women in computer technology

Pioneering Women in Computer Innovation V. Popplewell • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

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Ada Lovelace – The First Computer ProgrammerA visionary 100 years before her time, Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace or Count-ess Lovelace was a “mathematician who collaborated with Charles Babbageon the Difference and Analytical Engine, which are regarded as the theoreti-cal foundation for the modern computer” (Gurer, 2002).

Countess Lovelace understood and envisioned the full application of the gen-eral-purpose machine. She theorized that a machine could not only perform apreset task but could also be programmed to handle a limitless array of unre-lated tasks. In essence, she was envisioning a modern computer where thehardware becomes a commodity to the dynamic software. She proposed thatany piece of content, data or information can be expressed in digital form andmanipulated by a machine. It is this ideology that would remain at the core ofthe digital age (Isaacson, 2014).

In “The Notes,” a manuscript which detailed the sequence of operations andprovided descriptive charts showing how it would be inputed – Ada becamethe world’s first computer programmer. Along the way, she theorized manyprinciples of programming like “subroutines”, recursive loops and conditionalbranching (Isaacson, 2014). Ada's ideas were a “century before electroniccomputing machines appeared“ (Gurer, 2002).

Gürer, D. (2002). Pioneering Women in Computer Science. ACM SIGCSEBulletin, 34(2). doi:10.1145/543812.543853

Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses,and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schus-ter.

Pioneering Computer

Women InnovationIn

A Timeline by Venus Popplewell • May 7, 2015 • IXDS5503 Media History and Theory

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Edith Clarke Edith Clarke worked as an engineer for General Electric for more than 20years. During that time she conceived and filed a patent for a “graphical cal-culator”. This device was used to solve electric power transmission line prob-lems. In 1947, Clarke began teaching engineering at the University of Texas,Austin becoming the first female professor of electrical engineering in thecountry. (Edith Clarke , MSA SC 3520-14065, no date)

"Edith Clarke's engineering career had as its central theme the developmentand dissemination of mathematical methods that tended to simplify and re-duce the time spent in laborious calculations in solving problems in the de-sign and operation of electrical power systems. She translated what manyengineers found to be esoteric mathematical methods into graphs or simplerforms during a time when power systems were becoming more complex andwhen the initial efforts were being made to develop electromechanical aids toproblem solving. As a woman who worked in an environment traditionallydominated by men, she demonstrated effectively that women could performat least as well as men if given the opportunity. Her outstanding achieve-ments provided an inspiring example for the next generation of women withaspirations to become career engineers" (Brittain, 1985).

Brittain, J. E. (1985) ‘From Computor to Electrical Engineer: The RemarkableCareer of Edith Clarke’, IEEE Transactions on Education, 28(4), pp. 184–189.doi: 10.1109/te.1985.4321775.

Edith Clarke (no date). Available at:http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/clarke.htm (Accessed: 9 March2015). Edith Clarke , MSA SC 3520-14065 (no date). Available at:

Rozsa Peter Rozsa Peter was a Hungarian mathematician who founded of the recursivefunction theory. Unable find work she began her graduate studies in 1927,initially focusing on number theory. “Rózsa became disheartened when shefound that her results had already been proven by someone else. For a while,she turned her interests elsewhere, including to writing poetry, before herfriend Kalmár convinced her to resume mathematical endeavour. He encour-aged her to look at the work of Kurt Gödel, the Austrian-American mathemati-cian, on the subject of incompleteness” (Rózsa Péter | Women in science, nodate).

“Rózsa focused on Gödel’s studies of recursive functions. She made herown, different proofs and, in 1932, she presented a paper at the InternationalCongress of Mathematicians in Zurich, Switzerland. For this research, Rózsawas awarded her PhD summa cum laude in 1935. The work also helped to

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found the modern field of recursive function theory as a separate area ofmathematical research and her later book, Recursive Functions (1951) wasthe first book devoted exclusively to the topic” (Rózsa Péter | Women in sci-ence, no date).

Recursive functions are common in computer science because they allowprogrammers to write efficient programs using a minimal amount of code.

Rózsa Péter | Women in science (no date) Available at: http://www.epige-nesys.eu/en/science-and-you/women-in-science/810-rozsa-peter (Accessed:7 May 2015)

Hedy Lamarr“Although better known for her Silver Screen exploits, Austrian actress HedyLamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) also became a pioneer in the field ofwireless communications following her emigration to the United States. Theinternational beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, developed a"Secret Communications System" to help combat the Nazis in World War II.By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmissionand reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code to prevent classi-fied messages from being intercepted by enemy personnel” (Hedy Lamarr:Invention of Spread Spectrum Technology, no date).

Lamarr and Anthiel received a patent in 1941, but the enormous significanceof their invention was not realized until decades later. It was first implementedon naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequently emerged innumerous military applications. But most importantly, the "spread spectrum"technology that Lamarr helped to invent would galvanize the digital communi-cations boom, forming the technical backbone that makes cellular phones,fax machines and other wireless operations possible” (Hedy Lamarr: Inven-tion of Spread Spectrum Technology, no date).

