I agree, it wanders all over the place like they had to meet a quota of words. I don't think the article really communicates what it was like for the "computer nerds" off in a weird, unproven, tiny little corner of the world nobody cared about or believed in. I think if you explore that, you'll start to understand why women weren't as much a part of that weird subculture. It wasn't all bad, I worked closely with women at IBM in 1994 (working on OS/2) that was also the year WIRED started to go mainstream. TV ads started to show URLs. Java went mainstream in 1994. But before 1994, almost nobody knew what the Internet was. Once the Internet went mainstream, people already familiar with the technology had a huge advantage: nerds.

In 1994 when I was at the University of Florida, only one dorm on the entire campus had "Internet" access. But it wasn't web access, we only had telnet. The moldy dorm was 100+ years old and barely had air conditioning. They called it "Fletcher Island" because we were cut off from everyone else--there was maybe 6 of us guys on the whole campus that had Internet. And there was only one guy that knew how it worked--he never spoke, was very pale, and he lived like a hermit back in the dark corner of this ancient building. The air quality was so bad that I got sick and had to move out. Maybe 2-3 women lived under us but we never saw them because the hallways were locked to keep the sexes apart.