#44 Daily Tech: Working in the software industry, circa 1989
Hello! 👋
I'm travelling to see the family at the other side of the world (27 hours in the air and 7.5 hours around the airports – any guesses which countries I'm flying from and to?) tomorrow. This is the last Daily Tech issue for this week and I'll see you (jet lagged) on Monday. ✈️
Working in the software industry, circa 1989
The first software company I worked for was Applied Computing Devices in Terre Haute, Indiana. That place was filled with wicked smart people, and it was a joy to work with them. We made software that managed telephone networks. This was complicated stuff to manage, and our software products were correspondingly complex. I needed my 400-level college mathematics classes to understand some elements of our software.
‘Frankly it blew my mind’: how Tron changed cinema – and predicted the future of tech
From cyberspace to AI, Steven Lisberger’s 1982 sci-fi classic was way ahead of its time. The team behind it explain how they made a game-changer.
State lotteries transfer wealth out of needy communities, investigation finds
Lottery retailers in nearly every state are clustered in poor neighborhoods, driving a wealth transfer to multinational corporations.
How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself
The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written beautifully about why the capacity for boredom is essential for a full life and Susan Sontag contemplated the creative purpose of boredom. Perhaps we understand this intellectually, but we — now more than ever, it seems — have a profound civilizational anxiety about being alone. And the seed for it is increasingly planted in childhood — in an age when play is increasingly equated with screens and interfaces, being alone with a screen is not quite being alone at all, so the art of taking joy in one’s own company slips further and further out of reach.
Nine observations about what happens when you eat only potatoes.
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