She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home
The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.
Representation and what happened to women in Tech
Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.
Marketing matters:
When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.
Related links
What History’s Female Internet Pioneers can Teach us about Tomorrow on Vimeo
The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.
As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages (PDF)
Alan Kay’s initial description of a “Dynabook” written at Xerox PARC in 1972.