Obviously, i could do this privately and i have but i would like to say a public thank you to terry for her support for her advice over the years, including many good topics, suggestions, and if you are here you will know she is responsible for the beach boys, and all sorts of others we have enjoyed over the years thanks to her suggestions. So terry, would you please stand up . [applause] tonights speaker, claire l. Evans, has achieved notable success in two disparate fields, both as a musician and as a writer. In the former career, she is the lead singer and cofounder of the conceptual pop group yacht, and has recently returned from a tour in europe with that group. But it is her second career as an expert in the area of technology that brings her to us tonight. And in that regard, she is the former futures editor of motherboard and a contributor to vice, the guardian, and wired, among other publications. She is, for example, the Founding Editor of terraform, vices sciencefiction chronicle. However, the thing that particularly commands her to our attention and brings her here tonight is a book she has just written. Ill say more about that in a second, but she has lectured widely about Science Fiction, art, and technology around the world in such venues as the new museum of contemporary art, Arizona State university, university of california berkeley, the herschel museum, and the Riverside Museum of art in beijing, among many others. She lives in los angeles where she runs the popular l. A. Centric culture app, five every day. One of the accomplishments that brings her to Mary Washington is her recent highly acclaimed and pathbreaking book titled broad band the untold story of the women who made the internet. Which was published in 2018. One reader of that work had this to say. I am quoting broadband is , thrilling, powerful stuff. At once an electric feminist history of modern tech and a muchneeded corrective to the hyper male mythology of Silicon Valley. Her compelling, surprising, and eminently readable work restores due credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. Said another, and im quoting, evans riveting account of female innovators from the victorian age to today fills in gaps in the history we should have had all along and provides unique, enlightening insight into some of the most revolutionary technological advances of our time. The comment on that book that i like the best is this one. This is a quote. Claire evans tells a story like a friend who knows you get bored easily. [laughter] it is a generous sort that pulls generous sort of brilliance that pulls the reader in. Welcome with me, the multitalented claire evans. [applause] ms. Evans hello. Hi, everyone. Im so excited to be here, and i know it is a spooky time to be gathering in public, so i doubly recognize you for being here in a room with other human beings right now. I hope we are all washing our hands, but beyond that, i am very grateful also to be part of this auspicious series of lectures about our collective history. First, ive got to start up the old hard drive before i can Start Talking here. Ok. So, i am going to do something a little different tonight than what is customary for the series. Im not going to be talking about a single individuals contribution to history, but rather talk about a collective of people sorry, thats me in my best steve jobs outfit. I am going to be talking about a collective of individuals over a couple of generations spanning a couple hundred years. I did this for two reasons. One, because tech history is complicated and by definition, distributed. Often, Tech Innovation coalesces among multiple emergent paths and not so much in a clear and linear way, but i also do it because i am trying to tell a feminist story and to me, the opposite or the corrective to your standard great man history is not necessarily a great woman history. It is something thats a little more nuanced. One that reflects the collective nature of our efforts, our shared goals, and the many subtle ways that we influence one another as we go about our lives. But why tell the feminist history of computing at all . Well, for me, it is personal. I am 35, im an old millennial, and i grew up in a home that was full of computers. My dad worked for Intel Corporation and we always had computers in the home. I never felt growing up that computers were for boys or for girls any more than i thought the television or the toaster was for boys or for girls. It was just an appliance that was in the house. It happened to be an appliance that could transport you to other worlds, as you can see clearly in this documentation of me as an eightyearold playing the cdrom game myst, which maybe dates my generation, but i was so obsessed with that i forced my father to fill me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. [laughter] but i loved the computer. Not only because it took me to different worlds inside a story, but also because it took me across the world. Because thanks to the miracle of the World Wide Web, even when i was shut away in my teenage bedroom, i could make connections with individuals all over the world, which for me was a radically liberating thing for an introvert and an only child. In fact, i grew up feeling the World Wide Web was kind of my native country. It was a place where i defined my identity as a young person, learned how to write, learned how to learn, learned how to forge connections with others. It was really a place that i thought of as being my home and my country. But something happened in my adulthood between the time this video was taken and the time that i stand before you now, and that is that ive changed, of course, but also the web changed too, and it felt more inhospitable to me than when i was young. It felt more inhospitable to me as a person but also as a woman. It stopped feeling safe, sure, it stopped being fun, and it stopped feeling like home. So a few years ago i began to ask myself, well, had i always been wrong . Had this ever been my country . I looked at the past, as you do. I talked to a lot of older women about their careers in the