A People's History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

They have genuine material consequences contributions unrecognized are contributions that are not compensated. These erasures deny contributors to their expertise, labor, community standing, and ultimately, their power. This is a lasting injustice: women, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, people with disabilities, and other historically excluded individuals have long made crucial contributions to science, technology, and engineering, yet their labor has been continuously erased. For the majority of her time on the project, her male supervisor Arnold Lowan instead received credit. Despite her contributions, Blanch did not appear as the author of the papers she wrote. After earning her doctorate in mathematics at Cornell, she led new approaches to computation and published volumes of tables and calculations in scientific journals. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.In the 1930s Dr Gertrude Blanch led the important Mathematical Tables Project, a nearly 450-person effort to compute logarithmic, exponential, and other calculation results essential to the American government, military, finance, and science. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.īy 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. 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.

Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users.

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. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes.

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.

A People's History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin