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A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019)
- HenryBemis 3y agoTo those who haven't visited the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA), it is SO AMAZING!!! If you ever happen to be in the US/California, go spend a few hours in there. It is a wonderful place!
- bitwize 3y agoFrickin' love the CHM. My only complaint is they have only a few live specimens. But keeping those old beasts working is a challenge in and of itself.
- timcederman 3y agoI highly recommend following Ken Shirriff on Twitter, some great threads on the work he does to keep machines running at the Computer History Museum. https://twitter.com/kenshirriff https://twitter.com/kenshirriff
- mattbee 3y agoI really enjoyed my visit with my (then) 4yo son, but I agree. It's warmingly reverential but almost everything is behind glass. They're computers, they're machines, they can do amazing things just with a screen! The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (UK) explains as you go in that says unless there's a sign, you can play with anything you see. There's clearly an expert for each machine, so they are set up with who has games, word processors, educational software, a banking back-office (??), typewriters... so much more exciting. The star exhibit is the megaprocessor https://www.megaprocessor.com/progress.html https://www.megaprocessor.com/progress.html - which has Tetris hooked up.
- peteri 3y agoAlso https://www.rmcretro.com https://www.rmcretro.com which is very hands on.
- WoodenChair 3y agoWe did a podcast episode about her autobiography “Let It Go”: https://pnc.st/s/business-books/f3cc494478a544f6/let-it-go-by-stephanie-shirley https://pnc.st/s/business-books/f3cc494478a544f6/let-it-go-b...
- mech422 3y agoThis was really cool... I'm dying to know how you did WFH in the 1960s though? That's well before the pc/modem generation ?? I'm tempted to say it was probably still the punch card era ... Did they punch the code onto cards at home, and mail the stacks to the client ?
- saalweachter 3y agoBefore my time, but my understanding is that in ye olden days you'd write out your programs by hand, transcribe it to machine code on punch cards, and then submit the stack of cards for batch processing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mech422 3y agothat's what I was guessing, but I wasn't sure ... I came in a bit after punch cards :-P
- arrowsmith 3y agoMy uncle tells me that this is exactly how he would complete his programming assignments while getting his engineering degree back in the '70s.
- com 3y agoI remember when we could use an HB pencil for optical reader cards - no punch at home necessary!
- hinkley 3y agoMy dad switched into IT in the late 80’s, via community college. So being a community college, they still had a machine that ran on card readers. As I recall they had a machine that took the “scantron” cards and spit out punched ones. And I don’t remember if they had it or I just read about it later, but someone did eventually invent a punchcard sorter. You had to number the cards, and then you could stuff a dropped deck into the machine and it would save your bacon.
- shermantanktop 3y agoShe talks with typical British reserve about doing things that must have taken incredible will and courage. People today often don’t realize just how constrained gender roles were…and still are in some places.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- comprev 3y agoIn some instances the role becomes much harder instead of easier - for example Margaret Thatcher (love her or loathe her!) demonstrated a woman can hold powerful positions in a traditionally male-dominated environment. Liz Truss then took the title of second female PM in UK history and promptly tanked the economy in spectacular fashion! She was beaten by an iceberg lettuce [0] The next female MP who is aiming for the PM role has an enormous uphill battle against them and it could be decades before "the old boys club" vote for a woman. I can't even begin to fathom how difficult it was for "Steve" to battle against the odds. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/iceberg-lettuce-in-blonde-wig-outlasts-liz-truss https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/iceberg-let...
- inejge 3y agoLiz Truss then took the title of second female PM in UK history Theresa May never happened?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0898 3y agoDoes anybody know what the name of her company was?
- sspiff 3y agoIt's named in the article, "Freelance Programmers".
- ikt 3y agothat's funny, I literally thought it was just that, it'd be like a company being called programmers
- defrost 3y agoShirley founded, with a capital of £6, the software company Freelance Programmers, (later F International, then Xansa, since acquired in 2001 by Steria and now part of the Sopra Steria Group). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
- mcv 3y agoThat the gender of names matters in correspondence reminds me of an anecdote I heard about two people, a man and a woman, doing the same job supporting clients or customers of the company. Their boss was unhappy with the woman's performance, because she took much longer to do the same work as the man. Then, one day, the woman suddenly worked much faster and everything went much easier. At the same time, the man had a much harder time and customers were weirdly stubborn and obstructive. Turns out they were accidentally mailing under each other's name: the woman used the man's name, making customers much more willing to accept her expertise, while the man used the woman's name, making customers question everything he said. There's a lot of that kind of subtle sexism in our society that goes way deeper than mere equal rights. How can you possibly control customers taking you seriously or not based on your name? Should all women (and possibly people with non-western names, who can run into similar issues) work under fake names?
