
The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech - jcater
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/345799830/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech
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kps
The 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/)

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sbilstein
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.

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HillRat
To 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
It'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!

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cremno
Why do Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper count as forgotten?

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Dewie
Doesn'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
I don't know if it counts if they're only wheeled out as token examples when
the topic of women in technology comes up.

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cafard
There 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.

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olado
Walter 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."

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WBrentWilliams
I 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?

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yarrel
I knew of Lovelace and Hopper but not the others by name.

I do wonder to what extent this is a socioeconomic class thing.

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kps
Before 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
The "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.

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tzs
I'd be interested in how many people do not know Ada Lovelace but do know
Charles Babbage.

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CmonDev
Forgotten? 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?

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was_hellbanned
_I 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
Not sure if you meant to say Linda, but I make this mistake all the time too!

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fredo699
Please never talk about politics, HN.

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stdwhat
Can we have a publication named "The Forgotten Male Programmers Who Created
Modern Tech" now?

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sama
this is from a newly-created troll account from a dorm in the netherlands.
please go back to 4chan.

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jonah
While 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?

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calibraxis
With people like Kathy Sierra pushed off Twitter, Kevin Mitnick threatening
the job of a woman who stood up for her... And the high-profile guy who
previously attacked Kathy coming out as a Nazi... Such harassers should be
dealt with aggressively. (Deleted ASAP would be great.)

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cremno
That's kinda funny of you mentioning the “high-profile guy”, because he wrote
the following post not long ago, which mentions some lesser known women in
tech than this article does:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2hoffe/weev_stop_bash...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2hoffe/weev_stop_bashing_bash_and_gnu/ckv5rtj?context=3)

