Broad Band

January 15, 2018
Journalist Evans’s first book is an invigorating history of female coders, engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who helped create and shape the internet, and whose contributions, she argues, are too often overlooked. The book’s subjects stretch back to Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter and a collaborator with Charles Babbage on his analytical engine. Evans makes astute connections to draw her subjects into a narrative about the democratization of technology. Grace Hopper, who worked on the Harvard Mark I computer during WWII, “believed that computer programming should be widely known and available to nonexperts,” which led her to develop one of the earliest programming languages. Stanford scientist Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler hired and trained other women to help her develop and maintain one of the first servers at the Network Information Center at Stanford in 1970s, and programmer Brenda Laurel brought gaming (and computer skills) to a generation of girls through her Rockett Movado series in the 1990s. If the spirit of the internet is collaborative, Evans’s women embody that spirit entirely—which is no surprise, since, as Evans dutifully shows, they had a huge role in inventing it.

February 1, 2018
A history of the major role women played in creating the internet and the computer industry.Long before there were machines called computers, women worked as "computers," performing complex mathematical computations by hand for the U.S. Naval Observatory and other entities. When male engineers designed the first computing machines, using relays and switches and then vacuum tubes, they hired these same women to become the operators and programmers of the machines. Evans, the former futures editor of VICE's Motherboard and founding editor of its sci-fi imprint, Terraform, tells the fascinating story of how these highly intelligent, mathematically astute women were pioneers in a new field integral to the rise of the computer age. Since there were no training manuals, they had to figure out how the Mark I or the ENIAC computers worked by studying the hardware. Then they invented the software to run them and went back and wrote the training manuals for others to use. They wrote code, created ballistic trajectories for the war effort during World War II, invented the languages used by microprocessors today, designed searchable databases that were used to connect people across the country, and figured out a standard addressing format, which has led to the billions of .com, .org, .gov designations found online today. Throughout, the author consistently demonstrates how often these women were overlooked when it came time to acknowledge who had performed the work; they were the silent, behind-the-scenes workers who were underpaid and ignored when accolades were due. "Again and again," she writes, "women did the jobs nobody thought were important, until they were." Thankfully, Evans provides an informative corrective, giving proper due to these women and their invaluable work.An edifying and entertaining history of the rise of the computer age and the women who made it possible. A good choice for fans of Hidden Figures.

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March 15, 2018

Journalist and musician Evans delivers engaging, well-crafted portraits of the women who contributed to and influenced the development and invention of the Internet. Profiles include Grace Hopper, a gifted mathematician and academic who championed a future where computer programming was accessible to nonexperts. Hopper spent her days and many nights minding the Mark 1 computer at Harvard University during World War II, eventually crafting an early programming language. Some decades later, Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler harnessed and advanced ARPANET, a proto-Internet funded by the Department of Defense Advanced Project Research Agency. The narrative continues into the 1980s, when New York-based visionary Stacy Horn ran Echo, a pioneering social network popularized by women. These visionaries, Evans writes, arrive with each new technological wave, steadily and quietly forging indelible paths to the future. VERDICT A tribute to the underacknowledged female pioneers whose contributions to technology, while sometimes difficult to measure, are impossible to forget.--Emily Patti, Racine P.L., WI

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2018
According to Evans, the first ad in which the word computer appeared was in the classified pages of the New York Times in 1892. In this book, with its clever play-on-words title, Evans tells the stories of the many unsung women who propelled our computer age. As anyone familiar with Hidden Figures (2016) knows, early tech workers were called computers, as in someone who computes, or performs computations, and many of them were women. Thus, women were on the forefront of technology from the beginning. We're not ancillary; we're central, often hiding in plain sight, Evans notes. She writes about the best-known of these pioneers, Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron's daughter), Maria Mitchell, and many others, including the women the Harvard astronomer Edward Charles Pickering hired to analyze data because he could pay them for next to nothing. And yet despite the lack of proper payment, Pickering's maid and computer, Williamina Fleming, was credited with discovering the Horsehead Nebula. From COBOL and ARPANET to Silicon Valley and cyberfeminism, women have always played a major role in developing computer technology. Now their collective stories are finally being shared in Evans' fascinating and inspiring work of women's history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)