1. The search button on the browser no longer provides an objective search, but a commercial one.

Tim Berners-Lee (b.1955) British computer scientist and founder of the World Wide Web. Referring to the commercialization of the Internet. Weaving the Web (1999)

2. Many view the Internet merely as a sales channel and treat it as an add-on without fundamentally questioning their current business system.

Alex Birch, British consultant and author. The Age of E-Tailing (co-written with Phillip Gerbert and Dirk Schneider; 2000)

3. The one thing computers have done is let us make bigger mistakes. We have to be careful not to depend on our machines.

Michael Bloomberg (b.1942) U.S. entrepreneur, business executive, and Mayor of New York. Quoted in “Terminal Velocity,” Wired (David S. Bennahum; February 1999)

4. A modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the non-existent.

Sydney Brenner (b.1927) British scientist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Society (January 1990)

5. Take Wrigley’s Chewing Gum. I don’t think the Internet is going to change how people chew gum.

Warren Buffett (b.1930) U.S. entrepreneur and financier. Interview Fortune (July 1998)

6. The Weightless World

Diane Coyle, British economist and journalist. Book title. Referring to an economy in which information is more important than physical products. The Weightless World (1997)

7. You must accept that if the computer is a tool, it is the job of the tool user to know what to use it for.

Peter F. Drucker (b.1909) U.S. management consultant and academic. Quoted in Techno Vision (C. B. Wang; 1994)

8. Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork.

Sam Ewing (1920-2001) U.S. author. Quoted in Sun (London) (May 25, 1999)

9. What if computing were nearly free?

Bill Gates (b.1955) U.S. entrepreneur, chairman and C.E.O. of Microsoft. Referring to the falling price of computing components. The Road Ahead (co-written with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter N. Rinearson; 1995)

10. While new PCs outship new TVs on a worldwide basis, we still have a long way to go before we win this “war for eyeballs.”

Andrew S. Grove (b.1936) U.S. entrepreneur, author, and chairman of Intel Corporation. Speech (November 1986)

11. The PC is the LSD of the 90s.

Timothy Leary (1920-96) U.S. psychologist. Guardian (London) (June 1996)

12. A sort of cognitive equivalent of a condom-it’s a layer of contraceptive rubber between the direct experience and the cognitive system.

Jonathan Miller (b.1934) British Theater director and writer. Referring to reading from a computer screen. Independent on Sunday (London) (January 1996)

13. The value of e-commerce is not in the e, but in the commerce.

Octavio Paz (1914-98) Mexican writer. Quoted in Management Today (June 2000)

14. Computer are useless. They can only give us answers.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) Spanish artist ad sculptor. Quoted in .com (Gerry Griffin; 1999)

15. As an environment that can sustain economic life, the Web has given birth to entirely new species of start-ups and enterprises that could not have existed previously.

Evan Schwartz, U.S. author and journalist. Digital Darwinism (1999)

16. I would say that hardware is the bone of the head, the skull. The semiconductor is the brain within the head. The software is the wisdom and data is the knowledge.

Masayoshi Son (b.1943) Taiwanese C.E.O. of Softbank Corporation. Harvard Business Review (January/February 1992)

17. The advanced economy could not run for thirty seconds without computers.

Alvin Toffler (b.1928) U.S. social commentator. Powershift (1990)

18. Even a partial shift towards the electronic office will be enough to trigger an eruption of social, psychological, and economic consequences.

Alvin Toffler (b.1928) U.S. social commentator. The Third Wave (1980)

19. A computer can tell you down to the dime what you’ve sold, but it can never tell you how much you could have sold.

Sam M. Walton (1918-92) U.S. entrepreneur and founder of Wal-Mart, Inc. Made in America (co-written with John Huey; 1992)