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What am I doing here? I have come to terrorize you! I am a monster, you say? No! I am the people! I am an exception? No! I am the rule; you are the exception! You are the chimera; I am the reality!

Monique Wittig’s novel The Lesbian Body

was how I discovered Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sappho and Socrates, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Eine Frau zu sehen [To See a Woman], the ‘Rapport contre la normalité’ [‘Report against Normality’] published by the Front d’Action Révolutionnaire Gay, Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire, Joanna Russ’s The Fe

male Man, Loren Cameron’s Body Alchemy, Guillaume Dustan’s In My Room, the diaries of Lou Sullivan, the novels of Kathy Acker, the feminist rereading of the history of science by Londa Schiebinger, Donna Haraway and Anne Fausto-Sterling, the theoretical texts of Gayle Rubin, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve K. Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam,

I experienced ostracization and social rejection, but none of that was as disastrous, as painful, as the destruction of my life force, which would have been required of me in accepting the norm. Everything I have become I probably owe to the indifference to mental health I developed during my teenage years, buoyed up by books, in that Spanish town where it seemed that my future had been written by God Himself, and later translated into various languages by doctors and psychoanalysts

was a team of Bell Labs researchers who invented the transistor in the 1940s; two decades later, another Bell Labs team developed the Unix operating system, to mention only the most visible fruits of Bell Laboratories’ research. And it was at Bell Labs where much of the theory of information coding, transmission, and storage was developed.

stored program principle, which has been central to the design of all digital computers ever since. This principle, combined with the invention of high-speed memory devices, provided a practical alternative to the ENIAC’s cumbersome programming.

client-server architecture, an innovation that came from a laboratory located in Silicon Valley and run by the Xerox Corporation. Large, dedicated mainframes, now called servers, store and manipulate massive amounts of data, delivering those data over high-speed networks to powerful personal computers, laptops, and other smart devices, which are nothing like the “dumb” terminals of the initial time-sharing model. These clients do a lot of the processing, especially graphics.

To connect a PC, an individual connected a modem, which translated computer signals into audio tones that the telephone network recognized and vice versa. The connection to the phone network was made by placing the handset into an acoustic cradle; later this was replaced by a direct wire. The user then dialed a local number and connected to a service. In addition to commercial services, one could dial into a personal local “bulletin board,”

To connect a PC, an individual connected a modem, which translated computer signals into audio tones that the telephone network recognized and vice versa. The connection to the phone network was made by placing the handset into an acoustic cradle; later this was replaced by a direct wire. The user then dialed a local number and connected to a service. In addition to commercial services, one could dial into a personal local “bulletin board,”