Women in Computer Technology

Women

Pioneering In Computer Innovation A Timeline by Venus Popplewell • May 7, 2015 • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1842

Ada Lovelace – The First Computer Programmer

A visionary 100 years before her time, Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace or Countess Lovelace was a “mathematician who collaborated with Charles Babbage on the Difference and Analytical Engine, which are regarded as the theoretical foundation for the modern computer” (Gurer, 2002).

Countess Lovelace understood and envisioned the full application of the general-purpose machine. She theorized that a machine could not only perform a preset task but could also be programmed to handle a limitless array of unrelated tasks. In essence, she was envisioning a modern computer where the hardware becomes a commodity to the dynamic software. She proposed that any piece of content, data or information can be expressed in digital form and manipulated by a machine. It is this ideology that would remain at the core of the digital age (Isaacson, 2014).

In “The Notes,” a manuscript which detailed the sequence of operations and provided descriptive charts showing how it would be inputed – Ada became the world’s first computer programmer. Along the way, she theorized many principles of programming like “subroutines”, recursive loops and conditional branching (Isaacson, 2014). Ada's ideas were a “century before electronic computing machines appeared“ (Gurer, 2002).

Gürer, D. (2002). Pioneering Women in Computer Science. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 34(2). doi:10.1145/543812.543853

Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1919

Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke worked as an engineer for General Electric for more than 20 years. During that time she conceived and filed a patent for a “graphical calculator”. This device was used to solve electric power transmission line problems. In 1947, Clarke began teaching engineering at the University of Texas, Austin becoming the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. (Edith Clarke , MSA SC 3520-14065, no date)

"Edith Clarke's engineering career had as its central theme the development and dissemination of mathematical methods that tended to simplify and reduce the time spent in laborious calculations in solving problems in the design and operation of electrical power systems. She translated what many engineers found to be esoteric mathematical methods into graphs or simpler forms during a time when power systems were becoming more complex and when the initial efforts were being made to develop electromechanical aids to problem solving. As a woman who worked in an environment traditionally dominated by men, she demonstrated effectively that women could perform at least as well as men if given the opportunity. Her outstanding achievements provided an inspiring example for the next generation of women with aspirations to become career engineers" (Brittain, 1985).

Brittain, J. E. (1985) ‘From Computor to Electrical Engineer: The Remarkable Career of Edith Clarke’, IEEE Transactions on Education, 28(4), pp. 184–189. doi: 10.1109/te.1985.4321775.

1932

Edith Clarke (no date). Available at: http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/clarke.htm (Accessed: 9 March 2015). Edith Clarke , MSA SC 3520-14065 (no date). Available at:

Rozsa Peter

Rozsa Peter was a Hungarian mathematician who founded of the recursive function theory. Unable find work she began her graduate studies in 1927, initially focusing on number theory. “Rózsa became disheartened when she found that her results had already been proven by someone else. For a while, she turned her interests elsewhere, including to writing poetry, before her friend Kalmár convinced her to resume mathematical endeavour. He encouraged her to look at the work of Kurt Gödel, the Austrian-American mathematician, on the subject of incompleteness” (Rózsa Péter | Women in science, no date).

“Rózsa focused on Gödel’s studies of recursive functions. She made her own, different proofs and, in 1932, she presented a paper at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich, Switzerland. For this research, Rózsa was awarded her PhD summa cum laude in 1935. The work also helped to

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

found the modern field of recursive function theory as a separate area of mathematical research and her later book, Recursive Functions (1951) was the first book devoted exclusively to the topic” (Rózsa Péter | Women in science, no date).

Recursive functions are common in computer science because they allow programmers to write efficient programs using a minimal amount of code.

Rózsa Péter | Women in science (no date) Available at: http://www.epigenesys.eu/en/science-and-you/women-in-science/810-rozsa-peter (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

1941

Hedy Lamarr

“Although better known for her Silver Screen exploits, Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) also became a pioneer in the field of wireless communications following her emigration to the United States. The international beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, developed a "Secret Communications System" to help combat the Nazis in World War II. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted by enemy personnel” (Hedy Lamarr: Invention of Spread Spectrum Technology, no date).

Lamarr and Anthiel received a patent in 1941, but the enormous significance of their invention was not realized until decades later. It was first implemented on naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequently emerged in numerous military applications. But most importantly, the "spread spectrum" technology that Lamarr helped to invent would galvanize the digital communications boom, forming the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations possible” (Hedy Lamarr: Invention of Spread Spectrum Technology, no date).

"Lamarr wasn't instantly recognized for her communications invention since its wideranging impact wasn't understood until decades later. However, in 1997 Lamarr and Antheil were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award, and that same year Lamarr became the first female to receive the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, considered "The Oscars" of inventing" (Hedy Lamarr, n.d.).

