Maurice Wilkes famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

As soon as we started programming, we found 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

#Mistake #Technology #Debugging
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

#Mistake #Program #I Realized
A source of strength in the early days was that groups in various parts of the world were prepared to construct experimental computers without necessarily intending them to be the prototype for serial production. As a result, there became available a body of knowledge about what would work and what would not work.
-- Maurice Wilkes

#World #Body #Groups
Much of the early engineering development of digital computers was done in universities. A few years ago, the view was commonly expressed that universities had played their part in computer design, and that the matter could now safely be left to industry. [...] Apart from the obvious functions of keeping in the public domain material that might otherwise be hidden, universities can make a special contribution by reason of their freedom from commercial considerations, including freedom from the need to follow the fashion.
-- Maurice Wilkes

#Fashion #Views #Engineering
In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. [...] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way.
-- Maurice Wilkes

#Communication #Mean #Thinking
The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly.
-- Maurice Wilkes

#Inspiration #Animal #Wings
Surveying the shifts of interest among computer scientists and the ever-expanding family of those who depend on computers for their work, one cannot help being struck by the power of the computer to bind together, in a genuine community of interest, people whose motivations differ widely.
-- Maurice Wilkes

#Motivation #People #Community
Professor Wilkes is best known as the builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program. Built in 1949, the EDSAC used a mercury delay line memory. He is also known as the author, with Wheeler and Gill, of a volume on "Preparation of Programs for Electronic Digital Computers" in 1951, in which program libraries were effectively introduced.
-- Maurice Wilkes

#Memories #Preparation #Library

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.
When I was new, I didn't know where my career will go. Initially, my films were not even successful, but then I learned a lot from my mistakes.
Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.
Learn from the mistakes of others, and avoid being one whose mistakes are used as lessons by others.
The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake. You can't learn anything from being perfect.
They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologiesâ€¦the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you. When you're stumped, go to your notes like a wizard to his spellbook. Mash those thoughts together. Extend them in every direction until they meet.
An interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain [our] humanity and tell some amazing stories.
Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
The wages of sin is debugging.

Maurice Wilkes famous quotes

You may also like: