Adam Michlin shared a link.
23 June 2019 ·
The ENIAC Programmers: how women invented modern programming and were then written out of the history books
BOINGBOING.NET
Kathy Kleiman, founder of the ENIAC Programmers Project, writes about the buried history of the pivotal role played by women in the creation of modern computing, a history that is generally recount…
38 13 comments
Jay Kennedy How women's advocates are trying to rewrite the history books to make women's place in tech history look a lot more important than it is.
Yes, there definitely are lost stories about a time when computing was really considered a woman's job, But much of the most important work that survives today is definitely made primarily by men. 3
John Johnson Jay Kennedy: perfectly expressed, except to possibly add that it's not about a men v. women thing and doing that is itself the problem, there were many unsung heroes of both genders in the history of computing. 3
Olly Mannay Yep. Getting tired of people making everything a conspiracy of the patriarchy. Can’t we just celebrate achievement?
Jay Kennedy Olly Mannay Not any more.
Jay Campbell Agreed, this would have been more interesting without the social justice grievance angle. 3
Joost Rekveld same picture with text with better tone: https://www.npr.org/.../the-forgotten-female-programmers...
The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech
NPR.ORG
2
David Ireland This is excrement. Contributions from females in computer science are well documented and celebrated. Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Frances Allen, Margaret Hamilton, Anita Borg, ..... 6
Jay Kennedy David Ireland They're actually not well documented.
Most of the stories of these women are not accurately reported.
Ada lovelace wasn't an expert programmer, Margaret Hamilton was not primarily responsible for writing the Apollo guidance software, etc.
David Ireland Jay Kennedy incorrect ancetodal stories exist for everyone notable. What's your point?
Jay Kennedy David Ireland You said they're well documented. They aren't. They're typically grossly misreported. Margaret Hamilton had between little and nothing to do with actually writing the Apollo guidance computer software but it's widely thought she pretty much did the whole thing single handedly.
David Ireland Says who? What's your reference? Is it authorative? Or someone's blog?
Aron Insinga Jay Kennedy I don't think it matters how much of the code Margaret Hamilton wrote herself, because she was the Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, ultimately responsible for all of the code. That's not enough of a contribution for you? Ada Lovelace met Babbage at 17, and wrote the first program, to compute a particular numerical sequence, but had no machine to run it because the *men* had trouble machining its parts accurately. Jean Sammet developed one of the earliest programming languages and also worked on COBOL. Grace Hopper did similar work and got the first COBOL standard adopted. And 'The ENIAC programmers’ work included the development of concepts like subroutines and nesting. Jean Bartik would later lead a team to turn the ENIAC into a stored program computer in the late 1940s.' And I have seen a female student give up and walk away from the engineering part of a project when an adult male team leader (a retired fighter jock from long ago) ignored what she had to say but paid attention when a male student suggested the same thing later. Another female student had the same experience. So we don't know how many women never got into engineering because society ignored them or didn't give them any role models or didn't give them any encouragement, but it is long past the time when we should have started recording these women's stories. 1
Richard Sexton Hardly forgotten. Who can forget Rissa's comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac?