Ellen Ullman Reihenfolge der Bücher

This 25th Anniversary Edition of Close to the Machine, featuring a new introduction by Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley, resurfaces Ellen Ullman’s astonishing account of computing and the ways it shapes our very existence. A Salon Best Book of the Year In 1997, the computer was still a relatively new tool—a sleek and unforgiving machine that was beyond the grasp of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, the software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the strange ecstasy of being at the forefront of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient code. Close to the Machine is an elegant and revelatory meditation on the dawn of the digital era. “There are no crazed hackers here; no zen-master software 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.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"The 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 [this book] she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective. When 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. [This book] is essential to our understanding of the last twenty years-- and the next twenty."--Jacket

Originally published in 1997 by City Lights Books.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year San Francisco, the 1970s. A disgraced professor takes an office in an old downtown building to plot his return. But he is distracted by the sounds coming from the next room, the office of a psychiatrist. He overhears the therapy sessions of a young lesbian who is in search of her adoptive family. Enraptured by the sound of her voice and obsessed with her story, the professor takes up the patient's quest as his own and discovers the disturbing truth about her origins. As he sends each new revelation to the patient---disguised as correspondence from an adoption agency---she is energized by the information, but finds herself unmoored from everything she thought she knew about herself. With ferocious intelligence and enthralling, magnetic prose, Ellen Ullman's By Blood is a dark and brilliant novel about connection, identity, history, and the terrible desire to influence another life.

In 1984, Roberta Watson, a quality assurance tester with a computer start-up company, and Ethan Levin, a computer programmer, try to find the bug which is infecting their company's new software before it ruins the company and their lives.