Personal Computing Before Personal Computers: The Origins of America's Digital Culture (2015)
This dissertation demonstrates that contemporary digital culture originated with the users of academic time-sharing systems during the 1960s and 1970s. They practiced personal computing before personal computers. My focus on the educational context in which these users and their computing communities flourished compels significant revision of the traditional digital origin stories focused on the military and the ARPANET, as well as the garage hobbyists of Silicon Valley. This dissertation examines interactive computing projects that operated on time-sharing systems during the 1960s and 1970s, namely, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, the University of Illinois PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations) System, and several educational networks in Minnesota, including Total Information for Educational Systems (TIES) and the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). Time-sharing was a form of computing in which multiple users simultaneously shared the resources of one powerful central computer. The individual user typically ran his programs and received results via teletypewriter (teletype) terminals, connected to the computer via telephone lines. With time-sharing, a user could type commands into the teletype and receive printed responses on that teletype within seconds. Because of the connection via telephone lines, the teletype could be located hundreds of miles away from the central computer. This level of interactivity – and computing over a distance – was a dramatic change from the dominant mode of computing during the 1960s and 1970s, using mainframe computers. The students and educators using these time-sharing systems transformed computing from a military, scientific, and business endeavor into an intensely personal practice. They were more than users. They employed time-sharing together with new programming languages to craft original computing experiences. They created new knowledge about timesharing, and they authored software. They fostered communities of computing enthusiasts, and they devised novel modes of resource sharing. This dissertation highlights the creativity of users as an object of inquiry, and it emphasizes the educational space as a site of computing innovation. Thinking about users as the craftspeople of the digital age calls attention to the myriad ways in which the students and educators using time-sharing systems effected change as artisans, authors, programmers, communicators, and makers. At the small liberal arts college Dartmouth, the mathematics professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz elevated user convenience in the design of their time-sharing system and their new programming language, Beginners' All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, or BASIC. Their commitment to simplicity of use, instead of efficiency for the computer, combined with their commitment to accessible computing for all students, set them apart from the academic, industrial, and military computing mainstream. BASIC proved central to the growth of personal and social computing. BASIC fueled the spread of Dartmouth time-sharing in secondary schools and colleges across New England, and throughout Minnesota. During 1974-75, MECC's statewide time-sharing system served 84% of Minnesota's public school students. By 1978, students played OREGON, their beloved game The Oregon Trail , on the MECC network over 9000 times per month. OREGON had been written in BASIC in Minnesota early in the 1970s. Researchers at the University's of Illinois military-defense-oriented Coordinated Science Laboratory initially created their PLATO System as an exploration of the potential uses of computing in education, but over time they built a widespread system that fostered individualized, interactive computing. This dissertation argues that the PLATO project leaders' focus on enhancing their system's usability, especially for educational purposes, propelled the development of compelling new technologies including flat plasma display screens and touch-responsive screens. During the 1970s, PLATO users created a rich documentary history with their "NOTES" files, an online bulletin board. My analysis demonstrates how members of the PLATO community addressed censorship, computing security, identity, and resource sharing, while they created new job categories, games, modes of communication, and means of self-expression with the system.
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