"Lamarr wasn't instantly recognized for her communications invention sinceits wideranging impact wasn't understood until decades later. However, in1997 Lamarr and Antheil were honored with the Electronic Frontier Founda-tion (EFF) Pioneer Award, and that same year Lamarr became the first fe-male to receive the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award,considered "The Oscars" of inventing" (Hedy Lamarr, n.d.).

Hedy Lamarr (no date) Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/hedy-lamarr-9542252 (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Hedy Lamarr: Invention of Spread Spectrum Technology (no date) Availableat: http://www.women-inventors.com/Hedy-Lammar.asp (Accessed: 21 April2015)

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Grace Murray HopperRear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was a college instructor in 1943 whenshe decided to join the NAVY and help with the war effort. Grace held a Ph.Din Mathematics and was soon tapped to partner with some of the greatesttechnological innovators of the generation. Along the way she carved a placein the history of computer science.

This entry begins a series of entries about the remarkable contributionsGrace Hopper made to the computer revolution. Her trailblazing journeythrough the history of computer programming is unprecedented. I have identi-fied four significant events devoted to Admiral Hopper beginning with the year1943.

1943-45 Grace Hopper and the World’s First Computer Her first military assignment was to work with computer scientist, HowardAiken on the Mark I. The Mark I was a computing machine controlled by themilitary used to calculate solutions for rocket trajectories, proximity fuses,mines and ship hull design. Grace wrote a five-hundred-page book that wasthe history of the Mark I and a guide to programming it. Hopper became the“third programmer of the world’s first computer.” Her ability to articulate theprogramming language in a written format laid the foundation for future pro-gramming manuals. Her detailed descriptions also allowed others with lessadvanced knowledge of programming to be able to work with the machines.

Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2015, fromhttp://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html Isaacson, W.(2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Cre-ated the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

Hopper refines the subroutineGrace Hopper was always looking for shortcuts so she set about refining theredundant task of repeating code over and over for the same operations.Hopper and her team were working on mathematic solutions for the military.They needed to reduce the number of errors and shorten computation times.They generated a catalogue of subroutines based on error-free code thatcould be used to develop new programs. Subroutines, first introduced by AdaLovelace, are lines of code that can be used more than once. They are usefulbecause they eliminate redundancy in code making the totality of a programeasier to manage. Subroutines are a critical programming component foundin almost every type of computer program, software, game, etc.

Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2015, from

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http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html Isaacson, W.(2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Cre-ated the Digital Revolution. United States: Simon and Schuster.

Hopper’s Bug“First actual case of bug being found.” The historical use of the word may bein question but Hopper is attributed with coining the terms “bug” and “debug-ging” as related to computer glitches based on the event she recorded in1945 where an actual moth was discovered in the Mark I. These terms arestill commonly used today.


The Women of ENIAC“In 1946, six brilliant young women programmed the first all-electronic, pro-grammable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadel-phia as part of a secret World War II project.

They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for noneexisted)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran aballistics trajectory—a differential calculus equation—in seconds. Yet whenthe ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women werenever introduced; they remained invisible.”

Four entries (continue, 1946) will identify the six female mathematicians whocreated programs for one of the world’s first fully electronic general-purposecomputers. There is also an entry for Adele Goldstine, the woman who re-cruited and trained the women.

These highly skilled women were called “computers.” Most chose to use theirdegrees in mathematics to help with World War II rather than teach. The com-puting jobs came without prestige and were considered unimportant. The pioneering women of ENIAC were as follows: Kathleen McNulty MauchlyAntonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Snyder Holberton, Marlyn WescoffMeltzer, Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum.

The ENIAC is important historically, because it laid the foundations for themodern electronic computing industry. More than any other machine, theENIAC demonstrated that high-speed digital computing was possible using

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the then-available vacuum tube technology. It took years for the contributionsof the ENIAC women to be recognized and celebrated. It is documented thatmore than 80 women contributed to the calculations and operations of thishistorical machine. ENIAC Programmers Project (no date).

ENIAC Programmers Project. Available at: http://eniacprogrammers.org/ (Ac-cessed: 6 April 2015).

Adele Katz Goldstine - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (no date)Available at: http://ethw.org/Adele_Katz_Goldstine (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

ENIAC – Adele GoldstineAdele Goldstine was a mathematics teacher who is famous for writing one ofthe earliest computer programs and wrote the technical description for theENIAC and is attributed (later disputed by Betty Jennings) with training the sixfemale programmers of the ENIAC. In 1942 Adele Goldstine joined the MooreSchool when her husband, Herman Goldstine, was appointed as the projectmanager of the ENIAC. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering wasfunded by the United States Army during the Second World War. A group ofabout 80 women worked manually calculating ballistic trajectories - complexdifferential calculations. These women were called ‘computers’.

Adele wrote the detailed Operators Manual for the ENIAC around 1945. In1946, she implemented Dick Clippinger’s stored program modification to theENIAC. So the programmers no longer had to manually plug and unplug ca-bles for reprogramming every time but the computer was able to perform aset of fifty stored instructions. Initially the ENIAC was classified. In 1946, theENIAC computer was unveiled before the public and the press. (Adele KatzGoldstine - Engineering and Technology History Wiki, no date)

Unfortunately, no definitive photo could be found to identify Mrs. Goldstine,but an image of a book about her manual is in existence.

