The D-Unit we knew had always been a hardware guy, meaning that he regarded software as like unserious, or pretentious, as like the gyno-linguistic pedagogy of his wife. He had spent his life around machines and if he at least tolerated the code that programmed them it was because it came on discs that came packaged in envelopes, in boxes. The D-Unit we knew never had any patience for the service economy, but was fundamentally a maker, a producer, consumed by stuff and things. To him, legit computing could only be accomplished in a workplace with other professionals, in the flesh and on a schedule, time and space were physically shared. The engineers replaced the tubes, replaced the transistors and circuits, by hand, the boss had a desk with only a paperweight on it and could not even type. The home was the home, the office was the office, and to bring a hugenormous mainframe back into the house, even in a better color than mental-ward offwhite, was as like committable an offense as like bringing back into the house another lover to introduce to your child and spouse.
Joshua Cohen, “From the Palo Alto Sessions”