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A people’s history of computing in the United States
Rankin J., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018. 336 pp. Type: Book
Date Reviewed: Jan 24 2020

From 1965 to 1975, if you were to ask someone in the field what was going on in computing, you would likely get one of two answers. People in business data processing would point to the dominance of IBM and its mainframe computers. Specialists might be able to name the Systems Network Architecture (SNA), the dominant network architecture, and possibly the COBOL programming language, which allowed marginal programmers to create business information systems. People in academic computing would have very different responses. They would point to Bell Labs, where the Unix operating system and C programming language were developed. And their choice of network architecture would have been the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP). Clearly, other stuff was going on. But these were the two dominant threads.

And yet the author of this book focuses on other stuff: the BASIC programming language, timesharing communities, and the PLATO computer-aided instruction system developed by the Control Data Corporation. The BASIC programming language is rapidly fading into the mists of history, although a modern, much-updated version of it can still be found in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is the scripting language used to automate Microsoft Office applications. Timesharing is ubiquitous, although the timesharing communities addressed in this book are a rather limited example of timesharing technology. And one would be hard pressed to find anyone in the field of educational technology who has heard of PLATO, much less used it. So why would anyone write a book about these topics?

The author argues that the mythos of Silicon Valley and the giant computing corporations that grew out of humble garages misrepresents the true history of computing. This is probably true because many stories of garage origins have been shown to be publicity constructions. But that is not what the book is about. The book is a rather tedious documentation of some other stuff that was occurring in the computing field when nearly everyone was focused on IBM and Bell Labs. The many facts are largely uninteresting because there are no larger lessons drawn from this jumble of names and acronyms--and certainly nothing we might want to think about as the computing field progresses.

The book reads like an uninspired dissertation, with a few colorful bows added to make it more relevant to today’s audience. For example, the author points out that Dartmouth, where the BASIC programming language was developed, “was almost exclusively white, male, and affluent.” That is probably true, but would the computing field have been different in any important way if it were not true? The author simply drops the ball.

This book is not a fun read due to its endless offering of tedious facts lacking in useful insights or poignant observations. If you are a historian focusing on the computing field during this era, it might be worth looking at. If you are not, it probably isn’t.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  J. M. Artz Review #: CR146853 (2006-0128)
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