early computing industry and on the first wave of the web and i researched the history of women in computing. And in doing so, i found a lot of things. I found a lineage. I found a grip of radical tech grandmothers and mothers that we can all love and emulate. And i found a version of the established history that was very different than what i have been told. A version which wasnt necessarily just about people like steve jobs and bill gates, but rather about a great number of untold heroes and heroines. The thing i found that was most important, i think, was and i dont know how to say this, really, but i found the seeds of a different future. But well get to that. We should probably start at the beginning. Like, the very beginning. And the history of women in computing is very long. And it can start in a lot of places. But for the sake of brevity, ive chosen 1892 as our starting point. Ok, so lets imagine it is the year 1892 and for the sake of argument, you live in new york city. So, for context, in january of that year, an Immigration Processing Center ellis island was open for business and in march, the very first game of basketball was played in springfield, massachusetts thanks to the efforts of this man, a ymca instructor who was desperate to keep a bunch of stir crazy young people interested in hanging out indoors. But winter is over now and it is the first of may. Just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. It is long before the screen, before the byte, the mouse, the pixel, but before any of this, there is a notification in the classified pages of the new york times. A computer wanted, it says. This is the first instance of the word computer in print. And it wasnt placed by a time traveler. It wasnt placed by someone who was transported to the gilded age and jonesing for their laptop. Whoever placed this ad was looking for a computer to hire, not a computer to buy. For close to 200 years a computer was a person, a job, someone who computes, someone who performs computations for a living. The same is true for the word calculator. So lets say you decided to answer that want ad and decided to become a human computer. First, you have to take a math test and if you did well enough, on the first day of the job, you would be placed at a seat on a long table, Something Like this, and spend your whole day working on complicated largescale mathematics problems. You wouldnt work alone, you couldnt, because the problems that you would be tackling would be much too large for any single individual to handle. Instead, you would break those down into bitesize pieces and work collaboratively with lots of people, cross referencing each others work and crunching numbers in parallel. Together with pen and paper, maybe a tabulating machine, you would advance ballistics, or maritime navigation, or astronomy, or just pure mathematics. You would form the underlying copy additional infrastructure of the early scientific age. You would embody it, quite literally. You would make science possible. And computing offices like these were not highfalutin places of higher learning. They were kind of like stinking factories. The 19th century british mathematician Charles Babbage called what Human Computers did mental labor. That is a pretty good way of thinking of it. Computing wasnt seen as something that required a lot of intellectual talent or sophistication. It was just work you did with your brain in the same way that hammering a nail was work that you do with your arm. Ultimately, however, Human Computers did a lot more than hammer nails. They prepared ballistics trajectories for the u. S. Army. They assisted numerical studies of Nuclear Fission on the manhattan project. They crunched astronomical data at harvard. They cracked nazi codes. The applications of their work were as complicated as the applications of any method got a any mathematical problem. They did have one thing in common, and i think it is easy to guess what that is. They were all women. Thats right. Computing was so much a womans job that by the time computing machines came along, mathematicians would actually measure and calculate how long they took the process problems in girl years, or described units of machine labor in terms of kilo girls, which is pretty remarkable language. And of course from the beginning the women were being paid less than the few men doing the same job. So in the late 19th century, the astronomer Edward Charles pickering needed an arsenal of Human Computers to classify some stellar spectrum data in his harvard lab, and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilhelmina fleming. And he didnt do this because of some particular interest in the female mind, or some desire to nurture women in his life. He did it because he had a lot of data to process and he needed to employ twice as many workers to comb through it all. Fortunately women were paid half as much so he could get more for his buck. But the harvard computers, who are unfortunately known to history as pickerings harem catalogued 10,000 stars. And his maid discovered the horsehead nebula. Her colleague, annie jump cannon, who has one of the coolest names in the history of science, could classify at a rate of three stars per minute. They mapped the cosmos. But their were equivalent to the wages of unskilled workers, between . 25 and . 