Ellen Ullman

Ellen Ullman

"We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
8 Quotes
"We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins."
Ellen Ullman Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
"I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against 'hostile environments for women."
Ellen Ullman
"Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity."
Ellen Ullman
"Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system."
Ellen Ullman
"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."
Ellen Ullman
"People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true."
Ellen Ullman
"Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H. P. computers I. B. M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces."
Ellen Ullman
"I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away."
Ellen Ullman
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