A People's History of Computing in the United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3186181 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Louise Benjamin (Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 835-836 |
| Publication date | 2019-12-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaz657 |
| OpenAlex | W2991855406 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
Oh, those early computer days! What a pleasure to read a well-written, meticulously researched book that brings personal recollections of Basic, Plato, Cobal, and Fortran flying back. In A People's History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin details contributions that numerous students and educators made to computer development from 1965 to the mid-1970s. These “computing citizens,” as she calls them, used terminals connected to mainframes via telephone lines to create networks for communicating and sharing information and programs. Based largely at universities and high schools in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, these networks connected a widely dispersed, diverse set of users who created communities, exchanged messages, and developed early computer games. Their efforts and discoveries shaped the computer world of the mid-1970s, when other inventors and garage-based geniuses began fashioning today's interactive world. Rankin explores the development of these “time-sharing” systems, so called because the computer allocated its processing time among multiple simultaneous users working on individual terminals, and not, as sometimes erroneously believed, because the computer allotted time to individual users. Central to time-sharing's creation were students based at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The first three chapters detail the contributions Dartmouth made to user-friendly computer environments, including how Cold War gender role expectations played a key part in perceptions of computing as a “masculine” discipline. Rankin also outlines how Dartmouth's programming language, Basic, became the language of computing citizens from New England to the Midwest and, eventually, to California during the 1960s and 1970s
Art history · Genius · IBM · Programming language · Set (abstract data type · World Wide Web · Computer Science · History · History of Computing Technologies
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |