1/ Naive standard history of computing ignores the role of women entirely beyond Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Klari Von Neumann
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2/ Naive feminist revision suggests (but does not show) that women were the pioneers in the early decades, even more than men
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3/ The reality is more subtle: men *thought* they were giving women the boring punch-card grunt work and keeping the creative, hard stuff
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4/ What really happened: men gave away more power than they realized or intended to. Computing was new; loci of challenges was not obvious
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5/ The nominal work WAS tedious grunt work. But it was above data entry or typing levels. It was tedious and precise math.
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6/ The nominal work took math skills (diff equations etc.) women were thought to be poor at, but not ingenuity or creativity. Still a win.
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7/ But the real win was hidden creative work, tinkering, hacking where male architect types didn't even realize there were challenges.
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8/ What's remarkable about the early women was not the grunt work they endured, but the hacking at the edge of hardware and software.
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9/ This involved troubleshooting, improvising etc. to keep early unreliable machines working. This was hidden proto-hacking.
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10/ Men largely did the high level architecture of programs or built the machines. But women led (AFAICT) in gluing the two together.
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11/ 3 books Pioneer Programmer amazon.com/Pioneer-Progra Recoding Gender: amazon.com/Recoding-Gende Turing's Cathedral amazon.com/Turings-Cathed
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12/ When zone of hidden creative potential became legible with interactive computing (early 60s), men moved in, took over hacking. FBI>cops.
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