Mostly on 🟦☁️
asst prof of computers + video games @ MCC @ NYU // cohost UNBOXING podcast // The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, out May 2023 // https://linktr.ee/lainenooney
| Location | New York City |
| Pronoun | they/them |
In short, donate before my block at 9 PM ET on Saturday to maximize my confusion and witness the hilarity of me failing on stream to play a game that I've put a couple hundred hours into. (I'll commit to at least Stalker difficulty, maybe Misery or Interloper depending.)
You can donate here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/donations/start/romchip-a-journal-of-game-histories
Superb keynote by @LaineNooney at #INITHELLO now up on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5XVojLWIQo
It's a talk about the historiography of the history of computing, by way of their book "The Apple II Age".
...my secret anxiety... is that we have vastly misunderstood the actual powers at play that have put these technologies on our desks and in our pockets.
...a huge part of what drove the adoption of personal computing were the financial motivations of a small, elite class of people who won so hard that they literally disappear out of the narrative about how computing became personal.
Outstanding stuff.
MicroTimes (1985): "[They] met a couple of years ago at a party ... They became good friends before they started in partnership to produce software." <https://theprintshop.club/2024/07/26/the-people-behind-the-print-shop/>
@LaineNooney, "The Apple II Age" (2023): yeah I interviewed them personally. They were a gay couple. "Both had relocated to the Bay Area ... to explore their nascent identity in what was then a vibrant locus for the gay liberation movement in the United States."
Happy Pride! 🌈
@LaineNooney I'll do that! I've reached the Epilogue and I'm chortling to myself - it's dynamite. I can understand now why your argument must have ruffled the feathers of #retroComputing enthusiasts who aren't accustomed to the perspectives of modern critical history. Bravo. More of this, please.
Advocates for computing, historical and contemporary, must acknowledge and grapple with the forces of capital and power which, past and present, work to make computing omnipresent and unquestionable.
Laine Nooney's"The Apple II Age" is packed full of superb, fresh insights into the character of the forces acting to shape how personal computing came to be defined during the pivotal years between 1977 and 1984.
For example, here are a couple of pages on the compromises teacher and software author Tom Snyder had to make - sacrificing his goal of fostering collaboration and consensus-building among a group of students through exploration - to the neoliberal imperative of isolated individual-as-consumer, in order to render his software legible to the venture-capital-backed MBA types who needed to get a product to market by a hard date.
Bloody brilliant writing. Very insightful on the structures of power and privilege bending how society thinks about what the purpose is of computation cheap enough to be available to an individual.
Thank you @LaineNooney! So many other histories of computing I've read leave out exactly who was driving developments and for what ends.
playing games with @LaineNooney tonight 🙏
https://m.twitch.tv/sierra_offline
~7pm depending on whether or not I can outrun this storm
streaming video games with @LaineNooney tonight! catch us around 7pm!
Kendra Albert
Ben
Amin Girasol
4am ❧
Ramsey Nasser