Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

by Ellen Ullman
Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology

by Ellen Ullman

Hardcover

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Overview

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, GQ, Slate, San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, and Kirkus

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 Machine

The 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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374534516
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 08/08/2017
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

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 two 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. Her new book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, tells a continuing story of the technical world as she experienced it while living in its midst for more than two decades. She is based in San Francisco.

Table of Contents

A Note About the Dates ix

Part 1 The Programming Life

Outside 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 2 The Rise and First Fall of the Internet

The Museum of Me 81

Fiber Optic Nights 94

Off the High 104

To Catch a Falling Knife 115

Part 3 Life, Artificial

Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines "Life" 129

Is Sadie the Cat a Trick? 160

Memory and Megabytes 171

Dining with Robots 181

Part 4 Three Stories About What We Owe the Past

While I Was Away 197

Close to the Mainframe 208

The Party Line 223

Part 5 The Hand that Writes the Code

Programming for the Millions 237

Boom Two: A Farewell 272

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