I agree with the author who said that is ahistorical...at least from my, and the people I grew up with's, perspectives. I grew up with computers in the 70's and 80's and while you may be thinking of centralized computing (minicomputers and mainframes), the personal computing revolution was widely distributed, not centralized in academia. BBSes, swap meets, user groups, even the corner Radio Shack was where 'computing' was vibrant and active. (And the magazines...SO many 'zines!)
We may be talking past each other, but my experience of computing in the 70's and 80's was definitely not academic.
That didn’t start to become common until the early/mid 80’s.
Did it exist a little? Of course. But it was dwarfed by the other stuff going on. I suspect your (and a lot of other HN) experience is going to bias on the hobbiest side though, as does mine. I only found out about the much larger stuff going on at the same time much later.
Almost all the early networking stuff (UUCP, pre-Internet internet like Arpanet, early Usenet, Gopher, even HTML and the WWW, etc) was academic institutions or related.
Often with military grants/contracts. Sometimes with purely commercial contracts, but even those were almost always for some Gov’t project. The amount of work on basics like sorting algorithms that grew out gov’t research is mind boggling, for instance.
There is a lot of well documented history on this.
Then PCs and halfway decent modems became available (2400 baud+), and things changed very rapidly.
Mid 80’s, BBS’s started sprouting like weeds. There were a few before then, but the truly hobbiest ones were very niche.
Then even more so with commercial services like Prodigy, then AOL, then actual ISPs, etc.
I think the compromise position here is to concentrate on the 1980s, and acknowledge that there was a lot of networking tech going on in academia in the 1970s.
However, in context, what I was trying to convey was that the personal computing revolution took place outside of academia. Generally, that lineage started in the early 1970s, with the homebrew movement, and took off with the Apple II in the United States in 1977. This is also well-documented, but a different branch, and definitely more concerned with the idea of computers as providing autonomy.
I agree with the author who said that is ahistorical...at least from my, and the people I grew up with's, perspectives. I grew up with computers in the 70's and 80's and while you may be thinking of centralized computing (minicomputers and mainframes), the personal computing revolution was widely distributed, not centralized in academia. BBSes, swap meets, user groups, even the corner Radio Shack was where 'computing' was vibrant and active. (And the magazines...SO many 'zines!)
We may be talking past each other, but my experience of computing in the 70's and 80's was definitely not academic.
That didn’t start to become common until the early/mid 80’s.
Did it exist a little? Of course. But it was dwarfed by the other stuff going on. I suspect your (and a lot of other HN) experience is going to bias on the hobbiest side though, as does mine. I only found out about the much larger stuff going on at the same time much later.
Almost all the early networking stuff (UUCP, pre-Internet internet like Arpanet, early Usenet, Gopher, even HTML and the WWW, etc) was academic institutions or related.
Often with military grants/contracts. Sometimes with purely commercial contracts, but even those were almost always for some Gov’t project. The amount of work on basics like sorting algorithms that grew out gov’t research is mind boggling, for instance.
There is a lot of well documented history on this.
Then PCs and halfway decent modems became available (2400 baud+), and things changed very rapidly.
Mid 80’s, BBS’s started sprouting like weeds. There were a few before then, but the truly hobbiest ones were very niche.
Then even more so with commercial services like Prodigy, then AOL, then actual ISPs, etc.
I think the compromise position here is to concentrate on the 1980s, and acknowledge that there was a lot of networking tech going on in academia in the 1970s.
However, in context, what I was trying to convey was that the personal computing revolution took place outside of academia. Generally, that lineage started in the early 1970s, with the homebrew movement, and took off with the Apple II in the United States in 1977. This is also well-documented, but a different branch, and definitely more concerned with the idea of computers as providing autonomy.