A People's History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

My university computing days covered the years 1982-1987. To suggest football was intentionally chosen by early male computer enthusiasts as a move to repress/exclude women is honestly just silly. Football skill and computing expertise are generally extremely mutually exclusive. FOTBAL is fun! Video gaming is ultimately about simulating events most of us cannot do in the real world: fighting aliens, flying a 737, space travel, playing in the Super Bowl, designing cities, crushing candy, farming, etc. There’s little evidence they did so as some expression of male-dominance power BS, or to exclude women intentionally. The guys emulating Football in BASIC were doing so because it was fun. I was uncomfortable with much of the politically correct talk regarding chauvinism at Dartmouth in the computer labs. Lots of information about the origins of: PLATO, time-share computing, early social networking via PLATO, early email and instant messaging, network gaming, etc. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.Ī very informative book which fills the gap nicely between mainframes and micro-computers.

These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.īy imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today's debate about whether the Internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism.

A People's History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin