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  Portfolio/Penguin

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Claire L. Evans

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN: 9780735211759 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 9780735211766 (e-book)

  Illustration Credits:

  Here: Grace Murray Hopper Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

  Here: U.S. Army Photo, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Archives.

  Here: Courtesy of SRI International

  Here: Courtesy of Stacy Horn

  Here: Jim Estrin/The New York Times/Redux

  Here: Courtesy of the University of Southampton

  Here and here: Courtesy of Jaime Levy

  Version_1

  For the users

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION: THE DELL

  PART ONE: THE KILOGIRLS

  Chapter One: A COMPUTER WANTED

  Chapter Two: AMAZING GRACE

  Chapter Three: THE SALAD DAYS

  Chapter Four: TOWER OF BABEL

  Chapter Five: THE COMPUTER GIRLS

  PART TWO: CONNECTION TRIP

  Chapter Six: THE LONGEST CAVE

  Chapter Seven: RESOURCE ONE

  Chapter Eight: NETWORKS

  Chapter Nine: COMMUNITIES

  Chapter Ten: HYPERTEXT

  PART THREE: THE EARLY TRUE BELIEVERS

  Chapter Eleven: MISS OUTER BORO

  Chapter Twelve: WOMEN.COM

  Chapter Thirteen: THE GIRL GAMERS

  Epilogue: THE CYBERFEMINISTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  THE DELL

  When I was younger, I had a Dell.

  It was a beige box fastened to the Internet with a 28.8K modem that screeched with every connection. Its keys were as tall as sugar cubes and slightly concave. The installation occupied the elbow of an L-shaped desk in my bedroom’s inner sanctum. Over the years, I laid stickers in geological strata across the white laminate of my desk. Peeled one at a time, they’d have revealed earlier versions of the girl sticking them, like a candy passing through its flavors as it melts in the mouth. A teenage girl’s room is a cockpit, an altar, and a womb: it contains her most sacred things, and it holds her as she grows, until eventually it ejects her into the world.

  The Dell underwent its own changes. It ran every Microsoft operating system from MS DOS to Windows 95. The DOS era was wonderful: games on floppy disk, terminal commands. Over time, my monitor’s blunt plastic bezel thickened with coats of glitter nail polish and Post-It notes. GET A LIFE, I wrote across the Dell’s frame, in Sharpie, in anger, in devotion.

  When the Internet came into my life, it was as though my monitor became a glass gate. It opened to an infinite channel. When the modem stuttered, I’d shower it in compliments: You are such a good modem, and I believe you can do anything. It was my own compulsive folk tradition. I believed, then, that information, like people, needed support on its journey across the world. In my early years online, I learned how to write HTML and built rudimentary sites honoring my favorite bands. I sent passionate e-mails to estranged summer camp friends. I found answers to the questions I was too shy to ask. I made pen pals I was afraid of meeting. I journaled in pocket communities now obsolete. In short, I became myself, enjoying the freedoms the computer afforded me, freedoms both from—isolation, shyness, ignorance—and to—learn, experiment, discover, and play.

  I abandoned the Dell when I left for college with a Sony VAIO, one of those tragic interstitial laptop models that will likely populate future museums of technology, with a detachable base that served mostly to heat the tops of my thighs. Like most consumer electronics in the United States, the Dell was likely landfilled, or else dispatched by container ship to China, Malaysia, India, or Kenya, where it was disarticulated like a chicken carcass, cables snipped, guts stripped of valuable metals and ores. Today I think about how the glitter-encrusted monitor must have looked to the underpaid laborers, working in a toxic field of unprocessed e-waste, who ground my Dell into plastic dust. Even once they’ve grown obsolete, computers never fully disappear—they only become somebody else’s problem. Being mass-produced, they form part of our cultural memory, avatars, like my Dell, of childhood landscapes, or, like the Macintosh I never had, of personal computing as a whole. Doubtless this is why we so often consider the history of technology as a row of progressively smarter machines: from Chinese abaci to room-sized cabinets tended by pliant workers, from refrigerators with cathode-ray screens to ever-smaller incarnations of silicon and plastic, dwindling finally to the familiar handheld pane of glass. Anywhere along the line, it’s tempting to eulogize the box. To point to one and say, “The people who made this changed the world.” This story is not about those people.

  This is a book about women.

  It’s also a book about the use of computers, real and potential. This is not to say that men make and women use—far from it—only that the technological history we’re usually told is one about men and machines, ignoring women and the signals they compose. Female mental labor was the original information technology, and women elevated the rudimentary operation of computing machines into an art called programming. They gave language to the box. They wrestled brute mainframes into public service, showing how the products of industry could serve the people, if the intent was there. When the Internet was still an unruly assortment of hosts, they built protocols to direct the flow of traffic and help it grow. Before the World Wide Web came into our lives, female academics and computer scientists created systems to turn vast storehouses of digital information into knowledge; we abandoned those in favor of brute simplicity. Women built empires in the dot-com era, and they were among the earliest to establish and grow virtual communities. The lessons they learned in the process would serve us well today, if we’d listen.

