Obviously, i could do this privately and i have but i would like to say a public thank 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. So 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, vices sciencefiction chronicle. However, the thing that particularly commands her to our attention and brings 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 she runs the popular l. A. Centric culture app, five every day. One of the accomplishments that brings her to Mary Washington is her recent 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. I am quoting 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 compelling, surprising, and eminently readable work restores due 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 provides 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 generous sort of brilliance that pulls the reader in. Welcome with me, the multitalented claire evans. [applause] ms. Evans 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 hundred years. I did this for two reasons. One, because tech history is complicated and by definition, distributed. Often, 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 liberating 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 interested in hanging out indoors. But winter is over now and it 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 jonesing for their laptop. Whoever placed this ad was looking for a computer to hire, not a computer to buy. For close to 200 years 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 human 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 form 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. The 19th century british mathematician 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 would actually measure and calculate 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. Fortunately 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 catalogued 10,000 stars. And his maid discovered the horsehead nebula. Her colleague, annie jump cannon, 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 workers, desk laborers, who were earning their way for their skills at numbers. That might have been uncommon in the 19th century, but things change, 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. Patching connections which are 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 and hand and checked double checked well into the 1970s when nasa formally dissolved its human computing divisions, made famous by the book and the film, hidden 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, like a telephone operator, 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 kind, 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 math on that, and she quite literally reverse engineer 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. Looking at a screen. 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 patch 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 an operation, which could take weeks for single program, 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 to 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 inferences in a lot of the eniac was itabout 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 would work on the machine, the work of programming. In some historical images, they or credited as models 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. Please run with it. I have the tshirt already made. 6 were the time the eniac working 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. Eniac 6, betty snyder, 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 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. The way we say kleenex to mean tissue, 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 the world at 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 its instruction set, 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 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 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 it is 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. It sounds kind of 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, had it in funded, would have fundamentally have changed how we operate today. So these women are not just all models, they are not just 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 will give you a more concrete example, and we would 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. Now, 1989 is before the World Wide Web, so in those days, online generally meant a bbs, or a Bulletin Board system. Which is exactly what it sounds like. There was a text window you would call on the phone and read post Text Messages 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. But 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 sort of technoutopian 1970s attitude about technology and alienating to someone like stacy who was a new yorker. Real cynical new , yorker, and she could buy all this hippie stuff. She also never wanted to talk about computers. She couldnt understand how if you logged into a Service Using a Service Using a computer, you had to 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. She did not understand that. So when she founded her own system on the east coast, she called it echo, the east coast hangout, one of the first social networks on the east coast of the u. S. This gives 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 didnt 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 out of her apartment in Greenwich Village, on a stack of modems and servers surrounded by 20 figurines of gumby and photos of her friends. Which is in and of itself, fascinating. But what makes are interesting to my history here, is that echo was funded at a time in 1989 when the percentage of female users on the internet was vanishingly low. We dont have exact numbers, it was probably about 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. You 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 really 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. Bite me. 