SYSTEMS

"Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."
G. Hopper

"I have a friend who told me that the greatest computer system ever built by mankind was by the Druids at Stonehenge. Well, that's an old story. But what I like was that he felt that the Druids didn't die out, they just went bankrupt trying to debug the software."
James Finkle

"It's a well known fact that computing devices such as the abacus were invented thousands of years ago. But it's not well known that the first use of a common computer protocol occured in the Old Testament. This, of course, was when Moses aborted the Egyptians' process with a control-sea..."
Tom Galloway

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."
Leslie Lamport, as quoted in CACM, June 1992

"No matter how fast your computer system runs, you will eventually come to think of it as slow."
Unknown