  None of this quantifies cleanly, which makes these women’s contributions to computing difficult to catalog and even harder to memorialize. Although this book owes a debt of gratitude to the fine historical research it cites, I also drew from first-person accounts given by the women in these pages and from the fragmentary documentation characteristic of technological history: screenshots, chat logs, abandonware, outdated manuals, and eroded Web pages. I’ve done my best to explore what software artifacts remain, learning Unix commands and the social conventions of old-world online culture with the diligence of a student abroad. May the servers whir long enough to support more virtual tourism, because these places will become only more precarious with time. An irony: even as computer memory multiplies, our ability to hold on to personal memories remains a matter of will, bounded by the skull and expanded only by our capacity to tell stories.

  There are technical women in these pages, some of the brightest programmers and engineers in the history of the medium. There are academics and hackers. And there are culture workers, too, pixel pushers and game designers and the self-proclaimed “biggest bitch in Silicon Alley.” Wide as their experiences are, they’ve all got one thing in common
. They all care deeply about the user. They are never so seduced by the box that they forget why it’s there: to enrich human life. If you’re looking for women in the history of technology, look first where it makes life better, easier, and more connected. Look for the places where form gives way to function. A computer is a machine that condenses the world into numbers to be processed and manipulated. Making this comprehensible to as many people as possible, regardless of technical skill, is not an essentially feminine pursuit. Nothing is. That being said, the women I talked to all seemed to understand it implicitly and to value it as fundamental, inalienable, and right.

  To live with a box that connects the world to itself is expansive, life altering, and even a little magic. But the box itself is still only an object. If not taken to pieces and recycled, it’ll poison Earth for millennia, a permanence justifiable only if we believe what happens before the landfill is worthwhile. Spiritual, even. Computers are built to be turned on, cables are meant to be patched in, and links are made to be clicked. Without the human touch, current may run, but the signal stops. We animate the thing. We give it meaning, and in that meaning lies its worth. History books celebrate the makers of machines, but it’s the users—and those who design for the users—who really change the world.

  Women turn up at the beginning of every important wave in technology. We’re not ancillary; we’re central, often hiding in plain sight. Some of the most wondrous contributions in these pages bloomed in the grubby medians of the information superhighway. Before a new field developed its authorities, and long before there was money to be made, women experimented with new technologies and pushed them beyond their design. Again and again, women did the jobs nobody thought were important, until they were. Even computer programming was initially passed off onto the girls hired to patch cables and nothing more—until the cables became patterns, and the patterns became language, and suddenly programming was something worth mastering.

  A few notes before we go. I take as a given in this book that sex is to gender as body is to soul. “Woman” means something different for everyone. There’s no end to the ways in which it can be inhabited, and any loosening of the categories liberates a great many individual lives. That being said, women often share experiences, and particularly in environments where we are in the minority, it’s nice to look for commonalities that can bolster our solidarity. One more: the history of computers is an alphabet salad. We’ll meet ENIAC and UNIVAC and ARPANET and PLATO and the WWW. It can be difficult to read these acronyms without feeling like the past is yelling at you. Please don’t despair. It’s half the fun.

  Onward now. My Dell is gone, its memory wiped. What remains of it isn’t etchings on a hard drive but markings on a person: the user pushing symbols around. My memories of the Dell are like memories I have of family and friends. They’re memories of time spent together, of journeys traveled. Memories of revelation and transgression. That’s the miraculous thing about technology: it’s never wholly separate from us. Just as a hammer strengthens the hand, or a lens the sight, the computer amplifies a person, extending the touch of even a teenage girl into the world. I am the computer, and the computer is me.

  I won’t be the last to feel this way. And I certainly wasn’t the first.

  PART ONE

  The Kilogirls

  Chapter One

  A COMPUTER WANTED

  It’s 1892 in New York City. In January, an immigration processing center called Ellis Island opened for business. In March, in Springfield, Massachusetts, a YMCA instructor desperate to keep a class of stir-crazy youngsters entertained indoors hosted the first public game of “basket ball.” But the winter is over, and it’s the first of May, just shy of summer, just shy of the twentieth century. It’s before the screen, the mouse, the byte, the pixel, and one hundred years before my Dell, but there’s a strange notice in the classified pages of the New York Times.

  A COMPUTER WANTED, it says.

  This ad is the first instance of the word “computer” in print. It wasn’t placed by an indiscreet time-traveler, someone trapped in the Gilded Age and jonesing for the familiar glow of their MacBook. It was placed by the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, which was by then several decades into a mathematical astronomy project: calculating, by hand, the positions of the sun, stars, moon, and planets across the night sky. The observatory’s directors were not in the market, that spring, to buy a computer. They were looking to hire one.

