Preface

I’m going to issue a disclaimer before we proceed: I tried doing it the right way, I tried becoming a “real” programmer, I really did. But I failed. I started a computer science degree, but dropped out after about a year and a half. I’m sorry, but it bored me senseless.

As a young man, this career shift wasn’t entirely motivated by a need to restore the right-left hemisphere balance to my young brain; it may also have had something to do with the worry that knowing a lot about Alan Turing and C++ was probably not the best way to get a girlfriend.

My studies of early 1990s ideas of computing had so repulsed me that I made efforts to stay as far away from computers as I could for the next 10 years. For much of the 90s, I didn’t even own a computer; instead I had a guitar, an attitude, and an ill-advised haircut. I was only drawn back toward the end of the decade when the web started to take off, and a lot of creative people suddenly discovered that what they’d been doing recently with video cameras, photography, and hypertext was now being called New Media, and everyone was doing it. This rehabilitation of computing has continued unabated, to the point that today, to say you “work with computers” is about as meaningful as saying you breathe air.