11 ms·

I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents"

I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective, messy working contexts, filled with deadlines, bureaucracy, "rockstars"... Her takes on the internet are also super relevant today. A favorite extract of mine: "When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer. The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria — if only they could figure out how to use it. But they just sit and click, and look disconcertedly at the junk that comes back at them". What other similar books would you recommend?

ubermonkey 3y ago
>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.
- agentultra 3y ago
  My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
  - mikelevins 3y ago
    "My friend, it happens to everyone." Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
    - agentultra 3y ago
      My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      The oldest possible HN might have been a great grandparent at that point
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    > I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing. Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    If we're lucky, it does. When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult members of society and we're still managing software projects the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back then".
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user absolutely does not want?
  - nonameiguess 3y ago
    My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter) graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony Head was when he took the role. Charisma Carpenter and Nicholas Brendon have now both been over 50 for years and Alyson Hannigan will be 50 in 7 months.
    - ubermonkey 3y ago
      I do enjoy, Whedon revelations notwithstanding, that BTVS is in some ways evergreen. I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.
      - commandlinefan 3y ago
        Fun fact - if someone was born 9/12/01, they've been old enough to drink for about a year now.
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    I think I’m general projects are managed worse than they were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that provide value.
mannykannot 3y ago
"The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..." Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)
- developer93 3y ago
  There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.
  - chinchilla2020 3y ago
    I disagree. I have had no moments of profound discovery or insight from surfing the internet. It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet. Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.
    - developer93 3y ago
      I can say that I've got a much more open mind via conversions I've had with strangers on various platforms over the years. My feminism is much more informed and mature than it would be if I hadn't had access to the differing opinions I've read and discussed over the years for example. I also wouldn't be able to do my job without the internet. When I was just starting out, I learnt perl out of a big thick book (O'Reilly maybe?) and I can say that searching the internet is easier! I'm not saying it's perfect, but you must get some value out of it, or you wouldn't be here in the first place...
    - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
      > Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world. That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you just define treasure as something that you find in real life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure? I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for free.
dpkirchner 3y ago
That quote also stood out to me, but probably in a different way. It's missing a crucial piece of information: What is the correct way to use the internet? And computers, for that matter? A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  Her quote reminds me of Eternal September[1], when AOL started allowing their users to interact with Usenet. The people who were already there were not happy with this influx of the unwashed masses coming in and breaking stuff and ignoring good manners and the protocols that had been established. In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos. A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - dleeftink 3y ago
    Unfortunate as it may be, we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years. At the same time, I'd be interested to compare and see what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' and what it ends up being.
    - sixstringtheory 3y ago
      > we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years Why? > what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' My guess is that we’re on it right now.
      - 3y ago
xo5vik 3y ago
>What other similar books would you recommend? Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)
Random_BSD_Geek 3y ago
> What other similar books would you recommend? "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.
- manuhortet 3y ago
  This looks exactly like what I wanted - thanks!
- pramsey 3y ago
  Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier time, that still resonate. - Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier
- senkora 3y ago
  Can you or someone else explain what they liked about Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it somewhere online, but it didn’t really connect for me. I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle. I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
  - eep_social 3y ago
    I am an “old millennial” and Coupland’s work sort of resonates but my understanding is that it’s written primarily for and to gen x.
huimang 3y ago
"When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer." I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should be using them, according to -me-". The internet, the ability to communicate and access data instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greatest achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular group of similar people until now.
- manuhortet 3y ago
  I don't think she criticizes users here, but content. I see how your way of understanding it is valid without more context.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it. The real internet was the internet of those that build their own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/understood what I understand. Mix that with nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice and you get this line of critique. It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time, especially as the internet and then the web has become used by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper calculations and slide rule approximation can truly engineer.
  - wizofaus 3y ago
    > nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?
criddell 3y ago
I bet you'd like Ullman's book Life in Code. A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie: > We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.
muricula 3y ago
I haven't read Ullman's memoir, but I'll just put down "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder as a peek into hardware history you may find interesting.
jonjacky 3y ago
What other similar books would you recommend? Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995) Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.
entaloneralie 3y ago
- Dealers Of Lightning: Michael Hiltzik - Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Close to the Machine was published in 1997.. had the dot-com bubble already started at that time?

ubermonkey 3y ago

>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.

