Posted on 10/07/2014 10:44:54 AM PDT by Maceman
If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there's a good reason: It's true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female.
The Innovators How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson Hardcover, 528 pages Digital Culture Nonfiction Science & Health Business & Economy Biography & Memoir
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It wasn't always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know.
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 in computer science," says a slightly embarrassed Stephanie Pham. "This is so sad."
A few students, like Cheng Dao Fan, get close. "It's a woman, probably," she says searching her mind for a name. "It's not necessarily [an] electronic computer. I think it's more like a mechanic computer."
She's thinking of Ada Lovelace, also known as the Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815. Walter Isaacson begins his new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, with her story. Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbage. i
Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbage. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"Ada Lovelace is Lord Byron's child, and her mother, Lady Byron, did not want her to turn out to be like her father, a romantic poet," says Isaacson. So Lady Byron "had her tutored almost exclusively in mathematics as if that were an antidote to being poetic."
Lovelace saw the poetry in math. At 17, she went to a London salon and met Charles Babbage. He showed her plans for a machine that he believed would be able to do complex mathematical calculations. He asked Lovelace to write about his work for a scholarly journal. In her article, Lovelace expresses a vision for his machine that goes beyond calculations.
She envisioned that "a computer can do anything that can be noted logically," explains Isaacson. "Words, pictures and music, not just numbers. She understands how you take an instruction set and load it into the machine, and she even does an example, which is programming Bernoulli numbers, an incredibly complicated sequence of numbers."
Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later.
The women who would program one of the world's earliest electronic computers, however, knew nothing of Lovelace and Babbage.
As part of the oral history project of the Computer History Museum, Jean Jennings Bartik recalled how she got the job working on that computer. She was doing calculations on rocket and canon trajectories by hand in 1945. A job opened to work on a new machine. More On Women In Tech Harvey Mudd President Maria Klawe often uses her longboard to get around campus and chat with students like senior Xanda Schofield. All Tech Considered How One College Is Closing The Computer Science Gender Gap Ester Gerston and Gloria Ruth Gordon, early programmers working on the ENIAC computer in 1946. All Tech Considered Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers Marissa Mayer left Google to become the CEO of Yahoo. She was Google's 20th hire and is responsible for the look and feel of many of Google's major products. All Tech Considered New Yahoo CEO Among A Rare Few: Female Execs With Tech Creds Women attend a talk on Wednesday at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Portland, Ore. The conference offers mentoring and recruiting for women in technology fields. Technology Addressing The Shortage Of Women In Silicon Valley
"This announcement came around that they were looking for operators of a new machine they were building called the ENIAC," recalls Bartik. "Of course, I had no idea what it was, but I knew it wasn't doing hand calculation."
Bartik was one of six female mathematicians who created programs for one of the world's first fully electronic general-purpose computers. Isaacson says the men didn't think it was an important job.
"Men were interested in building, the hardware," says Isaacson, "doing the circuits, figuring out the machinery. And women were very good mathematicians back then."
Isaacson says in the 1930s female math majors were fairly common — though mostly they went off to teach. But during World War II, these skilled women signed up to help with the war effort.
Bartik told a live audience at the Computer History Museum in 2008 that the job lacked prestige. The ENIAC wasn't working the day before its first demo. Bartik's team worked late into the night and got it working.
"They all went out to dinner at the announcement," she says. "We weren't invited and there we were. People never recognized, they never acted as though we knew what we were doing. I mean, we were in a lot of pictures."
At the time, though, media outlets didn't name the women in the pictures. After the war, Bartik and her team went on to work on the UNIVAC, one of the first major commercial computers.
The women joined up with Grace Hopper, a tenured math professor who joined the Navy Reserve during the war. Walter Isaacson says Hopper had a breakthrough. She found a way to program computers using words rather than numbers — most notably a program language called COBOL.
"You would be using a programming language that would allow you almost to just give it instructions, almost in regular English, and it would compile it for whatever hardware it happened to be," explains Isaacson. "So that made programming more important than the hardware, 'cause you could use it on any piece of hardware." Grace Hopper originated electronic computer automatic programming for the Remington Rand Division of Sperry Rand Corp. i
Grace Hopper originated electronic computer automatic programming for the Remington Rand Division of Sperry Rand Corp. AP
Hopper retired from the Navy Reserve as a rear admiral. An act of Congress allowed her to stay past mandatory retirement age. She did become something of a public figure and even appeared on the David Letterman show in 1986. Letterman asks her, "You're known as the Queen of Software. Is that right?"
