Broad Band

Broad Band Plot Summary

Introduction

In the dimly lit rooms of early computing laboratories, women's fingers flew across keyboards and control panels, translating complex mathematical equations into the language of machines. These women—mathematicians, programmers, and visionaries—were the original "computers" before the term described machines. Their stories have been systematically erased from the popular narrative of technology's evolution, creating a distorted view that computing has always been a male domain. The true history reveals a different reality: women were central to every major breakthrough in computing's development. From the human computers who calculated ballistic trajectories during World War II to the programmers who taught ENIAC its first tasks, from the architects of COBOL to the designers of early hypertext systems, women shaped our digital world in profound ways. Their approaches to technology—often emphasizing human connection, accessibility, and practical problem-solving—continue to influence how we interact with computers today. By recovering these forgotten stories, we gain crucial insights into how gender has shaped technological innovation and how diversity drives progress in ways that homogeneity simply cannot match.

Chapter 1: Human Computers: Women as the First Calculators (1890s-1940s)

In 1892, a curious classified advertisement appeared in the New York Times seeking "A COMPUTER WANTED." This was not a request for a machine—personal computers were still nearly a century away. Rather, the United States Naval Observatory was looking to hire a person to perform calculations by hand. For close to two hundred years, a "computer" was a job title—someone who computes for a living—and increasingly, that someone was a woman. The story begins with astronomers like Maria Mitchell, who calculated the ephemeris of Venus at the Naval Observatory, and Edward Charles Pickering, who hired women at Harvard Observatory to catalog stars. These "Harvard Computers," including Williamina Fleming (who discovered the Horsehead Nebula) and Annie Jump Cannon (who developed the stellar classification system still used today), made groundbreaking contributions to astronomy while earning half the wages of their male counterparts. Fleming had been Pickering's maid before joining his observatory, exemplifying how women often entered scientific work through unconventional paths. During World War II, the demand for computational power exploded. The U.S. Army hired hundreds of women to calculate artillery firing tables, while NASA's predecessor employed Black women mathematicians in the segregated west section of Langley Research Center. Katherine Johnson, one of these "hidden figures," would later hand-calculate trajectories for Alan Shepard's and John Glenn's spaceflights. As Johnson famously noted, she was a computer back in the days "when the computer wore a skirt." These women worked with slide rules, magnifying glasses, and early calculating machines, forming human information networks that prefigured our connected, calculating, big-data world. What made women ideal for computing work in the eyes of employers was a complex mix of genuine aptitude and gender stereotyping. Women were valued for their perceived patience, attention to detail, and willingness to perform repetitive tasks for less pay than men. This created a paradox where women performed increasingly sophisticated computational work while being categorized as low-skilled labor. Nevertheless, these early women computers developed techniques for error checking, documentation, and collaborative problem-solving that would become essential to programming practices decades later. The transition from human to electronic computing marked a pivotal moment in technological history. The last significant human computing project in the United States, a reference book of mathematical tables funded by the Works Progress Administration, was published just as computing machines made it effectively obsolete. Yet many women who had been computers themselves found work tending their replacements, lifting their hands from pencils and slide rules to desk calculators and switches. The job description changed too: onetime human computers went from rivals to keepers, no longer executing the functions of the machine but rather programming those functions to be executed. This era established the foundation for women's central role in early electronic computing. Their mathematical skills, combined with the experience of translating abstract problems into step-by-step procedures, made them ideally suited for the emerging field of computer programming. As electronic computers replaced human computers, many women made the transition from calculating to programming, bringing their methodical approach to an entirely new discipline.

Chapter 2: Programming Pioneers: The ENIAC Six and Early Software (1940s-1950s)

