Life in Code

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.

CONTENTS

A Note About the Dates ix

PART ONE: 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 TWO: 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 THREE: 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 FOUR: THREE STORIES ABOUT WHAT WE OWE THE PAST
While I Was Away 197
Close to the Mainframe 208
The Party Line 223

PART FIVE: THE HAND THAT WRITES THE CODE
Programming for the Millions 237
Boom Two: A Farewell 272