You to terry for her support for her advice over the years, including many good topics, suggestions, and if you are here you will know she is responsible for the beach boys, and all sorts of others we have enjoyed over the years thanks to her suggestions. Terry, would you please stand up . [applause] tonights speaker, claire l. Evans, has achieved notable success in two disparate fields, both as a musician and as a writer. In the former career, she is the lead singer and cofounder of the conceptual pop group yacht, and has recently returned 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. And in that regard, she is the former futures editor of motherboard and a contributor to vice, the guardian, and wired, among other publications. She is, for example, the Founding Editor of terraform, a vices sciencefiction chronicle. However, the thing that particularly commands her to our attention and brings are here 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, university of california berkeley, the herschel museum, and the Riverside Museum of art in beijing, among many others. She lives in los angeles where l. A. Uns the popular centric culture app, five every day. One of the accomplishments that brings her here is her here is are highly acclaimed and pathbreaking book titled broad band the untold story of the women who made the internet. Which was published in 2018. One reader of that work had this to say. Broadband is thrilling, powerful stuff. At once an electric feminist history of modern tech and a muchneeded corrective to the hyper male mythology of Silicon Valley. Her surprising and eminently readable work restores credit to the countless brilliant women who made the connected world into what it is today. Said another, and 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 and provide s 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 that pulls the reader in. Welcome with me, the multitalented claire evans. [applause] claire hello. Hi, everyone. Im so excited to be here, and i know it is a spooky time to be gathering in public, so i doubly recognize you for being here in a room with other human beings right now. I hope we are all washing our hands, but beyond that, i am very grateful also to be part of this auspicious series of lectures about our collective history. First, ive got to start up the old hard drive before i can Start Talking here. Ok. So, i am going to do something a little different tonight than what is customary for the series. Im not going to be talking about a single individuals contribution to history, but rather talk about a collective of people sorry, thats me in my best steve jobs outfit. I am going to be talking about a collective of individuals over a couple of generations spanning a couple years. Hundred i did this for two reasons. One, because tech history is complicated and by definition, distributed. Often,ec Innovation Tech innovation coalesces among multiple emergent paths and not so much in a clear and linear way, but i also do it because i am trying to tell a feminist story and to me, the opposite or the corrective to your standard great man history is not necessarily a great woman history. It is something thats a little 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 the feminist history of computing at all . Well, for me, it is personal. I am 35, im 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 the toaster was for boys or for girls. It was just an appliance that was 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 eightyearold playing the cdrom game myst, which maybe dates my generation, but i was so obsessed with that i forced my father to fill me beating, which he did an excellent job of, by the way. [laughter] but i loved the computer. Not only because it took me to different worlds inside a story, but also because it took me across the world. Because thanks to the miracle of the World Wide Web, even when i was shut away in my teenage bedroom, i could make connections with individuals all over the world, which for me was a radically invigorating thing for an introvert and an only child. In fact, i grew up feeling the World Wide Web was kind of my native country. It was a place where i defined my identity as a young person, learned how to write, learned how to learn, 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 this video was taken and the time that i stand before you now, and that is that ive changed, of course, but also the web changed too, and it felt more inhospitable to me than when i was young. It felt more inhospitable to me as a person but also as a woman. It stopped feeling safe, sure, 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 at the past, as you do. I talked to a lot of older women about their careers in the early computing industry and on the first wave of the web and i researched the history of women in computing. And 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 than what i have 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 i found that was most important, i think, was and i dont know how to say this, really, but i found the seeds of a different future. But 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 it can start in a lot of places. But for the sake of brevity, ive chosen 1892 as our starting point. Ok, so lets imagine it is the year 1892 and for the sake of argument, you live in new york city. So, for context, in january of that year, an Immigration Processing Center ellis island was open for business and in march, the very first game of basketball was played in springfield, massachusetts thanks to the efforts of this man, a ymca instructor who was desperate to keep a bunch of stir crazy young people from interested in hanging out indoors. But winter is over now and is t is the first of may. Just shy of summer, just shy of the 20th century. It is long before the screen, before the byte, the mouse, the pixel, but before any of this, there is a notification in the classified pages of the new york times. A computer wanted, it says. This is the first instance of the word computer in print. And it wasnt placed by a time traveler. It wasnt placed by someone who was transported to the gilded age and joan xing and jonesing for their laptop. Whoever placed this ad was looking for a computer to hire, not a computer to buy. A computer was a person, a job, someone who computes, someone who performs computations for a living. The same is true for the word calculator. So lets say you decided to answer that want ad and decided to become a computer. First, you have to take a math test and if you did well enough, on the first day of the job, you would be placed at a seat on a long table, Something Like this, and 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 much too large for any single individual to handle. Instead, you would break those down into bitesize pieces and work collaboratively with lots of 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 just pure mathematics. You would inform the underlying copy additional infrastructure of the early scientific age. You would embody it, quite literally. You would make science possible. And computing offices like these were not highfalutin places of higher learning. They were kind of like stinking factories. Charles babbage called what Human Computers did mental labor. That is a pretty good way of thinking of it. Computing wasnt seen as something that required a lot of intellectual talent or sophistication. It was just work you did with your brain in the same way that hammering a nail was work that you do with your arm. Ultimately, however, Human Computers did a lot more than hammer nails. They prepared ballistics trajectories for the u. S. Army. They assisted numerical studies of Nuclear Fission on the manhattan project. They crunched astronomical data at harvard. They cracked nazi codes. The applications of their work were as complicated as the applications of any method got a any mathematical problem. They did have one thing in common, and i think it is easy to guess what that is. They were all women. Thats right. Computing was so much a womans job that by the time computing machines came along, mathematicians populated how long they took the process problems in girl years, or described units of machine labor in terms of kilo girls, which is pretty remarkable language. And of course from the beginning the women were being paid less than the few men doing the same job. So in the late 19th century, the astronomer Edward Charles pickering needed an arsenal of Human Computers to classify some stellar spectrum data in his harvard lab, and he hired only women, including his own maid, wilhelmina fleming. And he didnt do this because of some particular interest in the female mind, or some desire to nurture women 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. Women were paid half as much so he could get more for his buck. But the harvard computers, who are unfortunately known to history as pickerings harem, and his maid discovered the horsehead nebula. In her colleague, who has one of the coolest names in the history of science, could classify at a rate of three stars per minute. They mapped the cosmos. But their were equivalent to the wages of unskilled workers, between . 25 and . 50 an hour, which is more than a factory worker but less than a clerical worker. As the historian navin allen greer writes, women like these were not the intelligent workers of sympathetic men, they were werers, desk laborers, who earning their way for their skills at numbers. That might have been common in the 19th century, but things change of course, especially during wartime. The major wars have always affected gender and work. The American Civil War brought large numbers of battlefield widows into office work, and the first and second world wars ushered thousands of women into the workplace, most famously as mechanics, but also as typists, clerks, telephone operators, primarily. Telephone companies were the first major employers of a female workforce. In 1891, so, just one year before that computer wanted ad, 8000 women worked for the telephone companies. By 1946, nearly a quarter million. And these women were a nimble workforce. They were capable of working collaboratively, in fluid networks. We still talk about secretarial pools. We still hold some of that language. And once again, these are female bodies and minds serving as the physical infrastructure for an emerging technological age. Pension connections, which are networks, which are of course now patched electronically by bots and Automated Systems and, of course, ai, many of which still speak by default in female voices. As for the Human Computers, they began to disappear roughly around the 1940s, although in some domains, notably in aeronautics, important calculations continued to be done by hand and checked well into the 1970s when nasa formally dissolved its human computing divisions, made famous by the book and the film, hidd en figures. They found work programming the machines which emerged in the Computer Science research during world war ii and ultimately to replace them. And these machines, the earliest electromechanical computers, were developed in secret during the war to crunch numbers for the war effort, primarily to run ballistics for the boys at the front. The first people that were hired to operate these machines were the women who had already been doing that work for centuries before hand, but specifically the work of catalytic ballistic trajectories by hand. Because software wasnt really seen a something that was more important than patching cables, or handling punchcards and paperwork like a secretary, or doing math like a computer, programming was a job that was given to women without much thought. Of course, these women accepted the work gladly because here was finally something they could do with their Mathematics Education that wasnt just becoming a teacher or becoming a 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 information about how to run these things. These were built by engineers and handed off to the operators as an afterthought. These computers were the very first of their time. So when the mathematician grace hopper, who had a phd from yale in mathematics, was assigned to program the mark one computer at harvard in 1944, she was given no instruction other than just put this on that, and she quite literally reverse engineered the machine she had been assigned to, working nights, sleeping under her desk, studying wiring diagrams and taking components apart until she felt she understood its workings as well as, if not better than, some of the engineers that had built the machine. The same was true for the six women who were assigned to the first electronic programmable computer by the u. S. Army at the university of pennsylvania. Here, were talking about programming at the machine level. So when you talk programming now you think computing at a keyboard, typing symbols. This is not what programming was in the 1940s. This is a computer the size of the room. To program a machine like this, you had to quite literally crawl around inside this giant room sized machine making an ephemeral connections in time with touch cables and punchcards. It was something that was very physical. These women were replacing burnedout vacuum tubes, and fixing shorted connections and wiring control boards. By the time they were finished setting up, it could run differential calculus equations, but these women were officially classified in their employment as being subprofessional. When it was first unveiled to the public in 1946, after the war, the women who operated it were never introduced. And although the mathematical demonstrations it ran, especially for its first public demonstration of 