A picture of Margaret Hamilton, programmer for the Apollo space program, standing next to not one single microsoft error message or bluetooth problem.

[lerxst@az.social]

@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.

[beadsland@beige.party]

@mhoye

Yeah, and ever since then whole generations of programming boys have been cosplaying as her, despite most of them having not anywhere near half the responsibility.

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@tezoatlipoca @mhoye saying that Grace Hopper was indeed badass and had a sharp wit: https://front-end.social/@sarajw/113165853835788408

[lerxst@az.social]

@mhoye Yup, she's (not as) widely recognized (as I thought, apparently) as the founder of software engineering.

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@lerxst @mhoye mmhmmm. Amazing how the women got pushed out, I guess because it was seen as something that the clever men should do and be well paid for...

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@lerxst @mhoye the way I see it, it *should* be an ideal job for a parent (whether male, female, NB), with good opportunities to work async, part time, from home.

Sadly structural stuff, mandatory meetings, the so many "ritual" meetings make the async part-timeness more difficult.

[lerxst@az.social]

@sarajw @mhoye So many meetings could be literally two Slack or even IRC messages per person.

[janxdevil@sfba.social]

@sarajw @mhoye On that note, I recently learned about how the original group of ENIAC programmers were all women. One of them is credited with having invented the debugger breakpoint.

[ryanprior@mastodon.social]

@mhoye I read that she also coined the term "test harness"

[benjamingeer@piaille.fr]

@mhoye On the other hand, Michael Collins did have to turn something off and on again to fix a problem

[swiftone@mastodon.online]

@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.

[hyc@mastodon.social]

@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

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@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...

@lerxst @mhoye

[hyc@mastodon.social]

@janxdevil @sarajw @mhoye they have a monument dedicated to her at her birthplace now. I like to visit it every year...

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@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..

[mralancooper@hachyderm.io]

@mhoye

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?"

[craignicol@glasgow.social]

@sarajw @mhoye she coined the term to remind everyone that the software running the show was just as important as the engineering that went into the rest of the mission.

[sarajw@front-end.social]

@craignicol @mhoye absolutely!

[hyc@mastodon.social]

@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

[dws@mastodon.cloud]

@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.