Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day and the women who made the internet

[THEME MUSIC] IRA FLATOW: Hey, it’s Ira, and you’re listening to Science Friday. Remember the Hidden Figures, NASA’s human computers, or Apollo computing pioneer Margaret Hamilton, whose software helped land people on the moon and who passed away last week? Just a few examples of women who were pioneers in computers and technology.

Women helped build the structure of our modern internet, from UNIVAC to ARPANET to hypertext. And no woman is more remembered for her work in computing and as a programming pioneer than Ada Lovelace, creator of the first computer algorithm.

Today, we celebrate Ada Lovelace Week. And what better way than to listen to a conversation I had back in 2018 with Claire Evans, author of the book Broad Band, The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. She told me the book came from a crisis of faith she had about her place as a woman on the internet.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

CLAIRE EVANS: I grew up online, essentially. I’m of the generation where, although I can remember a time before the web, it’s not very clear for me. I grew up learning how to write on the internet. I saw text on the screen, and it empowered me as a young writer. My father worked for Intel. I had computers in the home growing up. I had always felt that the internet was my country, in some way.

But in the last few years, I started to feel a little bit disconnected from it, unsure if, as a woman, I had a place on the internet anymore. I felt more vulnerable. I felt like it was harder to express myself as freely as I had in my early days online. So yeah, the book comes from that.

IRA FLATOW: Did it solve– did it resolve your issues?

CLAIRE EVANS: [SIGH] I don’t about the future, but I’m certainly much more confident about the past.

IRA FLATOW: Where exactly do you think women’s stories– and why have they been left out of the history of the internet?

CLAIRE EVANS: Well, the internet is an interesting case, because it was developed by the Department of Defense to serve the needs of computer scientists and engineers at the highest levels of academic computer science. So by definition, it was a very male-dominated environment in terms of the infrastructure. But women have always found ways to position themselves, even within those kinds of spaces.

I mean, one of the most fascinating characters, I think, in my book is a woman who ran what was called the Network Information Center of the early ARPANET, the first version of the internet. She was the secretary, the air traffic control, the librarian, the head information resource of the network. She wasn’t a computer scientist, but she brought a lot of value to organizing the information on that network and connecting people on it, which tends to be a theme if you look at the history of women in computing, and also in my book.

IRA FLATOW: That was Jake Feinler?

CLAIRE EVANS: That’s Jake Feinler. Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. In reading your book, I learned a lot of new stories. I’ve been reading– living the internet for my whole career. But two of the names you write about are absolutely familiar, Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. Now, I have a particular soft spot for Grace Hopper, because I remember she did an interview with David Letterman in 1986. And it was one of my favorite clips. I play it as much as I can.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

DAVID LETTERMAN: And you worked on the original computer in this country, right?

GRACE HOPPER: I was very fortunate. The Navy ordered me to the first big computer in the United States, Mark I at Harvard.

DAVID LETTERMAN: It was called Mark I at Harvard? Now, in those days, the thing was–

GRACE HOPPER: 51 long, 8 feet high, and 8 feet deep.

DAVID LETTERMAN: And that was the pocket model.

[LAUGHTER]

GRACE HOPPER: That’s right. You can put it on a little tiny corner of a chip now.

DAVID LETTERMAN: Yeah. Now, how did you know so much about computers then?

GRACE HOPPER: I didn’t.

DAVID LETTERMAN: How did you–

GRACE HOPPER: The first one.

DAVID LETTERMAN: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

[END PLAYBACK]

IRA FLATOW: Wow. And that really set the stage for other people who followed, right?

CLAIRE EVANS: She was the best. Her name is not credited on that manual, by the way.

IRA FLATOW: Is that right?

CLAIRE EVANS: Yep. Yep.

IRA FLATOW: So she didn’t just program the Mark I. She also helped make programming accessible to the rest of us and for people who came later.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yes, exactly. I mean, when she came into her job as a programmer, there was no precedent. There was no established system. She had to learn how the machine worked from wiring diagrams and from taking it apart. She bootlegged her own engineering education. And then she not only refined the methods by which we operate programs on those old school computers.

But after the war, she dedicated a great deal of her career to establishing systems by which programmers could make– so their jobs could be made easier, essentially. She invented the first compiler. She pushed for what was then called automatic programming, which was a way for programmers to step to a level above the machine level and begin to think more symbolically about their work, which is, I would argue, what sort of catalyzed the development of programming as a discipline, as an art form, and as a language.

IRA FLATOW: I remember from back in the day, COBOL. She invented COBOL, which was used by everybody.

CLAIRE EVANS: The grandmother of COBOL, yeah.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: That was amazing.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: At the same time that Grace was changing the field of programming, a group of women were programming the ENIAC, the first successful ballistic demonstrations, right?

CLAIRE EVANS: Yes, exactly.

IRA FLATOW: And they didn’t get credit until many years later.