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. See, stacy understood that 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 conversation. That is what you was doing, building a social network. She understood that 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 the only founder 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, which was 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 spend 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. She created private spaces on her network which allowed women to communicate with each other in the absence of men, the way that 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 herht unix classes out of apartment in 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. Back in those days online , communities were always moderated by hosts. We still kind of have this on internet today moderators on , places like reddit, but hosts indies online communities 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 quarters of the internet that have posts like this, this moderation role has been outsourced to contract workers, a kind of shadow world of traumatized employees who are dealing with the worst of humanity all at once, and who have little to no relationship to the communities that they actually moderate. Every conversation of echo always had two 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 personalities, people who talked a lot and made it less exciting and interesting to participate, if you are a vanishing personality. There were less workers on echo and everybody saw themselves in the mix. It was a very egalitarian space. Echo still exists today. Its one of the oldest continuously operating communities in the world and this is actually what it looks like. Stacy never made the jump to the World Wide Web, she never sold a franchise or even indulged in the idea of doing a lucrative ipo. When the World Wide Web came along, the web browser came first along, she could not afford to create a hypertext interface. We will get into hypertext in a minute for her service, because she essentially had a paid service that people dial into. The idea of switching to a free online model, she wasnt able to do that. So, she never got rich. She never got famous. Regardless of all of that, her accomplishment remains massive. To me, at least. Because she managed to do two really amazing things. She achieved gender parity on an almost completely male dominated internet. Just because she cared enough to do it. And her platform has remained online for decades, outliving many, many web products and nurturing a small but devoted family of users. Because she just has cared enough to keep it that way. That, for me, is a word from a different future, different timeline. We dont hear a lot about care in relation to online space and in tech culture very much. For a lot of people in tech, caring means caring about, investing in a big idea, building it with no immediate promise of renumeration, taking risks, and all of that is admirable, of course. But what stacy represents to me is a different kind of care. It is not really caring about, it is caring after. Caring for. Continuing the commitment of care and investment in the community the end the exciting moments of the pitch and into the tedious workaday realities. A what Technology Actually is when it has been built. 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 filled with people, often women, whose skills are not seen as technical. But the way i see it, care is very much a technical skill. Because software is a mechanism by which human beings facilitate tasks for other human beings. And in order to do that effectively, you have to understand the task, understand the mental model of the people approaching that task, understand the context in which they operate, and understand how to translate all the messy realities of human life into code. You have to determine whether your tool solves the problem or simply creates new problems, and you have to go beyond simple metrics like growth and User Acquisition and market share and consider bigger implications like mental health, community, civic life, society at large. We are living in a world where we are dealing with the consequences of the tools that were not designed with those things in mind. Tools that are tearing at the social fabric and a pending our way of life. And 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 and messed with the larger social context in a world of users and enmeshed 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 with its inheritors, but i keep coming back to stacys 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 if those values and that approach where baked into the way we make things run a vendor patched on later after the fact rather than patched on later 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. Gives way to function, where capital gives way to community, and metrics give way to meaning. I will give you another example. This is another scintillating of wendy hall. Ph dame wendy hall. She was given the female inivalent of a knighthood two thousand nine for her contributions to Computer Science. When this photo was taken, she was a lecturer at the university of southampton in the u. K. Her field in usually was purely mathematics until she discovered something called hypertext. If we think about hypertext at all today, we think about it in the context of the World Wide Web. The web is written in hypertext markup language, html, and it started with those blue hypertext links. But dating back to the hypertext 1960s, was the larger study and practice of connecting ideas, images, multimedia documents together in Computer Systems through connections or links. That was kind of the utopian idea in a way, but as technology progressed and memory increased, and the amount of information that could actually be recalled grew, hypertext grew ever more complex, and its implications, that we might one day connect all of human ideas together in a dense web became a utopian cause in parts of Silicon Valley. Wendy had been turned on to hypertext in the mid80s. 1986. Through this totally and i can mistake, weird british this anachronisticony 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. It was released in 1986 as two laserdiscs you could only play video laserdiscs you could only play on this specific computer. The discs were full of all this interesting multimedia material, all Available Online and in the archives now. It has things like virtual walks through the british countryside. Images of british cities. Maps and firstperson accounts of life in the u. K. Written by british schoolchildren. All easily navigable. What made this interesting to wendy, then a mathematician, was not really the material. She lived in the u. K. At the time and she knew what it looked like. But it was how to integrated. It. 