Heroes and Titans: From Community to Consumer

Heroes and Titans: From Community to Consumer

In A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Joy Lisi Rankin attempts to restructure the narrative of how the modern computer was established. The narrative  of the myth of Technological Titans to a more cultural tale of students, professors, and teachers constantly refining an existing tool. Rankin discusses how communication and community helped create a technological age of accessibility and accountability to people all over the country, from New Hampshire and Minnesota to the West Coast and beyond. And along with this narrative, how a once-communal activity morphed into a solitary pastime.

Florida Memory (c034169)
An Employee at the Comptroller's Office Processing Data 
on IBM Equipment - Tallahassee, Florida, 1960

Throughout A People’s History, Rankin enforces the narrative of everyday Americans leading the push to refine a tool that was previously inaccessible. A tool that was primarily a tool of the government and military. Through communication and a desire for free accessibility communities –  “The People” – created technological timeshares and shared access to a mainframe, enabling communal interactions. Rankin notes that given the environment through which the early technology was both built and cultivated, that being a male-dominated, single-sex environment such as Dartmouth, there was initially a white male-centric dominance in the field of technology. 

Florida Memory (pr21935)
Miami-Dade Junior College Administrators
With New IBM - 1620 Computer System, 1963

However, this is not the whole story, which makes Rankin’s book so enticing.  A People’s History takes a story readers think they know (Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates) and flips the narrative, restructuring the entire history of computing, and returning the narrative and credit where it belongs: to The People.