westerly route, in which direction we have hitherto no certain evidence that any one has gone.
(Journey of the first voyage. 3 august 1492 diary entry)
Interviewer: Blogs?
George Bernard Shaw: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
(Man and Superman � maxims. 1903)
Interviewer: The danger in using online thesauruses?
William Shakespeare: But now, I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, bound in
to saucy doubts and fears.
to saucy doubts and fears.
(Macbeth. 1605)
Interviewer: Video Games?
William Shakespeare: By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes
(Macbeth. 1605)
Interviewer: The reason to spend all day on the Internet:
Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being
(Apology)
Interviewer: Cybercrime?
Edgar Allan Poe: Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.
(A Few Words on Secret Writing - Graham's Magazine. July 1841)
Interviewer: The limitations of the Internet?
Theodore Roosevelt: Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them. � if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck their power of usefulness is gone.
(Address on the laying of the cornerstone of the house office building, Washington, D.C. 1906)
Interviewer: Making sure to proof your email before hitting send?
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr: Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used, till they are seasoned.
(The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 1858)
Interviewer: Any other takes on that last question?
Charlotte Bronte: It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.
(Jane Eyre. 1847)
Interviewer: Critics of the Internet:
Thomas Huxley: If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Interviewer: Why there�s such bad writing on the Internet?
Aristotle: Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
(Rhetoric. I.1369a5)
Interviewer: Bad posts?
Miguel de Cervantes: There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault.
(Don Quixote de la Mancha. 1605-1615)
Interviewer: Constant edits on Wikipedia?
Arthur Conan Doyle: The more we progress the more we tend to progress
(The Stark Monroe letters. 1894)
