Joy Lisi Rankin. A People’s History of Computing in the United States

Historiography of computing has evolved from a focus on inventors and technical milestones to a deeper engagement with computer users, practices, and cultures. Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States continues this trend, highlighting user practices to challenge a hardware-centric account of the origins of online sociality. Rankin argues against a “Silicon Valley Mythology” that the invention of microcomputers in the 1970s and internet-based social media in the 1990s were the necessary preconditions for personal and social computing, a myth that “creates a digital America dependent on the work of a handful of male tech geniuses” (3). She asserts that “personal computing”—the ability of people to access, create, and form communities around computer resources—existed in the 1960s and 1970s, long before “personal computers” or the internet. To make her case, she documents innovative educational experiments in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, locales not popularly associated with digital culture. Her detailed examples demonstrate how networked sociality arose not just from the actions of a few heroic inventors but from the collaboration of thousands of ordinary students and teachers

Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Psychology