- verisimi 3y ago[flagged]
- mcv 3y agoThey're sides of the same coin; both examples of people[0] not taking women seriously, not treating them as equals. The fact that there are cases where women can benefit from this inequality doesn't change the root issue: that a lot of people[0] still don't take women seriously in various ways. But especially having your professionality and expertise questioned constantly in the work you do every day must be extremely tiring and potentially harmful to your career. Does getting out of the occasional traffic ticket really make up for that? Edit: [0] I used to have "men" instead of "people" here, but it's also possible for women to take women less seriously than men in a professional setting. It is in fact also possible to take men less seriously than women in some situations, though that seems to happen more in cases involving raising children. In most professional settings, the common prejudice tends to favour men.
- verisimi 3y agoYou're missing the point of what I'm saying I think. The idea of 'equal' is a false one because things aren't equal, can never be equal. It sounds good to say 'equal' but its just not the way humans are. Neither men nor women are perfect. No individual is perfect. Now you can force and harass people to do this or that.. but what you are doing is making everyone unhappy - people will be unable to act naturally and will never never be themselves. I personally think it is better to to let individuals be natural and a/ allow making of mistakes and b/ allowing for the opportunity of learning from those mistakes. The idea that there is some known perfect state 'equal' is a nonsense - no one knows what this is - we are not gods in fact. Forcing others to adopt such an idea is certainly wrong though - we can say that much. Manipulating others, indoctrinating them will surely make people unhappy - men and women - for who can say what is right for others?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Timwi 3y ago> employed over 8,500 people [...] making millionaires of 70 of her team members. That's less than 1%. So much for “profit-sharing and company co-ownership”. I don't think the author knows what those words mean...
- com 3y agoEmployed over time, and reading between the lines, lots of part-time and probably temporary workers given how they were hiring and the pressures on those women's time. Normally even co-ownership structures have earn-in periods, so this isn't a huge surprise. In a time where only capital-rich folks could invest in businesses (still the norm outside our contemporary VC tech bubble where vesting and cliffs etc are commonplace terms in employment negotiations) this was pretty radical.
- ejb999 3y agoHow many millionaire-employees have you created?
- vidarh 3y agoHad the author presented her as, say, a socialist who started a workers cooperative, that criticism would be justified. But the author did not. It's perfectly valid to talk about "profit-sharing and company co-ownership" even if she didn't share the ownership evenly.
- robaato 3y agoInteresting to note she donated to the purchase of premises for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Information_Technologists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Informat...
- rsingel 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Jun8 3y ago“not only for building a $3 billion tech empire in 1960s England, but for doing it with an all-female, work-from-home staff of professionally qualified women who had left the work force after marrying and having children.” Tangentially, this part brought up an early thought that I had: tapping into a qualified workforce that for some reason got removed from work standard work opportunities. One such large group the one mentioned (at the time in the UK, probably less applicable now). Another one that I usually think about is all the people with high levels of manufacturing expertise that got laid off in the US in the past decades, living in smaller towns. Would it be possible to tap into their knowledge remotely?
- hinkley 3y agoThere was a company maybe about 15 years ago that was looking to design solar panel array structures using automotive construction techniques. They essentially wanted to hire “surplus” autoworkers. I would think these days you’d be looking for the automation people as well.
- ddnb 3y agoInterestingly enough this thought was what made western europe (but various other parts of the world had something similar) transition from the guild system to the centralised factory system, essentially laying the foundation for industrialisation. Basically merchants realized there was a huge workforce outside the cities, families where wives and children had time left. So they purchased and place the worktools and resources with the individual families to later buy back the products they made and resell it in the markets. This was called the putting-out system if you want to look into it more.
- newmana 3y agoVideo from 1979 about F International (Dame Shirley's company) - working from home, as a computer a programmer, is the greatest revolution for working women since the pill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6URa-PTqfA&t=295s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6URa-PTqfA&t=295s