A Quote by Ellen Ullman

People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true. — © Ellen Ullman
People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.
I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.
Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true. Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me. My computer's memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.
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.
By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.
Similarly, computer literacy courses tend to produce computer people who know a lot about computers or a piece of software but they don't help people become fluent with the machine.
I was really looking at computers as a way to understand the mind. But at M.I.T., my mind was blown by having a whole computer to yourself as long as you liked.I felt a surge of intellectual power through access to this computer, and I started thinking about what this could mean for kids and the way they learn. That's when we developed the computer programming language for kids, Logo.
I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.
I don't take for granted all the blessings that I have, and as soon as I heard about Computers for Youth, I really wanted to be involved. Anyone who knows me knows how much time I spend on computers. I'm a computer addict. Every young person deserves to have a computer in his or her home.
Every disruptive innovation is powered by a simplifying technology, and then the technology has to get embedded in a different kind of a business model. The first two decades of digital computing were characterized by the huge mainframe computers that filled a whole room, and they had to be operated by PhD Computer Scientists. It took the engineers at IBM about four years to design these mainframe computers because there were no rules. It was an intuitive art and just by trial and error and experimentation they would evolve to a computer that worked.
That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
The first thing I think, I was building computers, I started to build a computer when I was 17 or 18 at home, an IBM compatible computer, and then I started to sell computers, and when I sold a computer to a company called Ligo I think, and they were selling systems which became blockbuster.
[Computer science] is not really about computers and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes... and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments.
We can go through our whole lives worrying about our future happiness, and totally miss where true peace lives-right here, right now.
I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.
Adults have been brainwashed into thinking that they can't really learn about computers without being taught, so it's more difficult for them to feel comfortable with a computer. Deep down, I think they're afraid of learning about computers.
I've never been much of a computer guy at least in terms of playing with computers. Actually until I was about 11 I didn't use a computer for preparing for games at all. Now, obviously, the computer is an important tool for me preparing for my games. I analyze when I'm on the computer, either my games or my opponents. But mostly my own.
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