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. What was interesting to her was not all of the material but how it was navigated. It was hugely novel to walk around the screen using these visual cues. It suddenly made all the impersonal data that Computers Made accessible feel all of a sudden very intuitive and immediate and very exciting. It made it comprehensible to people outside Computer Science and, 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. To large numbers of people. Again, this idea of accessibility regardless of expertise. To wendy, that 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, hyper media stuff. She ignored them as all of the greats do, and made a system that made it possible for people to Browse Library materials , in the same way she had browsed those discs. Through multimedia documents. She began with the archive at her universitys library, and by her team had built an entire system called microcosm. It demonstrated this new and exciting and intuitive way of navigating information. It made that information dynamics, alive, and adaptable to its user. In fact, it was not like the web at all. In many ways, it was better. Ill give you the quick fundamentals here. On the web, this is what a webpage looks like circa 1992. Hyperlinks are contextual, which means they are embedded in the documents. Buth means, effectively, when the destination of a link is taken down or dropped, we get what is called a 404 error. The web is full of 404 errors. This is a common feature of any navigation of the internet. The average lifespan of a website is about nine years, so there are a lot of these dead ends everywhere. Beyond being an inconvenience for the everyday browser of the web, it is a huge loss for our culture. When we get a 404 error, it means the connection that connected those two ideas together is gone forever. This is not insignificant information. That is made a data, meaning a, meaning,adat 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. Called a linkbase. What it effectively did is all of the links in microcosm were able to communicate with the underlying documents without making a mark on them, so it served sort of like 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. It meant that different users could layer different links. Depending on their level of fluency with the material or their level of interest. The system was designed to be adaptable to people and to encourage natural human learning, connectionbuilding. It was built for that and it valued that most important piece the nature of the connection s between things. Again web bad, microcosm good. Now, there were a lot of hypertexty systems like these in the late 80s and early 90s, coming out of universities and Research Labs and places like apple and ibm. Know they dont look that glamorous to you now, but they were really exciting in different ways. Almost every Team Building these women int the time had senior positions, if 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 in the late 80s or early 90s, you would be surrounded by humanists, poets, historians, what wendy calls the literati of Computer Science. 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 is what was the most important thing about making links. Why links were connected. Of scholars,nity that was the very essence of the field, because from why emerges the deepest meaning. In fact, it was so much what the discipline was about, but when sir tim bernerslee presented given the male equivalent of d for his contributions to communit Computer Science, we presented the demo of the world first wide web at the hypertext 91 conference in san antonio, which was the first time the web was shown in the u. S. At this conference, his paper was not even accepted. He had to bring his own demo on his own 10,000 computer. Cern inway from switzerland to san antonio on his own dime to demonstrate it at the hotel in san antonio. And even then, most people were highly disinterested in what he was showing them. They took one look at his demo and they saw that the links were all contextual and embedded in the documents which meant he could easily break they understood that problem and if links only went one direction, what good was the hypertext system if the links were so limited and they could easily breaks . And not even that 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. You look at these women and they are not having it. And one detail about this story that is so wonderful is that because this conference was held in summer in san antonio, texas,ne of the prime diversions entertainment after the conference 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 in fact, if you look at the photograph, the only photograph of the moment, there is a margarita on the table [laughter] this person just wandered in from the courtyard with a margarita in hand. Like, what is this web saying 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 published in the very first image to ever be clicked in a web browser, which happened to , aa photo of a doowop band group of female employees who sang satirical songs about life in the lab. Not related to the history, but i just had to show you this asic video, which gives you taste of how amazing they were. [singing] [doowop humming] claire i fill your mail file with hearts and roses and it comes back invalid users. You never let me into your computer there are a lot of these videos on youtube and i highly recommend them. They are delightful. Anyway, that thing said, obviously after this came everything else. The web became standard. By 1994, tim bernerslee was giving the keynote at the hypertext conference, and from that point forward, the hypertext conference and web conference were held in the same week. It was so clear that nobody would want to overlap