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.
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.
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) 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!
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.
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.
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."
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?
Interesting 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-...)
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.)
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/
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.
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?
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!"
Hi there. Female Programmer here. Long time reader, long time anonymous poster who's cycled through many a throwaway account. Anonymity and throwaways enabling freedom of discourse are important to me: as a woman, being identified in what is honestly a very insular industry is not something I want to fear when posting about my hobby & profession online. I know that I'm not alone in those feelings: there is a reason our community tends to rally behind those fighting Real Name Policies and doxxing. HN has, I thought, always been a relatively safe space for all.
Sama: what you've just done, in your post above, will now drive me, and others like me, off HN. You might say, "fine, good riddance" - and that would just be sad. Whether or not a poster is a "troll" account should not grant the right to disclose any identifying information about that person, in a public space, to whoever wields the largest hammer. I may not agree with GP, but I certainly defend his right to anonymity, as the only way to guarantee my own.
Someone below said that it shouldn't matter, because the "troll" could be posting from behind a proxy for all we know: so I suppose that means that, in order to maintain any sense of security from power-wielding HNers, I can only post from behind a proxy myself. Otherwise I'm explicitly opting-in to public identification, any time a mod disagrees with my opinions on NodeJS or Linux vs MacOS. Noted.
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?
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.)
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:
oh 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.
Well everyone here is as anonymous as they choose to be, apart from being outed by mods. Given that mods can ban any person with a click, I don't see any excuse for them punishing people by selectively providing their personal information.
The original post was
>Can we have a publication named "The Forgotten Male Programmers Who Created Modern Tech" now?
Is this really the sort of thing that warrants violating a persons privacy over? If we are going to use "name and shame" surely it should be for things that are manifestly abusive, not expressing an opinion.
What'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.
There are a lot of other interesting interviews — http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/