J. Presper Eckert

You can't innovate if you're afraid of blowing up a few tubes.

The most profound impact of the computer will be on information itself—how we store it, retrieve it, and use it.

I never imagined a computer in every home. I imagined a computer in every large office.

The difference between an idea and an invention is about 10,000 hours of debugging.

We used more electricity than a small town, but we were calculating artillery tables faster than ever before.

The stored-program concept turned the computer from a single-purpose machine into a universal one. That was the real revolution.

Our goal with UNIVAC was to make it so reliable a business could depend on it. That was a radical idea at the time.

The hardest part was not the arithmetic, but the control—telling all those parts what to do and when.

I've always believed that if you can define a problem clearly, you can build a machine to solve it.

The computer industry was built by engineers, not by businessmen. The businessmen came later.

Speed was everything. The whole point was to do in minutes what took humans months.

We were too busy building the future to worry about history.

The sound of a room full of ENIAC tubes was like the future humming.

You don't get reliability by accident. You design it in, from the ground up.

The boundary between hardware and software is an artificial one. To the machine, it's all just instructions.

Progress is measured in orders of magnitude. We were looking for a thousand-fold improvement, not ten percent.

The true legacy of ENIAC is not the machine itself, but the people it inspired to go further.

Invention is a team sport. Mauchly and I complemented each other perfectly.

We didn't have the word 'bit' yet. We talked about 'pulses' and 'no pulses.'

The fear of obsolescence is the engine of progress in this field.