both. And the more sophisticated systems, like the incredible microcosm system, which is very superior to the web, became a thing of the past. There is no way for us to know if Something Like microcosm could have replaced our web, just as there is no way to know what would have happened if Something Like echo had enough funding to make the transition to the World Wide Web and become our foundational social network. That doesnt stop me from dreaming about it. That is what i mean about the different futures some of these womens stories present us with. They demonstrate vividly how many other paths have laid before us, just as many paths still lie before us if we could only could look for them. It is important to remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. New technologies dont 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 and conventions. And social media as we experience it today could not exist without decades of experimentation in Online Community building on the early internet on platforms long gone, some of which still live with us. Tech history like other history is often told to us as a solitary genius working alone. We all know about tim bernerslee and bill gates, and steve jobs. Of course, those people are remarkable. But they have never been 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. To it also makes it so hard see where things come from, and more importantly, where things might lead and could still lead. When we dont see the multiplicity of all of this, out a huge part of the story, a beautiful part of the make it so much harder for all the other versions of the established history to work their 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. But for a few centuries, women working together were the hardware. Distributed biological machines capable of calculations beyond the powers of any single individual. These calculations catalog the cosmos, they charted the stars, they measured the world. The computer as we know it today is 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. Brought this existence about. In the 1960s, women were half of the workforce in computing and they earned 40 of degrees in Computer Science programs at american universities, until when the number began to dive 1984, and kept diving. Since then, the industry has found many different cunning , ways to edge women out of the picture, none of which would be surprising to any of you. Lack of mentorship, structural unwillingness to make space for inldcare, and a shift professional credentials and educational requirements necessary to get a job as a programmer. Technology historians suggest that the professionalization of the field of computing led to its masculinization. If it began as womens work, it had to be made masculine through various implicit and explicit efforts, most notably an effort industrywide in the late 1960s to rename programming, software engineering, which came with its connotation of certain educational requirements and National Requirements that were more conducive to men. Difficult forore women to keep a toehold in the industry and its set a male resident that has now been enforced by decades of marketing and misconception. If you were someone who was interested in buying or reading about computers in the 1970s, you would probably see ads like this all the time. In fact, if you searched any kind of Library Archive for historical images of computing advertisement, wildly sexist. They are wildly sexist. You might see products like these. Kitchen computers, which 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 with ad copy like this. If you could only cook as well as honeywell can compute. [laughter] extravagantly condescending language. An entire generation of people grew up with this as a kind of default. I am a bit younger, so i grew up with things like this. This is a movie weird science , which was about a couple of nebbish geek boys who design their dream woman using a computer. When i was a kid, that was a lot of imagery around computing. It was for boys. Something that boys like to do. Something that boys were naturally good at, that they enjoyed and girls did not. It was something that made people believe that men were ofural to the realm computing, and let women were at best accessories to it. And that is propaganda, it is a lie and an anachronism. A lot of us are proof. So if you remember nothing else irom this talk and dont blame you if you have forgotten a lot of it already about bbs communities, please remember this if there is a boys club that dominates Silicon Valley today, it is a bona fide historical anachronism. But i definitely believe that in a technological world technological histories are , important. If women and girls are able to see themselves in the dna of are most transfer motive technologies, as well they should, then they should 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. ,f we are going to survive it there i say, restart it, then we need on the help we can get. Thank you. [applause] walter thank you, claire. now we will take some questions. If you raise your hand, we will find as many of you as we can. You have a question . Here you go. [laughter] thank you. I assume the purpose of your talk is to say that a womans brain is as good as a mans brain . Right . I assume that is the purpose of what you are trying to say. Claire i would hope. Step one. [laughter] intellectually. But then, like halfway through, it looked to me like maybe you were disagreeing, the lady stacy, who was selling her product echo was using sex to sell it. Is that true or not . Claire sorry, i missed the second part of that. Stacy. Lady, the picture of her, was that a sexual picture . Claire sitting on the table . I mean, 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 a particularly sexy picture. That said, women can be intelligent and sexy at the same time and use whatever power she would like in order to sell her product. Ok, go ahead. [laughter] not so much a question but some trivia about grace hopper. Claire yes, please. In the 1980s, she was promoted to the one star rank of commodore. And thats the time when pcs were deployed everywhere. Radioshack, and of the commodore computer. So in some quarters, she