I love this essay. I’ve been hoping that Stephenson would rewrite it with 20 years of updates.
It describes the landscape better than anything else I’ve found as Stephenson is a user and a great writer, I think. Most other accounts are by people who make their living in journalism, or hardware, or software.
Stephenson is also an example of someone who is really into computers, and programming I suspect, but has a primary goal of writing. I like when non-programmers program (eg Jake VanderPlas [0] wrote chunks of scypi even though he’s an astronomer, even though he works as a programmer now).
If you like programmers who write fiction, you might also be interested to know that Mark Russinovich (of Windows Sysinternals fame) writes tech thriller novels.
(I haven't read them but they have been well-received.)
Vernor Vinge is another good author in the category of people really into computers who write fiction (I remember one of his novels had a side plot about interplanatary usenet having routing failures)
It describes the landscape better than anything else I’ve found as Stephenson is a user and a great writer, I think. Most other accounts are by people who make their living in journalism, or hardware, or software.
Stephenson is also an example of someone who is really into computers, and programming I suspect, but has a primary goal of writing. I like when non-programmers program (eg Jake VanderPlas [0] wrote chunks of scypi even though he’s an astronomer, even though he works as a programmer now).
[0] http://vanderplas.com/media/pdfs/CV.pdf