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 and a lot of the early press about it was it was this miraculous machine made by clever men that could process problems in 15 seconds, not acknowledging the weeks of labor that went into setting up those problems and devising how they do work on the machine. In some historical images, they are credited as models and cropped out of the images entirely. For the sake of writing that historical wrong, im going to introduce some of them to you now. And although the moniker eniac 6 was used to obscure their individual contributions to the state of the art, i think eniac 6 would make an excellent name for an allgirl punk band. Im looking at the front row over here. I have a tshirt already made. During the war and shortly after, software wasnt a word. Neither was programmer. So what these women did was vaguely referred to as coding or operating, like a telephone operator. One of the eniac 6 called their job a cross between an architect and a construction engineer. So there was no name for what they did or no clear definition. Although this comes pretty close to defining what programming is like even today. But it was through the work of women like betty snyder and her contemporaries defining the role of programming, defining the stateoftheart, defining how it would work both during and after the war, that programming became something with its own value, a value that was separate from the menial manipulation of hardware. Because of them, it became a language. It became many languages. 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 Company Computer company in the u. S. Emcc was responsible for a computer called the univac, which in the 50s was synonymous with the word computer. People said univac to mean computer in the 1950s. Because the only people in the world who knew how to program , and the best in programming were women, they ran the Software Side of things entirely. They headed the Software Side of the operation. They did the univacs logical design, wrote its construction set, they wrote custom programs for every client at every installation, and they debugged those programs when necessary. Which was a huge workload. And in fact, it is because they were so overworked doing this job at the beginning of the commercial computer industry that women like grace hopper and her contemporaries first 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 during the war, they had coded at the machine level using the most elemental instruction sets. But after the war, because of their workload, they began to develop this idea of automatic programming, which is a fancy way of saying that programmers should be able to step above that machine level and with the help of intermediaries like assemblers and compilers and generators, be able to code a higher level of abstraction. Essentially the process of writing programs that would assist in the writing of other programs to make it easier for human beings and machines to interact. And that move toward systems level thinking changed the industry completely and influenced its entire development. And lead to nothing less than the development of programming languages. In fact, grace hopper spearheaded the effort to create one of the earliest and most important shared computer languages, cobol, the common businessoriented language, which is nobodys favorite programming language today, and is partially responsible for the y2k crisis. But it did the job of opening up computing to another generation. See, grace hopper and many of her contemporaries understood that computing as it originally had developed could never continue to develop if it remained fully in the purview of experts. If it remained in the hands of a what was then sort of proudly called a shadowy priesthood of coders. Grace wanted to see programming made accessible to as many people as possible regardless of Technical Knowledge and knew that could only be possible if users, humans, could communicate with computers using Something Like natural language, not just numbers, but recognizable words. And if that language was hardware independent, meaning it could run as easily on an ibm machine as it could on univac. And this notion of interoperability and access regardless of expertise is something that comes up again and again in the history of women and computers and what i would like to emphasize to you today as being one of the primary contributions women make. I mentioned at the beginning of this talk that the women i came across in writing this book are the seeds of different future. And it sounds highfalutin, but i mean that. I cannot tell you how many times in the process of researching this work that i found myself reading about a technology or an approach to technology or a philosophy that hadnt been implemented early enough at scale, had not been listened to, would fundamentally have changed how we operate today. These women arent just role models, they are not these sticker book characters of cool, badass ladies from history. They are glimpses of another way of being and another way of building things that is amicable to the world we live in. I am going to give you a more concrete example, and we are going to jump significantly forward in history from the 1950s to the 1980s to get there. Otherwise, we will never get through it all. This is my friend, stacy horn. When this photo was taken around 1989, she had just founded an Online Community. 1989 is before the World Wide Web, so in those days, online generally meant a bbs, or a Bulletin Board system. Exactly what it sounds like. A tech window you would call on the phone and read conversations similar to a Bulletin Board in the back of a coffee shop. Stacy had been a fan of a very early Bulletin Board system in the bay area called the well, which is often cited as being the first social network. The well was deeply embedded in the technological culture of the bay area. It was populated mostly by guys, mostly working in the tech industry, mostly who were emerging from this technoutopian 1970s attitude about technology and alienating to someone like stacy who was a new yorker, a real, cynical new yorker, and she could buy all this hippie stuff. So when she started she also never wanted to talk about computers. She couldnt understand how if you logged into a Service Using a Service Using the computer you had to talk about computers. She wanted to connect with people and talk about theater, writing, art, and the things she cared about. She didnt want to talk about the specs of hardware. So she founded echo, the east coast hangout, one of the first social networks on the east coast of the u. S. Let me give you a sense of the tone of the culture of what echo was like. It was really genx, cynical, snarky, intellectual, and funny. And she did not run it out of some garage out of palo alto like the west coast guys were. She