was referred to as the computer commodore. You mentioned earlier, her work with compilers and assemblers and trying to take simple language and use a machine to translate things in to a language that computers could work with. And she was so focused on making that connection and thatnicating to people, among other things, whenever she had a public display, she would distribute what she called a nanosecond. A nanosecond, in her definition, is the distance it takes the speed of light to travel in a nanosecond. So it is about 12 inches. So she would distribute 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 rulebreaker and she trained and told the people who worked on her team to break the rules, but they were in the navy. And still observed the chain of command. The final rule she broke is 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 career in the navy was that when she was first assigned to a harvard computer, she was entering a very sort of maledominated environment. She was in the navy and they referred to the computer as a she like a boat. It was clipped and rulebound and everybody wore uniforms. But ultimately, the uniforms and the structure and the hierarchy were really effective in kind of dissolving any gender boundaries that existed. Everyone was working toward a cause, which ultimately, 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. Walter claire, we have a question over here. Thank you for your talk. It was really wonderful. Having a bunch of granddaughters , hoping to lead them into the future area and could you name some of the women that you think are an inspiration today and leaders in the tech world that you think 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 Software engineer who is working on a product right now an appblock party, that allows women to block people who harass them across Different Social Media platforms. [applause] yeah. Claire i love the idea of taking those problems handed down to us by mono Tech Companies that are thinking about the implications of the tools they make and finding ways to create your own solutions to them, a beautiful way of handling 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 such a big fan of you and your work for so long. I am wondering if you could expand on a point you made earlier about how most of the ai we have is voiced by females. And also, you put out a track a while back called party in the nsa. I am wondering what you think about how we have got this widespread acceptance of 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 book, to discover that there is a very clear lineage between female telephone operators and the way we are accustomed to hearing female voices on the other side of the phone in these kind of servile roles. And a. I. , gpss systems, but also in train stations and airports, its often a female voice. There are many reasons for the justification of that. 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. I think it is really important for us to begin to deconstruct that quickly, especially with conversational a. I. Like siri and alexa and cortana, they are sort of teaching us to automatically assume that female voices are going to be client pliant and subservient to our command and it scares me, especially with kids. Im worried we are teaching a generation of kids who bark commands at these sort of ambient helpmates around the house. That is one problem. I recently interviewed a woman and google who was working on the team developing the google assistant. She worries about that. She built in something where kids have to say please before it. Get anything out of i dont think that is a root of the problem. But i think having these conversations about how do we design a neutral a. I. . What does that mean . How does that come through in a human voice . These are important questions we should be definitely thinking about, and they are big design problems which i think the next generation of designers should be tackling with enthusiasm, because what is more exciting than designing the voice of an a. I. . What an opportunity to interface in a very intimate way with technology and create social precedents and standards so we further way that we communicate with each other and with 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. I do have a siri in my phone , that is inescapable. But i think we need to be very, very conscious of consumers as to what we are letting into our homes and what we are becoming ok with, because i think it is a slippery slope for sure. Hi,. Claire will shirt. My question is somewhat similar. Do you think bias toward a. I. Has contributed to that sexism . Things like alexa and siri were in things like film, a lot of a. I. Women are portrayed in a ist way where as women where as men can be like a sick humanoid figures. Claire for sure. It is interesting to me that the most prevalent ai architects in a. I. Archetypes that we have in the film are sexy lady voice or scary, murderous, social graphic a. I. Man voice. I think in a lot of cases, we cant really tackle some of these tech problems until we look in the mirror first. I dont think there are Technical Solutions to social problems, we need to be working on ourselves first. That being said, i do think that Science Fiction film and cinema is a really important site for educating the public about what technology is. We have a Widespread Lack of literacy about what a. I. Is and how it works based on this idea that it is this kind of pliant or so ship ethics, conversational voice. Even thinking about a. I. In anthropomorphic way is detrimental to our understanding of how the Technology Actually functions. Which is in 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 actually represent a. I. For what it is and represent things that are genuinely scary about a. I. , which is not how it will destroy us all, but like that Police Forces could start using badly manufactured a. I. Technology to systematically oppress entire groups of people. Or that we will iterate our a. I. Nt biases in all that is more scarier to me than Something Like skynet. I think we have a lot of work to do and then is to be more of a conversation between computer scientists, scientists and filmmakers