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" Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies. "

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" It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. "

Ellen Ullman

Know

Understand

Technology

" I was a girl who came into the clubhouse, into the treehouse, with the sign on the door saying, 'No girls allowed,' and the reception was not always a good one. "

" Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster. "

" I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient. "

" Truly new inventions take time to play out. "

" If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not. "

" The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface. "

" The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does. "

" I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly. "

" I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command. "

" Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. "

" The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it. "

" I'm pretty bad at crying. "

" My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife. "

" It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature. "

" Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information. "

" Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life. "

" The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom. "

" A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error. "

" Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity. "

" Abhorring error is not necessarily positive. "

" A computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very small part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule and clarity. "

Ellen Ullman

Order

" I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old. "

" It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later, I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears - the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism - there was no reason to think I could escape it forever. "

" When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top. "

" Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good. "

" Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. "

" Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug. "

" I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens. "

Ellen Ullman

I Am

Intimidated

" I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail. "

Ellen Ullman

Detail

Knowledge