Howard H. Aiken

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

Howard Hathaway Aiken (8 March 1900 – 14 March 1973) was a pioneer in computing, being the primary engineer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer.

Sourced

• The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.
  • "Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine" (1937)

• Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
  • As quoted in Portraits in Silicon (1987) by Robert Slater
  • Variant: Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
    • As quoted in A Computer Science Reader : Selections from Abacus (1988) by Eric A. Weiss, p. 404

External links

• Profile at the University of St. Andrews
• Father of the computer age