agentultra 3y ago
My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curiosity. And looking at trying to keep at it for twenty more. Life’s a trip.
- mikelevins 3y ago
  "My friend, it happens to everyone." Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.
  - agentultra 3y ago
    My daughter is 11 now and just getting into creating her first Minecraft mods. Life is wonderful!
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The oldest possible HN might have been a great grandparent at that point
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I created my first program on punch cards in '79. I can't even remember what the programming language was although I suspect FORTRAN. I wish I'd kept a listing. Tangentially, my valued copy of The Lord of the Rings that I loved as a child has the date 'Christmas 1973' inside the front cover. I'm going to read it again this Christmas, 50 years later. I've been avoiding anything Tolkien-related since about 2017, when I last re-read it (and noticed the upcoming anniversary), to come to it as fresh as possible, accepting that I know the story backwards.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  If we're lucky, it does. When you were typing in '89, I was on a mainframe in college.
commandlinefan 3y ago
That was my first thought too - but my second was "there are people who were BORN after the internet who are now adult members of society and we're still managing software projects the exact same braindead broken way we were doing it back then".
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Isn't it even worse now because we need JIRA tickets that all start with, "as a user," before continuing on to describe something like obtrusive ad placement that a user absolutely does not want?
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  My oldest niece (who is my little sister's daughter) graduated college two months ago and wasn't born until after 9/11. I think that was the most recent thing to make me feel old. I'm class of '99 and currently rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, depicting kids who were also class of '99, and I now identity with Giles the school librarian, and in fact I'm exactly the same age as Anthony Head was when he took the role. Charisma Carpenter and Nicholas Brendon have now both been over 50 for years and Alyson Hannigan will be 50 in 7 months.
  - ubermonkey 3y ago
    I do enjoy, Whedon revelations notwithstanding, that BTVS is in some ways evergreen. I do not enjoy that one of the defining moments of my adult life -- 9/11, which happened when I was 31 -- is now long enough ago that there are adults who do not or literally COULD not remember it. Time marches on.
    - commandlinefan 3y ago
      Fun fact - if someone was born 9/12/01, they've been old enough to drink for about a year now.
- stcroixx 3y ago
  I think I’m general projects are managed worse than they were 25 years ago. As the years go by and Agile gets further entrenched there is more time lost to ceremonies and rituals and less time spent solving real problems that provide value.

mannykannot 3y ago

"The users seem to believe that they are connected to some vast treasure trove — all the knowledge of our times, an endless digitized compendium, some electronic library of Alexandria..." Personally, I feel that this is one thing that worked out about as well as could reasonably be expected (it would be unreasonable to expect that the benefits of this could be reaped without effort...)

developer93 3y ago
There is a treasure trove, it's just mixed in with a lot of trash. Like panning for gold, you need to know where the good lodes are and recognise it when you see it.
- chinchilla2020 3y ago
  I disagree. I have had no moments of profound discovery or insight from surfing the internet. It has been a useful tool for finding specific knowledge and skills, but I would say that there is no "treasure" on the internet. Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world.
  - developer93 3y ago
    I can say that I've got a much more open mind via conversions I've had with strangers on various platforms over the years. My feminism is much more informed and mature than it would be if I hadn't had access to the differing opinions I've read and discussed over the years for example. I also wouldn't be able to do my job without the internet. When I was just starting out, I learnt perl out of a big thick book (O'Reilly maybe?) and I can say that searching the internet is easier! I'm not saying it's perfect, but you must get some value out of it, or you wouldn't be here in the first place...
  - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
    > Any treasure you find will be found through experiences in the real world. That's romantic, but why would it be true, unless you just define treasure as something that you find in real life? Specific knowledge and skills are not treasure? I'm curious if you lived before the days of having so much knowledge instantly accessible, practically for free.

dpkirchner 3y ago

That quote also stood out to me, but probably in a different way. It's missing a crucial piece of information: What is the correct way to use the internet? And computers, for that matter? A generous interpretation is that users are expected to take the knowledge and do greater things with it, instead of sitting and clicking, but that obviously doesn't make sense after a few seconds' thought. I'm stumped.

