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My 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
by sbilstein 12y ago
My 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!