Praise for CLOSE TO THE MACHINE "This book is a little masterpiece, an exquisitely melan choly cry from a body disappearing into the machine. It is a wrenching swan-song for human beings. I have never read anything like it because nothing like it could have been written before. Here is the perfect way to say good bye to the millennium." - Andrei Codrescu "Computer programmers are remaking the world. Here is ground truth about that world-making and brilliant insider critique of it. The reader vibrates between delight and alarm on every page. It's wonderful to see such a blending of code craft and word craft (and no small measure of life craft) in the author. It's a perfect book for City Lights longstanding purveyor of subversive honesty and art." - Stewart Brand "Ullman's work has the keenness of all my favorite writ ing .... Here, her talent enables readers to explore inti mately, and without forced profundity, one of the biggest questions of our time: What is it about the numerical, seemingly inhuman world of computing that holds such powerful, wholly human allure." - Brad Wieners, editor, Wired Books "Ullman's story oflife in the electronic world is a reckon ing, a warning, a seduction. It is also very funny." - Rebecca Brown "There are no crazed hackers here; no zen-master soft ware moguls; no media stereotypes; just a wonderfully written book about Ullman's days and nights at the heart of the new machine. I recommend it with unfettered enthusiasm." -Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle "Ullman wittily spills the beans about the technology on which we all depend." -Publishers Weekly "Ellen Ullman, a software engineer, writes with the energy of Boswell, the clarity of Orwell, and the warmth of Montaigne. You may wonder: how could a software engineer write so well? Ullman is a wonderful writer, and Close to the Machine is a wonderful book." -John Gehl, editor, Educom Review "Close to the Machine so very accurately paints the never ending race a programmer must run to make these (damn) wonderful computers useful to humanity. I found myself nodding in violent agreement at her concise summaries of programming hell." - Dan Lynch, chairman, Cybercash Discontents c= Ellen Ullman City Liihts Books San Francisco © 1997 by Ellen Ullman All Rights Reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Rex Ray Book design: Nancy J. Peters Typography: Harvest Graphics Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ullman, Ellen. Close to the machine: technophilia and its discontents / by Ellen Ullman. p. cm. ISBN: 0-87286-337-9 (cl).-ISBN 0-87286-332-8 (pb) 1. Ullman, Ellen. 2. Computer programmers - Biography. I. Title. QA76.2.U43A3 1997 005.1'092 - dc21 DB] 97-27244 CIP City Lights Books are available to bookstores through our primary distributor: Subterranean Company, P.O. Box 160,265 S. 5th St., Monroe, OR 97456. 541-847-5274. ToU-free orders 800-274-7826. FAX 541-847-6018. Our books are also available through library jobbers and regional distributors. For personal orders and catalogs, please write to City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. Acknowledgments With unending gratitude for the help of Clara Basile, Naomi Epel, and Jeanette Gurevitch. Three short sections of this book, in a slightly dif ferent form, were first presented as the commentaries "On Becoming an Old Programmer," "My Virtual Company," and "In Their Fifties" on the National Public Radio pro gram ''All Things Considered." This book describes real people and events. In many cases, however, names and identifying details have been changed, and events slightly rearranged, to give a measure of privacy to the individuals involved. For Nancy To my fathtr Contents [0] Space Is Numeric 1 [1] Transactions 17 [2] Sushi 39 [3] Real Estate 53 [4] Software and Suburbia 65 [5] New, Old, and Middle Age 95 [6] Virtuality 123 [7] Money 149 [8] The Passionate Engineer 175 [9] Driving 185