so I just started listening to A People's History of Computing, which I'm sure will be a good book, but which opens with some very irritating paragraphs
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
ok its THREAD TIME! let's talk the first few paragraphs of A People's of Computing!
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
so the book starts by talking about time share systems, and it insists that time share systems were networked. it even says "and make no mistake, they were networked"
which is just on the face of it actually false and wrong
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
the point that's trying to be made is that these time share systems in question -- PLATO, the Dartmouth system, something in Minnesota -- all enabled _social_ interactions, and social networks were massively important, and the literal networking isn't all that matters
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
before I continue, I want to actually say that this book is 100% going to be a GREAT book, and I am deeply inspired by PLATO specifically, and it feels like the predecessor to Star Trek's LCARS
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
but we need an honest appraisal of these systems, and that's why I think this book's framing of these systems as """networked""", and its initial critical framing of the personal computer revolution, are actually kind of tricky
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
there's a number of journalists and critics of the SV narrative that similarly dislike the individualist cyber-libertarianism of the standard narrative, and critical views are good, but we have to not let our good sense get railroaded here
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
so ok why do I have an issue with the mislabeling of these systems as networked
i mean on the one hand its because of the narrow technical reason, but im often amenable to expansive notions
so why not here?
b/c the _technical_ issue is actually deeply related to the POLITICAL!
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
the PC revolution was deeply hostile to time sharing systems as a whole because they historically meant centralized control of the computer. the archetypal form of this control was the batch processed mode of use where you'd give your punch cards to some operators who would..
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
..then run it on the machine, but even the terminal time-shared systems, including PLATO, were still deeply centralized, and the PC revolutionaries were hostile to that too
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a lot of this hostility came from the limits that this entailed for people's access to the computer
not just the literal access, where you would have to have a terminal wired up to connect to the remote computer, which typically meant terminals in computing centers not your home
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
it also meant in the more abstract sense of being able to get your hands on the computer itself to poke at it, to learn about it, modify it, etc.
time shared computers were not for tinkering, experimenting, and learning, not even PLATO
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
these time sharing systems were tools, and the administrators of them definitely did NOT want people fucking with them in unauthorized ways
you had more _time_ access but it still wasn't YOURS to do with and play with as you pleased
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
this is the classic hostility that the PC revolutionaries had in the early to mid 1970s
but there's another hostility that ought to have existed latently amongst the users of the _social_ time sharing systems specifically: hostility towards government oppression and censorship
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
now this is one of those things that the critics of cyberlibertarianism will roll their eyes at, but this is, as always, a completely dopey response
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
PLATO is an extremely good example of this, in fact, because government censorship was a REAL problem with PLATO at one point
in the early 1970s, during Nixon's political troubles, there were lots of rich conversations happening on PLATO about Nixon specifically
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and at one point, some people were organizing a political rally on PLATO to support impeachment or something to this effect
Nixon heard about this, and because PLATO had federal funding, was able to threaten PLATO and get them to ban that conversation and all future ones like it
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
this is not a hypothetical bogeyman of government censorship, this is one of the most corrupt presidents DOING censorship because the system was partially government funded and therefore could not be associated with partisan organizing, etc.
this is a textbook case of censorship
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
and the thing is, this actually isn't all that unusual, when you think about it
those of us who are old enough to have grown up with computers in school prior to the widespread ownership of laptops and smart phones kids have today since birth have intimate knowledge of this
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tranny demon hackerreplied to tranny demon hacker last edited by
millennials, and maybe some gen x folx, are VERY aware of the risks of government censorship of computer systems because some of the first actual computer censorship we encounter comes directly from governments in school
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schools, at the direction of the local school board, often install very conservative censorship programs onto school computers and networks, generally banning all sorts of things but importantly banning searches for queer issues, abortion, and so forth