Forgotten women in computer science
Grace Hopper and Radia Perlman
The US has been one of the top developed countries at the front of Computer Science developments, with tech giants springing up all over the country. The people credited for achievements in technology are men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Turing, and Steve Wozniak. Women who worked to advance innovations in computer science are rarely recognized and often not talked about. While women have had fewer opportunities to join the field, there has most definitely been significant achievement and advancement made by women. In fact, without some of these female computer scientists, we would not have modern-day technology and computers.
Harvard Mark I
Grace Hopper was one of these women. She became one of the first scientists to develop the Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical computer vital to World War II efforts. The computer was utilized to design the first atomic bombs. Considered one of the earliest and most important electromechanical computers, the Harvard Mark I calculating tables were used to aid in the aiming of artillery shells and bombs. (Lantero, 2015) This, of course, would not have been possible without the contributions of an often uncredited woman: Grace Hopper. She was the main programmer of the calculating machine and worked alongside the inventor to make it a reality. As displayed by the newspaper article from 1944, the wonders of the calculating machine are described in great detail, yet the only contributions mentioned are those by men. She additionally coined the modern-day terms of bugging and debugging that are vital to computer function and widely used by everyday Americans now.
Grace Hopper
Programming the Harvard Mark, I was an important achievement on its own and no small feat however, Grace Hopper's career was even more impressive, making the fact that she is virtually unrecognized compared to her male counterparts much more unjust. Grace Hopper went to Yale University, where she completed her Ph.D. in mathematics. Not only was it rare for women to be educated in the 1930s, and it was even rarer for a woman to complete a doctorate. Admiral Hopper decided to join World War 2 efforts at age 37 and was rejected multiple times (Yale Office of the President, 2022). After her persistence, she joined the women’s reserve. During her career in the navy, she completed intensive training taking a break from her role as a professor. She continued her work on computers and developed two more MARK computers. She was denied a permanent position at Harvard University, where she did research, as they did not offer women permanent positions of any kind. This was a challenge she faced due to her gender, yet it did not stop her from contributing more. In her lifetime, she developed the first electronic computer, one of the first programming languages, and completed sixty years as a Navy reservist. She developed COBOL and received more than forty honorary degrees and awards. She was the first woman and the first American to become a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. Clearly more qualified than many of her widely recognized male counterparts, she never received the recognition she deserved. Her success in a male-dominated field was exceptional.
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The UNIVAC
The UNIVAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer. The design of the computer was credited to John Mauchly, one of the men pictured. Hopper was detailedly involved in the creation of the Univac, the first all-electronic digital computer (Norwood 2014). She invented the first computer compiler, which allowed the UNIVAC to function, and without her invention, it would not have been able to operate.
Radia Perlman
Mother of the Internet
Radia Perlman is often nicknamed “The Mother of the Internet” She attended MIT at a time when there were only a few dozen women in her class of nearly a thousand people (Rosen, 2015). She went on to develop the Spanning Tree Protocol, which is essentially what makes our use of the internet possible today. Her innovations in the 1970s allow link-state routing protocols to function effectively. Despite the fact that individuals like Al Gore are widely recognized for inventing the internet, Perlman’s contributions made the internet what it is today. (Lemeson 2005) Perlman also contributed to early education development and was key to making computer science accessible for young children.
The Button Box and the TORTIS
Pictured is the Button Box and children using Perlman's invention to control a robot. She was the sole creator of TORTIS: a child-friendly programming language. The device allowed children as young as age three to control robots or turtle robots to be exact, using child-friendly programming language. The system was meant to teach children playing with the system concepts such as numbers, breaking large problems into small solvable steps, writing and debugging procedures, recursion, variables, and conditionals (Morgado, 2006). Radia Perlman's contributions to computer science education were invaluable, yet it is exceptionally difficult to find her name in an article detailing early childhood education using computers (Larsbrinkhoff 2022). Overall her contributions to the fields of computer science and early education have been extremely important and needed.
