G. Pascal Zachary

creative people brainpower question contradictory

“Highly creative people don't necessarily excel in raw brainpower. They are misfits on some level. They tend to question accepted views and to consider contradictory ones.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

jockey plow horse operating system chip

“No matter how good a jockey, he can’t turn a plow horse into a thoroughbred. It was the same with chips and software. Indeed, an operating system depended on a reliable chip.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

code programmer engineer work psychology

“Code writers and engineers often maintain the fiction that their own psychology has little bearing on their work."

― G. Pascal Zachary

technical ends commercial decision values psychology

“There are invariably many ways to achieve roughly the same technical ends. Technical choices are often highly personal. While shaped by commercial considerations, technical decisions also reflect human values and psychology."

― G. Pascal Zachary

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“If you don’t measure the performance, you’re just guessing, and if you’re guessing, you’re not very likely to write top-notch code.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

character pause incantation human perfection program

“If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn’t work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjustment to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

visualization abstract concept Hollywood graphics

“It was now the age of visualization, when abstract concepts as well as basic needs and wants were increasingly expressed in visual terms. From its origins as a number cruncher, the computer had gone Hollywood; it was now an image maker of vast power. Thus, graphics in many ways defined the look and feel of computing."

― G. Pascal Zachary

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“The great advantage of digital media is that it can be stored, retrieved and massaged by a computer—at lightning speed and with unerring accuracy.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

code programmer engineer distract conundrum

“Code writers, like engineers generally, tend to get sidetracked by interesting but irrelevant conundrums.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

harbinger computer revolution Altair person

“The harbinger of a revolution, the Altair was the first mass-marketed personal computer. For the first time a computer was dedicated not just to a single task but to one person. The old guard of computing entirely missed the significance of this.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

mainframe personal computer mass transit car PC

“Fans of mainframe computers boasted of the benefits of handling many jobs in large batches. But the mainframe was as efficient as mass transit—wonderful as long as everyone wanted to travel to the same place at the same time. The PC was like an automobile; it would go anywhere its driver wanted. Instead of organizing work around the mainframe’s schedule, a person with a PC could do computing anytime.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

Unix shortcoming common version DOS standard

“But Unix had a serious shortcoming: No common version existed. Over the years different versions of Unix had proliferated like weeds, so that an application written for one would not run unmodified on another. While DOS presented a single target to consumers, applications writers and computer makers, Unix did not.”

― G. Pascal Zachary

Windows NT complex comprehend

“NT is alarmingly complex. Consisting of six million lines of code, the program is among humanity’s most intricate handiworks. “No one mind can comprehend it all,” Cutler says."

― G. Pascal Zachary