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 MachineThe 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.

CONTENTSA Note About the Dates ixPART ONE: THE PROGRAMMING LIFEOutside of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life 3Come in, CQ 18The Dumbing Down of Programming: Some Thoughts on Programming, Knowing, and the Nature of "Easy" 39What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K 56PART TWO: THE RISE AND FIRST FALL OF THE INTERNETThe Museum of Me 81Fiber Optic Nights 94Off the High 104To Catch a Falling Knife 115PART THREE: LIFE, ARTIFICIALProgramming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines "Life" 129Is Sadie the Cat a Trick? 160 Memory and Megabytes 171Dining with Robots 181PART FOUR: THREE STORIES ABOUT WHAT WE OWE THE PASTWhile I Was Away 197Close to the Mainframe 208The Party Line 223PART FIVE: THE HAND THAT WRITES THE CODEProgramming for the Millions 237Boom Two: A Farewell 272