Hedy Lamarr (no date) Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/hedylamarr-9542252 (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Hedy Lamarr: Invention of Spread Spectrum Technology (no date) Available at: http://www.women-inventors.com/Hedy-Lammar.asp (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1943

Grace Murray Hopper

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a college instructor in 1943 when she decided to join the NAVY and help with the war effort. Grace held a Ph.D in Mathematics and was soon tapped to partner with some of the greatest technological innovators of the generation. Along the way she carved a place in the history of computer science.

This entry begins a series of entries about the remarkable contributions Grace Hopper made to the computer revolution. Her trailblazing journey through the history of computer programming is unprecedented. I have identified four significant events devoted to Admiral Hopper beginning with the year 1943.

1943-45 Grace Hopper and the World’s First Computer Her first military assignment was to work with computer scientist, Howard Aiken on the Mark I. The Mark I was a computing machine controlled by the military used to calculate solutions for rocket trajectories, proximity fuses, mines and ship hull design. Grace wrote a five-hundred-page book that was the history of the Mark I and a guide to programming it. Hopper became the “third programmer of the world’s first computer.” Her ability to articulate the programming language in a written format laid the foundation for future programming manuals. Her detailed descriptions also allowed others with less advanced knowledge of programming to be able to work with the machines.

Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2015, from http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

1944

Hopper refines the subroutine

Grace Hopper was always looking for shortcuts so she set about refining the redundant task of repeating code over and over for the same operations.

Hopper and her team were working on mathematic solutions for the military.

They needed to reduce the number of errors and shorten computation times.

They generated a catalogue of subroutines based on error-free code that could be used to develop new programs. Subroutines, first introduced by Ada Lovelace, are lines of code that can be used more than once. They are useful because they eliminate redundancy in code making the totality of a program easier to manage. Subroutines are a critical programming component found in almost every type of computer program, software, game, etc.

Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2015, from

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http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

1945

Hopper’s Bug

“First actual case of bug being found.” The historical use of the word may be

in question but Hopper is attributed with coining the terms “bug” and “debugging” as related to computer glitches based on the event she recorded in 1945 where an actual moth was discovered in the Mark I. These terms are still commonly used today.

Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2015, from http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

1946

The Women of ENIAC

“In 1946, six brilliant young women programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadelphia as part of a secret World War II project.

They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for none existed)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran a ballistics trajectory—a differential calculus equation—in seconds. Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women were never introduced; they remained invisible.”

Four entries (continue, 1946) will identify the six female mathematicians who created programs for one of the world’s first fully electronic general-purpose computers. There is also an entry for Adele Goldstine, the woman who recruited and trained the women.

These highly skilled women were called “computers.” Most chose to use their degrees in mathematics to help with World War II rather than teach. The computing jobs came without prestige and were considered unimportant.

The pioneering women of ENIAC were as follows: Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Snyder Holberton, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum.

The ENIAC is important historically, because it laid the foundations for the modern electronic computing industry. More than any other machine, the ENIAC demonstrated that high-speed digital computing was possible using

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

the then-available vacuum tube technology. It took years for the contributions of the ENIAC women to be recognized and celebrated. It is documented that more than 80 women contributed to the calculations and operations of this historical machine. ENIAC Programmers Project (no date).

ENIAC Programmers Project. Available at: http://eniacprogrammers.org/ (Accessed: 6 April 2015).

Adele Katz Goldstine - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (no date) Available at: http://ethw.org/Adele_Katz_Goldstine (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

1946

ENIAC – Adele Goldstine

Adele Goldstine was a mathematics teacher who is famous for writing one of the earliest computer programs and wrote the technical description for the ENIAC and is attributed (later disputed by Betty Jennings) with training the six female programmers of the ENIAC. In 1942 Adele Goldstine joined the Moore School when her husband, Herman Goldstine, was appointed as the project manager of the ENIAC. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering was funded by the United States Army during the Second World War. A group of about 80 women worked manually calculating ballistic trajectories - complex differential calculations. These women were called ‘computers’.

Adele wrote the detailed Operators Manual for the ENIAC around 1945. In 1946, she implemented Dick Clippinger’s stored program modification to the ENIAC. So the programmers no longer had to manually plug and unplug cables for reprogramming every time but the computer was able to perform a set of fifty stored instructions. Initially the ENIAC was classified. In 1946, the ENIAC computer was unveiled before the public and the press. (Adele Katz Goldstine - Engineering and Technology History Wiki, no date) Unfortunately, no definitive photo could be found to identify Mrs. Goldstine, but an image of a book about her manual is in existence.

Adele Katz Goldstine - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (no date) Available at: http://ethw.org/Adele_Katz_Goldstine (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1946

ENIAC – Meltzer and Teitelbaum

1946 Marlyn Meltzer and Ruth Teitelbaum were a special team of ENIAC programmers. As "computers" for the Army, they calculated ballistics trajectory equations painstakingly using desktop calculators, an analog technology of the time. Chosen to be ENIAC programmers, they taught themselves and others certain functions of the ENIAC and helped prepare the ballistics program.