In 1945, as World War II drew to a close, the U.S. Army unveiled ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the world's first general-purpose electronic computer. This massive machine—weighing 30 tons and containing 18,000 vacuum tubes—was designed to calculate artillery firing tables. When the military needed people to program this unprecedented device, they turned to six mathematically talented women: Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum, and Frances Bilas Spence. These women, now known as the "ENIAC Six," faced an extraordinary challenge. With no programming languages, no operating manuals, and no precedent to follow, they had to understand the machine's physical structure to program it. They traced the paths of electronic pulses through complex wiring diagrams, crawled inside the enormous computer to manipulate cables and switches, and developed the fundamental programming techniques that would shape the field. As Jean Jennings Bartik later recalled, "We were pioneers in a job that nobody knew how to do." Despite their groundbreaking work, the ENIAC women were deliberately excluded from recognition. When the computer was unveiled to the press in February 1946, they were not introduced or mentioned in reports. Photos from the event show men examining the machine while the women who made it function remained invisible. At the celebration dinner following the demonstration, none of the ENIAC Six were invited—not even Betty Jennings and Betty Snyder, who had created the demonstration program. As Betty Jean wrote decades later, "It felt like history had been made that day, and then it had run over us and left us in its tracks." Meanwhile, Grace Hopper was making her own mark at Harvard's Computation Laboratory. After leaving her position as a mathematics professor at Vassar College to join the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, Hopper was assigned to work on the Mark I, another early computer. There she would become, as she liked to say, "the third programmer of the world's first computer." Hopper's most significant contribution came in 1952 when she developed the first compiler—a program that translates human-readable instructions into machine code. This revolutionary concept allowed users to command computers in natural language, independent of any specific machine. During this era, programming was widely considered "women's work"—detail-oriented, painstaking, and requiring patience rather than brilliance. Computer manufacturers actively recruited women, with Cosmopolitan magazine publishing a 1967 article titled "The Computer Girls" that encouraged women to enter the field. As one computer industry expert told Cosmopolitan, "Programming requires patience, persistence, and the ability to pay attention to detail. Women are 'naturals' at computer programming." This gendered perception of programming as clerical rather than creative work would persist until the field gained prestige in later decades. The 1940s and 1950s represent a fascinating paradox in computing history. Women were central to the development of programming as both a practice and a profession, creating many of the foundational techniques and tools still used today. Yet as the field grew more prestigious and lucrative, forces were already in motion that would push women to the margins. The seeds of computing's gender shift were being planted even as women led some of its most significant innovations.

Chapter 3: Language Creators: COBOL and the Birth of Modern Programming (1950s-1960s)

By the early 1950s, Grace Hopper was facing a crisis at Remington Rand, which had acquired the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. The company was struggling to sell their million-dollar UNIVAC computers, partly because programming them was so difficult. Hopper believed that computer programming should be widely accessible to non-experts, not just an elite priesthood of specialists. If computers weren't so painstaking to program, perhaps they'd be easier to sell; if clients could write their own code, her staff wouldn't have to create custom programs for each installation. Hopper's solution was what she called "automatic programming"—a revolutionary concept that would allow users to command computers in natural language, independent of any specific machine. Her first compiler, A-0, translated human-readable instructions into machine code. This was a radical idea at the time. Many programmers, whom Grace called "Neanderthals," resisted automatic programming, fearing it might put them out of work. But Grace and her supporters, the "space cadets," believed in a future where programs wrote themselves. The compiler was just the beginning. Hopper refined her ideas through successive versions, introducing "pseudo-code" that served as an intermediate language between humans and computers. Her business compiler, MATH-MATIC, employed the globally understood language of mathematics, while its descendant, FLOW-MATIC, assigned mathematical variables to commonly used words and phrases. These innovations made it possible for non-technical project managers to assess programming work being done. As more companies developed their own compilers and programming languages, Hopper recognized the danger of a "Tower of Babel" situation, with competing, mutually incomprehensible languages crowding each other out. In 1959, she called a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss creating a common business language. This led to the formation of the Conference on Data Systems and Language (CODASYL), which brought together representatives from major computer manufacturers, the government, and private industry to develop COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). COBOL was designed to be hardware-independent and readable by non-specialists. The Department of Defense mandated that all its computer installations use COBOL and required suppliers to provide hardware that supported it, effectively dictating the direction of the computing industry for a decade. By the turn of the millennium, 80 percent of all code on the planet was written in COBOL, representing some seventy billion lines of code still running critical systems from banking to government operations. Many women were involved in COBOL's development, including Betty Holberton, Mary Hawes, Jean Sammet, Deborah Davidson, Sue Knapp, and Gertrude Tierney. Like Grace, these women were overworked, often expected to provide customer support in addition to writing, testing, and debugging computer code. But with "both the expertise to devise solutions and the incentive to make programming easier for experts and novices alike," they were uniquely positioned to effect real change in how humans interacted with machines. Hopper's emphasis on collaborative development and the network of volunteer programmers she mobilized predated the open-source software movement by four decades. By building common languages that remained consistent even as hardware evolved, she cemented the possibility for programming to develop as a functional art form and transformed the early computer industry from a hardware-focused business into one where software would eventually become the primary value creator.

