[HN Gopher] A woman named "Steve" - IT pioneer, entrepreneur, ph...
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A woman named "Steve" - IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist
(2019)
Author : dxs
Score : 259 points
Date : 2024-03-03 23:34 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.computer.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.computer.org)
| HenryBemis wrote:
| To those who haven't visited the Computer History Museum
| (Mountain View, CA), it is SO AMAZING!!! If you ever happen to be
| in the US/California, go spend a few hours in there. It is a
| wonderful place!
| bitwize wrote:
| Frickin' love the CHM. My only complaint is they have only a
| few live specimens. But keeping those old beasts working is a
| challenge in and of itself.
| timcederman wrote:
| I highly recommend following Ken Shirriff on Twitter, some
| great threads on the work he does to keep machines running at
| the Computer History Museum. https://twitter.com/kenshirriff
| mattbee wrote:
| I really enjoyed my visit with my (then) 4yo son, but I
| agree. It's warmingly reverential but almost everything is
| behind glass. They're computers, they're machines, they can
| do amazing things just with a screen!
|
| The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (UK) explains
| as you go in that says unless there's a sign, you can play
| with anything you see. There's clearly an expert for each
| machine, so they are set up with who has games, word
| processors, educational software, a banking back-office (??),
| typewriters... so much more exciting. The star exhibit is the
| megaprocessor https://www.megaprocessor.com/progress.html -
| which has Tetris hooked up.
| peteri wrote:
| Also https://www.rmcretro.com which is very hands on.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| We did a podcast episode about her autobiography "Let It Go":
|
| https://pnc.st/s/business-books/f3cc494478a544f6/let-it-go-b...
| mech422 wrote:
| This was really cool...
|
| I'm dying to know how you did WFH in the 1960s though? That's
| well before the pc/modem generation ?? I'm tempted to say it was
| probably still the punch card era ... Did they punch the code
| onto cards at home, and mail the stacks to the client ?
| saalweachter wrote:
| Before my time, but my understanding is that in ye olden days
| you'd write out your programs by hand, transcribe it to machine
| code on punch cards, and then submit the stack of cards for
| batch processing.
| mech422 wrote:
| that's what I was guessing, but I wasn't sure ... I came in a
| bit after punch cards :-P
| arrowsmith wrote:
| My uncle tells me that this is exactly how he would complete
| his programming assignments while getting his engineering
| degree back in the '70s.
| com wrote:
| I remember when we could use an HB pencil for optical reader
| cards - no punch at home necessary!
| hinkley wrote:
| My dad switched into IT in the late 80's, via community
| college. So being a community college, they still had a
| machine that ran on card readers.
|
| As I recall they had a machine that took the "scantron"
| cards and spit out punched ones.
|
| And I don't remember if they had it or I just read about it
| later, but someone did eventually invent a punchcard
| sorter. You had to number the cards, and then you could
| stuff a dropped deck into the machine and it would save
| your bacon.
| kragen wrote:
| did you write software in this way
|
| i've only ever seen it for multiple-choice questions
| kitd wrote:
| Code was usually written out by hand (and code-reviewed)
| first before being sent off for compilation. If there was no
| terminal at home, the first part of that could be done over
| fax/telephone.
| jojobas wrote:
| Also wondering what was the nature of of this work in the first
| place.
|
| Hundreds of women familiar with assembly programming couldn't
| have appeared of thin air to go mentally execute their code and
| punch it into cards.
| kragen wrote:
| maybe ibm wouldn't hire them back after they got married or
| had a baby
| jojobas wrote:
| It was a booming market, why wouldn't they?
|
| I guess it was a possibility, but then it's a prime example
| of capitalism fixing/exploiting the pay gap.
| mcv wrote:
| Even as late as the 1970s, it was not uncommon for women
| to automatically get fired once they got married. Some
| jobs, like secretary, nurse or teacher, were deemed
| suitable for unmarried women, but married women had to
| stay home, raise kids, and run the household. This left a
| lot of highly capable women outside the workforce.
|
| A company specifically created to hire those women was a
| brilliant idea.
| Amezarak wrote:
| In the US the labor force participation rate in 1975 for
| women was 45%; today it is 57%. Was it really that much
| worse in the UK?
| kragen wrote:
| that 45% was to a significant extent poor women doing
| unskilled labor: maids, factory workers, cooks. not
| office workers
|
| however, shirley did not found her company 'freelance
| programmers' in 01975
|
| she founded it in 01959
|
| the ensuing 20 years were among the most successful years
| in history for feminism in the usa and uk, marked by,
| among other things, rapidly growing female participation
| in the labor force
| Amezarak wrote:
| Even in 1959, the US labor force participation rate for
| women was 37%. So since that time, there's only been
| about a twenty point increase.
|
| Most people were poor, and married, and with children, so
| that would make sense if the real issue was
| underrepresentation in some upper class jobs.
| kragen wrote:
| if you were a computer programmer, high school teacher,
| or secretary before you got married, it might be the case
| that the only jobs open to you after marriage were
| factory worker and maid, both involving a substantial
| risk of sexual abuse and resulting marital rupture. even
| as a programmer, shirley reported experiencing 'being
| fondled, being pushed against the wall'
|
| also, if you had a baby, usually you got fired because
| you couldn't come to work for months or even years
| (unless you could afford a nanny), and then you had to
| start your career again from the beginning at a new job
|
| underrepresentation in upper-class jobs was a real issue,
| but far from the only one
| kragen wrote:
| roughly speaking, they considered it unethical
| petsormeat wrote:
| There's a short book that covers this period of British
| computing history: Programmed Inequality: How Britain
| Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing,
| by Mar Hicks.
|
| It's more history than sociology, though the title suggests
| otherwise. There are interesting anecdotes from women who
| worked from the 1940s-1970s for British intelligence, the
| General Post Office, and, yes, Dame Steve Shirley.
| shrubble wrote:
| Note that the interviewer of Dame Shirley is this same Mar
| / Marie Hicks. link to the full transcript is http://www.co
| mputerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738707
| ioblomov wrote:
| My guess is most of them, like Grace Hopper and Margaret
| Hamilton in the US, had math or physics backgrounds. Even
| assembly is comparatively easier than, say, formal logic or
| partial differential equations.
| jojobas wrote:
| Just having learned maths or physics doesn't magically make
| you able to code, let alone blindfold-code.
| basilgohar wrote:
| Code is math. Variables, functions, and expressions are
| all mathematical terms.
|
| The main difference is the time between feedback on your
| code. Back then, you'd only know if there was an error in
| your code when it failed to run. Now we get it almost
| instantaneously. But that's not how it always was.
| jojobas wrote:
| Where I've studied abstract algebra, TFCV, partial diff.
| equations and quantum mechanics were mandatory courses,
| normally passed by everyone. Not all of them were cut to
| follow code paths, recursion etc (although a large
| fraction thrived with coding and are now in the industry,
| much larger than that of the general population). I don't
| think you could grab a random 60's mathematics BSc's and
| have them punch in business-ready code, male or female.
| pests wrote:
| One more example the early spaceflight guidance computers
| were completely designed / engineered on paper in graph
| form, with mathematicians and engineers doing all the
| hard math work.
|
| Assembly programmers would then turn the graphs into
| assembly using the best technique at the time, at moments
| having to use NOPs to cool down the ram.
|
| For these people the source of truth was the graphs and
| the actual assembly was throwaway.
| jph00 wrote:
| > _assembly is comparatively easier than, say, formal logic
| or partial differential equations_
|
| Can you explain how, exactly, one compares the ease of
| assembly to the ease of formal logic, such that one can
| then make a definitive and sweeping statement about that
| comparison?
| jl6 wrote:
| It is perhaps an opinion more than a fact, but an opinion
| that is likely widely shared by people who have done
| both. Computer assembly languages are not conceptually
| complex in the same way that higher level math is. The
| difficulty of assembly comes from its relative obscurity,
| the proliferation of instructions and architecture
| variants, and the process of analyzing a problem into the
| required steps. These are things that can be overcome
| with patience and reference manuals. At its heart,
| assembly instructions are doing simple things.
|
| At the risk of an analogy, I would describe assembly
| programming as memory-intensive, and math as compute-
| intensive.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Having done both, I have to agree with OP that assembly
| language is far easier than PDEs.
| ajb wrote:
| Initially that company didn't even have their own computer and
| mailed programs to a bureaux with a two day turnaround (I read
| previously on her website). So being in the office didn't
| noticeable speed things up.
|
| The bureaux was a third party, I think their clients didn't
| have a computer either but I don't know.
