Mark

“There was a program on the computer ... where two people could “chat” to each other while on the computer, sharing information.

Woz ... hacked into the depths of the system and discovered a way to break in on other people’s electronic conversations.

So when Gordon French, for instance, was flaming about his new trick with the 8008 Chicken Hawk, his home terminal would inexplicably begin printing out these semiobscene Polish jokes, and he never did figure out that somewhere miles away Steve Wozniak was doubled up in laughter.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Chapters 1 and 2

“... if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

But here’s an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“Paul Davies noted in Nature, it is “almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt…”
― Steven Levy, Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution Chapters 1 and 2