Before that particular wanted ad, 8,000 people worked for the company and then nearly a quarter million, and they were capable of working collaboratively in fluid networks. We still talk about language, and keeping the females in mind serving the infrastructure of the technological age. Connections that are now patched electronically by digital assistanasi assistan assistants, bots, and ai many of which still speak by default in female voices. It started to disappear in the. She was at 40 female users that made it one of the earliest spaces online to be genuinely hospitable to women online, but thee resisted that she created it as a safe space for women. Bite me, she said, i wanted to get more in on echo to make it better. Not a refuge, not an accommodation, she understood that diversity is an asset that serves the entire community. She was building a social network. And she knew that if there was more perspectives there would be a more exciting and dynamic product. She was the only founder that was actually actively trying to course women to come online. Women didnt really come online in large numbers and surpass the number of male users until the worldwide web. She would do things that were out of the box. She would go to art galleries, happenings, shows, and convince them to do something that was spend 100 on a modem. She made access for women free for an entire year. She gave womens groups areas. She created private spaces so that women could talk in the absence of men. So a lack of Technical Knowledge would never be an inhibition for knew users. This is here on charlie rose, and she is teaching him how to use echo. But her main strategy was not just this outreach, but it was baked into the design of her system. Online communities were always moderated by hosts. We still have this today, but hosts in the early online communities were users of the service that were deputized and given free access to the service in exchance for the responsibility of guiding and moderating conversations. We still have corners of the internet. They have been outsourced to a shadow world of traumatized employees. Every conversation always had two hosts. A man and a woman. And that meant that every time a woman logged on to the service, she would immediately see herself represented in not just the power structure, but the community as well which made women less likely to jump in. A lot of times they talked a lot and made it feel less exciting and interesting to participate in. So there were less lurkers on echo, everyone kind of saw themselves in the mix. That that representation was an effective part of what made it such a great service. Echo still exists today. This is actually what it looks like. Stacey never made the jump to the worldwide web. She did not sell, franchise, or doing a lucrative ipo. When the worldwide wed came along, she could not afford to do a hyper dex interface. The idea of twitching to a free beyond model was not until really in hershey wasnt able to do that. So she never got rich or famous and her accomplishment remains massive. She managed to do two amazing things. She achieved gender parody just because she cared enough to do it, and her platform remained online and nurturing a small and devoted family of users because she just cares enough to keep it that way. That to me is a world from a different future and timeline. We dont hear much about care in the online space or tech culture very much. For a lot of people in tech caring means caring about. Investing in a big idea. Taking risks, all of that is really admirable, of course, but what her legacy represents to me 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 workday realities of what a technology is once it has been built. This is something that our culture associates with women and in Silicon Valley the professional realms associated with this work, they are twham are not seen as having sec nick kal skills, but the way i see it it is a very technical skill. It is a way that human beings social da associate tasks for others. Understand the context in which they operate and how to translate all of the messy realities in into code. You have to determine if your tool solves a problem or simply creates new problems and you have to go beyond simple metrics like growth, user acquisition, market share, and consider bigger implications. Society at large, were living in a world where were dealing with tools not designed with those things in mind. Tool thats are tearing the social fabric. Changing what it means to live in a city, changing our way of life, and social skills are essential. And i dont mean getting along with people, but being able to see a object as an extension of and em measured in a world of users with people. And yes ultimately i mean caring about people. And i know that echo cant compete with his competitors. It is a great lust opportunity bhap if the architects of our present day social media inhas been tors and Mutual Respect that someone like stacy made because it was the right thing to do. What if those values and that approach were bakes into the way we make things rather than patched on after the fact when people have be looking at the history and the technology, and it helps to look at where those users are cared for. Where form gives way to function, capital and community, and metrics give way to meaning. Let me give you another example. This is another scintillating 1980s photograph of dame wednesdayy hawendy hall. When this photo was taken, she was a lecturer at the university of South Hampton in the u. K. Her field initially was pure ma mathematics, not technology until she discovered hyperfection. If we think about it today we think about it in worldwide web. It is blue hyper text links but in the days before the web, hyper text was the larger study and practice of connecting ideas, images, multimedia ducts, and more. That was already a utopian idea in a way, but as technology increased, the amount of information that could be recalled grew and grew hypertext grew more complexion and the implications that one day we might collect all ideas together. It was a totally weird British Community project calls the domesday project. A now defunct system