Science & Tech Quote by Bill Budge

“The power of the computer is starting to spread” reads like a calm weather report on the edge of a storm. Coming from a businessman, it’s not prophecy for prophecy’s sake; it’s a market signal. “Power” does double duty here: raw computational muscle, yes, but also leverage - the ability to decide faster, measure more, automate judgment, and quietly reorganize who gets to win.

The phrase “starting to spread” is doing the real work. It implies contagion rather than a planned rollout. Computers aren’t staying in labs or back offices; they’re leaking into everyday infrastructure, then into habits, then into expectations. That verb choice flattens the romance of invention into the logic of adoption: once the tool is cheap enough, small enough, and networked enough, it stops being a discrete product and becomes an environment.

The subtext is both opportunity and warning, delivered in the neutral tone business culture loves. If power is spreading, scarcity is collapsing. The advantage shifts from owning one big machine to knowing how to deploy many small ones - and, later, how to capture the data and attention those machines generate. It’s also a quiet admission that control is becoming distributed: the computer’s “power” won’t belong solely to institutions, which threatens old gatekeepers even as it creates new ones.

Contextually, Budge’s line fits the late-20th-century pivot from centralized computing to personal and networked computing. It’s a simple sentence that smuggles in a sweeping rewrite of labor, culture, and authority - the kind of rewrite that, once “started,” doesn’t really stop.