I got this book as a discard from my public library when I was a young kid, having only ever used standalone computers. The networked future it described re: home computers (which Kemeny characterized as terminals) seemed like fantasy. Later, after PCs decentralized and democratized computing it's references to large centralized computing resources seemed quaint and dated. Now it seems prescient. Personal computing feels like it was a flash in the pan.
By this time Kemeny was the president of Dartmouth. He's surely the first university president in history to have a computer terminal in his office (and at his home).
The terminals were for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time-Sharing_System>, via which a majority of Dartmouth students and faculty were using computers with reasonably friendly, real-time keyboard interfaces (no punch cards needed) to send email, play games, write programs, use educational software, etc. No other university was doing anything like this in the 1960s and 1970s. Not Berkeley, not Illinois,[1] not MIT,[2] not Stanford, not Michigan (despite MTS).
(Kemeny's book only briefly discusses DTSS, in chapter 3, but it is fascinating reading.)
[1] No, PLATO was never nearly so widespread
[2] Until Project Athena in the mid-1980s, most MIT non-Course 6 students graduated without ever touching a computer
Dartmouth had remarkably democratized access to computers (which I mostly used for word processing with some exceptions both for tech and fun purposes). Funnily enough an engineering school I also attended in the Northeast, while I did take a FORTRAN course there, had far less easy access to computer resources unless you were in the EE/CS school or had some other specific academic purpose.
Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture"
In terms of usage, there aren't many stats, but I saw this:
"The CERL PLATO system logged 10 million hours of use between September, 1978 and May, 1985 (a period for which the most complete statistics are available).
> Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture"
>The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO. Not because PLATO was super-influential on the later industry—far from it, with only minor exceptions—but that doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve examination.
Yes, Athena was a bit after my time. I did take FORTRAN using keypunches and the card reader at the joint computer facility (I was mechanical engineering). And I think VAXs were just coming in shortly after. But attending Dartmouth for grad school, you just had a computer account with no real limits, within reason.
* Characteristica universalis, Leibniz (c. 1679) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis
* As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (1945) - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
* Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener (1948) - https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph-pdf/2254528/book_9...
* An Introduction to Cybernetics, Ashby (1956) - https://ashby.info/Ashby-Introduction-to-Cybernetics.pdf
* Man-Computer Symbiosis, J. C. R. Licklider, (1960) - https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
* Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, by Douglas Engelbart (1962) - https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
* Man and the Computer, John G. Kemeny - https://archive.org/details/mancomputerbyjoh0000john
* The Extended Mind Thesis, Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) - https://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/clark-chalmers-1998.p...
* The Dream Machine (2002) - https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...
See also the Wikipedia article on "Intelligence Amplification", which gives a subset of the above list but also provides a great deal of context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification
I have these notes to hand because I've written about it in the context of the deep history of computer science:
https://www.oranlooney.com/post/history-of-computing-2/#appe...
The terminals were for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_Time-Sharing_System>, via which a majority of Dartmouth students and faculty were using computers with reasonably friendly, real-time keyboard interfaces (no punch cards needed) to send email, play games, write programs, use educational software, etc. No other university was doing anything like this in the 1960s and 1970s. Not Berkeley, not Illinois,[1] not MIT,[2] not Stanford, not Michigan (despite MTS).
(Kemeny's book only briefly discusses DTSS, in chapter 3, but it is fascinating reading.)
[1] No, PLATO was never nearly so widespread
[2] Until Project Athena in the mid-1980s, most MIT non-Course 6 students graduated without ever touching a computer
Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture"
The wikipedia page has some overview info on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
In terms of usage, there aren't many stats, but I saw this: "The CERL PLATO system logged 10 million hours of use between September, 1978 and May, 1985 (a period for which the most complete statistics are available).
https://liz.nl/plato18.htm
Quoting myself from 2023, in a discussion of computer history books:<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35405385>
>The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO. Not because PLATO was super-influential on the later industry—far from it, with only minor exceptions—but that doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve examination.