After the war, Ruth relocated with the ENIAC to Aberdeen, Maryland, where she taught the next generation of ENIAC programmers how to use the unique new computing tool.

1946

Hall of Fame - ENIAC Programmers, Kathleen McNulty, Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Synder Holber, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (no date). Available at: http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/298369/ENIAC-Programmers-Kathleen-McNulty,-Mauchly-Antonelli,-Jean-Jennings-Bartik,Frances-Synder-Holber-Marlyn-Wescoff-Meltzer,-Frances-Bilas-Spence-andRuth-Lichterman-Teitelbaum/ (Accessed: 6 April 2015).

ENIAC – Spence and McNulty

“Frances Bilas Spence and Kathleen McNulty Antonelli were a second ENIAC team. Both mathematics majors in the class of 1942 of Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, they responded to the Army's call for mathematicians and were assigned to operate the Differential Analyzer, a huge analog machine of which there were only a few in the world. Fran and Kay led the teams of women who used this machine to calculate the ballistics equations. After the war, both Fran and Kay continued with the ENIAC to program equations for some of the world's foremost mathematicians. Kay married Dr. John Mauchly who, together with J. Presper Eckert, invented the ENIAC and UNIVAC computers, and Kay worked with John on program designs and techniques for many years.”

Hall of Fame - ENIAC Programmers, Kathleen McNulty, Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Synder Holber, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (no date). Available at: http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/298369/ENIAC-Programmers-Kathleen-McNulty,-Mauchly-Antonelli,-Jean-Jennings-Bartik,Frances-Synder-Holber-Marlyn-Wescoff-Meltzer,-Frances-Bilas-Spence-andRuth-Lichterman-Teitelbaum/ (Accessed: 6 April 2015).

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1946

ENIAC – Jennings and Holberton

1946 "The third ENIAC programming team was comprised of Jean Bartik and Betty Holberton. As ENIAC programmers, they took on the challenging task of learning the Master Programmer that directed the performance of all program sequences of the ENIAC. They led the entire group in programming the ballistics trajectory for the February 14, 1946 demonstration, but that was only the beginning.

After the War, Jean Bartik worked on the team that converted the ENIAC into a stored program machine, making it easier and faster to program larger and more sophisticated problems. Jean then programmed the BINAC, designed logic for UNIVAC I, designed an electrostatic memory backup system for UNIVAC I, and later, developed reports to help businesses understand a powerful new class of computers, the microcomputer. She worked tirelessly to make computers easier to use.

After programming the ENIAC, Betty Holberton joined the company founded

by Eckert and Mauchly and worked on the first commercial computers. She wrote the C-10 instruction code for UNIVAC I, forever making programming easier and faster for programmers. She designed the control console for UNIVAC I and its computer keyboards and numeric keypad. In 1952, she designed the first sort merge generator for UNIVAC I. She served on the COBOL committee to design the first business language to operate across computer platforms, wrote standards for FORTRAN and served on national and international computer standards committees for decades."

Hall of Fame - ENIAC Programmers, Kathleen McNulty, Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Synder Holber, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (no date). Available at: http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/298369/ENIAC-Programmers-Kathleen-McNulty,-Mauchly-Antonelli,-Jean-Jennings-Bartik,Frances-Synder-Holber-Marlyn-Wescoff-Meltzer,-Frances-Bilas-Spence-andRuth-Lichterman-Teitelbaum/ (Accessed: 6 April 2015).

1952

Hopper – Develops a fully-functional compiler, the precursor to COBOL

1952 “A true visionary, Admiral Hopper conceptualized how a much wider audience could use the computer if there were tools that were both programmerfriendly and application-friendly”(‘Grace Murray Hopper’, n.d.).

Hopper believed that computer programs could be written in English. She

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

moved forward with the development of the B-O compiler, later known as FLOW-MATIC. “It was designed to translate a language that could be used for typical business tasks like automatic billing and payroll calculation” (‘Grace Murray Hopper’, n.d.). “Using FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Hopper and her crew were able to “make the UNIVAC I and II understand twenty statements in English.” However, “it was three years before her idea was finally accepted; she published her first compiler paper in 1952” (‘Grace Murray Hopper’, n.d.).

Through her vision for the compiler, Grace delivered computer programming to the masses. “Hopper’s vigorous efforts to further the cause of automatic programming led to the development of Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL)” (Beyer, 2009).13 Isaacson (2014) describes it as the “first cross-platform standardized business language for computers” (p. 117). She created a process of programming that used words rather than numbers.

Simply, Hopper visualized a computer language that would allow program instructions to be given in almost regular English. Thus identifying the programming (software) to be more important than the hardware.

Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2015, from http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

1952

Judy Clapp

“Judith A. Clapp's career spans the history of software engineering as a technology and as a profession. She received her bachelor's in physics from Smith College in 1951, and master's in applied science with a concentration in computer science from Radcliffe in 1952. That same year, she joined a small team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) using Whirlwind, one of the earliest digital computers.

She was the only woman on the team, which developed a proof-of-concept prototype for an air defense system. By doing so, the team demonstrated a revolutionary new use of computers as real-time control systems rather than automated calculators for grinding out mathematical tables. A pioneer in establishing software engineering as a discipline, Judith Clapp has made a significant contribution to technologies for managing the development and acquisition of large-scale command and control systems, and has motivated and encouraged the professional growth of other software engineers as their manager, role model, and mentor” (no date)

(no date) Available at: http://test-swe.djgcreate.com/images/AwardRecipients/pr_achieveaward_clapp01.pdf (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1957

Lois Haibt

Lois Haibt is an American computer scientist and is most famous for being a member of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN. She was the only female member of the team.

“In an effort to create the language that would revolutionize computer science, IBM hired a team composed of members in their 20s and 30s who were skilled in problem solving. Haibt was successful in building the flow analysis, the very core of the Fortran compiler.

Fortran, which was revealed in 1957, is a mix between algebra and shorthand, and was hailed by New York Times reporter Steve Lohr as a programming language that was a historic breakthrough in computing'' (Lois Haibt: The core of Fortran, no date) Lois Haibt: The core of Fortran (no date) Available at: http://innovators.vassar.edu/innovator.html?id=100 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

1958

Joyce Currie Little

"Joyce Currie Little was one of the original programmers at Convair Aircraft Corporation in the Wind Tunnel Division in the late 1950s. The wind tunnel held a critical role in the development of aircraft by providing aerodynamic testing for the aerospace industry. Little wrote programs to analyze data taken from models (e.g., airplanes, automobiles, radio towers) that were tested in an 8-foot by 12-foot wind tunnel. She wrote her programs in an assembly language, SOAP, which was run on an IBM 650 with punched cards.

To ensure accurate and reliable results, a room full of 37 women using Frieden calculators calculated all the check-points to confirm the computer output (Gürer, 2002).

"For analysis, the data had to be physically carried to the computer, which was in another building. At one point, Convair had a major project with American Airlines to prove that an airplane could take off in less than one mile. Due to the expense of keeping the wind tunnel going, they needed the analysis in a very short time frame. To get the results in real time, Little and a colleague of hers, Maggie DeCaro put on roller skates and, data in hand, furiously skated from the wind tunnel to the computer building—taking a shortcut through the huge model design shop—bumped whoever was on the computer, loaded the current data, ran the data analysis program, and then furiously skated back to the wind tunnel with the results. The raised some eyebrows, but successfully completed the project on time” (Gürer, 2002).

Dr. Little has been a strong advocate for the role of women in computing. Her

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

current activities include a project on the evaluation of computer ethics courses in the Computer Science major at Towson University, and a project on the social impact of certification on the industry.

Gürer, D. (2002). Pioneering Women in Computer Science. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 34(2). http://doi.org/10.1145/543812.543853

1959

Mary Hawes

COBOL, or Common Business Orientated Language, was one of the first computer-programming languages to run successfully on different brands of computers. In the early years of computing, each manufacturer used its own individual programming languages. Programmer Mary Hawes identified a need for a common computer language for use in accounting. A committee of computer programmers set to work on the task—the result was COBOL (National Museum of American History Showcases COBOL, 2012).

In April 1959, Mary Hawes, a programming manager at Burroughs, and colleague Saul Gorn, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed that trying to develop a single business language would be in the interests of the young industry. A meeting was held at the University of Pennsylvania computer center. It was attended by representatives of a small group of customers and manufacturers, including Grace Hopper, who led the Flow-Matic development at Sperry Rand. It was Hopper who suggested the Pentagon serve as a kind of orchestra leader for their collective undertaking. COBOL borrowed heavily from the principles of Hopper’s, Flow-Matic (Lohr, 2001).

“By the 1970s, COBOL had become the preferred programming language for commercial data processing.

Although other languages have now taken over many of COBOL’s functions, COBOL programmers are still at work—on much smaller computers. COBOL and other common programming languages made the flourishing computersoftware industry possible” (National Museum of American History Showcases COBOL, 2012).

