Ellen Ullman

Close to the Machine

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Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, Ellen Ullman's cult classic memoir of the world of computers in the 1980s and early 1990s, is an insight of a world we rarely see up close."Astonishing… impossible to put down"San Francisco Chronicle
“We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind”Wired
Close to the Machinehas become a cult classic: Ellen Ullman's humane, insightful, and beautifully written memoir explores the ever-complicating intersections between people and technology; the strange ecstasies of programming; the messiness of life and the artful efficiency of code. It is a deeply personal, prescient account of working at the forefront of computing.
With a new introduction by Jaron Lanier, author ofYou Are Not a Gadget
“By turns hilarious and sobering, this slim gem of a book chronicles the Silicon Valley way of life… full of delicately profound insights into work, money, love, and the search for a life that matters”Newsweek
Ellen Ullman'sClose to the Machine, a memoir of her time as a software engineer during the early years of the internet revolution, became a cult classic and established her as a writer of considerable talent; with her second book,The Bug, she became an acclaimed and vital novelist;By Bloodis her third. All three titles are published in the UK by Pushkin Press. Her essays and opinion pieces have been widely published in venues such asHarper's,The New York Times,Salon, andWired. She lives in San Francisco.
This book is currently unavailable
175 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2012
Publication year
2012
Publisher
Pushkin Press
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  • jbmeerkatshared an impression7 years ago
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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.
  • jbmeerkathas quoted7 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.”
  • jbmeerkathas quoted7 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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