| hinkley wrote:
| (bureaux is the plural form)
|
| I can barely comprehend a build-test-compile cycle that
| involved standing in line to use a machine. Sending them
| through the postal service is mind boggling. I don't think
| anywhere near this many neurodivergent people could have
| worked in IT back then. It would have been too much.
| ajb wrote:
| It would have required a different mindset, more like the
| degree of manual checking needed to write a mathematics
| paper. Plenty of mathematicians seem to be neurodivergent,
| but maybe not the kind of neurodivergence you are thinking
| of?
| mech422 wrote:
| oh thanks!
| euroderf wrote:
| A Texas Instruments (IIRC) terminal with a telephone handset
| cradle and a thermal printer for output. So yes, the extreme
| terseness of "ed" and other Unix CLI utilities was a feature
| not a bug.
| hinkley wrote:
| The earliest teletypes were practically ticker tape weren't
| they?
|
| You couldn't redraw the "screen", just reprint the command
| line every time you hit backspace. Which is also why CTRL-U
| and CTRL-W are commands that date back to teletype machines.
| Much quicker and cheaper to drop the entire input or a word
| and try again.
| mech422 wrote:
| yeah - I worked on ASR-35 teletypes, with a punch tape
| reader/writer and an acoustic couple modem ... I thought
| they came much later though like mid 70s/80s?
| hinkley wrote:
| Which they? I did a deep dive on CTRL-U once when someone
| gave me a good breadcrumb to start with, and those
| control codes were way, way older than I suspected.
|
| SO + Wikipedia seem to think it was the ASR-33, which was
| originally 1963. I had this notion that it was about 5
| years before that. But it's clear the ASR-32 does not
| have a CTRL or a SHIFT key, and I'm not sure who they
| could have possibly stolen the idea from.
|
| Reading a little more reminded me of another fact: the
| ASR33 was the first commercial use of the ASCII character
| format, which was developed in parallel.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| in the 60s time on the machine was really really expensive.
| You'd never code online as that would waste loads of time that
| could be sold to other people.
|
| So you would need to write out your program manually. You'd
| need to explain in clear english what you were doing and why.
| Then you'd transcribe into machine language (or an intermediary
| if you were using something fancy like assembly) you can see
| part of the process here: http://ict1301.co.uk/13010310.htm
|
| Then you'd put them onto card or tape, but that might be done
| by someone else. Typist were a specialised and often
| exclusively feminine profession, often seen as something not
| done by "programmers".
|
| byt the mid 60s though, it was much more common to have
| programmers type their own shit.
|
| Then once thats done, you'd deliver the media (card desk or
| paper tape, later on other things) to the operator, who would
| run the programme and return the results. You'd stack your
| programmes in queues. (hence where we get that name from)
| hinkley wrote:
| In the 90's some French coders were claiming that American
| coders were being made complacent by the instant
| gratification of workstation class computers and that our
| code quality was suffering.
|
| It was definitely suffering, and I found that thesis
| interesting, but I don't think I ever agreed with it. It was
| a mismanagement problem not a workflow one.
| mech422 wrote:
| I actually started my career as a system operator for an old
| IBM 4341 and some Prime systems (couple with front panel
| toggles for IPL address :-) ). We were all mag-tape though,
| aside from the paper tape forms control on the IBM printer.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I think it helps to remember that programming was "secretarial"
| work back then. Essentially, most programmers were women, and
| working from home meant they were also able to keep up their
| home duties and child-care.
|
| Back then you'd program in punch cards, so if you have the
| punch-card equipment you could do this near anywhere. So there
| wasn't a big difference between being at home or the office. It
| also allowed managers to hire low-wage women easier.
|
| It wasn't later that IT became a more profitable and less niche
| field that these women were pushed out and replaced with men.
| Programming stopped being 'pink collar' due to this dynamic.
|
| As far as modems go, we didnt really see that get big until the
| 1980s with speeds like 1200-2400 baud being groundbreakingly
| fast compared to 300 baud. You could receive or send text
| almost as fast as you could read it or type it, so it was not
| that different than using a green screen terminal at work or at
| university.
| pmontra wrote:
| The cost of a 8 hours phone call would be huge, at least in
| my country. Of course if the company is paying for it, great!
| They would have to install a separate phone line not only to
| ease billing but also because you'd be unreachable all day
| long. I remember that the fixed costs were not negligible but
| again, if the company is paying for it out of the money they
| make selling your work, that's OK.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| I think in the old, old days you'd do a batch job. So you'd
| connect, then upload/download at whatever baud speed was
| accepted. Your modem would only connect for x amount of
| minutes.
