I was writing my Ph.D. in the late 1980s and was keeping an eye on what was happening in the world. It became obvious to me that Russia couldn't live without computers. I think I worked this out a year before anyone else. I started looking for people who could help import them.
Bounty hunters these days - because everything is so sophisticated with computers and surveillance, it doesn't have to be a one-man-army-type guy who goes in and kicks a door down.
Whatever they do, criminals and non-criminals act in particular ways. Some writers, for instance, use computers, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a distinct style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.
When I was younger, I would look at a game with computers and still be fascinated by the possibilities.
I happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago.
I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.
Before computers, you'd start designing using shapes of cubes. Now I can start with something like a handkerchief, an object that doesn't have strong inside and outside boundaries or much closed volume.
It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.
Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don't get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.
The contrast of ISIL's videos - which proclaim a fully-functioning and prosperous state - with those of RBSS, which captured the dysfunction and violence of everyday life, is shocking. In a sense, it's a war of ideas, a war of propaganda, a war being waged with cameras and computers, not just guns.
It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
By the end of 1978, we had 11 partners and six franchisees, we were operating in 22 cities, and we had about 6,000 clients. We had left Electronic Accounting Systems and were doing our own processing on our own computers.