> The fact that one of the main characters is a "cool" girl at a time where all the characters were a bunch of nerdy guys

From what I recall seeing as a kid, and when working in my teens, that wasn't too unlikely.

There were a lot of women in computing, of various pre-Yahoo-IPO eras.

I think the relative numbers diminished dramatically with the dotcom gold rush, and the newer bro cultures, and gatekeeping.

Only in recent years have we started seeing more women in "tech" again.

I'll add Judy Estrin to the list of cool girls from the time, in addition to the non-famous ones I worked with. Her little company stomped our big company at making X terminals back in the 80's. We were probably 70:30 M/F among our ~two dozen new grads.

No, you're wrong. I was there. It was mostly guys, but there were plenty of women as well. Radia Perlman, to name just one famous one. I recall another from Lawrence Livermore whom I met at an IETF. I went to grad school with several of them.

There certainly is a lot of woke revisionist BS around. No doubt about that.

Edit: in my current book "This New Internet Thing" one of the characters, Cassie, wants to adopt a child as a single woman. I got advice on that process by Heidi Buelow (RIP), who was last at Oracle but worked on the Xerox Star, and adopted two children of her own (Cassie is not modeled on Heidi, except for that). Heidi unfortunately died while I was writing it, and I can't find any online obituary on her.

Since we're talking about "back in the day" naturally some of those people have crossed the Great Divide. You can find a few women in here as well:

https://decconnection.org/memorials.htm

Not a lot, of course. But not none.

i know a significant number of women who were important in the tech industry back then too

You guys have in fact proven my point by bringing up all two of them.