didnt run it in some office funded by big telecom money. She ran it in Greenwich Village surrounded by 20 figurines of gumby and photos of her friends. Which is in and of itself, fascinating. But what makes her interesting to my history is that echo was founded at a time in 1989 when the percentage of female users on the internet was vanishingly low. We do not have exact numbers but it is Something Like 10 , 15 . Which effectively means if you were a woman signing onto the early internet in one of its many guises, youd usually get a lot of undue attention if you used a female alias. He would maybe even get harassed. So a lot of female users of the early internet would use genderneutral or male aliases just to avoid any trouble, which made it really hard for women to find one another in these early social spaces of the internet. Authentically. Because you didnt know who anybody was, which was part of what was beautiful about the early internet. The rich anonymity of it all. It also made it difficult to form authentic communities with people you were looking to find. Echo, during a time when the entire internet was 10 female, had almost gender parity. She was at 40 female users, which made it one of the earliest spaces online to be genuinely hospitable to women in any way. Although stacy always resisted the idea that she created a safe space for women. Bite me, she wrote in 1998. I told you she was a genxer. I wanted to get women on echo to make it better, not as some concession to women, not a refuge, not an accommodation to a vulnerable population. She understood diversity isnt some favor you do to the under represented, it is an asset that serve the entire community. She was building a system predicated on healthy and exciting communication. That is what she was doing, she was building a social network, and she knew if there was more perspective, it would be a more exciting, dynamic conversation and that translated to a better product. And it was. Anyway, she had all those female users because she was actively trying to court women to come online. Women didnt really come online in large numbers and surpass the male population of Internet Users until the World Wide Web, significantly later. She would do stuff that was out of the box. She would recruit people from nontechnical spaces. She would go to Art Galleries and happenings and shows in new york city and find interesting looking people and try to convince them to do the thing that sounded insane at the time, which was spent 100 on a modem and join her fledgling Online Community. And if a woman left her service, she would call her personally and ask her what happened. She made access for women free for an entire year. She gave womens groups their own areas of the service. He created private spaces on her network which allowed women to communicate with each other in the absence of men, the way women do sometimes in the absence of men, and also report instances of harassment, if necessary. She spoke to womens groups about the internet and she taught out of Greenwich Village so that a lack of knowledge would never be an inhibition. This is her on charlie rose in 1994, which i know the footage has not aged well, but she is teaching charlie rose how to use echo, ever the teacher. But her main strategy for recruiting female users wasnt just an outreach, which worked really well, but was baked into the design of her system. So in those days, online communities were always moderated by host. We still kind of have this on the internet today, moderators on places like reddit, but hosts were users of the service who were deputized and given free access to the service in exchange for the responsibility of guiding and moderating conversation. Kind of like hosts at a party. And although we still have some form of the internet that has hosts like this, this moderation role has been outsourced to contract workers, a shadow world of traumatized employees who are dealing with the worst of humanity all at once, and who have little to no relationship worst of humanity all at once. Every conversation always had to hosts. A man and a woman. Sometimes logging onto the internet for the very first time, you immediately see yourself represented. Not in just the power structure but in the community. This made women less reluctant to jump in and enter the conversation. Other spaces were dominated by male conversations, they lessated and made it interesting if you were a vanishing personality. Everybody saw themselves in the mix and echo, it was a very egalitarian space. Echo still exists today. Its one of the oldest continuously operating communities in the world and this is what it looks like. Stacy never made the jump to the World Wide Web. She never sold, franchised or indulged in the idea when the idea of doing a lucrative ipo. When the first web browser came along, she could not afford to create a hypertext interface. She essentially had a paid service that people dial into. The idea of switching to a free online model was not she was not able to do that. She never got rich. She never got famous. That, her of all of accomplishment remains massive. To me, at least. She did amazing things. She achieved gender parity on a n almost completely male dominated internet. Just because she cared to do it. And her platform has remained online for decades, outliving many web products and nurturing a small but devoted family of users. Because she cared enough to keep it that way. That is a word from a different future, different timeline. Carent hear a lot about in relation to online space and tech culture much. In tech, caring means caring about, investing in a big idea, building it was no immediate promise of renumeration, taking risks, and all of that is admirable. But what stacy represents to me is a different kind of care. It is not caring about, it is caring after. Caring for. Continuing the commitment of care and investment in the community beyond the exciting moments of the pitch and into the tedious workaday realities. This is something our culture associates with women, and in Silicon Valley, the professional realms that are associated with this kind of work tend to be women,with people, often whose skills are not seen as technical. But the way i see it, care is very much a technical skill. Software is a mechanism by which human beings facilitate paths for other human beings. To do that effectively, you have to understand the task, understand the mental model of the people approaching the task, understand the concept the context in which they operate and understand how to translate the messy realities of human life into code. You have to go beyond simple metrics like growth and User Acquisition and market share and consider bigger implications like mental health, community, society at large. We are living in a world where we are dealing with consequences of the tools that were not designed