But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Originally I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1 000 computers.

Before computers telephone lines and television connect us we all share the same air the same oceans the same mountains and rivers. We are all equally responsible for protecting them.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

Just as characteristic perhaps is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post telegraph telephone and popular press.

There's all these ways to instantly communicate - cars computers telephone and transportation - and even with all that it's so hard to find people and have an honest communication with them.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution yellow-pages directories landline telephones and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

Sisters are always drying their hair. Locked into rooms alone they pose at the mirror shoulders bare trying this way and that their hair or fly importunate down the stair to answer the telephone.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.