Gordon Bell - Quotes

Quotes

From Computer World "VAX Man" interview, June 1992.

• "Microsoft NT...is going to be very far-reaching. It's going to grab the rug out from under Unix."
• "In 10 years, you'll see 99% of the hardware and software systems sold through what are fundamentally retail stores."
• "Twenty-five years from now...Computers will be exactly like telephones. They are probably going to be communicating all the time ... I would hope that by the year 2000 there is this big infrastructure, giving us arbitrary bandwidth on a pay-as-you-go basis."
• "Somebody once said, 'He's never wrong about the future, but he does tend to be wrong about how long it takes.' "

Some of his classic sayings while working at DEC:

• "The most reliable components are the ones you leave out."

At the February 10, 1982 Ethernet Announcement at The World Trade Center with Bob Noyce of Intel and David Liddle of Xerox, he stated:

• "A Broadband Cable for TV is like a sewer pipe that in principle can carry gas, water, and waste: it is easy to get all that shit in there, but hard to separate it out again."
• "Ethernet is the UART of the 1980s."
• "... the network becomes the system."