with those things in mind. It is changing our way of life. Social skills are essential in all of this. By social skills, i dont mean getting along with people, i mean being able to see a technological object as an extension of and in meshed with the larger social context in a world of users who are people. And ultimately yes, i mean caring about those people. I know Something Like echo cannot realistically compete inheritors, but i keep coming back to stacy story because it represents to me this great lost opportunity. What if the architects of our presentday social media platforms had made the kind of efforts at inclusion and representation and Mutual Respect that someone like stacy made without fanfare because it seemed to be the right thing to do . What of those values and approach were baked into the way we made things rather than patched and afterthefact after people had already been hurt . Would i be standing here talking about how for me the web is not fun anymore or does not feel like home anymore . I dont think so. Stacy is not an outlier. If you are looking for women in the history of technology, it helps to look first in those places where users are especially cared for. Where form gives way to function, capital gives way to community, and metrics of way to meaning. I will give you another example. This is another scintillating will he scintillatingly 1980s photograph. Damedane windy hall wendy hall. When this photo was taken, she was a lecturer at the university of southampton. Her field was purely mathematics until she discovered something called hypertext. If we think about hypertext at all today, we think about it it in the context of the World Wide Web. The web is written in hypertext andup language, html, includes those blue links. In the hypertext was the larger 1960s, study of connecting ideas, images, multimedia documents together through computer systems. That was already a utopian idea in a way. As technology progressed and memory increased and the amount of information that could be recalled grew hypertext grew , ever more complex and the implication that we might connect all of human ideas together in a dense web became a utopian cause in parts of Silicon Valley. Endy had been turned on to hypertext in the mid80s. Act andhrough this anachronistic system called the doomsday project. It digitally documented british life. It was released in 1986 as two video laserdiscs you could only play on this specific computer. The discs were full of multimedia. It is all available online. It had virtual walks through the british countryside. Images of british cities. Accountsfirstperson of life in the u. K. Written by british schoolchildren. All easily navigable. What was interesting to her was but howof the material it was navigated. This is a glimpse of what the interface looks like. This was before the web taught us to pointandclick get images in recognizable areas. Very ahead of its time. It was hugely novel to walk around the screen using visual cues. It suddenly made all of the impersonal steaming data that Computers Made accessible feel intuitive and immediate and exciting. It made it comprehensible to people outside of Computer Science. Combined with the emerging technology of the personal computer, she realized it might make this previously unaccessible information accessible to a large number of people. Again, the idea of accessibility regardless of expertise. It felt revolutionary and exciting. She decided to throw herself into this field of hypertext. Her colleagues at southhampton in the mathematics and later Computer Science department told her there was no future for her at the university or in Computer Science if she kept up with this hypertext stuff. She ignored them as all of the greats to and made a system that made it possible for people to Browse Library materials through the same way she had browsed those discs. She began with the archive at by university library, and 1989, her team had built an entire system called microcosm. It demonstrated this new and exciting and intuitive way of navigating information. It made it dynamic, alive and adaptable to its user. It was not like the web at all. In many ways it was better. Im going to give you a primer. On the web, this is what a webpage looks like circa 1992. Hyperlinks are contextual, embedded in the documents. That means when the destination of a link is taken down, we get what is called a 404 error. The web is full of 404 errors. The average lifespan of a website is nine years. There are a lot of dead ends everywhere. Aside from being an inconvenience, it is a huge loss for our culture. When we get a 404 error, it means the connection that together is gone forever. This is not insignificant information. That is metadata and context. That is what makes knowledge knowledge. Microcosm is different. It did not do this. It kept all of the links separate in a database. What it effectively did is all of the links in microcosm were able to communicate with the underlying document without making a mark on them. It was an overlay rather than a structural change to the material. It meant a link could have many different sources and many different destinations. A more fluid understanding of what a link could be. A link could go in different directions. Different lawyers could users could layer different links. The system was designed to be adaptable to people and to encourage natural human learning , connection building. It was built for that and it valued that most important piece the nature of the connection between things. , microcosm good. There were a lot of systems like this in the late 80s and early 90s. They were coming out of universities and Research Labs and places like apple and ibm. They do not look that glamorous now, but they were really exciting in different ways. Almost every Team Building these at the time had women in senior positions is not at the helm. Thats because hypertext as a discipline was more accessible to people outside of the traditional Computer Science background. If you went to a hypertext conference at the time, you would be surrounded by humanists and historians. It was not just hardnosed engineers and programmers. It was people interested in making meaning out of data. All of these systems, as different as they were, shared that value. This idea that the association between ideas was the most important thing about making links. Why links were connected. To the community of scholars, that was the essence of the field. From why emerges the deepest meeting meaning. Bernerslee presented the first demo of the World Wide Web at the hypertext 91 conference in san antonio, which was the first time the web was shown in the u. S. , his paper was not even accepted. He had to bring his own demo on his own 10,000 computer. All the way from switzerland to san antonio on his own dime to it at the hotel in san antonio. Even