Sublime

SHANNON’S PAPER contained a claim so surprising that it seemed impossible to many at the time, and yet it would soon be proven true. He showed that any digital message could be sent with virtual perfection, even along the noisiest wire, as long as you included error-correcting codes—essentially extra bits of information, formulated as additional 1s

individual messages could be easily broken up into smaller pieces and then reassembled at the end of the system with perfect fidelity. This, too, accentuated the resilience of Baran’s architecture; even the messages themselves were mini-networks of data, with each partial message finding its own way across the broader network. Baran called his appr

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission Report (1986)

Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men.

High utilization creates queues; partially completed work sits idle, waiting for capacity to become available, and feedback gets delayed.

Fixing a defect has a substantial (20 to 50 percent) chance of introducing another.

There are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve not because computers couldn’t eventually solve them, but because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are

Preface to the Third Edition

However, the fundamental idea of programming as the process of assembling a sequence of operations remains central.