Grace Hopper got her start in programming on the Mark I, which ran calculations around the clock for the war effort in World War II-some of which ended up in the development of the atomic bomb.

Grace Hopper was also one of two people-along with Richard Bloch-who “invented coding syntax and workarounds for the way code is written to this day.”Īs early as 1944, Grace realized she she could save herself from rewriting code from scratch for each problem by holding onto reusable scraps, which came to be known as subroutines. This system of documentation became standard practice for programmers, and it still is: good code is always documented. When Grace’s code got thorny, she made a habit of annotating the master code sheets with comments, making it easier for colleagues to unravel her handiwork later. In the process, they developed some habits that would become cornerstones of programming that still exists today: This was at a time when a computer was something you stood in, rather than sat at, in which you were punching cards and patching cable. It is the story of Grace Hopper and the ENIAC Six-women who not only programmed the first computers during World War II, but figured out how they would work without a user manual and reverse engineered them to write the user manuals that didn’t yet exist for them. It is story of Ada Lovelace explaining Charles Babbage’s ideas of the “Difference Engine” and “Analytical Engine”-widely considered to be the first mechanical computers-to the world, and detailing how they would work. This is, in part, the story Claire Evans tells. It was women computers that “cataloged the cosmos, charted the stars, measured the world, and built the bomb.” And when computers became the physical objects they’ve become to be known as today, it was women who animated them, who gave them their ability to do what they had always done-which was the math. The computer as we know it today is named for the people it replaced, and long before we came to understand the network as an extension of ourselves, our great-grandmothers were performing the functions that brought about its existence. Claire Evans, in her new book Broad Band, reminds us that “for close to two hundred years, a computer was a job.”Īlone, women were the first computers together, they formed the first information networks.

But computers have a longer and richer history than that. The story of human progress as a species is often told through the progression of the technologies we’ve developed, all of which converge inside the box of the computer-from the large mainframes developed in the years of World War II that took up entire rooms, to the handheld devices we carry with us everywhere we go today. Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L.

Broad band the untold story