50 an hour, which is more than a factory worker but less than a clerical worker. As the historian navin allen greer writes, women like these were not the intelligent workers of sympathetic men, they were workers, desk laborers, who were earning their way for their skills at numbers. That might have been uncommon in the 19th century, but things change, especially during wartime. The major wars have always affected gender and work. The American Civil War brought large numbers of battlefield widows into office work, and the first and second world wars ushered thousands of women into the workplace, most famously as mechanics, but also as typists, clerks, telephone operators, primarily. Telephone companies were the first major employers of a female workforce. In 1891, so, just one year before that computer wanted ad, 8000 women worked for the telephone companies. By 1946, nearly a quarter million. And these women were a nimble workforce. They were capable of working collaboratively, in fluid networks. We still talk about secretarial pools. We still hold some of that language. And once again, these are female bodies and minds serving as the physical infrastructure for an emerging technological age. Patching connections which are now patched electronically by bots and Automated Systems and, of course, ai, many of which still speak by default in female voices. As for the Human Computers, they began to disappear roughly around the 1940s, although in some domains, notably in aeronautics, important calculations continued to be and hand and checked double checked well into the 1970s when nasa formally dissolved its human computing divisions, made famous by the book and the film, hidden figures. They found work programming the machines which emerged in the Computer Science research during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. And these machines, the earliest electromechanical computers, were developed in secret during the war to crunch numbers for the war effort, primarily to run ballistics for the boys at the front. The first people that were hired to operate these machines were the women who had already been doing that work for centuries before hand, but specifically the work of catalytic ballistic trajectories by hand. Because software wasnt really seen a something that was more important than patching cables, like a telephone operator, or handling punchcards and paperwork like a secretary, or doing math like a computer, programming was a job that was given to women without much thought. Of course, these women accepted the work gladly because here was finally something they could do with their Mathematics Education that wasnt just becoming a teacher or becoming a secretary. Except, of course, that operating one of these computers was not at all a simple proposition. These were the first of their kind. There was no precedent, there was no instruction manual. There was no information about how to run these things. These were built by engineers and handed off to the operators as an afterthought. These computers were the very first of their kind, so when the mathematician grace hopper, who had a phd from yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark one computer at harvard in 1944, she was given no instruction other than just put this math on that, and she quite literally reverse engineer the machine she had been assigned to, working nights, sleeping under her desk, studying wiring diagrams and taking components apart until she felt she understood its workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers that had built the machine. The same was true for the six women who were assigned to the first electronic programmable computer by the u. S. Army at the university of pennsylvania. Here, were talking about programming at the machine level. So when you talk programming now you think computing at a keyboard, typing symbols. Looking at a screen. This is not what programming was in the 1940s. This is a computer the size of the room. To program a machine like this, you had to quite literally crawl around inside this giant room sized machine, making an ephemeral connections in time with patch cables and punchcards. It was something that was very physical. These women were replacing burnedout vacuum tubes, and fixing shorted connections and wiring control boards. By the time they were finished setting up an operation, which could take weeks for single program, it could run differential calculus equations, but these women were officially classified in their employment as being subprofessional. When it was first unveiled to the public in 1946, after the war, the women who operated it were never introduced. And although the mathematical demonstrations it ran, especially for its first public demonstration to the press, were completely programmed and put on the computer by women, none of them were mentioned in any of the subsequent articles. In fact, the emphasis and a lot inferences in a lot of the eniac was itabout was this miraculous machine made by clever men that could process problems in 15 seconds, not acknowledging the weeks of labor that went into setting up those problems and devising how they would work on the machine, the work of programming. In some historical images, they or credited as models cropped out of the images entirely. For the sake of writing that historical wrong, im going to introduce some of them to you now. And although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contributions to the state of the art, i think eniac 6 would make an excellent name for an allgirl punk band. Im looking at the front row over here. Please run with it. I have the tshirt already made. 6 were the time the eniac working during the war and shortly after, software wasnt a word. Neither was programmer. So what these women did was vaguely referred to as coding or operating, like a telephone operator. Eniac 6, betty snyder, called their job a cross between an architect and a construction engineer. So there was no name for what they did or no clear definition. Although this comes pretty close to defining what programming is like even today. But it was through the work of women like betty snyder and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the stateoftheart, defining how it would work both during and after the war, that programming became something with its own value, a value that was separate from the menial manipulation of hardware. Because of them, it became a language. It became many languages. It became an art form. After the war, grace hopper and her peers went on to careers in the early computer industry, heading up the programming teams of the very first commercial Computer Company in the u. S. Emcc was responsible for a computer called the univac, which in the 50s was synonymous with the word computer. The way we say kleenex to mean tissue, people said univac to mean computer in the 1950s. Because the