The Forgotten Female Programmers Who Created Modern Tech
npr.org
npr.org
There are a lot of other interesting interviews — http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/
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.
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.
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."
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?
I do wonder to what extent this is a socioeconomic class thing.
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.)
I'm simultaneously horrified and amused at myself because, as I was reading along with the article, I thought to myself, "Linda Lovelace!"
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.
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.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2hoffe/weev_stop_bash...
I think he just said that to try to damage the reputation of nazis by association with him.
Seems like providing personal information of an individual who thought they were anonymous, and merely expressed an opinion, is more like harassment.
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.