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The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the MachineThe last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in
Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.
When Ellen Ullman moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s and went on to become a computer programmer, she was joining a small, idealistic, and almost exclusively male cadre that aspired to genuinely change the world. In 1997 Ullman wrote
Close to the Machine, the now classic and still definitive account of life as a coder at the birth of what would be a sweeping technological, cultural, and financial revolution.
Twenty years later, the story Ullman recounts is neither one of unbridled triumph nor a nostalgic denial of progress. It is necessarily the story of digital technology's loss of innocence as it entered the cultural mainstream, and it is a personal reckoning with all that has changed, and so much that hasn't.
Life in Code is an essential text toward our understanding of the last twenty years-and the next twenty.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
CONTENTSA Note About the Dates ix
PART ONE: THE PROGRAMMING LIFEOutside of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life 3
Come in, CQ 18
The Dumbing Down of Programming: Some Thoughts on Programming, Knowing, and the Nature of "Easy" 39
What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K 56
PART TWO: THE RISE AND FIRST FALL OF THE INTERNETThe Museum of Me 81
Fiber Optic Nights 94
Off the High 104
To Catch a Falling Knife 115
PART THREE: LIFE, ARTIFICIALProgramming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines "Life" 129
Is Sadie the Cat a Trick? 160
Memory and Megabytes 171
Dining with Robots 181
PART FOUR: THREE STORIES ABOUT WHAT WE OWE THE PASTWhile I Was Away 197
Close to the Mainframe 208
The Party Line 223
PART FIVE: THE HAND THAT WRITES THE CODEProgramming for the Millions 237
Boom Two: A Farewell 272
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of the novels:
By Blood, a
New York Times Notable Book; and
The Bug, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her memoir,
Close to the Machine, about her life as a software engineer during the internet's first rise, became a cult classic. She is based in San Francisco.