documented british life. It was one specific computer. The disks were full of all of this material. It is fascinating. It is indexed and easily navicable. She knew what it was like, but how it was navigated. This is a glimpse of the disks looked like. It looks like a website, a cdrom game, or an early computer experience. This is way before digital user interfaces. This is very ahead of its time. What knocked wednesdandy out is the terrible but how it is navigated. It was novel to walk around the screen using these visual clues. And it made all of the data feel very intuitive and very immediate and very exciting. It made it comprehensible to people outside of Computer Science, and combined with the technology of the personal computer. And she realized it might make all of it assessable to large numbers of people. And to wednesdayy, that felt revolutionary and very exciting. She decided to throw herself into this field of hyper text. Her colleagues at South Hampton in the Mathematics Department and the Computer ScienceDepartment Said there was no future for her if she cant kep with the hyper text stuff. And she dedicated her efforts to making a Computer System for people to Browse Library materials in the way she browsed those domesday disks. She started with the archives at her university library. Just as the worldwide web would do, it demonstrated a new way to navigate information. It made the information dynamic, alive, and adaptable to louuser. On the web, links, hyper links, are imbedded in the documents. When the destination is taken down or rots, we get what is called a 404 error. It is the common feature of any navigation of the internet. The average life span is about nine years. Beyond being an inconvenience to the every day browser, it is a huge loss for our culture. When we get a 404 error, that means that piece of information is gone forever. That is meta data, meaning, context, it is what makes knowledge knowledge. And the micro causeen didnt do this. It kept all of the links separate. I wont get too deep into the weeds on this, but they were all able to communicate without making a mark on them, so it was like a overlay rather than a structural clehange. It meant a link could have more destinations. It meant that a link could go in two directions. It meant that deferent users could player different links on different material. The system was designed to be adaptable to people, and to encourage the actual human learning and connection building and it valued that most important piece. The nature of the connections between things. Again web back, microcausim gum good. They were coming out of these but i promise they were all exciting in different ways. And that is because hyper text as a disblin was just more welcoming to people. And if you went to an early hypertext conference you would be surrounded by humanists, poets, historians. It was not all just hard nosed engineers and programmers, it was people interested in making meaning out of data. All of these systems as different as they were, they all shared that value. The requested that the association was the most important thing about making links. To that community of collako sc that was the deepest mining in the field. It was so much what the discipline was about. He was given the male male equit of the dame. In 1991 his paper was not accepted. He had to bring his own demo on his 10,000 computer from switzerland to san antonio to demonstrate it and most people were highly disinterested because they took one look at his demo and they saw the links were all contextual and embedded in the document. So what good was the system if the links are so limited and they skould easily break a could easily break down. And it was expensive and you see how unimpressed everyone in this photo looks. Theyre all not having it. And one detail about this story that is to wonderful, one of the prime diversions after the conference was a margarita fountain. Nobody cared. If you look at this photograph, there is a margarita on the table. She just wouandered in with a margarit aerks and she is like what is this, i dont care. By 1992, he published the first image of a toe toe, it was a group of female employees that sang songs about life on the lab. Not hugely related to the history, but i have to share this music video with you that gives you a taste of how amazing they were. Oh. I fill your mail file with hearts and you never let me back on to your computer. Anyway. That being said, after this came everything else. The web became standard by 1994 he was giving the keynote at the hypertext conference, and from that point forward it was held on the same week. And the more sophisticated systems, which is highly shoe peer your to the web in many ways became a thing of the past. But there is no way for us to know if Something Like a microc microcausim could have replaced our web. That doesnt stop me from streaming about it, and thats what i mean about the different stories that some of these women demonstrate to us. They show me just how many our paths have been before us. And how many more lie before us if we could just look for them. New technologies are unbiden. They emerge from a continuum of ideas. The worldwide web could not have existed would the decades of research of women. And social media as we see it today could not exist. Tech history, like most history, is genius working alone. They are alone. They have been surrounded by people and ideas. It invites so many of us in, it makes it so hard to see where things come from, and more importantly where things might lead and where they could still lead. And we dont see the multiplicity of all of this, we leave out a huge part of the story, a beautiful part of the story, and we make it harder for all of the versions of the established history to mark their influence on our world. Machines can do in fractions of a second. They were the hardware, distributed biological machines, and these populations catalog the cosmos. They charted the stars and measured the world. The computer as we know it today is named after the people it replaced. Our grandmothers and great grandmothers in the 1960s, women were have of the workforce. That was until about 1984 