alt Hacker NewsBy 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
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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.
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.
Comments like yours is the main reason I read HN.
>[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