Women who inspire me
On one rainy day in Bay Area, while I was looking at my terminal, trying to debug a piece of code, it suddenly hit me that all through my professional and academic life my role-models and mentors were mostly men. I pondered over that thought over a cup of tea and quickly let it slide into the back of my head, as I had to get back to my debugging.
A couple of weeks later, I stumbled upon this unheard book called Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans, which had an amazing rating on goodreads.com. This book not only opened my eyes to an array of facts that previously I wasn’t aware of but also surprised me when my friends too didn’t know about most of these facts.
Popping out the thought I had slid into the back of my head the other day, I further probed into it. I realized that through most of my tech journey, the people who I looked up to and idolized were mostly men. This pattern continued through my college days as well, since I didn’t know many women programmers. The only few women in tech that I followed back then were — Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Grace Hopper, and an XKCD comic character called Elaine (which of course is fictional!).
Every tech conference I went to, every tech-quiz I participated in, and every tech community I joined had very few women in them. It eventually started to make me feel that female programmers were naturally not as great as male programmers.
So, I want to dedicate this post to all these amazing women programmers who shattered the glass ceilings of the tech industry since the time of Charles Babbage (no kidding!). I believe that the unknown contributions that these women have made to this world are to be known and recognized by a wider audience.
The Grandmother of COBOL
If you are in the tech industry then you might have heard about the annual Grace Hopper Conference. It is one of the sacred pilgrimages which many women in tech aspire to go to. But what many wouldn’t know about Grace Hopper is that she programmed some of the most complex mathematical problems of her times. She assisted John von Neumann in partial differential equations which turned out to be a mathematical model for the atomic bombs used during World War 2 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (little did she know that her equations would lead to such massive destruction!).
COBOL, one of the oldest programming languages, was developed in 1959 based on a previous programming language developed by Grace. By 1969, 80% of all the code on our planet was written in COBOL. Hence, Grace is considered the grandmother of COBOL.
Grace also collaborated with different organizations to popularize COBOL which eliminated the cut-throat competition for market share, something just like an open-source movement, but 40 years before the word “open-source” came into the picture.
Oh, and BTW, when next time someone asks me how “pseudocode” came into existence, I’m gonna say that it was Grace Hopper who introduced it first (through her A-2 compiler for UNIVAC).
When they were cropped out of the picture
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) — the first large-scale computer was built during the early 1940s. The initial programmers of ENIAC consisted of women — Betty Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder (they were 2 of the 6 women programmers of ENIAC).
Betty Jean Jennings and Betty Snyder were a mathematician and a “human computer” respectively, hired to program ENIAC without receiving any prior training. Betty Snyder was also the inventor of “breakpoints” in debugging!!
One day during the Second World War, they were supposed to demo the calculation of a ballistic missile trajectory using ENIAC to the Generals. In spite of preparing for the demo for over 2 sleepless long weeks, things were still not working until the night before the big demo. But Betty Snyder dreamt of a solution in her sleep that night and voila! the demo went successfully. This breakthrough in calculating the missile trajectory was so huge that it made it to the front page of the newspapers, but the Bettys were cropped out of the picture in the newspapers!
“Men might have dropped bombs, but it was women who told them where to do it. And at what angle to be fired.”
The human DNS algorithm
Jake Feinler worked for Department of Defence (DoD) for various roles. During the initial days of the internet when websites were assigned and named, companies had to call up the office of Jake Feinler at the NIC (Network Information Center) to make sure that the hostnames weren't already taken (how cool is that?).
When the number of websites started growing exponentially, she came up with this idea of categorizing these websites into domains such as — .com, .gov, .org, .net, .edu, etc. That’s Domain Naming System (DNS)!
“Long before the search engines we now take for granted existed, NIC was the Google of its day, and Jake its human algorithm. She was the Internet’s Joe Smith, totally anonymous and totally ubiquitous at once.”
Mother of the Internet
When the Internet originated, the network protocol that was used to communicate among computers locally was Ethernet. Although this was developed at Xerox, it was later promoted by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Xerox, and Intel jointly to a network standard.
During the initial days of Ethernet, the packets would collide frequently causing a lot of interference in the lines. This was a very common problem faced at DEC. Here comes Radia Perlman, who came up with a scalable and fault-tolerant algorithm based on Minimum Spanning Tree to solve this issue (she wrote this algorithm in just one day!). This became the Spanning Tree Protocol.
That same weekend she wrote this catchy (and geeky!) poem too —
I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree.
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity.
A tree that must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN.
First, the root must be selected.
By ID, it is elected.
Least-cost paths from root are traced.
In the tree, these paths are placed.
A mesh is made by folks like me,
Then bridges find a spanning tree.
I do remember studying many network protocols and some of the groundbreaking algorithms during my undergrad and grad days, but surprisingly I do not remember any algorithm named after the women who wrote them.
One of the reasons for few women programmers
In spite of such a majority of women programmers (and women computers) during the time of the World Wars, the number of women programmers began to gradually reduce during the 1960s. This was mainly because women were paid around 45% less than the men ($7,763 vs $11,193), and there wasn’t any support given to women for childcare.
The last nail in the coffin was when NATO changed the skill of writing computer programs from “programming” to “software engineering” and authorized this engineering degree as a necessary prerequisite for programming jobs. This led to many of these highly talented but self-taught women programmers to quit jobs.
My girl friends and I grew up to this notion that the tech industry had very few women pioneers because it is just the way how the world is. But here I am so proud today to know that there were amazing women contributors too to the tech industry. It's just that they were not given enough recognition to be idolized. I’m sure that the coming generation of young programmers would know of more women programmers to be inspired of and to look up to.
This is a must-read book to every tech enthusiast (and everybody else too!)
All the facts and figures (and quotes) are taken from the book and Wikipedia.
