Close to the Machine

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With a New Introduction by Jaron Lanier
A Salon Best Book of the Year
In 1997, the computer was still a relatively new tool---a sleek and unforgiving machine that was beyond the grasp of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the strange ecstasy of being at the forefront of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient code. Close to the Machine is an elegant and revelatory mediation on the dawn of the digital era.

Computers History Social Science Technology Studies

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183 printed pages

Original publication: 2012
Publication year: 2012
Publisher: Picador

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Impressions

jbmeerkatshared an impression7 years ago
👍Worth reading
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Quotes

jbmeerkathas quoted7 years ago
In the middle of the demo, I realized how fortunate we were to be engineers. How lucky for us to be people who built things and took our satisfactions from humming machines and running programs. We certainly wouldn’t mind if the company went public and we all got fabulously rich. But the important thing was right in front of us. We had started with some scratchings on a whiteboard and built this: this operational program, this functional thing.
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jbmeerkathas quoted8 years ago
She stopped, a dark look on her face.
“The problem is the programmers. Especially the ones working with the new stuff. Nobody can figure out how to manage them.”
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jbmeerkathas quoted8 years ago
I started to panic. Before this meeting, the users existed only in my mind, projections, all mine. They were abstractions, the initiators of tasks that set off remote procedure calls; triggers to a set of logical and machine events that ended in an update to a relational database on a central server. Now I was confronted with their fleshly existence.
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