From lettuce@ctrl-c.club Tue Aug 20 12:12:00 2024
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2024 12:12:00 -0500 (CDT)
From: lettuce@ctrl-c.club
To: loghead@ctrl-c.club
Subject: ZINE contribution

Hi Loghead, here's my summary of the book club discussion on A People's
History of Computing in the United States for submission to the ZINE.

Thanks,
~lettuce


This summer on Ctrl-c's iris message board we tried out a first experiment with a "book club" discussion thread (in thread 423). This article is a summary of the Book Club discussion idea and some responses.

The book I proposed we read is A People's History of Computing in the United States, by Joy Lisi Rankin, published by Harvard Press in 2018. The book would be of interest to anyone participating in Tilde computing. I kicked things off in the discussion with some summary and questions posed, and let potential participants in the discussion know that while the book was a great read, it was not necessary to read it to be involved in discussion.

The book in the introduction sets itself up as a counter to the "great man" theory of computing, which I'll summarize as "First there was the military building computers and funding labs. Then there was Bill Gates. Then there was Steve Jobs. Then there was Mark Zuckerberg..." Instead, it tells of the communities of people building their own alternate computing systems.

In Chapter 1, "When Students Taught the Computer", it describes the late 1950s to early 1960s period at Dartmouth when Professor Tom Kurtz had an ambitious idea that all students taking basic Intro Mathematics at the university, which is part of the general required curriculum, should receive basic instruction to working with computers in their class. And all should be given access to computers to use. And all of this without having to submit programs as punch paper, or sent (on paper) to others, the "elites" who would do the actual physical computing and send the results back days or weeks later after running it for the students. Of course, one problem was lack of computers. So they started fundraising. Then Kurtz learned about timesharing. A single computer could have lots of terminals connected to it. The timesharing computer had software that split up its cycles, allowing multiple programs to run by different users simultaneously all wired in to the same computer. Kurtz decided to build such a system, but one thing was of utmost importance to him...

> "Kurtz instructed his programmers [of the time-sharing system], 'In all cases where there is a choice between simplicity and efficiency, simplicity is chosen. Every effort will be made to design a system convenient for the user. But maximizing the time that the 235 [computer] is used is NOT one of the goals.' Kemeny and Kurtz demonstrated their commitment to users in their memo outlining the time-sharing system. Rather than starting with an explanation of the computer processes involved, they explained time-sharing from the user's point of view - how a user accessed the machine, the commands entered by the user, and how the user exited the system. Only after that description did they detail the computer processes connecting the teletypewriters, the Datanet-30, and the GE- 225 computer. The prioritization of ease of use extended to BASIC. Kemeny worked to write a language that could be learned in layers: once a student had mastered a beginner's level, with which he could still write powerful programs, he could supplement his skills with additional commands and programming techniques, but nowhere along the way would his advanced techniques detract from ease of use for the beginners. These values of widespread use, user convenience, and a privileged position for BASIC - the values of individualized interactive computing -became embedded in the system." (pages 29-30)

As a starting point for discussion, I posed the prompt: we have a shared timesharing (Linux) computer that we all use and operate together. How or where in our computer/tilde/ctrl-c community do we have an environment "convenient for the user?"

I was also wondering how are we or how could we emulate the scaffolding described above about BASIC? What are the beginner-level introductions that are provided for newbies to learn the most basic skills, such as navigating the file system, accessing email, participating in the iris message board, using IRC chat, creating and editing text files, and anything else that would be helpful to know at the beginning? How do we provide a basic knowledge of these things and then a pathway to learning more? Finally, I posed the question: "Are we embedding our values in this computer system?"

I started the discussion by providing some of my own responses, first to the latter questions. I think in some ways we provide some intro pathways, with the Message of the Day (MOTD), and generally with the overall activity of the community on iris/IRC/CTRL zine, but we may be missing some opportunity of welcoming folks by leaving out a handbook, introduction experience and instead expecting folks to just find a Linux book or tutorial to get started. I think a lot of learning MORE works really well by creating a space for folks to ask and answer questions here in our beloved iris. But for example, when we've tried to restart a wiki, that didn't jumpstart as quickly. Even the idea of providing an introductory welcome text file or mini intro handbook could be a good way to let beginners know they are welcome and how to participate. Coming back to the text I posted above: I think this is because there may not be an obvious way for us to provide an introduction to beginners on a Linux system, and I was wondering folks' thoughts on that.

Stated differently (or in addition): where does our computer system emphasize simplicity and "convenience for the user" over and above "efficiency" of the system?

Lots of folks participated in the discussion. Rather than reprint the thread directly I'm going to summarize some of the responses.

One of the discussion points was on the Message of the Day providing a reminder of the `newstuff` program that lets you know the most recent webpage, gemini pages and iris messages posted. So many programs or options are hidden in the command line, hard to discover in the Bash shell, so potentially a beginner-shell could have a menu system with some common options such as starting a bash shell, starting iris, starting IRC with an easy client, launching the nano editor, viewing the wiki, or disconnecting.

There was a mention that a mini-handbook could be a nice addition, and that directing new users to iris specifically is a great approach as it acts like the "local greasy spoon diner that's been there forever."

Some of the discussion participants are professors and talked about the distance between that early computing era and today, and a fear that today's students eyes may glaze over when presented with low-level computing or the command line. Some responses to this discussed showing utility before showing the underlying system, and motivating students' desire to learn by including games (such as the original BASIC games books/programs) or programs like bashcrawl which teach the user basic Linux commands through playing a simple text adventure.

Some other shared ideas included creating a section in Ctrl Zine with little tutorials or tips and tricks for beginners.

Finally in the discussion several folks pointed out an idea from Chapter 1 of the book of computer access as akin to library access. "I'm a big fan of public libraries, and so this really lands with me," said ~nttp. Finally, ~pgadey posed the question "If public access computing is like open stack library access, then whas is a membership of a pubnix like ctrl-c.club?"

And that was our first book club discussion on iris. Thanks to the Ctrl-C community for trying out this experiment, and particular thanks to ~kiseratu, ~nttp, ~pgadey, ~loghead for your contributions to the conversation.