CLAIRE EVANS: They did not get credit for 50 years until they finally got sick and tired of it all and started to tell their own stories, which is very important for women to remember to do sometimes.

IRA FLATOW: And why were they not remembered?

CLAIRE EVANS: Well, back in those days, there wasn’t much of a distinction made between hardware and software. Software was considered to be menial manipulation of the hardware. It was kind of subservient to the hardware. It took many years for programming to be seen as a kind of art form or as something with the real power to change the world.

The people who operated the ENIAC, they came from applied mathematics. They were doing the grunt work of the scientific age. They were mathematicians, but really, they were seen as on the level with telephone operators or secretaries. It was seen as clerical work, not as significant. So it wasn’t until the significance of that work became clear that, well, other people wanted to take the credit for it, as they always do.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. If you didn’t have an advanced degree or a degree in computer science, or some sort of thing like the men had, you weren’t looked at as legitimate.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, part of the decline of women in computing coincides with the development of the professionalization of the field. When its importance became recognized, programming was sort of– implicitly, there was a semantic shift. They stopped calling it programming. They started calling it software engineering. And software engineering has its own established professional canon. It’s got a clear chain of– a linear chain of educational prerequirements that you have to have in order to become an engineer, so that kind of edged women out of the field just as they were most needed.

IRA FLATOW: And we can thank Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler for our handy dandy domain sorting system, .edu, .com.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yeah.

IRA FLATOW: She’s sort of a one-woman Google of her time.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yes. She was the one person– I mean, back in the early days of the ARPANET, the internet, there was no interface for navigating those resources. If you wanted to use a computer at a distance, you had to know what was on that computer.

And so what Jake did was she created the sort of white pages, the yellow pages of the internet. She was the one person who knew where everything was. If you had a question about the internet, for 20 years you called a phone number in her office, and she answered or one of her employees answered and told you how to have access to the thing you needed. It’s pretty mind-blowing to think about.

IRA FLATOW: It is. Are these stories about women, or internet pioneers who happen to be women?

CLAIRE EVANS: Hmm. I think it’s a story about underdogs, frankly, who happen to be women, yes. For me– listen. I think it’s not so much that I want to counter great man history with great woman history. I think people often do that with people like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. They’re easy to point to and say, here’s this amazing woman.

For me, what’s more interesting is simply providing more complexity and more nuance to the stories of the technologies that have changed our world. And one way to do that is to tap into the amazing resource of all these extra people that were also in the room at the time, and hear what they had to say about what it was like.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

IRA FLATOW: We have to take a break. When we come back, we’ll meet one of the pioneers of the early internet. Stay with us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Before there was a Facebook or even a Friendster, if you wanted to go online to make friends in, let’s say, 1990, you might join a BBS. Do you remember those? Bulletin Board System. There was no graphic interface for the net. You typed everything on that little green screen, remember? And you could join any number of conversations about arts, culture, politics, or just the weather.

The Well in San Francisco was one of those places. But here in New York, Stacy Horn from her apartment in Manhattan built one such network just for people in New York City. It was called ECHO the East Coast Hang Out. And its thousands of members met in person. They formed friendships, talked politics, even live tweeted, so to speak, news events, what they could do in those days.

And more remarkably, ECHO was the rare space on the internet that was full of women. They had their own private channels on ECHO to talk with each other, and they were put in charge of moderating conversations on an equal basis with men. Stacy Horn joins us here in our studios. Welcome, Stacy.

STACY HORN: Great to be here. Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: You remember those start at the beginning of those days?

STACY HORN: Well, I was a student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and we had an assignment to call The Well, which I instantly became addicted to. Called every day throughout graduate school. And when I was in my last semester, I was logged into The Well and someone said, oh, I heard you’re going to start the East Coast version of The Well, which actually, it never occurred to me.

But the second I heard it, I thought, oh, yeah. And I typed back, yeah, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start the East Coast version. And I dropped a course I was taking, picked up another course called Writing a Business Plan, and put it together.

IRA FLATOW: And you made sure you had a voice in how ECHO was run. Every separate chat room or conference had to be a female host, a male host.

STACY HORN: Yeah, I wanted women, when they logged in, to not feel that this place was run by men. There was just as many women in charge as men so that they, again, weren’t there at the behest of men and weren’t being controlled by men and told how to speak by men. There were women in charge.

IRA FLATOW: But of course, like anything else, it also had its share of ills, right? What was it like to be the first person to deal with the trolls, the internet trolls?

STACY HORN: Horrible. Whenever anyone tells me to look back, probably the first thing I’ll remember is panic. I started to ECHO with all these wonderful dreams of community and conversation. And the minute people got together, conflict arose. Which of course, when you think about it, is like, duh. But at the time, I didn’t know what I was doing. There was no troll manual.

IRA FLATOW: But you must still have realized that despite the trolls, there’s great value in creating this community. It overshadowed the trolls.