Chapter 4: Network Architects: Building the Internet's Foundation (1970s-1980s)

In 1972, Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler walked into the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute for her first day of work. With her hair combed back and wearing a smart business suit, she stood out among the bearded, long-haired men sitting in beanbags, "looking kind of like unmade beds." Jake had been hired by Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, to manage the Network Information Center (NIC), a central office for the ARPANET—the military and academic packet-switching network that would evolve into today's Internet. Jake's first assignment was to produce a Resource Handbook for the ARPANET in just six weeks. "What's a Resource Handbook?" she asked. "Honestly, I don't know," Engelbart replied, "but we need one." Jake figured it out, contacting every host site on the nascent Internet to document what resources they had available. The resulting thousand-page handbook became the first documentation of the Internet's technical infrastructure, listing every node, institution, and person keeping the ARPANET running. As the ARPANET grew, Jake's role expanded dramatically. Working with a largely female staff, she created the ARPANET Directory (the "electronic yellow and white pages"), managed the registry for all new hosts (the "Host Table"), indexed network conversations, and ran a hotline for the Internet that rang day and night. She was effectively air traffic control, head librarian, and manager of the Internet all rolled into one. When someone didn't know where to go on the network, they called Jake. In 1974, the NIC took over maintaining the ARPANET's Host Table, the central registry that kept track of every computer on the network. As the Internet grew, this system became unwieldy. Jake suggested dividing hosts into separate "domains" based on where the computers were kept: military hosts could have .mil, educational hosts .edu, government hosts .gov, organizations .org, and so forth. For commercial entities, Jake and her colleagues debated between .bus for business and .com for commercial. They settled on .com—which would become the most widely used domain on the Internet. While Jake was organizing the Internet's infrastructure, another woman, Radia Perlman, was designing the protocols that would allow it to scale globally. As one of only fifty women in a class of nearly a thousand at MIT, Radia often felt out of place in the male-dominated world of computer science. Despite being told repeatedly that good engineers take electronics apart from a young age, Radia excelled by thinking conceptually, stepping "outside of the complexity of a particular implementation to see things in a new way." In 1985, while working at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Radia invented the spanning-tree protocol, an elegant algorithm that solved a critical limitation of Ethernet networks. Her solution allowed packets of information to travel on unique paths between computers without looping back on themselves, and it was infinitely scalable and self-healing: if one computer in the network went down, the protocol automatically determined a new route. This approach made large computer networks like the Internet possible. As Radia said in 2014, "Without me, if you just blew on the Internet, it would fall over and die." These women's contributions to networking weren't technological so much as they were organizational. They built the systems that gave the Internet the best possible chance at holding together amid rapid and unstructured growth. Without their work in creating addressing systems, protocols, and documentation, the Internet as we know it might never have been possible.

Chapter 5: Digital Communities: Women Shaping Early Online Culture (1980s-1990s)

In 1988, Stacy Horn, a graduate student at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, decided to start an online community for New Yorkers. She called it the East Coast Hang-Out, or Echo. Unlike the West Coast's WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), which catered to Grateful Dead fans and ex-hippies, Echo would have a distinctly New York flavor—more techno-hipster than techno-hippie. Stacy wanted a place to talk about literature, film, culture, and sex, with plenty of women around and friends she might actually meet in real life. When Stacy took her business proposal to banks, "people just openly made fun of me. And looked at me like I was the biggest loser in the world to ever think that people would want to socialize via their computers." Undeterred, she invested her savings and hit the streets, recruiting interesting people at parties, art openings, and bars. She invited new users to her Greenwich Village apartment for Unix classes, teaching them to use the server and modems piled on red aluminum shelves in her living room. Echo quickly became a vibrant online community with a distinctly New York personality. Users, known as "Echoids," were playwrights, actors, writers, artists, and intellectuals who posted in threaded "conferences" on topics ranging from culture and media to death. The quintessential Echo thread was "I Hate Myself," where users confessed their trespasses with dark humor. As one journalist noted, "Sometimes newcomers don't realize that if Echoids attack their views and mercilessly beat down their arguments without so much as saying hello, they're not being hostile. Far from it. It's just that special New York way of saying, 'Welcome to our world!'" What made Echo truly unique was its gender balance. At a time when the entire Internet was only about 10 to 15 percent female, women made up nearly half of Echo's user base. Stacy's advertising tagline captured this distinction: "Echo has the highest percentage of women in cyberspace—and none of them will give you the time of day." She actively recruited women, made membership free for them in 1990, and established a mentoring program. Echo also had female-only spaces like Women in Telecommunications (WIT) and BITCH ("WIT with a leather jacket"), where women could discuss everything from sex advice to politics to online harassment. On the West Coast, another woman-led community was taking shape. Ellen Pack and Nancy Rhine founded Women's WIRE (Women's Information Resource and Exchange) in 1993, the first online service specifically for women. As Rhine explained, "Where is the quilting bee? Where's the agora? Where's the town square where we're all hanging out?" Women's WIRE provided that digital town square, offering resources on women's health, business opportunities, and political activism alongside vibrant discussion forums. These early communities grappled with issues that remain relevant today: online harassment, gender dynamics, privacy, and the relationship between virtual and physical identity. When a transgender woman requested access to Echo's women-only space in 1993, it sparked a community-wide conversation about gender identity online—years before such discussions entered mainstream awareness. As Horn later wrote, "Echoids were only able to reach a tentative understanding and agreement through a lot of words, volumes and volumes, over years of time." The culture of these text-based communities differed significantly from later social media. With no algorithms driving engagement and no advertising model requiring constant growth, they emphasized depth over breadth. Users developed rich, context-specific communication styles and strong community governance. When tragedy struck—such as during the 9/11 attacks, when Echo members posted real-time accounts from Manhattan—these platforms provided crucial emotional support and information sharing.