then, most people were highly disinterested in what he was showing them. They saw the links were all contextual and embedded into the documents, which meant that they could easily break. The good was the system if links were so limited and they could easily break . At the time, the internet was highly cost prohibitive. It was expensive, simplistic and easily breakable. You can see how unimpressed everyone in the photos looks. These women are not having it. One detail that is so wonderful was held in the summer in san is because this conference was held in the summer in san antonio, one of the prime conferenceafter the was over, was a massive margarita fountain in the courtyard outside. It is a true fact that the very first time the World Wide Web was being shown to scholars in the u. S. , everybody was outside getting drunk on margaritas. Nobody cared. If you looked at the photograph, one of the only photographs of the moment there is a margarita , on the table. [laughter] this person just wandered in from the courtyard with a margarita in hand. What is this web thing, i dont think so. It is such a snapshot. We all know what happens with the web. It very quickly outpaced everything in the hypertext world. By 1992, tim bernerslee on theed the first photo internet. Employees thatof sing satirical songs about life in a lab. Its not really related but i have to share with you. I fill your mail file with hearts and roses and it comes back invalid users. That being said, after this came everything else. The web became standard. Bernerslee was giving the keynote at the atertext conference, and that point the hypertext conference and web conference were held in the same week. ,he more sophisticated systems like the incredible microcosm system, became a thing of the past. Noah is no way for us to Something Like microcosm could have replaced the web, just as there is no way to know what would have happened if Something Like echo had had enough funding to make the transition to the World Wide Web and become our foundational social network. That doesnt stop me dreaming about it, and thats what i mean about the different features some of these womens stories present us with few did it demonstrates to me vividly how many other paths have laid before us, just as many paths still lie before us if we could only look for them. It is important to remember nothing exists in a vacuum. New technologies do not fall from the sky unbidden. They emerge from a continuum of ideas. The World Wide Web could not have existed without decades of Research Done by hypertext scholars, mostly women, and social media as we experience today could not exist without decades of experimentation in Online Community building on the early internet on platforms long gone, and some that are still with us. Tech history like other history is often told to us as a solitary genius working alone. We all know about bill gates and steve jobs. Of course those people are remarkable. But they were never alone. They were always surrounded by people and ideas. Because making big things requires big communities. Thats what is so exciting about technology, it invites so many of us in, but it also makes it hard to see where things come from and more important, where they might lead and could still lead. Dont see the multiplicity of all of this, leave out a huge, beautiful part of the story and we make it so much harder for the other versions of the established history to work there versions on our world to make it better. Machines can now perform in fractions of a second what would have taken a human computing office many girl years to complete. For a few centuries, women working together were hardware. Distributed biological machines capable of calculations beyond the powers of a single individual. They catalogued the cosmos, charted the stars, measure the world. The computer as we know it today was named after the people it replaced. And long before we came to relying on the network as a fundamental part of our lives, our grandmothers and greatgrandmothers were performing the functions that brought these systems about. In the 1960s, women were half of the workforce in computing. They earned 40 of degrees in Computer Science programs at american universities until about 1984, when the number began to dive and kept diving. Since then, the industry has found many cunning ways to edge women out of the picture, which im sure is not surprising to any of you. Lack of mentorship, structural unwillingness to make space for child care, and the requirements necessary to get a job as a programmer. That theuggests professionalization of the field led to its masculinization. If it began as womens work, it had to be made masculine through specificallyrts, in the 1960s to rename computing as software engineering. It came with professional requirements that were more conducive to men. It set a male president that has been reinforced by decades of marketing and misconception. If you were someone who was interested in buying or reading about computers in the 1970s, you would see ads like this all the time. If you search any kind of Library Archive for historical images of computing, they are widely wildly sexist. You might see products like these. The honeywell kitching computers, it took two weeks of classes to learn how to use, but it was marketed to women to help organize the recipes. More condescendingly, it came to it came with ad copy like this. If only she could cook as well as honeywell can compute. [laughter] extravagantly condescending language. An entire generation of people grew up with this as a default. I grew up with things like this. Sciencealled weird which was about a couple of nebbish geek boys who design their dream woman using a computer. Computers were for boys. It was something that made people believe that men were natural to computing. And that women are at best accessories to it. And that is propaganda, it is a lie and an anachronism. A lot of us are proof. If you remember anything from this talk, and i dont blame you if youve forgotten a lot of it already, please remember this if there is a boys club that dominates Silicon Valley today, it is a bona fide historical anachronism. I generally believe in a technological world, technological histories are important. If women and girls are able to see themselves in the dna of a familynets most transformative technologies, then they can see themselves more easily in the future. I write about history and i do not know that much about the future. But there is one thing i know for sure, if we are going to survive it and restart it, we will need all the help we can get. Thank you. [applause] thank you, claire. Now we will take some questions. If you raise your hand, we will find as many of you as we can. Thank you. I assume the purpose of your talk is to say that a womans brain is as good as a mans brain . I assume that is the