Adele Katz Goldstine - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (no date)Available at: http://ethw.org/Adele_Katz_Goldstine (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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ENIAC – Meltzer and Teitelbaum1946Marlyn Meltzer and Ruth Teitelbaum were a special team of ENIAC program-mers. As "computers" for the Army, they calculated ballistics trajectory equa-tions painstakingly using desktop calculators, an analog technology of thetime. Chosen to be ENIAC programmers, they taught themselves and otherscertain functions of the ENIAC and helped prepare the ballistics program.After the war, Ruth relocated with the ENIAC to Aberdeen, Maryland, whereshe taught the next generation of ENIAC programmers how to use the uniquenew computing tool.

Hall of Fame - ENIAC Programmers, Kathleen McNulty, Mauchly Antonelli,Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Synder Holber, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer,Frances Bilas Spence and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (no date). Availableat: http://www.witi.com/center/witimuseum/halloffame/298369/ENIAC-Pro-grammers-Kathleen-McNulty,-Mauchly-Antonelli,-Jean-Jennings-Bartik,-Frances-Synder-Holber-Marlyn-Wescoff-Meltzer,-Frances-Bilas-Spence-and-Ruth-Lichterman-Teitelbaum/ (Accessed: 6 April 2015).

ENIAC – Spence and McNulty“Frances Bilas Spence and Kathleen McNulty Antonelli were a second ENIACteam. Both mathematics majors in the class of 1942 of Chestnut Hill Collegein Philadelphia, they responded to the Army's call for mathematicians andwere assigned to operate the Differential Analyzer, a huge analog machine ofwhich there were only a few in the world. Fran and Kay led the teams ofwomen who used this machine to calculate the ballistics equations. After thewar, both Fran and Kay continued with the ENIAC to program equations forsome of the world's foremost mathematicians. Kay married Dr. John Mauchlywho, together with J. Presper Eckert, invented the ENIAC and UNIVAC com-puters, and Kay worked with John on program designs and techniques formany years.”


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ENIAC – Jennings and Holberton1946"The third ENIAC programming team was comprised of Jean Bartik and BettyHolberton. As ENIAC programmers, they took on the challenging task oflearning the Master Programmer that directed the performance of all programsequences of the ENIAC. They led the entire group in programming the bal-listics trajectory for the February 14, 1946 demonstration, but that was onlythe beginning.

After the War, Jean Bartik worked on the team that converted the ENIAC intoa stored program machine, making it easier and faster to program larger andmore sophisticated problems. Jean then programmed the BINAC, designedlogic for UNIVAC I, designed an electrostatic memory backup system for UNI-VAC I, and later, developed reports to help businesses understand a powerfulnew class of computers, the microcomputer. She worked tirelessly to makecomputers easier to use.

After programming the ENIAC, Betty Holberton joined the company foundedby Eckert and Mauchly and worked on the first commercial computers. Shewrote the C-10 instruction code for UNIVAC I, forever making programmingeasier and faster for programmers. She designed the control console for UNI-VAC I and its computer keyboards and numeric keypad. In 1952, she de-signed the first sort merge generator for UNIVAC I. She served on theCOBOL committee to design the first business language to operate acrosscomputer platforms, wrote standards for FORTRAN and served on nationaland international computer standards committees for decades."


Hopper – Develops a fully-functional compiler, the pre-cursor to COBOL1952“A true visionary, Admiral Hopper conceptualized how a much wider audiencecould use the computer if there were tools that were both programmer-friendly and application-friendly”(‘Grace Murray Hopper’, n.d.).

Hopper believed that computer programs could be written in English. She

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moved forward with the development of the B-O compiler, later known asFLOW-MATIC. “It was designed to translate a language that could be usedfor typical business tasks like automatic billing and payroll calculation”(‘Grace Murray Hopper’, n.d.). “Using FLOW-MATIC, Admiral Hopper and hercrew were able to “make the UNIVAC I and II understand twenty statementsin English.” However, “it was three years before her idea was finally accepted;she published her first compiler paper in 1952” (‘Grace Murray Hopper’, n.d.).

Through her vision for the compiler, Grace delivered computer programmingto the masses. “Hopper’s vigorous efforts to further the cause of automaticprogramming led to the development of Common Business Oriented Lan-guage (COBOL)” (Beyer, 2009).13 Isaacson (2014) describes it as the “firstcross-platform standardized business language for computers” (p. 117). Shecreated a process of programming that used words rather than numbers.Simply, Hopper visualized a computer language that would allow program in-structions to be given in almost regular English. Thus identifying the program-ming (software) to be more important than the hardware.


Judy Clapp“Judith A. Clapp's career spans the history of software engineering as a tech-nology and as a profession. She received her bachelor's in physics fromSmith College in 1951, and master's in applied science with a concentrationin computer science from Radcliffe in 1952. That same year, she joined asmall team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) using Whirl-wind, one of the earliest digital computers.

She was the only woman on the team, which developed a proof-of-conceptprototype for an air defense system. By doing so, the team demonstrated arevolutionary new use of computers as real-time control systems rather thanautomated calculators for grinding out mathematical tables. A pioneer in es-tablishing software engineering as a discipline, Judith Clapp has made a sig-nificant contribution to technologies for managing the development andacquisition of large-scale command and control systems, and has motivatedand encouraged the professional growth of other software engineers as theirmanager, role model, and mentor” (no date)

(no date) Available at: http://test-swe.djgcreate.com/images/AwardRecipi-ents/pr_achieveaward_clapp01.pdf (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

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Lois HaibtLois Haibt is an American computer scientist and is most famous for being amember of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN. She wasthe only female member of the team.

“In an effort to create the language that would revolutionize computer sci-ence, IBM hired a team composed of members in their 20s and 30s who wereskilled in problem solving. Haibt was successful in building the flow analysis,the very core of the Fortran compiler.

Fortran, which was revealed in 1957, is a mix between algebra and short-hand, and was hailed by New York Times reporter Steve Lohr as a program-ming language that was a historic breakthrough in computing'' (Lois Haibt:The core of Fortran, no date)

Lois Haibt: The core of Fortran (no date) Available at: http://innovators.vas-sar.edu/innovator.html?id=100 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

Joyce Currie Little"Joyce Currie Little was one of the original programmers at Convair AircraftCorporation in the Wind Tunnel Division in the late 1950s. The wind tunnelheld a critical role in the development of aircraft by providing aerodynamictesting for the aerospace industry. Little wrote programs to analyze datataken from models (e.g., airplanes, automobiles, radio towers) that weretested in an 8-foot by 12-foot wind tunnel. She wrote her programs in an as-sembly language, SOAP, which was run on an IBM 650 with punched cards.To ensure accurate and reliable results, a room full of 37 women usingFrieden calculators calculated all the check-points to confirm the computeroutput (Gürer, 2002).

"For analysis, the data had to be physically carried to the computer, whichwas in another building. At one point, Convair had a major project with Ameri-can Airlines to prove that an airplane could take off in less than one mile. Dueto the expense of keeping the wind tunnel going, they needed the analysis ina very short time frame. To get the results in real time, Little and a colleagueof hers, Maggie DeCaro put on roller skates and, data in hand, furiouslyskated from the wind tunnel to the computer building—taking a shortcutthrough the huge model design shop—bumped whoever was on the com-puter, loaded the current data, ran the data analysis program, and then furi-ously skated back to the wind tunnel with the results. The raised someeyebrows, but successfully completed the project on time” (Gürer, 2002).

Dr. Little has been a strong advocate for the role of women in computing. Her

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current activities include a project on the evaluation of computer ethicscourses in the Computer Science major at Towson University, and a projecton the social impact of certification on the industry.

Gürer, D. (2002). Pioneering Women in Computer Science. ACM SIGCSEBulletin, 34(2). http://doi.org/10.1145/543812.543853

Mary HawesCOBOL, or Common Business Orientated Language, was one of the firstcomputer-programming languages to run successfully on different brands ofcomputers. In the early years of computing, each manufacturer used its ownindividual programming languages. Programmer Mary Hawes identified aneed for a common computer language for use in accounting. A committee ofcomputer programmers set to work on the task—the result was COBOL (Na-tional Museum of American History Showcases COBOL, 2012).

In April 1959, Mary Hawes, a programming manager at Burroughs, and col-league Saul Gorn, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed thattrying to develop a single business language would be in the interests of theyoung industry. A meeting was held at the University of Pennsylvania com-puter center. It was attended by representatives of a small group of cus-tomers and manufacturers, including Grace Hopper, who led the Flow-Maticdevelopment at Sperry Rand. It was Hopper who suggested the Pentagonserve as a kind of orchestra leader for their collective undertaking. COBOLborrowed heavily from the principles of Hopper’s, Flow-Matic (Lohr, 2001).

“By the 1970s, COBOL had become the preferred programming language forcommercial data processing.

Although other languages have now taken over many of COBOL’s functions,COBOL programmers are still at work—on much smaller computers. COBOLand other common programming languages made the flourishing computer-software industry possible” (National Museum of American History Show-cases COBOL, 2012).

National Museum of American History Showcases COBOL (2012) Availableat: http://americanhistory.si.edu/press/releases/national-museum-american-history-showcases-cobol (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Lohr, S. (2001) Go to: The Story of Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers,Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts – the Programmers whocreated the software revoltion. New York: Basic Books

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Thelma Estrin“Thelma Estrin is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles. As aUCLA professor, Estrin was a pioneer in the field of biomedical engineering,using computer technology to solve problems in health care and medical re-search. Estrin designed and then implemented the first system for analog-dig-ital conversion of electrical activity from the nervous system, a precursor tothe use of computers in medicine. She also published papers on how to mapthe brain with the help of computers, and in 1975--long before the Internet be-came popular and easy to use--she designed a computer network betweenUCLA and UC Davis” (Women Who Inspire Us, Thelma Estrin, no date).

“In 1954 she traveled to Israel where she served as an electronics computerengineer at the Weizmann Institute of Science. While there she helped to de-sign Israel's first computer, the WEIZmann Automatic Computer (WEIZAC), in1954. The WEIZAC became the first electronic computer in the Near East”(n.d.).

