…nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa

When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would eke out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind's eye: “The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter's box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate.” and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.

…this is a system invented by people [programmers] to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners.

[on Unix folder abbreviations] Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

Frequently these sorts of files can be found in a directory with the name /src which is the hacker's Hebraic abbreviation of “source.”

The teletype was exactly the same sort of machine that had been used, for decades, to send and receive telegrams. It was basically a loud typewriter that could only produce UPPERCASE LETTERS. Mounted to one side of it was a smaller machine with a long reel of paper tape on it, and a clear plastic hopper underneath.

In order to connect this device (which was not a computer at all) to the Iowa State University mainframe across town, you would pick up the phone, dial the computer's number, listen for strange noises, and then slam the handset down into the rubber cups. If your aim was true, one would wrap its neoprene lips around the earpiece and the other around the mouthpiece, consummating a kind of informational soixante-neuf. The teletype would shudder as it was possessed by the spirit of the distant mainframe, and begin to hammer out cryptic messages.

The idea that Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling are somehow superior to [William] Gibson because they write about more technical detail is absurd. That's like saying Tom Clancy is a better writer than Hemingway because Clancy would describe a submariner's watch for three paragraphs, when Hemingway would just say, “He glanced at his watch. 4:30.”

Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

“Anyway, my grandmother came to visit,” she continued, glancing back over her shoulder at the painting. “I avoided her until we all sat down for dinner. And then she figured out the whole situation in, maybe, ten minutes, just by watching my face across the dinner table. I didn't say more than ten words—'Pass the tortillas.' I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”