Joy Lisi Rankin

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.… (mais)

A little clunky (tends to list, for example, every game you could play on Dartmouth’s early network), but an interesting counterpoint to a Silicon Valley-centric narrative of how computing developed in the US. Rankin traces a lost history of shared computing (dumb terminals linked over phone lines to a central computer) in a number of places, including Dartmouth and a bunch of high schools to which it linked as well as in Minnesota—the source of the famous Oregon Trail game. Bill Gates and several other people who show up in Silicon Valley histories first encountered computing through these noncommercial, non-personal computer systems, though that’s largely written out of the history. It’s interesting and somewhat sad to think about the road not taken—computing as a utility like power and telephone service. Though that might not have changed as much as we might (like to) think; Rankin regularly points out the gender and racial hierarchies assumed and reinforced by places like Dartmouth, which didn’t admit women at the time it developed its timesharing system.… (mais)