Chapter 6: Web Visionaries: Hypertext Innovation and Information Design (1990s)

In 1986, Dame Wendy Hall, a mathematics professor at the University of Southampton, saw something that changed her life: the BBC's Domesday Discs, an interactive multimedia update of the medieval Domesday Book. The discs used interconnected links that could be navigated with a cursor, much like we do on the Web today. For Wendy, who had never been particularly interested in computers, this revealed the future: a world where images, texts, and ideas were connected through intuitive screen-based links. Despite being told by a senior professor that there was "no future" for her in multimedia work, Wendy pursued her vision. After a stint at the University of Michigan, where she learned that what she was interested in was called "hypertext," she returned to Southampton to develop Microcosm, a revolutionary hypertext system. When the university's archivist approached her about digitizing the multimedia archive of Lord Mountbatten, Wendy saw the perfect opportunity to put her ideas into practice. Microcosm's core innovation was the way it treated links. Rather than embedding links in documents, as the Web does today, Microcosm kept links separated in a database called a "linkbase." This made links flexible information overlays rather than structural changes to the material. If a user was browsing documents about Mahatma Gandhi, for example, Microcosm would automatically link any instance of Gandhi's name to relevant multimedia information, across every document in the system. This "generic linking" created a system that could adapt to its users while presenting them with more opportunities to learn. Between 1984 and 1991, a flurry of hypertext systems like Microcosm emerged from universities and research labs. Each suggested different linking conventions and levels of precision for navigating information. The young discipline of hypertext was heavily populated with women. At Brown University, Nicole Yankelovich and Karen Catlin worked on Intermedia, a visionary system that connected five distinct applications into one "scholar's workstation." Amy Pearl developed Sun's Link Service, and Janet Walker created the Symbolics Document Examiner, the first system to incorporate bookmarks. At Xerox PARC, Cathy Marshall developed NoteCards, an "idea processor" that allowed users to chain digital cards into complex collections, sequences, and mental maps. Unlike Microcosm, which was designed for browsing information, NoteCards helped users organize their thoughts and make connections visible. Marshall's subsequent systems, Aquanet and VIKI, allowed for spatial arrangement of ideas, supporting the kinesthetic thinking process of "wiggling molecular models in space or moving a jigsaw puzzle piece into different orientations." In 1991, at the Hypertext conference in San Antonio, these sophisticated systems were displayed alongside a newcomer: the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. Compared to systems like Microcosm, the Web's version of hypertext was years behind. Its links went in only one direction, to a single destination, and were embedded in documents rather than stored in a linkbase. As Wendy Hall recalls thinking, "These links, they're embedded in the documents, and they're only going one way—this is really too simplistic." Yet within just a few years, the Web would completely eclipse these more advanced hypertext systems. By Hypertext '93, more than half the demos were Web-based, and by 1997, the Hypertext and World Wide Web conferences were scheduled for the same week. The Web's simplicity, combined with its free availability and the network effect of the Internet, made it unstoppable. As Wendy Hall observed, "People used to say, 'I think what you're doing is wonderful, but this Web thing is free, so we're gonna try that first.'" Today, the Web suffers from problems that systems like Microcosm solved decades ago, such as "404 Errors" when links break. But its lightweight, user-friendly nature made it more accessible than the vastly more powerful hypertext systems that preceded it. As Wendy Hall noted, "There's lots of different ways that we could have implemented a global hypertext system. The Web won—for now."

