A People's History of Computing in the United States

336 pages

English language

Published Nov. 7, 2018

ISBN:
978-0-674-97097-7
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OCLC Number:
1023100261

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5 stars (1 review)

Does Silicon Valley deserve the credit it gets for digital creativity and social media? Joy Lisi Rankin questions this triumphalism by revisiting a pre-PC world where schools were not the last stop for mature consumer technologies but flourishing sites of innovative collaboration.

A People's History of Computing in the United States reveals a forgotten time when students taught computers, rather than the other way around, and visionaries dreamed of networked access for all. The invention of the personal computer undoubtedly liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. 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. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users.

Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music …

1 edition

Subjects

  • Computer systems
  • History
  • Information commons
  • Computer networks

Places

  • United States