[ applause ] dont get carried away. Shell get, you know. Now, obviously, i could do this privately and i have, but id like to say a public thank you to terry for her support, which has not only been tangible in support of the series but also personal in her encouragement and advice over the course of many years, including many good topic suggestions and if you are here, you know she was responsible for the beach boys, but others we have enjoyed over the years. Thanks to her suggestion. So, terry, would you please stand up . [ applause ] now, tonights 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 conception al pop group yacht and has in fact recently turned 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. In that regard, she is the former futures editor of mother board and a contributor to vice, kwaurts, the guardian and wired among other publications. Now, she is, for example, the Founding Editor of tara form, vices Science Fiction vertical. However, the thing that particularly commends her to our attention, 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, uc, university of californiaberkeley, the her sean 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 5 every day. As i mentioned, foremost among the accomplishments that brings her to Mary Washington is her recent highly acclaimed and pathbreaking book titled broadband the untold story of the women who made the internet which was published in 2018. One reader of that work had this to say. Im quoting. Broadband is thrilling, powerful stuff. Modern tech and a much needed corrective to the hyper male mythology of silicon valley. Her compelling, surprising and imminently readable work due credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. Said another, 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. It 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 of brilliance that pulls the reader in. So please join me in welcoming to the university of Mary Washington and to the great lives program, the multitalented claire evans. [ applause ] hello. Hi, everyone. I am so excited to be here. I know its kind of a spooky time to be gathering in public. So i doubly recognize you for being here and being in a room with other human beings right now. I hope we are all washing our hands. But beyond that, i am grateful to be a part of this auspicious series of lectures about our k collective history. First i have to start up the hoa hard drive. I am going to do something a little bit different than is customary for this series, which is i am not going to be talking about a single individuals contributions to history, but rather talking about a collective of people over sorry, yeah, thats me in my best outfit. Auto collecti a collective of individuals of generations spanning a couple hundred years. I do this for two reasons. One, because tech history is complicated and by definition distributed. Often Tech Innovation coalesces among multiple emergent paths, moments of key opportunity and not so much in a clear and linear way. I also try to tell a feminist story. To me the opposite or the corrective to your standard great man history is not necessarily a great woman history. Its something that is a little bit 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 a feminist history of computing at all . Well, for me its personal. So im 35. I am 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 toaster was for boys or girls. It was just an appliance 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 8yearold playing the cdrom game mist which, well, maybe that dates my generation. But deeply immersive kind of incredib incredibly boring cdrom game i was obsessed with. I forced my father to film me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. But i love the computer. Not only because it took me to different worlds inside of a story, but also because it took me across the world because thanks to the miracle of the worldwide web, even when i was shut away in my teenage bedroom, i could make connections with individuals all over for the world which for me was a radically liberating thing for an introvert and only child. I thought it was kind of my native country. It was a place where i defined my identity as a young person, thats where i learned how to write, where i learned how to learn, its where i 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 that this video was taken and the time that i stand fbefore you now, and that is i changed, you have of course, but the web changed, too. It start today feel more inhospitable than when i was young. It felt more inhospitable as a person but also as a woman. It stopped feeling safe. 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 to the past, as you do. I talked to a lot of older women about their careers in the early computing industry 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 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 from what i had 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 that was most important, i think, 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. And the history of women in computing is very long and can start in a lot of places. For the sake of brevity, i have chosen 1892 as our starting point. Okay. So lets imagine that its the year 1892. Say for the sake of argument you live in new york city. For context, in january of that year an Immigration Processing Center called ellis island opened for business. In march the very first game of basketball was played in springfield, massachusetts, thanks to the efforts of this man, a ymca instructor desperate to keep a bunch of stir crazy young people interested in hanging out indoors. But the winter is over now, and its the first of may. So just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. Its long before the screen, before the bite, before the mouse, the pixel. Before any of this, there is this notification in the classified pages of the new york times. Computer wanted it says. This is the first instance of the word computer in print. It wasnt placed by a time traveler. It wasnt placed by someone who was transported to the gilded age and jonesing for their laptop. They were looking for a computer to hire, not a computer to buy because, for close to 200 years, a computer was a person. It was a job as in someone who computes, who performance computations for a living. Same is true for the word cal cue later. So you decide that ad and become a human computer. You have to take a math test. If you did well enough, your first day on the job you will be placed at a seat at a long table Something Like this and you would 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 too large for any single individual to handle. You would break them down into bitesized pieces and work with other 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 pure mathematics. You would form the underlying computational infrastructure of the early scientific age. You would embody it quite literally. You would make science possible. Computing offices like these werent high fa lawsuiting places of higher learning. Charles babbage called what human computerers did mental labor. Thats a good way to think about it. You know, computing wasnt something that required a lot of intellectual talent or sophistication. It was work you did with your brain. Ultimately, however, Human Computers did a lot more than hammer nails. They prepared ballistics tra jebt reese for the u. S. Army, assisted studies of Nuclear Fission on the manhattan product, they cracked nazi codes at bletchley park. Their applications were as diverse as any mathematical problem. They had one thing in common. Its easy to guess dwha that thing is. They were all women. Thats right. Computing was so much a womens job, by the time computing machines came along math