Chapter 7: Silicon Entrepreneurs: Women Leading the Dot-Com Revolution (1990s-2000s)

In the early 1990s, as the World Wide Web began to take shape, a new generation of digital pioneers emerged in New York City's "Silicon Alley." Among them was Jaime Levy, a punk rock filmmaker turned electronic publisher who had been creating interactive magazines on floppy disks since her days at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Her publications, Cyber Rag and Electronic Hollywood, combined the DIY ethos of punk with the emerging possibilities of desktop publishing, featuring edgy interactive games, hacker how-tos, and catty musings about cyberspace. Packaged on floppy disks and sold in indie book and record stores, Jaime's electronic magazines were exactly like websites—long before the Web existed. They featured hypertext links and interactive animations accessible to anyone with a Mac. When Jaime discovered Mosaic, the first browser for navigating the World Wide Web, she experienced it as a conversion: "Once the browser came out, I was like, 'I'm not making fixed-format anymore. I'm learning HTML and that was it.'" Jaime became Silicon Alley's first real celebrity, a poster girl for a new generation of twentysomething media titans. With her peroxide-blonde hair, skateboard, and flannel shirts, she made a compelling figurehead for the emerging digital culture. "I was the Kurt Cobain of the Internet," she told the Village Voice, only half kidding. Her CyberSlacker parties in her Avenue A loft sparked the tinder of a uniquely New York tech scene, bringing together hackers, artists, and entrepreneurs who saw the Web for the first time on her Mac II. Another key figure in Silicon Alley was Marisa Bowe, known online as Miss Outer Boro. A veteran of online communities since her teenage years on the PLATO system, Marisa became one of Echo's most popular users and the host of its Culture conference. Where she was shy in real life, she was bold and irrepressible online. In 1995, Marisa became the editor-in-chief of Word, one of the Web's first online magazines. Unlike traditional print magazines, Word was interactive, experimental, and constantly evolving. It featured multimedia stories that could only exist online, like "Mothers Who Think," which later became a popular feature at Salon.com. On the West Coast, Ellen Pack and Marleen McDaniel transformed Women's WIRE from a text-based community into women.com, one of the most successful women-focused web destinations. Securing venture capital was an uphill battle—Pack recalled pitching to rooms full of male investors who would say, "I'm gonna have my wife look at this"—but they persevered. By 1999, women.com had become a publicly traded company valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, offering content on everything from finance to health alongside active discussion forums. These women entrepreneurs faced unique challenges. They had to convince skeptical investors of the web's potential while simultaneously building new business models from scratch. As Gina Garrubbo, women.com's VP of Sales, recalled of one investment meeting: "We start telling them how women are currently not the majority of online users but will be the majority, how women are going to buy things online... and they look at us like we're mad." Yet these pioneers were vindicated as women indeed became the majority of internet users by 2000. The dot-com crash of 2000-2001, followed by the 9/11 attacks, devastated Silicon Alley and many women-led ventures. Word.com shut down, women.com merged with competitor iVillage before both were eventually acquired by larger media companies, and many pioneers left the industry. Yet their innovations—in content strategy, community building, interactive design, and digital storytelling—established templates that would influence digital media for decades to come.

Summary

Throughout computing history, a consistent pattern emerges: women have been central to innovation, often creating the fundamental building blocks of our digital world, only to be systematically written out of the narrative as those innovations become profitable and prestigious. From Ada Lovelace's algorithmic vision to the ENIAC programmers who invented software methodologies, from the network architects who built the internet's infrastructure to the community builders who humanized online spaces, women have repeatedly shaped technology in ways that emphasized human connection, accessibility, and practical problem-solving rather than technical virtuosity for its own sake. This hidden history offers crucial insights for addressing today's technology challenges. First, it reveals that computing's gender imbalance is neither natural nor inevitable but the result of specific social and institutional choices that can be unmade. Second, it demonstrates that technological progress flourishes with diverse perspectives—the women who approached computing differently often created the most user-centered, adaptable, and enduring innovations. Finally, it reminds us that technology is fundamentally a human creation, reflecting the values and priorities of its creators. By recovering these forgotten stories and ensuring that today's technology development includes voices from all backgrounds, we can build digital systems that truly serve humanity's needs rather than narrowing our possibilities.

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Claire L. Evans

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