A People's History of Computing in the United States
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Narrated by:
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Bernadette Dunne
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By:
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Joy Lisi Rankin
About this listen
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.
©2018 Joy Lisi Rankin (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.
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Missed important information
- By Ms. on 04-01-22
By: Jing Tsu
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The Formula
- How Algorithms Solve all our Problems…and Create More
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms - what they are, why they’re such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they’re headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola.
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Not about algorithms. Not an original book.
- By Landon Rordam on 12-02-14
By: Luke Dormehl
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Artificial Intelligence: 101 Things You Must Know Today About Our Future
- By: Lasse Rouhiainen
- Narrated by: Rodger Paxton
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Artificial intelligence is changing our world faster than we can imagine, and it will impact every area of our lives. And this is happening whether we like it or not. You might have heard that many jobs will be replaced by automation and robots, but did you also know that at the same time a huge number of new jobs will be created by AI? This book covers many fascinating and timely topics related to artificial intelligence, including: self-driving cars, robots, chatbots, and how AI will impact the job market, business processes, and entire industries, just to name a few.
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Completely useless
- By Joe V on 03-29-19
By: Lasse Rouhiainen
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The Future of the Professions
- How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
- By: Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.
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I Hope It's Not All True
- By John on 05-01-16
By: Richard Susskind, and others
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Broad Band
- The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
- By: Claire L. Evans
- Narrated by: Claire L. Evans
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Women are not ancillary to the history of technology; they turn up at the very beginning of every important wave. But they've often been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize. Vice reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the Internet what it is today. Evans shows us how these women built and colored the technologies we can't imagine life without.
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Inspiring
- By Jean on 03-29-18
By: Claire L. Evans
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Thinking Machines
- The Quest for Artificial Intelligence - and Where It's Taking Us Next
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Gus Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When most of us think about artificial intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that artificial intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate.
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Mostly platitudes with no depth
- By Gary on 03-24-17
By: Luke Dormehl
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Now You See It
- How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn
- By: Cathy N. Davidson
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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When Duke University gave free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics said they were wasting their money. Yet when the students in practically every discipline invented academic uses for the music players, suddenly the idea could be seen in a new light - as an innovative way to turn learning on its head. Using cutting-edge research on the brain, Cathy N. Davidson show how attention blindness has produced one of our society's greatest challenges.
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3 Reasons to Read
- By Joshua Kim on 05-06-12
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The World Is Flat
- Further Updated and Expanded
- By: Thomas L. Friedman
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 27 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will they say was the most crucial development in the first few years of the twenty-first century? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations?
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If you like cliches...
- By Jonathan Shultz on 09-08-07
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Creative Schools
- The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education
- By: Lou Aronica, Ken Robinson
- Narrated by: Ken Robinson PhD
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Ken Robinson is one of the world's most influential voices in education, and his 2006 TED Talk on the subject is the most viewed in the organization's history. Now, the internationally recognized leader on creativity and human potential focuses on one of the most critical issues of our time: how to transform the nation's troubled educational system.
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The Answer to Why Students Stop Trying
- By Alison Sattler on 07-21-15
By: Lou Aronica, and others
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The Filter Bubble
- What the Internet Is Hiding from You
- By: Eli Pariser
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.
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Now in the top 3 best books I've ever read
- By Brian Esserlieu on 05-26-11
By: Eli Pariser
What listeners say about A People's History of Computing in the United States
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-16-22
good history
the lack of editing, producing, and the frequent ranting are well worth pushing through to get at the actual history content which is rare and key.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-17-21
The fresh view of the author was very enlightening
I could have done without some of the needing to draw sociology conclusion, but the contrast was stimulating and informative.
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- Leisure Reader
- 09-27-23
wow the woke is woven in
Difficult to follow the history when you are supporting the sociological consequences that early competing is based solely on male testosterone. Grace Hopper, Margret Hamilton, are good examples of early pioneers.
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- Nate
- 04-23-19
Title is misleading
You might think that this book is about the history of computing in the United States but in fact it talks about the history of time sharing systems and early computer networks in the 1960-70s. It does a good job of focusing on those elements of computing history. If you are interested in those things and that time period, I recommend this book.
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5 people found this helpful
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- James J. Shackel
- 11-30-19
Informative with dry automaton narration
A very informative book which fills the gap nicely between mainframes and micro-computers. Lots of information about the origins of: PLATO, time-share computing, early social networking via PLATO, early email and instant messaging, network gaming, etc.
I was uncomfortable with much of the politically correct talk regarding chauvinism at Dartmouth in the computer labs. The guys emulating Football in BASIC were doing so because it was fun. There’s little evidence they did so as some expression of male-dominance power BS, or to exclude women intentionally. FOTBAL is fun! Video gaming is ultimately about simulating events most of us cannot do in the real world: fighting aliens, flying a 737, space travel, playing in the Super Bowl, designing cities, crushing candy, farming, etc. Football skill and computing expertise are generally extremely mutually exclusive.
To suggest football was intentionally chosen by early male computer enthusiasts as a move to repress/exclude women is honestly just silly.
My university computing days covered the years 1982-1987. In those days we computer nerds would have loved to include more women into the male-dominant tech realm. I cannot remember a single female Computer Science Engineering student at my school whom wasn’t also a foreign student. Surely a sad reality.
We did not exclude women nor feel threatened by their presence in the classroom. Most of the women I studied beside easily outperformed me. Still, not threatened.
After listening to this book I’m left wondering why the feminist politics were injected into an otherwise wonderful body of work? I’m a feminist BTW. Waving the BS flag on the notion of threatened men imtentionallu excluding women from early computing.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Greg
- 05-28-21
Mostly about gender bias in computing
This book is a real disappointment. While it has a historical underpinning, the book incessantly harps on about gender, the masculinity of computing along with racial imbalance. The book has repetitive references to it. I gave up a few chapters in - it was intolerable. I can’t help wonder whether the author has a chip on their shoulder.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Paul
- 02-27-19
Very mixed feelings
On listening to the introductory chapter I was almost ready to return the book for a refund. I was sure that the narration was a text to speech implementation, wooden and unemotive. It was also introducing an new definition of networking that I had not come across in my 35 years of professional computing.
Liberal use of the skip function has saved me from beating up my audio player by skipping the sections of the book that the author is attempting to spin a history from fragments of facts and drawing massive conclusions.
I did find the history of the development of time sharing and BASIC to be interesting and it was chapters like these that kept me from returning the book.
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9 people found this helpful