Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems
Beginning with punch cards, an IBM1130 computer, FORTRAN, and space exploration in the late 1960’s, Arriving Simultaneously on Multiple Far-Flung Systems is a virtual reading machine, created/recreated with JavaScript in a HTML/CSS structure and read “on-the-fly”. With a complex array of randomly-generated texts, the work mirrors the life of Diana, an early aerospace information retrieval programmer, who later worked to bring community networking to rural and urban areas. The gap between the acceptance of women programmers who worked — not only during WWII but also in the decades after WII — and the current dominance of men in the field, is core to this narrative of one woman’s journey through an environment of changing technologies.
(Source ELO 2018.)
Everything was happening at once... "I spent last week at Langley", he said. FORTRAN, as the unforgettable manuals in my memory and the faded notes in my code workbook have memorialized "is a language that closely resembles the language of mathematics; it is designed primarily for scientific and engineering computations." The occasionally unfathomable behavior of the computer... The data in an automated library catalog does not create itself. Like a glass-enclosed gold and silver work of art, the satellite was housed in a clean room.
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