alt.hn

7/29/2026 at 10:53:44 PM

Man and the Computer by John G. Kemeny (1972 book by the co-creator of BASIC)

 https://archive.org/details/mancomputerbyjoh0000john

by MilnerRoute

7/30/2026 at 12:15:50 AM

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 EvanAnderson

7/30/2026 at 12:14:30 AM

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 olooney

7/30/2026 at 1:09:58 AM

Everyone in Silly Valley needs to read chapter 5 ASAP.

by dajt

7/30/2026 at 3:37:26 AM

I skimmed it, many quotable stuff[1], fascinating:

"Symbiote or Parasite?

The Popular Reaction to Computers

Most people would concede that computers are strange new entities that have a significant impact on human life. However, I would suspect that most of them would classify the species of computer as a harmful partner rather than as a symbiote. Why has popular reaction to computers been so negative?"

----

"Next there is the common human fear that massive computers will be "Big Brother watching us." Indeed, there are a number of deep legal and moral questions concerning invasion of privacy, but I will not attempt to discuss these in this book.1 It is important to remember, however, that computers do only what they are told to do. If governments and big businesses are allowed to invade our privacy, it is our own fault for allowing them"

----

"A great deal of work has gone on, under the general title of "artificial intelligence," to try to teach a higher form of intelligence to computers. The decade of the 1960s showed that this task is vastly more difficult than some of the proponents of artificial intelligence had guessed. Although there have been a number of notable successes, in many cases the human effort to teach the computer has turned out to be' horrendous, and the amount of labor required for a computer to simulate human intelligence is discouragingly great. Often it reaches a point at which the effort is simply not worthwhile."

----

"On the other hand, it makes no sense for human beings to spend several days teaching a computer a task that a human being could do himself in an hour. In the present state of the art most of the attempts to teach higher intelligence to computers come under this heading. However, this rule has a clear-cut exception: if there is a task that human beings have to carry out over and over again, it may well be worthwhile instead to spend several days teaching a computer how to do it. It is also worthwhile to invest considerable effort in developing "artificial intelligence" in computers in the hope of possible future payoffs."

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4acfam7ybm4rtqrjpuss5hyb/po...

by sedatk

7/30/2026 at 3:58:58 AM

The guy below downvoted for insulting SV and saying "read chapter 5" is correct: Read Chapter 5, the "Symbiote or Parasite" one you've partially quoted here. It's a real banger.

Read it both in the context of the time, the early 16-bit 70s when retail store what-we'd-call-ERPs were bleeding edge technology, and then in the context of today where the actualities are different but the realities are still there.

Don't let the computer take the blame.

by McGlockenshire

7/29/2026 at 11:15:17 PM

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

by TMWNN

7/30/2026 at 1:06:58 AM

>[1] No, PLATO was never nearly so widespread

Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture"

The wikipedia page has some overview info on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

In terms of usage, there aren't many stats, but I saw this: "The CERL PLATO system logged 10 million hours of use between September, 1978 and May, 1985 (a period for which the most complete statistics are available).

https://liz.nl/plato18.htm

by opo

7/30/2026 at 1:17:51 AM

> Plato often gets overlooked, but it was highly influential. A well written book on it is: "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture"

Quoting myself from 2023, in a discussion of computer history books:<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35405385>

>The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO. Not because PLATO was super-influential on the later industry—far from it, with only minor exceptions—but that doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve examination.

by TMWNN

7/30/2026 at 1:03:02 AM

Dartmouth had remarkably democratized access to computers (which I mostly used for word processing with some exceptions both for tech and fun purposes). Funnily enough an engineering school I also attended in the Northeast, while I did take a FORTRAN course there, had far less easy access to computer resources unless you were in the EE/CS school or had some other specific academic purpose.

by ghaff

7/30/2026 at 1:08:43 AM

Yes, Athena was a bit after my time. I did take FORTRAN using keypunches and the card reader at the joint computer facility (I was mechanical engineering). And I think VAXs were just coming in shortly after. But attending Dartmouth for grad school, you just had a computer account with no real limits, within reason.

by ghaff

7/30/2026 at 7:40:51 AM

I wonder how many big 5 - world leaders today know how to use a computer.

by MiroslavPokorny

7/30/2026 at 7:04:46 AM

[flagged]

by runtime_lens