National Museum of American History Showcases COBOL (2012) Available at: http://americanhistory.si.edu/press/releases/national-museum-americanhistory-showcases-cobol (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Lohr, S. (2001) Go to: The Story of Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts – the Programmers who created the software revoltion. New York: Basic Books

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1961

Thelma Estrin

“Thelma Estrin is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles. As a UCLA professor, Estrin was a pioneer in the field of biomedical engineering, using computer technology to solve problems in health care and medical research. Estrin designed and then implemented the first system for analog-digital conversion of electrical activity from the nervous system, a precursor to the use of computers in medicine. She also published papers on how to map the brain with the help of computers, and in 1975--long before the Internet became popular and easy to use--she designed a computer network between UCLA and UC Davis” (Women Who Inspire Us, Thelma Estrin, no date).

“In 1954 she traveled to Israel where she served as an electronics computer engineer at the Weizmann Institute of Science. While there she helped to design Israel's first computer, the WEIZmann Automatic Computer (WEIZAC), in 1954. The WEIZAC became the first electronic computer in the Near East” (n.d.).

Women Who Inspire Us, Thelma Estrin (no date) Available at: http://www.girlgeeks.org/innergeek/inspiringwomen/testrin.shtml (Accessed: 21 April 2015) Thelma Estrin - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (no date) Available at: http://ethw.org/Thelma_Estrin (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

1962

Jean E. Sammet

“Jean Sammet was born in New York, New York, in 1928. She holds a B.A. in mathematics from Mount Holyoke College (1948), an M.A., also in mathematics, from the University of Illinois (1949), and an honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke College (1978)” (Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum, no date).

“From 1958 to 1961, she worked at Sylvania Electric Products and managed the basic software development for MOBIDIC, a computer built for the Army Signal Corps. From 1959 to 1961, she served as a key member of the committee that developed COBOL, which became the standard programming language for business applications around the world” (Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum, no date).

“Sammet joined IBM in 1961 and directed the development of FORMAC, a widely used programming language and system for symbolic mathematics. In 1965, she became programming language technology manager in the IBM systems development division and later led IBM's work on the Ada programming language” (Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum, no date).

Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum (no date). Available at: http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Jean,Sammet/ (Accessed: 9 March 2015).

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1964

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller is thought to be first woman to obtain a PhD in computer science, doing so at the University of Wisconsin in 1965. She also studied at Purdue, the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College. Dartmouth relaxed the “men only” rule barring women from its computer center, which allowed Keller to assist in the development of the computer language BASIC. Before BASIC, only mathematicians and scientists could write custom software. BASIC allowed anyone who could learn the language to do so -making computer use accessible to a much larger population (n.d.)

Keller believed that women should be involved in computer science, particularly in information specialization. She said, “We’re having an information explosion…and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available.” An interest in advancements in artificial intelligence propelled Keller to found and direct the computer science department at Clarke College in Iowa for twenty years. Sister Keller wrote four books about computer science. (National Women’s History Museum, no date).

National Women’s History Museum (no date) Available at: https://www.nwhm.org/blog/celebrating-computing-women-part-iv-2/ (Accessed: 21 April 2015) The First Woman to Earn a PhD in Computer Science Was a Nun (no date)

1961

Erna Schneider Hoover

Erna Schneider Hoover earned a B.A. with honors in medieval history from Wellesley College, and later a Ph.D. in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics from Yale University. In 1954, Erna Schneider Hoover started work as a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where she created a computerized telephone switching system. The switching system used a computer to monitor incoming calls and then automatically adjusted the call's acceptance rate. This helped eliminate overloading problems. Hoover’s invention “revolutionized modern communication.” The principles of Erna Schneider Hoover's design are still used today, she was awarded one of the first software patents ever issued (Patent #3,623,007, Nov. 23, 1971). Bell Labs made her their first female supervisor of a technical department (The Ada Project, no date).

The Ada Project (no date) Available at: https://www.women.cs.cmu.edu/ada/Resources/Women/ (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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1972

Karen Sparck Jones

Professor Karen Spärck Jones was one of the pioneers in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England, she worked in these areas since the late 1950s and made major contributions to the understanding of information systems (Computer Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007, no date).

In the 1960s, she started working on IR. In a paper in 1972, she introduced one of her most important contributions -- the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) term weighting, a technique which has been adopted as standard in modern systems, including Web search engines, and has percolated to other language processing applications (Computer Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007, no date). IDF is a statistical method used to evaluate how important any given word is in a set of documents, and thus the word's significance for an individual document. Search engines use inverse document frequency, as it is known, to help score and rank a document's importance in response to a user's query (Computer Science, A Woman’s Work - IEEE Spectrum, no date).

She subsequently collaborated with Stephen Robertson to establish the value of relevance weighting for terms, a key step in the development of a highly successful probabilistic model of retrieval to which she continued to contribute (Computer Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007, no date).

Computer Science, A Woman’s Work - IEEE Spectrum (no date) Available at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/computer-science-a-womans-work (Accessed: 21 April 2015) Computer Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007 (no date) Available at: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obituaries/sparck-jones/ (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

1973

Adele Goldberg

Dr. Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object-oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. Along with computer scientist Dr. Alan Kay, Dr. Goldberg developed Smalltalk, the first true objected-oriented programming language which allowed users to interact with the computer intuitively through a graphical interface. Goldberg wrote much of the documentation.

