(In)Famous Quotes



Previous slide Contents Next slide


From the Script: SLIDE 3 - (In)Famous Quotes

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office

No one knew better than the US Patent Office Commissioner that the industrial revolution in America was a time of fantastic innovation and change. Still, he wouldn’t see the Wright brothers’ airplane for four more years, the Model-T for nine years, or the first moving assembly line for fourteen years; nor would he see the radio, television, atomic power, microwaves, computers, or thousands of other inventions. In 1994 alone, 113,268 patents were issued.

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft, 1981

Within three years, Bill Gates would realize that because MS-DOS limited users to 640K of RAM of hard disk storage, it was becoming obsolete. In response to users’ needs, Bill Gates developed OS/2; released in 1987, OS/2 offered 25,000 times more memory -- 16 megabytes of RAM. [Chposky]

“The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.” Admiral William Leahy, Manhattan Project, 1943

Admiral William Leahy would be proven wrongin just two years’ time... twice. On August 6, 1945, the “Enola Gay” airplane successfully dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On August 9, 1945, a second bomb was successfully dropped on Nagasaki, ending World War II.

“Let’s use C++. It’s less costly and error-prone than Ada.” YOU?

The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate why this statement belongs here in this list of infamous quotes. C++ is an influential language today for many reasons, which we will address later, but there is a growing consensus that Ada is the best choice for your software engineering requirements.