A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin (PDF)

Description

Does Silicon Valley deserve all the credit for digital creativity and social media? Joy Rankin questions this triumphalism by revisiting a pre-PC time when schools were not the last stop for mature consumer technologies but flourishing sites of innovative collaboration—when users taught computers and visionaries dreamed of networked access for all.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I really enjoyed this book for the way it talked about how users–not just inventors, corporations, or the Silicon Valley elite–played a really important role in making computing what it is today. Especially in terms of the internet. The history of networked systems didn’t start and end with arpanet and this book shows how a lot of ignored networks in places that weren’t considered high tech hotspots were actually a blueprint for the kinds of social information networks we have today. Lots to think about here. Highly recommend.

⭐I am very interested in the history of computing, particularly in education. This book was extraordinarily well researched, clearly presented, and thought provoking. I loved it.

⭐A very nice description of the challenges and opportunities in early language development. The autor captures the excitement of the age.

⭐I had to read this book for class, and it provides a unique perspective on the history of computing. A worthwhile read if this sort of stuff interests you.

⭐The author seems to have come to this with a thesis and a bias. You _could_ call using a time sharing system Personal Computing but we generally don’t and there’s a reason for that. It’s not in the same category. The author seems to have wanted to make a modern retelling of the history of computers that’s not dominated by white males and so she wrote this. It’s biased and tries to re-write history in a way that is not the genuine article. She refers to the users of the pre-PersonalComputer era in ways that they did not refer to themselves, in an effort to further her narrative. A few chapters were interesting but the overall flavor is a Modern Retelling. Not great.

⭐Of what I’ve read so far, half the chapters would be worthy of a 5-star review. The other half seem to be hand-wringing about the white-male-dominated 1960’s. Yes, we get it – the 60’s were the dark ages for the modern day rainbow crowd. I’m not clear on why this needs to be dwelt on – it is judging the past through the lens of current social/moral norms (presentism).For example, on page 48, “…those connections reinforced contained Cold War gender roles of heteronormative pursuing men and wooed women. … it was the normative man-woman pairings that were also highlighted, never the possibility of the range of queer pairings beyond those that would yield a nuclear family.” — I mean, that is OBVIOUSLY a history of time sharing and the BASIC programming language, right?Perhaps the author is genuinely upset that the football-crazed all-male student body of Dartmouth didn’t rise up and demand female and gender norms like we have in the 2020’s. Perhaps the students were too busy dealing with the 60’s? You know — Vietnam, flower power, LSD, and all of that?The sad thing is that there are a lot of good tidbits of history, so it had the possibility of being a great book. Unfortunately there seems to be a very strong undertone of judgment by todays standards that makes the book much less palatable.

⭐Long before the days of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, America had an active computer culture centered around academic computing. This book tells the story.In the 1960s, computer usage involved batch processing. A person would type a program on punch cards, hand them to an operator, and wait several hours, or overnight, for the result. At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, time-sharing made it possible for for multiple terminals, actually teletype machine, to interact with the computer, a GE mainframe, at the same time. A person could now get their answer in minutes, instead of hours. The network grew to include colleges and all-male prep schools all over New England. The BASIC computer language was developed to give the average person the ability to actually do computer programming.Minnesota was already familiar with computers, being the home of corporations like Honeywell and Control Data. Starting with a connection to the Dartmouth computer, a state-wise high school and college computer system was developed. It was started by using a mainframe owned by the Pillsbury Corporation.While the system that became ARPANET was having compatibility problems, a parallel system called PLATO, centered at the University of Illinois, was humming along quite nicely. It had terminals with working touch screens. It also had all the elements of a present-day online community, including email, file sharing, computer games, flame wars and gender discrimination.This book shows that there is a big difference between a history of computing and a history of computers. It is very easy to read and understand. It is also eye-opening in that it shows that the stereotype of computers being an all-male field is not accurate. This is very much worth reading.

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