Joy Marie Lisi Rankin, a doctoral candidate in History at Yale University, is the Charles Babbage Institute’s 2013-2014 Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellow.   Ms. Rankin has an AB from Dartmouth College, and a MA in Liberal Studies from Duke University. She has presented at the History of Science Society, at a number of other prestigious conferences, and has received numerous honors, including the 2012-2013 IEEE Life Members’ Fellowship in History and the Yale University Sheffield Scholarship.

In her dissertation, “Personal Computing before Personal Computers,” Rankin argues that students and educators created personal computing as a set of behaviors, practices, and techniques on academic time-sharing systems during the 1960s and 1970s, namely, the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, the University of Illinois PLATO System, and several education-centered projects across the state of Minnesota, including the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC).  The users of these systems popularized the now-ubiquitous activity of sitting in front of a keyboard, typing, and responding to messages appearing on a text-oriented display, and they fostered communities of computing enthusiasts. Rankin employs the phrase “personal computing” not to suggest that time-sharing was merely a step along the way in the development of personal computers; instead, one goal of her project is to recover the deep and multifaceted history of time-sharing on its own terms, rather than as a forerunner to personal computers. Rankin’s dissertation draws attention to the important but little studied area of the history of technology in education. In the case of interactive computing, students and educators were some of the earliest groups of users, and they developed complex systems around time-sharing. Viewed in this light, the classroom becomes a rich site of inquiry, where students, educators, parents, corporations, devices, and hopes and fears about education and computing all meet.