Smalltalk was used to prototype the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) interface on the Xerox Alto. The Alto was introduced in 1973 and is widely

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known as the world’s first personal computer. Goldberg and her PARC colleagues pioneered the use of icons, point-and-click commands, pull-down menus, local area networks and graphical user interface all of which have been influencing the design of software, personal computers and their descendants for more than forty years. PARC’s radical leap in tech evolution led to remarkable feats in computing. Apple and Microsoft (arguably the most successful computer companies) respectively created user-friendly personal computers (Macintosh) and the graphical operating system (Microsoft Windows) in response to growing interest in the graphical user interface technology ¬– first designed, built and used at PARC. Committed to bringing Smalltalk to a wider audience, in 1988 Goldberg cofounded the spin-out company ParcPlace Systems. Goldberg served as CEO and Chairman of the company, which created development tools for Smalltalk-based applications. https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/muiseum/goldberg/goldberg_page.htm http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Adele_Goldberg

1974

Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov is an American mathematician, computer scientist and Ford Professor at MIT School of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1968 Stanford University made her the first woman in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department.

“At MIT she led the design and implementation of the CLU programming language (1973), which emphasized the notions of modular programming, data abstraction, and polymorphism. These concepts are a foundation of objectoriented programming used in modern computer languages such as Java and C#, although many other features of modern object oriented programming are missing from this early language.”

“Her MIT group also created the Argus language, which extended the ideas of CLU to ease implementation of programs distributed over a network, including support for nested transactions. An example of such a distributed program might be a network based banking system. Argus provided object abstractions called “guardians” that encapsulate related procedures. As an experimental language, Argus influenced others developers but was never widely adopted or used for deployed networked applications” (Barbara Liskov - A.M. Turing Award Winner, no date). Barbara Liskov - A.M. Turing Award Winner (no date)

Available at: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/liskov_1108679.cfm (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1976

Frances E. Allen

An American computer scientist and in 2006 the first woman to win the A.M. Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for her “pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques that laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel execution” (Frances Allen | Computer History Museum, no date).

“Allen began her career at a small rural high school in Peru, New York, teaching practical math to farm kids, then took a job at IBM in order to earn the money she needed to pay off her college loans. She had planned to work there for a couple of years and then return to her first love-teaching-but at IBM, she found something she loved even more, "great people." She would stay at IBM for the next 45 years, making dozens of important and original contributions to computer science.

Allen is a pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, programs that translate source code written in a programming language into machine code for direct use by a computer. Her specialty is the development of advanced compilers for making such computers work faster and more efficiently. Her 1976 paper co-authored with John Cocke describes one of the two main analysis strategies used in optimizing compilers today” (Hosch, no date).

Frances Allen | Computer History Museum (no date) Hosch, W. L. (no date) Frances E. Allen | biography - American computer scientist

1978

Lynn Conway

“Lynn Conway is a famed pioneer of microelectronics chip design. Her innovations during the 1970's at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have impacted chip design worldwide. Many high-tech companies and computing methods have foundations in her work.

Thousands of chip designers learned their craft from Lynn's textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems, which she co-authored with Prof. Carver Mead of Caltech. Thousands more did their first VLSI design projects using the government's MOSIS prototyping system, which is based directly on Lynn's work at PARC. Much of the modern silicon chip design revolution is based on her work.

Lynn went on to win many awards and high honors, including election as a

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition an engineer can receive” (Introducing Lynn Conway: A biographical sketch, no date).

Introducing Lynn Conway: A biographical sketch (no date) Available at: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/BioSketch.html (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

1978

Carol Shaw

“Said to hold the title and honor of being the first female video game designers, Shaw was originally an Atari employee, then later joined Activision where she programmed her best known game, River Raid which everyone remembers as a "classic"– a scrolling shooter, RR was released in 1982 by Activitsion for the Atari 2600. Shaw also brought us 3-D Tic Tac Toe (1979) Super Breakout (1978), and Happy Trails (1984). Shaw also worked on the widely unknown Polo and the Atari Basic Reference Manual. Part of the foundation of gaming, Shaw has games credited to her as late as 2006 and was noted for anticipating the industry's procedural content generation (by 25 years, ahem) using algorithms to create RR's continuous, but non-random, landscape. Done out of necessity, the machine at the time provided only 128 bytes (yes, bytes) of RAM” (The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History, no date).