Women Who Inspire Us, Thelma Estrin (no date) Available at: http://www.girl-geeks.org/innergeek/inspiringwomen/testrin.shtml (Accessed: 21 April 2015)Thelma Estrin - Engineering and Technology History Wiki (no date) Availableat: http://ethw.org/Thelma_Estrin (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Jean E. Sammet “Jean Sammet was born in New York, New York, in 1928. She holds a B.A. inmathematics from Mount Holyoke College (1948), an M.A., also in mathemat-ics, from the University of Illinois (1949), and an honorary doctorate fromMount Holyoke College (1978)” (Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum,no date).

“From 1958 to 1961, she worked at Sylvania Electric Products and managedthe basic software development for MOBIDIC, a computer built for the ArmySignal Corps. From 1959 to 1961, she served as a key member of the com-mittee that developed COBOL, which became the standard programming lan-guage for business applications around the world” (Jean Sammet | ComputerHistory Museum, no date).

“Sammet joined IBM in 1961 and directed the development of FORMAC, awidely used programming language and system for symbolic mathematics. In1965, she became programming language technology manager in the IBMsystems development division and later led IBM's work on the Ada program-ming language” (Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum, no date). Jean Sammet | Computer History Museum (no date). Available at:http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Jean,Sammet/ (Ac-cessed: 9 March 2015).

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Sister Mary Kenneth KellerSister Mary Kenneth Keller is thought to be first woman to obtain a PhD incomputer science, doing so at the University of Wisconsin in 1965. She alsostudied at Purdue, the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College. Dart-mouth relaxed the “men only” rule barring women from its computer center,which allowed Keller to assist in the development of the computer languageBASIC. Before BASIC, only mathematicians and scientists could write customsoftware. BASIC allowed anyone who could learn the language to do so --making computer use accessible to a much larger population (n.d.)

Keller believed that women should be involved in computer science, particu-larly in information specialization. She said, “We’re having an information ex-plosion…and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’savailable.” An interest in advancements in artificial intelligence propelledKeller to found and direct the computer science department at Clarke Collegein Iowa for twenty years. Sister Keller wrote four books about computer sci-ence. (National Women’s History Museum, no date).

National Women’s History Museum (no date) Available at:https://www.nwhm.org/blog/celebrating-computing-women-part-iv-2/ (Ac-cessed: 21 April 2015) The First Woman to Earn a PhD in Computer ScienceWas a Nun (no date)

Erna Schneider Hoover Erna Schneider Hoover earned a B.A. with honors in medieval history fromWellesley College, and later a Ph.D. in the philosophy and foundations ofmathematics from Yale University. In 1954, Erna Schneider Hoover startedwork as a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where she created acomputerized telephone switching system. The switching system used acomputer to monitor incoming calls and then automatically adjusted the call'sacceptance rate. This helped eliminate overloading problems. Hoover’s in-vention “revolutionized modern communication.” The principles of ErnaSchneider Hoover's design are still used today, she was awarded one of thefirst software patents ever issued (Patent #3,623,007, Nov. 23, 1971). BellLabs made her their first female supervisor of a technical department (TheAda Project, no date).

The Ada Project (no date) Available at:https://www.women.cs.cmu.edu/ada/Resources/Women/ (Accessed: 21 April2015)

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Karen Sparck JonesProfessor Karen Spärck Jones was one of the pioneers in information re-trieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). Born in Huddersfield,Yorkshire, England, she worked in these areas since the late 1950s andmade major contributions to the understanding of information systems (Com-puter Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007, no date).

In the 1960s, she started working on IR. In a paper in 1972, she introducedone of her most important contributions -- the concept of inverse documentfrequency (IDF) term weighting, a technique which has been adopted asstandard in modern systems, including Web search engines, and has perco-lated to other language processing applications (Computer Laboratory – Obit-uaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007, no date). IDF is a statistical methodused to evaluate how important any given word is in a set of documents, andthus the word's significance for an individual document. Search engines useinverse document frequency, as it is known, to help score and rank a docu-ment's importance in response to a user's query (Computer Science, AWoman’s Work - IEEE Spectrum, no date).

She subsequently collaborated with Stephen Robertson to establish the valueof relevance weighting for terms, a key step in the development of a highlysuccessful probabilistic model of retrieval to which she continued to con-tribute (Computer Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen Spärck Jones, 1935–2007,no date).

Computer Science, A Woman’s Work - IEEE Spectrum (no date) Available at:http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/computer-science-a-womans-work(Accessed: 21 April 2015) Computer Laboratory – Obituaries: Karen SpärckJones, 1935–2007 (no date) Available at: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obit-uaries/sparck-jones/ (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Adele GoldbergDr. Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the develop-ment of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts re-lated to object-oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox PaloAlto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. Along with computer scientist Dr.Alan Kay, Dr. Goldberg developed Smalltalk, the first true objected-orientedprogramming language which allowed users to interact with the computer in-tuitively through a graphical interface. Goldberg wrote much of the documen-tation.

