Racist UNIX?
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 McPherson argued, “…given that competing modes of computation were still quite viable until the 1960s” (151). Misses the point. Perhaps they were, but the point is the idea of modularity and simplicity was clearly superior to what came before it. It’s easy to forget that computers in this time were severely resource constrained. RAM was typically measured in bytes, and storage was in kilobytes. The ideas of modularity and reuse formed from the limitations of computing of its time. When considering the public knowledge of how mainframe computing systems worked and the limited availability of them probably didn’t lead to someone in politics or city planning to read an ACM article on UNIX and say “hey we can use these ideas to keep those troublemaking black people in place. “
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 I had a hard time following the logic of how race and UNIX are deeply intertwined. Perhaps it’s because my major is computer science, not the humanities. I can see the parallels that McPherson points out on p. 141 but I have a hard time seeing any causality.
You make a very good point here about the unlikelihood of a person in politics using information within UNIX to create laws related to race. And what you said about public knowledge of mainframe computing systems being quite limited, still holds true today, I think. And while the use of computing systems help us utilize technology more efficiently, it does little to make any advocating points against racism.
Your first sentence here is an incomplete sentence: to me, this indicates that you ought to put a little more time and thought into contextualizing McPherson’s writing and claims. For example, this quotation does not contain a clear argument, yet you use the word “argues” in setting it up. What, exactly, is the “claim” that you see McPherson making here? And what is the significance of that claim? What evidence does she use to bolster it? (If none, that itself is an open invitation for critique, of course).