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@mastodon.social! So many other histories of computing I've read leave out exactly who was driving developments and for what ends.