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Code Nation explores the social, technical, and commercial changes that took place in the U.S. as computer programming became a regular part of life for so many. The trials and triumphs of PC programmers are featured on these pages, as well as the negative consequences that came to people who were denied the opportunity to code based on their location, gender, ethnicity, or economic circumstances. My emphasis is not on high-tech leadership strategies or the tactics that generated corporate wealth, but on the stories of lesser-known programmers, authors, academics, and entrepreneurs. Some were successful, and some have been mostly forgotten. But this is itself a lesson in the history of innovation, business, and technology.

To tell this tale, Code Nation presents a new history of personal computing in the U.S. I present a detailed analysis of early computer platforms, a discussion of important compilers and development tools, a “behind-the-scenes” look at application and operating-system programming, the origins of corporate and Enterprise computing “enterprise” computing strategies, the rise of user’s guides and computer books, and early attempts to market and sell PC software. Writing a fresh history of personal computing involves significant challenges, in part because the most recent storytelling emphasizes the roles that famous “pioneers” and “founders” have played in narratives about Silicon Valley, the Greater Boston area, and the Pacific Northwest. There has been no shortage of popular books about Apple Computer, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook—usually emphasizing the rise of the stereotypical “computer nerds” to positions of wealth and influence in the companies that benefited from personal computing and Internet-based technologies.¹⁶

It is often difficult to move beyond these perspectives because of a curious lack of sources that document early personal computing and its broader impact on American society. Most of the earliest PC hardware and software companies have merged or gone out of business, leaving little in the way of historical materials to study. IBM is a noteworthy exception to this trend, recently releasing some of its materials to historians of computing.¹⁷ But Apple Computer’s corporate records have been carefully edited by their legal teams and are only partially available. Microsoft has also been reluctant to open its corporate archives to scholars and the general public. Beyond the personal narratives of former employees and product enthusiasts, how are historians to study the history of personal computing? What sources can we use to understand how corporate identities were shaped, hardware and software products were created, and whether computing initiatives succeeded or failed? Just as important, how did the users of PCs experience new products and come to understand their features? Can we assess how regular people accepted, accommodated, or rejected the plans and proposals of industry elites?

Code Nation proposes a publication-centered way of examining the early history of microcomputing and personal computing, from experiments with time-sharing systems, to the mail-order kits of early enthusiasts, to book and magazine publications for platforms like MS-DOS MS-DOS, the Apple Macintosh (Mac OS) Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows, and Unix/Xenix Unix/Xenix. I evaluate the history of personal computing using hundreds of programming primers, textbooks, manuals, magazines, user’s guides, and trade show catalogs from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. These neglected sources have allowed me to explore the challenges presented by the first PC systems, the content of computer literacy debates, the methodology of early programming primers, the strategies of successful (and unsuccessful) entrepreneurs and corporations, and the way that computing has impacted the daily life of Americans. To support this analysis, I include technical descriptions of hardware and software systems, code snippets from historic programming languages, the biographies of little-known programmers and entrepreneurs, and a product-based assessment of early hardware and software systems. I also present over 80 historic photographs selected from relevant archives, museums, corporations, and private collections.

I have learned that printed materials related to computers and software—once a common feature of many offices, homes, and schools—have been discarded at an alarming rate. When discussing the issue of “disappearing sources” with a local college librarian, I learned that older computer books and magazines are especially vulnerable to being categorized as ephemera, or transitory sources of information about outdated methods or technologies. (See Figure 1.7.) With new computer books and periodicals arriving on a monthly basis, and shrinking budgets, how important is it to maintain an historic collection of Formula translation (FORTRAN) FORTRAN, BASIC, and C primers? Especially in locations where shelf space is at a premium? My source’s questions are legitimate, of course. But the comment points out how vulnerable technical sources are to abandonment. “Often, they are simply recycled,” my informant conceded.

But, if we cannot study issues like computer literacy in the past, how can we hope to evaluate it in the present?

