Publicly express appreciation to this evening sponsor, Teresa Crawley dds. [applause] dont get carried away. Shell, you know. [laughter] obviously, i could do this privately come and i have, but i would like to say a public thank you to tarry for her sport terry for her support for her advice over the years, including topics. Suggestions, so would you please stand up . Tonight speaker, claire l. Evans, has achieved notable success 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. Cannot regard, she is the former future editor of motherboard and a contributor to vice, the guardian, and wired, among other publications. She is, for example, the Founding Editor of terraform, a sciencefiction article. The thing that particularly commends her to our attention and brings are 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, uc, university of california berkeley, herschel museum, and the Riverside Museum of art in beijing among many others. She lives in los angeles where she runs the l. A. Centric culture app. One of the accomplishments that brings her here is her book titled broad band the untold story of the women who made the internet. Published in 2018. One read of that work had this to work to say. Thrilling, powerful stuff. At once an electric feminist history of modern tech and a muchneeded corrective to the hyper valley mythology of Silicon Valley. Her readable work restores credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. Said another evansriveting account of female and innovators from the victorian age to today fills in the gaps in the history we should have had all along and provide 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 the reader in. Welcome with me the multitalented claire evans. [applause] hello. Hi, everyone. Im so excited to be here and i know it is a scoop 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 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. I will do something a little different tonight and 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 thats me in my best steve jobs outfit. A collective of individuals over a couple of generations spanning a couple of years. I did this for two reasons. One, tech history is complicated and by definition, distributed, often coalesces among multiple emergent paths and not so much in a clear and linear way, but i also know 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 a little more nuanced. One that reflects the collective nature of our efforts, our shared goals, and the many subtle ways we influence each other as we go about our lives. Why tell the feminist history of computing at all . For me, it is personal. I am 35, an old millennial, and i grew up in a home that was full of computers. My dad works for Intel Corporation and we always had computers and home. I never felt growing up that computers were for boys or for girls anymore than i thought the television or the toaster was for boys are for girls. It was just an appliance that was in the house. It happened to be an appliance that can transport you to other worlds, as you can see clearly from me as a little girl playing the cdrom game mistt that i was so obsessed with i forced my father to fill me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. But i loved the computer. Not only because it took me to different worlds inside a story, but because it took me across the world. 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 was a radically invigorating thing for an introvert and only child. I grew up feeling the World Wide Web was kind of my native country. It was a place where i got find 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 i thought of as being my home and my country. Something happened in my adulthood between the time this video was taken and the time i stand before you now, and that is that ive changed, of course, but the weather changed social and its web changed too and it felt more inhospitable to meet him when i was young. It felt more inhospitable to me as a person but also as a woman. It stopped feeling safe, it stopped being fun, and it stopped feeling like home. I began to ask myself, 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 in the first wave of the web and i researched the history of women in computing. In doing so, i found a lot of things. I found a lineage. I found a great of radical grip of radical tech mothers we can all emulate, indie version of the established history that was 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. Well get to that. We should probably start at the beginning. Like the very beginning. The history of women in computing is very long. For the sake of brevity, ive chosen 1892 as our starting point. Lets imagine it is the year 1892 and for the sake of argument, you live in new york city. For context, in january of that year, a new 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 wanted to keep stir crazy young people from hanging out indoors. Winter is over now and is the first of may. Just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. It is long before the screen, the byte, the mouse, the pixel but before any of this, there is a notification in the classified pages of the new york times. Computer wanted. This is the first instance of the word computer in print. It wasnt placed by a time traveler. It wasnt placed by someone transported to the gilded age. Whoever placed this ad was looking for a computer to hire, not a computed br to buy. A computer was a person, a job, someone who performs computations for a living. The same is true for the word calculator. 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 you would be tackling would be much too large for any individual to handle. Instead, he would break those down into bitesize pieces and work collaboratively with people come across first 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 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. Computing offices like these word from higher places of learning. They were kind of like stinking factories. Charles babbage called what computers did mental labor. That is a pretty good way of thinking of it. Computing wasnt seen as requiring a lot of intellectual talent for sophistication. It was just work you did with your brain in the same way that hammering a nail was work that you did with your arms. Ultimately, Human Computers did a lot more than hammer nails. They prepared ballistics trajectories for the u. S. Army. They assisted numerical studies on the manhattan project, crunched astronomical data at harvard, crunched cracked nazi code. They did have one thing in common and i think it is easy to guess what that is. They were all women. Thats right. Commuting computing was so much a womans job that by the time computing machines can long, mathematicians populated 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 in which. From the beginning the women were being paid less than the few men doing the same job. Charles pickering needed an arsenal of computers for stellar data in his lab and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilhelmina fleming. He didnt do this because of 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 code through it all. Women were paid half as much so he could get more for his buck. The harvard computers, who are known to history as pickerings harem, his maid discovered the horse head constellation. These were prodigiously talented at what they did but their wages were equivalent to unskilled workers, between . 