Man and Mainframe at Dartmouth: Liberal Possibilities in Centralized Computing
Shane Lin · 2014
With its abstract message of individuality and freedom in place of any specific product claims, "1984" has far outlived the machine it was made to promote (Apple even resurrected it twenty years later in 2004, cheekily giving the runner a pair of its trademark white iPod headphones).Swift and nimble in spite of her massive payload, the runner became the most potent symbol of the distributed, individual, and personal revolution that swept the computing world over the next decade.With its legion of faceless drones and overbearing Orwellian authority, the ad also helped to cement a contrasting view of mainframe computing as monolithically conformist, strictly hierarchical, and corporate, the very enemy of discordant diversity.This binary has proved remarkably resilient.The dim view of the mainframe echoed fears of earlier decades, of machines become too powerful to the despair of their creators -of HAL 9000 and Colossus and the Strangelovean Doomsday Device.With the dramatic downfall of mainframes and the corresponding ascension of personal computers, "1984" became prophecy, further reinforcing its divergent diptych.Moving forward, it has served as a useful foil for the new heroes of the PC revolution: Cambridge hackers, Menlo Park counterculturalists, and ascendant garage enterprises from Los Altos to Albuquerque.The ideas that they championed became seen not only as PC philosophies that sharply diverged from those of the mainframe, but as inherently and exclusively PC ones.Computing at Dartmouth College, from its establishment in the late 1950s through the height of its mainframe time-sharing system in the 1970s, serves as a compelling counter to this strict dichotomy of PC and mainframe.The BASIC computer language was originally developed for use on Dartmouth mainframes before it became the lingua franca of the landmark 1977 personal computer "Trinity"; in fact, its later use by PCs was a direct consequence of the philosophical objectives of its creators.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-can all be found on the Hanover campus a decade before Lin 4 the rise of the personal computer.In challenging 1984's vision of mainframe computing, these convergences help remind us that although hardware architecture helps shape the contours of its use, it is not destiny.Within the allowances of technical possibility, the individual choices and institutional culture of its designers and users are important determinants to consider. Early Years: 1955 to 1959From its inception, computing at Dartmouth was driven largely by two professors of mathematics, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz.Kemeny had immigrated with his Jewish family to the United States as a teenager, leaving his native Hungary just prior to its entry into World War II.Near the end of the war, he was drafted into the US Army, which happily recognized his mathematical talents and assigned him to Los Alamos.There, Kemeny's work with the Manhattan Project's team of human computers and his acquaintance with fellow Hungarian émigré and computer pioneer John von Neumann would guide his later enthusiasm for digital computation.After the war, Kemeny briefly worked as Albert Einstein's assistant at Princeton, completed his doctoral thesis under Alonzo Church (who earlier helped establish the theoretical foundations of computer science with his contributions to the Church-Turing thesis) in under a year, and was appointed assistant professor of logic in the Philosophy Department at Princeton in 1951.Two years later, on the recommendation of Einstein and von Neumann, Dartmouth College recruited Kemeny by offering him a full professorship and near-total autonomy to completely rebuild its aging and rapidly shrinking mathematics program as departmental chairman.They were unaware when they made the offer that he was only 27 years old.