So much of what passes as public discourse about “the history of technology” is false. Most people in the field know it’s false, but there’s not much they can do about it.
When you tell anyone in the press something you know to be true about that history, but which is generally at odds with the prevailing “story”, you can be pretty certain that what you say will not be reported. If you are speaking to a reporter on the phone, what you say will not make it into the article. If you are doing a television interview, those parts will get edited out. Believe me, I’ve been through it many times.
I don’t think that this is because reporters are trying to not be truthful. It’s more that they don’t think it is their responsibility to correct incorrect history. It’s simply not something they think of as part of their mandate.
Which is why it was wonderful today to seew Brenda Laurel get up in front of a group of young people at the Weird Reality conference and give an accurate history of the relationship between interactive narrative and evolving media technology.
She didn’t say anything that would be controversial to someone who actually knows the true history of this stuff. But many of the things she said would not have been heard before by the young people in the audience, if they had heard only the conventional wisdom — the version that “everybody knows”.
Some of those young people, noticing the disparities between what Brenda said and what they thought they knew, might even look it up afterward and realize that her accounting of that history was accurate. That would be nice.
Along similar lines, I thoroughly enjoyed the book “Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution”. It’s amazing how many innovations (personal computers, local area networking, the original Intel processor architecture) came from this obscure company.