For the purpose of this study, I was able to find many older computer books and periodicals in private collections, as well as the technical libraries of larger public universities. For example, I have spent many weeks in the engineering library at the University of Washington in Seattle, which has a good collection. I also found many books, newsletters, and software packages in the Computer History Museum in Fremont, California. But like the chapbooks and “street literature” of earlier eras, historic computer books and materials can easily be lost if historians are not sensitive to the many treasures that they contain. In particular, they reveal the teaching strategies used to introduce new technical systems, and the opinions and practices of regular people who are learning new technologies. I hope that this publication-centered approach will be of interest to future historians of computing. There are still many fascinating sources that slumber in our nation’s technical collections.

Figure 1.7The title page of Thom Hogan’s Osborne CP/M User GuideCP/M. Published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill in 1981, this book was one of the most important operating system primers of the microcomputer era. Like many older computer publications, however, it has been widely discarded by libraries. (Photo courtesy of Michael Halvorson)

I begin Code Nation with a comparative analysis that examines computing in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizing the era’s sense of crisis about how software was being created and its multilayered hopes for renewal. My survey presents four overlapping computing mythologies, each representing a different aspect of the period’s professional, cultural, and technical traditions. These narratives introduce early advocates for software engineering practices, countercultural idealists who promoted widespread access to tools, creative scholars from the emerging discipline of computer science, and the designers of the first personal computers. In the 1980s and 1990s, American programmers drew on many of these motifs, creating a worldview that bundled hopes, anxieties, and dreams about the new platforms.

1.Ted Nelson, Computer Lib Dream Machines (Self-published, 1974; Microsoft Press revised edition, 1987), 40.

2.See Computerization Movements and Technology Diffusion: From Mainframes to Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Margaret S. Elliott and Kenneth L. Kraemer (Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc., 2008).

3.For a discussion of the phases that take place when a new consumer technology is introduced, see Joseph J. Corn, User Unfriendly: Consumer Struggles with Personal Technologies, from Clocks and Sewing Machines to Cars and Computers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Also useful is Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and the essay collection Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, eds. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994).

4.See Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

5.Nelson, Computer Lib, 43.

6.Clive Thompson, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 11.

7.Georg Simmel first developed the idea of Cross-cutting social circles “cross-cutting social circles” to discuss how different groups meet at points of common interest, dispute, or compromise. See Georg Simmel, Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations, trans. Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix, respectively (Glencoe, IL, 1955, original Berlin, 1908). For additional studies in the history of technology that have influenced my approach, see Joseph J. Corn, ed., Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology, and the American Future (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986); David E. Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997); Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, “The shoulders we stand on and the view from here: Historiography and directions for research,” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 9–30; David E. Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998); Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Greg Downey, “Commentary: The Place of Labor in the History of Information-Technology Revolutions,” in Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1750–2000 (International Review of Social History), vol. 38 Supplement 11 (2003), 225–261; Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); and Christopher Tozzi, For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017).

8.Steve Lohr, Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists, and Iconoclasts—The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 6–7.

9.International Data Corporation, 2014 Worldwide Software Developer and ICT-Skilled Worker Estimates (Framingham, MA: International Data Corporation, 2014).

10.Jane Margolis, Rachel Estrella, Joanna Goode, Jennifer Jellison Holme, and Kimberly Nao, Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, Updated Edition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017). See also J. Margolis, J. Goode, and K. Binning, “Exploring computer science: active learning for broadening participation in computing,” Computing Research News 27, no. 9 (October 2015).

11.Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke, Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016).

12.See “Code.org 2018 Annual Report,” February 12, 2019, 3. https://code.org/files/annual-report-2018.pdf. Accessed August 9, 2019.

13.For a summary of the current concerns and priorities in the computational literacy field, see Emmanuel Schanzer, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Kathi Fisler, “Education: what does it mean for a computing curriculum to succeed?” Communications of the ACM 62, no. 5 (2019): 30–32.

14.Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill, Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1951).

15.Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 68–69, 94–100.

16.An example of this work is Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014). An intriguing new approach is Margaret O’Mara’s history of Silicon Valley, which connects the technical and business development of the region to local and national politics. See Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).

17.See James W. Cortada, IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), especially chapter 14. Cortada was well positioned to write this history because he is a former IBM employee as well as a professional historian.