A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.
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@sarajw @mhoye I'm old enough to remember when I got into this field when there were more women in it. Back then, it was a way to make a decent living, but not a path to riches.
That changed with the internet boom and I ran into fewer women developers and sysadmins. Once it got out of its "clerical" status and into a path to riches, the demographics shifted. My first dev job iin 1990 was 40% women devs to 60%.
I've worked in places since then with NO women devs. Those all sucked, BTW.
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@mhoye didn't know that either.
Honestly man the more I learn about women in computing in history, the madder I am about the state of tech today.
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On a more serious note, I didn't realize that Hamilton coined the term "software engineer".
@mhoye I read that she also coined the term "test harness"
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A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.
@mhoye On the other hand, Michael Collins did have to turn something off and on again to fix a problem
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A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.
@mhoye I use the first pic to teach the difference between the purpose of a caption and alt text, with a guerilla casual mention of how much we owe Hamilton and similar minimized women.
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@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye yep. Kay McNulty was one of them, from just a bit up the road from my house. https://www.womensmuseumofireland.ie/exhibits/kay-mcnulty
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@spacehobo is it just going to make me more mad or give me something constructive to do about it?
Otherwise nowadays I can only cope with fiction, novels, I need the escapism...
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@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye yep. Kay McNulty was one of them, from just a bit up the road from my house. https://www.womensmuseumofireland.ie/exhibits/kay-mcnulty
@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye they have a monument dedicated to her at her birthplace now. I like to visit it every year...
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@spacehobo @lerxst @mhoye thank you either way, I'd like to know but it might make me feel very frustrated about what could have been..
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A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.
In 2017 Margaret Hamilton was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows. On that occasion I was privileged to accompany her on a private, docent-guided tour of the Museum's public display.
She looked about the same as she does in these pictures from the 1960s, albeit a little grayer; a bright, diminutive grandma.
But she was very humble and human. At one point we rounded a corner into the Apollo section. Prominently in the front of the exhibit was a reproduction of your left-hand photo. Upon seeing it, Margaret stopped and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh! Is that me?"
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@mhoye didn't know that either.
Honestly man the more I learn about women in computing in history, the madder I am about the state of tech today.
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@craignicol @mhoye absolutely!
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@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye they have a monument dedicated to her at her birthplace now. I like to visit it every year...
@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye I don't recall any of these women being mentioned in my courses at UMich. But I knew Grace Hopper coined "computer bug" (but it was an actual bug, a moth, that fried itself on a circuit). Probably just picked up in outside reading. I learned about Kay from reading about ENIAC, because the EECS department had a slice of it (1/10th) on display. I learned about Margaret because... a colleague of mine at the UM Computing Center looked like her. https://websites.umich.edu/~umvm/MIDAC/midac_eniac.html
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A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.
@mhoye What's lost there to people not of a certain age is that she's standing next to Source Code Control. Diffs were done manually by setting inches-thick listings of versions of modules down side-by-side, then flipping through them to eyeball changes and make notes.
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@mhoye I use the first pic to teach the difference between the purpose of a caption and alt text, with a guerilla casual mention of how much we owe Hamilton and similar minimized women.
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@sarajw @lerxst @mhoye here's a decent article on the subject (despite being on the guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech-industry-wrote-women-out-of-history
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@sarajw @lerxst @mhoye here's a decent article on the subject (despite being on the guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech-industry-wrote-women-out-of-history
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@eons yeeep:
"But by the 1970s, there was a change in mindset and women were no longer welcome in the workplace: the government and industry had grown wise to just how powerful computers were and wanted to integrate their use at a management level. “But they weren’t going to put women workers – seen as low level drones – in charge of computers,” explains Hicks. Women were systematically phased out and replaced by men who were paid more and had better job titles."