artists and writers , to tell better stories. Walter 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 cant write a book about women in computing without starting with ada lovelace. I skipped it for tonight because she is one of these characters that is often trotted out in this context. I am not sick of her, i love her, she is a fascinating character. The first two chapters in my book are about her. For larger context, ada lovelace was the daughter of the poet lord byron. She was an incredibly brilliant mathematician in her own right and had the same kind of reckless poetic sensibility of her father, just in numbers instead of words. She is responsible for writing the first computer program, 150 years and change before the first computer machine was ever built. A brilliant mind. She was also the first person to understand that computers could process information beyond just numbers. She made conceptual leaps in her writing about computing to imagine a world in which a computer might operate upon or these morers, abstract entities. And how right she was. It took a really long time for us to catch up to it, but were just beginning to understand. Walter do you have a question over there . Oh, andy. Ok, andy. I gre 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 smartphone knows what you are doing, you know . How do you think that is going to affect society, the fact that our privacy is anticipated . Claire theres a couple of ways of thinking about that. One, our smartphone doesnt know what we are doing, but the people who are building the software about our smartphone runs on certainly know what we are doing, because they are tracking all of our consumer patterns, 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. Yes, it is scary to me that we have traded privacy for convenience pretty much full heartedly as a culture. It is difficult, you know . We tend to go for the path of least resistance. We are trying to participate in culture and connect with other people. We are trained to have the convenience of the world, trying to get places and use maps, doing other things that we do not because you are oblivious to what is happening, but because we want to be a part of the larger world. Unfortunately, the barrier to entry is giving up a large measure of our privacy. I dont know if that is a good deal that we have made, but it seems to be a deal that weve collectively made, and i think Tech Companies are profiting enormously from that. You said something that really sounded scary to me, which was, making sure that we say please to alexa, are like we are going to hurt her feelings, of the machine. [laughter] threade that is a common , where you have to constantly treat a machine better, a machine needs food like you do, and are you hurting the machines machines feelings . Should there be some kind of cap or protocol, something that makes sure that we dont have to they haveines like feelings . Because that always seems to be where they get out of control. Claire i think when we say please to alexa, is not so much for alexas benefit, but our s. We dont want to get into the habit of being demanding. We want especially to ingrain in our kids, Healthy Habits of andies and the invers being respect for the others. If alexa is forming in their young brains this is how you interact with other people, we have to make sure that respect is built 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. Right . It is about modeling, consistently modeling this empathetic behavior toward all things. I dont think my computer is alive, that i know that the world is alive and i went to be a respectful participant in this planet. I want to do whatever i can. Doesntow that siri have feelings, but it makes me feel better enemies they feel like a better person when i try to be respectful to siri makes me feel better and it makes me feel like a better person when i try to be respectful to siri well said. 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 and engineering field . And beyond that, do you detect any bias in the hiring of those students . Claire yeah. That is not particularly my field. There is still a definite wage gap and a significant diversity and inclusion problem in tack in the entire in tech. It is the entire pipeline. These problems are systemic and go way back. There are also problems of diversity and inclusion in Computer Science programs and in Computer Science education leading up to that, which is why it is so important to get s. T. E. M. Education at a young age so that if understand tech is for everybody interested in it, not just for boys. I also think part of dismantling this is beginning to question what is technical, what qualifies as a technical job. I think the associate classical job anding as a techie then these other jobs around it like content moderation as not technical, and not given the same economic renumeration in tech workplaces. Those jobs, to me, are very technical and they are part and parcel of making Good Software products. I think this brick 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 that are, you will see much more movement in terms of gender backandforth on those things. Likenk sometimes men feel it is somehow stigmatizing for them to work in these slightly more userfacing roles in tech, so they stick to what they think is for men versus the other way around. When we break down those divisions, we all benefit enormous sleep. So we have a lot of work to do. A lot ofee, it took generations to get to where we are now and it will probably take another generation to get to where we were in the 1950s. Walter ok, clear, dont go away. Let me show you what is coming up thursday. Lets see yes. Great topics. Cs lewis. Oh, looks like a period is missing after the s. Anyway, cs lewis. And you may recall devon brown did a talk about the tocqueville for us last year. I hope you will be back for that. Check the website. To be sure. But we look forward to that. Right now, it is on. We look forward to seeing you. Now, you are going to go back and sign some books in the back, so before you do that, lets all show our appreciation for the wonderful [applause] claire thank you. Thank you, bill. 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