Man and Mainframe at Dartmouth: Liberal Possibilities inCentralized Computing
2014
Students and faculty at Dartmouth College created a
variety of mainframe computer platforms from the late 1950s through
the 1970s, including the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System and
accompanying BASIC computer language. The goals of these projects
and the means by which they were accomplished weaken the notion of
a cultural dichotomy between PC and mainframe computing. Precedents
to many of the ideological shifts attributed to the later PC
revolution–open access to computing resources, democratization of
information, popularization of computer education, Free
software–could all be found on Dartmouth's Hanover campus a decade
before the rise of the personal computer. Before Cambridge hackers,
Menlo Park counterculturalists, and ascendant garage enterprises
from Los Altos to Albuquerque embraced those same principles,
Dartmouth's professors and student programmers had already embedded
them deep into the systems they designed. In challenging the vision
of mainframe computing as monolithically centralized and strictly
hierarchical, Dartmouth's computing efforts show that the cultural
ideals that fully bloomed with personal computing were not solely
contingent on the technical allowances of hardware
architecture.
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