Gray Theodore - How things work the inner life of everyday machines

FOR MANY YEARS I worked on creating a computer program called Mathematica. Many other people worked on it too, but for several years, at the beginning, the Notebook user interface portion of it was mine and mine alone. I found great satisfaction in watching this creation of years come together. It was my life. (Literally: I had no other life, not even a date, for a decade.)

Even today I can see in my mind the structures inside this program, the internal logic, the chaos in a few places. I havent looked at the actual code in many years, but if I did, Im sure I would find many old friends, along with new ones added by the programmers who have come after me.

I still use Mathematica nearly every day to do my work. Yes, sometimes I curse my former self for bugs I could have fixed or features I will never see because no one else will ever care enough to add them. It was my baby, but not anymore. And, like my kids who were once small but then grew up, I have to accept my baby for what it is, not resent it for what it might have been.

Making Mathematica shaped me for twenty-three years. Its an important thing in the world, and I am proud of my work on it. But Im also glad that when the chance presented itself to make something else, I took that road.

I got started collecting elements by accident, but have since spent a lot of time with themI wrote a few books about them. Elements are good. Like kids, they are primal and raw, unique and universal. Everything is made of elementseverything we know and everything we are. And the kids, too, they are made of elements. The machines we call molecules are some of the most intricate and remarkable machines in existence. The machines called DNA and the machines called proteins are life itself to us. The time I spent with elements changed my life, and made me better. More interesting, I think.

I Grew Up with Things

SOFTWARE AND ELEMENTS are great, but this book is not about software or elements. It is about the certain and comfortable world of mechanical things. I made, played with, took apart, broke, and fixed a lot of things when I was young, and in the years since. I learned a lot from these things. Most of all I learned to love them. They changed me. They were there for me in good times and bad. They kept me going, and opened worlds for me. These things are now a part of my past, but other things are very much part of my present, and yours. I have gathered many interesting things for you to see and learn about in this book. I hope that in the pages that follow, you will see the beauty I do in the inanimate, yet very alive world of things.