My Brief Career in Abstraction

I was a generative pre-trained transformer before GPTs were cool. After dropping out of grad school in the mid-eighties, I landed a job with a new digital-media division of H. W. Wilson, the venerable publisher whose Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature had long been a mainstay of library reference desks. Looking to capitalize on the surging popularity of personal computers and online databases, the company had decided to create a digital supplement to the Guide ...