|
| Later, more 'always on' was possible. In the US, the phone
| system was setup in a way that local calls, defined by
| geographic rings based on switching stations, were 0 cents
| a minute after the initial first minute. So that allowed
| things like BBS culture to thrive.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| She talks with typical British reserve about doing things that
| must have taken incredible will and courage. People today often
| don't realize just how constrained gender roles were...and still
| are in some places.
| comprev wrote:
| In some instances the role becomes much harder instead of
| easier - for example Margaret Thatcher (love her or loathe
| her!) demonstrated a woman can hold powerful positions in a
| traditionally male-dominated environment.
|
| Liz Truss then took the title of second female PM in UK history
| and promptly tanked the economy in spectacular fashion! She was
| beaten by an iceberg lettuce [0]
|
| The next female MP who is aiming for the PM role has an
| enormous uphill battle against them and it could be decades
| before "the old boys club" vote for a woman.
|
| I can't even begin to fathom how difficult it was for "Steve"
| to battle against the odds.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/20/iceberg-
| let...
| inejge wrote:
| _Liz Truss then took the title of second female PM in UK
| history_
|
| Theresa May never happened?
| me_me_me wrote:
| lets face it both are forgettable
| dukeyukey wrote:
| You _want_ a forgetttable politician. I don't really
| agree with Theresa May's general politics, but she's a
| competent politician who knows what the job entails.
|
| Liz Truss was _definitely_ not forgettable.
| 0898 wrote:
| Does anybody know what the name of her company was?
| sspiff wrote:
| It's named in the article, "Freelance Programmers".
| ikt wrote:
| that's funny, I literally thought it was just that, it'd be
| like a company being called programmers
| defrost wrote:
| Shirley founded, with a capital of PS6, the software company
| Freelance Programmers, (later F International, then Xansa,
| since acquired in 2001 by Steria and now part of the Sopra
| Steria Group).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley
| mcv wrote:
| That the gender of names matters in correspondence reminds me of
| an anecdote I heard about two people, a man and a woman, doing
| the same job supporting clients or customers of the company.
| Their boss was unhappy with the woman's performance, because she
| took much longer to do the same work as the man.
|
| Then, one day, the woman suddenly worked much faster and
| everything went much easier. At the same time, the man had a much
| harder time and customers were weirdly stubborn and obstructive.
| Turns out they were accidentally mailing under each other's name:
| the woman used the man's name, making customers much more willing
| to accept her expertise, while the man used the woman's name,
| making customers question everything he said.
|
| There's a lot of that kind of subtle sexism in our society that
| goes way deeper than mere equal rights. How can you possibly
| control customers taking you seriously or not based on your name?
| Should all women (and possibly people with non-western names, who
| can run into similar issues) work under fake names?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Should all women (and possibly people with non-western names,
| who can run into similar issues) work under fake names?
|
| Some people have such a low opinion of women in tech they
| invent entire fake AI avatars and legends [0] rather than deal
| with the real thing [1].
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/backlash-over-
| fa...
|
| [1] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=22
| theultdev wrote:
| That seems more like a grift of the environment promoting
| women. It's easier to control sockpuppets and you don't have
| to pay them.
|
| I don't think that person cared one way or another about
| women, they were just taking advantage of the environment.
|
| They would have faked male speakers had it benefitted them.
|
| (not condoning, just noting my perception)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| This wasn't because they had low opinion of women in tech.
| It's because some other speakers refused to attend if there
| weren't a specific percentage of women speakers but the
| organizers couldn't find enough to meet that quota. Still
| scummy to fake women speakers, but the motivation was not
| simply a low opinion of women.
|
| > Hanselman confirmed that he was "duped" by seeing the bill
| including at least one fake female speaker. He also confirmed
| that speakers like him have rules for participating in
| conferences, including only joining inclusive speaker
| lineups.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > This wasn't because they had low opinion of women in
| tech. It's because some other speakers refused to attend if
| there weren't a specific percentage of women speakers
|
| You raise a good, fair objection.
|
| Maybe I shouldn't have said "low opinion". I don't know
| these chaps and what their opinion is.
|
| "Quotas" and suchlike certainly do those of us that
| advocate for diversity - but confront reality - a great
| disservice.