prometheus76 3y ago
Her quote reminds me of Eternal September[1], when AOL started allowing their users to interact with Usenet. The people who were already there were not happy with this influx of the unwashed masses coming in and breaking stuff and ignoring good manners and the protocols that had been established. In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a different crowd because the barrier to entry was pretty high and required a lot of dedication and problem-solving abilities. As the bar of entry came down, along with it came all of the things that come with football stadiums, shopping malls, and time-share condos. A more recent, similar event was when Digg shut down and all the users from there flooded onto Reddit. That was the beginning of the end of the golden days of Reddit, imo. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- dleeftink 3y ago
  Unfortunate as it may be, we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years. At the same time, I'd be interested to compare and see what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' and what it ends up being.
  - sixstringtheory 3y ago
    > we would be remiss to accept Digg's 2010 exodus as recent, especially in internet years Why? > what is currently purported to be the 'golden age' My guess is that we’re on it right now.
    - 3y ago

xo5vik 3y ago

>What other similar books would you recommend? Similar era at least: Po Bronson - The Nudist on the Late Shift ... and other tales of Silicon Valley (1999)

Random_BSD_Geek 3y ago

> What other similar books would you recommend? "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.

manuhortet 3y ago
This looks exactly like what I wanted - thanks!
pramsey 3y ago
Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier time, that still resonate. - Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier
senkora 3y ago
Can you or someone else explain what they liked about Microserfs? I read it after hearing a recommendation for it somewhere online, but it didn’t really connect for me. I’m young enough that I don’t have any personal knowledge of the time period to compare it with, so maybe I’m missing a nostalgia angle. I don’t doubt that it is a great book, it just didn’t grab me for whatever reason.
- eep_social 3y ago
  I am an “old millennial” and Coupland’s work sort of resonates but my understanding is that it’s written primarily for and to gen x.

huimang 3y ago

"When I watch the users try the Internet, it slowly becomes clear to me that the Net represents the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer." I think this is an asinine quote, to be honest. It comes across as elitist: "these idiots don't use computers how they should be using them, according to -me-". The internet, the ability to communicate and access data instantly across the globe, has been one of humanity's greatest achievements to date. But because some people look at junk or don't use it efficiently, it's "the ultimate dumbing-down of the computer"? Really? People like this complain about "the unwashed masses", but fail to recognize that the internet would not nearly have been as useful if it were limited to an insular group of similar people until now.

manuhortet 3y ago
I don't think she criticizes users here, but content. I see how your way of understanding it is valid without more context.
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
This line of criticism has always had elitism woven into it. The real internet was the internet of those that build their own modems/wrote their own modem code/added specific NNTP headers to their news messages/had their own static IPv4 IP/understood what I understand. Mix that with nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice and you get this line of critique. It's an alluring tale and appeals to the technologist in all of us old enough to feel nostalgic about a lost time, especially as the internet and then the web has become used by a broader swath of the population. I have a successful uncle who tells us stories about how calculators and CAD dumbed down engineering and only his ilk of paper calculations and slide rule approximation can truly engineer.
- wizofaus 3y ago
  > nostalgia over a time when "have you tried restarting it" was the most common piece of advice I think I missed the memo... that's surely still the single most common go-to when something stops working mysteriously? Or are you suggesting it's no longer "advice" because everyone already knows that by now?

criddell 3y ago

I bet you'd like Ullman's book Life in Code. A passage early on that resonated with me is her report of a talk given by Whitfield Diffie: > We were slaves to the mainframe! he said. Dumb terminals! That's all we had. We were powerless under the big machine's unyielding central control. Then we escaped to the personal computer, autonomous, powerful. Then networks. The PC was soon rendered to be nothing but a "thin client," just a browser with very little software residing on our personal machines, the code being on network servers, which are under the control of administrators. Now to the web, nothing but a thin, thin browser for us. All the intelligence out there, on the net, our machines having become dumb terminals again.

muricula 3y ago

I haven't read Ullman's memoir, but I'll just put down "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder as a peek into hardware history you may find interesting.

jonjacky 3y ago

What other similar books would you recommend? Other memoirs by people who worked in computing and became disillusioned or dissatisfied with it: Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) Cliff Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil (1995) Neither is all memoir like Ullman's book -- both are mostly exposition and argument. But both have some passages of memoir, and in both the author's personality shows through clearly throughout.

entaloneralie 3y ago

- Dealers Of Lightning: Michael Hiltzik - Soul Of A New Machine: Tracy Kidder

pcthrowaway 3y ago

Close to the Machine was published in 1997.. had the dot-com bubble already started at that time?