My definition of elegance is the achievement of a given functionality with a minimum of mechanism and a maximum of clarity.

- Fernando J. Corbato

The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing d…

- Fernando J. Corbato

To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were…

- Fernando J. Corbato

Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.

- Fernando J. Corbato

The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics t…

- Fernando J. Corbato

One is faced with a dilemma: If one places total trust in all other users, one is vulnerable to the antisocial behavior of any malicious user conside…

- Fernando J. Corbato

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has…

- Fernando J. Corbato

Design bugs are often subtle and occur by evolution with early assumptions being forgotten as new features or uses are added to systems.

- Fernando J. Corbato

Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the sa…

- Fernando J. Corbato