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A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. --John Gall

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila. --Mitch Ratliffe

A crash is when your competitor's program dies. When your program dies, it is an 'idiosyncrasy'. Frequently, crashes are followed with a message like 'ID 02'. 'ID' is an abbreviation for idiosyncrasy and the number that follows indicates how many more months of testing the product should have had. --Guy Kawasaki

A program is a spell cast over a computer, turning input into error messages. --Anonymous

All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. --Anonymous

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. --Rich Kulawiec

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. --Dave Parnas

As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. --Maurice Wilkes

Bad Command or File Name. Good try, though. --Anonymous

BASIC - A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company. --Anonymous

Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers. --Leonard Brandwein

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg. --Bjarne Stroustrup

C:\DOS... C:\DOS\RUN... \RUN\DOS\RUN -Anonymous

Cannot find REALITY.SYS...Universe Halted. --Anonymous

COFFEE.EXE missing. Insert cup and press any key. --Anonymous

Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and the Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare! --Blair Houghton

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

Computers aren't intelligent, they only think they are. --Anonymous

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

Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. --William Gibson

Debugging is anticipated with distaste, performed with reluctance, and bragged about forever. --Anonymous

Don't get suckered in by the comments ... they can terribly be misleading. --Dave Storer

Earth is 98% full. Please delete anyone you can. --Anonymous

Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue... --Anonymous

Error reading FAT record. Try the SKINNY one? (Y/N) -Anonymous

f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmmng. --Anonymous

General Failure's Fault. Not Yours. --Anonymous

Genuinely skillful use of obscenities is uniformly absent on the Internet. --Karl Kleinpaste

Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked. --Jeff Pesis

He who hasn't hacked assembly language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain. --John Moore

Hit any user to continue. --Anonymous

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

I speak BASIC to clients, 1-2-3 to management, and mumble to myself. --Anonymous

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image. --Stephen Hawking

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

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet. --Bruce Sterling

I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' -Mike Godwin

If a train station is where the train stops, what's a workstation...? --Anonymous

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. --Robert Cringely

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. --Robert X Cringely

If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas. --Harold Abelson

If you can't beat your computer at chess, try kickboxing. --Anonymous

If you put a billion monkeys in front of a billion typewriters typing at random, they would reproduce the entire collected works of Usenet in about ... five minutes. --Anonymous

If you're masochistic enough to program in ADA, we're not going to stop you. --Matt Welsh

Information Superhighway is really an acronym for 'Interactive Network For Organizing, Retrieving, Manipulating, Accessing And Transferring Information On National Systems, Unleashing Practically Every Rebellious Human Intelligence, Gratifying Hackers, Wiseacres, And Yahoos'. --Keven Kwaku

Intel has announced its next chip: the Repentium. --Anonymous

Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life. --Andrew Brown

It's easy to cry 'bug' when the truth is that you've got a complex system and sometimes it takes a while to get all the components to co-exist peacefully. --Doug Vargas

Looking at the proliferation of personal web pages on the net, it looks like very soon everyone on earth will have 15 Megabytes of fame. --MG Siriam

Mosaic is the 1990s equivalent of forcing friends to sit through slides of your trip to Florida - painful for everyone but the host. --Steve G. Steinberg

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

Old hackers never die. They just go to Bitnet. --Anonymous

Old programmers never die. They just branch out to a new address. --Anonymous

Old programmers never die. They just can't C as well. --Anonymous

Ooops. My brain just hit a bad sector. --Anonymous

Optimization hinders evolution. --Anonymous

Pascal keeps your hand tied. C gives you enough rope to hang yourself. --Anonymous

Pentiums melt in your PC, not in your hand. --Anonymous

Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption. --Keith Bostic

Press any key... no, no, no, NOT THAT ONE! --Anonymous

Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals. --Henry Spencer

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

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

Real programmers are those that can sleep in front of terminals ... with their eyes opened. --ricS Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. --Larry Wall

Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. --Anonymous

Real programmers don't work from 9 to 5. If any real programmers are around at 9am it's because they were up all night. --Anonymous

Real programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN. --Anonymous

Scandisk is now checking your hard disk. You can start praying. --Anonymous

Shell to DOS... Come in DOS, do you copy? Shell to DOS... --Anonymous

Smash forehead on keyboard to continue. --Anonymous

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed in Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debuging Monday's code. --Dan Salomon

Sped up my XT; ran it on 220v! Works greO?_| -Anonymous

Surfing on the Internet is like sex; everyone boasts about doing more than they actually do. But in the case of the Internet, it's a lot more. --Tom Fasulo

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's because it's the best book on anything for layman. --Anonymous

The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8m/sec/sec. --Marcus Dolengo

The computer is a moron. --Peter Drucker

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. --Joseph Weizenbaum

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway. --Bernard Avishai

The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it. --Anonymous

The Internet is like a giant jellyfish. You can't step on it. You can't go around it. You've got to get through it. --John Evans

The Internet is like a vault with a screen door on the back. I don't need jackhammers and atom bomb to get in when I can walk through the door. --Anonymous

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

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

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little. --Porterfield

The Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. --William Gibson

The NeXT Computer: The hardware makes it a PC, the software makes it a workstation, the unit sales makes it a mainframe. --Anonymous

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster. --Adam Smith

The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out... --Anonymous

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

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. --C.A.R. Hoare

There are two ways to write error-free programs. Only the third one works. --Anonymous

To err is human--and to blame it on a computer is even more so. --Orben's Current Comedy

URLs are the 800 numbers of the 1990's. --Chris Clark

Usenet is like Tetris for people who still know how to read. --Computer Museum (Boston)

Usenet isn't a right. It's a right, a left, and a swift uppercut to the jaw. --Computer Museum (Boston)

Want to make your computer go really fast? Throw it out a window. --Anonymous

WARNING: Keyboard Not Attached. Press F10 to Continue. --Anonymous

We're thinking about upgrading from SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5. --Henry Spencer

What goes up must come down. Ask any system administrator. --Anonymous

Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad. --Anonymous

Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk? --Anonymous

Why doesn't DOS ever say EXCELLENT command or filename! --Anonymous