25 and . 50 an hour, which is more than a factory worker but less than a clerical worker. Women were not the intelligent workers of synthetic men, and were desk workers earning their way for their skills and numbers. That might have been common in the 19th century, but things change in wartime. The major wars have always affected gender and work. The American Civil War brought 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 with first major employers of a female workforce. In 1891, just one year before that computer wanted ad, 8000 women worked for the Telephone Companies by 1946, nearly a quarter million. Women were capable of working collaboratively, in fluid networks. We still talk about secretarial pools. These are female bodies and minds serving as the physical infrastructure for an emerging technological age. Patching networks which are patched electronically by bots and Automated Systems and, of course, ai, many of which still speak by default and female voices. As for the Human Computers, they began to disappear roughly around the 1940s although in some domains, notably in aeronautics, important cancellations continued to be done by hand and checked well into the 1970s when nasa formally dissolved its human computing division. Sound work programming the machines which emerged in the Computer Science research during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. 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 hired to operate these machines were the women who had already been doing that work for centuries before hand, but basically the work of catalytic ballistic trajectories by hand. Because software wasnt really seen a something that was more important than 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 the things. They were built by engineers and handed off to the operators as an afterthought. When the mathematician grace hopper, who had a phd from yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark when computer at harvard in 1944, she was given no extracts instruction and she reverse engineered 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 the workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers who had built the machine. The same was true for the six women 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. When you talk programming now competing sitting at the program, typing symbols. 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 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, replacing burnedout vacuum tubes, and fixing shorted elections and wiring control boards. By the time they were finished setting up, it could run differential calculus equations, but these women were officially classified in their employment as being so subprofessional. Sub professional. When it was first unveiled to the public in 1946, the women who operated it were never introduced and although the mathematical demonstrations, and it ran, especially for its first public demonstration of the press, or completely programmed and put on the computer by women, none of them were mentioned in any of the subsequent articles. Contact come the emphasis and a lot of the early press about it was it was this miraculous machine made by brilliant men that could process problems in 15 seconds, not a knology and weeks of labor that went and is setting up those problems and devising how they do work on the machine. In some historical images, they are credited as models and cropped out of the images entirely. Let me introduce them to you now. Although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contributions, i think eniac 6 would make a infernal girl punk band. Im looking at the front row over here all girl punk band. Im looking at the front row over here. During the war and shortly after, software wasnt a word. Neither was programmer. What these women did was referred to as coding or operating, like a telephone operator. One of the eniac 6 called their job a cross between an architect and a construction engineer. There was no name for what they did or no clear definition. It comes pretty close to defining what programming is like even today. It was through the work of women like betty snyder and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the stateoftheart, 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 for. Because of them, 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 Companies in the u. S. Emcc was responsible for the univac, synonymous with the word computer in the 1950s. People said univac to mean computer in the 1950s. Because the only world in the world who knew how to program are women, they ran the Software Side of things entirely. They headed the Software Side of the operation. They did the univacs logical design, wrote its construction set, custom programs for every client at every installation and debugged those programs when necessary. It was a huge workload and it is because they were so overworked doing this job at the beginning of the commercial computer industry that women like grace hopper and her contemporaries first started bush the art of programming forward by looking for ways to streamline what was becoming a tedious and complex process. During the war, they had coded at the machine level using the most elemental instruction sets. After the war, because of their workload, they began to develop the idea of automatic programming, which is a fancy way of saying programmers should be able to step above that machine level and with the help of intermediaries like assemblers and compilers and generators, be able to code a higher level of abstraction. The process of writing programs that could write other programs to make it easier for human beings and machines to interact. That move toward systems level thinking changed the industry completely and influenced its entire development. Grace hopper spearheaded the effort to create one of the earliest and most important shared computer languages, cobalt, the common businessoriented language, which is nobodys favorite language today, and is partially responsible for the y2k crisis. But it did the job of opening up computing to another generation. The grace hopper and many of her contemporaries understood that computing as it originally developed could never continue to develop different remained in the purview of experts. If it remained in the hands of a shadowy priesthood of coders. Grace wanted to see programming made accessible to as many people as possible regardless of Technical Knowledge and new that could only be possible if users, humans, could communicate with computers using Something Like natural language, not just numbers but recognizable words. If that language was hardware independent, meaning it could run as easily on ibm machine as it could univac. This interoperability regardless of expertise is something that comes up again and again in the history of women and computers and what i would like to emphasize