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We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.

One of the things that's interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.

GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow.

Briefly, to program it requires an absolute understanding of how all 65,536 processors are interconnected.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.

If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.

The speed at which modern CPUs perform computations still blows my mind daily.