Joy Lisi Rankin leads the research program in Gender, Race, and Power in Artificial Intelligence at the AI Now Institute at New York University. She was a Contributing Editor for Lady Science and a consultant for the television show Girls Code and the documentaries The Birth of BASIC and The Queen of Code. She worked at the intersection of technology and education for over a decade. Her website is joyrankin.com.
A powerful and densely detailed account of how digital culture in
the 1960s and ’70s shaped our contemporary experiences of
technology as a tool for social connection…As Rankin’s analysis
shows, racism and misogyny played a part in molding digital culture
from its inception.
*The Nation*
Compellingly recasts people’s computing as one of networked
belonging, intimacy, and coterie. In doing so, Rankin restores a
crucial forgotten 10-year period between mainframe and personal
computing, chronicling a history of networked belonging and user
culture well before Jobs and the Woz rolled out Apple I…Rankin’s
book is interested in how students and their teachers worked at the
margins to elaborate varying notions of computer citizenship…She
deepens the account of computing in all its problems.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Obviously inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the
United States, Joy Lisi Rankin’s book positions itself as a
corrective to what she calls ‘Silicon Valley mythology.’
*Public Books*
Highly recommended… Rankin’s study offers insight into some of the
unsung pioneers of personal computing—namely, the teachers and
students who were using computers to program poems, build games,
exchange messages, and build online communities back in the 1960s
to 1970s… A fascinating historical account of early experiments in
online learning and edtech.
*ElearningInside News*
Provides enough evidence to bury the Silicon Valley Myth…Rankin’s
study is a major revision of our understanding of the history of
computing as well as our assumptions about the relationship between
the general public and technological development. The book is also
a delight to read.
*Australian Book Review*
Digital computers were brought to us by their inventors, a story
frequently told. The digital revolution, in contrast, was brought
to us by computer users, and that story—as vividly narrated by Joy
Rankin in A People’s History of Computing in the United
States—deserves to be better known.
*George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the
Digital Universe*
A fascinating story of personal and social computing long before
the advent of personal computers, the internet, and social media. A
compelling challenge to the traditional male-dominated narrative of
the importance of personal computers and ARPANET in laying the
groundwork for today’s digital world.
*Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College*
We’re familiar with the story of an American computing culture
created by great men—geniuses and mavericks. Very rarely have we
heard about exceptional women who made significant contributions to
hardware and software development. A People’s History of Computing
in the United States subverts that old story and takes us into the
homes, classrooms, and offices of ordinary Americans—girls and
boys, women and men—who built an extraordinary, vibrant digital
culture long before the arrival of the PC in the 1980s. The girls
(and boys) who code today are the successors to the democratic
computing culture that once thrived in this country.
*Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code*
If you’re interested in computing’s present, then this is one of
the books you need to read about its past… Kudos to Joy Rankin on
this timely, relevant new release.
*Marie Hicks, author of Programmed Inequality*
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