Book review, “Man and the Computer”

By R. S. Doiel, 2025-02-10

Open Library has a wonderful collection of classic Computer related texts. This is a review of one of them. “Man and the Computer” was written by John G. Kemeny and published in 1972. The book covers the evolution of the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS) and BASIC¹.

It is an interesting weekend read. You can read the text at Open Library. The book is short (160 pages or so). It is written for casual reading like a talk given to a small group.

The first part goes into the innovations that resulted for the undergraduate students who used, developed and extended the systems. The later part of the book covers what the implications of the system had been by the 1970s and what it suggestions for the future through 1990. Given that the book was written before DARPAnet, before Internet and before “Personal Computers” a surprising amount of the Kemeny’s predictions were on target and remaining relevant today. He anticipated Open Access and Cloud Computing and the benefits the were possible. My take away is it is a charming reflection of where computing was at for Dartmouth and its alumni in the start of the 1970s.

Stepping back to a bigger picture of computing in the 1960s and 1970s the book does have blind spots. This is not surprising because the communications were so much more restrictive before the Internet in terms of technical exchange in computing. It is no wonder that there is but one line that mentions the innovations in time-sharing that occurred at RAND with the Johniac Open Shop System (aka. JOSS-1, JOSS-2). They system have some parallels with the early DTSS/BASIC incarnations and may have preceded by as much as a few years². JOSS lead to other systems like CAL, PIL/I, FOCAL and MUMPs. The later, like JOSS, bare similarities to what would be developed at Dartmouth in the form of BASIC.

It is quite reasonable for this text to the have these blind spots. First it was not intended to be a history of computing (see the Preface of the book) but rather a high level look at what the promise was for people who could work interactively with a computer. I feel it gives insights into the early era where computing access was rapidly increasing and the sense of promise that carried. Well worth the reading time if you’re a hobbyist or arm chair computer history buff.