The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History (no date) Available at: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_women_tech _history?page=0,1 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

1980

Carla Meninsky

“When Carla Meninsky was hired as a game designer for the Atarti 2600 console in the early 1980s, she was one of only two female engineers working at Atari. The other? Carol Shaw. While working at Atari, Meninsky was responsible for the development of Indy 500 (1977), Star Raiders (1979), and Dodge ‘Em, an award winging racing game released in 1980. Call of Duty, it was not, but this driving game (which involved controlling a race car on a four lane track and collecting dots in order to advance through the levels) is a considered a classic from the golden era of gaming’s beginning. Meninsky, who also worked on the multiplayer Warlords, is now an intellectual property attorney” (The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History, no date).

The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History (no date) Available at: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_women_tech _history?page=0,1 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1983

Sophie Wilson

In 1983, Wilson designed the instruction set for one of the first RISC processors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), later to become one of the most successful IP-cores (i.e., a licensed CPU core) of the 1990s and 2000s. Acorn's two key design engineers on this project were Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson. Furber concentrated on the hardware architecture, while Wilson designed and refined the instruction set. Acorn's CEO at the time, Hermann Hauser, recalls that "while IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain." After several years' development, the Acorn Archimedes was the first fruit of the ARM project (Sophie Wilson, no date).

The ARM processor has transformed computing. Found in 95% of the world's smartphones and a large percentage of other electronic goods, ARM chips not only maximize the performance of these devices, they also minimize the power required to operate them. The result: fast, smooth performance, long battery life, and cheaper running costs (Office, no date).

Sophie Wilson (no date). Available at: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6615/Sophie-Wilson/ (Accessed: 21 April 2015) Office, E. P. (no date) Lifetime achievement: Sophie Wilson. Available at: http://www.epo.org/learning-events/europeaninventor/finalists/2013/wilson.html (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

1983

Sandy Lerner

Cisco Systems co-founder Sandra Lerner is credited with making major design enhancements to one of the technologies that makes the Internet possible—the router.

While in graduate school at Standford, learner met and married fellow “hacker type” Leonard Bosack. “He eventually became director of computer facilities for Stanford's Computer Science Department, while Lerner had found a job running the computer facility for the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

Their offices were just 500 yards apart, but their computers were separate entities, as were all the departments' computer rooms across the campus.

Lerner and Bosack wanted to share software and databases with one another without resorting to time-consuming disk transfers; it was a time when floppy disks were actually floppy, measuring more than five inches across, and software purchases came in a box containing a dozen or more of them. They created a local area network, or LAN, using a router that Bosack had made, first between their offices, and then linking the entirety of the school's computer system” (Sandy Lerner Biography - Newsmakers Cumulation, no date).

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

“Lerner and her husband were at the cutting edge of computer technology at the time, having linked 5,000 computers across a 16-square-mile campus area single-handedly. Some computer makers were offering networking capabilities, but their systems could only be used with their own particular products. By contrast, the router that Lerner and Bosack had come up with was a unique "multiprotocol" bit of hardware and software that could work with many different kinds of computers” (Sandy Lerner Biography - Newsmakers Cumulation, no date).

They decided to strike out on their own, and quit their jobs. They began Cisco in the living room of their Atherton, California, home and sold their first router in 1986. Early on they realized there were much larger possibilities for networking (Sandy Lerner Biography - Newsmakers Cumulation, no date).

Sandy Lerner Biography - life, family, childhood, parents, name, death, school, mother - Newsmakers Cumulation (no date) Available at: http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2005-La-Pr/Lerner-Sandy.html (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

1985

Radie Perlman

Known sometimes as the “mother of the internet.” Dr. Perlman is a software designer and network engineer who is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (‘The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History’, no date).

Dr. Perlman’s work has had a profound impact on how networks self-organize and move data. Her innovations enable today’s link state routing protocols to be robust, scalable, and easy to manage. The particular protocol she designed in the 1980s (IS-IS) continues to flourish for routing IP today. She designed the spanning tree algorithm that transformed Ethernet from the original limited-scalability, single-wire CSMA/CD, into a protocol that can handle large clouds. Later, she improved on spanning tree-based Ethernet by designing TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links), which allows Ethernet to make optimal use of bandwidth (Radia Perlman, no date).

Currently employed by Intel, Perlman holds more than 50 patents from Sun alone, and is the author of a textbook on networking, and a co-author of a textbook of network security. (‘The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History’, no date).

‘The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History’ (no date). Maximum PC. Available at: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_women_tech_ history?page=0,1 (Accessed: 9 March 2015).

Radia Perlman (no date). Available at: http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/radia-perlman (Accessed: 9 March 2015).

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

1985

Shafrira Goldwasser

Shafrira Goldwasser is an American-born Israeli computer scientist. She is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and 2013 corecipient of the Alan M. Turing Award.

“Professor Shafi Goldwasser first met her MIT colleague Prof. Silvio Micali when they were graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. They shared a mentor and thesis advisor, Prof. Manuel Blum, and they also shared a passionate interest in cryptology, the science of codes.

