In 1995, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte authored Being Digital. The insightful book presented a history of digital technologies to date, followed by generally accurate predictions of how those technologies would advance and affect society.
A central conceit of the book is how the world is moving from “atoms” to “bits.” Atoms being a fundamental unit of the physical world, and bits being a fundamental unit of the digital domain. Atoms to bits, physical to digital.
1995 was also the year Alan started a company to help move bits around the internet, having moved with Priscilla from Cupertino CA to Ashland OR the year before. Since that time, the bookshelves in Alan’s new office have turned out to be emblematic of Negroponte’s thesis.
Starting with artifacts from Alan’s days at Apple, the shelves at first grew through the addition of atom-based materials like paper books. After a few years, they were still accumulating atom-based material, but these items, like boxes of software and CD-ROMs, were often filled with bits. And then the shelves stopped changing altogether. Just about everything Alan worked with had gone fully digital and had no need for a shelf.
The penultimate item added to Alan’s emblematic bookshelves, appropriately enough, was Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs. The ultimate item, added over a decade later: a 2024 Apple Vision Pro. A device for translating atoms to bits!
