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.