Book Review: A People's History of Computing in the United States

Reviewed by paulml

A People's History of Computing in the United States by JoyLisi Rankin, Harvard University Press, 2018, ISBN: 978-0674970977

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 results.  At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, time-sharing made it possible for multiple terminals - actually teletype machines - to interact with the computer, a GE mainframe, all 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 the Northeast.  The BASIC computer language was developed to give the average person the ability to actually write their own programs.

Minnesota was already familiar with computers, being the home of corporations like Honeywell and Control Data.  Beginning with a connection to the Dartmouth computer, a statewide high school and college computer system was developed.  It was started by using a mainframe owned by Pillsbury.

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.