STACY HORN: And in a way, there’s great value for trolls. If you can somehow manage to at least mitigate their conversational skills or communication skills a little bit, you can safely online get into the heads of someone that you disagree with and someone you find abhorrent.

IRA FLATOW: Claire, you joined ECHO in the process of writing the book, right?

CLAIRE EVANS: I did. I did. I lurked around on ECHO for some time. It’s a pretty fascinating thing for someone who grew up on the web to experience. You don’t realize how much your understanding of how the world’s information is navigated is predicated on hyperlinks and conventions that are more graphic. But ECHO is something that you have to dive into this textual universe. It’s very fascinating.

And the fact that it’s been around for so long, it’s like this amazing time capsule. It contains thoughts and feelings and reactions to all these important historical moments and all these mundane things as well. And they all exist in the same sphere, and you can navigate it. And you can sort of be a ghost flying through the entire history of New York City, it feels like.

STACY HORN: Yeah, because we saved everything. All the conversations that take place are still there. Let’s go to Cincinnati. And Sunita, welcome to Science Friday.

AUDIENCE: Hello, thank you. Thank you for taking my call.

IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: So I was a woman in computer science in the early ’90s. I finished my degree in the early ’90s. And when I started my degree, I actually did not have any background in computing. Had never touched a computer. And my dad thought, well, I think you might like this, because my favorite subject in high school was math.

But I just didn’t have the confidence. And at that time, you didn’t have the mentorship. I didn’t even know that I needed a mentor at that point. But not having a mentor and not having that confidence, and then in most of my classes, they were mostly guys. So I was actually enrolled in the honors program, and I dropped out of it because I just– you felt out of place a lot of times.

But I did go on, and for my masters I did a degree in geography, which was mostly applying computing– like, computer cartography and GIS. And after that, I worked for a few years in IT.

And then following that, I did leave because of family reasons, so that was one of the reasons I called. When you think about a lot of the women who were in computers, even at that time, many of them are not in computer science careers anymore. And some of those reasons are family reasons. Because when I tried to negotiate flex time or part-time work, I wasn’t successful in doing that.

IRA FLATOW: Hmm. So you’re saying that women today have it a little better because there’s more sympathy for women’s issues.

AUDIENCE: I think there is more of an awareness for women’s issues. I think people at least talk about the balance between balancing work and family life. There is at least a conversation. I think at the time when I was dealing with some of these issues, if you brought it up, then your boss or the people that you worked with might see you as somebody who is not committed to their job or their career.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: And some of us also didn’t think of it. I guess when I look back, I think I thought of my job as a job, not necessarily as a career. And there is a big distinction between the two sometimes.

IRA FLATOW: All right. Let me get a reaction to that.

CLAIRE EVANS: Yeah. I mean, she touched on some issues that come up again and again in this history, which is that mentorship is really important, community and representation. Seeing yourself surrounded with other people in the workplace or online really matters. That’s why I think the fact that Stacy made female moderation a big part of ECHO is a really powerful thing, a very simple thing to do. And of course, companies making space for childcare obligations, because those are not just women’s issues. Those are everyone’s issues.

IRA FLATOW: Menlo Park, California. Beverly, hi. Welcome to Science Friday.

AUDIENCE: So one story that I wanted to highlight that I think is left out is the story of Lynn Conway. So I would put her in a similar league to maybe Grace Hopper, maybe being compared to Grace Hopper.

But she solved a key problem in computing called very large-scale integration, which is modern computers have many, many processors instead of just one processor. And the problem is that a program, a computer program, is a linear set of instructions that you just start at the top and go to the bottom. So how do you run those on two computing cores at the same time? So at IBM, she was one of the key team members who helped solve that problem.

The catch is Lynn Conway is transgender and did that work as a man. So she did that work as a man, and then she changed to a woman. And to protect herself, she hid her past, including that key part of computing history, and then rose again from the bottom, just a mere programmer, to the top again.

And she’s now a tenured professor at the University of Michigan. She literally wrote the book on very large-scale integration while she was at Xerox. And I was completely flabbergasted when I read about her, because I personally studied the stuff she invented in school my senior year in an electrical engineering and computer engineering degree.

IRA FLATOW: I see the wheels in Claire’s head going around.

CLAIRE EVANS: Broad Band 2.

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS]

CLAIRE EVANS: That’s remarkable.

STACY HORN: Yeah.

CLAIRE EVANS: I’ve heard of Lynn Conway. The thing about this book I really hope I can get across is that I really don’t want people to look at this book and say, well, OK, the stories have been written, but we’re done now. There’s so many more– so many more that even I don’t know, and I’ve spent years thinking about this stuff. It’s remarkable how many incredible women have been involved in the development of computing.

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IRA FLATOW: That was Claire Evans, author of Broad Band, The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, and Stacy Horn, Founder of the New York social network ECHO. We talked to them back in 2018. Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everybody. I’m Ira Flatow. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you tomorrow.

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