purpose. Claire i would hope. Step one. [laughter] intellectually. But halfway through it looks like maybe you disagree the lady stacy who was selling her product echo was using sex to sell it. Was that true . Claire what was the second part . The picture of stacy, was that a sexual picture . Claire sitting on the table . Sure. I dont think that is a particularly sexy picture. It is an edgy picture. She was kind of popular in 1990s counterculture writing about technology i would not say it was objectively sexy picture. That said women can be , intelligent and sexy at the same time and use whatever power she likes to sell her product. Ok, go ahead. Not so much a question but some trivia about grace hopper. Claire yes please. Promoted to commodore. In the 1980s, she was promoted to commodore. That is the time when pcs were deployed everywhere. In some quarters she was referred to as a computer commodore. You mentioned earlier her work with compilers and assemblers and trying to take Simple Machine tod use a translate things in to a language that computers could work with. She was so focused on making that connection and communicating to people, that among other things, whenever she had a public display, she would distribute what she called a nanosecond. Definitiond in her was the distance it takes the speed of light to travel in a nanosecond. About 12 inches. She distributed these as a way to communicate to people that when you see tv reporters talking to each other and there was a delay in the conversation, it was because of satellite transmissions taking time. But clearly she was a real rule breaker and she trained and told the people who worked on our rules, butak the they were in the navy and still of jove still observed the chain of command. The final rule she broke is after she retired, she insisted whenever she went out in public to wear her uniform. She was so proud of serving her country. But that was against the rules. Claire she was one of the greats. Its interesting you mentioned the uniform one of the interesting things about her early coyear early career in the navy, when she was first given a computer, she was entering a male dominated environment. She was they referred to the in the navy and computer as a she, like a boat. It was clipped and rulebound and everybody wore uniforms. But ultimately, the uniforms and the hierarchy were effective in dissolving gender boundaries. Everyone was working toward a common cause, which i think benefited her and that is probably part of why she was so attached to the uniform later in life. She was great, one of the greats, obviously. We have a question over here. Thank you for your talk. It was wonderful. Having a bunch of granddaughters and hoping to lead them into the future. Could you name some of the women that you think are an inspiration today and leaders in the tech world you think we should follow . I would appreciate that, thank you. Claire of course. I write about history, so most of my heroes are oldschool. There are plenty of interesting women. I have a good friend who is an amazing engineer who was working on product called block party that allows women to block people who harass them across Different Social Media platforms. [applause] claireyeah. I love taking those problems handed down to us by mono Tech Companies that are thinking about the tools they make and fighting ways to create your own solutions to them. I think thats a beautiful way of handling the complexities. I would hope your granddaughters would be people i could cite in future lectures. Yes . Thank you so much for coming. I have been a big fan of you and your work for so long. I was wondering if you could expand on a point you made earlier about how most of the ai we have is voiced by females. , you put out a track a while back called party in the nsa. I was wondering what you think about widespread surveillance in our homes with things like google home and alexa. Claire good questions. I was surprised when i was doing the Historical Research that is a clear lineage between female telephone operators and the way we are accustomed to hearing female voices on the other set of the phone in these servile roles. Ai, but also in train stations and airports, its often a female voice. Some people say both men and women respond more positively to a female voice in that context. I dont know if it is true. I have heard that female voices cut through ambient sound more clearly, i dont know if that is true. I think it is a Cultural Association that we now have. It is important for us to deconstruct that quickly. Especially with conversational alexa andri and cortana, they are teaching us to automatically assume that female voices will be pliant and subservient to our command and it scares me, especially with kids. Im worried we are teaching a generation of kids with these ambient help mates around the house. That is one problem. I recently interviewed a woman and google who was working on the team developing the assistant. She worries about that. She built in something where kids have to say please before they getting before they get anything. I dont think that is a root of the problem. But i think having these conversations about how do we design a neutral ai . What does that mean and how does that come through in a human voice . These are important questions we need to think about, and big design problems the next generation should be tackling with enthusiasm. What is more exciting than designing the voice of an ai . What an opportunity to interface in a very intimate way with technology and create social precedents and standards so we can communicate with each other and our tools. Its a great opportunity. The flipside of that is the surveillance aspect of these tools, which is generally very scary. I dont have an alexa in my house. It gives me the heebiejeebies. Siri in my phone that is inescapable. But we need to be conscious of consumers with what we are ok with. It is a slippery slope for sure. My question is somewhat similar. Do you think bias toward ai has contributed to that sexism . Siri weree alexa and brought up, but also in things like film, a lot of ai women are portrayed in a sexist way. Men can be interfaces and basic humanoid figures. Claire for sure. It is interesting to me that the most prevalent ai architects are are sexy lady voice or scary sociopathic ai man voice. Cantk a lot of cases, we really tackle some of these tech problems until we look in the mirror first. I dont think there are Technological Solutions to social problems, we need to work on ourselves. That being said, i do think Science Fiction film and cinema is a really important site for educating the public about what a technology is. We have a Widespread Lack of about what ai is, where is this companion or sociopathic voice. Even thinking about an ai and an anthropomorphic way is detrimental to our understanding