Smalltalk was used to prototype the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers)interface on the Xerox Alto. The Alto was introduced in 1973 and is widely

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known as the world’s first personal computer. Goldberg and her PARC col-leagues pioneered the use of icons, point-and-click commands, pull-downmenus, local area networks and graphical user interface all of which havebeen influencing the design of software, personal computers and their de-scendants for more than forty years. PARC’s radical leap in tech evolution ledto remarkable feats in computing. Apple and Microsoft (arguably the mostsuccessful computer companies) respectively created user-friendly personalcomputers (Macintosh) and the graphical operating system (Microsoft Win-dows) in response to growing interest in the graphical user interface technol-ogy ¬– first designed, built and used at PARC.

Committed to bringing Smalltalk to a wider audience, in 1988 Goldberg co-founded the spin-out company ParcPlace Systems. Goldberg served as CEOand Chairman of the company, which created development tools forSmalltalk-based applications.

https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/muiseum/goldberg/goldberg_page.htmhttp://ethw.org/Oral-History:Adele_Goldberg

Barbara LiskovBarbara Liskov is an American mathematician, computer scientist and FordProfessor at MIT School of Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology. In 1968 Stanford University made her the first woman in the UnitedStates to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department.

“At MIT she led the design and implementation of the CLU programming lan-guage (1973), which emphasized the notions of modular programming, dataabstraction, and polymorphism. These concepts are a foundation of object-oriented programming used in modern computer languages such as Java andC#, although many other features of modern object oriented programming aremissing from this early language.”

“Her MIT group also created the Argus language, which extended the ideas ofCLU to ease implementation of programs distributed over a network, includ-ing support for nested transactions. An example of such a distributed programmight be a network based banking system. Argus provided object abstrac-tions called “guardians” that encapsulate related procedures. As an experi-mental language, Argus influenced others developers but was never widelyadopted or used for deployed networked applications” (Barbara Liskov - A.M.Turing Award Winner, no date). Barbara Liskov - A.M. Turing Award Winner(no date)

Available at: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/liskov_1108679.cfm (Ac-cessed: 21 April 2015)

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Frances E. AllenAn American computer scientist and in 2006 the first woman to win the A.M.Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for her “pioneering con-tributions to the theory and practice of optimizing compiler techniques thatlaid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and automatic parallel ex-ecution” (Frances Allen | Computer History Museum, no date).

“Allen began her career at a small rural high school in Peru, New York, teach-ing practical math to farm kids, then took a job at IBM in order to earn themoney she needed to pay off her college loans. She had planned to workthere for a couple of years and then return to her first love-teaching-but atIBM, she found something she loved even more, "great people." She wouldstay at IBM for the next 45 years, making dozens of important and originalcontributions to computer science.

Allen is a pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, programs that translatesource code written in a programming language into machine code for directuse by a computer. Her specialty is the development of advanced compilersfor making such computers work faster and more efficiently. Her 1976 paperco-authored with John Cocke describes one of the two main analysis strate-gies used in optimizing compilers today” (Hosch, no date).

Frances Allen | Computer History Museum (no date) Hosch, W. L. (no date)Frances E. Allen | biography - American computer scientist

Lynn Conway“Lynn Conway is a famed pioneer of microelectronics chip design. Her inno-vations during the 1970's at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)have impacted chip design worldwide. Many high-tech companies and com-puting methods have foundations in her work.

Thousands of chip designers learned their craft from Lynn's textbook Intro-duction to VLSI Systems, which she co-authored with Prof. Carver Mead ofCaltech. Thousands more did their first VLSI design projects using the gov-ernment's MOSIS prototyping system, which is based directly on Lynn's workat PARC. Much of the modern silicon chip design revolution is based on herwork.

Lynn went on to win many awards and high honors, including election as a

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Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professionalrecognition an engineer can receive” (Introducing Lynn Conway: A biographi-cal sketch, no date).

Introducing Lynn Conway: A biographical sketch (no date) Available at:http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/BioSketch.html (Accessed: 21 April2015)

Carol Shaw“Said to hold the title and honor of being the first female video game design-ers, Shaw was originally an Atari employee, then later joined Activision whereshe programmed her best known game, River Raid which everyone remem-bers as a "classic"– a scrolling shooter, RR was released in 1982 by Activit-sion for the Atari 2600. Shaw also brought us 3-D Tic Tac Toe (1979) SuperBreakout (1978), and Happy Trails (1984). Shaw also worked on the widelyunknown Polo and the Atari Basic Reference Manual. Part of the foundationof gaming, Shaw has games credited to her as late as 2006 and was notedfor anticipating the industry's procedural content generation (by 25 years,ahem) using algorithms to create RR's continuous, but non-random, land-scape. Done out of necessity, the machine at the time provided only 128bytes (yes, bytes) of RAM” (The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History,no date).

The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History (no date) Available at:http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_women_tech_history?page=0,1 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

Carla Meninsky“When Carla Meninsky was hired as a game designer for the Atarti 2600 con-sole in the early 1980s, she was one of only two female engineers working atAtari. The other? Carol Shaw. While working at Atari, Meninsky was respon-sible for the development of Indy 500 (1977), Star Raiders (1979), and Dodge‘Em, an award winging racing game released in 1980. Call of Duty, it was not,but this driving game (which involved controlling a race car on a four lanetrack and collecting dots in order to advance through the levels) is a consid-ered a classic from the golden era of gaming’s beginning. Meninsky, who alsoworked on the multiplayer Warlords, is now an intellectual property attorney”(The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History, no date).

