Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

The stories of Hedy Lamarr and the computer women at NASA get repeated endlessly as if they're the only contributions women have ever made to CS, which must be absolutely discouraging to the young girls who are interested enough to dig deeper and find out that Hedy's contribution was essentially negligible.

It'd be much better to talk about Liskov, Goldberg, the women at Bluetooth SIG, or the countless other examples available.

View on HN

Diana Merry, Lorinda Cherry, Fran Allen, Lynn Conway, Grace Hopper. There were numerous smaller contributors as well; my friend Ann Hardy, for example, had to rewrite the OS for her cloud computing startup from the ground up to get it to be usable, but got denied stock options because she was a woman and eventually got pushed into management.

The hyperbole that 'Hedy Lamarr invented Bluetooth' seems innocuous to me - it's a pop culture thing, like the claim that 'Steve Jobs invented the personal computer'.

I wouldn't lose sleep over hypothetical crestfallen child engineers. If they read a biography of Hedy Lamarr, they'll finish it more impressed, not less. She was an exceptional person.

That sounds like "Cocaine seems innocuous to me—it's a party drug, like strychnine."

It's hard to imagine a historical myth about personal computing more harmful than the myth that it was invented by a man who spent his life trying to take the power of personal computing away from the people!

Afaik the basis of the Bluetooth thing is that out of all the different kinds of spread-spectrum radio we use now, Bluetooth happens to be the closest to her original design. So it's a drastic simplification, but not wrong.

Forgive me if you already know this, but there are reasonable arguments to describe either the Apple I or the Apple ][ as the first real personal computer.

Although Woz engineered both, without his partnership with Jobs, they wouldn't have been consumer products (which even the Apple I was, if barely!).

The reason I used 'Steve Jobs invented the personal computer' as a comparison, isn't that I think it is dead wrong, but that, to use your words, it's a drastic simplification.

The point is that Bluetooth descends from an independent intellectual heritage. No one was aware of her patent. The original experiments with Frequency hopping happened in the early 1900s with Marconi and Tesla. FSK was used for military radio in the 1930s and by the 40s had trickled out into widespread knowledge. Here's an example of a trade magazine from 1948 describing FSK [0] citing military work in the late 1930s, which also says

    It may appear to the reader that this recent advance in telegraph technique is a rather obvious one

Going on to say that it's little studied because there simply isn't a good method to synchronize the transmissions yet. That's what Hedy and others were trying to solve, but the widespread solution would come from the independent invention of Barker codes in 1953. Many decades later when the people at Ericsson were designing what became Bluetooth, they looked at the FCC requirements that had been written to accept FSK radioteletypes in widespread use after the war and common best practices for radio system design.

[0] https://worldradiohistory.com/UK/Wireless-World/40s/Wireless...

What’s discouraging is seeing that any contribution by a woman is going to be picked over and minimized.

The intention behind these stories is to tell learners "people like you made great contributions, so can you". If your main example is a woman whose contribution is a patent that didn't inspire any of the things popularly attributed to it, the actual subtext you're communicating is that there are no better examples.

"You'll be minimized too!" isn't exactly a great subtext to encourage interest in the field, compared to other positive examples like the people I've already mentioned.

Yes, whenever I hear a story about someone I assume they were chosen because there are no better examples. I only listen to stories about the paragons of humanity. My brain has space for knowledge of like 3 people tops. Good point.

That is about the least charitable interpretation of that comment.

There is no charitable interpretation, because it’s patent nonsense.

Isn't that exactly what these sort of things are about?

No one is inspired (which is usually the point of the factoids) by "this person made marginal contributions to the field for 30 years and then retired".

It will be even more discouraging now that the well actually guys will say that it wasn't true...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com