of how the Technology Actually functions. It is a series of highly specified mathematical operations for classifying data. It is way less sexy. But we need to find a way to tell stories that represents ai the way it is and represent things that are genuinely scary about ai. Liket that police that police could use ai to systematically repress groups of people. That is way scarier to me than Something Like skynet. I think we have a lot of work to do and there needs to be more of a conversation between computer scientists and film makers, artists and writers to tell better stories. A question from one of my students. This is a jump to the past. Do you have any information about ada lovelace . Claire of course. You cannot write a book about women in computing without starting with ada lovelace. I skipped it for tonight because she is one of these characters who is often trotted out in this context. I am not sick of her, i love her, she is a fascinating character. Lovelacer context, ada was the daughter of the poet lord byron. She was a brilliant mathematician in her own right and had the same kind of reckless poetic ideas of her father, just in numbers rather than words. She is responsible for writing the first computer program. And shea brilliant mind was the first to understand that computers could process information beyond just numbers. She made these conceptual leaps in her writing about computing to imagine a world in which a computer might operate upon musical colors or use more abstract entities. And how right she was. It took a long time for us to catch up with her, and we are just beginning to understand. Do you have a question over there . Andy, ok. Obviously you grew up with technology. My question is i think we are all marveling as we get our smartphones now and you click that you agree to the terms and so forth. It is kind of like your smart phone knows what youre doing. How do you think that is going to affect society, the fact that our privacy is anticipated . Claire there are couple of ways of thinking about that. One, our smartphone doesnt know what we are doing, but the people who are building the software it runs on certainly know what we are doing. They are tracking all of our consumer habits, what we browse and look at, how long we look at it, the part of the page we look at, if we open our emails everything is quantified down to the individual second of our time. I am more afraid of the people who build those tools knowing a lot about me rather than the tool itself. It is scary to me that we have traded privacy for convenience. Pretty much wholeheartedly as a culture. But it is difficult. We tend to go for the path of least resistance. We are trying to participate in culture and connect with other people, have convenience and use maps. We are doing all the things we do not because we are oblivious to what is happening but because we want to be part of the larger world. Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is giving up a large measure of our privacy. I dont know if thats a good deal we have made. It seems to be a deal we have collectively made. I think Tech Companies are profiting normatively enormously from that. You said something scary, making sure we say please to alexa like we are going to hurt her feelings. [laughter] i noticed that as a common thread. Where you have to constantly treat a machine better and the machine needs food iq do, and are you hurting the machines feelings . Should there be some kind of cap or protocol, something that makes sure we dont have to treat machines like they have feelings . That always seems to be where they get out of control. Claire i think when we say please to alexa, is not so much alexas benefit, but our own. We dont want to get into the habit of being demanding. We want to ingrain in our kids especially healthy habits. If alexa is forming in their young brains this is how you interact with other people, we have to make sure respect is into that. I know it is corny but i genuinely feel like when im being nice to my siri or delicate with my computer, it is more about being a gentle person in general. It is about consistently modeling this kind of empathetic behavior to all things. I dont think my computer is alive but i know the world is alive and i want to be a respectful participant in this planet. I want to do that where i can. I know siri does not have feelings. But i think it makes me feel better and it makes me feel like a better person when i try to be respectful regardless. Well said. One more. Looking to the future, do you have any information on the gender of the people who are studying in the colleges and universities in the Computer Science field . Secondly, beyond that, do you detect bias in the hiring of those students . Claire that is not particularly my field. There is still a definite wage gap in and a definite inclusion problem in tech. It is the entire pipeline. These problems are systemic and go way back. Inre are also problems Computer Science Education Programs leading up to that. Thats why it is important to get stem indication Stem Education at a young age so that people understand tech is for everybody. Not just for boys. I think that dismantling this is starting to question what is technical and what qualifies as a technical job. I think we associate classical programming as a tech job and then these other jobs like content moderation is not technical and not given the same economic renumeration in tech workplaces. Those jobs to me are very technical. They are part and parcel of making Good Software products. I think this brick while we have between front end and back end is really dangerous and makes for bad products. I think if there is more fluidity in the definitions, you will see much more movement in terms of gender backandforth on those things. I think sometimes men feel like it is stigmatizing for them to facing these more user roles in tech and so they stick to what they think is for men. When we break down these divisions we all benefit. But we have a lot of work to do. It took some generations to get to where we are now. It will probably take another generation to get back to where we were. Dont go away, let me show you what is coming up thursday. Yes. See great topics. Cs lewis. And you may recall devon brown did a talk last year. I hope you will be back for that. Check the website. We look forward to that. We look forward to seeing you. You are going to go back and sign some books in the back. Before you do that, lets all show our appreciation. [applause] claire thank you. Thank you, bill. Youre watching American History tv, covering history cspan style with lectures in college classrooms, visits to zooms and Historic Places all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Each week, American History tvs reel america brings you archival films that provide context for todays Public Affairs issues