  For close to two hundred years, a computer was a job. As in someone who computes, or performs computations, for a living. Had one been browsing the Times that May Day in 1892 and decided to answer the classified ad, they’d soon be taking an algebra test. The Naval Observatory job was cushy, relatively: those who lived nearby worked in a cozy, informal office in Cambridge, far from the observatory itself, which was perched on a bluff above the Potomac. They clocked five-hour days, charting the skies from individual tables by a roaring fire, pausing often to discuss the scientific ideas of the day. The rest worked from home, from detailed mathematical plans they received in the mail. Computing, as one historian has noted, was the original cottage industry.

  Every day, these computers—much as computers do today—would chip away at complicated, large-scale math problems. They wouldn’t do it alone. Our new hire would be part of a team: everyone crunching their share of the numbers, some correcting each other’s work for extra income. With pen and paper alone, the Naval Observatory team would chart the skies, just as other computing offices throughout the Western world would advance ballistics, maritime navigation, or pure mathematics. They wouldn’t receive much individual credit, but whatever the problem was, they’d have been instrumental in solving it.

  Computing offices were thinking factories. The nineteenth-century British mathematician Charles Babbage, whose desire to calculate by steam led to important early developments in mechanical computing, called what the human computing offices of his time did “mental labor.” He considered it work one did with the brain, just as hammering a nail is work one does with the arm. Indeed, computing was the grunt labor of organized science; before they were made obsolete, human computers prepared ballistics trajectories for the United States Army, cracked Nazi codes at Bletchley Park, crunched astronomical data at Harvard, and assisted numerical studies of nuclear fission on the Manhattan Project. Despite the diversity of their work, human computers had one thing in common. They were women.

  Mostly, anyway. The Naval Observatory hired only one female computer for its Nautical Almanac Office, although she was by far the most famous among them: Maria Mitchell, a Quaker from Nantucket Island, who had won a medal from the king of Denmark before she was thirty for discovering a new comet in the night sky. It came to be known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” At the observatory, Mitchell calculated the ephemeris of Venus, being, as her supervisor told her, the only computer fair enough to tackle the fairest of the planets.

  Her presence as a woman in a computing group was unusual for its time, but it would only become less so. Maria Mitchell discovered her comet only a year before the Seneca Falls Conference on the Rights of Women, which was largely organized by Quaker activists. Her church was the sole religious denomination allowing women to preach to its congregations, and Maria’s father, an amateur astronomer, lobbied aggressively for her accomplishments to be recognized. Before the end of the twentieth century, however, computing would become largely the purview of women. It was female mental laborers, breaking intractable problems down into numerical steps much as machines tackle problems today, who ushered in the age of large-scale scientific research.

  By the mid-twentieth century, computing was so much considered a woman’s job that when computing machines came along, evolving alongside and largely independently from their human counterparts, mathematicians would guesstimate their horsepower by invoking “girl-years,” and describe units of machine labor as equivalent to one “kilogirl.” This is the
story of the kilogirls. It begins, as the most beautiful patterns do, with a loom.

  THE SPIDER WORK

  The loom is a simple technology, but in the warp and weft of thread lies the weaving of all technologically literate society. Textiles are central to the business of being human, and like software, they are encoded with meaning. As the British cultural theorist Sadie Plant observes, every cloth is a record of its weaving, an interconnected matrix of skills, time, materials, and personnel. “The visible pattern” of any cloth, she writes, “is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous.” This process, of course, historically concerns women. Around looms, at spinning wheels, in sewing circles, in ancient Egypt and China, and in southeastern Europe five centuries before Christianity, women have woven clothing, shelter, the signifiers of status, even currency.

  Like many accepted patterns, this was disrupted by the Industrial Revolution, when a French weaver, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, proposed a new way to create cloth—not by hand, but by the numbers. Unlike a traditional loom, singularly animated by its weaver’s ingenuity, Jacquard’s invention produced remarkably complex textiles from patterns punched into sequences of paper cards, reproducible and consistent beyond a margin of human error. The resulting damask, brocade, and quilted matelassé became highly coveted all over Europe, but the impact of Jacquard’s loom went far beyond industrial textile production: his punched cards, which separated pattern from process for the first time in history, would eventually find their way into the earliest computers. Patterns encoded on paper, which computer scientists later called “programs,” could meaningfully entangle numbers as easily as thread.

  The Jacquard loom put skilled laborers, male and female, out of work. Some took out their anger on the frames of the new machines, claiming as a folk hero the apocryphal Ned Ludd, a weaver said to have smashed a pair of stocking-frames at the end of the previous century. We use the term Luddite now in the pejorative, to describe anyone with an unreasonable aversion to technology, but the cause was not unpopular in its time. Even Lord Byron sympathized. In his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 1812, he defended the organized framebreakers by comparing the results of a Jacquard loom’s mechanical weaving to “spider-work.” Privately, he worried that, in his sympathy for the Luddites, he might be taken as “half a frame-breaker” himself. He was, of course, not—and he was dead wrong about the spider work, too.