
- 319 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Notice
- Dedication
- A Note About the Dates
- Part One: The Programming Life
- Part Two: The Rise and First Fall of the Internet
- Part Three: Life, Artificial
- Part Four: Three Stories About What We Owe the Past
- Part Five: The Hand That Writes the Code
- Notes
- Also by Ellen Ullman
- A Note About the Author
- Newsletter Sign-up
- Contents
- Permissions Acknowledgments
- Copyright