matitions would measure and calculate how long they took to process problems in girl years or described units of machine labor in terns of kilo girls, which is pretty remarkable language. And of course from the beginning that women were doing this kind of work were paid less than the very few men doing the same job. In the late 19th century the assist tron mer pickering needed an arsenal of Human Computers to classify stellar spectrum date in his harvard lab and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilamena fleming, and he didnt do this because of some particular interest in the female mind or some desire to nurture woman 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 got more for his buck. The harvard computerists who were unfortunately known as pickerings harem catalogued 10,000 stars and wilamena fleming, the maid, discovered the horse head nebula and her colleague, annie jump cannon, who has like the coolest name in the history of science, could classify spectrum data at three per minute. They mapped the cosmos. But their wages were equivalent to the wages of unskilled worker. They were paid 25 to 50 cents an hour. As the historian David Alan Grier writes, women like these were not the talented loving daughters of sympathetic men. They were workers. Desk laborers who were earning their way into this world through their skill at numbers. That might have been uncommon in the 19th century, but things change, of course, especially during wartime. So major wars have always had an effect on gender and work. The American Civil War brought large numbers of battlefield widows into office work. The Second World War ushered women in as mechanics, typists, clerks, telephone operators primarily. Telephone companies were the first major employers of a female work force in 1891. So just one year before that a commute wanted ad, 8,000 women worked for the telephone companies. By 1946, nearly a quarter million. They were capable of working collaboratively in fluid networks. We talk about secretarial pools. These are female bodies and minds servaling as a physical infrastructure for an emerging technical age. Digital assistants and bots and Automated Systems and a. I. , many of which still speak by default in female voices. As for the Human Computers, they began to disappear around the 1940s. In some domains and in aeronautics important calculations continued to be done by hand and doublechecked well into the 1970s which is when nasa formally dissolved their human computing divisions made famous by the book hidden figures. Some found work programming the machines during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. And these machines, the earliest electromechanical and Electronic Computers were developed in secret during the war, to crunch numbers for the war effort, to run ballistics trajectories 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 beforehand, but specifically the work of calculating ballistics trajectories by hand. And because software wasnt seen as something that was more important than sort of patching cables like a telephone operator or handling punch cards and paperwork like a secretary or doing math like a computer, programming was a job given to women without much thought. Of course, these women accepted the work gladly. Here was finally something they can do with their Mathematics Education that wasnt just becoming a teacher or 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 any information really about how to run these things. These were built by engineers and handed off to the operators as an after thought. These computers were the first of their kind. When grace hopper, who had a ph. D. From yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark one program at harvard in 1944, she was given no instruction other than put this math on that and she had to quite literally reverse engineer the machine she had been assigned to, working nights, sleeping under her desk, studying wire diagrams and taking components apart until she felt she understood its workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers that built the machine. Now, the same was true for the six women assigned to the first all electronic programmable computer by the u. S. Army at the university of pennsylvania. Here we are talking about programming at the machine level. When we talk about programming now you think sitting at a keyboard typing symbols, looking at a screen. This is not what programming was in the 1940s. This was the size of a room. In order to program a machine like this you had to quite literally crawl around inside this room size machine making ephemeral connections with patch cables and punch cards. It was very physical. They were replacing burned out vacuum tubes and fixing connections and wiring control boards. By the time they were finished setting up an operation, which could take weeks for a single program, it could run differential calculus equations. But they were officially classified in their employment as being subprofessional. In fact, when it was first unveiled to the press and public in 1946 after the war, the women that operated it were never introduced. All the mathematical demonstrations it ran, especially for the 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 in a lot of these early press about the eniac was that it was a m miraculous machine, a giant brain made by men that could process mathematical problems in 15 seconds. Not acknowledging the weeks of labor that went into actually setting up those problems and devising how they would work on the machine. In some historical images its credited as models or cropped out of the images entirely. For the sake of writing that historical wrong, i will introduce them to you now. Kathleen mccullty, bet 2i jean jennings, elizabeth snider, francis belis, and ruth lichter man. And although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contribution toss the state of the art, i think it would make an excellent name for an allgirl punk band. I am looking at the front row over here, over here. Run with it. I have the tshirt already made. At the time that it was working during the war and shortly after, so tftware wasnt a word. Neither was programmer. What these women was referred to as coding or operating like a telephone operator. And one of the enica 6, betty snider, called their job a cross between ang architect and construction engineer. This comes close to defining what programming is like even today. But it was through the work of women like Betty Schneider and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the state of the art, defining how it would work during and after the war that programming became something with its own value, a value separate from the menial manipulation of hardware. Because of them, it became a language. It became many languages, in fact. 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. , the eckert mockly computer corporation. It was responsible for the univac, which in the 50s was synonymous with computer. Like we say kleenex to mean tissue today, people said univac to say computer in the 50s. Because the best people of the world at programming were women, they ran the Software Side of things entirely. They headed the Software Side of this operation. They did the univacs logical design. They wrote its instruction set. They wrote custom programs for every client and every installation and debugged all those programs when necessary, which was a huge workload. In fact, its because they were so overworked doing this job at the beginning of the commercial computer industry that women like grace hopper and her contemporaries started to push the art of programming forward by looking for ways to simplify and streamline what was becoming a really tedious and complex process. So durin