 | |
| Author | Claire L. Evans |
|---|---|
| Subject | Women in science |
| Genre | Nonfiction |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc. |
Publication date | 2018 |
| ISBN | 9780735211759 |
| Website | https://clairelevans.com/ |
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet is a nonfiction book by American writer Claire L. Evans published in 2018 by Penguin Putnam Inc. The magazine Inc. named it one of the ten top business books of 2018. [1]
Broad Band explores the development of the Internet through contributions made by women. Evans said in an interview, "Broad Band itself came out of a series of articles that I wrote for Motherboard a few years ago about cyberfeminism." [2]
The book begins with the first use of the word computer in print, an 1892 classified ad in The New York Times for a job at the United States Naval Observatory, and then describes the accomplishments of Maria Mitchell, the sole woman computer for the observatory's Nautical Almanac Office. By the turn of the century, being a computer was considered women's work.
The book's first in-depth examination is of Ada Lovelace's work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Next it tells the stories of computer scientist Grace Hopper and the six original programmers of the ENIAC: Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum.
Continuing the evolution of the internet through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the book introduces:
The book concludes with a discussion of VNS Matrix and cyberfeminism.
In The New York Times, Dava Sobel wrote that Broad Band and similar books "provide much needed perspective, along with presumed-absent foremothers and role models". [3] Katherine Boyle in the Wall Street Journal says "While Broad Band excels as a collection of brief lives, it struggles as a work of social history and criticism." [4] Booklist praises it as a "fascinating and inspiring work of women's history". [5]
Kirkus Reviews says Broad Band is "An edifying and entertaining history of the rise of the computer age and the women who made it possible". [6] The review in Publishers Weekly describes it as "an invigorating history of female coders, engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who helped create and shape the internet". [7]
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
Dava Sobel is an American writer of popular expositions of scientific topics. Her books include Longitude, about English clockmaker John Harrison; Galileo's Daughter, about Galileo's daughter Maria Celeste; and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars about the Harvard Computers.
Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century, and contributed substantially to the industry. As technology and practices altered, the role of women as programmers has changed, and the recorded history of the field has downplayed their achievements. Since the 18th century, women have developed scientific computations, including Nicole-Reine Lepaute's prediction of Halley's Comet, and Maria Mitchell's computation of the motion of Venus.
The term "computer", in use from the early 17th century, meant "one who computes": a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available. Alan Turing described the "human computer" as someone who is "supposed to be following fixed rules; he has no authority to deviate from them in any detail." Teams of people, often women from the late nineteenth century onwards, were used to undertake long and often tedious calculations; the work was divided so that this could be done in parallel. The same calculations were frequently performed independently by separate teams to check the correctness of the results.
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Claire L. Evans is an American singer, writer and artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is the lead singer of the pop duo YACHT.
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