The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History (no date) Available at:http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_women_tech_history?page=0,1 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

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Sophie WilsonIn 1983, Wilson designed the instruction set for one of the first RISC proces-sors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), later to become one of the most suc-cessful IP-cores (i.e., a licensed CPU core) of the 1990s and 2000s. Acorn'stwo key design engineers on this project were Steve Furber and Sophie Wil-son. Furber concentrated on the hardware architecture, while Wilson de-signed and refined the instruction set. Acorn's CEO at the time, HermannHauser, recalls that "while IBM spent months simulating their instruction setson large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain." After several years' devel-opment, the Acorn Archimedes was the first fruit of the ARM project (SophieWilson, no date).

The ARM processor has transformed computing. Found in 95% of the world'ssmartphones and a large percentage of other electronic goods, ARM chipsnot only maximize the performance of these devices, they also minimize thepower required to operate them. The result: fast, smooth performance, longbattery life, and cheaper running costs (Office, no date).

Sophie Wilson (no date). Available at:http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6615/Sophie-Wilson/ (Accessed: 21April 2015) Office, E. P. (no date) Lifetime achievement: Sophie Wilson. Avail-able at: http://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2013/wilson.html (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Sandy LernerCisco Systems co-founder Sandra Lerner is credited with making major de-sign enhancements to one of the technologies that makes the Internet possi-ble—the router.

While in graduate school at Standford, learner met and married fellow “hackertype” Leonard Bosack. “He eventually became director of computer facilitiesfor Stanford's Computer Science Department, while Lerner had found a jobrunning the computer facility for the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.Their offices were just 500 yards apart, but their computers were separateentities, as were all the departments' computer rooms across the campus.Lerner and Bosack wanted to share software and databases with one anotherwithout resorting to time-consuming disk transfers; it was a time when floppydisks were actually floppy, measuring more than five inches across, and soft-ware purchases came in a box containing a dozen or more of them. They cre-ated a local area network, or LAN, using a router that Bosack had made, firstbetween their offices, and then linking the entirety of the school's computersystem” (Sandy Lerner Biography - Newsmakers Cumulation, no date).

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“Lerner and her husband were at the cutting edge of computer technology at thetime, having linked 5,000 computers across a 16-square-mile campus area sin-gle-handedly. Some computer makers were offering networking capabilities, buttheir systems could only be used with their own particular products. By contrast,the router that Lerner and Bosack had come up with was a unique "multiproto-col" bit of hardware and software that could work with many different kinds ofcomputers” (Sandy Lerner Biography - Newsmakers Cumulation, no date).

They decided to strike out on their own, and quit their jobs. They began Cisco inthe living room of their Atherton, California, home and sold their first router in1986. Early on they realized there were much larger possibilities for networking(Sandy Lerner Biography - Newsmakers Cumulation, no date).

Sandy Lerner Biography - life, family, childhood, parents, name, death, school,mother - Newsmakers Cumulation (no date) Available at: http://www.notablebi-ographies.com/newsmakers2/2005-La-Pr/Lerner-Sandy.html (Accessed: 7 May2015)

Radie PerlmanKnown sometimes as the “mother of the internet.” Dr. Perlman is a software de-signer and network engineer who is most famous for her invention of the span-ning-tree protocol (‘The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History’, no date).

Dr. Perlman’s work has had a profound impact on how networks self-organizeand move data. Her innovations enable today’s link state routing protocols to berobust, scalable, and easy to manage. The particular protocol she designed inthe 1980s (IS-IS) continues to flourish for routing IP today. She designed thespanning tree algorithm that transformed Ethernet from the original limited-scal-ability, single-wire CSMA/CD, into a protocol that can handle large clouds. Later,she improved on spanning tree-based Ethernet by designing TRILL (TRanspar-ent Interconnection of Lots of Links), which allows Ethernet to make optimal useof bandwidth (Radia Perlman, no date).

Currently employed by Intel, Perlman holds more than 50 patents from Sunalone, and is the author of a textbook on networking, and a co-author of a text-book of network security. (‘The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History’, nodate).

‘The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History’ (no date). Maximum PC. Avail-able at:http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/15_most_important_women_tech_history?page=0,1 (Accessed: 9 March 2015).

Radia Perlman (no date). Available at: http://www.internethalloffame.org/in-ductees/radia-perlman (Accessed: 9 March 2015).

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Shafrira Goldwasser Shafrira Goldwasser is an American-born Israeli computer scientist. She is aprofessor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and 2013 co-recipient of the Alan M. Turing Award.

“Professor Shafi Goldwasser first met her MIT colleague Prof. Silvio Micaliwhen they were graduate students at the University of California at Berkeleyin 1980. They shared a mentor and thesis advisor, Prof. Manuel Blum, andthey also shared a passionate interest in cryptology, the science of codes.One of their projects involved finding a way to play a game of poker securelyover the phone. From this, the two devised a method for encrypting and en-suring the security of single bits of data. This original research led to award-winning careers for the pair” (MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins ‘the Nobel Prize incomputing’ | Jewish Women’s Archive, no date).

