Women invented the Internet, too
When we talk about tech, we often talk about the people behind some of the amazing inventions and technologies that we use everyday, and how those people came to create them. We might have heard of Robert E. Kahn or Vint Cerf (AKA those guys who created the Internet), Brendan Eich for creating the programming language JavaScript, or even Charles Babbage who invented the programmable computer that resembles the ones we use today. Then of course we’ve got our household names such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Sadly, few women have reached the same level of fame for their contributions in the world of computer technology. It’s pretty safe to say that tech industries in general have been historically male-dominated. As a woman entering the field of Web Development, I think it’s important that I learn about the women who did amazing work to get us to where we are today, and who are maybe not as widely known. In this blog post I am going to barely scratch the surface of the history of women in tech, but here are a few that I think are super important to know about.
We start this journey with Ada Lovelace (formally Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace), you may have heard of her, and that’s great! She lived a pretty short life (died at age 36) but it’s pretty amazing what she accomplished in such a short time. She was a mathematician, and she actually worked on Babbage’s computer called The Analytical Engine in the early- to mid-1800s. She created the first algorithm (!) because she realized the machine could do more than just pure calculations. This makes her the first ever computer programmer. She called her style poetical science which kept her curious, and led her to observe how individuals and society interact with technology in a collaborative way.
If you’re a developer, how many times a day do you use the word debug? For that we can credit Grace Hopper, an American who served in the navy in World War II. This was where she worked on the Mark 1 computer, which was actually the finished version of Babbage’s machine that Ada Lovelace worked on. At this time, people were still considering computers as machines that were just meant for math calculations. Hopper wasn’t about that, and she ended up writing the first code compiler (a program that translates programming language to the language that the computer understands). Ada would have been proud! She was also part of the team that pioneered COBOL which was the first programming language to use words, not numbers (COBOL is still used today). Accessible and understandable to humans! Oh also, she developed the standards for testing computer systems. And if you’re curious about the whole debugging thing and why we use that word, Hopper and her associates found an actual moth caught inside a switch on one of their machines and had to remove it (literally de-bug) because it was obstructing the machine’s operation. The remains of that moth are now in the Smithsonian. Wow!
The Internet being as massive of an interconnected system as it is today is thanks to a woman named Radia Perlman. She is actually often referred to as the Mother of the Internet. The Internet connects devices all over the world, and massive amounts of our information is stored in a mysterious cloud. It wasn’t always like this, though, and when it first began the Internet could only be used to communicate between a handful of organizations. In the 1980s, Perlman wrote an algorithm that enabled more devices to connect to each other. She was working for a company that was trying to find a way for computers to exchange information reliably. She was able to come up with a solution for this, and it was called the Spanning Tree Protocol (took her less than a week btw). It’s complicated, but it basically created direct active paths between networks. Some people describe her work as the “basic traffic rules” for information on the Internet. The STP makes sure that data is delivered when it is called for by a machine. Now, she specializes in network security and is constantly improving the STP. I watched a video of her accepting an award from the Internet Hall of Fame and she says that she is not in love with computers. She says that she “designs things for people like [her]self, [she] want[s] things to just work and you shouldn’t have to understand it”. She didn’t think that using the Internet should be complicated and frustrating or that only people like engineers could figure out. I think it’s pretty cool that her passion for helping people (not a passion for computers) is what led her to create this amazing thing that makes our lives so much easier and has really progressed the industry.
What do you think of when you think of the first social network? MySpace? Facebook? Well, it was actually created by a woman named Stacy Horn. The first social network was called EchoNYC and it was created in 1990 in Horn’s apartment on a borrowed computer. Echo, standing for East Coast Hang Out, was a BBS (bulletin board system) and was intended to be used by people who had computers and wanted to discuss things like movies, books, and music. It was also a place for users (called Echoids) to make friends and connect with each other. The social network was apparently so popular in New York that the state’s telephone system ran a separate cable to her apartment. It was an entirely new concept! The success of Horn’s platform paved the way for social networks to thrive as they do today.
The history of computer technology is complex, but more importantly collaborative. The Internet as we know it today was not created by two men, but by countless people who contributed to the creation and development of amazing technologies over centuries. These are just 4 of the many women who helped lead us to where we are now. There are so many other women and people of color who have helped us make huge progress in the world of computer technology who are not talked about enough, and I encourage you to join me in learning about them and sharing their stories.
Sources:
https://www.autostraddle.com/15-trailblazing-women-and-how-they-made-the-internet-248532/
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/the-women-who-made-the-internet/
https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/radia-perlman
https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/big-thinkers/mother-of-internet.htm
https://www.shethepeople.tv/news/5-women-who-made-the-internet-possible