|
| > Still scummy to fake women speakers, but the motivation
| was not simply a low opinion of women.
|
| What I think happened (and maybe watch our video, please
| because Mercy and Helen say things a little bit different -
| and why pay attention to my words, written by a man, when
| you can see and hear what the women actually have to say):
|
| > but the organizers couldn't find enough to meet that
| quota.
|
| Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find
| enough". No way, they could have "found enough". There's no
| shortage of smart, confident women who have plenty to say
| about working in digital tech. I've been in that situation
| myself as a conference organiser and had to work extra hard
| to convince them that they would be taken seriously and
| given equal voice - and could _say what they want_.
|
| I strongly suspect what these organisers couldn't find were
| women who would say the things _they wanted_.
| theultdev wrote:
| > I strongly suspect what these organisers couldn't find
| were women who would say the things they wanted.
|
| Agreed. Plus you don't have to pay sockpuppets.
|
| He was making them "cancel" their talk, but he had then
| met the "women quota" so all good.
|
| Honestly it's the affirmative action culture that led to
| this.
|
| People will take advantage of things like that.
|
| Like a man that gets last in weight lifting amongst their
| male peers, "transitions", then blows out the #1 spot
| amongst women.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Where I disagree is over "the organisers couldn't find
| enough". No way, they could have "found enough".
|
| It depends at lot on what the definition of "inclusive"
| Hanselman and other speakers were using. There are indeed
| situations where people are expected to have female
| participation that's well above their rate of
| participation.
|
| This tracks well with what women in tech have told me:
| they're constantly bombarded with requests for them to
| speak. But they're quite reluctant because they feel
| (often correctly) that they're primarily being invited on
| account of inclusivity quotas like Hanselman's.
| vasco wrote:
| In the place I work at at some point a customer support
| analysis was done and female agents got way more abuse, drive-
| by curse words, etc. It was like a different job compared to
| the men.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Sounds like the kind of perfect anecdote that is made up to
| make some point. "accidentally mailing under each other's name"
| doesn't sound like a thing.
|
| Incidentally, this kind of thing is easy to test, and indeed
| such studies have been done - I lent my name & image to such a
| study when I was a student, that was testing racial bias in
| resume applications.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Putting aside the fact that this is a convenient "and then they
| all stood up and clapped"-esque anecdote, scammers and poor
| quality outsourced customer support people working under names
| that are blatantly fake is such a popular meme, that doing it
| unironically is certainly not how you would improve customer
| interactions.
| Timwi wrote:
| > employed over 8,500 people [...] making millionaires of 70 of
| her team members.
|
| That's less than 1%. So much for "profit-sharing and company co-
| ownership". I don't think the author knows what those words
| mean...
| com wrote:
| Employed over time, and reading between the lines, lots of
| part-time and probably temporary workers given how they were
| hiring and the pressures on those women's time. Normally even
| co-ownership structures have earn-in periods, so this isn't a
| huge surprise. In a time where only capital-rich folks could
| invest in businesses (still the norm outside our contemporary
| VC tech bubble where vesting and cliffs etc are commonplace
| terms in employment negotiations) this was pretty radical.
| ejb999 wrote:
| How many millionaire-employees have you created?
| vidarh wrote:
| Had the author presented her as, say, a socialist who started a
| workers cooperative, that criticism would be justified. But the
| author did not. It's perfectly valid to talk about "profit-
| sharing and company co-ownership" even if she didn't share the
| ownership evenly.
| robaato wrote:
| Interesting to note she donated to the purchase of premises for
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Informat...
| Jun8 wrote:
| "not only for building a $3 billion tech empire in 1960s England,
| but for doing it with an all-female, work-from-home staff of
| professionally qualified women who had left the work force after
| marrying and having children."
|
| Tangentially, this part brought up an early thought that I had:
| tapping into a qualified workforce that for some reason got
| removed from work standard work opportunities. One such large
| group the one mentioned (at the time in the UK, probably less
| applicable now).
|
| Another one that I usually think about is all the people with
| high levels of manufacturing expertise that got laid off in the
| US in the past decades, living in smaller towns. Would it be
| possible to tap into their knowledge remotely?
| hinkley wrote:
| There was a company maybe about 15 years ago that was looking
| to design solar panel array structures using automotive
| construction techniques. They essentially wanted to hire
| "surplus" autoworkers.
|
| I would think these days you'd be looking for the automation
| people as well.
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