A People's History of Computing in the United States

Rankin deliberately begins her history of personal computing not in Silicon Valley garages but at Dartmouth College in the 1960s, where time-sharing systems gave ordinary students interactive access to mainframes for the first time. She traces how educational networks, community computing projects, and time-sharing cooperatives created cultures of personal computing years before the microcomputer existed. The book's central challenge is to the standard origin story: the idea that personal computing was born when hardware became cheap enough to own individually. Rankin argues that the experience of personal computing — direct interaction, creative exploration, a sense of ownership over the machine — was a social achievement that emerged from institutional design decisions, not from miniaturization alone. The result is a history that recovers forgotten networks like DTSS, PLATO, and the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and asks who gets to define what counts as the beginning.