A People's History of Computing in the United States

Joy Lisi Rankin

336 pages, parution le 25/10/2018

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Résumé

Does Silicon Valley deserve all the credit for digital creativity and social media? Joy Rankin questions this triumphalism by revisiting a pre-PC time when schools were not the last stop for mature consumer technologies but flourishing sites of innovative collaboration-when users taught computers and visionaries dreamed of networked access for all.Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer 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. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today's debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.Joy Lisi Rankin is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Michigan State University. She served as a consultant for the documentaries The Birth of BASIC and The Queen of Code, and the television show Girls Code. Prior to entering the academy, Rankin had a successful career launching educational programs for students of all ages, which took her around the country. Her website is joyrankin.com.

Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Harvard University Press
Auteur(s)	Joy Lisi Rankin
Parution	25/10/2018
Nb. de pages	336
EAN13	9780674970977

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A People's History of Computing in the United States

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