Digital Odyssey

Tech Whiz Girl Bursts Own Bubble

Susan Quinn

$45.95 $39.25

Paperback

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English

Ballast Books
30 September 2025

Memoirs; Business & management; Electronics engineering; Family & relationships; Advice on parenting

Digital Odyssey is a memoir by SE Quinn, a pioneering innovator who built the first live text streaming platform on the early internet-and lost nearly everything while doing it.

Set against the explosive rise of Silicon Valley in the 1990s, the book chronicles her journey from a single mother working through the night to a tech visionary blazing a trail for women in the industry. As the founder of Wordcasters and creator of TextCast, Quinn developed a revolutionary system that captured spoken word and streamed it across the web with interactive chat-delivering accessibility and immediacy in a time of dial-up and static web pages. Her work-predating Zoom, YouTube, and Twitter-solved problems no one else was thinking about yet.

But Digital Odyssey is more than a story of innovation. It's a raw, unsparing look at what it took to build something original while navigating motherhood, professional invisibility, and survival at the start of the internet economy. Quinn explores the cost of being early, the compromises she made to protect her family, and the deeper journey of confronting cycles of abuse and generational trauma-while refusing to view herself as a victim. Digital Odyssey reclaims a missing chapter of tech history and reframes what it means to invent, to be a mother, and to come home to the self you left behind.

By: Susan Quinn
Imprint: Ballast Books
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 295g
ISBN: 9781966786498
ISBN 10: 1966786492
Pages: 250
Publication Date: 30 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Susan Quinn makes her home in the Mexican jungle with her dog, cat, chickens, and garden. She began her career pioneering real-time text streaming and later created one of the first multi-camera platforms for live streaming interactive video. Part of the founding circle of San Francisco's women-in-tech movement, Quinn is a mother of three-a role that has shaped her deeply and continues to unfold. Digital Odyssey is her first memoir.