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The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech
- yarrel 12y agoI knew of Lovelace and Hopper but not the others by name. I do wonder to what extent this is a socioeconomic class thing.
- jacalata 12y agoWhat do you mean?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kps 12y agoBefore that time, ‘computing’ was considered largely ‘women's work’, along with other clerical tasks like filing and word processing. I'm fond of this photo of a room full of computers, taken sometime between between 1909 and 1932: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90710989/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90710989/
- pbhjpbhj 12y agoThe "computers" being the people, the machines are computing machines - or more likely here, merely calculating machines. At least that's the early usage in the UK.
- calibraxis 12y agoInteresting point! There's one tentative idea that in the 1960-70's, people had the fear that compilers would deskill programming. So you want to protect the profession's wages somehow, like other professionals do. (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-open-source-identity-crisis http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-open-source-identity-...) Regardless of details, it's obviously useful to make your job seem so arcane that only gifted people can do it. Exploiting cultural prejudices, you'd better have white males (maybe "honorary whites"); otherwise it might seem like anyone can do it. For good measure, they should probably be cismale; after all, Turing was basically killed by the government for transgressing gender roles. (That is, his life made unlivable.)
- ripb 12y agoSocial justice clickbait.
- WhitneyLand 12y agoWhat's that supposed to mean? A lot of us want more women in the field whether it's to benefit our daughters or to simply to enjoy the diversity. Research has shown a key way to make this happen is modeling and examples.
- stdwhat 12y ago"A lot of us want more women in the field" [Citation needed]
- dang 12y agoThis comment was killed by user flags.
- kps 12y agoThe piece mentions CHM's Oral History interview with Jean Bartik, which is available here: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658322 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658322 There are a lot of other interesting interviews — http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/
- stdwhat 12y agoCan we have a publication named "The Forgotten Male Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" now?
- sama 12y agothis is from a newly-created troll account from a dorm in the netherlands. please go back to 4chan.
- jonah 12y agoWhile the GP comment is completely inappropriate, I also think it's inappropriate for you to use your power to dox the trolls. Can't their comment stand on it's own demerits and downvotes?
- smtddr 12y agooh geez, "Somebody in Netherlands" is far from doxing. And that Somebody could be using a proxy. So all we know is that this person is human and located on earth... maybe. EDIT: Sama or Dang should should just delete this whole thread. It's going to become a big irrelevant sideshow. It's already the longest thread here.
- jaunkst 12y agoFemales do have a few genetic advantages in theory. They have doubled in the workforce since 2009 and I predict this trend to continue.
- cremno 12y agoWhy do Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper count as forgotten?
- Dewie 12y agoDoesn't seem that way to me, either. She comes up in any discussion about women and programming (in a historical perspective). She even has a programming language named after her. Ada Lovelace is the Marie Curie of computer science - the canonical example of a woman scientist that is brought up any time one is talking about women being ignored in CS, which makes the fact that she is so famous kind of ironic.
- mkr-hn 12y agoI don't know if it counts if they're only wheeled out as token examples when the topic of women in technology comes up.
- was_hellbanned 12y agoI took a trip to ground zero for today's computer revolution, Stanford University, and randomly asked over a dozen students if they knew who were the first computer programmers. Almost none knew. I'm simultaneously horrified and amused at myself because, as I was reading along with the article, I thought to myself, "Linda Lovelace!"
- BigChiefSmokem 12y agoNot sure if you meant to say Linda, but I make this mistake all the time too!
- sbilstein 12y agoMy high school CS teacher taught us about Grace Hopper. He had been a nuclear engineer for the Navy in the sixties and seventies if I remember correctly, so he seemed to really enjoy surprising the largely male class (and encouraging the female students to stick around) that a woman had invented Cobol. I'm pretty sure the first time I heard about Ada Lovelace was from the Boy Scout Computers Merit Badge book when I was 14. Ironic, given that organizations reputation as of late. I don't really recall any college courses really focusing on the history of technological development unless it was particularly relevant, except maybe grad level courses in which we read historical research papers.
- HillRat 12y agoTo me, the saddest part of this is that there are plenty of high-caliber female computer scientists out there right now -- Denning, Liskov and Wing, Hamilton (computer science and the Apollo program!), Greif, and many others. On a more prosaic and less-theoretical level, I recall that my copy of A Quarter-Century of Unix showed that women were key developers in many parts of that OS. But, of course, those were more elegant applications for a more civilized age.
- sbilstein 12y agoIt's pretty silly that although a common (and fallacious) argument against women as software engineers has something to do with math ability when a casual look at the wikipedia list on Women in computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing) mostly lists women with theory and systems programming, which are arguably a lot more mathy than most work in tech. The ACM even had it's first female president in 1974!
- tzs 12y agoI'd be interested in how many people do not know Ada Lovelace but do know Charles Babbage.
- vladsanchez 12y agoMay be forgotten now, but when I went to college in the 80's and 90's, Babbage and Lovelace were all referred in the intro courses as the fathers of computing...
- olado 12y agoWalter Isaacson has created a playlist for his book, and has a personal video post on the female programmers here: http://milq.com/bead/great-digital-innovations?sort=recent http://milq.com/bead/great-digital-innovations?sort=recent The playlist is a collaborative; where Walter asks the community to provide the top digital innovations: "I've just written a book, The Innovators, about how a group of inventors, hackers, geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution. I thought this Bead might be a great way for us to share examples of great innovations around the development of computers and the Internet and the stories behind them."
- WBrentWilliams 12y agoI was taken more by the lack of historical grounding of the students in the story. Then I remembered two things: 1) The journalist probably didn't have dig hard, but could easily have cherry-picked a fun interaction for story color. 2) Most history is taught as iconoclasm until the college level, leaving most college students with just a vauge idea of how events happened and why. I think it more important to show that women have always been part of computing and that they, traditionally, did not get the desired work. They got the parts the men did not want. The "lack" of women in Computer Science then becomes a challenge: Can you highlight and surpass the work of the un-sung who came before?
- fredo699 12y agoPlease never talk about politics, HN.
- CmonDev 12y agoForgotten? This is the fifth time this year alone I am reading about both (Hopper is a bit overrated and part of military propaganda). Besides how could someone who knows about Babbage wouldn't know about Lovelace?
- cafard 12y agoThere are two questions here: forgotten by whom, and forgotten compared to whom? I have to say that Ms. Bartik's name rang no bells. But Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper are not at all unknown. Nor are a number of other women in the field, some of whose names are mentioned in other comments. Next, how would Grace Hopper do on a name recognition quiz versus John Backus, Adriann Van Wijngaarden (whose first name & double-a I had to look up), or John McCarthy? Remember, I'm talking about the general public, not the HN gang. As for Ada Lovelace, she greatly expanded on a description of Babbage's Analytic Engine, and added the algorithm, but how many of us can name the Italian engineer's description that she started from? I sure can't, without looking it up.