when the number started to dive and kept diving. Since then many different ways have been used to get women out of the workforce. It started as until that was womens work and it had to be made masculine. It included certain educational and professional requirements that were more conducive to men. And this made it more difficult for women to keep their toe hold in the industry and it seemed to have set a male dominant precedent that has been reinforced by decades of markets and misconception. If you were interested in buying computers you would see ads like this all of the time. If you search any archive of computer advertise wants they are wildly sexists. This is a kitchen computer, it could be used organize recipes, and it came with ad copy like this. If she can only cook as well as ho hon hon honeywell can compute. This is the movie weird science which is about a couple geek boys that design their dream woman using a computer. When i was a kid that was the imagery around computing. It was for boys, something that boys liked to do, something that boys enjoyed and girls did not. It was something that made people believe that men are natural and women are accessories. It is a lie. A lot of us are proof. So if you remember nothing else from this talk, and i dont blame you if you forgot everything about bbs history, if there is a boys club that dominates Silicon Valley today, but i believe that technological histories are important. If women and girls are able to see themselves, as they well should, then they can see themselves more easily in their future. I write about history and i dont know much about the future, but if were going to survive it, dare i say we start it and get all of the help that we can get. Thank you. Thank you, now we will answer some questions as we can. Will, do you have a question . What do you got . 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 youre trying to say. I hope yeah, step one. Intellectually. But it looked to me like the lady, stacey, selling her protect echo was using sex to sell it, is that true or not. That picture of her, stacey, was that a sexual picture to get her to oh, sitting on the table . I mean, sure. I dont think that is a particularly sexy picture, i think it is edgy. She was popular in 90s Counter Culture writing about it, but that said a woman can be intelligent and sexy at the same time and use whatever power she would like to sell her product. Okay, go ahead. Not so much a question, but a trivia about grace hopper. In the 80s, she was promoted to the one star rank of commodor and that is when pcs were deployed everywhere. And in some quarters she was referred to as a computer commodor, and you mentioned earlier her work about compilers and assemblers and trying to take simple plain english language and using a machine to translate things into language that computers could work with. And she was so focused on making that connection and communicating to people that among other things when she had a public display, she would distribute what she called a nano second, it was the distance of the speed of light in a nano second, so it was about 12 inches, and it was a way to communicate people to say when you see tv reporters talking to each other, and there is a delay in the conversation, it is because of satellite transmissions taking time, but clearly she was a real rule breaker and she trained and told the people that worked on her team to break the rules, but they were in the navy, and still observe the chain of command. And the final rule she broke was after she retired, she insisted when she went out in public to wear her uniform. She was so proud of serving her country but that was against the rules. It is interesting you mention the uniform. One of the interesting things about her early career in the navy is when she was first assigned to harvard mark 1 computer, it was a very mail dominated environment. They refer to the computer as a she, like a boat, it was clipped and rule bound, but the uniforms, the structure, and the hierarchy, were effective in dissolved any of the gender boundaries. Everyone was the same which i think benefitted her and i think that is probably part of why she was so attached to the uniform as well. We have a question over here. Thank you for your talk. Could you name some of the women that you think are inspiration today and leaders in the tech world that you think we should follow, i appreciate that, thank you. Yes, most of my heros are old goal because i write about history, but there are plenty of them. Tracey fallon is an Amazing Software engineer who is working on a program called block party, i belove the idea. Yeah, yeah. They are finding ways to create your own solutions to them. It is a beautiful way to handle the complexities, but i home your granddaughters are people that i can sight in future lectures. Im wondering if you can expand on a point that you made earlier about how most of the ai that we have is voiced by females and also you put out a track called party at the nsa. What do you think of the widespread acceptance of surveillance in our homes with things like google home, assistance and such. Yeah, there is quite a lineage between our female operators, and now pa announcements at train stations, participates, gps, and there is lots of reasons and justifications for that. Some say that both men and women respo respond. I think it is a Cultural Association that we now have. And especially with conversational ai like siri, alex is alexa and all of these tools theyre teaching us to assume that female voices will be quiet and subservient. I think were teaching a generation of kids to bark commands at ambient help mates floating around the house. I interview a woman who just built in something called pretty bless, they have to say please before they get anything from siri. I dont think that gets to the root of the problem, but we are talking about how is a knew really ai, and these are important questions that we should be thinking about and theyre big design problems and we should be talking about it wholeheartedly with enthusiasm. What an opportunity to interface in a very intimate way to create social precedence and standards. So