

When Women Stopped Coding - sarahkpeck
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding

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jleyank
There is sense in this. In ancient times, to hack one had to be where the iron
was. This resulted in clumps of people with shared interests who had to be
somewhat social to maximize the hacking. Given a vaguely even gender split,
there was even "traditional social interaction" available - one had to pass
the time waiting for the card deck/printout back or for a terminal to open up.

Once computing became personal, the need for such grouping declined. It wasn't
because the PC's were more powerful, as they weren't. They were merely more
convenient, nobody controlled access, nobody chewed your ass when they
crashed, etc. Whatever social skills which were maintained with F2F and
limited resources atrophied as neither situations remained. There was also
less of a need to maintain a real persona as it was harder to spot posers or
assholes at 300 baud.

Thus, if anybody was into the social aspect of computing, or reveled in multi-
person/large projects, the shift to microprocessors was a horrible thing.
Until the FOSS movement reappeared, there was little such people could gain
from the network. They could take their skills off to other areas where
collaboration was (still) the norm and get a better buzz.

What was left was those who wanted to bend the iron to their will, and to do
it solo. If UUNet had followed closely this might have been delayed long
enough for multi person projects to be multi-site, but they had to think it up
first. And man, were phone rates high before MCI.

While we've gained from the output of high-skill people who were uncomfortable
in groups (they can be rock stars), we've lost the glue that held the
community together. For me, there were 10-20 people who I saw every time I
hacked. And usually there were 2-3 of them I was working with (Life, Chess,
whatever). Read Levy's Hackers then compare it to Wargames, as they capture
the feel of the two communities (at least in my mind).

tl;dr, maybe, but I would have preferred the network to have proceeded the
mips/mflops...

------
sarahkpeck
"The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same
moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant
numbers."

