anglepoised.com

Slabs of com­pute run­ning hot in offices, basements, dorm rooms … not a new thing, exactly, but their capa­bil­i­ties are new — their inhab­i­tants are new — and the whole scene is just great. Exciting and strange. Gleaming and haunted. Pile on the adjectives, the vibes: it’s somehow all richer and weirder than any­body ever dreamed in 1984.

He had a sudden insight, something that many adults in technical cultures never attain. “I use these things all the time, but I don’t know exactly how they work. We can follow these directions, but how would we know what to change?”

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.