"More or less," says the 79-year-old Hopper.
But it was also just about this time that the number of women majoring in computer science began to drop, from close to 40 percent to around 17 percent now. There are a lot of theories about why this is so. It was around this time that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were appearing in the media; personal computers were taking off.
Computer science degrees got more popular, and boys who had been tinkering with computer hardware at home looked like better candidates to computer science departments than girls who liked math, says Janet Abbate, a professor at Virginia Tech who has studied this topic.
"It's kind of the classic thing," she says. "You pick people who look like what you think a computer person is, which is probably a teenage boy that was in the computer club in high school."
For decades the women who pioneered the computer revolution were often overlooked, but not in Isaacson's book about the history of the digital revolution.
"When they have been written out of the history, you don't have great role models," says Isaacson. "But when you learn about the women who programmed ENIAC or Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace ... it happened to my daughter. She read about all these people when she was in high school, and she became a math and computer science geek."
Lovelace, the mathematician, died when she was 36. The women who worked on the ENIAC have all passed away, as has Grace Hopper. But every time you write on a computer, play a music file or add up a number with your phone's calculator, you are using tools that might not exist without the work of these women.
Isaacson's book reminds us of that fact. And perhaps knowing that history will show a new generation of women that programming is for girls.
It is, and missing from the list but surely mentioned elsewhere is actress Hedy Lamarr, who co-invented a “Secret Communiations System” that laid the foundation for spread spectrum communications which is the backbone today of everything from mobile phones to wi-fi and bluetooth. She wasn’t a programmer or mathematician but had the inspiration and patented the idea decades before it was implemented in practical applications during the early 60s.
IBTH
Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. That’s it. Grace Hopper, yes. Ada Lovelace? That’s a stretch. But even if I concede her, that’s a whopping two women “pioneers” in computer science. Versus how many men?
It’s just another case of people who contributed very little trying to share in the glory. Kinda like all those muslim contributions to this country’s founding. Or all those inventions by blacks that make our lives better.
It was men who led this computer revolution. Overwhelmingly. Quit rewriting history to be PC.
Indeed, the mechanical computer makes me think of the Antikythera device, which may have been a really early computer (BC Greek).
Thanks for posting. Interesting subject and a great writer.
Even the history of the PC must be ... PC!
Grace Hopper's teams were all female. I had the privilege to work with "one of Grace's girls" when she was hired to review our department's management practices. She was the head of the FORTRAN validation testing team back in the beginning. We had a blast with that lady. She was off-the-scale smart and kept us laughing all of the time.
She wasn't very pretty, to be polite. She once laughingly told us that the rest of her team were all jealous of her because she was the prettiest one of all.
COBOL and FORTRAN both came into existence because of the efforts of all female teams. Learn to live with it.
It’s just another case of people who contributed very little trying to share in the glory. Kinda like all those muslim contributions to this country’s founding. Or all those inventions by blacks that make our lives better.
It was men who led this computer revolution. Overwhelmingly. Quit rewriting history to be PC.*
It reminds me of how the Soviets claimed to invent almost anything modern because somewhere along the line you could point to some obscure improvement made to a device by a Soviet scientist.
I'm sure that women have made a lot of contributions that we haven't heard of, but unfortunately for the PC storm troopers, most things seem to have been invented by white men. A disproportionate percentage of them seem to have been Scottish or had Scottish ancestry. Dunno why. A lot of days spent inside thinking because the damp days kept them in?
I was privileged to attend a gathering, meet, and hear Grace Hopper speak in Lubbock, TX in the mid ‘80s. What a brilliant mind she had. And what a commanding person who knew her stuff! As absolutely amazing personality! She took crap from nobody. The military lost a lot when she retired.
That is just so much bull shiite. You'd better learn a little bit before you spout off. Women like Grace Hopper contributed a lot to the computer revolution in the trenches, back when computers took up entire floors of buildings. A lot of men learned from her. Give credit where credit is due. Both men and women contributed. She was a true pioneer who actually did something without clinging to the coattails of someone else.
And the computers they programmed on? Wouldn’t have been much need for programmers if it hadn’t been for the work of MEN like Turing, Charles Babbage, Lee de Forrest, John Atanasoff, Clifford Berry, Herman Hollerith, William Shockley, and a host of others.
Go make your own history and quit stealing mens’.
...lot of insecure men on this thread. LOL.
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