Life in Code

A Personal History of Technology

By: Ellen Ullman

Narrated by: Ellen Ullman

This program is read by the author. 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 20 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 audiobook toward our understanding of the last 20 years - and the next 20.

©2017 Ellen Ullman (P)2017 Macmillan Audio

Nostalgia, but no revelation

I lived through this, and didn't find much beyond reminiscence age nostalgia here. Still pleasurable for the memories, but I was going for insight from perspective.

Too boring

I barely finish to reading it. The only story that I liked was about Y2K.