Life in Code; A Personal History of Technology

The format is approximately 5.625 inches by 8.5 inches. viii, [2], 306, [2] pages. Ellen Ullman is an American computer programmer and author. Ullman earned a B.A. in English at Cornell University in the early 1970s. She began working professionally in 1978 as a programmer of electronic data interchange applications and graphical user interfaces. She eventually began writing about her experiences as a programmer. From 1994 until 1996, she published articles in Harper's Magazine and in the collections Resisting the Virtual Life and Wired Women. She has written books, articles, and essays that analyze the human side of the world of computer programming. She has owned a consulting firm and worked as technology commentator for NPR's All Things Considered. Her breakthrough book was non-fiction: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents. 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. First Edition [stated]. First Printing [Stated].…