by
Ellen Ullman
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A storm was coming in off the Pacific. The air was almost palpable, about to burst with rain. The wind had whipped up the ocean, and breakers were glowing far out from the beach. The world was conspiring around us. All things physical insisted we pay attention. The steady rush of the ocean. The damp sand, the tide pushing in to make us scuttle up from the advancing edge. The birds pecking for dinners on the uncovered sand. The smel of salt, of air that had traveled across the water all the way from Japan. The feel of continent's end, a gritty beach at the western edge of the city.
I feared for the health of my ENTER key. I looked for manuals: found none. Searcched for help disks: hiding somewhere in the mass of CDs Microsoft had relentlessly sent me. Two hours of pawing through stacks of disks. Horns of rush-hour traffic. Light fading from the sky. Disks tumbling to the floor.
[...] The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: we build our computers the way we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.
pretty
An immense calm settled over the room. We were reminded that software engineering was not about right and wrong but only better and worse, solutions that solved some problems while ignoring or exacerbating others. That the machine the world wants to see as possessing some supreme power and intelligence was indeed intelligent, but only as we humans are: full of hedge and error, brilliance and backtrack and compromise.
Linus Torvalds talk about Linux design tradeoffs
Above us, projected onto a screen no one is looking at, is the Netscape browser source code. I stare at it: it's blurry from the projector's unfocused red-blue-green guns, unreadable as it scrolls frantically down. There is something foreboding in this blur and hurry. The mood feels forced. Despite the band and the lights and Andreessen's triumphant pass through the room, I cannot convince myself that technologists truly do drive computing, that it is not all marketing; cannot convince myself that, if we only get the source code into the hands of people who understand it, we will redeem our human souls.
Then Fuller says, "I read an article about how the Federal Reserve would crash everything if our work went bad. It was the first time in my life I understood everything the Federal Reserve did." He laughs uneasily. "I discovered we were kind of important."
Thirty years at the Federal Reserve, I think, and this is the first time he knows what it really does. A nice, competent programmer used to thinking about his work in terms of source code and assembler looks over the top of his cubicle. I hear the fear in hs voice. Y2K is forcing him to learn what his code does in the world.
[...] All this will occur, he says, because the world's systems "were put together over thirty, forty years without any adult supervision whatsoever."
The crowd applauds. It is just what they want to hear. They are like spurned lovers. All those boys we coddled with big salaries, in their tee shirts and cool eyewear, whom we fetishized for their brilliance - we left them alone to play with their machines and screens and keyboards and they havebetrayed us.
[...] I sit in my seat and fume. Programmers do not decide which new systems should be built and which should be abandoned. Programmers do not allocate company resources to one project or another. Programmers are the resources. Managers make those decisions. Corporate officers make those decisions. Venture capitalists decide which new technologies shall be funded and which shall not. It is precisely the adult supervision Yardeni should be mad at.
on Yardeni talking about Y2K
Days went by, then weeks. I still did not have a faucet.
People who have no choice are generally unhappy. But people with too many choices are almost as unhappy as those who have no choice at all.
And that was the state of unhappiness into which the web had lured me. [...] on the web, I was alone, adrift in a sea of empty, illusory, misery-inducing choice.
What shall we desperate knowledge workers do? Diffie asked the audience. "Organize!" he said. We need "the rise of labor again," said Whitfield Diffie, renowned cryptographer and former believer in the power of code. "We need to tighten up the relationships among knowledge workers," he said, "and bargain as a whole."
whaaaat
I don't believe in all of this web-stock madness; I know the game is rigged in favor of the VCs. My father, an accountant and small-time real-estate investor, gave me good middle-class advice when he warned me about the market: it's a crap shoot and you should put in only what you are prepared to lose. But there is no escaping one's guts. The air around me is drunken with greed. The rocketing technology stocks create a force field of desire. I am as intoxicated as I was in those fiber optic nights at Infusion, but crazier. I see the startup boys making millions. Why shouldn't I get into the game of betting on technology riches?
[...]
I call Clara Basile, my longtime friend and financial adviser [...] "Do you know what the profit margins are in the grocery business? Three percent, maybe four. Would you buy Safeway?"