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
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.
A brief chronology of the extended mind thesis:
* 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...
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
Comments like yours is the main reason I read HN.