First conceived in 1985, Goldwasser and Micali created new mechanisms forhow information is encrypted and secured, work that is fundamental totoday’s communications protocols, Internet transactions, and cloud comput-ing. In 2013, the pair received the Alan M. Turing Award presented by the As-sociation for Computing Machinery. The ACM credited them with“revolutionizing the science of cryptology” and with developing the gold stan-dard for enabling secure Internet transactions (MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins‘the Nobel Prize in computing’ | Jewish Women’s Archive, no date).

MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser wins ‘the Nobel Prize in computing’ | JewishWomen’s Archive (no date) Available at:http://jwa.org/thisweek/jun/15/2013/this-week-in-history-mit-s-shafi-gold-wasser-wins-nobel-prize-in-computing (Accessed: 21 April 2015)

Henriette Avram“Known as the “Mother of MARC,” Avram’s work at the Library of Congressreplaced ink-on-paper card catalogs and revolutionized cataloging systems atlibraries worldwide” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Library of CongressInformation Bulletin, no date).

“The practical effect of her complicated mathematical formulations was tomake library collections more readily accessible to scholars and the generalpublic. Her work greatly expanded interlibrary loan programs throughout thenation and allowed people to sit at computers and look through automatedcard catalogs at libraries everywhere” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’Library of Congress Information Bulletin, no date).

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“After working at the National Security Agency during the early years of thecomputer age, Avram joined the Library of Congress in 1965. With no back-ground in library work, she was assigned to develop an automated catalogingformat where none had existed” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Libraryof Congress Information Bulletin, no date)

Combining two complex fields, computer programming and intricate cata-loging practices, she and a small team completed the MARC Pilot Project—for Machine Readable Cataloging—in 1968. The system quickly became thepreferred format for libraries throughout the country and, ultimately, aroundthe globe” (Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Library of Congress Informa-tion Bulletin, no date)

Henriette Avram, ‘Mother of MARC,’ Dies (May 2006) - Library of CongressInformation Bulletin (no date) Available at:http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0605/avram.html (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

Anita Borg“Anita Borg was a member of the research staff at Xerox's Palo Alto Re-search Center. After receiving her Ph.D. from New York University, Borgworked for four years on a fault tolerant operating system for Auragen Sys-tems Corporation in New Jersey and then with Nixdorf Computer in Germany.She spent 1986 to 1997 at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she devel-oped and patented a performance analysis method for high-speed memorysystems. During that time, she also developed Mecca, a system for communi-cating in virtual communities.”

“Founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Borg isalso a leader on women's computing issues in the Association for ComputingMachinery, the Computing Research Association and the National Academyof Engineering” (Women Who Inspire Us, Anita Borg, no date).

Women Who Inspire Us, Anita Borg (no date) Available at: http://www.girl-geeks.org/innergeek/inspiringwomen/borg.shtml (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

Jeanne Ferrante2000s“In compiling, applications are translated from high-level programming lan-guages such as C and Fortran (among others) to machine-executable form.Professor Ferrante’s work has focused on the middle stage of the compilingprocess: program transformation or optimization for performance. Her resultshave led to increased parallelism on a variety of parallel machines as well as

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better use of a computer’s memory hierarchy. Ferrante's research into per-formance has also extended to grid computing, or networks of computers thattie together various types of machines, some of them separated by great dis-tances. This has included the development of algorithms that focus on maxi-mizing steady-state throughput when scheduling work across a grid” (UCSDJacobs School of Engineering, no date).

“The foundation of program transformation is the underlying program repre-sentation. Ferrante helped develop intermediate representations for optimiz-ing and parallelizing compilers, most notably the Program DependenceGraph and Static Single Assignment (SSA) form. Her SSA work (with col-leagues from IBM) was recognized in 2006 by the ACM Programming Lan-guage Achievement Award as a "significant and lasting contribution to thefield" (UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, no date)

UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering (no date) Available at: http://www.jacob-sschool.ucsd.edu/faculty/faculty_bios/index.sfe?fmp_recid=105 (Accessed: 7May 2015)

Danese Cooper2000sDanese Cooper has a 25-year history in the software industry and has longbeen an advocate for transparent development methodologies. She is some-times called the “Open Source Diva.”

Cooper joined PayPal in February 2014 as their first Head of Open Source,and has previously held many leadership roles within the computer sciencesector. She has managed teams at Apple Inc., Symantec, and for six yearsserved as Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun Microsystems before leav-ing to serve as Senior Director for Open Source Strategies at Intel. She ad-vised on open source policy to the R community while at REvolutionComputing (now Revolution Analytics), and she served 18 months as ChiefTechnical Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. Her six years with Sun Mi-crosystems is credited as the key to the company opening up its source codeand lending support to Sun's OpenOffice.org software suite, Oracle Grid En-gine, among others (Cooper, no date).

Cooper, D. (no date) Transparency and transformation at PayPal - O’ReillyRadar. Available at: http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/07/transparency-and-trans-formation-at-paypal.html#more-69494 (Accessed: 7 May 2015)

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