One of their projects involved finding a way to play a game of poker securely over the phone. From this, the two devised a method for encrypting and ensuring the security of single bits of data. This original research led to awardwinning careers for the pair” (MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins ‘the Nobel Prize in computing’ | Jewish Women’s Archive, no date).

First conceived in 1985, Goldwasser and Micali created new mechanisms for how information is encrypted and secured, work that is fundamental to today’s communications protocols, Internet transactions, and cloud computing. In 2013, the pair received the Alan M. Turing Award presented by the Association for Computing Machinery. The ACM credited them with “revolutionizing the science of cryptology” and with developing the gold standard for enabling secure Internet transactions (MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins ‘the Nobel Prize in computing’ | Jewish Women’s Archive, no date).

MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins ‘the Nobel Prize in computing’ | Jewish Women’s Archive (no date) Available at: http://jwa.org/thisweek/jun/15/2013/this-week-in-history-mit-s-shafi-goldwasser-wins-nobel-prize-in-computing (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

1986

Henriette Avram

“Known as the “Mother of MARC,” Avram’s work at the Library of Congress replaced ink-on-paper card catalogs and revolutionized cataloging systems at libraries worldwide” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Library of Congress Information Bulletin, no date).

“The practical effect of her complicated mathematical formulations was to make library collections more readily accessible to scholars and the general public. Her work greatly expanded interlibrary loan programs throughout the nation and allowed people to sit at computers and look through automated card catalogs at libraries everywhere” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Library of Congress Information Bulletin, no date).

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

“After working at the National Security Agency during the early years of the computer age, Avram joined the Library of Congress in 1965. With no background in library work, she was assigned to develop an automated cataloging format where none had existed” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Library of Congress Information Bulletin, no date) Combining two complex fields, computer programming and intricate cataloging practices, she and a small team completed the MARC Pilot Project— for Machine Readable Cataloging—in 1968. The system quickly became the preferred format for libraries throughout the country and, ultimately, around the globe” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Library of Congress Information Bulletin, no date) Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Dies (May 2006) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin (no date) Available at: http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0605/avram.html (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

1986

Anita Borg

“Anita Borg was a member of the research staff at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. After receiving her Ph.D. from New York University, Borg worked for four years on a fault tolerant operating system for Auragen Systems Corporation in New Jersey and then with Nixdorf Computer in Germany.

She spent 1986 to 1997 at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she developed and patented a performance analysis method for high-speed memory systems. During that time, she also developed Mecca, a system for communicating in virtual communities.”

“Founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Borg is also a leader on women's computing issues in the Association for Computing Machinery, the Computing Research Association and the National Academy of Engineering” (Women Who Inspire Us, Anita Borg, no date).

Women Who Inspire Us, Anita Borg (no date) Available at: http://www.girlgeeks.org/innergeek/inspiringwomen/borg.shtml (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

2000s

Jeanne Ferrante

2000s “In compiling, applications are translated from high-level programming languages such as C and Fortran (among others) to machine-executable form.

Professor Ferrante’s work has focused on the middle stage of the compiling process: program transformation or optimization for performance. Her results have led to increased parallelism on a variety of parallel machines as well as

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Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

better use of a computer’s memory hierarchy. Ferrante's research into performance has also extended to grid computing, or networks of computers that tie together various types of machines, some of them separated by great distances. This has included the development of algorithms that focus on maximizing steady-state throughput when scheduling work across a grid” (UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, no date).

“The foundation of program transformation is the underlying program representation. Ferrante helped develop intermediate representations for optimizing and parallelizing compilers, most notably the Program Dependence Graph and Static Single Assignment (SSA) form. Her SSA work (with colleagues from IBM) was recognized in 2006 by the ACM Programming Language Achievement Award as a "significant and lasting contribution to the field" (UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, no date)

UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering (no date) Available at: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/faculty/faculty_bios/index.sfe?fmp_recid=105 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

2000s

Danese Cooper

2000s Danese Cooper has a 25-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. She is sometimes called the “Open Source Diva.”

Cooper joined PayPal in February 2014 as their first Head of Open Source, and has previously held many leadership roles within the computer science sector. She has managed teams at Apple Inc., Symantec, and for six years served as Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun Microsystems before leaving to serve as Senior Director for Open Source Strategies at Intel. She advised on open source policy to the R community while at REvolution Computing (now Revolution Analytics), and she served 18 months as Chief Technical Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. Her six years with Sun Microsystems is credited as the key to the company opening up its source code and lending support to Sun's OpenOffice.org software suite, Oracle Grid Engine, among others (Cooper, no date).

Cooper, D. (no date) Transparency and transformation at PayPal - O’Reilly Radar. Available at: http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/transparency-and-transformation-at-paypal.html#more-69494 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

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